by Gary Fry
Ian hurried to reach a stile, climbed over it, and then stepped onto a newly laid road. Now here was civilisation. He hurried on to locate the address he recalled reading on the questionnaire back in the car. It would soon be early evening and he had a five-hour drive back to Yorkshire after conducting this part of the research.
Everybody he’d talked to so far had had a complicated caring situation, looking after a relative while trying to hold down a job. Pacing through the neighbourhood, which appeared deserted in the autumn gloom, Ian considered how difficult it was earning a living at the same time as providing for loved ones. He sympathised with the people he’d interviewed, but his heart had never been in the job. He wanted to write fiction—horror stories, mainly. However, his occasional story sales hardly paid the household bills…at least, not yet. And with no opportunity to sit down and produce more material—a novel was surely the next step—he often wondered whether his grisly little tales ever would.
“Little chance of any chilling ideas here, ” he muttered, and that was when he spotted the property he’d been seeking. Shadow smothered the small detached, lending it a sinister bearing, but of course that was just his dark imagination conjuring fear out of nothing. Despite being unable to remember the exact house number, he knew this was the right place: a child had just run across a hallway behind a panel of frosted glass in the front door. Hadn’t the questionnaire claimed that the homeowner was caring for a little boy? Autism, hadn’t the problem been? This lad had been little more than a fractured blur through the distorting pane.
Thrusting aside these thoughts, Ian paced up to the front entrance and rang the bell.
He didn’t know much about psychology (having graduated in sociology), but regularly thanked the God he’d never believed in that his daughter had been born healthy. He’d heard some terrible accounts of illness and disability in this, his first job after securing a PhD: elderly people with Alzheimer’s, adults with schizophrenia, as well as many disabled children…Sometimes he considered the things he wrote about—ghosts, monsters, and similar tropes of the genre—inconsequential compared to the horrors involved in real life.
The door opened and a slim woman with a pleasant smile greeted him, but there was no sign of her incapacitated son. Perhaps, as often happened in these meetings, the father had taken the boy into another room, allowing his wife to conduct the interview in private. If that was the case here, Ian was pleased; his recordings were a bugger to transcribe with raucous background noise.
“Hi there, ” he said, flashing the ID card he’d plucked from one jacket pocket. “I’m Ian Withers from the University of Leeds. I’ve come to talk to you about your experiences as a–”
“Oh yes, please come in, ” said the woman, interrupting him and stepping back to allow entry.
On the questionnaire returned months ago, the woman had ticked the box for “25-34 years old”, but looking at her now, in the soft light of the house’s interior, it was clear she was either near the top of this age group or extremely tired. There were dark circles under her eyes and her hair was pinned back in a greasy bundle. Ian’s wife, Sally, had never appeared so untidy, not even during Vanessa’s infancy.
“Come through, ” the woman said, leading him into a kitchen situated at the property’s rear. There was little furniture on view, an observation that, in Ian’s experience, hinted at poverty. His own wage as a researcher was hardly likely to make him rich, but at least allowed him to provide all his family needed for a comfortable life.
He was offered a drink but turned it down because he didn’t want to stop at service stations to urinate during his drive north. He sat opposite the woman at a small dining table and then revealed the usual consent and confidentiality issues. She acquiesced willingly, adjusting the sleeves of her plain shirt. And soon, after switching on his digital recorder, the interview was underway.
It turned out to be one of the discussions to which he contributed very little. The woman was passionate about her views, and although Ian’s mind had wandered during the earlier stages (he’d been hoping the hire car was okay; he’d spotted a few dubious-looking teenagers on street corners close to where he’d left it), he was slowly drawn in to her story.
This was a pitiable situation. Ten years ago, the woman’s son had contracted a virus at eighteen months old and consequently experienced epileptic fits. He now suffered profound learning difficulties and had been diagnosed with autism. He tended to eat everything he could get hold of—“from his own poo” to “pieces of dried pasta and bits of charcoal from the fireplace”—and slept only about three hours a night. He also had a low pain threshold and butted all household goods. He’d broken several TVs, a large display cabinet, and every bed he’d ever owned. Despite these circumstances, however, little help had been made available by local social services.
Ian had begun to feel uncomfortable while listening to this account, and even forgave the woman for talking for longer than the usual hour. He wondered why she constantly referred to her boy in the past tense, but then realised that this was probably how she coped with the situation. Perhaps she believed the worst excesses of her son’s condition had been overcome and there was hope for the future.
Once the interview had come to an end, Ian thought he’d spoken only about fifty words. The woman’s story would be important to the project, which was concerned with how people coped with caring and the support they received from local authorities. He’d also responded as a human being, however. Despite having been a solitary youngster, detached from everyday life, he was now a father and a husband. And the carer’s tale had moved him in a way few others had in the past. He thanked her for taking the time to talk amid her hectic life; she also held down a part time job, as without this, she’d claimed, she’d have “hanged herself ”.
As Ian was shepherded back out, curiosity forced him to ask a question it had been unnecessary to record. “Where’s the lad at the moment?”
The woman pulled open the front door, her face assuming an even more troubled impression. “Didn’t I…Oh, sorry, I must have forgotten to put that on the questionnaire. ” She paused, averted her gaze, and then added, “My son is dead. ”
Then who had Ian seen while approaching the building, the small figure rushing beyond the frosted glass in the door?
But he merely listened as the woman told him what had happened. She’d always found it difficult to control her boy and once he’d run in front of a car in Swansea city centre, just before they’d been due at another welfare interview at the council’s headquarters.
“It appals me to say so, ” she finished with a remorseful voice, “but maybe that was for the best. It was no kind of life, really. ”
As Ian, decidedly troubled, made to leave, he carried these words more heavily than even the digital recorder in one pocket. After saying goodbye and wishing the woman luck, he hurried away to re-access the path that would take him back through the short stretch of woods to the car.
Was someone following him? Whenever he turned to look while pacing relentlessly, he noticed dark shapes stirring among tangles of undergrowth clustered between countless trees. Was one about the height of his daughter? This possibly imaginary figure wrestled free of the foliage demarcating the route Ian had taken and quickly scampered his way…if indeed it was anything other than a trick of his fraught mind and startled eyes.
But then he’d reached the hired vehicle. He unlocked it with a single squeeze of the key fob, opened one rear door, flung his research equipment onto the back seat, and clambered into the front. Once settled inside, did he hear the other back door swing open and then swiftly shut? No, that was only faulty perception, a consequence of exhaustion. It had been a long day, and he must be careful as he drove the hatchback back along unforgiving motorways.
He buckled himself into the driver’s seat, gunned the engine, and let out the clutch. The child he saw in his rear-view mirror was just an imposition of the one that permanently occupied his mind’s ey
e. He couldn’t wait to get home to beautiful young Vanessa and of course his wife Sally, as well as the relative normality of their secure life together.
——
By the time he’d reached Bradford, Ian had thought of a new story to tell his wife and daughter. Something about the Swansea woman’s pitiable story must have clung to his mind while inventing the plot, because the central character was an isolated carer, struggling to look after a disabled infant. Nevertheless, no monsters were involved in the research participant’s story…
Ian pulled into his driveway, parking behind the family’s brand new saloon. The guys from the hire company would arrive in the morning to collect the hatchback he’d been using for fieldwork, but Ian realised this thought was just an attempt to throw his psyche off the main issue concerning him: the short person he’d seen crossing the hallway beyond that distorting glass in Wales.
Had the woman had a second child?
Before climbing out of the vehicle, he turned in his chair and removed the carer’s questionnaire from his luggage on the backseat. Although it was Friday evening, he was reluctant to step inside and see his family for the first time in three days until he’d steadied his mind. The drive had been punishing and surely only this caused his hands to shake while checking the relevant information.
The woman lived alone, he observed at once. And she’d also written that her only dependent had recently died.
Despite his sudden disquiet, Ian felt like such a shit. Why was his attention only ever half on his job? The people he was supposed to help were desperate, and he was paid reasonably well to carry out his role. And what was the one thing he’d thought about during the five-hour journey home? New horror stories involving silly monsters.
He felt ashamed while gathering his belongings and stepping out to lock up the car. Then he paced towards his house, a sizeable semi in a nice area, with many healthy, respectful neighbours.
It must have been the hire vehicle’s cooling engine that made a sound like something creeping in pursuit, but it wasn’t long before he sealed himself inside his warm, secure home.
——
Before Vanessa would agree to go to sleep, Ian had to tell her a new story. Sally had tucked the girl into bed while he’d poured himself a stiff drink in the lounge, and after knocking this back to drain tension from his muscles, he trudged upstairs and regaled his wife and daughter with a tale about a struggling carer who summoned malevolent creatures to deal with unhelpful representatives of her local council.
Once he’d finished, Vanessa appeared frightened and refused to allow her daddy or mummy to close her bedroom door as they prepared for bed with the landing light on.
“I hope there’s none of those…things in my wardrobe, ” the girl called, her six-year old voice faultless in both grammar and enunciation.
Sally yelled back, “It’s just a story, love. Now go to sleep. ”
All this made Ian feel even worse about himself.
His wife was an English teacher at a local college. They’d met at university, where she’d been studying for a postgraduate certificate in education and he’d been wrestling with his doctorate. In nightwear, they slid beneath their welcoming sheets and were holding each other before Sally said, “I thought that tale was a bit…well, darker than usual. Are you sure you should be telling Nessy about such things at her age?”
Ian felt affronted, a consequence of his tiredness of course. “That’s what life is like, love, ” he said, trying to remain calm. “I think it’s best to prepare children for such truths. ”
“Hey, is this the same person who won’t even let her walk home from school on her own?”
That was true: whenever Ian could do so, he’d wait outside the building in the car each afternoon. His research post allowed him at least this flexibility, if not enough to write every day. Before long, he must compose something new—a novella, maybe; a weighty piece to develop his reputation in the horror field—even though what he’d heard earlier today had diminished the importance he’d once assigned to his genre…Perhaps he just needed a good night’s sleep.
“You okay?” his wife asked as he shuffled down and dropped his head onto the pillow.
“Yeah, fine, ” he replied, trying to persuade himself as much as her. “It’s been a demanding trip. I’ll be okay; I have the weekend to recover. ”
“Sweet dreams, darling, ” said Sally, and to Ian’s weary mind, these words sounded like a cruel curse.
——
He suffered a nightmare in which someone was prowling outside his house. This person looked ineffectual, but exhibited manic behaviour which threatened to do far worse than onlookers might expect. The figure scuttled to and fro, seeking entry, moonlight crowning its determined form with a halo of fury. Then it knocked at the door…
…and Ian awoke abruptly, his head full of sour recollections. Just my imagination, he thought, opening his eyes to let merciful daylight fully rouse him.
That summons continued at the front of the property, however.
He got out of bed to tug on his dressing gown, and once his mind had cleared while straying downstairs, he realised that the newcomers would be from the hire company, come for the keys to their vehicle. He unhooked the bunch from a hook in the kitchen and then went to open the door.
“Oh dear, dear, dear, ” said the man who’d knocked, while his companion on the driveway looked shocked and outraged.
“What’s…wrong?” asked Ian, still not fully awake. He felt pressure behind his eyeballs, either from the long drive yesterday or all the interviews he’d conducted this week. “Is there a problem with the car?”
“I’ll say there is, ” the second man called, and immediately stepped aside…to reveal the tin-can mess thugs had made of the hire vehicle.
It was as if someone had prised one of the back doors out of its frame. This was hanging wide open, its edges bent and ragged. Chips of light-blue paintwork were scattered below, but there was no sign of the kind of tool that might affect such damage.
Had vandals broken into the car? If so, why hadn’t they stolen it? It was of course ludicrous to suspect that somebody had been trapped inside the vehicle, before clambering out less than gracefully…Nevertheless, Ian’s sluggish mind considered this possibility.
“I can’t believe it, ” he said, his eyes opening wide. “I heard nothing overnight. I can only assume that…well, that someone must have broken in while I was sleeping. ”
He glanced around his trouble-free neighbourhood and spotted a figure standing in the mouth of an alley at the head of the cul-de-sac. After adjusting his focus, however, he realised that this was just a pile of rocks, and not the child he’d thought he’d seen…
“Look, guys, the uni’ will cover the costs. We’re fully insured. ” He spoke rapidly to eliminate a creeping shock that threatened to render his body mutinous. He felt like throttling the bastards who’d caused this damage, but eventually calmed enough to finish. “Get in touch with our finance people who make the bookings with your company. They’ll sort it out. ”
The two men had no option but to agree, and after jamming the damaged door back into its buckled housing, they climbed inside the vehicle and drove off with a back-spurt of exhaust smoke.
Ian was now outside his house and standing on the path beside his lawn. His feet felt cold against the concrete, and it must be an errant wind which led him to believe that someone had just darted into the property, moments before he did so himself. After closing the door, he heard footsteps scuttling upstairs.
That was surely just Sally or Vanessa headed for the bathroom, he told himself…but after making hot drinks and carrying them up to the bedrooms, he found both fast asleep.
His wife mumbled semi-conscious gratitude. After opening her eyes, however, his daughter said, “Daddy, there’s someone in my wardrobe. And he’s very, very mad. ”
——
To a child, madness needn’t mean what it meant to an adult. The word was
often used to denote rage…but in this case, was that definition any less unsettling?
Ian spent much of the morning organising the recordings from his fieldwork trip. He planned to transcribe them in the same order he’d conducted them, just as he always had. He downloaded the first of five—an interview with a middle-aged man caring for his mentally ill sister—into transcribing software, but then decided that he needed to go out somewhere. A little fresh air and exercise after a busy working week would surely help him feel better.
Vanessa was still shaken from what she’d imagined that morning, and a few disapproving glances from Sally did little to make Ian feel less guilty about his tale causing the girl’s bad dream. But at least this was all she’d suffered. Any connection between her unrest and the ruined car was nonsense.
Ian drew this conclusion despite the irrational fi he wrote for magazines and anthologies. Horror was an essential outlet for people in a terrifying world; it served as catharsis, providing symbols for nebulous terrors. Societal breakdown, terrorism, global confl disease, insanity, illegal drugs, vandalism…The list of everyday horrors was endless, and the genre at its best could deal with these and many other issues. That was its value.
Bolstered in his ambition to become a writer rather than an academic, Ian drove his family to a park, where they spent hours feeding ducks, browsing a small museum, and eating ice cream in a café. During this final stage, a mother tried pushing the wheelchair of her disabled son into the outlet, but there was no ramp and she had to leave him outside while entering to buy sweets. After receiving the packet, the boy tossed it vehemently aside, prompting the overburdened woman to move on, her eyes faded versions of what they’d surely once been.
Ian examined his wife’s sparkling gaze and then glanced at his daughter’s even brighter one. He felt fortunate and relieved, full of love for both of them.