The Box of Demons

by Daniel Whelan

  He spent most of the day there, and would probably have stayed longer were it not for his grandmother calling him inside as evening approached. He scooped Druss up (frustrating his attempt to strip the garden of dock leaves) and returned him to the hutch. At the back door, having had it drilled into him at an early age, he started to take his shoes off.

  ‘I wouldn’t bother if I were you,’ said his grandmother.

  ‘What?’ said Ben.

  ‘Pardon. We don’t say “what”, we say “pardon”.’

  ‘Pardon?’

  ‘Don’t take your shoes off. Your grandad is going to be late back, so I need you to go to the chip shop.’

  ‘Aw, Gran . . .’

  ‘You can go out the back gate. It won’t take you twenty minutes.’

  Ben took the money she offered, retied his shoelaces, and stomped back outside. He drew back the bolt on the gate to the front yard and lifted the latch. The Box began to protest, a resentful shift in its default melody.

  All right, all right, he thought. Keep your hinges on.

  He walked round to the front door, took his shoes off, and ran up to his room. He walked coughing through a cloud of Djinn, who was clapping his hands in excitement.

  ‘Are we going, Ben? To the chippy? Are we? Are we?’

  ‘Yes. Get in the Box. And stop hiding behind the door.’

  Djinn dissipated, his gaseous form rolling across the floor and into the Box. Kartofel and Orff were nowhere to be seen, but the evidence of them having been out was all around him: books and clothes were strewn across the floor, and the all-pervading musty smell was proof that Orff had been lying on the bed. Ben grabbed the Box, shoved it into his satchel, and bolted down the stairs. With a grunted, ‘See you, Gran,’ he was off out the door.

  The chippy was busy, as was to be expected on a Saturday night, and Ben found himself at the back of a long queue. The moment they had arrived, Djinn had squelched out of the satchel and set up home on top of a small circular table that was crammed into the recess of the shop’s bay window. He was now breathing in the aromas and sighing happily; every time he took a ‘breath’, he turned a pale watery brown colour, not unlike vinegar on a chip.

  A rat-faced young man in a red tracksuit came in, looked at the queue, and pushed in with a glare that dared Ben to protest. Ben waited for the man to turn away and then started mentally punching him in the back of the head. Kartofel scrambled out of the satchel and perched on Ben’s shoulder.

  ‘I wouldn’t let him get away with that, no way. Taking the mick, that is.’ Ben tried to ignore him, but he felt the heat on his left cheek and needed to fan himself. ‘I wish you weren’t such a wimp. I wish we were stuck with someone else. Someone in the Cadets who wouldn’t let some scumbag push in.’

  ‘Shut up,’ said Ben under his breath.

  ‘What was that? I didn’t hear you,’ said Kartofel.

  ‘Shut it, OK?’

  ‘You say something?’ said the man in the tracksuit.

  ‘Yeah, bog off, bumface,’ said Kartofel.

  ‘Um. No. Sorry,’ said Ben with a weak smile. The man turned round, and Ben flicked Kartofel off his shoulder. He landed on his claws, his little talons clattering on the tiled floor. There, he scuttled around cursing to himself.

  The queue moved slowly towards the till until Ben was next in line, which was when he heard the grating, high-pitched giggle. He knew what it was even before he turned around. It was usually his cue to run away, or to throw himself into the nearest hedge.

  It was the call of the Furies.

  It was typical that of all the potential bullies in school, he’d ended up with three twelve-year-old girls. It relegated him to the second string of victimhood, as if he was so pathetic that the top-tier idiots didn’t even consider him worthy of their time. The ringleader of the group was Smelly Jenny: an aggressive, greasy-haired gorgon with an addiction to eyeliner and an acne problem. Her best friend, and second-in-command, was Sally, a clenched fist in the shape of a girl, and the unholy trinity was rounded off by Nikki, a nervy, slight redhead who was the source of the annoying giggle.

  Jenny was pointing at him and saying something to the others. Ben turned back quickly, pretending that he hadn’t seen them. He felt the heat rise in his cheeks, and stared intently ahead. The Tracksuit paid and left, and the hairy man behind the counter took Ben’s order and set to work.

  ‘Three more of them, please, Mr Chipsman. We’re with Bendy here,’ said Jenny, draping a chunky arm around Ben, who almost buckled under the extra weight. Sally and Nikki moved behind him, pinning him to the counter. The combined smell of cheap perfume on the three of them threatened to drown out the stench of Jenny. It was a valiant attempt, but unsuccessful nonetheless. Out of the corner of his eye, Ben saw an anxious-looking Djinn turn a murky brown colour.

  ‘They’re not with me,’ said Ben quietly.

  ‘That’s not very nice, is it, Bendy?’ said Jenny, and cuffed him on the back of the head.

  The man behind the counter had assembled Ben’s order on a kind of autopilot which allowed him to keep his eyes firmly on the teenagers. ‘Sol’ vingar?’

  ‘No, thank you,’ said Ben. ‘Can I have them wrapped, please?’

  Behind him, Sally sniggered. The Chip Man shrugged and began wrapping the portions.

  ‘What, no sol’ vingar?’ said Jenny, grabbing the salt off the counter. She shook it all over the food, covering the Chip Man and the counter in the process.

  ‘Right, that is it,’ said the Chip Man. ‘Out. Get out. Ruddy kids.’ The girls burst out laughing and started mocking his accent. Ben got out the money his grandmother had given him and offered it to the Chip Man.

  ‘What, you no speak English? You ruddy slow or something? Get all of you out or I call the police.’

  Ben looked longingly at the fish suppers lying on the counter. He began to protest, but the Chip Man waved his arms in the air and started saying how he would not serve anyone else ‘till these ruddy kids disappear’.

  The Furies were in hysterics. Ben stared at the fish suppers, then at the laughing Furies. He screwed up his face.

  ‘Urgh,’ said Kartofel, peering up at Jenny. ‘Can you smell that? Satan’s chisel! If had a nose, I’d hold it. If I had arms.’

  ‘Oi,’ said Jenny, ‘are you eyeing me up, Bendy?’ Nikki began to laugh so hard she could hardly breathe. ‘He is, isn’t he? Do you fancy me or something?’

  All three Furies made noises of mock disgust, followed by more howling. Ben felt the eyes of the other customers upon him. Embarrassment flushed in his face.

  ‘Idiots!’ he yelled. ‘You . . . idiots!’ He grabbed the vinegar bottle from the counter and squirted it at them, shaking out every last drop like the winning driver at a particularly low-budget Grand Prix.

  ‘Awesome,’ said Kartofel, dancing a mad samba in excitement. Djinn started clapping his hands together and hyperventilating from blue to yellow to green, sucking in the flood of smells as vinegar was splashed around with wild abandon.

  Ben let go of the empty bottle. There was a moment of silence.

  Jenny wiped her hands on her hideous neon-pink skirt and looked him square in the eye. Her skin looked waxy, like a walrus just out of water.

  ‘You,’ she said calmly, ‘are a dead man, Bendy.’

  Kartofel squealed in delight. Ben turned back to the Chip Man, slammed the money down on the counter, and yoinked the chips from under his nose. And then he did the most athletic thing he had ever done in his life. He tucked the fish suppers under his arm, turned back to face the Furies, and charged towards the slight gap between Sally and Nikki. Djinn tried to scramble up, causing the table to wobble. Ben burst through, knocking Nikki to the ground, and shot out of the door. Djinn dived for the Box as Ben passed, but missed, splatting into the opposite wall, condensing into little droplets and sending the table crashing across the exit. Kartofel tried to scurry past, panicking, hoping to avoid the stretching, but Ben was already away, curses f
rom the Furies and the Chip Man ringing in his ears. The Box started to play a joyful air, but as Ben pulled away it was abruptly replaced with a familiar scraping sound as Kartofel and Djinn were drawn up out of the shop and back inside the satchel.

  He ran, though it hurt his lungs, and only stopped when he thought he was far enough away to have escaped. At the bottom of Fford Heulwen he sucked in long lungfuls of air, taking deep, desperate breaths. It would have normally been a painful sensation, but it wasn’t now. All he felt was elation. Slowly he caught his breath, and then walked triumphantly towards his house, his oversalted prize tucked under his arm.

  Chapter Three

  Bedlam

  When Ben was small, he thought everyone had music in their heads. So when he first heard his grandparents’ ancient radio, he could not understand the point of it: it clashed with his head music. When he tried to ask his grandmother about it, it had led to visits to specialists, who had asked him questions about what he could hear, and then about his ‘imaginary friends’, and whether or not he knew they weren’t really there, or if they told him to do bad things. Eventually Ben had learned that the music was something to do with the Box, and that as other people couldn’t see the demons, and the demons lived in the Box, it was for the best if he pretended to the doctors that neither existed at all.

  Ben’s grandmother had good reason to be concerned, and that reason was Ben’s mother. While she was having Ben, she had started to believe that she could talk to angels, and that one day they would be coming to take her away. This was not something she had felt able to keep to herself, and so before she moved to Drylands Hall she could often be found outside the Job Centre in town, preaching to the unemployed, the shop workers on their lunch breaks, the seagulls and – if any of them ventured that far from the sea – the tourists. Anyone who would listen, and more often than not anyone who wouldn’t listen and ran hurriedly past.

  Ben’s mum was the local weirdo. This is quite some feat in Rhyl.

  Ben’s grandmother had always been frank about her daughter’s illness, which had made it easier for Ben to cope. He knew that his mother had been at university the year before he was born, and that things that happened there had made her the way she was. He also knew that it wasn’t her fault, and that she would probably never get better.

  Once it emerged at primary school that Ben’s mum was ‘Hail Mary’ his classmates had tried to use it torment him, inventing a game that involved ‘accidentally’ bumping into him before running away screaming. A game of tag would develop, as the other children frantically tried to pass the ‘germs’ on to somebody else. It was a game Ben could never join in, and one for which he was always ‘it’. His grandmother’s honesty meant that they never got a rise out of him, and the game was eventually adapted to fit some other victim.

  Before Ben’s mum had gotten really sick, the Robson family had been religious. Ben’s grandmother had even kept it up for a short while after her daughter had been sent away. However, once his daughter had been committed, Ben’s grandad refused point blank to set foot in a church ever again, and had been a firm atheist ever since. Ben’s grandmother remained a believer – she had insisted that Ben go to St Elian’s rather than a secular school, for example – but over the years her attendance had waned. Now the family’s Sunday-morning ritual did not involve visiting a church, but the asylum.

  ‘Same thing,’ Ben’s grandad would mutter, ‘same damn thing.’

  Drylands Hall was in Abergele, an old Roman town less than five miles from Rhyl. The Hall had, at one time, been the home of some long-forgotten local squire, but since the First World War it had been in use solely as a hospital for the mentally ill. The exterior was immaculately maintained, as befitted its listed status: wrought-iron gates opened out on to a long gravel drive lined with weeping willow, leading up to a malfunctioning fountain featuring a school of fish dribbling liquid into a central pool.

  The house itself was an imposing Gothic mansion in sandstone, all sharp angles and straight lines. There were plinths all around its ramparts where once gargoyles had perched: they had been removed lest they disturb the inmates, and now took pride of place in the local historical society’s museum, alongside some grubby Roman coins and a signed photograph of the actor Timothy Dalton, who was from nearby Colwyn Bay.

  Ben hated going to Drylands Hall. He hated the building, he hated being trussed up in his Sunday best, and he even hated the stupid fountain. He hated the other patients twitching and talking to themselves, fussing and fighting over what was on the television in the day room. He hated the staff, hated the jolly way they patronized the patients. But most of all, he hated the anticipation.

  He would never know which version of his mother would be waiting for them in the day room. Would she have cut off all the elbows and shoulders of her clothes, or drawn symbols on her face with poster paints? Would she have had her medicine, and so spend the visit staring out of the big bay windows? Or would she be normal, like other people’s mums? Those times were rare, and Ben dreaded those most of all, for when they came it was like they were a proper family; they would sit together, the four of them, and they’d watch the telly or do a jigsaw – the sort of thing Ben imagined normal families did on a Sunday, though having no friends he had nothing to compare it to. Those times were hard because they gave him hope. The promise that each Sunday would be one of those Sundays, and that one day they could be the norm, was too cruel.

  The hospital visits were the demons’ favourite part of the week. To them, Drylands Hall was a massive playground. Orff got to indulge his hypochondria; Djinn adored the smell of Sunday lunches being produced on a massive scale; and Kartofel had the opportunity to cause chaos. There was a pyromaniac who lived on the second floor that he had a special place in his charred heart for, but mostly he enjoyed ‘magically’ moving objects when nurses and orderlies weren’t looking and tormenting the patients by running up their pyjama legs. And because they loved it, Ben always left his satchel in the car.

  There had been times, when he was small, when he had taken the Box inside. He’d had it out on the table, or had sat on the floor playing with it, and the demons had behaved themselves. There were no embarrassing demonic incidents in those days. It was only as Ben had gotten older that they had become harder to handle, and so in the car they stayed.

  The day room was large, well lit, and had been the victim of an NHS refurbishment at some point in the past three decades. The walls were painted a faded yellow colour and bore the wounds of generations of patients throwing food and attacking them with crayon. The carpet, once thick, was now threadbare and covered in trodden-in Blu-Tack and dried glue.

  It took a little while to spot Ben’s mother amongst the dressing-gowned throng. They found her on her own in the corner, sitting on an old armchair which, like all the chairs there, was covered with plastic in case an inmate had an ‘accident’. When she saw Ben, she leaped up from her chair and waved enthusiastically, like an American in a Mickey Mouse costume. Ben smiled and waved back timidly.

  ‘Hello, Mary Rose,’ said Ben’s grandfather. He nodded at her before taking the seat furthest away. Now that they were closer, Ben could see that his mum had received – or more likely given herself – a haircut since their last visit. Her deep-brown hair, which had been shoulder length, was now cropped short, with ‘interesting’ patches where it had been cut too close to the scalp, battling it out with odd tufts that sprang up here and there.

  ‘Annette! Paul! Ben!’ Mary Rose greeted them with wide-open arms, as if the day room was alive to the sound of music. That she had called her parents by their first names was not a good sign. Ben gulped as she clambered over the other chairs to reach him.

  ‘Benji!’ she said, hugging him warmly and for a little too long. ‘Happy birthday!’

  ‘It’s not my birthday, Mum.’

  ‘Really?’ She looked unsure.

  ‘Yes, darling,’ said Ben’s grandmother. ‘Ben’s birthday is in April, rememb
er?’ She hugged her daughter, and they sat down. Mary Rose looked disappointed.

  ‘I suppose he doesn’t look any older,’ she said. ‘Does that mean there’s no cake?’

  ‘We’ve brought cake for dessert, but not because it’s Ben’s birthday. We always bring cake, don’t we? Sweetheart, what have you done to your hair?’

  ‘Oh, it’s these people, Annette, they made me cut it. These people here, the minions’ – ‘minions’ was Mary Rose’s name for the staff at Drylands Hall ‘– they’re not good people. They don’t want me to get the messages.’

  ‘The messages?’

  ‘From the angels. I was worried that they weren’t getting through, so I needed something to boost the signal. I thought, milk bottle tops, they’ll do the job, and so I spent all day gluing them to the right strands of hair, and then the minions came and cut them all off. They’re real so-and-sos, Annette. Devils.’

  Ben’s grandfather rolled his eyes.

  ‘That’s nice, dear,’ said Ben’s grandmother. ‘Shall we see if there is anything on the television?’

  After lunch, it was time for the cake that Ben’s grandmother had brought. It was Mary Rose’s favourite: a home-made lemon sponge with white icing. Ben’s grandmother fished the old Quality Street tin out of a carrier bag, and set it down on the table. She then produced four paper plates, and finally a small metal cake slice.

  During the preparations, the day nurse – Pat – had been hovering in the corner of the room. She was a rotund, middle-aged lady with short dyed hair, round spectacles and silly hooped earrings, whose default setting was a put-on joviality which disguised a deeply selfish nature. As soon as the cake slice appeared from out of the bag she swoop-waddled over, like a fat owl spying a lemon-curd-flavoured mouse.