1
I blame Pinocchio for thinking that everyone had one. One of my earliest memories was of sitting watching the old movie on video cassette. The TV was a small portable that had been balanced on the bedside table, putting it too low to be watched from the mattress itself. I watched from the floor, sitting cross-legged with one arm draped across the dishevelled blanket that covered it.
Toby watched with me of course, laughing inappropriately as he always did and making those strange comments that I never really understood until much later. When Pinocchio met Jiminy Cricket Toby went uncharacteristically quiet, and this drew my attention.
I was only a child, I don’t remember my actual age, but I could not have been into double figures yet, and Toby was older by a few years. It never occurred to me until much, much later how odd that fact was.
“You ever think about that?”
The serious tone is what drew my attention from the movie, for a moment I completely forgot it existed.
I shook my head, not to indicate I didn’t think about it, just to indicate I didn’t know what “it” was.
Toby looked at me then with an intensity that unsettled me. In fact – I have never told anyone this before – the look still makes a guest appearance in my waking dreams to this day. Those daydreams always make the day a surreal experience, as if the veil between the conscious and unconscious worlds are closer than I usually like to think.
“I dunno.” He said and fell into a morose silence.
It was clear that he did know, whatever it was, I was the one who was clueless.
However old I was I had reached that age when I knew how little I understood of the world. I understood the difference between boys and girls for instance, but I didn’t understand why they had begun to make me feel so strange when I was around them. Especially some girls, particular ones. Even though they never responded to me, never acted like they even knew I was there, I still responded to them, and it was these responses that confused me more than their disregard.
Outside of the small bedroom window I saw the sky was an unbroken blue, and I imagined the other children from school would be roaming around the city. Some would be wandering from store to store across the city centre, while others would be trespassing across the railway lines that ran along the side of the main road. It was the easiest way to get through to the empty fields beyond, and some kids were drawn to the route by its forbidden nature.
Toby would sometimes stand by the window, which looked out over the road that led to school and watch those familiar faces as they moved from door to door, collecting a growing gaggle of kids before moving off to some mysterious destination.
Toby’s door was never knocked.
For so long I was grateful for Toby’s company, thinking it was symptomatic of his good nature. I didn’t understand what was really happening, I was just not experienced enough at the time to make the connections. I was just the result of my environment, after all.
Toby appeared to be watched the movie, but I knew that he wasn’t. His humour had dried up and he just sat stoically with slightly unfocused eyes pointed in the direction of the screen. He wasn’t seeing it, he was elsewhere, and the slight twitch of his upper lip suggested wherever he was he was having harsh words to say to someone else.
I hoped it wasn’t me.
Even then he scared me, not that I would have admitted it. I knew he was different, that he affected the world around him in a way I never could, and I knew that sometimes the way he left the world in his wake was not an improvement on how he found it.
Later I realised this was why no one ever knocked on his door, and why the girls avoided us when we were at school. There was something about Toby – I believed it was Toby even back then, and not me – that made others shy away from us. I didn’t think it was me, they didn’t even seem to notice me, but I saw their furtive sideways glances at Toby. Seeing people for who they were was a benefit of being invisible to them.
His face twisted into a momentary grimace, and he leaned forward and hit the eject button on the video recorder. The rectangle of black plastic popped from the drive, and he snatched it out. I watched as silently he broke the cassette in two, the black tape inside stretching and snapping. He then placed the two halves back into the blue case with its colourful sleeve and closed it.
To anyone who had not seen these private moments, the change would have been a subtle one, perhaps they may have even put it down to Toby growing into a teenager with all the problems that implied, but I didn’t know about any of that, all I knew is that something was happening to my friend.
His changing mood was helped, or hindered – depending on your point of view, by the long spring break which meant he spent a great deal of time alone. So, I was the only one who witnessed the slow disappearance of the old cassettes – both audio and video – and the slow growth of clipped images that started to congregate on the wall.
At first, I put this down to him growing up too, I suppose, though I didn’t formulate my thoughts in such clear language. I just thought that Toby was changing, and this stabbed a fear into me that I didn’t entirely understand. It made me feel lonely and distant from him. I was fearful that he was beginning to leave me behind.
Occasionally he would forget I was there, sometimes leaving me alone, my words ignored and my attempts to draw him out of himself disregarded. He was becoming like the others; I was fading away in his eyes. He would become engrossed in clipping and positioning the increasing number of images on the walls, some of which I could not look at without shuddering, and then he would turn and recoil as he noticed me.
He once said, “I thought you had gone,” and it was as if he had driven a knife through me.
I knew I would soon, at this rate.
The images were black and white, mostly clipped from books, a few from newspapers. I was thankful for that, but Toby’s strange ingenuity caught hold and he bought a pack of coloured pens with which he coloured in the images.
He used up the red pen first.
He used up lots of red pens.
Toby talked more than he used to, but not to me. He talked to himself now, or to someone I couldn’t see. The idea frightened be deeply. He would mutter under his breath, and I would peer around the room with wide eyes, seeking faces in shadows, terrified I might find one.
Toby did not live alone; his mother could be heard most days moving around downstairs. She would leave early in the morning while Toby still slept and return a little before he arrived home from school. Over spring break, she was at home more, but she only climbed the stairs to the second storey when she returned to bed, never in the day.
Toby’s room was a testament to how little time she spent in it, as well as how little Toby cared, and as the days of their break from school collected into weeks the cleanliness of the room did not improve.
It was the night before our return to school when Toby acknowledged my presence again. It was late, outside the window the sky had turned ashen, and I could feel Toby’s utter desolation at the impending school term.
I sat in the corner, next to the window. My elbow was resting on the ledge, my chin nestled in the crook of my arm. I watched the sky darken and the first stars break through the dying daylight. First one, then another, until a sea of them blinked down on us.
Tony was sat in bed, no more than a shadowy silhouette against the wall of images behind him. In front of him he had a box about the size of a small suitcase. Its edges were well worn, the course blue fabric worn almost through to the metal. Its top was open, and he was peering into it intently.
From where I was, I could not see its contents.
I turned my attention back to the sea of stars.
“Did you know,” I said, not expecting an answer, “it was twenty years ago today that the first person slept in space?” I paused for a moment, running the unfamiliar name over in my head before attempting it. “He was a russkie called Gherman Titov.”
Toby giggled but I ignored it.
“Stayed up there for a whole day he did, first person to do that.”
I tried to ignore the stars and tried to look at the space between them. I thought of a cocoon of metal floating in that blackness and wondered if I could sleep drifting around in all that nothing; then I realised that everyone did just that, every night of their lives.
I shuddered.
“Ever heard of the Milgram experiment?”
Toby’s voice was hushed, and when I looked back toward him, I saw his head was moved as if he were looking at me, but I could not see his eyes in the shadows. In front of him the case was still open, and the top had dipped towards the bed, inside I could see something catch the light from the window.
I shook my head.
“Stanley Milgram done a test to see if people would ‘lectrocute other people if someone in a lab coat told ’em to. Torture ‘em. Zapping them with enough ‘lectricity to kill ‘em.”
“Did they?”
“’Bout six out of ten.” He paused and investigated the case. “More killers out there than normal folk, it seems.”
So, with that Toby had killed any desire for conversation and he did it as effectively as flicking a switch.
The following morning, he woke without a murmur, startling me from my dreamy reverie. I had watched the sky shift to the red of dawn and the sight filled me with an unfamiliar foreboding.
Usually, the dawn was a time of day I cherished most dearly. It made the city skyline beautiful despite the trash littered streets and the thousands of miles of cracked concrete. The glow of dawn bathed it in a glow that was sanctifying, giving even the rats of the earth, both human and animal, hope of redemption.
Usually.
It wasn’t quite like that today.
Influenced perhaps by Toby’s mood of the previous evening the beauty I usually saw in the dawn’s hours seemed more a showy tease of the perfection the world would never reach.
“What’s going on there then?”
Toby’s hand came into the edge of my view, one stubby finger pointing towards a neighbour’s driveway. There was a removal truck parked with two wheels on the path and two burly men in overalls were sliding it open to reveal a hodgepodge of furniture strapped in a confusing mess in the back.
The other side of the driveway I could just make out the front end of a car, dark blue, with a dented front fender just above the headlight. I could imagine the dislodged light would cast a beam uncoordinated with its sibling on the other side of the car. I was going to mention this to Toby, intending to make a crack about calling the car Marty Feldman, but I realised that Toby would have no idea who that was.
Beside me Toby moved closer to the windowpane, almost pressing his face against it as the girl stepped into view. She was short and slim. Her blonde hair was so long that she could have worn it as a dress, and even at this distance her eyes shone as if lit inside.
I instantly hated her.
Toby’s reaction was altogether different.
2
It was carved into half of a concrete paving stone; its edges artfully worked as if it had stood in the elements for centuries rather than months. The two words had been carefully written in a cursive script, then carved with a steady hand using whatever tool was available. The man who had carved it had no special talent for the task, but he had done an admirable job, nevertheless. The cursive lettering swept naturally across the eighteen inches of grey concrete as if it had meant to be there. The spacing was perfect and the depth of the letters consistent. What made it work, everyone who saw it agreed, was the weathering. Even though it had been created only a few months before, when the couple had moved in, it looked as though it had been there forever.
That was the first thing people noticed, and then one of them would squint and move closer.
Then they would notice the spelling error and laugh a hearty laugh.
“Look!” They would say and their index finger would trace the word etched into the concrete.
“They forgot the ‘r’!”
And that was how the house became known as The Fiendly Place.
The Friendly’s, who obviously were referred to with a smirk as The Fiendly’s, were newlywed when they moved in. Janet had been a personal assistant to a locally famous author who had hit the big time with his last novel. This had forced on her a choice when the novelist had decided to relocate to the US, and to everyone’s surprise Janet had chosen her then fiancée rather than the bright lights of LA.
It had been a surprise not because anyone doubted her love. It had been a surprise because she would the only working member of the household. Thomas Friendly, the man she had dated since high school, was never going to set the world on fire. It was unlikely he would ever cause anything more than a warm breeze, and this only on days where the stars were suitably aligned. The sign he had created for their new home together optimised Thomas Allen Friendly’s life. There was ability there, talent even, but sloppiness would always defuse any attempt at greatness.
Thomas sat in the north facing living room, seeing the bright sun outside turn windows into molten pools of light while still sitting in the gloom, and felt the cool glass in his hand. Janet had left an hour earlier and was now sitting in the waiting room of an office complex with possible interview questions running incessantly through her mind. She had sat down at almost the same time her husband had, but while she had a tasteful – though modestly priced – briefcase in her hands, he had a bottle of bourbon.
He poured and emptied the glass.
Things were not turning out the way he had planned.
He filled the glass again.
The drinking had begun on the third day in their new home, it had not begun straight away, it had been about seven forty-five when his shivering hand had grabbed at the bottle, and he had broken that first glass as he tried to pour the bourbon. It had been three quarters of an hour since the boy next door had knocked on the door, five minutes after this he had asked the question, and thirty seconds after that the boy had smiled and sent shivers down Thomas’ spine.
It was not the words themselves; it was not the smile; it was what the boy was smiling at.
Janet had just left for the local general store – not to shop, no – but to apply for a job position she had seen advertised there. Thomas had turned on the TV and had found static rather than Star Trek playing, so he had turned it off. Somewhere there was an intermittent fault in the cable, he’d have to deal with it, but not now, for the moment he could do without television.
Then there was a knock and for a moment Thomas stood confused by the sound.
The Friendly’s, despite their name, were not socialites.
Another knock came a moment later and for the briefest of moments Thomas considered not answering, but this quickly passed as sense prevailed. It would not do to make such a poor impression so soon. Thomas pushed past boxes still filled with their belongings that stood against the living room wall and walked down the short hall to the front door. In the frosted glass he saw a single shadow surrounded by the orange streetlight that stood at the edge of the garden.
The face that greeted him as he opened it was young, and at first glance there was nothing special about it, nothing that would stick in his mind. The boy had short, dishevelled brown hair and hazel eyes, his face was plump as the belly that pulled slightly against his T-shirt, the hem of which drooped over his faded and fashionably torn blue-jeans.
“Hello?”
The boy didn’t answer, and Thomas saw his eyes drift into the hallway behind him. For a moment Thomas felt the urge to look back into the dingy hallway but resisted.
“Hello?” He repeated and felt his own eyes drawn to a spot behind the boy.
There was a moment of confusion, something akin to the disorientation felt when a person’s eyes adjust to an optical illusion and suddenly the picture of a rabbit become that of an old man sitting in a rocking chair.
For a moment he thought someone was stood behind the boy, someone smaller who was half hidden, but the illusion was brief and disappeared almost the moment it had occurred.
“Hello?” This time Thomas could clearly hear the irritation in his voice, and the single words sharp edge drew the boys’ eyes back to his own.
“Hi,” the boy said back. It sounded like a martial artist striking an opponent. “I… er…” The boy glanced behind himself, to the spot Thomas had thought he had seen a figure, and something clutched Thomas’ chest in a greasy grip. Then the boy’s eyes moved back to the hallway.
“I was wondering if your daughter was going to go to Grey High,” he dropped his eyes and Thomas thought he saw obvious shyness there, “I was wondering if she’d like me to show her… to, erm… walk with her to school?”
Thomas blinked, and then he did look behind him into the hallway, and then back again to the boy. He had not seen anything, he assured himself, he had not seen anything standing there in the darkness behind him. Nothing stood beside the boxes, with its pale face peering out between two stacks as if hiding there.
Whatever he had not seen, was not looking at him, but past him, out onto the path in front of the house. Perhaps at the boy who stood in the doorway, perhaps; perhaps at whatever he had half seen stood behind the boy.
Thomas didn’t know how long he had stood in silence; it may have been seconds that only felt like hours. He felt his hands shake and his stomach roll.
“I’m sorry.” His own voice felt small as the young boy seemed to grow before him. “I’m sorry but there seems to be a mistake. We don’t have a daughter.”
The boys’ eyes moved and refocused. Slowly back to Thomas’ own, and Thomas felt the temperature drop around him.
“What?”
The boy spoke in the same staccato that had accompanied his “hi,” a blow rather than a word.
“I said…”
“I heard what you said.”
His eyes moved back to the thing that Thomas had definitely not seen in the darkness of the hall, the thing he certainly did not feel creep closer as the boy spoke.
Then the boy smiled and something cold as a shard of arctic ice slithered between Thomas’ ribs.
He smiled at that thing that was definitely not in Thomas’ house. He smiled and it was the smile that only came from the infatuation of youth.
Thomas had slammed the door and closed his eyes. He then kept them closed as he navigated the darkened hallway until his nose collided with the kitchen door and he felt it safe to open them once more. The kitchen door led to the kitchen and the kitchen led to the first bottle of bourbon.
When Janet had returned, she was in high spirits. The interview had gone well, and she had been told – unofficially of course – that she should prepare for good news. On her way home she had purchased a takeaway meal and a bottle of wine and prepared their meal as she took him step-by-step though her conquest. Thomas tried to listen but caught no more than one word out of five. He ate and nodded in all the right places; Janet too caught up in her excitement to see how distracted he had become.
When, finally, the time came to go to bed Thomas filled his eyes with his new wife and followed her close as she took the stairs. He told himself it was his desire for her, and it was easy to make himself believe it was the truth. Her blonde hair still glistened, and her skin was still the flawless of porcelain. He still knew how easy it was to fall into those pale blue eyes and be drawn away by her voice as it always flirted with the edge between humour and intelligence.
It was all true, he told himself, but he also knew that as he concentrated on the woman before him, he was still aware of what crept up from behind.
3
The new Toby that emerged over the next few days grew ever more unsettling. The images that covered the far wall of his room had been removed, as if I were watching a film of cancer spreading in reverse, and the box he sometimes peered into had been placed, locked, under the foot of his bed.
I watched him from my place by the window. He was sitting on the bed, the tiny TV angled towards him. On it was a teen comedy, or was it a romance? They looked so much alike to me I could never tell. I suspected Toby would not know either, he seemed to be paying the movie little attention. Instead, he was focused on an A4 pad in front of him and a selection of coloured pencils he selected from as he carefully produced something that he hid behind a crooked arm.
Momentarily his tongue poked out from the corner of his mouth and his eyes squinted nearly closed in concentration, then the tongue disappeared with a pop, and he continued talking.
He was talking a lot since our visit to the neighbours, and I noticed I was talking a great deal less. I knew that if Toby’s mother could poke her head into the room she would be pleasantly surprised by the change in her son, and her acceptance of it would have chilled me. It was something of a blessing to me that this was not at all likely to happen.
The whole situation chilled me, if the truth was known, and I blamed Pinocchio.
School would start again soon, and – for once – I welcomed it. Anything to drag us out of this room and the world Toby had created in it. I knew that the beginning of school would also be the beginning of the end. I pushed the idea from me, but it returned by stealth each time. But there had been a point when the collapse of our world had become as welcome as dawn.
I watched the house next door, and I wondered about the fear I had seen on the man’s face. For a moment he had looked at me, then behind him and I wondered how clear his eyes had been.
“Not good enough.”
Those three words peppered Toby’s monologue, sometimes spoke with venom, sometimes with something approaching tears. The tears scared me more, the venom I was used to.
The tongue appeared at the corner of his mouth, and he leaned closer to the pad of A4 paper. The pencil he held moved almost imperceptibly. He mumbled something that I did not catch, and I wondered if those often repeated three words were in relation to the work in front of him or his treatment by the new neighbour. I could feel the dread in me drag me down and I wanted to speak but did not dare. If I did, I was not sure the words would come to me. I knew what I should say, but I did not know how to say it.
It is not what you think Toby, I should begin, but then nothing is really what you think. Let me begin.
But then where would I go?
Outside the sun was drifting towards the horizon, bathing the city in its cleansing glow. Lights had been switched on in living rooms and strings of streetlights dotted the city. Across the street two women chatted over the garden fence and the image of them made me think of…
I stopped, abruptly. I did not want to think about it.
The scratching of Toby’s pencil on the paper drew my attention back to the boy by whose side I never left. He had the expression on his face of someone contemplating the completion of a monumental task. He held up the paper it blank back towards me and examined it. To me it was nothing more than a rectangle of off-white paper, its edges slightly creased and the centre bubbling slightly from the heavy lines of his pencil. I did not need to see it to know it was filled with harsh lines and blocks of heavy black shading. Toby was not an artist, the subtleties of art was lost on him, Toby knew only how to shout and never to whisper.
My eyes drifted to the neighbour’s house. Inside lights were on and I thought I saw the curve of shoulder in the upstairs hallway window. A shadow that may have been of a person. The darkened shape did not move, and I squinted and looked more closely. Was that the curve of a head? I thought. Surrounded by a halo of blonde hair?
The wife was blonde, it may have been her, but I knew that it wasn’t. The figure was as still as the dead, and though it may have had its back to the window I also knew that it did not. I knew who the figure was, and I knew what it was looking at.
Me.
I waited until Toby slept, his head resting on the drawing pad he held across his knees, propped up like a marionette with its strings cut, and I made my way outside. Grey blocks of concrete and brick curved around on themselves, windows of black, eyeless sockets that somehow still managed accusatory stares. If I felt the cold I would have been, I could see a spider-work of frost on car windscreens that hugged the edges as if afraid to set out. I thought of a child skating on the edge of a frozen lake, and I thought of women chatting over a garden fence, and I shuddered.
She was a wisp of golden locks that flowed silently into my field of vision, and for the first time I saw her for what she was, unclouded by the clutter of the hallway in which I had glimpsed her earlier.
I could understand why I had thought she may have been the wife in the window earlier in the night. The resemblance was arresting. Both had the same pale blue eyes and long blonde hair, but the resemblance was far deeper than that. I may have said that they shared a sad cast to their eyes, I may also have pointed out that in spite of their petite size that still stooped slightly as might a tall man drawn by old age.
But it was more.
People held physical space in the world, a volume of flesh and bone, but some spilled out from that physical space, as if their mind were not capable of holding the thoughts that tore at its seams. Some people carried with them a mist of these thoughts, and aura of personality.
The girl was one such person and so was…
Her sister?
Once the thought occurred to me, I instantly knew it was true. I saw the same elfin features. A nose just a little too sharp, a chin that protruded just a little too much, a slim neck atop an equally slim body. She was the wife’s younger twin; it was no mystery why Toby thought she was the woman’s daughter.
She allowed me to appraise her without interruption, perhaps she was appraising me in much the same way, then she spoke in a voice made of harps and flutes, and I saw my hatred of her flutter away into the starry night.
4
Thomas was seeing less on Janet as the summer drew to a close. Her hours were longer than what he would consider reasonable, but – as the new girl – she needed to show her engagement. It was – she said – to secure her job, not just for herself but for both of them, and the life they wanted to build.
The house had grown colder even as they filled it with the symbols of a lived life. They had the big screen TV, and the internet subscriptions they rarely used, as well as appropriate paintings adorning the walls that signalled their sophistication to visitors.
They never had visitors.
Thomas sat in the house alone.
That’s what he told himself.
The figure did not stand at his shoulder; it did not follow him as he made his way from bottle to chair. It didn’t stand at his shoulder as he urinated, making the action something he did only when pain started to build in his abdomen, and even then, he would stand with his bladder stubbornly failing to evacuate.
His stomach burned as the alcohol wend down, it was not a pleasant sensation. Acid reflux threatened to shoot the liquid back up, but he fought it down, concentrating on the pain. It was better to think of that than the real reason his wife spent so many late nights at work, and it was better to think of that than the thing that definitely did not stand at his shoulder.
Sometimes he would sit and try to count how long he had sat there, alone – assuredly alone – in that house. He tried to calculate how long he had been married and how long his wife had spent in her new job, but time no longer had the meaning it once had to him. Before the boy had knocked on their door, before Thomas has felt the thing at his back, time had been a simple thing he had taken for granted. Then morning followed night and night followed day. It was predictable. Back then he could say something as innocuous as “see you tomorrow,” and not fall into an existential quandary as to the meaning of the words. Now it was different, now he suspected that there was not a tomorrow, which meant that there was not a yesterday, and if that were true the woman for whom he awaited could not be his wife, because there was no wife.
His head hurt, and he took another drink only to find the glass empty.
That was another thing, he thought as he pushed from the chair and made his way to the kitchen, a glass no longer seemed to hold the same amount as it used to hold. Perhaps it was space, as well as time, which was broken.
Thomas felt chilly air press against his shoulder, and he quickened his pace to the kitchen, momentarily out running the column of frigid air. The bottle on the counter-top was empty too, which confirmed his hypothesis – obviously, bottles were much like glasses – and he went to the cupboard where he hid his stash. He cracked the seal and poured until the liquid almost reached the rim.
The glass was empty by the time he heard the key chain rattle and the door open. He didn’t look but could feel the self-satisfied woman shift through the darkness of the hallway into the living room and heard her bag thump down next to the sofa. She kicked off her shoes and padded into the kitchen.
“Hi, what are we having?” She whispered, and her lips were cool against his cheek.
Thomas’ hand shook as he hid the bottle from her view, its contents sloshing halfway up its length. His knees wobbled under him, and he almost fell. He grasped the edge of the counter-top and steadied himself.
He watched her reflection in the kitchen window as she moved to the refrigerator, the light in it glaring as she pulled the door open, momentarily turning her into a silhouette.
“Put the leftover lasagne in the oven while I take a quick shower, would you?”
The light extinguished and she turned towards the stairs. Thomas turned and watched her walk away. The hem of her blouse was pulled from the back of her skirt and an egg-shaped smudge of dust circled her right buttock as if she had been leaning against something. She tugged her blouse free of her waistband as she walked away, and it fell obscuring the mark.
She turned to climb the stairs and their eyes met.
“Are you putting in supper?” She asked, and for a moment Thomas was struck by how different she’d become. She smiled, but it was the smile a parent might offer a child. She spoke, but it was instructions, kindly commands.
“Thomas?”
Her eyes narrowed, and her head tilted to the side in a listening posture, but Thomas no longer saw her. His gaze had been wrenched from her to the figure who stood at her shoulder. Her carbon copy, smaller, less substantial, but unmistakable. Its mass of blonde hair was a mirror to hers, the intelligence in its eyes no less striking.
Its lips curled in a smile even as her lips pursed in irritation.
Thomas recoiled, his grip tightening on the neck of the bottle, his mouth opening to a dumb-struck oval of slack-jawed horror.
5
I recoiled as Toby swept past me, I could not help it, my fear of his would never dissipate. He did not shout in rage but grumbled as I imagined a stressed bulkhead of a ship might. The strain of it threatening to burst its seams and send it passenger to icy graves.
He no longer saw me; I was nothing more than a ghost to him now.
The rage had begun earlier in the day, triggered by whomever, or whatever, it did not matter. Toby never needed a reason. Inside him something would build until seams burst. The person responsible for setting him in motion bore no blame, eventually the volcano would erupt, and the only thing anyone else has control over was whether they were in the path of the flames.
The box that lived beneath the bed was lay open on the wrinkled sheet, its worn edges showed tarnished metal, inside all that remained was foam that had been dotted black with oil. The box’s contents were nowhere to be seen, but the was Toby’s jacket hung suggested the machines’ location. When Toby pulled the jacket from where it hung its pocket swung in an arc and struck the wall, leaving a dent in the plaster. My eyes drew to the cracked paint, the tanned colour of the plaster beneath it clear. The lines of the wound were so sharp a person might cut themselves on them.
The door to the room was dragged open with such force its base hit the foot of Toby’s bed, pushing one of its legs an inch across the carpet. When he reached the front door, he forgot to unhook the security chain and I watched as his face was revealed, then hidden, and then revealed again as he swung the door back and forth. It was like an unhinged game of peek-a-boo, his face contorting more with each reveal, his eyes rimmed with inflamed red, his lips twisted.
I watched as I retreated from the door, stepping closer to the limits of my world. Across the threshold between my home and next door.
The door swung, then swung again. The sound was of a bull striking an oil drum, the booming of a drowning boy in a bathtub. I thought of women talking over a fence, lost in conversation as inside one of their homes a child struggled. I pushed the thought away, but persistently it returned only to be drowned out by the shattering of glass.
The door was ripped inward, the glass in it shattering, wood splintering from where screws were torn free, and the creature that had been my friend was released.
There was no blame, I told myself. No blame to be aimed, it would happen eventually. I repeated this to myself as Toby stormed past me, his right hand buried in one heavily laden pocket. I watched as he marched down the path, withdrawing his hand, something gleaming within it.
6
Thomas was no longer himself when the pounding began at the door. Like every other time, he initially didn’t recognise it for what it was. At first, he thought of a bass drum, then he thought of a child slamming palms against the side of a bathtub. Then he saw the shadow of a figure in the glass, and he rose from where he slouched at the foot of the stairs.
He wiped his hands on his trousers and squeezed his eyes closed.
The thing standing there looked at him with hateful eyes. He no longer feared its look. It was not fear that had closed his eyes, it had been shame.
The door was three steps away, a marathon. His mouth twisted in mirthless agony and his vision swam. Again, the door shook and the booming continued. He took a step and the world swayed, pushing him against the wall beside the living room door, he slid along it until he reached the front door. It took three attempts to find the door handle, another two for his feeble grip to twist it.
The air rushed in as the door swung open, washing the acrid smell from the hallway. Thomas did not have time to reach from the blow, even if he had the drink had made him far too unsteady on his feet to dodge the blow. It landed firmly in the middle of his chest, driving the air from him.
A moment later the floor leapt up and struck him.
He coughed, and something warm sprayed from his lips, threads of it hanging from his chin. The door was a rectangle of light in the darkness, the streetlight bathing the boy in an orange glow that gave him a jaundiced look. Behind the figure something moved, peering past the boy as if searching. Perhaps looking for whatever it was that bobbed back and forth in the doorway near where Thomas lay. Thomas coughed again and this time the action brought on a burning pain that emanated from his spine and reached all the way to his breastbone. He wanted to cry out, he tried to, but the movement sent an agony ripping through him that could not be described.
Something glinted as the boy stepped into the hallway, the figure behind him close at his heels, and Thomas tried to focus on it. He blinked, his eyes filling with pain induced tears.
It was brass, polished wood, chrome.
It was the hilt of a knife, its blade buried deep inside his chest. He could feel the steel inside him, he could feel his bones squeak against its polished surface, his own blood sparkling with the streetlamps reflected light.
Thomas watched it. He did not know it, but his eyes were caught in an expression of confusion. The pain was overwhelming, every breath tore something inside him a little more, sawing through his lungs, his blood filling them.
7
Toby didn’t wait, the knife was driven forward before he even knew if it was the man of the woman who opened the door. A moment later Toby stepped over the man as he gargled red.
I followed.
Toby recoiled and I knew it was because of the smell. Death had its own aroma. A mixture of faeces, blood and what I can only describe as dust. It’s the smell of a house locked up far too long from the sun, it’s a dry smell, a smell of dark places and broken promises, and I knew it waited for everyone.
I saw her stood at the foot of the stairs, but I knew Toby couldn’t. I saw his eyes, wide eyes, eyes only moments away from madness, as they searched. He stormed past the dying man, not even registering the woman twitching on the stairs, her leg quivering in her death-dance. Beside her lay a bottle, unbroken but smeared in blood and hair. Something else was stuck to it, something slimy and thick that I thought was the woman’s brains.
Toby began to shout.
The spirit girl looked at me and I looked at her. Her smile was filled with mischief, and I knew that mine must also look that way to her. She whispered and only I heard her, I spoke back in words that were for her alone.
Toby screamed.
I reached up tentatively, never as nervous in life as I was at this moment. Her fingertips touched mine and I felt another soul for the first time in…
Toby cried.
I did not know how long time had stood still for me. People looking through me, by the time I had met Toby my mind had already broken. With nothing to contain it, pieces of me had drifted away, leaving vague recollections that carried with them emotion but no memory. I owed Toby thanks for presenting me with focus, I owed him thanks for finding me someone I could love.
I pulled my gaze from hers and watched Toby fall to the kitchen floor, his screams unintelligible now, an outpouring of some dark fragmented thing that could not live within words.
I owed him so much, and for his pains I had given him madness. By the time I thought this the street had been filled with onlookers, and we had fallen too far into each other for me to care.
8
The Fiendly Place sits in a stretch of overgrown land on the edge of what was once a nice neighbourhood. Once, as far back as fifty years before, the area had been filled with young families, and it had been a desirable place to live, but few places can survive a tragedy without being scarred by it, and almost none can survive a succession of them.
When the little boy had drowned the community had reeled. He had been a small child, an introvert who had been well liked. It had broken his mother and each time she saw one of the neighbourhood women talking over the garden fences she was certain their words were unkind ones about herself. Her guilt plagued her, and though she deserved no ill feelings for the accident, it plagued her until she felt that death was her only reprieve.
With scars both clear and hidden her attempt failed, and she and her husband sold the house and moved on, but the building remained and over time the story became a legend told to children on stormy nights, and the home became one of those things talked about in hushed tones. The houses either side of what became known as The Fiendly Place remained empty, and those looking to live in either building rarely lasted. Bad dreams plague them, and rising tempers tore their families apart. Those who are lucky moved far away, telling themselves that it was the pressures of work, or life, which took its toll, but those who were not so fortunate carried a little of the house with them for the rest of their unhappy days.
Sometimes there are tragedies that scar a place too badly for it to be healed, and when the double murder occurred, leaving a young boy forever broken beyond repair by what he had done, the scar of the house spread, infecting all the buildings around it.
Few people walked through the neighbourhood after that, none at night, but still sounds could be heard, and sometimes faces could be seen in bedroom windows. They were faces that belonged to the young, they were smiling faces, faces that haunted those who saw them. Those faces wore mischievous grins and bore eyes that followed and burrowed into people’s dreams.
They were faces of happy horror, and few forgot them once they saw them.