by Matt Shaw
“Hello?” I said quietly. Deep down I hoped that, if there was someone out there, they wouldn’t hear me and they’d leave. I’ve learnt from writing horror and watching films over the years, hell even watching the news on television...I’ve learnt that if someone is out walking in the woods, late at night, it’s generally a good idea not to open the door to them should they come knocking. “Anyone there?” I asked again in a quieter tone than strictly necessary. I waited in silence desperately hoping no one would answer. With a general feeling of unease creeping over me I took up the gun in my writing hand and raised it towards the door. Part of me just wants to put two bullets through the door on the off-chance someone is out there but I hold back from firing. Good self-control. Guess I’m hearing things. Either that or I dreamt it in my shallow sleep.
A couple more seconds passed before I heard the familiar sounds of heavy footsteps walking the length of the cabin, away from the front door. My heart jumped in my throat as I recalled the sound from my childhood when it woke me from my sleep and I had gone running into my dad.
Someone was out there.
I leapt up from the chair, with the gun in hand, and dashed through to the bedroom, as quietly as I could, where the sounds of the footsteps were headed. With any luck they’d pass in front of the bedroom window and I’d be able to see who it was but by the time I crossed the bedroom, to the window, the footsteps had all but disappeared. Whoever it was had obviously stepped off the wooden porch, down onto the soft mud to mute the sounds of their unwelcome steps. Dammit. I peered out of the window but, again, could see nothing. Even less by the time my heavy breathing had misted the window panes up. I wiped them clear with my free hand and suddenly screamed, falling backwards onto my ass, when I saw the pale face of a young boy staring right back at me, inches away from my own face.
Whoever it was stepped back, into the blackness, out of view. I rushed over to the window again and peered out but they were gone.
I closed my eyes tight and tried desperately to remember his face in case I recognized him as being one of the youngsters hanging around outside the store earlier but all I could recall was a long scar running down his neck. Did I really see that or did my imagination paint that picture to fool me and make me feel even more nervous? I opened my eyes again and squinted into the eerie night-air.
BANG!
The thud echoed through the cabin causing my heart to miss a beat once more - a horrible feeling becoming all too familiar.
“Leave me alone!” I screamed at the top of my lungs. I didn’t believe my yelling would help. If the sound of bullets flying through the air didn’t scare off whoever was trying to mess with me then I’m sure my pathetic cries would do nothing apart from maybe encourage them to continue.
BANG!
I don’t know why but I hurried back through to the living room, where the noise was coming from, and froze in the middle of the room as I nervously waited for the next bang.
KNOCK! KNOCK!
I span around, on the spot, to face the front door; someone’s knocking again.
“Who is it?” I demanded. I raised the gun to what I thought would be head level for whoever was out there. “Who’s there?” I watched, in terror, as the door handle started to slowly twist counter-clockwise. “I have a gun!” I warned them. The handle stopped moving. It seems, whoever it is, does have some common sense in them after all.
BANG!
I span back towards the wall behind me. How many people are here?
“Fuck off!” I yelled. Yelling is all I can do. I’m too afraid to move the seat out of the way of the door to run out and confront whoever it is. It’s fair to say the image of someone standing at the window and old memories of what I had heard when I was here with my dad, all those years ago, have me more or less frozen with fear. Morning can’t come quick enough.
KNOCK! KNOCK!
I looked down at my watch. It’s only just turned midnight. There’s at least five hours before the sun will start to come up, illuminating enough of the woods to allow me to walk into town.
BANG!
I can’t take five hours of this. I turned my attention back to the door handle which had started to slowly turn again. I hesitated for a split second before raising the barrel of the gun back towards the door. I mentally gave whoever was out there a couple more seconds to stop moving the handle. One. Two. I squeezed the trigger and put a hole straight through the door. The handle stopped moving immediately. I lowered the gun and froze, waiting to hear if someone would cry out in pain or if I’d hear the sound of someone dropping to the floor like a dead weight. There was nothing. Did I even hit anyone?
“Hello?” I called out nervously. No one replied.
Suddenly, with no warning, a loud ear-piercing scream echoed through the house followed by loud banging noises from what felt to be all of the cabin’s walls. I too screamed as I dropped to my knees, letting the gun fall to the floor beside me. I placed my hands over my ears to drown the racket out.
Before I knew it the only noise in the cabin was the sound of my own screaming. I stopped. My throat was sore from the strain I had put upon it. I nervously moved my hands away from my ears. Silence. Blissful silence. I wonder how long for, though? I didn’t get up. I didn’t move in case my movement triggered it all off again. I just stayed there, on my knees, in the middle of the living room.
This is stupid. I’m stupid. No. I’m being stupid. There’s nothing out there. My dad told me so. There’s no such thing as ghosts. Ghosts are nothing more than figments of a tired imagination or cruel tricks of the mind. It’s probably just a group of teenagers mucking around. Probably the same people who caused all the damage to the cabin. I expect they came back to hang out in their den and were annoyed to see me here. They’re probably just trying to scare me out; a logical reason to calm my shattered nerves.
My logical reason isn’t helping much. I’ve fired three shots now; two outside and one through the door. How would that not have scared them off by now? Had the shoe been on the other foot, I would have run after the first shot had been fired. I certainly wouldn’t have hung around to encourage more bullets to be shot towards me.
Slowly, and quietly, I pulled myself up from my knees and onto the seat. Once comfortable, I reached down and collected the gun from the floor. If the gunshots weren’t enough to deter whoever is trying to scare me, maybe I’d be better off just leaving the cabin and letting them have it. I mean, if they want it that desperately they fear no bullets...Perhaps they deserve it?
“There’s no one out there,” dad had said after I’d woken him up to tell him about the footsteps I’d heard out the front. Dad seemed to be more annoyed by the fact I’d disturbed him than by the fact someone could be outside pacing up and down in front of his cabin. I’ll never forget that. On the rare occasions when one of my girls had woken me up, in the past, to tell me something was wrong - I always checked out their story with no hint of my annoyance, no matter how tired I was. What if they had been right and someone was in their closet or someone was stood at the back window, looking in?
“There is someone out there,” I had insisted as I tried to pull him from his bed.
“Just ignore them,” he had replied, “they’ll soon go away.”
Is my subconscious serving up that memory as a way of telling me to simply ignore whoever is out there? Is that what I need to do? Just ignore them and they’ll leave. Worry about them if and when they decide to try and walk through the front door. Why should I feel scared anyway? I’m the one with the gun after all. Perhaps they should be out there fearing me?
This is silly. They’ve gone quiet again. I’ll do the same. I’ll creep around here, until morning. I won’t shout at them anymore. I won’t go running out there or start screaming. Whatever they do, I’ll just ignore it. I just need something to help distract my mind; I’m sure it’s my own mind making this feel a lot worse than it actually is anyway. I’m tempted to try and go back to sleep but I know my body won’
t let me. I know I’ll regret the lack of sleep in the morning, when I go to the Sheriff’s department, but I have too much adrenalin flowing through my system at the moment. Besides, if I did doze off, whoever’s outside will only give me a jolt awake again when they start their scaremongering once more. Fuck that. I won’t give them the satisfaction. And I had best be on my guard on the off-chance they do happen to come in. I’m not saying they’ll try anything, if they crossed the threshold but, even so, I’d rather be ready for anything. Sleep can wait. So much for trying to distract my mind from thinking of them. I think, since deciding that, I’ve actually thought about them more.
I shook my head and stood up as quietly as the creaking chair allowed me to. I wonder if any of my dad’s old paperwork bits and pieces are still here? The last time I was here, I found some stashed in a drawer in the office. I had always promised myself to have a flick through, in case there were any notes or anything I could use for a new story, but I never got around to it. Despite wanting to do it - I never seemed to manage to find the time. Well, time is all I have now...
I crept through to my study, and my father’s study before that, and sat down at the desk where we used to write. Where he used to scribble notes down, on various scraps of paper, at the desk - before using a typewriter - I used to just bring my laptop and do everything on that. It was much easier. Back in those days, though, I guess my father didn’t have the luxury of computers. Even when he could have turned to them, towards the end of his writing career, he never bothered. He said he preferred the feel of using his typewriter. He wasn’t superstitious with most things in life but he did always worry his words would never flow so well if he changed from using his trusty typewriter.
For a while, after his death, I tried to use his typewriter after my mother passed it down to me. I hated it. I guess I make too many mistakes to use a typewriter. It’s much easier with a computer; the ‘backspace’ key in particular.
I sat at the desk, on the old wooden chair, once I had brushed the various bits of rubbish from the surface of both of them. The wooden table used to be a fine piece of furniture but now there’s hardly an area which doesn’t have some kind of childish etching scratched into it; whether it’s some silly slang or some immature doodle.
BANG!
That’s cool. Ignore it. They’ll go away. Besides, it came from the living room and I’m not there anymore. They’re not even near me. Forget about it. I pulled open the desk’s drawer and was confronted by an old photograph of my father and I. My heart sank as I realized it had been drawn on. The young image of me was untouched but my father’s image; his eyes had been crossed out and a line, with stitches, had been drawn down the length of his neck. Had my dad still been alive, it probably wouldn’t have angered me as much. I took the photo from the drawer and placed it on the top of the table.
BANG!
I wet the bottom of my thumb, with my tongue, and ran it across the ink but it made no difference. I had hoped it would have wiped it clean off but no such luck.
“They said, if you hear the scream, you die a year later and your soul goes to haunt the very same woods where you originally heard the scream...” dad had told me. His face was so serious, why wouldn’t I have believed him as he passed on what he was told by the locals. Twelve years old, I would never have believed he’d lie to me. I had no reason to doubt him. Not until just under a year later when I discovered the affair more or less detailed in the many notes. Part of me wonders why he had kept them. Surely, for a man who liked to keep his own business private, he’d have just burned them once he had read them and savored the words within. I’ll never know for sure but maybe he was planning on publishing them; a cruel way to inform his wife, who read all of his work, that he was actually having an affair with this whore. I digress. Before I read those notes... I’d have never doubted him and so I never doubted what he said the locals had told him about the footsteps and the scream.
Although I still dreamt about hearing the footsteps, I more or less had forgotten about the story until dad’s death. Practically a year, to the day, since the final night of our last happy holiday together. It was but a few months, from getting home from our cabin adventure, that I ventured into his empty office and read the truth about my father.
Now his story is at the forefront of my mind and I can’t shake it out despite knowing, deep down, it’s ridiculous.
“...your soul goes to haunt the very same woods where you originally heard the scream...” his words echoed through my mind as I tried to ignore the footsteps which were pacing the front of the cabin once more.
“It’s just a story,” I said to myself. “A story to scare kids from venturing into the woods by themselves. That’s what all ghost stories are - simple, yet effective, storytelling methods to keep you from doing something stupid.”
KNOCK! KNOCK!
“It’s just kids out there. Nothing more, nothing less. They’ll get bored eventually and they’ll go home. Worst case scenario, they’ll come in and then you can scare them away with your gun...” I whispered to myself. The sound of my own voice offered me little comfort.
Your gun? I’d rather not get used to referring to the gun as mine. It’s not my gun. It’s Josh’s gun. It’s the murder weapon. Don’t refer to it as ‘your gun’ again.
KNOCK! KNOCK!
Why did I have to leave my cellphone in the car with Susan? This could have all been dealt with by now and I might have even been on the way to meeting her at her mum’s. I picked the gun up, once more, and crept back through to the living room, where the knocking was coming from.
I’ll wait. That’s what I’ll do. I’ll wait until they go quiet again. And then I’ll creep out of here, into the woods, where I can watch the cabin. I’d bet my last dime that, as soon as I’m out, they’ll all come in and start their partying. It’s just kids. It’s just kids. It’s just kids...I crept across to the chair, opposite the door, and quietly lowered myself into it before I placed the gun to my side. I’m just going to sit here until they go quiet and then I’ll make my move.
‘What if there’s no one out there and no one runs in the cabin, after I vacate it?’ a random thought asks in the back of my mind. I don’t even want to think about it. If it’s no one fucking with me then I’m going mad. There’s no other explanation.
I’m just grateful Susan and the kids didn’t stay here tonight. I’d have hated for them to have to sit through this too. I know it would petrify Susan and Jamie but Ava...She’s too young to be exposed to these kind of mind games. She’d never sleep again. Not entirely sure I will yet.
KNOCK! KNOCK!
* * * * *
“Yes?” my dad had called out from his office door. He needn’t have bothered. I would have gone in regardless as to whether he had invited me or not. I hadn’t meant to knock on his door, when I went to confront him. It was force of habit. I had meant to just burst in and have it out with him.
I stormed over to his desk. So young and yet acting so old I demanded to know, “How long have you been seeing her?”
Dad span around, in his swivel chair, to look at me. He didn’t even bother getting up. I remember, at the time, how it annoyed me; the way he dared to look at me as though it was I who was in the wrong and not the other way around. He tilted his head down and looked at me over the top of his black-rimmed glasses - couldn’t even be bothered to take them off to address me properly.
“What are you talking about?” he had asked me.
“I know, dad, I know...”
“Know what?”
“Just tell me how long you’ve been seeing her?”
“What do you think you know, son? I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
“Don’t lie to me!” I remember I shouted at him. The first time, and not the last, that I’d dare to stand up to him; dare to point out how he, Mr Perfect, was in the wrong.
“Look, I’m really busy at the moment. These books don’t write themselves...What do you want?”
“I want to know how long you’ve been cheating on my mum!” I yelled.
Dad didn’t say anything. I remember how he just looked at me as though I was muck on his shoe, like I was nothing more than an unpleasant inconvenience to him. I remember, at the time, wondering whether the previous times we’d spent together, laughing and generally being happy, were nothing more than a lie on his part. An act he’d put on to keep both my mother, and I, happy so as to give him a relatively easy life. It’s amazing how one look from someone can ruin years and years of ‘progress’ with regards to a relationship.
“Son, I don’t have time for this...” he had told me. It was at that point, in the conversation, he originally turned his back on me and, from that moment on, it felt as though he had his back to me for the rest of his life.