The Creakers

by Tom Fletcher

  Creak.

  Norman froze. The noise had come from behind him. Then he noticed, in the polished surface of the ward-robe door handle, two little black specks like beady eyes staring at him from under his bed.

  “Hello?” he whispered, terrified of what might be lurking behind him.

  There was no reply. He swallowed his fear, gripped the iron, and whipped around in a flash, but there was nothing. No beady black eyes. Just shelves lined with his Transformers collection.

  He sighed in relief, his heart pounding.

  “At least I’ve got you here for company!” he said as he dropped some food into the fish tank for his two pet underwater snails. (Norman used to have a goldfish, but it ran away—at least that’s what his dad told him.) He watched as what looked like two boogers wearing shells slowly slurped up the side of the tank, their oily dark green bodies leaving a trail on the inside of the glass.

  He yawned and reached into the cold water to pat each snail on its hard, slimy shell.

  “Good night, Optimus. Good night, Megatron,” he said, then he grabbed his flashlight from the table, switched off his bedroom light, and leapt into bed.

  He stayed up for a while reading. He read a page of Scout Monthly, learning the latest knot-tying techniques. It was his favorite thing to read before bed, but as he turned to the next page, he suddenly felt as though a cloud of tiredness had fallen over him. He shook his head, rubbed his eyes, and began reading the first line when…

  CREAK!

  “H-hello?” Norman croaked, now feeling weak and floppy. He was sure he’d heard someone in his room, but sleep was just…too…tempting.

  His eyes closed automatically and his head fell back onto his fluffy pillow as he drifted into a strange dream about slimy green creatures with oily skin making creaking noises under his bed.

  * * *

  —

  Lucy skipped along the street in her baggy blue overalls, dragging a black plastic sack behind her.

  “Dad, you forgot this one!” she called over the sound of the garbage truck starting up.

  “Ah, well done, Lucypops!” Mr. Dungston said, cutting the engine and stepping out of his enormous vehicle. “Are you coming to work with me today?”

  He held out his hands as Lucy struggled to lift the heavy bag off the ground. “What the jiggins have you got in there?” he said, giving her a hand.

  “Just trash,” Lucy said.

  “Just trash?” Mr. Dungston echoed in disbelief. “JUST trash? My little Lucypops, it’s far more than just trash! It’s glorious, wonderful, stinking, rotten trash!” He lifted Lucy and the trash bag and spun them around. “And it’s this wonderfully stinky stuff that puts food on our backs and clothes on the table.”

  Lucy laughed.

  “Dad, you mean, clothes on our backs and food on the table!”

  “Do I? Oh yes, I suppose I do,” he teased. “Right, throw it in, then.” He lifted Lucy up high so she could drop the bag of garbage into the back of the truck.

  “Lovely throw, my Lucypops. Now off you trot back to your mom, and I’ll see if I can turn that bag of trash into a nice roast for dinner.”

  He popped Lucy back on the ground, pushed her bangs to one side, and kissed her forehead before she turned and ran to her mom, who was standing in the doorway.

  “Have a good day, Larry!” Mrs. Dungston called.

  “Full of rotten goodness as always, my dear,” he said as he swung himself up into his truck and slammed the door shut with a…

  BANG!

  Lucy woke up from her dream in a startled panic.

  How did I fall asleep?! she asked herself, and quickly looked around. There was an orange glow from her window as the first bit of sunlight poked through the curtains and began filling her room. The last thing she remembered was staring into the shadows beneath her bed, and the next moment she was waking up!

  She blinked and felt something in the corners of her eyes. She rubbed them, and tiny clumps of sleep fell out.

  Lucy wasn’t sure why, but now that the sun had come up she wasn’t as scared anymore. Funny how sunlight does that, isn’t it? You can be scared stiff during the night, but as soon as it’s daytime you feel fine again. Like we all somehow know that strange things only happen at night.

  Lucy stood up, took off her dad’s grubby coat, returned it to its hiding place, and opened the curtains, allowing the sunlight to fill her room to the brim.

  Then she lay flat on the bed and carefully lowered her head over the edge to get a good look underneath. There was a nice gap under her bed, big enough for Lucy to fit if she ever wanted to. Big enough for her to be able to see right to the other side. To her relief, there was nothing there. No scary little eyes staring back at her, just her creaky old floorboards gathering dust.

  She sighed a big fat sigh.

  I must have imagined it, she thought.

  Was it all in my head? she wondered.

  Must have been a nightmare, she hoped. A very realistic nightmare!

  But very soon Lucy was going to find out that it wasn’t all in her head. Before long, Lucy was going to see those little black eyes again…and next time the Creaker would not be alone.

  Blimey! How are you doing? That was a bit intense, wasn’t it? Eyes under the bed. Creaks in the dark! Well, I wish I could tell you that it all gets better from here, that the rest of the book is full of pretty winged ponies galloping across rainbows, scattering jelly beans from their hooves as they fly, but I’m afraid it isn’t. It only gets worse. A lot worse. What’s worse than a Creaker…?

  You’ll see…

  Lucy burst out into the sunlit yard with new-found determination. She didn’t want to just dream about her parents for the rest of her life. She wanted them back.

  Now.

  “That’s it,” she said to herself. “I’m going to find the grown-ups.”

  And with that she tightened the straps of her overalls, slicked her bangs over, and marched out into Clutter Avenue.

  But something very strange stopped Lucy in her tracks. The disaster movie that Whiffington had looked like the night before wasn’t quite as disastrous this morning. The town actually looked relatively tidy!

  “That’s odd,” Lucy said to herself, noticing that all the toilet paper had been cleared from the trees, the overflowing trash cans on the street were now empty, and the pavement looked as though it had been swept clean.

  “Where did all the garbage go?” Lucy whispered to herself, searching in her head for any possibilities.

  She was so deep in thought that she didn’t see it…

  Lucy gasped as something suddenly tightened about her ankle, like a snake wrapping itself around her leg. Then, before she could do anything about it, she was flipped upside down and yanked straight off the ground, and found herself swinging in the air. She was hanging by her foot from a rope tied to a large tree in someone’s front yard.

  “GOTCHA!” Norman cried as he sprang out from behind the hedge, his Scout uniform covered in leaves and twigs (he also had a camouflage badge, which was so hard to find on his uniform even he’d forgotten where he’d sewn it). When he saw Lucy, his face fell. “Oh, it’s you!”

  “Yes, it’s me! Now get me down!” Lucy demanded.

  “Sorry, I thought you were those boys—y’know, the ones from school,” Norman said as he cut Lucy free, letting her fall on her head.

  “Ouch!” Lucy said. “Boys? What boys?”

  “You know, the ones that…”

  “That what?”

  “…that laugh at me,” Norman mumbled.

  “Oh,” Lucy said, suddenly feeling a little bad for shouting at him.

  “They’ve been throwing eggs at my house since the grown-ups disappeared, so I set some traps for them,” Norman said with pride.

  Lucy stood up and dusted herself of
f.

  “Wow!” she said, looking around Norman’s front yard, which she now saw he’d turned into a fully functioning campsite. There was a hammock tied between the tree and the drainpipe on Norman’s house, and a sundial made of sticks and stones. Scattered along the entire perimeter was an assortment of handmade snares and traps, like the one Lucy had managed to get caught in. There was a campfire with a pan of beans boiling to a bubble on top, and around it some wooden chairs carved from a tree trunk.

  “Did you make those?” Lucy asked.

  Norman nodded, indicating a woodwork badge on his uniform. “And I put that up by myself!” he added, pointing to an enormous green tent pitched on the grass nearby. It was large enough to sleep ten people at least, Lucy thought, although through the opening she could see just one Transformers sleeping bag.

  “Why are you sleeping out here, though, and not in your bedroom?” Lucy asked.

  Norman suddenly looked a little embarrassed.

  “I, erm, well, it’s silly really,” he said, staring at his feet.

  “What is?” Lucy asked.

  “Oh, it’s nothing…I just had a funny dream and got a bit…”

  “Frightened?” Lucy asked, but Norman was saved from having to answer by the voice that came crashing down the street toward them.

  “Look, it’s Abnormal Norman!” called a scruffy kid as he and two more boys on bikes whizzed past.

  “AbNorman’s got a girlfriend! Hey, love-nerds, eat this!” one of them yelled as the three boys hurled eggs at Norman and Lucy.

  “Quick, hold this!” Norman ordered, shoving a metal shield into Lucy’s hands. She instinctively held it up in front of her head, feeling the thud, thud, splat of eggs cracking on impact.

  “See you loser lovers later,” the bike boys cackled as they wheelied off into the distance.

  “Are you OK?” Lucy said, lowering the egg-covered shield.

  “Me? Yeah, I’m used to it,” Norman said, shrugging off the moment. But Lucy could tell by the little twitch of his lip that he was upset.

  Lucy had never really taken the time to get to know Norman at school. Of course, she knew who he was. Everyone did. He was “the geeky kid,” the one who no one wanted to sit next to at lunch or get paired with in PE. The one who brought a packed lunch instead of eating school lunches, and the one who climbed to the top of the tallest tree and stayed there all the way through break, watching birds through his binoculars. He was…different.

  Lucy suddenly remembered what her dad would say.

  “You know, it’s the different people who make a difference,” she told him.

  Norman blushed. “Yeah, and they get free breakfast!” he replied.

  “Huh?”

  “Eggs!” Norman smiled, taking the shield away from Lucy and showing her that it was actually a large frying pan. She laughed as Norman held it over the campfire and began to fry the eggs.

  “You can help yourself to some orange squash and a biscuit while you wait…if you sign up,” Norman said, motioning toward a clipboard he’d attached to his front gate.

  “Sign up?” Lucy asked.

  “Yes. A crisis is the perfect opportunity to recruit new members for the Whiffington Scout Troop. Girls can join too, you know,” Norman said, flipping the eggs.

  “Oh, I see. Well, maybe not today…,” Lucy said politely. She didn’t want to offend him, but joining the Scouts was the last thing on her mind.

  “Well, I can’t guarantee there’ll be a space for you if you don’t put your name down today,” Norman warned.

  “Oh, how many new members have you got?” asked Lucy.

  “Well, it’s…it’s still just me, just one member, at the moment. But if my intuition is anything to go by, I’d say interest in the Scout troop is about to pick up in a major way. I’ve printed flyers and everything. I’ve got the intuition badge, you know,” Norman said, proudly showing off a yellow badge with a strange eye on it.

  “I see,” said Lucy. “And what does your intuition say about finding our parents?”

  Norman paused and looked sad.

  “I don’t know. I mean, that letter sounded pretty final to me.”

  “I don’t believe it for one second,” said Lucy. “My mom wouldn’t just leave me like that. There’s something fishy going on, and I’m going to find out what it is.”

  “The only fishy thing going on is the smell from your dad’s truck. I don’t think they’re ever coming back, Lucy. Whiffington is our town now,” Norman said gloomily.

  “It’s like a nightmare!” Lucy sighed.

  Norman’s face suddenly scrunched up like he’d smelled a bad smell (and not just the stink coming from Lucy’s dad’s truck).

  “What is it?” Lucy asked.

  “You just reminded me. I had a nightmare last night,” said Norman.

  Lucy’s heart stopped for a moment.

  “So did I,” she said.

  “Mine was really weird.”

  “Mine too!”

  “I dreamed I saw this thing…”

  “Yes?” Lucy said.

  “These shiny, gleaming eyes…And it was all dark and shadowy. And it was hiding—”

  “UNDER YOUR BED!” Lucy interrupted him. “That’s why you came and set the tent up out here, isn’t it?”

  Norman stared at her. “How did you know that?” he asked.

  Lucy looked up at the window of Norman’s bed-room. How was it possible for them both to have the same dream? The same nightmare?

  Unless it wasn’t a nightmare at all.

  Unless what they’d both seen in the night, those black eyes, were real.

  Lucy and Norman stared at one another in silence.

  “BOO!” shrieked a high, shrill voice from behind Norman’s fence.

  “Ella!” Lucy cried, her heart pounding as Ella Noying skipped out into the street wearing an old wedding dress that trailed along behind her.

  “I couldn’t help it!” Ella laughed. “Your faces!”

  “Ella, what are you wearing?” Lucy said in utter disbelief.

  “What, this old thing? Oh, it used to belong to Mama. I’ve had it for years, darling.” Ella beamed, dragging the dress along the ground as she swished it.

  “And what on earth is around your neck?” Norman asked.

  “My jewels? They belonged to my dad, but they look far better on me, don’t you think?” Ella said, trying to swing the chunky gold chain, which was obviously too heavy for her.

  “That’s your dad’s?” Norman asked.

  “Her dad is the mayor of Whiffington. It’s part of his uniform,” Lucy explained.

  “Which means now that he’s gone, I am the new mayor of Whiffington!” Ella announced, completing her look by perching a triangular hat that she’d folded out of paper on top of her bouncy hair. The word MAYOR was scribbled in felt-tip pen on the front.

  “I’m not sure that’s how it works,” Norman told her.

  “It doesn’t matter anyway, because your parents are definitely coming back. Just like my mom is definitely coming back—and Norman’s dad too,” said Lucy firmly. “So, if I were you, I’d take those things off right now.”

  Ella ignored Lucy. “Mama isn’t here! Mama isn’t here! No one can stop me! Mama isn’t here!” she sang merrily as she twirled around like a princess.

  Lucy suddenly had a thought.

  “Hey, Ella,” she said. “What did you dream about last night?”

  Ella pretended to think. “Erm…can’t remember!” she said as she came skipping back down the road toward them.

  “Please try! When you woke up this morning, did you remember what you dreamed?”

  Ella looked up at Lucy and pretended to zip her lips.

  “If you tell us, I’ll let you have some eggs!” Norman said, waving the pan temptingly.


  Ella’s eyes narrowed. “Runny ones?” she asked.

  Norman nodded and Ella unzipped her lips at once.

  “Well, it was just the same dream I have every night,” she said.

  “And what’s that?” said Lucy.

  “It’s a funny dream, really,” Ella said. “You know, that one when you dream about the creature that lives under your bed.”

  Lucy and Norman looked at each other.

  “What the jiggins?” Lucy breathed softly.

  It was at that moment that Lucy and Norman both realized their nightmare wasn’t a nightmare at all. There had been something under their beds last night—and Lucy had a funny feeling that this was all connected somehow.

  The grown-ups disappearing.

  The creatures under the bed.

  What could possibly happen next?

  Remember when I said, “What’s worse than a Creaker?”

  Lucy jumped into bed that night faster than she’d ever done before. She was so fearful that some-thing might grab her ankles from underneath the bed as she climbed up that she literally leapt from the floorboards to the mattress and pulled her bedcovers up and over her head. She didn’t even bother to take off her overalls, brush her teeth, or tidy the house! She left it all messy and grubby.

  And what a grubby mess it was!

  There were all sorts of trash and litter scattered here, there, and everywhere from the piles of children who had been in and out of her house over the last couple of days. So many crumbs of breakfast cereal had been trodden into the carpet that it felt more like walking on sand. She’d been so busy confiscating dangerous items from silly-billy children today that, unlike yesterday, she hadn’t washed the dishes, emptied the trash cans, or done any washing whatsoever.

  The house was, quite simply, Dis-Gus-Ting.