by Gary McMahon
The way the strangers moved was odd, artless, as if they all had trouble bending their limbs. I thought that they resembled the puppets I’d enjoyed seeing perform in seaside Punch and Judy shows as a boy: rudimentary features, slack postures, stiff, arthritic movements.
Suppressing a shiver not entirely caused by the drop in temperature, I moved away from the window. The last thing I saw before closing up the gap was one of the small band of people reaching out a fisted hand to knock on the door.
I made myself a bowl of soup and sat eating it in front of the television. Vera had never allowed me to do that when she’d been around to object, but now I did it just for the company. A televised voice in the house was better than none at all, even if it did belong to some mincing Liverpudlian transvestite on what passed for a quiz show.
The soup was unbearably bland, so I left most of it, setting the bowl down on the low coffee table at the side of my comfy armchair. The table lamp that provided the only illumination in the room flickered a couple of times, then finally settled. There had been a few blackouts over the past months, and I hoped to God that this didn’t signal the approach of another.
The older I got the more fearful of the dark I became. It was like regressing to the point in my childhood where I’d been most afraid. Back when I was ten-years-old I’d been scared of everything, but darkness (and the threat of what it concealed) had been the worst, the ultimate terror.
Now I tended to see faces looming in the darkened rooms of my house, and the smeared outlines of heavy bodies swimming like whales through the gloom. Vera had kept me safe from such imaginings, but now her protection was gone.
I got to my feet and turned on the main light, blinking at the sudden transition from dim to too bright. Then I took my dinner dishes through into the kitchen and placed them by the sink, ready for washing in the morning.
There came a sound from the front of the house: a sharp clattering thud, as if something substantial had collided with a front wall of one of the neighbouring buildings.
Stepping slowly and quietly through to the front door, I peered out through the tiny glass spy hole I’d had the son-in-law of the man up the road install immediately after Vera’s funeral.
There was a large mob of people gathered outside the entrance to one of the flats across the way. Some sort of commotion seemed to be taking place - a row or disagreement. I could clearly hear raised voices, snatches of angry conversation.
Someone was telling the door-to-door God Squad who’d bothered me earlier to go away – and in no uncertain terms. A burly gentleman with tattooed arms who stood outside gesticulating in a vest and shorts despite the seasonal chill.
I pressed my eye to the glass, straining to make sense of the images given false distance by the distorting fish-eye lens.
Seven or eight figures stood smiling around the shouting man, and in response to his insults and obscenities they all reached slowly towards him with unnaturally long hands that looked to have too many fingers.
A car flashed by on the road between my house and the block of flats, obstructing the view for perhaps a couple of seconds. Certainly no more than that. By the time the vehicle had passed all was calm; the previously enraged resident now stood in silence, mouth hanging open in such a way that it seemed to be dangling on a faulty hinge.
Then the suddenly taciturn man led the group inside his home, and the door slammed shut on the back of the last one in.
I prised my eyeball away from the peephole and forced myself up to bed, where I slept uneasily, thinking of Vera and how much I missed her company.
The next morning was a Saturday and I slept uncharacteristically late, due mostly to my troubled night’s slumber. Rising just after 10am, I washed, dressed, and then cooked an early lunch. My head felt heavy, stuffed with cotton balls; my mouth was dry as old bones and my eyes itched maddeningly.
I locked up the house and decided to take a stroll down by the canal, where bleary-eyed weekend fathers dragged sleepy toddlers into the frosted park and hyperactive dogs took listless owners for brisk jogs along the gritty litter-lined towpath.
Paranoia hung over me like a cloak: glazed eyes watched me from all quarters. The skinny branches of deformed winter-bare trees hid stunted stick figures, and a thin man in a knee-length Macintosh inspected my progress intently from the other side of the canal through a large pair of binoculars.
The cold was nipping like claws, so I truncated my constitutional. Taking a shortcut through the car park behind the bus depot, I made my way back to my safe little suburban haven.
The rest of the day was spent reading Dickens and I just about managed to lose myself in the London of a bygone era, where men wore tops hats and women paraded in huge conical skirts that hid more than a multitude of sins.
By sunset I was feeling edgy, and as the sky turned a deep shade of crimson I checked that all the doors and windows where secured against more than just the cold.
I watched some television with the sound turned down low for a little while, and then unable to resist the temptation for any longer, I twitched aside the living room curtain and looked for signs of what I can only term oddness outside.
Most of the house lights in the street were turned off – except for the ones inside the very flat that the annoying word-spreaders had entered the previous night. I glimpsed movement behind the glass, and occasionally a face would turn to stare in my direction. Although certain that I could not be seen, I turned out the lights and retreated upstairs in hated darkness.
Over the next few hours people left the burly man’s dwelling in small groups of two or three, visiting several of the other flats in the same block. Then they progressed along the quiet street, knocking on doors and rapping on darkened windows. Each time a door was opened to them a discussion ensued – sometimes animated, most times not. Each of these exchanges ended in the same way: the visitor would reach out a hand, casually touch the forehead of the other person, and be wordlessly invited inside.
I watched from a first floor window, unsure of what I should do. If I called the police, or any of the other emergency services, what was I supposed to report? A feeling that all was not well? A hunch that the neighbours I barely even spoke to – despite having lived among them for twenty-five years – were being coerced into joining some kind of religious cult?
No. That simply would not do. I was being paranoid again, scared of my own cowering shadow. I hated being old, lacking in any kind of physical strength. Old age meant nothing more to me than fear and regret, and I was being mercilessly eaten alive by demons of my own creation.
So I sat in the dark and spied on them, deathly afraid of what nestled in the dense and silent shadows that gathered inside the room, but far more fearful of what was going on out there, up and down the night-time street.
Yet more figures drifted to the impromptu block party, arriving from points unknown. From other houses, other streets. A few cars and a battered mini-bus even pulled up at the kerb, disgorging even more of the shambling stiff-limbed gatecrashers.
Then, at some point just before one in the morning, something new happened. Something entirely unexpected.
Those inside the shabby flats suddenly spilled out into the street, stealthy and silent as thieves. They lined up and stared at my house, as if they knew that I was watching them. I decided that they probably did.
It was only then that I allowed myself to admit that the entire street had been taken over, and that the only house in the district from which they had been turned away was mine. Every other door stood open; every other heart and hearth laid bare to this strange invasion.
They stepped forward in unison, a slow-marching army of broken dolls. When they reached my low garden wall they swarmed over it, circling the house like crippled scavengers.
I found myself unable to move, unable to scream. The darkness inside the house was closing in on me, and then engulfed me in an instant as the lights I’d left on downstairs suddenly went out.
I did not know what else to do, so I continued my watch.
A single figure was pushed to the front of the gathering on my clipped front lawn, limping and shuffling like an inexpertly animated marionette.
It was an old woman, her shoddily etched features resembling those of my dead wife. It was as if a rough version of Vera’s aged face had been stencilled onto the empty head of a department store mannequin. Her thin mouth, small, deep-set eyes, the dark worry lines in her pale brow…all evoked as a graven image so that I might be tempted to follow peacefully wherever they led.
Tears began to stream down my cold, cold cheeks, and I struggled to understand what I was being shown. Then I heard the sound of breaking glass and of clumsy bodies flopping through into the rooms downstairs.
I dearly hoped that whatever was on its way to convert me would do so only after the darkness had swallowed me completely, saving me the horror of seeing my own hastily scribbled face bearing down on me with a dead cartoon smile.
They entered the room one by one, lining up against the wall, lying across the neatly made bed, leaning against the wardrobe. I turned to face them, to embrace what I was about to become. Hand-drawn faces leered from the darkness, thin pencil lips twisting into uncomfortable smiles.
The facsimile of Vera stood among them, not even recognising me as I silently pleaded with her to take me in her arms and soothe away the night terrors, just as she’d done so many times before.
And just as I reached out my thin arms to accept the inevitable, they walked away. Leaving the room quicker than they had entered it, and not even looking back at me as I shuffled pathetically forward on my aching knees to follow.
They had rejected me. For some uncertain reason I was not fit to join their ranks, and they had only broken in to tell me so. A street was chosen, and I had been left behind.
I slid to the floor, as loose and boneless as a rag doll…or a puppet deprived of its strings. When dawn finally arrived I was still there: stiff as marble, still and lifeless as the street outside.
If I wait here long enough they might return, lumbering along the highways and byways, tumbling over motorway safety fences and wading through the shallow and stagnant waters of the old canal.
If I wait here long enough they might return to save me. Just like they saved everyone else.
A BIT OF THE DARK
I
“Nobody heard him and nobody saw,
His is a picture you never could draw,
But he’s sure to be present, abroad or at home,
When children are happy and playing alone.”
Robert Louis Stephenson,
The Unseen Playmate
Frank Link stood on the slight rise above the busy motorway bypass, surveying the pathetic remains of the place he’d called home for three terrible years of his troubled youth. Tension flared across his shoulders and he was unable to relax his facial muscles out of the scowl they’d twisted into minutes earlier. The sound of the traffic below and behind him did nothing to alter his mood; anger was the dominant emotion and it bounced around inside him like the metal ball in a pinball machine.
Black sheets billowed at the edges of his vision like curtains blowing in a strong breeze, but whenever he turned to look there was nothing there. Just settling dust and the sensation of being watched from afar. It was a feeling he’d grown accustomed to across the years.
Riven Manor was in ruins; and that was exactly the way he liked it. The demolition squad had moved out three days before, and now he could see the place for what it truly was, a flattened pile of old masonry, rotten timber and dark, dark memories.
“Are you okay, honey?” asked his wife, moving close and linking her arm into the crook of his elbow.
“It’s dead,” he said, meaning more than the building; the dark place inside his heart that Riven Manor had created.
“I know, Frank. The monsters can’t get you now.”
He turned to her and smiled, tears welling at his eyes. She looked beautiful standing there against the clear afternoon sky, her blonde hair done up in a loose ponytail and her sparkling brown eyes seeing only him and nothing of the crushed but still twitching horrors spread out below. Claire knew little of the terrors he’d experienced as a child, but what she did know horrified her. The treatment Frank and the other boys had received here could not be excused, and Claire was all for suing someone. Anyone.
Frank smiled at her, his thoughts flying sky-high. She was a caring, understanding woman, but it was best if she did not know the full truth of what had happened all those years ago. If he told her, he feared she might never look at him in the same way again.
He’d spent most of his life exorcising the demons of Riven Manor. Writing about them in his novels, feeding them bit by bit into the mincing machine of the film industry by way of screenplays for low budget horror movies, and finally, now that the place had been brought tumbling down, he felt on the verge of some kind of closure.
“Where’s the boy?” he said, holding her hand and gently rubbing his thumb along the side of her palm.
“Exploring.”
A sharp spur of horror raked along the meat of his mind, drawing old blood. But then he remembered that it was all over, and nothing could happen to his son. The monsters were dead; only bad memories remained.
II
Terry ran along the edge of the pit, looking down at the exposed foundations. A sturdy wooden fence surrounded the area, but he’d managed to enter through a section where two uprights had been pulled apart – possibly by local vandals. The walls inside the compound had been torn down, the roof lay in tatters on the dusty ground, and Terry was amazed that such a huge building could be reduced to so much rubble.
He glanced back up the hill, at his father and mother standing there like biblical statues. He’d been warned to stay back, to keep away from the debris, but no ten year-old boy in creation could ever resist the lure of a building site. Leaping into the shuttered trench, Terry imagined that he was a W.W.II soldier on a mission deep into enemy territory. If he were discovered here, in the ruins of this French hotel, he would be captured and tortured by the dreaded General Heinz Boobyhoff, Nazi scourge of the allied forces!
It was a bright day; the sun was just past its peak. Terry took off his sweater and tied it around his middle, pretending it was an ammo belt. He picked up a stick shaped roughly like a pistol, and held it before him, ready to take down any enemy troops he encountered along the way. Rubble crunched underfoot and he almost twisted his ankle on a fallen door that splintered beneath his weight.
When he saw the boy, Terry was so caught up in his game that he almost ran up behind the lad and clobbered him over the head with his makeshift weapon.
He stopped running, breathing heavily and wondering if the boy had heard his noisy approach. All Terry could see of him was a narrow back and the nape of a thin neck; the boy was sat huddled over something, poking at it with a length of oil-stained copper pipe.
Terry approached with caution. The boy could be a Nazi sympathiser.
“Hello,” said the boy without turning around.
“Come and see what I’ve found.”
Terry drew level with the stooped figure, and peered over his shoulder. There was a hole in the ground, about the size of the bathroom window at home, and the boy was pushing stones over the rim and into the darkness below. Terry listened: the stones were taking a long time to drop. The sound they eventually made as they hit bottom sounded faint and incredibly distant.
“My name’s Franz,” said the boy, turning his head to look up at Terry. “I used to live here.”
A solitary cloud chose exactly that moment to cross the sun, darkening the area around he and the boy; Franz’s eyes were immediately lost in shadow and his mouth twisted into a strange leering grin. He slowly stood, reaching his full height, and placed a tiny hand on Terry’s arm.
Terry tensed; he did not like to be touched - especially not here, in this lonely location, and certainl
y not by this odd and slightly intimidating fellow. He opened his mouth to say so, but the words got stuck in his throat.
“Will you be my friend?” Franz muttered, blinking like a lizard as the sun came out of hiding.
“Terry!” His mother’s voice, sounding panic-stricken.
Terry pulled away from Franz, stumbling on the broken bricks, falling sideways and on top of the loose timbers that covered the hole like vertical blinds across a small window.
Then he fell, and nothing seemed the same again.
III
They left the hospital and booked into a cheap hotel, fraught with worry regarding their only son. The doctor had said that Terry was merely suffering from shock; he’d banged his head slightly in the fall, but all he’d have to boast about at school next week was a small swelling above the left ear. Frank bit his nails, worrying a sliver of loose skin on his ring finger. Sometimes being a parent was the most demanding and difficult job in the world.
“He’ll be okay. He is okay” Claire whispered as they set their things down on the incredibly narrow double bed. There was little furniture in the room apart from the bed, a spindly high-backed chair, two frail-looking bedside cabinets and a battered single wardrobe.
“I know, I know. It’s just that…”
“You can’t handle him being hurt.”
“Yes, that’s it.” Frank sat down on the rickety wooden chair by the bed, kicking off his muddy shoes. “I hate this feeling of powerlessness. I know he’s okay this time, but what about next time? What if he has some kind of major accident or contracts a severe illness?”
“We’ve been through all this before, Frank. Just because you had an awful childhood doesn’t mean that our son will too. You’re a fucking great dad; I’m a terrific mother. He’ll survive.” She smiled, reached out a hand to smooth down his fringe, as if he were the child in question.