The Monster Man of Horror House (23 page)

But
it had moved, I was sure it had. The shadow had moved. I’d seen it – sort
of.

A
second sudden onrushing behind me had me leaping six feet to my left and
flicking matches in my defence, but they lit up nothing but empty air and a few
tinder dry clumps of grass where they fell.

It
was all in my head. It had to be. The night was playing tricks on me. That was
all.

But
I wasn’t prone to paranoia. I’d been cast away to the outer limits of human
endurance too many times before to let simple shadows get the better of me.
There was definitely something out here –

–
something foul.

I
decided to return to Long Fenton as fast as I could and spend the rest of the night
at The Black Fox come what may. To hell with Brian, to hell with those Flower
Pot Men who’d made merry at my expense and to hell with any tits I might bump
into during the night.

All
I wanted was not to be out here in the darkness any more.

And
possibly another of those cheese sarnies if they had any left.

I
tried to remember the way I’d come but fear had cost me my bearings. Was it
straight on across the clearing and left? Or back through the trees and to the
right? When the voice murmured its evil thoughts once more just beyond my left
lobe I realized it didn’t matter just so long as I ran, so that’s what I did, fleeing
through the night and every overhanging branch in this county as lean and
twisted shapes fanned out behind me to now give chase.

It
felt like a hundred shadows following close behind, reaching spindly arms and
grasping at my collars and every now and then I would see something darting between
the trees to rip through a ray of moonlight.

Voices
– lots and lots of voices now spoke up in excitement; whispers and grunts,
cackles and snarls, like the babble of malevolent children taking delight at
pulling the legs off a particularly juicy spider.

If
ever I’ve been more scared in my life I’d obviously done well to bury the
memory for I could barely draw a breath to extinguish the flames that burned
deep within my chest. I simply ploughed on, stumbling headfirst over tree roots
and rocks, rabbit holes and divots, until I fell out of the treeline and tumbled
into the yellow grass of Ronnie Earlcott’s fallow field.

I
picked myself up and continued running, daring to glance over my shoulder for
just the briefest of seconds and instantly regretted it when a dozen spectral
sprinters burst from the treeline to chase me across the field.

They
moved like nothing I’d seen before, seeming to glide across the rutted terrain like
skaters on ice. They closed the open ground between us in seconds and
threatened to swallow my very screams but a blinding flash of light immediately
vanquished every shadow around me and knocked me on to my face.

“You
back already then are you boy?” chortled the most beautiful voice I’d ever
heard as a truck door swung open the other side of a barbed-wire fence.

“Brian?
Oh for fuck’s sake. Please help me, take me back to The Black Fox? Please,
please, please!” I implored with all of my soul.

“That,
my old beauty,” he said with great satisfaction, “is something I reckon I can
just about manage.”

v

I spilled all to Brian on the drive back to Long Fenton; the shadows, the
voices and the chase, and while he didn’t entirely buy everything I was flogging
he was unsettled enough with his recent circumnavigations to hold his cynicisms
in check.

Not
like the rest of the gang in The Black Fox. Oh no, they laughed down my every
tremble.

“Shadows
out there is it? ’a course there’s shadows out there, boy, it’s bleeding night-time,
or ain’t yee noticed?”

“’fraid
a the dark is you, son?”

“Leave
a light on for him, Tony. Will-o’-the-Wisp be after him.”

“Ha-ha-ha-ha,
good one, Dicky.”

“Fucking
wankers!”

Brian
stayed uncharacteristically quiet throughout the inquisition, unsure which side
of the bar to unfurl his bedding. On the one hand he had just driven around in
circles trying to unsuccessfully leave a village he’d grown up in and presumably
knew as intimately as the top of Mary’s head. But on the other, I was an
outsider, and a flashy books-smart townie at that, with white collars, polished
shoes and fingernails that didn’t need trimming back with an angle grinder so
he was clearly conflicted. In the event, Brian sided with the arseholes he knew
rather than the arsehole he didn’t as that seemed the least complicated furrow
to plough despite all the misgivings that were clawing at his eyebrows.

“Don’t
know his elbow from a stick in shit, that one,” he contributed to the
collective assessment, winning guffaws and chuckles all around to cement his
return to the fold. “Scaredy cat city folk, what are they like?”

“Never
seen a shadow before, hey boy?”

“Not
a shadow that runs,” I reasserted. “That can chase you across a field,” but
they weren’t having any of it, insisting I’d been running from bats or clouds
or Zulus or something.

“Ha-ha-ha-ha,
stupid townie.”

Still,
I’ll say one thing for them, they were only too happy to buy a man a few drinks
while they insulted him, so I was able to steady my nerves with a couple of warming
shots and a never empty pint pot, although The Black Fox’s resident ring
master, who’s name I came to learn was Richard – Dicky to his friends
– had scoffed the last cheese sarnie while I’d been racing with goblins
across Ronnie Earlcott’s field, as he liked to put it.

“Fraidy-cat
townie!”

“What
a dick!”

Brian,
having re-established his place amongst the ranks of my persecutors, now eased
off, either because he knew in his heart there was something genuinely strange
going on, or because he found it harder than he thought ripping the piss out of
someone he’d carouselled around the county.

“Time
gentlemen please!” Mary eventually called, ringing an old brass bell at an hour
that was closer to first knockings than last orders.

I
still had nowhere to sleep and all talk of me spooning the night away with
Brian’s missus had been dropped once the gang had a new gag to knock about. Not
that there looked like any sort of opportunity for that anymore. Brian kept
himself between me and Mary at all times and had even waited until I’d slipped
outside to splash my shoes before going to the toilet himself, so I might not
have known where I was staying, but I most certainly knew where wasn’t.

I
finished my drink and stood in the road outside The Black Fox as the rest of
the gang bid each other a fond faredywell and stumbled home to their comfy warm
beds. Old Dicky was one of the last to emerge, sporting a nose he could see his
way home by and he gave me a formal, if slightly awkward, nod when he saw I had
no place to go.

“
’night,” he said, looking away before I had a chance to catch his eye and snag
his couch. I watched him waddle up through the main street and take a dirt
track into the trees and I wondered if I should go after him and emotionally
blackmail him into putting me up. I probably could’ve, but I was too drunk and
proud to beg these people. If they couldn’t offer I wasn’t going to ask, preferring
instead to sleep rough; to make the meadows my bed, the grass my pillow and the
stars my nightlight.

And
of course, the shadowy ghost monster things my bunkmates.

“Shit!”
I said, realizing I’d forgotten all about them. A night of bumpkin baiting and
a bellyful of beer had jarred the experience clean from my head to leave me
standing next to a church yard full of long shadows as the lights inside the
pub suddenly went out.

“Hang
on!” I called, taking to my toes to catch up with my chief tormentor before he
could drop a front door between us. “Hang on, mate, I’ve got a favour to ask.”

Up
and down Long Fenton the lights were going out. I knew if I was so much as a
second late, Dicky would have his shoes off and be feigning snoring from behind
the front door as loudly as he could until I went away so I belted it up the high
street, along the dirt path and up to the gate of the large thatched cottage at
the end of the path, only to stop dead at the sight that met me.

Shadows
swarmed all over Dicky’s cottage: over his roof, his walls and his garden. They
tugged at his windows, dug into his straw thatch and climbed on top of his
chimney as they probed his home for a way inside, but Dicky himself was
oblivious. Through the kitchen window I could see him eating a sausage roll as
he examined the pots and pans on the hob for signs of edible leftovers, while jet-black
hordes scurried up and down and around and around the brick and flint walls of
his home.

I
was frozen to the spot, unable to move for fear of betraying my presence and yet
compelled by the sheer spectacle of these ghostly apparitions. They were more
or less human in form in that they had two arms, two legs and a head, but no
other discernable features I could see. They were simply black, like shadows,
like holes in the night, devoid of substance or detail, and that much more
horrifying for it. They moved with an inhuman agility and clambered over the
walls and roof as though they had nothing to fear from granite and gravity. And
more than once I saw two of the figures blend as one as they scrambled over
each other, only to then part as three or four in opposite directions.

I
don’t know how long I’d stood there at the gate. It could’ve only been a matter
of seconds although it felt like an eternity, but now I became acutely aware of
a pair of eyes staring at me.

It
was Dicky.

He’d
finally spotted me through the kitchen window and didn’t look at all happy
about it. I tried to signal him to get out of the house but what I sent obviously
wasn’t what was received because as seamlessly as he could, he strolled over to
the light switch and flicked the kitchen lights out.

The
shadows immediately went frantic, racing around the cottage and slipping
through any crack they could find as though they were gaping doorways.

I
watched with horror as shapes swarmed in behind the glass of every window and
all at once there was a horrified scream from the pitch-black kitchen as Dicky
was sucked from this life...

...
and dragged kicking and bleating into the next.

vi

“They’re here! They’re here! They’ve got him!” I yelled at the top of my voice
as I sprinted back along the high street and towards The Black Fox.

Curtains
twitched and lights clicked back on but I didn’t check my stride once, not
until I’d got to the pub and was banging on its doors until my arms burned in
agony.

“Open
up! Open up! For the love of God, open up!”

Why
I’d returned to the pub, I couldn’t tell you. If these ghostly shadows had been
able to slip through the keyholes and cracks of a two-hundred-year-old private
residence, a three-hundred-year-old public house wasn’t going to offer that
much more security. I guess it was just instinctive. I’d spent most of the evening
here in relative comfort and contentment so it was natural I should return to a
place like this when the chips were down. Besides, if you must be snatched from
this world by a horde of unstoppable shadow monsters intent on erasing you from
existence, lying across the bar of a country boozer with your head under the
optics was as good a place as any.

“What
is it? What’s all this racket about?” Brian snapped from behind the door the
sound of slippers and stairs gave way to bolts and chains.

“They’re
here! They’re here!” I repeated breathlessly, pushing my way past Brian as soon
as he had the door open and making a dash for the hard stuff.

“Oi,
get back here!” Brian objected and all at once Mary was there too, doing what
she could wrestle a bottle of Cinzano from my face.

“Don’t
you understand, they’re here. The shadows are here!” I repeated, backing away from
behind the bar as voices approached from outside.

“He’s
barmy,” Mary concluded. “Get him out of here.”

Brian
dragged me out from behind the bar but stopped short of slinging me into the street.
Instead he plonked me onto a bar stool and poured me a glass of scotch as
Ronnie, Tony Potter, Nigel Whatsisname and half a dozen other regulars turned
up to take advantage of the re-opened pub.

“What
be all this fuss about?”

“It’s
the young ’us. He be gone potty.”

“No,
it’s Dicky,” I spluttered, quaffing my scotch and gasping at the burn. “They’ve
got him.”

“Who’s
got him?” Tony asked, nodding at Mary to prompt her to break out a few more glasses.

“The
shadows he says,” Brian relayed.

“The
shadows?”

“Load
of nonsense,” someone at the back dismissed, though I notice he didn’t leave us
to it once a bottle was uncorked.

“He’s
playing games with us he is?”

“At
this time of night!”