A Monstrous Place (Tales From Between)

by Matthew Stott

  ‘Not really, why don’t you tell me something completely believable and then I’ll see if I believe it.’

  ‘Well, it’s 'cos... I’m tied up. I’m on the bed, ropes round my arms and legs. Oh, he was so mean and awful and bad to me, a poor little boy! I cried and shouted for him not to tie me up, but he didn’t care, he’s the bad one!’

  ‘Ah, that makes sense.’

  ‘Yes! See? All makes sense, all right as rain! Now open the door. I’m really very scared,’ said the Boy, delight in his voice now.

  ‘One little thing though, you were over by the window, waving at me. I may be being stupid, but how did you do that if you were all tied up on the bed?’

  Silence.

  ‘You know, these prints are pretty small,’ said Molly, looking closer at the red smears covering the wall next to her. ‘I don’t think a grown up made these. They look like a kid did them. Quite a small kid, too. Are these your prints?’

  Silence.

  Molly banged on the door. ‘Oi, I asked you a question! Did you leave all these blood prints everywhere?’

  The Boy giggled.

  It was a high-pitched giggle and it slid out of the room like a razor, Molly wincing.

  ‘I think maybe I won’t let you out after all,’ said Molly, and she stepped back.

  The door shook furiously as something very strong punched and barged and kicked at it; but it remained steadfastly shut. ‘Open! Open the door, stupid girl, open now or I’ll make patterns on the walls with your blood too, stupid idiot selfish girl!’ screamed the Boy.

  ‘You’re not really convincing me there. I think you can stay right where you are; whoever put you in there had the right idea.’

  ‘I’m going to pull you into bits, stupid ugly girl! Going to open you up and do my painting! D’you like my painting, stupid, stinking girl? Open! Open! Open—!’

  The screaming, threat-filled tantrum grew more muffled as Molly made her way quickly back along the bloodstained corridor, down the stairs, and headed for the front door, angry with the strange lying Boy, but much more angry with herself, that she’d let herself be distracted from her mission; well, no more. She would walk straight out of this house and head for whatever waited at the Fisks'; she would save her Mum and nothing and no one was going to stop her n...

  ... the thought remained unfinished in her head as Molly stepped out of the house that stood directly opposite her own and strode into the front garden. Only it wasn’t that home’s front garden, with its neat, round bushes and empty ceramic pots; this one was completely paved over, a large red car sat to her left, and the street beyond the gate (which was now brown and wooden rather than twisted iron painted green) was not her street at all. It was a completely different street.

  Molly looked back to the house she had just stepped out of, to find that it too had now changed. She hadn’t a single clue as to where she was.

  ~Chapter Eight~

  Molly tried to re-enter the house, which was now a completely different house to the one she had walked out of, but the door was locked. She knocked, rang the bell, bashed at the window, but no one came to answer. She picked up a rock and thought about smashing one of the windows and climbing in, but even if she did, what then? Would the house inside suddenly be the one imprisoning the Boy again, or would she just find herself inside this new house and still be as lost as ever? Molly threw the rock into the street in anger and sat on the front step, absolutely incandescent with rage at herself.

  The note had told the truth, the Boy was bad and a liar. That being the case, how did she know if he’d told the truth about the Fisks having gone out, and that they would be out for hours? Perhaps they had been in their house all along, and now it was much too late and her Mum was dead, all because of her stupidity.

  Molly jumped to her feet and screamed out in impotent anger. As she stopped to catch her breath, someone screamed in reply.

  It had sounded almost like an animal, a beast, perhaps a wolf. But Molly knew that it wasn’t any of those, it was a person. She moved slowly to the gate and looked to her left, the direction of the scream. At first she thought the street was empty, then she blinked and there he was. It was the unnaturally tall man in black she’d glimpsed on her way into the lying Boy’s house.

  The man was quite still and he almost seemed like he wasn’t really there at all, like he’d been superimposed, or badly Photoshopped into the picture. Molly could hear her heartbeat pounding furiously. ‘Hey! Are you trying to scare me? Because it won’t work, alright?’ Molly screamed with much more authority than she felt. The tall man said nothing and did nothing. Molly felt a bit better, she’d told that creep what for.

  And then the tall man began to walk.

  He began to walk towards Molly.

  Molly pulled open the gate and moved out into the street, ‘Hey, you just stay where you are, okay?’

  Long, steady strides, the tall man took; he was in no hurry.

  ‘Are you listening to me? Stay back or else, you weirdo!’

  Forward he came, he didn’t pause and didn’t turn away.

  Molly spotted a bicycle propped up against the hedge of the house next door. It was a bit too small for her but it would have to do. She leapt onto it and pedalled furiously to the bottom of the street, turning sharply into the next street, and then the next street, and the one after that. She rode until her throat felt wind-chapped and her thighs ached and she thought she might throw up. Finally she stopped and shakily stepped off the bike, her breathing quick and hungry. She walked wobbly-legged onto the pavement and pushed her way into a garden with an overgrown hedge, dragging the liberated bicycle behind her, before collapsing onto the ragged lawn, gasping for air.

  The tall man had been left long behind, she was sure of that; she’d glanced over her shoulder every few seconds and there’d been no sign of him. In fact, there’d been no sign of anyone. Street after street after street, empty.

  Feeling better composed now, she sat up and pondered her situation. She still had no idea where she was. None of the streets she rode down had looked at all familiar. Then she remembered her phone.

  She patted at her pockets, and there it was, a small lump of plastic, five years out of date because Mum would only let her use one of her old ones. She’d only let her have it in the first place to keep safe. Who to call? Perhaps if she called her house Gran would answer? She dialled the number and put the phone to her ear. It rang twice, then crackled to such a painful degree that Molly pulled it away from her ear in surprise.

  ‘Hello?’

  The voice creeped quietly out of the phone, Molly quickly put it back to her ear. ‘Gran? Hello, Gran, is that you?’

  ‘No.’ The voice was male, emotionless.

  ‘Oh. Who is this? Are you at my house?’

  ‘I am not in a house. I am in a street,’ replied the voice flatly.

  ‘But I phoned home. How did you pick up?’

  ‘What are you doing Between?’ asked the voice.

  ‘None of your business, whoever you are.’

  ‘You spoke to the lying boy in the room. What were you talking about?’

  Molly felt the hairs on the back of her neck prickle. ‘It’s you. You’re the tall man in black.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘What do you want?’

  ‘I want to know where you are. Then I can also be there.’

  ‘Tough!’ Molly hung up the phone quickly, her heart racing. This was bad, there was no doubt about it. She was lost and alone with a stranger chasing after her and no way of knowing how to get back to her street. Was she even in her own town anymore? Her own country? How did things work here? Perhaps she’d never find a way ba—

  *DING-DING!*

  Molly jumped at the sudden, shrill noise and looked up to see that a red double-decker bus was parked in front of the house. She had neither seen nor heard any sign of its approach, but now there it was. One thing was for sure; it was a British bus, so she was, at the very least, still in th
e same country.

  *DING-DING!*

  The doors hissed open to reveal the driver, who was so large and round that it was as though he was one with his driver compartment itself. His face was speckled with random outcrops of whiskers, and his eyes were so close together that a single hard sneeze might cause them to collapse into one.

  ‘Well?’ said the Driver. ‘Getting on or staying put?’

  ‘Do you go by Whitmore Avenue?’ Molly asked.

  ‘We go everywhere,’ said the Driver.

  Molly stepped onto the bus. ‘Oh,’ She patted at her pockets. ‘I don’t think I have any money.’

  ‘Money?’ And the Bus Driver laughed. ‘Take a seat young girl.’

  The doors closed with a sigh and the Driver gave the bell a quick ‘ding’ before he eased the bus away from the pavement, and off they went.

  The interior of the bus was gloomy and strangely dank, the shapes of other passengers indistinct, but Molly could see that the bus was almost full.

  She took one faltering step forward into the silent interior and peered at the nearest passenger. It was a man. Or it had been a man, once upon a time. His eyes, now shrunken and dry, hung from their sockets. His tongue lolled fatly from a breathless mouth with what remained of his broken, brown teeth framing it. He was dead. They were all dead. Every single passenger was a corpse.

  The Driver laughed and hit the bell over and over in delight. ‘Welcome, to the bus of the dead; this will be your final destination!’

  ~Chapter Nine~

  Molly staggered backwards towards the driver, ‘Stop! Stop the bus, I want off!’

  ‘Stop the bus?’ said the Driver, ‘Between officially designated stops? Oh no, more than my jobs worth.’

  ‘They’re all dead... all of them!’

  The Driver licked his lips with a sharp black tongue that was split at the end into two prongs that moved independent of each other.

  ‘Oh yes, they have all reached their final destination, thanks to me. I always get them where they’re going. Don’t you worry girl; I’ll do the same for you too.’

  Molly banged on the plastic door to the Driver’s compartment, ‘You better let me off right now or I’ll, well, I’ll do something horrible to you-!’ she raised her small fists by way of a show of force, chin out, mouth a grim line. The Driver hit the brake, causing Molly to tumble to the grimy floor as the bus doors hissed open.

  ‘Good! You’re lucky you did as I asked ‘cause otherwise I’d have...’ Molly’s voice died in her throat as a dirty black boot stomped onto the bus, followed by a second. She looked up from her place on the floor, up to a man in a tatty, ancient bus conductor’s uniform. His cheeks were sunken, his lips missing to reveal a permanent skeletal grin, and his eyes were hidden in shadow beneath the brim of his frayed hat.

  ‘Tickets, please,’ came a voice like nails on a chalk board. ‘Show me your tickets please.’

  ‘Better do as he says, girl, or you’re for it,’ said the Driver, and he chuckled, his face eager, unnatural black tongue darting from his mouth.

  ‘Tickets, please. Show me your valid tickets for this journey.’

  ‘I don’t have a ticket, he didn’t give me any ticket!’ said Molly.

  ‘They always blame the driver,’ said the Driver, sadly shaking his head.

  ‘Ticket please.’ said the Conductor again, advancing on Molly. She scrabbled up to her feet and looked for a way out, but the Conductor’s frame blocked the exit.

  ‘I said I don’t have one! What’re you going to do, hey? Tell the police?’

  The Driver laughed at that, a proper belly laugh, ‘Police? That’s good that; oh that’s proper rich!’

  ‘Tickets, please. Please show me your valid ticket.’ and the Conductor pulled a large, rusted blade from his coat pocket. It looked like an old bayonet, the kind of knife they attached to the tops of guns in World War One.

  ‘What are you doing? Hey! Put that down—'

  The Conductor swung it at Molly’s head, narrowly missing as she ducked. ‘Tickets please.’

  She ducked a second time, and a third, then bolted for the narrow staircase, scrabbling upwards on hands and knees.

  ‘Tickets please.’ The Conductor followed, steadily taking each step upwards.

  Like downstairs, the top floor was full of the dead, no doubt the work of the Conductor and his rusty blade.

  ‘Tickets. Tickets, please.’

  The Conductor was still out of sight as he slowly stalked his way up the winding stairs. Molly desperately looked around for a way out; she spotted two of the dead leant forward in their seats. She dove behind them, flattening herself against the seat, and heaved the corpses towards her so that their bodies and tattered coats masked her presence, doing her best to block out the rancid smell that forced its unwanted way up her nostrils.

  Two heavy boots stepped onto the top deck. ‘Tickets please.’

  Molly held her breath.

  Silence.

  Very slowly, she moved her head. Just slightly. She peered with one eye through a button hole in one of the corpses coats; the Conductor had his back to her. His head slowly swung from one side of the bus to the other, searching.

  ‘Tickets please.’ He slowly dropped down to one knee, his movements stiff and awkward. He placed one palm against the floor and bent further, looking along the length of the bus, first one way, then the next. Molly knew he was looking for a small girl, balled up under a seat; but all he would see was old shoes and newspapers. The Conductor straightened, then stood again, joints cracking.

  He seemed to waver, considering his next move, before swiftly twisting to one side and thrusting his blade into one of the seated corpses with such force that it stabbed into the seat itself. ‘You must show a valid ticket.’ And the next one, through went the blade, brittle, dead bones yielding with a terrible crack as he went about his business. The conductor was making his way methodically from one corpse to the next, stabbing until he found the bodies that hid her.

  Molly began to breathe slowly. Steady, shallow, so the body in front of her remained still. She knew she was in bad trouble, her only chance was to make a run for the stairs once the Conductor had made his way to the far end of the bus. Push the body and race down the stairs, pull the door aside and jump for it.

  But then the Conductor stopped, and he turned.

  He turned back towards where Molly hid, now once again holding her breath. Had she made a noise? The air moving in and out of her lungs too heavy?

  ‘Tickets. Tickets please.’ The Conductor made his way down towards where she hid. He stopped two seats from her, the rusted blade thrusting through the body of a dead woman. He didn’t know, he was still guessing, but he was so close now, and he was between Molly and the stairs. She was trapped.

  ‘Tickets.’ He stopped before the seats in front of where Molly hid, sticking the knife into the corpse who sat there with such force that it stuck right through the back of the seat, the pointed end just touching the clothing of one of the bodies she lay behind.

  ‘Last chance, tickets please.’ The Conductor stepped forward, he held the blade high, his dried face with its fraying skin blank and without mercy. ‘I said tickets plea—'

  Screaming with a mix of fury and effort, Molly thrust her arms forward, propelling the top half of the corpse she hid behind towards the Conductor, its legs remaining stuck to the seat. The body’s head struck the Conductor in the throat and he staggered back, his bayonet clattering to the floor.

  Molly leapt from the seat. Seeing the blade fall she ducked and grabbed it, the Conductor recovering enough to swing a large fist in her direction, but Molly was quicker, ducking the lumbering blow then striking upward with the blade, sinking it deeply into the Conductor’s arm.

  He made no sign of being in pain, but it was enough for him to take a couple of steps backwards. Taking advantage of the Conductor’s momentary loss of balance, Molly, blade still in hand, sprinted past him and towards the staircase, running
down each step with such speed that her foot missed half-way down and she fell the rest of the way, landing in a painful heap at the bottom.

  The bus screeched to a halt as the Driver pushed the brakes in surprise. ‘What’s happening back there? I’ll have no monkey business on my bus!’

  Molly leapt up, blade still in hand, as the Driver emerged from his compartment. His eyebrows shot up in surprise as he saw Molly stood before him, face like thunder, knife in hand.

  ‘Open that door, right now, or you’re going to find yourself with a puncture.’

  ‘But this is not a designated stop.’

  ‘Tickets... please...’

  Molly glanced up the stairs as the Conductor’s heavy boots stomped onto the first step. She stepped towards the Driver, waving the rusty blade. ‘Right now! Open the doors!’

  The Driver glanced to the stairs as the heavy steps made their way slowly downwards. He smiled. ‘You won’t use that, you’re bluffing.’

  Molly poked the blade sharply forward, jabbing the Driver’s hand, drawing blood.

  ‘Ow!’ the Driver yelped, recoiling.

  ‘Right now! Open—! The—! Door—!’

  The Driver sucked at his wounded hand and glared at her with murderous fury. He stepped back into his compartment; with a sigh the door folded open.

  ‘Tickets please.’

  The Conductor was four steps from the bottom; Molly sprinted for the open door, past the Driver, and leapt into the empty street.

  ~Chapter Ten~

  Molly’s feet hurt and her stomach grumbled in protest every few seconds at the continued lack of food. She wasn’t sure how long she’d been walking; it must have been hours. Hours and hours and hours, though the light showed no sign of dimming to suggest the evening was approaching. She’d wandered this way and that, up and down unfamiliar streets, taking turns into yet more unfamiliar streets as the fancy took her. She may not have known every nook, cranny, and cul-de-sac of her hometown, but she was certain she would have recognised something by now; this seemingly endless parade of unfamiliar streets just wasn’t possible.