A Hatful of Shadows

by Richard Ayre

  I rose slowly from the corpse of its mother and climbed the stairs towards it. I think it tried to run. I think it tried to make itself run. But it couldn’t move. It could only stare, soundless, terrified, as the blood soaked man climbed slowly towards it, holding up the knife to show it.

  I reached the landing and stared down at it as it stared at me with those lovely blue eyes, totally uncomprehending, totally damaged now. I picked it up and it was then that it began to scream. I carried it into its room and closed the door.

  The police and the neighbours broke the front door down about 5 minutes later. But by then it was far too late.

  They found me in the bedroom, drenched in blood. They had seen the bodies of the parents downstairs, the neighbours knew that a little girl was here too. And they found the intruder’s body lying next to the terrified girl, his throat gaping in a big, red grin, the bloodied knife still in his hands. Apparently he had taken his own life. They could only be thankful that he hadn’t killed the six year old Heather too.

  I watched them. One of the neighbours picked up my home and carried it towards a waiting ambulance. People stood in the orange and flickering blue glow of street lamps and emergency service lights with shocked faces.

  They kept asking my home questions but I kept it silent. That was easy to do. I simply locked it in the cupboard under the stairs. In the weeks and months that followed my new home was moved around from place to place, until another family took it in. And there it stayed.

  From the blue windows of my lovely new home I stare out at the world and smile. And now, people smile back. They never used to, but now they do. Because my new home is so nice. I have had lots of houses over the years, but never a home, you know what I mean? Yes, it may be small, but it’s growing every day, and one day, it will be so big it will consume everything.

  I sigh and sit back in my rocking chair beside the fire, and I sip my tea and think;

  ‘Ahhh. Home. Home at last.’

  Home at Last was originally published in Bad Neighborhood, (American spelling) a horror anthology by the remarkable Fox Emm. http://bloggingonward.com/

  She began the whole thing with a kick-starter campaign and was gracious enough to offer me a place in the book. Give it a go-there are some incredibly good horror stories here under the theme ‘Home.’ It’s even available as an audiobook.

  https://www.amazon.com/Neighborhood-Misfit-Horror-Anthologies-Book-ebook/dp/B018O3SIIA/ref=asap_bc?ie=UTF8

  The Door

  The door stays closed now. Whatever happened behind it all those years ago remains a mystery. Its red paint is peeling. The wood beneath the paint is starting to rot, and small, armoured insects have made it their home.

  The locals have heard the rumours of course. About what occurred in this house and the fate of the family that used to live here, but nowadays my neighbours pay those rumours no heed.

  I do though. For I know they’re true.

  I crouch behind that faded red door and wait.

  Because I know that one day, someone will come again.

  A very short one, this. It was another failed competition entry. (Do you see a pattern emerging?) This time for The Readers Digest 100 word Short Story comp. I think it frightened them too much. (At least that’s what I tell myself.)

  The villain of the piece.

  Whenever anyone ever asked Rob how he was, he always replied; ‘Fine. How are you?’

  He always put it back on them. Always took the pressure off him having to answer truthfully.

  Because no-one actually wanted to know how he was. If he told them how he felt, how he really felt, they’d run a mile. It was just something to say, wasn’t it?

  People don’t say what they mean. They all speak in a secret code that isn’t really a secret but is as open as the sky. They don’t even think what they mean. Truth does not exist because we hide it, even from ourselves. Because if we were truthful to ourselves, really, heartfelt truthful to all our faults, we wouldn’t last the night. The entire human race would commit mass suicide because we would realise that everything, everything we did was a complete waste of time. It did not make one bit of difference to anything.

  Or at least that was what Rob thought. He didn’t voice this of course. To do so would sabotage that unspoken rule that everyone else followed. To speak of it would shatter the frail illusion that people actually mattered, that anything mattered. When Rob knew, with an unwavering certainty, that it did not.

  When this realisation first hit Rob, he began to think about that unthinkable act. He was sitting in the kitchen. It was night and Pink Floyd’s Dark side of the moon was playing away quietly on the turntable in the living room. He was drinking whiskey. It was the second or maybe the third week of whiskey drinking. He couldn’t quite remember. It was raining outside, and as he sat at the kitchen table he slowly became aware of his reflection staring back at him in the black window. Its face was very gaunt. Not surprising as he had hardly eaten in the last eight weeks or so. Perhaps the odd McDonalds cheeseburger once every three days. That night he had put a frozen pizza into the oven, but when he started to eat it, he began to cry. He had thrown it in the kitchen bin and spat out the mouthful he’d taken on top of it. He then cracked open a can of beer.

  The beer was gone now. But he had wanted to drink more. So he got out the whiskey again.

  He wasn’t at home. He didn’t have a home anymore. He was at his friend’s house. Paul had suggested he could come and stay as he had a loft conversion that wasn’t being used. Paul had a big house. He was in love with his wife and he was always smiling. If Rob had told Paul that nothing mattered, he would have laughed. He was too good at telling the lie to himself.

  Paul and his wife Helen were not there. They had gone on holiday. Again. It seemed like they were always on holiday. Together. They wouldn’t be back for another week. Rob had the house to himself.

  Rob could just see out into the yard through the window. He could make out the clothesline swinging in the wind and the rain. He took another long swallow and contemplated it.

  The questions came to him and they were removed from any emotion. He was curious, that’s all. His dead eye gaze travelled from the clothesline outside to the stairs through the open kitchen door. He got up and walked to the bottom of them, staring up at the balcony on the first floor. It was at least twelve feet he reckoned. The balustrade was old, but solid. He knew this from the numerous times he had used it for support when he returned from the pub. He believed the clothesline could fit around the bannister easily, leaving ten feet or so. Definitely enough space for him to do what he was thinking about.

  Rob nodded to himself, satisfied. As if he had worked out a problem. Then he moved back into the kitchen and sat down again, pouring himself another drink. He slowly thought about what the consequences of his actions might be.

  Troublesome. They would be troublesome.

  For a start, what about Paul and Helen? How would they feel to come home from Alicante, suntanned and laughing, to find a withered yet bloated corpse hanging from their stairwell? Probably very annoyed. Sad of course, but annoyed all the same. Rob had heard that when people were hanged back in the day, their bodies often ejected waste as they fought for breath. Not only would Paul and Helen have to put up with a dead body hanging in their hallway, but he might have pissed and shit all over their carpet. Imagine the smell!

  Then there was Rob’s mother of course. What would happen to her? She loved Rob. He knew this, but in his current mental predicament he could not understand why. The thought that killing himself might have killed her too never crossed his mind. He was thinking more along the lines that she would be embarrassed. What would she tell her neighbours?

  His thoughts then turned to the girls. How would they feel about having a suicide for a father? Would it make them forgive him? Or make them hate him more than they already did?

  The thought of his daughters coaxed tears again, and for a while he just sobbed silently, gulping air
and gulping whiskey.

  Why had he left? Why had he not stayed and tried to sort out the carnage of his marriage? Why had he been so selfish? When had he realised that he no longer loved his wife? How had he just walked away that night? With his daughters crying and his wife shouting? Sometimes it didn’t seem real. It was like some nightmare that his drunken mind had dredged up.

  The tablets didn’t help either. He had gone to the doctor’s about a month after he had walked out on his wife and family. He had started to tell him that he had a stomach problem, that he was constantly being sick. (He didn’t tell him it was probably because of the copious amounts of alcohol he was consuming every day however.)

  But he had bitten the bullet and began to tell the doctor that he thought he may have been depressed. Then he had wept in front of him, embarrassed and horrified, the tears coming so fast his breathing couldn’t keep up. The doctor had been very nice. He had let him weep, then asked him some questions from the Hamilton Depression Rating. How was he sleeping? Had he lost weight? Had he any suicidal thoughts? Rob got nine out of nine.

  The tablets had duly been prescribed. They had made him feel sick. They made him think funny thoughts and gave him lurid, technicolour dreams that brought him screaming awake at exactly the same time every morning. 4.32 am. That’s what time Rob got up. Every day.

  He had been lost for a long time in his marriage. He had found himself living with a woman he didn’t understand and had nothing in common with anymore (or so it seemed.) He had felt alone. He was a father, tick. He was a husband, tick. But who the fuck was he? At the age of forty four, Rob felt adrift, not even the woman he had spent the last twenty years with able to understand or help him. The arguments had gone on for a year. They had tried to patch up their differences but for Rob the chasm between himself and his wife just grew wider. After one particular argument, over nothing really, he had left, driving into the distance like some old Romantic hero-striking out on his own because of the stifling normality of the life he could no longer deal with.

  But he wasn’t that hero. In this play he was the villain of the piece. Villain. Of the. Piece. He had walked out on his family for no good reason that he could see. And here he now was, sitting in a friend’s house because he had given everything to Rebecca. The house, the car. Even the fucking dog. He owned nothing except the clothes dumped in the wardrobe upstairs, and he was in debt because he had also taken on some of the loans he and his wife had acquired over the years together. Rob poured more whiskey.

  Another problem was actually a practical one. He didn’t know how to make a hangman’s noose. On the telly, suicides all seemed to innately understand how this worked, but he didn’t. And it was this simple fact that actually bamboozled him. He might have to give up on it because he didn’t know how to make a knot. This fact made him feel even more useless than before.

  He sighed and wiped his eyes. They seemed to leak, his eyes. They never seemed dry. They constantly formed salty droplets that built up and then slid down his cheeks, sometimes at the most inopportune moments. He drank more whiskey.

  The record stopped playing in the next room. In the silence Rob continued to stare at nothing. He truly believed he would never know happiness again. Would never laugh again.

  Everyone had been very sympathetic towards his wife, and he was pleased that they were. Her friends had rallied around her. But in a way it was easier for her. She was the victim. He was the perpetrator. She deserved their sympathy. He did not. There was no-one for Rob to turn to. And he didn’t want sympathy anyway. He didn’t deserve it. Rob truly hated himself. He had messages that he had written on his phone to prove this. One of them went ‘God hates me and I hate him.’

  Nothing he did made any difference. It made no difference whether he lived or died. Nothing mattered. Not anymore. He stood up.

  Fuck it. He’d sort the knot out somehow. He went out barefooted into the wet yard and unfastened the clothesline, bringing it back in and placing it on the kitchen table.

  He messed about with the wet rope until, more by luck than judgement, he fashioned a sort of sliding loop into one end. He guzzled more whiskey. He then took the rope upstairs and tied the other end around the bannister. He went downstairs and admired his handiwork. The shadow of the noose swung gently in the light from a lamp and he thought it looked suitably melodramatic. He nodded to himself, satisfied.

  He retrieved the whiskey bottle from the kitchen. It had a quarter left. He would finish it, then finish himself. He did not deserve to stay on the same planet his daughters occupied.

  He put Floyd on again. The music satisfied his mood. When it was finished, so was the whiskey. He gave a sigh and picked up his phone, writing a final message to his daughters. I’m so sorry it has ended like this. Please believe me when I say that the days you were born were the happiest of my life. You are both perfect, and you deserve so much more than I have given you. Please try not to hate me too much. I love you both so much. Dad xx.

  His eyes were leaking again. He could barely see when he had finished typing.

  He threw the phone onto a table and walked up the stairs, pulling up the clothesline and slipping the loop over his head. He tightened it around his neck. He jumped.

  The bannister creaked, but held. The thin clothesline sliced into his throat, the pain coursing through his alcohol soaked body. It took a while for him to die. And it wasn’t a pleasant death. But at last, when it was over, Rob had found some sort of peace. His body swung slowly.

  His phone rang on the table. After a few rings it cut to answerphone.

  ‘Dad. Hi. It’s Emma. Me and Terri miss you. We’ve had enough of this. Terri’s here with me now. Can we see you soon dad? Give us a ring when you’re free.’ There was a pause, then; ‘We love you dad. Don’t ever forget that. See you soon. Bye.’

  Rob’s shadow swung above the phone. It eventually stopped swinging when the screen light went out.

  I wanted to write a horror story that was not a supernatural horror story, and so, as authors are constantly told to do, I looked back to a fairly dark part of my own past to find that story. I’m pleased to say that when I was at my lowest, I had my friends and my family to help me and I never contemplated anything like Rob’s solution with any real intent. Thank God.

  No Triple X

  Scaggs knew this city well. He had been here a few times before, mostly when on shore leave. And always in this quarter. The area drew him back again and again. He could get his ‘special’ cakes if he wanted them (although if the MP’s found him with these in his possession he would have been for the high jump) and he could drink his coffee and beer quietly in some corner of a bar. Watching.

  Scaggs liked watching. He liked to stare. Not to touch though. He had never wanted to do that. No. It was enough for him to just observe the girls in their windows. To imagine what it would be like to heed their beckoning and actually enter their establishments. To try their wares. To feel their curves under his hands. Their smooth hips and the rougher, ruched material of their panties. To hook his thumbs into the lining, to slide them down…

  But imagining was all Scaggs wanted. He didn’t want the reality. He didn’t want to look into their dull, uncaring eyes when he was satiated. When he was fumbling for his trousers in the red glow of post coital coupling. When the fantasy had become disappointingly real and sordid. When they would no doubt laugh at him with their compatriots once he had left, ducking his misshapen head through the exit as quickly as he could. Stomping off into the Amsterdam night.

  No. Who wanted that? Scaggs just liked to watch. He was the watcher of life. This red-light, low life. It was his as long as he didn’t touch.

  He continued on his search, past the lit windows with their living mannequins, aimless yet alert to new vistas.

  Soon he found himself at the mouth of a dingy alleyway, his wanderings paused by the sandwich board placed on the corner. He read the printed words. ‘See the most beautiful and erotic woman in all the world. Are y
ou looking for something more? Are you searching for your special lady? Then look no further. No modern trash. No Triple X.’

  Scaggs read the sign twice then peered down the darkened alleyway, trying to discern any sort of doorway. There was nothing he could see, but that sign beguiled him. ‘Something more. No Triple X.’ Would it hurt to take a look? He decided it would not, and shuffled down the alleyway, quickly leaving the bright main street behind him, along with its noises.

  His footsteps were loud in the closeness of the alleyway. The old weathered bricks on either side seemed to be closing in on him as he walked further into the gloom. The smells changed; from beer and hotdogs and men in heat to an older, dryer scent. Perhaps jasmine and spices he did not recognise. But he liked it. He liked that smell.

  He suddenly became aware of a figure up ahead, a bobbing cigarette weaving in the darkness like the eye of a Cylon. Scaggs approached the figure he now saw was an old man. He wore trousers and a dirty white shirt with the sleeves rolled up his thin, sinewy arms, and an old fashioned leather apron covered the front of his body. The old man eyed Scaggs as he sidled up to him. He nodded.

  ‘Good evening Sir,’ he said. He pronounced ‘Sir’ as ‘Shir.’ Obviously a local with the usual amazing grasp of the English language.

  Scaggs nodded. ‘I saw a sign at the mouth of the alleyway,’ he began, but the old man straightened and threw his cigarette onto the ground.

  ‘Yes Sir.’

  Scaggs waited but it seemed no more was to come. The old man stared up at him, waiting for him to continue. Or leave.

  ‘How much does it cost?’ asked Scaggs. ‘I only want to look mind, that’s all. I’m not interested in anything else.’

  ‘Looking is all there is,’ said the old man. He waited again.

  Scaggs frowned. ‘Well how much?’ he repeated, getting annoyed.