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After his parents died, Mike counted down the days until he turned eighteen.
Eighteen years old meant freedom now more than it ever had done before – freedom from the life he had found himself living, from the people who had welcomed him into their home in the grudging way that could only come from an obviously temporary measure. Once he was eighteen, Mike had no doubt that he would be expected to find his own arrangements, but the thought didn’t concern him. The discomfort around his current situation was mutual; his aunt and uncle had two young children of their own, and while Mike knew they would never throw him onto the street it was clear that there was no room for him in the family dynamic.
Not with all the issues he had brought with him.
Sometimes, when Mike was feeling particularly uncharitable, he thought his aunt and uncle might resent him. There was, after all, plenty to resent. He was not an easy person to deal with, a combination of his healing injuries and his long-term oddities making even the most normal day a risk, but sometimes he thought it went further than that. Two school-aged children were expensive enough, and Mike often felt that he was just another mouth to worry about feeding. On top of that, he had seen how much he was to inherit once he came of age, and even with the house as a lost asset, he was fairly certain that the lump sum was more money than his aunt and uncle could ever hope to make in their lives. Mike couldn’t exactly blame them for resenting him that. He would probably think the same, had their roles been reversed.
The major problem was that his aunt and uncle were scared of him. Mike hadn’t noticed it when he had first moved in, too focused on his injuries and the chaos that his life had become. Only when he had recovered enough to have room for thoughts other than pain and discomfort did the thought occur to him, and even then it was only as a vague theory that confused him more than anything else. After all, there wasn’t much about him to be frightened by. He had arrived at their home bruised and aching and with nothing but the clothes on his back; since then he had endeavoured to make himself as unobtrusive as possible, spending most of his time staying out of their way. Eventually he had concluded that it was his distance that unnerved them, and he wondered if he should make more of an effort, but the thought was exhausting. He wasn’t there to pretend that any of them were happy about this situation, and he had never known them overly well even when his parents had been alive. He had avoided most family gatherings as a rule, considering his family’s penchant for outdoor barbeques; Mike knew that his jumpiness and constant sky-watching was something of an embarrassment for his parents, to say nothing about what would happen if Mike suddenly got it into his head that he could hear thunder.
No, it was better to keep his distance, and have them all remain safe in the excuse of grief. Grief was a gift at the moment; Mike could use it as an excuse to request anything, to cover up any odd behaviour. The truth was that the grief hadn’t actually hit him yet – the loss of his parents was nothing but a numb weight in the centre of his chest – but Mike had no qualms about using its shadow to drift mostly unnoticed through his aunt and uncle’s lives. He had even been installed out of the way of the main house, in the guest bedroom located in the small extension reaching out over the garage. It was decorated plainly and neutrally, reminding Mike far too much of the hospital; below him was nothing but the stacks of junk and garden equipment in the garage, and the noise from the living room and kitchen never quite reached him. If he trod lightly on the carpet as he moved around, he would go completely unnoticed downstairs. He lived like a ghost, and he was content with that. If his aunt and uncle’s occasional unnerved glances was the price he had to pay to be left alone, he would take it.
The night the real issue made itself clear, Mike was on edge. He was waiting, and he had been waiting for a while. He wanted to tell himself that he didn’t know what he was waiting for, but of course he did. When he caught the flickering movement at the corner of his eye, he didn’t dignify it with a glance. The terror gripped him all the same, but he was quite calm as he stood up, walking quickly up the hall to the bathroom, telling himself the whole while that he needed a reasonable excuse to be wandering around at all hours; that if he admitted he had been chased out of his room by that grinning creature, he would have somehow lost.
It felt marginally safer in the bathroom, with its frosted glass and the heavy curtains over the windows leaving no gaps. The artificial lighting was too bright, despite the fact it was apparently supposed to mimic daylight. The glare was blue-silver, and it made Mike’s eyes ache after the darkness of the bedroom. He stood in the centre of the room for several long moments, blinking rapidly and pretending that the door between himself and the rest of the house was enough to protect him.
Underneath the door, reaching in like impossibly long fingers, the flickering continued. Mike climbed into the bathtub, pulled the shower curtain firmly across the rail, and hugged his knees to his chest. He tried to breath through his mouth, but it was no use. He could taste the ozone as much as he could smell it.
Mike didn’t know how much time he spent sitting there, eyes tightly closed, willing the thing at the door to leave him, to lose interest. He didn’t know if he slept, or if the terror shorted out his thoughts and he simply existed, suspended in silence and dread until the whispering slowly drew him out of it. He couldn’t quite tell when it had started, only that it had clearly been going on for some time before he finally noticed. At first, he even assumed he was imagining it, or that it was some new torment. Only when the whispers rose in volume and solidified into the recognisable cadence of conversation did Mike realise it was just his aunt and uncle, standing right outside the bathroom door. Mike’s heart leapt with a strange combination of fear and hope, and he reached out an unsteady hand, pulling the shower curtain hesitantly back. The flickering light under the door had stopped, replaced by the bright orange glow of the hallway. The only movement was his aunt and uncle’s shadows, moving back and forth as they shifted their weight or leaned closer to the door.
Finally, Mike realised he should probably listen to what they were saying.
“It wouldn’t be that difficult to open, Matt. If you just get a coin, a pound coin or something, and put it into the groove of the lock—”
“And why should I be the one to do that? If he’s gone and done something, if he’s—”
“We don’t know if he has. He could have just fallen asleep.”
“The way we were banging on the door, I doubt it. Even Jake and Harry didn’t sleep through it, and their bedroom is on the other side of the house.”
“Matt…”
“Hannah, the last thing I want is to walk in there and see something I’m not going to be able to forget. Especially with the kids up and running around – and on a school night, I might add.”
“I just don’t think anything is that wrong, alright?”
“And if it is?”
“I just don’t think…”
“I don’t know what they were telling you about him,” his uncle said, dropping his voice low enough that Mike had to lean out of the tub to hear, “but from what I managed to glean from you, the boy is a lunatic. Who knows what he could be doing in there? I mentioned this when you said—”
“Matt, don’t be cruel.”
“—that you were going to let him stay here, but you didn’t listen, did you?”
“He isn’t a lunatic. He isn’t dangerous.”
“Isn’t he?”
“Christ, Matthew. He got his brains scrambled at eight years old and he just lost both of his parents! Of course he’s going to be a little off!”
They think I’m in here killing myself, Mike realised, with sudden clarity. The thought was utterly ridiculous, and he found himself grinning in the brief moment before all the other implications caught up to him. He climbed stiffly out of the tub, his limbs cramped and aching, and landed a little too heavily on the tiles. He stumbled, wincing in pain, and caught himself against the wall before he fell over completely. His legs were still covered almost completely in bruises, and the hard surface of the tub hadn’t done Mike any favours. He tried to breathe as quietly as possible as the cramp in his legs peaked and then began to fade.
Outside the bathroom door, his aunt and uncle had fallen silent. It was then that Mike sensed the depth of their apprehension; the fear of him. He had confirmed himself to be alive – now they were wondering what he was going to do next.
Quite suddenly Mike felt stupid. He hadn’t even considered that his parents might talk about him to outsiders – to their family, to their friends. After all, there was a lot to say. It made sense that they would seek outside support and advice; that they had been worried about him, probably often frustrated with him. Mike had never been good at hiding his reactions to the various things he saw and experienced. If he were honest with himself, he had never really tried particularly hard. At some point he had grown so frustrated with never being believed that he had decided if everyone was going to act like he was crazy then he wasn’t going to coddle them. They couldn’t see what he saw, and fair enough – maybe they thought they were safe, but he could see it, and he’d be damned if he was going to let other people’s comfort put him in danger. He would make his escapes when he had to; he would do whatever was necessary to keep that thing from getting hold of him. When it inevitably cornered him, he would scream for help as much as he needed to. What did he care if he made a scene? There was no place for dignity in the face of terror like that. It had all looked a certain way, yes – but who had been right in the end? For all his parents had tried to be rational about this kind of thing, with their worried whisperings about paranoia and schizophrenia and post-traumatic stress disorder; for all the professionals they made him see and medications they made him try, they had still been killed by a book. They had still been killed by a book, a book that had brought their house crashing down around them in a cascade of incomprehensible rot and filth and decay. What had their rationalising and logic done for them, in the end?
The beginnings of a thought crossed his mind then, quick and too fleeting, chased away by the sudden knock on the bathroom door. Mike frowned and tried to catch the thought again, but the knocking was incessant and finally he unlocked the door, wrenching it open with far more force than he had anticipated. His palms were sweaty and he lost his grip; the door hit the wall with a loud thud.
“Michael.” His aunt gave him a disapproving stare. “Really.”
Mike pretended the noise hadn’t startled him. “What?”
“What have you been… doing in there?” she asked.
Mike didn’t miss the way she turned her body slightly, looking over his head and into the bathroom.
“I couldn’t sleep,” he said.
It wasn’t an answer, but it was better than silence. Mike adopted what he hoped was a neutral expression, trying to force back the frustration building in him the longer he looked at his aunt and uncle’s expressions: a little concerned, a little suspicious, a little annoyed.
“And you were… sitting in the bathroom instead?” his aunt eventually asked. “Doing… what?”
Mike sighed. He could handle everything else – the fear, the frustration, the disdain… even the debate over whether or not to potentially find his dead body themselves or wait for the police to deal with it. What he couldn’t stand was being treated so delicately; with his aunt’s tiptoeing questions.
“Did my parents not tell you?” he asked bluntly. “A scary monster follows me around. I was hiding from it.”
He took advantage of their stunned silence to slip between them and return to his room, doing his best to ignore the two pairs of eyes peering at him from the crack in his cousins’ door. He kept his pace even despite the urge to sprint the short distance to his room, though his resolve failed him at the last moment. He grabbed the door with sudden desperation, slipping through the smallest gap and closing it behind him far too firmly to be casual. Once inside, the claustrophobia immediately overwhelmed him again; Mike crouched by the door and bit down on his fist, eager to feel something other than the dizzying anxiety already building in his chest.
By the time the house finally fell silent again, the earlier thought had returned to Mike. It settled into him gradually, calming and welcome, and there was no hesitation in his movements as he stood and found his coat. He pulled it on as he stepped back out into the hallway, treading carefully until he got downstairs. From there it was simple – everyone else in the house was a notoriously deep sleeper, and Mike didn’t have to try too hard to be quiet as he found his shoes and rooted around in the kitchen drawers for the spare set of house keys. Within a few moments he was outside, the air cooler than it had been in the day but still worryingly thick. Mike cast a nervous eye skyward as he hurried down the street, but the stars were visible and there were no clouds gathering. The sight brought him a little comfort, but not enough. He still felt vulnerable under that great, open expanse – too exposed. He reached behind him and pulled his hood up, tugging it low over his face and blocking the sky from view.
It took him a little over an hour to reach the ruins of his house. He hadn’t been back since he had been pulled from the wreckage, bruised and aching and breathless with fright that had nothing to do with the collapse. It seemed suddenly alien, walking the familiar path up his old street – the same familiar path he had walked countless times coming back from the shop or the bus stop seemed to have taken on new dimensions and angles, obscenely different in the glow of the streetlights and with the new, gaping break in the rows of houses. Mike slowed his pace and finally stopped outside the temporary fence erected around the rubble of his home, the hulking ruin of the house visible through criss-crossed metal. The fence was set in concrete support blocks, another temporary measure, and it took no effort at all for Mike to lift one end of the fence out of the hole and slip through the gap, replacing it behind him.
Only part of the lower floor was still recognisable as a house. The front door was still there, buckled into its frame, and either side of it the wall looked relatively stable if Mike ignored the great cracks in the brickwork. He couldn’t ignore the shattered living room windows, however, or the way the frames sagged inward with such severity that the size of them had been reduced by over half. Looking through the gaps where the glass had once been, Mike could see nothing but brick and timber and dust, fragments of barely recognisable furniture adding the only colour to the otherwise monotonous grey and brown.
Mike circled around once, quietly taking in the wreckage, and then returned to the rear of the house. The back garden was completely untouched, the damage to the building less obvious from this angle and the grass free of rubble. It was longer than Mike had ever seen it before, which caused a strange feeling to reverberate through his chest. He remembered then how meticulously his father had mowed that grass, out every other weekend in the summer, headphones jammed over his ears as he went back and forth in neat lines. Mike stared for a long moment, taking in the weeds, the way the daisies shone almost blue in the moonlight, and then turned back to the house. He found a way in through the kitchen window and climbed through it with some difficulty, feet scrabbling on the brickwork as he hauled himself through the gap and onto the draining board by the sink. Carefully he let himself down from the counter, testing the floor, but the structure felt solid enough. In fact, the kitchen seemed to be the least damaged part of the house. It was covered in plaster dust and the walls were cracked, the ceiling noticeably sagging and the floor completely detached from the wall over to his left, chunks of plaster covering the dining room table, but it was still very much recognisable as the room Mike remembered. The tea towels were still hung neatly over the radiator, the mugs lined up by the kettle. The fridge and the washing machine were both dusty but completely undamaged, the washing machine door slightly open and a few towels inside, still waiting patiently for the rest of the laundry. If Mike turned his back on the worst of the damage over by the table, and ignored the water on the ground, he could almost pretend it was another regular night.
The water was still several inches deep, remnants of the cascade from the burst pipes above. Without wanting to, Mike remembered being trapped under the rubble with the water at his feet, soaking through his socks, feeling it slowly rising and wondering what it would do if it filled the space around his head.
What could I have done? Aside from just drown?
He had forgotten about the water until now, and his shoes were soaked already. His socks felt damp and uncomfortable, the cuffs of his trousers heavy, and he knew there was no way he would be able to cover this up – these were the only pair of shoes he owned. With that in mind he gave up trying to keep himself as dust-free as possible and instead committed to the task at hand, looking towards the door. He was briefly tempted to turn back and open the fridge, see if the remains of his parents’ last weekly shop would still be there, but at the last moment he remembered that the power had been shut off for months now. He felt nauseous enough without smelling what might be behind the fridge door. Besides, why did he want to see it in the first place? There were hardly any touching memories of his parents to discovered among the swollen bottles of milk and the dripping egg cartons.
Carefully, Mike made his way over to the doorway, peering out into the hall. There was no roof, and thanks to the clear night he could see the outlines of the rubble and knew roughly where to put his feet. He climbed through what had once been the upstairs bathroom, the backs of the shattered tiles black with mould, the floorboards rotted through and jutting up stark against the sky, like the branches of so many dead trees. Detouring around the bathtub, Mike climbed downwards, into the dip created by the rescue efforts. Here, he could make out debris he recognised well – parts of his desk, tatters of mould-eaten clothing, waterlogged books. Mike climbed over part of his bed and then crouched down, his back to the rubble covering the living room, the excavation of rubble that had led rescuers to his parents’ corpses. He didn’t want to look over there; he focused only on what his hands were doing, digging through the sodden piles of books and school papers, searching first methodically and then with increasing desperation.
Until that moment, it hadn’t occurred to mike that the book might have been a figment of his imagination. After all, could he really be so sure that the strange, flickering figure that haunted him was actually there? It was easy to be indignant when faced by the kinds of looks his aunt and uncle shot him whenever he reacted to some movement they couldn’t see, but alone, digging feverishly through the wreckage of his home in the middle of the night, it was a lot easier to believe that perhaps he really was insane. There was certainly more evidence for that than anything else. Nobody else had ever seen that creature, and it had all started after Mike had suffered extreme trauma at a very early age. It even looked like lightning, and Mike supposed it wouldn’t take a genius in the field of psychiatry to connect the dots there.
As for the book – had anyone else seen that, either? Mike had found it when he had been walking home from the bus stop. It had been sitting in a muddy puddle just off the path as Mike had cut across some wasteland between the rows of houses, right in his line of sight. It had been waterlogged, the pages browned and foul-smelling, but for some reason he had picked it up and brought it with him, barely breaking his stride as he did so. He hadn’t even particularly thought about his actions. It had just seemed right to do so. It had stayed in his bag for a few days, plenty of time for somebody to catch a glimpse of it at school – it was conspicuous enough, decently sized and absolutely filthy, and never losing the cloying smell of dirt and rot and stagnant dishwater – but nobody had ever mentioned it. When his mother had put her head into Mike’s room to say goodnight, a few nights before the house collapsed, she hadn’t noticed it sitting on his desk right in plain view. For all Mike knew, it had never existed anywhere outside his own head.
But the rot had been real. The damp, the mould, the sagging floors, the groans and the shifts as the house sank on its foundations. Mushrooms sprouting between sudden cracks in tiles and between the bathtub and the wall; the growing grey stains on the ceiling. That had all been real, as had his parents’ frustration and confusion, the endless parade of specialists and workmen and consultants who had tried and failed to tackle the problem. The whole time, the book had sat there in a small puddle of its own filth, sometimes wet and spotted with white spores, other times sprouting thick, beige mushrooms from its pages. Mike had read what he could, but none of it had made sense with the context. What had it got to do with the creature that tormented him?
Now, searching the rubble, pulling blindly at brick and wood and grazing his knuckles over and over, Mike wondered how he could have ever been so stupid. He had been focusing so much on its relevance to the thing that stalked him that he hadn’t even considered that there might be other things out there – things he hadn’t seen, things he didn’t know about, things just as nightmarish and impossible.
Things that might help.
Things he might be able to use.
“Come on,” he muttered, leaning down and reaching his arm blindly into the rubble. “Come on. Where are you?”
There was nothing there but old schoolbooks and paperback novels. Mike scrambled back and turned, climbing down further into the depression, unease creeping up his spine as the rubble loomed above him. If something shifted, or he lost his footing… Mike shook the thoughts away and looked around himself, his breathing ragged.
Something bright caught his eye. Turning, he saw a flash of garish orange, florescent among the debris. Mike crawled over to it, staring for a moment before he reached out and picked it up. It was a wrapper, the various symbols printed on it telling Mike it must have been something from the rescue attempt – something medical, some kind of injection or other sealed equipment. He didn’t remember anything like that being used on him, and abruptly it occurred to him that the idea his parents had died immediately was nothing more than an assumption. He had been upstairs in bed when it had happened, and the rescuers had reached him first, digging him out after only a couple of hours. But what about his parents? They had been downstairs in the living room, the site of the worst destruction. Mike had thought they had been killed instantly, buried under that impossible amount of rubble and rot, but he realised now that he had never actually been told that. All his aunt and uncle had said was that they had been killed – Mike had made his own assumptions. Now, he found himself forced to question them. Had they been trapped in the rubble, alive, just as he had been? The presence of all the medical debris – more and more of it, now Mike knew what he was looking for – told him that there had clearly been some attempt to save either one or both of his parents. There must have been something there that had made the medics try so desperately. Had it been a formality, an attempt just in case? Or had it been a real battle, one that could have gone either way, that – had things been only slightly different – might have left Mike with at least one surviving parent?
For some reason, it was this more than anything else that brought the weight of grief down on Mike with merciless force. It had been easier to think that they had died suddenly, in a single moment, there one second and gone the next. It was cruel, and senseless, and sudden – but it was unavoidable. There was no question about it. Whatever had killed them had done so irreversible, meaning it totally – like twisting the neck of a chicken. Concentrated force, no room for survival, no room for any other outcome. As senseless as it was, there had been some comfort in knowing that things could not have possibly ended any differently.
The fact that at least one of them had been alive when the rescuers reached them changed that. Mike was forced to confront the fear they must have felt; the worry they would have had for him. Perhaps his mother and father had been capable of speaking, of asking the rescuers about him, of feeling relief when they were told he was alive and headed to the hospital. Or perhaps they hadn’t had enough sense left for that; perhaps they had been frightened, confused, demanding to know over and over what had happened, unable to make sense of it. Or maybe they hadn’t been awake at all, losing consciousness somewhere in that dark, crushing place, knowing on some level that they would never see daylight again. Maybe they had intended to fight, to try to live – and of course they must have, it was human nature! – only to find that they were helpless against their injuries, that they process of death had become irreversible. Or maybe they had chosen to die instead, the fear and the pain too much for anything to be worth it.
Regardless of the details, the fact remained that they had stood a chance, however brief, and it had still ended like this. They were dead. They were not coming back.
That word that Mike had seen so often in the books he had read as a child – that he had seen as nothing more than shorthand for adventure, for children overcoming cruel distant relatives and making their way in a world that was bright and exciting and only ever scary in the good way – suddenly held far too much weight for him to hold.
Orphan.
Mike had only ever associated that word with childhood. After all, there were plenty of books out there about orphaned children, but they had never really gone into what happened after the child grew up. It had been a contained word, one with an ending – but now Mike realised he was an orphan for life, that he wouldn’t stop being an orphan when he turned eighteen. No matter what he did, what he achieved, who he became, it would always be in a world without his parents in it. He was supposed to see them die of old age when he had lived a majority of his own life. He was supposed to have lost them when he was comfortably on his own two feet, surrounded by his own family, comforted somewhat by the fact that this was the natural order of things. He was supposed to say goodbye to them when he had some experience, a better idea of what life was like, when he no longer needed their guidance as much. The dates on their graves should have been seventy, eighty, ninety years apart. Instead the dates weren’t yet fifty years apart, and the final date was the same for them both.
A sob burst from him, taking him by surprise, and Mike finally dropped the wrapper and clamped his hands over his mouth. He sat back, landing heavily on the rubble, but the sudden movement didn’t frighten him as it might have done only a few minutes previously. The rubble remained as it was, thankfully only showering Mike with a little dust that he barely noticed. He squeezed his eyes closed and tried to force the tears back, though by the time he finally opened his eyes again his eyelashes were stuck together and the scene around him was blurry. He moved his hands away from his mouth and took a long breath.
There was nothing he could do about the loss of his parents, but he was still alive. He was alive, and while that thing was tormenting him it would never be a life – just an existence, fraught with terror and nothing worth his survival when his parents had died. If Mike was going to have to deal with this, if he was going to have to go through this as well as everything else – navigating this world wholly alone, with nothing but that flickering monster as a constant – he was going to have to try and make it worth it.
Mike rubbed his sleeve across his eyes and crawled back over the wreckage, resuming his search. He moved numbly, oblivious to the smell of rot, to the dust coating him in fine layers, to the aching in his limbs and his head. When he finally found the book, crushed between damp plaster and what had once been a set of drawers, it was a hollow victory but a victory nonetheless.
Mike crouched in the rubble for a long time, the book resting on his knees, staring at it blankly. Only when the sky began to lighten above him did he move, tucking the book into his coat. Its damp smell reached him even through the fabric, familiar and somehow a comfort. It had happened, then – he wasn’t crazy. This book existed, and with it, there existed the possibility of something else.
It was an encouraging thought, but one for later. Mike stood, and began pulling himself out of the wreckage of his home with heavy, aching limbs.