Five Stories High

by Jonathan Oliver

  THE MEN IN the family – and that’s how it feels, they’re all part of a family. On the good days, and there are many of them, when he almost enjoys the stories whispered in his ear, when he can only look at his captor with deep affection – because he cares for the boy, doesn’t he, you could say that much? “You liked that story, didn’t you?” the man might say, with obvious delight – “I’m so pleased, I like that one too! Let me come up with something you might like even better!” – on the good days, the boy can even pretend he’s happy.

  “I want you to know,” the storyteller says one day, “that I appreciate this is a complicated relationship we have. That you’re not exactly here through choice. That, let’s not mince words, you’re my prisoner, and I’m torturing you to death. Ha! But I want you to know, really and truly. That I’m very fond of you. And I hope you’re a little bit fond of me.”

  HE LIKES THE stories that are gory, they’re his favourites. And the stories with no gore in them at all, they’re his favourites too.

  HE GETS USED to the paint demons above his head. He’s never not frightened of them, but it’s a qualified fear. He respects them, he knows they have a job to do, and they’re doing it to the best of their ability. Secretly he gives them names! Any name he likes the sound of, and the joy of it is, he can change the name as often as he likes, no one has to know! He names the first demon Martin and Eustace and Melvyn and Pete; he names the second Wallace and Gromit and Stuart and Brad. The third demon is his favourite demon. He never quite knows what to call the third one. The third demon, he thinks, is the most majestic demon, the most powerful, the most deadly. In different circumstances, the boy thinks, the boy hopes, the third demon and he might be friends.

  SOMETIMES HE THINKS of his parents. And he realises he can’t quite recall what they looked like any more. He sees his mother as a frail young woman, forever standing in the background – until those moments when she comes to kiss him on the mouth and slake his thirst with spit. He sees his father as a misshapen freak. And he thinks, are these confused memories something the man and woman are doing to him deliberately, are they erasing everything he ever knew and replacing it with lies of their own? Or is it worse than that – is this something he’s doing all by himself?

  He smiles at his Mummy lover and his storyteller Dad, and he tries to love them, he wants to love them – that would make everything so much easier.

  “IT’S YOUR TWENTY-FIRST birthday today!” the boy is told. “You’re a proper man now, it’s a very special day!” First the woman bites off his beard, then slices of birthday cake get passed around for breakfast. The boy snuggles into the best position in which the storyteller can whisper in his ear. “No, no,” the storyteller says, “today you get a break! No work. How about today we get to do whatever you want for a change. Really, no fooling!”

  So instead the three of them chat, and laugh, and sing songs, and play games. They play I Spy and charades and twenty questions – “I’ve an idea,” says the storyteller suddenly, “this’ll be fun, let’s take all the bed sheets and build a little fort!” And they do that too, and afterwards have a pillow fight.

  “There’s an extra present for you,” the storyteller says at last, “but don’t you go gobbling it all at once!” And he gives the boy a raw carrot. And for a moment the boy is disappointed, he’s not altogether fond of carrots, he might have hoped instead for a bowl of chips or a steak and kidney pie, he might have hoped for a chipolata sausage. But the carrot is the first savoury food he’s been offered in ages, something that isn’t sugar and flour and fat – and he looks at the shining faces of his two new parents, he doesn’t want to let them down. He bites into the carrot and the snap sound that makes is just so crisp and satisfying. He plays the carrot chunk about on his tongue, and it doesn’t dissolve into sweet paste the way the cake always does, this is firm and hard and so so wonderfully solid. The storyteller and the woman watch the boy as he chews on the carrot like Bugs Bunny; they smile.

  “We’re proud of you,” says the man; “so proud,” says the woman; “not many boys last this long,” says the man; “most would be dead by now,” says the woman.

  THAT NIGHT, AFTER she has given the boy his drink of eye juice, the woman doesn’t leave the room. Without a word, she climbs into bed beside him.

  He supposes he is a man now, so that is right and proper – but deep inside it still feels a little strange.

  Her head upon the pillow, she turns to face him.

  They are so close now.

  The boy wonders if he’s supposed to say anything. He doesn’t want to say anything, he knows it’ll come out wrong. And then she’ll get up and go and leave him all alone.

  He waits for her to leave him all alone.

  His heart is beating so fast.

  He opens his mouth for a kiss.

  She wriggles close. She does not kiss him. She whispers in his ear. “Eye,” she says.

  He frowns at her. She tilts her head on one side, and frowns back. “What?” he says. She just keeps frowning. Then at last she turns over, and goes to sleep.

  And from that point onwards, every night, she gets into bed with him at the end of the day. If her feet are cold she might put them against his skin to warm herself up, and he never minds. Or she’ll hold him in the dark. Or she’ll give him that kiss he wants, after all. But most nights she just turns over, so her back is towards him, and snores.

  But whatever else – every night, without fail, she’ll whisper something in his ear. “Are,” she says to him that second night. Are what? What does she mean? “Oh,” she says the night afterwards. And then fixes him with a look so intent, as if to make certain he understands the import of what she’s saying – and he nods, because he can’t bear to disappoint her.

  In time he realises they are letters, just simple letters. And maybe this is the best she can do. All day long, with all the words that flow out of the storyteller, thousands of them, paragraphs without end. Unable to speak at all, her mouth stopped as she sucks upon an eyeball, she can only listen. Now, at the end of the day, she gets her little chance to say something. A tiny letter, at random. “O, N, G, R, O.”

  Day by day the woman never ages, and pretty soon the boy suspects he is now older than his lover.

  THE BED THEY share is so fucking vast that sometimes he needs to hold her whilst she sleeps so he won’t lose her in the wastelands. At others, the bed tapers to a narrow point, and they’re balanced right on the precipice, and he holds her so they won’t drop into the abyss.

  HE THINKS HOW lucky he is – to be a grown man, and have no responsibilities of his own. He doesn’t have to go to work, or raise kids, or pay a mortgage, or feed himself, or clean himself or clothe himself. He doesn’t have to do anything at all. He gets to lie in bed all day and listen to stories.

  HE WAKES HIMSELF up in the night screaming for his Mummy and Daddy.

  SOMETIMES THIS IS all there is, and all there can ever be.

  AND ONE DAY he thinks up the perfect name for the biggest of the paint demons! He looks up and watches it glower overhead. “Hello, Trevor,” he says.

  HE’S HAPPY TO turn thirty. Thirty’s still young, but it’s properly adult too, and the world is his oyster.

  THE DOOR COMES back.

  It arrives without a murmur. The boy is listening to another story, the man’s breath hot in his ear. He looks away from his eyeless socket just for a moment, his own eyes stray towards the window – and there it is, small and utterly unassuming, the little wooden door tucked neat beneath the windowsill.

  It’s all the boy can do not to react. With measured calm he looks back from the door to the storyteller, and his face shows no surprise, no fresh hope – and he keeps his breathing constant, his features neutral.

  He times it in his head – a whole minute, sixty long seconds – before he dares to flick his attention back to the window to see if is really true.

  The boy thinks it is that same door that appeared to him the first time
, so long ago. (What, now, over twenty years?) It’s so small and discreet that only he has seen it.

  It might fade away again at any moment. But he has no choice. He has to wait.

  And the boy is very good, he smiles along to the stories, and by the smiles seems to encourage the man to talk for longer – though his every instinct is to push him to one side, jump from the bed, and run, run towards the only possibility in years of escape.

  The stories are done. Some haunted house has claimed some other hapless victim. “Did you enjoy that one?” asks the man, and the boy very politely says he did. He considers asking for another one – but he mustn’t push his luck, the man might say yes.

  The man suspects nothing. He pulls away from the boy. He reaches out for his eyeball to be returned, screws it back into place. Wishes the couple a restful night and leaves.

  And only now can the boy dare to look at the small wooden door directly.

  Is it, in fact, too small? He recalls that comforting sense he got when he first saw it, that this was a door designed for children. But he’s not a child any longer, he’s grown every which way. He daren’t waste time worrying about that now.

  He hasn’t been up from his bed in decades. “Help me,” he says to the woman.

  “No,” she says.

  “You’ll help me if you love me,” he says, and reluctantly, she comes to his side.

  She’s so young, he realises – only a few years shy of childhood herself. So young and frightened, he knows he’ll have to be brave for both of them if he wants to set them free.

  She helps him throw off the bed covers, he sees his adult body for the first time. It has grown indeed – but he’s been lying flat all this time, and without gravity to make it all hang down in the right direction, he’s gone a bit higgledy-piggeldy. His chest is wide and fat, but his stomach narrows to a point. One of his thighs looks thick and meaty, the other spindly like a table leg.

  He lowers his feet on to the bedroom floor, and tries to shift his weight upon them. “Help me,” he says to the woman again, but it’s too much for her, she’s in the shadows, her head is in her hands. The feet have no idea what he’s trying to do, no one ever told them they were supposed to be load-bearing feet, this isn’t what they’re trained for! What does he expect, they’ve been splayed out on a mattress for years! And the sensation of carpet between his toes, those little woollen fronds, is something else the feet just cannot fathom – the barrage of strange information is too much for them, this sudden world of new feeling and new responsibility.

  The boy collapses to the ground.

  It knocks the air out of him – but even this is good. This is different, this is better. He feels a rush of fear, but also pure joy.

  “Please,” he says to the woman, but she just shakes her head. So, he has no choice. Slowly, he drags himself across the floor.

  He remembers how once he had dragged himself across the frozen wastes for months, and this should be easy, it’s only a few feet. But he’s older now, he supposes, and several times he is brought to a stop in exhaustion and pain.

  He looks up at Trevor the demon, and Trevor is watching him beadily, but does nothing.

  He is at the door. He is at the door.

  And he can see now that it is too small. He’ll get his head through, but what about the shoulders? What about his chest, come to that? And he thinks – it doesn’t matter, I’ll force my way through, I’ll bend my body into any shape necessary.

  He thinks of his parents, and he hasn’t thought of them in years.

  He reaches his hand up to the rounded doorknob, the knots on it seem to be shaped like a smiling face.

  He pulls.

  It doesn’t open.

  Pushes. No.

  Of course not.

  And the sudden despair is almost too much for him, and then he remembers – but this is what happened before, isn’t it? The door is teasing him, it’ll open when it’s good and ready. He has to be patient. (But, oh, hasn’t he been patient enough already?)

  The door will swing wide for him, and he’ll be home.

  “Come back,” says the woman. “If he catches you out of bed, he’ll kill you.” There’s such flat certainty to it – it’s a statement of fact, and he was wrong, she isn’t frightened at all.

  But he can’t go back. The door will open for him. He pulls at the doorknob again.

  There’s a keyhole.

  There wasn’t a keyhole before.

  There has never been any keyhole, not on any of the doors, before.

  And there’s light pouring through it. He puts his eye against it so he can see.

  It’s too bright to make anything out – but no, did something move? A shadow passing over something – “Mummy,” he calls out, and he’s embarrassed, in his panic his voice squeaks like an infant’s, “Mummy, I’m here!”

  But the shadow won’t stop for him, won’t reply (and what would his mother want with him now anyway? Her baby son so old and distorted – whatever would she say?)

  The woman’s voice, and for one glorious moment the boy thinks it’s his mother answering after all: “He’s returning. I can hear him.”

  The boy tries to pull away from the door. He can’t.

  “Hurry up!” An edge of panic creeps into her voice.

  He pulls harder. But his head won’t move. And he realises what’s happened –

  His eyeball is stuck. His eyeball is stuck in the keyhole. He shouldn’t have looked, but he did look, the eyeball seemed to fit so snugly, and now it’s wedged in, he can’t get his eyeball free.

  (Or – no. Something nastier. That something the other side of the door – something, and not his Mummy – has reached tiny fingers into the keyhole, and grabbed hold of his eye, and won’t let go.)

  The woman starts to cry. He has never heard her do that before. “He’ll kill you so bad!” she says. “Or worse!”

  He puts his hands flat against the door, he pushes on them with all his might, and he jerks his head back – and he can feel the eye straining, stretching out of shape.

  And the boy decides that he’ll just give up. It doesn’t matter, it doesn’t – the storyteller will find him trying to escape and kill him – and if his eyeball is in the keyhole, he won’t even see him do it. “Or worse”, the woman had said – “or worse” – and at that he heaves hard again.

  “Help me!” the boy shouts, and it’s a roar now, so very far from his adolescent squeak.

  He doesn’t believe that she will. But now he feels her hands around his legs, and he steels himself to pull too – and he’s just got time for one last terrible thought. What if his body gets pulled free, but the eye gets left behind? What if it’s yanked straight out of its socket? – and then there’s one bright jolt of pain, and he’s free.

  He scrabbles back towards the bed, and there isn’t even time for him to ascertain whether his eye is still there or not – but there’s vision – there’s a red mist, but he can see – that can only mean he’s still in one piece.

  He’s away from the door – he’s by the bed – but even now it’s all for nothing, because he hasn’t got the strength to haul himself up again, and then the woman’s arms are around him, she’s tugging him up the cliffside to safety.

  The storyteller is in the room. Staring down at the boy. How long has he been there? And the boy can’t help it, he looks across at the window, and the little door has gone. The man follows his gaze – and then slowly back across the carpet where the boy dragged himself. Did the boy leave tracks? He doesn’t know. He can’t tell.

  The storyteller says, “I made you a promise.”

  The boy tries to shut his eyes against the storyteller. He can’t. The eyelid won’t lower, there’s something in the way.

  “I promised I would never lay a finger on you.” He raises a finger now, and it looks very long and very sharp. “But needs must.”

  The finger is descending on him, and it fills the boy’s whole vision – it is up against the
extruding eyeball, and it pushes hard – and with a click the eye snaps back into place.

  “Well then,” the storyteller says. “If you’re quite ready, shall we resume?”

  AS THE YEARS go on, the boy discovers that if he shakes his head from side to side he can hear his eye rattle, and he’s not sure whether that’s down to his experience with the keyhole, or age.

  EVERY OTHER BIRTHDAY another tooth falls out, and the boy is forced to suck on his slice of birthday cake.

  SOMETIMES HE THINKS of his parents, and wonders whether they’ve aged to death yet.

  ANOTHER BIRTHDAY, AND they can’t wait to celebrate this one with him! The storyteller is beaming from ear to ear. “Congratulations, old friend,” he says. “I always knew you had it in you!” The woman says nothing, but she’s so excited she can’t stay still, and that’s especially impressive when you consider just how distended her stomach is.

  She’s six months along, and the boy is proud he’ll be a father. Though he can’t but help wish he had in any way been witness to the conception.

  He feels suddenly shy of this woman with whom he has shared a bed for all these years. As if they’ve never really spoken, as if he doesn’t know who she is. There’s something magical taking place within her innards, and it seems to him he doesn’t have an awful lot to do with it. “May I touch?” he asks, and the woman nods – he prods at her stomach with his fingers. It is soft, like warm rubber. And such stupid questions pop into his head – do you have a name for it yet? Or a school? Or a career?