Where The Bodies Rest: A Heart-Stopping Psychological Thriller

by Kate Sten

  ‘You should get yourself out of bed. You know what time it is.’ Molly rolled the sheets off me, nudging me on the feet gently with her bony knuckle.

  ‘Can’t I stay at home this once? I don’t like it there!’ I sulked bitterly, throwing both hands beneath my armpits. ‘I won’t be any bother. I swear I won’t.’

  I scrunched my face up the best that I could. I wasn’t the best at making poppy dog eyes so I just wore an unappealing frown. I had hoped that Molly would give in to my sudden recalcitrance. Maybe being a bit stubborn would make her reconsider her attempts to get me out of bed.

  I was wrong! I was really, really wrong!

  Quicker than lightening, her fingers poked at my sides. The rippling feelings of paralyzing laughter hit me really hard. I could do nothing but chuckle uncontrollably, as I spun around, on my side, on the bed. Whatever resistance I had built up had been unraveled by Molly’s persuasive offensive.

  ‘Okay! Okay! I’ll get out of bed! No more!’ My quaking voice boomed.

  ‘Well then, John, you should be moving your behind from the top of that bed really quickly then. Mr. Shadwick won’t wait forever to ferry you to school. You know the drill. He drives you to school so I can get to work to keep this roof over our heads. Bills don’t pay themselves, you know.’ Molly shot me an unimpressed look.

  I wiped the warm tears that were streaming down my face, nodding, as I ceded to her will. I stepped out of bed and snatched a cream coloured towel from her hand. It smelt really nice. Molly always did the laundry with an extra helping of sweet smelling powder. She was also a bit of a germaphobe - Always forever wiping surfaces even when they were already dazzlingly clean. There was always a handy disinfectant in her back pocket.

  ‘I have left the shower running. You can shut the door behind you,’ Molly shouted, as I walked past her.

  ‘I know! I know! I sort of do this everyday!’ I frowned with an irked look on my face. ‘You don’t have to remind me all the time as if I am thick, or something.’

  I was almost fuming by the time I had gotten to the bathroom door. I hadn’t bothered to look back at Molly. She was probably moping with an apologetic look on her face. She often got that way when she realized the extent of her overbearing interventions. She hadn’t followed me all the way to the bathroom door this time. I couldn’t hear any thumping footsteps behind me.

  That was a relief. I planted my hand on my chest, sighing deeply.

  I reached out to touch the doorknob. I shouldn’t have bothered to make the effort. The door wasn’t fully shut. It slid open, creaking rather eerily as it pushed backwards. I was a bit taken aback by that, but I tried not to draw any conclusions. The window in the bathroom was slightly open so there must have been a slight pull from travelling air.

  ‘Definitely airy in here. Yep, definitely just a little huff. Nothing extraordinary about this.’ I nodded reassuringly, as I ventured into the bathroom.

  The warm steam from the rushing water rushed over my skin. It felt slightly soothing. Slamming the door effortlessly behind me, I peeled off my clothes and climbed into the white bath tub in front of me. I hummed a quiet tune, as the warm water rushed over my skin.

  My hands wrapped round a bar of soap. The lather from the soap circled round all of me. I was surely getting all the grotty mess from yesterday’s dinner off me - Bacon and a good helping of horseradish always went down a treat with me.

  To my left, the window slammed shut unexpectedly. I hurriedly washed the soap from my eyes and swung my face sideways. There was nothing before my peering eyes. All I could see was a shut window. I was anything but calm. I sucked in air profusely and decided to shut out everything and go to my comfortable place. Humming something always made me feel better when those panicked moments struck unexpectedly. I didn’t need to rack my brain too much. I had a special tune that was burned into my memory from an early age.

  I had picked it up way before I met my foster parent, Molly. The orphanage kids sang all sorts of songs and rhymes. My favourite one had a goose in it.

  ‘Goosey, Goosey gander! Where shall I wander?’

  ‘Upstairs, downstairs, In my lady’s chamber. There I met an old man who wouldn’t say his prayers. I took him by his left leg, and threw him down the stairs,’ I croaked the nursery rhyme in a sombre tone of voice.

  I felt safe again. I felt calm rush over me. I resumed my cleansing ritual, washing the soap off myself very quickly.

  An unfriendly face with pointy teeth pressed against the other side of the shower curtain. I pressed my back anxiously against the tiled wall behind me. I nearly slipped and lost my footing, as my feet skidded against the white tub beneath me.

  Squeezing my eyes shut very tightly, I sat down in the tub and huddled into a tight ball. Rocking myself back and forth, I whispered some reassuring words to myself. Surely, this was my imagination running wild. Surely, there was nobody there.

  ‘It isn’t real. It isn’t real. Nothing is out to get you, Johnny. This is all in your head.’ My lips trembled rampantly.

  I pinched myself several times to make sure that I was not slipping into some sort of delusional episode. I was already on antidepressants. The child psychologist thought they would help. She also gave me some other horse pills for the anxiety issues. I hated those large pills. Sometimes I pretended to swallow them and kept them hidden between my fingers. Molly hadn’t worked that trick out yet so I sort of got away with not taking the anxiety pills.

  I was a kid and medication was sort of a kid's worst enemy - That was a universal fact. Those things tasted like bile in my mouth anyway. They weren’t sugar-coated at all. Even with water, it felt as if they were being forced down one's throat.

  Doctor Salter, my psychologist, says that all the scary stuff was in my head. She said it was just my brain coping with all the bad stuff I had been through. Who was I to argue with the lofty thoughts of an adult. I was just a kid. Surely, the wise adults had all the logical answers. All I could do was go along with most of what was said to me, even though I knew all that therapy wasn’t really helping my situation.

  Doctor Salter had also told me in one of our numerous sessions that my brain was buggy. She said it was lying to me and playing tricks on me. She said Alice wasn’t real. She said Alice was a false memory. Apparently, she thought I had made Alice up to cope with a trauma that I wasn’t quite ready to face yet.

  Well, Alice had not been made less real, and I wasn’t feeling any more secure than I had been before I started seeing Doctor Salter. She looked even crazier than I was inside my messed up head. I was thinking of her sessions. Part of me hoped she was right about my so called imaginary friend. Part of me hoped that the crazy-looking lady’s diagnosis about my brain being wired wrong was the only thing that was wrong with me. That would have made life simpler for me.

  I had never mentioned Alice by name to Doctor Salter or anyone else in recent times, not even to myself. We just called her ‘the lady.’

  Doctor Salter had only ever seen bad sketches of her. I was no artist. At best, I could scribble stickmen and zigzags. That was the extent of my artistic prowess. I had been stewing in my own thoughts for some time. The thuds on the bathroom door jolted me.

  ‘John, what are you doing in there? You’re not falling asleep, are you?’ Molly's voice boomed in my ears, as the thuds got more urgent. ‘John! John! Open this door, John!’

  The screams from the other side of the door were faint in my head. They sounded more like muted noises swirling around on the edge of my thoughts. Bubbles gushed out of my mouth as I gained some level of awareness. I realized that I wasn’t seated in the tub anymore. I was submerged under water and something was keeping me under. It weighed on my chest quite heavily.

  I didn’t feel any hands on me. It felt more like a force - A concentrated rush of air that was immobilizing me. I desperately tried to speak. I couldn’t do that with all that water rushing into my gaping mouth. I was struck with fear. The prospect of being drowned underneath
one’s own bathwater was truly terrifying.

  I couldn’t move my legs. I couldn’t move my hands. I was almost passing out when I felt warm hands drag me out of the bathtub.

  ‘What the hell was that all about? Why didn’t you answer when I called out to you?’ Molly shot me a perturbed look, gripping my arms with both of her hands.

  ‘I couldn’t! There was all that water around me, and I couldn’t move! I was scared, okay!’ I yelled back at her, sobbing bitterly.

  ‘Oh John, there wasn’t any water in there when I pulled you out. In fact, the tub was bone dry.’ Molly’s eyes widened in abject displeasure.

  She was cross with me. She thought I had taken the whole imaginary friend thing a bit far that morning. There was no hiding her resentment at the drama that had just played out. It might have looked like a prank to her but what I had experienced felt unshakably real.

  FOUR

  JOHN

  It was 10 pm. I was in school late again today. Mr. Bradshaw was not going be pleased. Molly dropped me off in her yellow mini cooper. Her hands pushed out of the window, as she waved profusely at me. She did that after plastering her moist lips on my forehead in a bid to show some affection towards me.

  ‘Get off! Yuck!’ I wiped my forehead with the edges of my fists.

  I did not wave back at her. I just signed deeply, and almost turned a sickly shade of green in the face when I thought about setting foot in the classroom, and sharing the same space as other humans that were not quite in the same frame of mind that I was.

  I felt like a slave in my own skin. My bones seemed as though they were fragile things wrapped beneath stifling chunks of flesh. My nails dug into my arms, as I pushed through the lobby. I hoped nobody was looking.

  All those happy, cheery faces, chitchatting about mundane things - The things that should have made a child my age jump with glee. But doing stuff like planting a toad from the science class in a goby little wench's locker did not appeal to me.

  My mind was simply not tuned into the world around me. I could not afford to let anymore people close. I couldn’t let anyone near me. Maybe that would keep whatever madness that was infecting my mind from bringing harm to them too.

  Alone is better. Alone is safer.

  I spied Boris Barker, the school bully, from the spot where I was stood, contemplated whether I should have gone into class, or found a hiding place in the locker rooms as I often did on my bad days.

  I had hoped to avoid the portly annoyance today. His tongue was worse than his fists, and he always stank of raw fish. His dad, Mr Barker, was a fisherman. I guess that was why his clothes smelt that way. He liked to cut things up. That was why he hung around the fish shop all day - Probably a bizarre compulsion to see the insides of things that were once animated.

  Old Mrs. Newman once accused the rascal of cutting off her cat's paw for the fun of it. The poor thing walks with a limp now - Even with the most capable prosthetics attached to its stump.

  His broad, haunting smile sent some unpleasant chills down the back of my neck. I tried to avoid those penetrating eyes of his. They roamed all around the classroom. He looked everywhere but where the teacher was stood. His slouched position often gave the impression that he did not care for whatever knowledge was being dispensed by our wise, and learned mentor.

  Boris Barker had inflated cheeks and an almost non-existent neck which had been buried beneath folds of skin. The blubber on his saggy chin had completely camouflaged his short neck. Those sausages for fingers were never up to much good. Everyone tried to stay out of his way. Everyone that wasn’t in his little gang of nasty playmates.

  ‘Look who has just dragged themselves into class at this hour. Half the English lesson is over, already and maths has already been done. This behaviour is most unbecoming of you young man. Something ought to be done to remedy that.’ Mr. Bradshaw’s baritone voice bounced around the room, causing all eyes to be focused on the object of his ire which happened to be my dishevelled self.

  My springy hair was all over the place. I hadn’t had time to put anything in place. The comb had fallen behind the bed somewhere, and there was no time to find it. My trousers were slightly damp from not properly drying myself off, and I had to lean low several times to pick up items of stationary that kept falling out of my school bag.

  ‘I am sorry, Sir. We got delayed in traffic this morning. I’ll try to do better,’ I raised my voice slightly in my defence.

  ‘If you spent less time lurking in the hallways you might actually get some learning done. Now, go park your backside behind your desk. You’ve held up the rest of the class long enough.’ Mr Bradshaw waved his hands dismissively, with his glasses sliding slightly lower on the ridge of his nose.

  I shifted my gaze from Mr. Bradshaw’s judgmental, prying eyeballs. His knickers were clearly in a twist on account of me not keeping up with his strict ways of running his classroom like it was some sort of navy ship, and the slacker amongst the bunch of eager-to-please shipmates had somehow fallen out of line, and ruined things for him.

  The scribbles on the old chalkboard didn’t really make much sense to me. I was way behind on classwork. Concentration definitely wasn’t easy for me. I wasn’t big on that. My whole life there felt as if I was constantly walking on egg shells. It was hard to keep your head up when you had this sick feeling that the world beneath your feet would cave in and you would somehow fall into scorching lava.

  I had often dreamed of my face being burnt off by some faceless demon. I say dream but it often happened during the day as well. It was more like a memory flashing before my eyes. My fingers would shake and my muscles would turn to jelly.

  My whole entire body got the feeling of being a useless lump of meat and bone good for nothing but laying around in a chair, and being tormented by something that I barely even remembered - Something scratching the edge of my thoughts, desperate to dig its freaking way out of my skull.

  ‘You shouldn’t listen to him, you know. He is so full of shit. Look at those sad sad eyes behind the ridiculously large glasses. Bet the old grump hasn’t had a good time with anyone in years,’ a familiar unnerving female voice whispered in hushed tones from behind me.

  ‘I am not allowed to talk about things like that. I can't talk to you. It is forbidden to do that. Molly won’t be pleased.’ I shook my head disapprovingly, plugging my ears with my finger tips.

  ‘Don’t be a fucking prude. You need to grow a spine. Don’t let people like him walk all over you. That is so humiliating,’ The faint female voice giggled, a deft feeling of her brushing her feet against the my shin made me shiver in my seat. ‘You don’t want yourself feeling this small, as if you were meant to be kept in some sort of cramped box.’

  ‘Shhh... Be quiet! I am not letting anybody walk over me!” I raised my voice in protest, not realizing where I was, and completely forgetting how I was expected to behave when I was in the classroom.

  I hadn’t whispered. I hadn’t measured the decibels that sprang from between my lips. I had just spewed out raw emotion from the depths of my belly. Alice had a way of untangling the knots that kept me restrained.

  My head had disengaged from my body and my emotions had bested better judgement.

  The teacher was soon on my case again. He marched straight to my desk, wearing a long face, as if someone had poured sour milk into his coffee. Those tense wrinkle lines above his brows spoke volumes about how much I had irked him on the day.

  ‘You don’t want to be here? That’s fine! Just don’t try to ruin it for the other kids who are actually making an effort, and trying to pick up some useful life skills!’ Mr. Bradshaw pointed an accusing finger in my general direction.

  ‘But I.. I didn’t mean to put everyone off. I was just trying to settle in,’ I protested in my own defence.

  ‘That is quite enough backchat from you, young man. You will be placed in timeout for the remainder of this lesson. Maybe you’ll take the time to contemplate your actions in the confines o
f a dreary empty room.’ Mr. Bradshaw shifted his index finger, and pointed to the exit commandingly.

  A cold sense of immediate resentment bubbled up inside me. I hated being in that badly lit timeout room. There were no windows, and it always felt as if those dull magnolia walls were going to cave in, and crush the life out of you.

  It’s only four walls.

  It’s only four walls.

  Nothing can hurt you in here. Nothing at all.

  I often whispered those words of comfort to myself whenever I had been banished to the accursed place where unruly children were shoved into for lack of discipline, or merely being an irritant to the master of the classroom.

  This was his only play. He couldn’t whack you over the head his bare knuckles, or slap you over the hands with a ruler. Even though, his eyes often betrayed the inner desire to shake unruly kids like a barren mango tree until his tactics had somehow bore fruit.

  I knew Mr. Bradshaw must have thought of me as some sort of hollowed out husk of a plant that would never bloom or yield anything useful to gratify all the efforts he had poured into reforming my person.

  ‘Well, here we are again, locked up in this dull place, behind these four walls. I shall go mad in here one of these days. Not that I’m not already halfway there. This is just silly. I shouldn’t be here, in this place - In this terrible place.’ I swung my feet back and forth beneath the seat on which I was sat.

  FIVE

  JOHN

  Would she find me here? Would her cold haunting hands reach out to grab hold of my quivering flesh?

  Those were the thoughts that batted back and forth in the recesses of my mind. My hands gripped the girth of my triceps, and my eyes looked uncomfortably across all sides of the room. This was either a safe room or a tomb for me.