Board Thread:Writer's Workshop/@comment-28745016-20160614053623

(this is my first attempt at this kind of thing, I hope I haven't missed any rules or formatting problems or anything)



Here’s a story you might know.

You’re walking in the dark. Any old dark will do. It could be midnight there; you’re halfway along a street with no end; the streetlights are stencilling out too many shadows. Or you’re sneaking to the fridge for snacks. Either way, you’re joined on your enterprise by a nameless fear. It’s a weight hanging on your neck, and a chill in your belly, and it makes your skin tighten around you. There’s no sensible reason for it to be there, behind you and in your chest. Sometimes there are rational fears along with it, but they’re secondary; just extra limbs. They’ll will mug you, or perhaps outright eat you, while the central mass does something unspeakable to your soul.

Everyone knows that one, am I right? Plenty of people are scared of the dark. There doesn’t have to be a reason.

When I was a kid, there was. It made sense to me.

You probably know this one too, if only second hand. ‘If you’re naughty, the Sandman will come take you away.’ Or the Sackman. The local bogey. Evil faeries. The king of crows. My parents promised me to all of them.

I was an adventurous child, and there must have been half a dozen monsters with stakes in my future. I had grubby knees and gappy teeth and a lingering sense of dread from about the age four upwards. I used to lie awake, watching the plaster swirls of the ceiling start to spin gently as I tipped down further into groggy twilight, trying not to let my eyes close. I would be there, knowing they were waiting. In the dark. Any dark. Maybe the dark behind my eyelids. There were lots of questions which occupied those times, and most of my answers only made sense in that halfway space of falling awake, when my sense of reality was dreaming and the rest of me wasn’t. I thought about how an assembly of monsters might chose to split me between them. I thought of how the night light just gave me shadows to see twitching. I wondered why they hadn’t come for me yet, and whether it would be tonight.

I remember asking, once, just after the lullaby had been sung. I wasn’t asleep, but maybe the thing under the bed was. It hadn’t been let in on the deal yet.

“What if they did?” I asked. I can’t remember my tone, really, but I suspect I was trying to imply that my being kidnapped by nightdwellers would make my parents sorry. For not letting me stay up late watching movies, for not telling me they were proud of my report card, for anything at all, really. “What would you do then?”

“We’d miss you,” my father said. He sounded somewhere between exasperated and resigned.

“Would you try to get me back?” I asked, curious.

“Go to sleep,” he said. The next morning I broke a vase and the sub-bed monster was invited in on the action.

Anyway, up until I was sixteen, whenever I went anywhere in the dark, and I felt that waiting thing behind me, I knew it was one of them.

After that I was old enough to call myself silly and resent my parents for going with the scare-‘em-straight style rather than something supportive. It was still there, of course, I just didn’t believe in it.

So, seventeen years after the onset of sceptism, I was a little surprised to hear actual footsteps following me down an alley when I was walking home one night. They sounded both real and shallower than nightmares were: footsteps which were probably plastic soled, not shod in any sort of livid shadow. Still slightly too close for comfort, and slightly too many. I swung my briefcase idly and hoped it was just the rising of an ancient paranoia. I should have run either way.

<p class="MsoNormal">One of them took a swing at the back of my head. I knew it was coming – heard the swish of air displacement – but I was so startled by the thing I was worrying about actually actively intruding on my life that I was too slow to duck, and I got knocked face first into the pavement. The guy attacking me took the opportunity to swing a kick at my kidneys, and scored there too. I rolled, tasting blood and, oddly, smelling smoke, and managed to get a look at them. Bunch of straggly teenagers. But they knew how to apply the boot.

<p class="MsoNormal">“Wait,” I gasped. My lungs were heaving – it felt like they’d gone out of sync. “Wait, wait! I don’t have any money on me.”

<p class="MsoNormal">In return I got kicked to the ground again. I managed to roll with it, but by that time there was nowhere to go: the gang had formed a circle around me. They stood there, scrawny and backlit by the light from the end of the alley, somehow more menacing in their absurdity. If they were nothing much, I was correspondingly weaker. It wasn’t the most frightened I’d ever been – there was that trove of childhood memories to set the bar – but it was the closest I’d thought I’d ever come to serious physical harm.

<p class="MsoNormal">I raised my hands, kneeling in the centre and hoping that there was some mercy in the ring with us. “I’m sorry,” I said. “What do you want? I have a phone, a watch...”

<p class="MsoNormal">“Give’em,” one of them said, gesturing. There was a glint in the gesture I couldn’t keep my eyes from tracking, and I froze for a moment. My ears were buzzing. I’m going to throw up on this teenage crimeboss’s shoes, I thought, and that’s going to be my last act on earth.

<p class="MsoNormal">He wasn’t going to be patient, I could tell that much. My ears wouldn’t stop their ringing, and my hands had started shaking too, and I couldn’t remember the sequence of movements I needed to give him what he’d asked for. Since I was kneeling and looking up at him, I suppose my face was a particularly appealing target, even though the angle between us was awkward. He raised his knee and stomped down. It was a strongly telegraphed stomp. Looking back, I would guess that the best compromise between antagonising him further and keeping my nose on the front of my skull would have been to turn my head and try to take it on the shoulder. Instead, I lunged up, hooked him under the knee, and knocked him flat on his back. I don’t think it was actually any more dignified than the vomiting would have been. I screamed on the way up; he was about two thirds of my weight and a good fifteen years younger; and as soon as I’d bowled him over I was staring around me in bewilderment, wondering what the hell I could possibly do next.

<p class="MsoNormal">At that point the world dissolved into teenage antagonists – they didn’t need their head to break mine, apparently. I thought I could still hear the leader swearing somewhere, but since I could hardly separate myself from the collection of fists and feet and elbows which were pummelling me, I didn’t give him or his potential vengeances much thought. If he wanted to sort this out and re-establish some sort of kicking hierarchy he’d be doing me a favour, frankly. Even the knife might be better than being beaten to death.

<p class="MsoNormal">And then there came a silence. It seeped in a few seconds before the rest of the world slowed down. I was still at the centre of a storm of limbs, but I felt nothing where they struck me. It was like the hush had slipped between my skin and theirs, and nothing else could touch me, not really. The ringing in my ears stopped. The smell of smoke was getting stronger, even though my nose was bleeding and I shouldn’t have been able to pick up anything over the taste of copper in my mouth. It was damp wood and overdone meat, and there was something sickly sweet on top of it – flowers faded to dust and fragrance. Lavender, maybe.

<p class="MsoNormal">And, look. I was pretty beaten up, and my head had taken a battering. One of my eyes had swollen shut entirely, and the other was seeing in 8-bit pixels. So when I say I saw them...I can understand why that wouldn’t be convincing. And saying I felt them too, in that crushing quiet, in the cold which got inside me and filled me like I was an overcoat...well, I can understand why that might sound like a traumatised imagination at work. It’s not like there’s anything left of the gang to corroborate it.

<p class="MsoNormal">But I did see them. And I refuse to believe my imagination could work that way. That...that isn’t in me. Those things they did, I didn’t make those up. They weren’t in my head before. They always will be now. All those things...protecting their investment, I suppose.

<p class="MsoNormal">When I was a child, I wondered what they were waiting for. For a grown up body to eat? For a travel-stained soul to – something? For some special date, some right of passage I had to pass? Or maybe it had been a bureaucratic sort of delay, as they worked out their fair share between them.

<p class="MsoNormal">Well, my soul’s as stained now as I think it’s ever going to be, and I stopped growing at seventeen. So now I wonder if they’re waiting for something else. My children, perhaps. Those children’s children. Sometime down the line, if we’re all lucky, there’d be enough for all of them. <ac_metadata title="Investment (unreviewed)"> </ac_metadata>