Haunted

  Haunted

  Jesse Jackson Lowe

  Copyright © 2018 Jesse Jackson Lowe

  All rights reserved.

  ISBN-13: 978-1-9996657-1-5

  2

  Don't be frightened... It's all in your head.

  'Be quiet.'

  It's Ollie's voice. He's behind me, his hand over my eyes, holding my head against his chest. His words are quick and serious.

  'What... what is it? What's going on?'

  My voice is croaky and uncertain. I feel funny. I was in bed. I was asleep. Now I'm stood being held. I don't know where we are. I can hear our breathing; the space sounds small. There's dust here too – I can smell it.

  Suddenly there's a loud clang from somewhere. Ollie presses my head back harder against his chest, his other arm around my middle.

  'I can't tell you. Keep still, keep your voice down,' he says quickly.

  'Tell me, Ollie, please. What's happening?'

  'You're too young, you wouldn't understand.'

  Ollie's hand is starting to hurt my face. I want to move it. I begin to squirm anxiously.

  'Ollie, I'm not too young. Let go of me.'

  He releases me reluctantly.

  'OK. But be still. And stay quiet.'

  With his hand gone, I still can't see anything, not even Ollie. It's too dark. I feel clothes at my side.

  'Is this the wardrobe?' I say, keeping my voice low.

  'Shhh, we're safe here.'

  'Safe from what?'

  'The monsters,' he says seriously.

  'There's no such thing as monsters, Ollie. Don't be silly.'

  'You think?'

  'There's not,' I whisper.

  'There's always been monsters, Jacob, and there always will be. You said you were old enough, remember. Shhhh, listen.'

  I hold my breath, trying to pick out the smallest sounds.

  'I know you like to think you can know everything,' Ollie whispers right in my ear. 'But no one can know everything. Not even you. But that's OK.'

  I will know everything, I think to myself, when suddenly I hear a noise.

  It sounds like the bedroom door. I've heard it a hundred times before. It inches open. Is something coming into the room? A floorboard creaks. Something is getting closer. I try not to breathe.

  'It can smell us,' Ollie whispers. 'They can smell the living. They hate our smell. They hate us for it.'

  The floor creaks right outside the wardrobe. I dare not make a sound.

  Suddenly the door swings open and I shout in alarm at the huge shape towering over us – a black wall against the darkened bedroom.

  'What the hell are you boys doing?'

  It's Dad. It's just Dad. I breathe. I try to answer.

  'Ollie said there was a monster.'

  Dad pulls us from the wardrobe and marches us to our beds, past all the packed-up moving boxes and bin liners full of toys and clothes in the centre of the room. He leaves and closes the door with a firm “goodnight” that sounds like an order.

  'See, I told you,' I say to Ollie once everything is quiet, feeling silly for having believed him.

  'Don't worry, Jacob, I'll look after you, I promise,' Ollie says, then rolls over, facing away from me in the dark.

  Mum was angry. She seemed angry at a lot of things these days. The coffee stain on the sleeve of her day suit was just one more thing. Ollie added to her irritation, of course. Having refused to finish his eggs, he was now stood on his chair, tucking into a bowl of his favourite cereal, repeatedly flicking the sunflowers hanging by a string from the kitchen ceiling that the gardener had brought in to dry the day before.

  Ollie had never liked these flowers. He told me that there were hundreds of tiny creatures hidden inside. Creatures that would drop out when no one was looking, silently falling onto the table and disappearing into unknown corners of the house.

  Insects are fascinating in their own way, but Ollie had a way of describing things that stuck in your head, and the idea of a slow, unstoppable invasion of scurrying and scuttling things, finding their way into my bed while I slept, was worrying enough for me to keep an eye on the flowers as he patted them, the swing growing with each hit.

  'Sit down and eat properly or you'll knock something over,' Mum warned Ollie from the counter, rubbing her sleeve with a cloth.

  Ollie ignored her. A few seconds later, mid-swing, his chair tipped back accidentally. He instantly tipped it forward to save himself, but it all happened too quickly and he lost his balance. He came off the chair and jammed into the table, dropping his bowl of cereal over the rug.

  Milk cartons, cups of tea and glasses of juice were all dislodged by the collision. The liquids mingled with the unopened letters sitting in our father's place that had been vacated before Ollie and I had arrived for breakfast. Drips poured off the table in all directions, joining the cereal on the floor. Mum rushed around, swearing at the whining Ollie and shouting for Dad to “come and help sort this fucking mess out”. Neither achieved anything and Ollie and I were quickly sent outside without much ceremony – just a warning not to be seen inside for the rest of the morning if we wanted to make it to tomorrow alive. I had a feeling Mum meant it. Ollie's complaints about the pains in his shin stopped the moment we were outside.

  Dad's shed was locked. But this proved nothing. He may have been inside. We didn't really have any way of being sure. Even if you put your face right up against the blacked-out glass, you couldn't tell if he was there. I have always felt older than my age, it was the same when I was younger and it's the same now I am eleven, but the facts are that I am younger and shorter than my brother. Because of this I had to use a branch from the nearby apple tree as support and stretch on tiptoes to reach the shed window that was easily head-height for him. Neither of us could see or hear anything, and after a few moments we gave up and set off for the back of the house.

  The back lawn led into a meadow, beyond which were the woods. Ollie ran off to look for a stick below the nearest trees. I ran into the long grass where the meadow began, following a pair of cabbage whites tumbling around each other, doing the mating dance I'd read about in my butterfly book. I quickly lost them in the tall grass where a few seed heads were already forming. They tickled my arms as I slowed to a walk. The gentle hiss of hidden insects trailed off in all directions, and the rising sun flickered through the highest leaves of the surrounding trees. A long, late summer day lay ahead. I smiled and moved on.

  Within a short distance I emerged onto a well-trodden path where the grass was kept short to create a winding trail that led into the woods. I noticed the small hedgehog instantly. It was sitting in a rut in the middle of the path. Based on its size, it could have been no older than a few months.

  I knew that hedgehogs were usually nocturnal creatures, snuffling around the cat dish when all was quiet, so there was something out of the ordinary to see one this young sitting in the middle of the path in broad daylight. The stillness in particular seemed unusual. It was enough to make me stop for a few moments, the shade of the tree line cutting me in half. Things in nature usually react to a human, but the small hedgehog didn't move at all upon my arrival. I carefully nudged the spines with my foot to see if it was dead. There was a small reaction, a sort of sleepy acknowledgement to someone pushing you awake. It seemed it was alive. Perhaps the little guy was ill? It was hard to say. I rolled it over a little further. It began to tuck itself into its defensive position, a ball of spikes irritating enough to stop a predator. As it curled up, I saw enough of its legs and underside to spot whether there were any injuries. It seemed not. There was no dried blood or obvious wounds – just a small, still hedgehog.

  I could hear Ollie whacking sticks against tree trunks over by the woods. I decided not to call him. Instead I r
an to the potting shed. With my thin wrists sticking out of a pair of large, heavy gardening gloves, I came back to the path and gently rocked the small hedgehog into the tough, brushed leather palms. I walked slowly out onto the lawn with the creature held out in front of me. It was nestled on its back and it seemed to be relaxing a little in the cradle of my hands, opening from its ball a touch, its small feet and little snout sticking up in the air. There was something endearing about the animal. The eyes on its cute face were shut and it continued to have the slow, funny air of someone recently woken. Standing beneath a large walnut tree, I examined it more closely. I had little experience to tell me what could be wrong with it though, so I thought it might be a good idea to get an adult's opinion. Despite Mum's warning about returning inside, with Dad's whereabouts unknown and there being no gardener around today, she was my only option.

  Standing in the kitchen with the hedgehog held out in front of me, I called for her. There was no reply the first few times, but eventually she called out with irritation from a distant room saying that she'd “be there in a second and you better have a damn good excuse for being inside”. While I waited, I looked again at the creature in more detail. As I did, I began to notice things I had not seen before.

  I don't know if it was the change in light, or whether they had always been there, but I now saw, nestled close to the skin between the mess of spines all over the hedgehog's back, what appeared to be hundreds of small, slightly sticky-looking grains of rice. I was confused at first, surprised that I could have missed them before. But looking at them now I had the feeling I'd seen these rice-like shapes somewhere before. It took a few moments for me to remember where – it was the cat dish, when it was left outside with leftover scraps of meat in it. These were flies' eggs – and the little hedgehog was covered in them.

  I instantly began to shift a little on my feet, and there was a change of feeling towards the animal resting in my hands. How long had it been sitting out in the open? Is this something I should be showing my already irritable mother? I looked at the hedgehog's sleepy face as I heard Mum approaching. Could the creature still be seen as cute despite its egg-covered state? With Mum about to arrive, I had to hope so. It was my only chance to avoid more shouting.

  But as I wondered this, I suddenly saw for the first time that the eyes of the small creature weren't in fact shut, and instantly a deep dread began to rise in me. It was still the case that there were no eyeballs to be seen amongst the fur, but this wasn't because the animal was asleep. I could now see for the first time that where the eyeballs should have been, there were in fact two pus-filled craters that writhed with life. As Mum appeared in the hallway, a tiny pus-white maggot crawled out from one of these moving craters and crawled along the hedgehog's nose. I then watched in silent revulsion as the baby hedgehog pulled the little maggot into its mouth with its dexterous snout and tongue, instinctively taking in any sustenance it could. Mum stared at me in confusion as I let out a strange noise I had never heard myself make before and looked up at her. But before she could say anything, I ran from the kitchen as fast as I could – my hands held out in front of me, unsure what to do.

  I ran down the drive, straight across the lane and into the entrance to the field opposite. With my eyes shut tight, I flung the hedgehog as far as I could into the thick barley crop – my only thought to get it as far away from me as possible. I paused for a moment, staring into the field where I imagined the creature had disappeared, then I ran back towards home, across the road and down the drive just as quickly as I had gone the other way, throwing off the large gloves in the process, not wanting them to touch my skin. I ran off behind the house to the shouts of my mother from the front door, who amongst several other complaints was chastising me for dumping the good gardening gloves in the middle of the drive and not watching the road when I crossed.

  'You're supposed to be smart, Jacob, for God's sake!' was the last thing I heard as I made for the back garden.

  Alone by a tall sycamore tree, the smell of cut grass and summer flowers filled my nose, and underneath that, the ripe smell of earth and mulch at the foot of the tree. I could sense the insects scurrying and scuttling everywhere around me and, for a moment, it felt like I would never be able to look at nature in the same way again.

  I couldn't stop picturing the maggot creeping from the hedgehog's eye-hole and inching along its nose. And the tongue pulling it into its mouth – the small teeth chewing – the terrible moment the little creature had tried to keep itself alive by feeding on the maggots that were slowly devouring it, eyeballs first. What had that little hedgehog done to deserve that?

  I tried to concentrate on Kant, space travel, chemistry, David Gemmell, anything else, but it wasn't working. That poor little hedgehog. I stared into space as summer gently hissed around me. I ran my fingers through the soil. A gentle breeze tugged at my hair.

  Then something came to me.

  I looked around the garden. It was all the same. All of it.

  The maggot-infested eyeballs of that animal were just as much part of nature as anything else I could see. They were the same as the trees and the birds and the blue sky beyond. It didn't matter what my reaction was to any of them – this is reality, this is how things are. It was a fact as plain and clear as the damp earth in my hand. That baby hedgehog had done nothing to deserve its fate, and it was as much part of the world around me as anything else.

  My heart thumped at the thought. I stared at the grass. In the distance I heard the church bells ringing. I thought of the large flint building by my school in the middle of the village. I pictured myself sitting in the pews looking up at the wide wooden ceiling, light shining in through the coloured glass.

  God and religion as I knew it, as I was taught it, was just something that was there, like the countryside that had provided the flint for the church's construction. But from the sun on my face and the long grass tickling my arms, to the writhing, pus-filled eye sockets of that baby hedgehog – the stories I had been told about the Bible and God, they didn't add up. Not if you really looked at the world. How could they? If the God I was told about existed, then that God had put those maggots in that baby hedgehog's eyes, there was no question; He was all, that was how it worked.

  I could hear Ollie playing by the woods as I let this sink in. Was this some sort of revelation? Had Ollie ever been through anything like this? Did everyone go through something like this? It felt like you just had to look the right way to see it.

  I didn't call Ollie though. Sitting alone, listening to the sound of the distant bells drifting over the fields, I stared at the trees, the grass, the birds, the sky – everything that made up the beautiful day around me – the day I realised with absolute certainty that there was no God.

  * * *

  I woke with a feeling of panic. I felt uneasy and disorientated, my cheek pressed against the sheet. I looked around. The shapes of the darkness didn't fit together in a way I recognised. Was the doorway somehow closer than it should be? Had the window moved? Was this even my room? It felt strange and different. I turned and blinked at the unfamiliar angle of the beams across the ceiling. Then I looked down and saw my feet resting on the pillow.

  It took a moment for my brain to work out what I was looking at. I took a long, deep breath then began to ease my body back round the right way, keeping the cover close. My head found the soft, cool down of the pillow, and it soothed my hot cheek. I breathed in deeply and took in the fresh summer scent of the washing line.

  I could just see Ollie's shape across the room in the dark, a silent mass beneath a duvet. There was no waking him. But something had woken me.

  What was it?

  My eyes were drawn to the top of the wardrobe in the corner of the room. Objects resting in the thick dust gave the sense of something folded within their dark shape, something large with powerful shoulders looking down at me. The house creaked against a breeze. I heard an owl hoot and a fox cry in the distance. It had always been like th
is. This building, with its old wooden bones, it was my home. These night-time shapes and sounds were familiar. So why tonight do they add to a sense that something is wrong? What was bothering me?

  Of course there was no God. It was obvious. Even though I had never said it clearly before, I must have known this all along. Some form of doubt had always been there. Through prayers at morning assembly, visits to the church and religious education classes, I couldn't recall ever truly taking it all at face value. But if that was true – why this unease? Why would I still be agitated? I had gone to bed tired and happy.

  I tried to analyse my thoughts more deeply, to put everything in order. I could feel the sparks and the connections working as I did, my brain flexing – the thing that makes me special. The thing that makes me 'me'.

  Then suddenly something hit me. It stopped me in my tracks. Something caught in my throat and there was a click as I swallowed.

  Shit. I hadn't in fact thought this all through. Not yet.

  I sat up a little, staring into the dark.

  What an idiot I was. I had dismissed the idea too quickly – what if God did exist, and He did put maggots in baby hedgehogs' eyes?

  Dread swept through me. Could that really be the world I lived in? I scanned the room. Was this fearful entity watching me now, unhindered by the darkness, listening in on my thoughts, judging me, planning what to do with me when my time came? Would He punish me for my disbelief, my ideas? My crimes were far worse than any hedgehog's. In Hell, would I receive maggots in my eyeballs?

  But no. It couldn't be. That can't be how things are. I should trust my senses. Trust my brain. There was only one conclusion anyone could come to and remain sane. My first conclusion was the right one. God did not exist. I thought about it again, and turning it over in my mind felt like rubbing an aching muscle – it hurt a little but in a good way, painful but comforting. Deep inside I knew what was true, what was right.