Occasionally, Tim heard a rustling noise on the landing, but thought little of it. He thought nothing too, of the strange dreams he had from time to time. Dreams in which he was flying, or hunting in the dark. He certainly never thought of the egg. Indeed, he had forgotten its very existence.
Time passed swiftly and it was soon Christmas. Tim was very excited. His cousins would be coming for Christmas Day and he was looking forward to receiving his presents.
On Christmas morning Tim visited the shoebox again. Among the treasures inside it was a small present for his mother—a pair of sewing scissors. He had bought them in the summer, knowing the pair she already owned was getting rusty.
The scissors were there all right, but someone had been to his box. The lid had been removed and was lying upside down next to it. Tim was just considering remonstrating with his mother for going through ‘his things’ when he noticed the broken pieces of eggshell. He suddenly realised what had happened. Incredibly, the egg had hatched and the chick had pushed the lid off the shoebox to escape.
Tim stared into the depths of the cupboard, which housed the hot water tank and sheets, towels and pillow slips. He could see nothing—no signs of a bird of any kind. His mother would not be pleased to find droppings or feathers on her clean linen, that was certain. Finally he decided that the bird must have got out of the cupboard earlier, when his mother had opened the door. No doubt it was free, somewhere in the house. He would have to keep his eyes open for the creature.
When Tim’s cousins and various relatives arrived the creature was soon forgotten in the excitement of exchanging presents. Tim got the pair of roller blades he’d wanted for ages, from his mother. They were the latest in roller skates and he and his cousins, who also had blades, went off to the local skateboard park to try them out.
Late in the evening the last guest left the house and Tim and his mother were alone again, clearing away and washing up together before going to bed.
‘Have you enjoyed today?’ asked his mother anxiously. ‘I’m sorry the turkey was overdone. I don’t think your uncle Jim liked it very much.’
‘Never mind, Mum. Turkey’s turkey—and the roast spuds were good.’
Her eyes lit up a little at these words.
‘Were they, dear?’
‘Brill, Mum—take my word for it. And the roller blades are ace! Thanks a million.’
She went to bed fairly happy after these words. Tim was always amazed at the power he had to make his mother cheerful or sad, and sometimes it frightened him. He did not want the responsibility for her happiness.
He put out the lights and went to his room at the back of the bungalow, where he stowed the roller blades in a cupboard before climbing wearily into his pyjamas. He tried to read a comic but his eyes kept closing, so he switched off the light and lay down to sleep.
It must have been about twenty minutes later that Tim woke to a strange sound. For a few moments he just stared into the darkness of the room, wondering what had roused him from his first sleep. Then he heard it again—a kind of rustling, scratching noise which seemed to be coming from the corner of the room. He peered into the dense shadow but his eyes could make out nothing except blackness. For a while nothing happened and Tim was dropping off to sleep again when there were further sounds.
He felt a trickle of fear go down his spine. What was it? Had a mouse got into his room? Maybe it had been attracted by Christmas cake crumbs or something. He and his cousins had been eating in the bedroom that day.
He wanted to get out of bed and look but a stronger feeling of fright would not let him. He was afraid of what he might find. Late at night there were things that worried him more than they might have done during the day. Things were different in the dark, in the silence of the small hours.
Suddenly, Tim reached for a book on his bedside table. He threw it into the corner and buried his head under the bedclothes. After a few moments he listened hard for the sounds to return and when they didn’t decided it must have been a mouse after all—now frightened back into its hole. He would search the room tomorrow and block the creature’s lair, wherever it was. The fear-sweat that had covered him earlier now began to leave and he was able to go back to sleep.
Later, however, he had the sensation of being disturbed by a faint rustling in the bedsprings, but it was not loud enough to wake him thoroughly and in the morning Tim wondered if he’d fallen asleep and dreamed it after hearing the scratching in the corner. It was always difficult to sort the real from the unreal after night fears.
An inspection of the bedroom after breakfast revealed no holes in the skirting-board. Remembering the broken egg-shell, Tim searched for fur and feathers too, but found nothing and convinced himself he’d been dreaming as a result of too much Christmas dinner.
‘Had a bad dream last night,’ he told his mother.
‘Did you, dear?’ she replied vaguely. ‘How upsetting for you.’
‘Oh, it was no big deal,’ Tim added. ‘It wouldn’t even seem scary if I told you now.’
‘Fine,’ she replied. ‘Now I must get these papers finished before I go back to work tomorrow. Can you amuse yourself?’
‘Sure,’ said Tim, leaving his hard-working mother to her problems.
Boxing Day was spent walking the downs and using the roller blades. It was one of those sharp, crisp winter days, where a low sunset throws out bright rays to make the frost glisten on the meadows and pick out crystallised spiders’ webs in the hedgerows.
That evening, on returning to the house, Tim found his mother still engrossed in her papers. She murmured something about ‘lunch’ and Tim told her lunchtime had long since gone and it was time for dinner.
‘Oh dear,’ she said, pushing her glasses up her nose and brushing away strands of hair from her eyes. ‘Never mind, we’ll have some turkey sandwiches in a moment. Will that be all right?’
‘Fine, Mum.’
Tim went to his room to put away his roller blades. It was gloomy in there, as the main bulb had blown and only his small bedside table lamp cast a pale light over the corner. He opened his wardrobe door and put the blades in the shoe rack inside. As he did so he glanced up at the hanging coats.
Something white stared out from amongst their dark folds.
Tim jumped backwards quickly, startled into uttering a sound much like the yelp of an injured puppy. Fear gripped him. It washed through his whole body like a wave of freezing water. His breath came out in short, sharp pants.
He was immobilised, rigid with terror, as he stared at the creature before him, perched on the coat rail.
It was a bird with the face of an old woman.
The creature ’s feathers were white. The complexion, with its tiny, shrewish features, was a pasty grey. Prehensile claws flexed on the coat rail. The creature spat at him viciously.
‘Yetchhh!’ it screeched.
Tim could do nothing but stare into the mean eyes of this nightmarish fiend. He wanted to scream for help, yell for his mother, but the eyes would not let him. They held him fast where he stood, their control over him complete. He could not even move his hands or feet.
‘Eeerchh!’ whined the owl, through the tiny, white, even teeth.
Tim’s own teeth started chattering and he bit his tongue several times. Sensing his distress, the owl’s human face produced a savage smile. Then some strange creaking words came from its mouth and Tim found to his horror that he understood them. Hypnotised, he closed the wardrobe door gently and went into the kitchen.
There he walked straight to the fridge and selected a piece of liver still swimming in a pool of blood. Taking some scissors from the cutlery drawer, he cut the raw liver into slivers and carried them back to his bedroom. He opened the wardrobe door again to find the terrible owl still there. Tim fed it the strips of raw liver, watching in disgust as it snatched them from his hand and swallowed them like worms.
When the creature was satisfied, it shuffled on its perch, said something in its dark, ugly to
ngue and closed its eyes. Tim shut the door on it and crept away, still chilled to the marrow by the encounter.
He went straight to the living room and stood in front of his mother. Her head was bend over her work but eventually she looked up at him.
‘Goodness, Tim!’ she cried. ‘Are you all right? You look so pale.’
Tim wanted to tell her about the horrible thing in his wardrobe but his tongue would not let him. Instead he heard himself say, ‘I’m fine, Mum. Just a bit tired. I think I’ll skip dinner.’
‘Skip dinner?’ she said. ‘You must be ill. Go to bed. I’ll bring you something.’
He stumbled out of the living room, half in a dream, and went to his bedroom. There he changed into his pyjamas and got into bed. Later his mother brought him some turkey soup and he ate it. Then she pulled the curtains and left him alone.
That night he hardly slept at all.
Over the next few weeks Tim was haunted by the owl. It sat on the headboard of his bed at night and kept him awake by whispering foul things in his ear. It made demands on him, urging him to bring it pieces of raw meat. The creature began to grow at an alarming rate, until it was as large as a pillow, its creased, wizened face becoming more evil-looking with every passing night. It devoured everything that Tim could find in the house, until eventually he had to begin begging for meat from other places.
Tim himself began to change too, both in appearance and attitude. He was morose and glum, avoiding his friends until they began to shun him. His teachers became worried about him and sent notes home to his mother, telling her that Tim was falling asleep in class. These he threw away on the way home from school.
Eventually a teacher went to Tim’s house and had a long talk with his mother, who confessed that she had had a crisis at work and had not noticed that her son was looking unwell.
‘I’ll take him to the doctor in the morning,’ she promised.
When she finally did take time to notice him, she saw how hunched he was, his head sunk between his shoulders and his arms dangling by his sides.
‘Why are you standing like that?’ she asked. ‘Oh, Tim, you do look a bit grey and worn. We’ll have to see what the doctor says.’
The doctor gave Tim a check-up but could find nothing wrong with him.
‘It’s probably one of these new viruses,’ he said. ‘They sap one’s energy and leave one feeling listless and apathetic. Give him three of these tablets a day and see how we go on. If he needs rest, you’d better let him stay off school for a while. We’ll have to play this one by ear. All right Tim?’
Tim gave the doctor a tight, wan smile, as weak as a winter sun. He had the words ready in his head to tell them all—the teachers, his mother, the doctor—but nothing would come out of his mouth. He longed to tell someone, to ask anyone what he could do about this dreadful creature which was destroying his life, but he couldn’t. So he simply hunched deeper into himself and shuffled his feet, like an owl settling on a perch.
That night, when he took the owl some raw lights, the creature made Tim eat some too. Together, the human-faced creature and Tim tore at the soft giblets and intestines of animals which Tim had begged from the butcher, the juices dribbling down their chins and dripping on to the bedroom carpet. Tim had told the butcher that the raw innards were for his pet bird.
‘What have you got? A kestrel hawk or something?’
Tim had nodded and muttered, ‘Or something...’
He wanted to be sick when the slimy giblets slid down his throat but the owl stared into his eyes and he found he could not bring up the disgusting raw meats and had to digest them.
‘I hate you,’ he whispered to the owl and its old woman’s face snarled and spat at him, telling him he was hers to use and he would have to eat far worse things before too long.
Anyone walking into Tim’s room that night would have been shocked to the core at the scene. On one end of the bed sat the terrible owl, hunched into its feathers. On the other end of the bed sat the boy, hunched into his shoulders. Both creatures were uttering strange black words at each other, like two demons who despise each other yet are forced to live under the same roof. They hissed and spat and ground their teeth, the boy rippled his arms like wings and the owl shuffled her feet and sneered like a human. It was the most appalling and terrifying sight to witness.
Tim began to grow desperate. There was no one he could talk to about what was happening to him. No one would understand. He himself didn’t understand. He began frequenting libraries and reading books on mythology, determined to discover what this creature was and where it had come from. Day after day he searched, but found nothing.
One day, Tim was lying on his bed trying to get some rest when his mother came into his room. She had his coat in her hands and she made straight for the wardrobe. Tim knew the owl was perched inside and he sat up expectantly as she opened the door.
She looked inside, gave a high-pitched scream, dropped the coat and ran from the room.
Tim followed her out a few moments later. At last, he thought, someone would do something to help him out of his nightmare. Instead, his mother was beside herself with anger. She was furious with Tim. He stood by helpless as she berated him.
‘How could you?’ she cried, shaking with annoyance.
‘What?’ pleaded Tim.
‘You know very well—that horrible mask. You hung it in your wardrobe to frighten me. I don’t know what’s happening to you lately, Tim. You used to be such a nice boy. Now you’re lazy and full of silly tricks like this. Mr James, the butcher, said you’ve been asking for meat from him for an eagle or something. I told him we hadn’t got any kind of pet. What are you playing at?’
‘I don’t know,’ said Tim, close to tears.
‘Well, I certainly don’t know either,’ replied his mother. ‘Now if you’ll go to your room, I’ll try to get on with earning us some money, though I’m sure I don’t feel like it after that ugly scare.’
Tim lurched from the living-room, tears in his eyes. The owl seemed to have him trapped. He was its slave and he was becoming more owlish every day. He could no longer go to the butcher’s so he would have to start trapping mice and rats. The owl’s and, indeed, his own appetite was voracious. That evening he found some mouse traps in the garden shed and set them in likely places. Lately he had found his movements becoming quicker and his hearing and smell more acute. Perhaps he would soon be able to hunt without traps.
Just before the summer holidays, Tim finally discovered what he was up against. He found a book in the school library which somehow he’d missed before. It was entitled Local Myths and Folk Lore. Delving into it he came across a section entitled THE MEGOWL. It seemed that King Arthur’s half-sister, the witch Morgan le Fay, had once passed through a remote corner of Essex. She had become displeased with one of the local witches, an old woman named Meg Hopkins, whom she had changed into an owl.
The Megowl was a bird with a human face which laid one egg on Halloween, then lived only until Christmas Day, dying the moment the new chick was born. It was, in fact, a rebirth—the old Megowl giving birth to herself through her own egg. Sometimes the egg lay dormant, waiting for centuries, for it had to be nurtured by a human child. Once the child was found, the Megowl gradually turned it into a creature like itself, so that it could more easily obtain food to feed her. And the worst thing of all, was that there was no way of destroying it.
Tim put the book back on its shelf and left the library, feeling bleak. He was indeed caught by a fiend, a demon who refused to let him go. Some of his former friends were off to the pitch to play football. They saw Tim staring after them and yelled cruelly, ‘There’s the boy-bird of Ashingdon! Why don’t you flap your arms for us, Sully?’ Tim bared his teeth like a savage animal and moved so swiftly towards the jeering youths that they ran off, leaving their football on the ground. Tim pierced it with his sharp fingernails, puncturing it. Then he made for the nearest ditch to hunt rats.
Several days later, Tim w
as called to the front of the class by the geography teacher.
‘Tim, you don’t seem to be paying attention. Are you sure you’re well?’
‘I’m never well,’ muttered Tim, burying his head in his shoulders and flexing his clawlike fingers.
‘I see. Well, if you’re ill you’d better go home, but we hardly see you lately, do we...?’
The teacher stopped in mid-sentence, for Tim had begun a peculiar movement, now familiar to him but so far not witnessed by anyone else. His throat was pulsing and his chest heaving violently. A kind of shudder was going through his whole body.
‘Are you going to be sick?’ cried the teacher, stepping back in alarm.
Suddenly the boy gave a kind of strangled cough and spat a large pellet at the teacher’s feet. The wad which had come out of his mouth was made of fur and bones, packed together into a tight pellet. It was in fact the regurgitated remains of a mouse that Tim had eaten earlier that morning. He had been unable to digest this pellet and, just like an owl’s, his body had rejected it.
The teacher took Tim’s hand and led him immediately from the room. His mother was called on the telephone and came to collect him half an hour later. On the drive home, she questioned him.
‘What have you been eating, Tim?’ she asked, her eyes fixed on the road.
‘Nothing,’ said Tim, sullenly.
‘Tomorrow,’ said his mother, nodding, ‘tomorrow, we’re going to the doctor’s.’
Hope surged through Tim’s breast. He had been eating mice, voles and other small creatures for several weeks now. He knew exactly what he needed to do.
That night he climbed out of his bedroom window, under the sharp, piercing eyes of the Megowl. He had told her in her own tongue that he was going hunting. This was true enough. Tim intended to catch several small mammals.
He crawled into the nearest ditch, on all fours like a wild animal, and waited in the moonlight. When he heard a rustling in the hedgerow, his hand flashed out and snatched the small creature. It was a vole. The speed of his strike would have electrified any human witnessing this scene. Tim’s movements were as fast as any wild predator’s. He waited for a second creature to come along. Animals tend to use pathways they have made for themselves rather than cross open country, and Tim was waiting by one of these busy highways.
Moby Jack & Other Tall Tales Page 27