S. Bolton: Dead Scared

The room directly above where she slept was at the end of the corridor. She could hear nothing. The door was closed. She pushed it open and switched on the light.

The room was empty. No en suite bathroom. Curtains drawn back. Nothing to hide behind. No sign of anything out of the ordinary, except stray ash and twigs around the fireplace. Knowing that a trapped bird or rodent could probably explain the sound she’d heard, Evi felt a small measure of relief. It would be a nuisance, getting the chimney swept, but hardly a big deal. She was halfway across the room when the tapping began again.

This close, there was no mistaking exactly where it was coming from. Not the chimney after all, but one of the beautiful fitted oak wardrobes to either side of the fireplace. The one to her right. Evi stepped closer. The sound was tiny, tinny. There was nothing to be afraid of, surely, from something that sounded so small?

Evi put her hand on the wardrobe door handle, knowing she was very afraid. Knowing also she didn’t have a choice. She pulled open the door.

For a second she didn’t see it. She’d been looking directly ahead, half flinching, expecting something to fly out at her. Then she looked down and saw the bone man.

BRYONY’S FIRST SESSION with the counsellor had been in the third week of term. Even that early in the academic year, she’d been struggling to cope, finding the rough and tumble of student life, the banter, the frequent practical jokes, difficult to deal with.

I finished my second glass of wine and wasn’t sure I could stay awake much longer. Then I got to the notes of Bryony’s third session with her counsellor and suddenly sleep seemed a very long way away.

During this session, Bryony had brought up her fear that someone was coming into her room at night and touching her while she was asleep. There were no transcripts of the sessions, so I couldn’t judge exactly how the counsellor had reacted to Bryony’s suspicions, but I had a sense, from her notes, that she wasn’t taking the girl too seriously.

On her fourth and fifth meetings with her counsellor, Bryony referred again to her fears, her belief that she wasn’t quite safe in her room. She’d suffered increasingly from sleeplessness and bad dreams, needing to catch up on her rest during the day. As she’d become more and more tired, her coursework had suffered. She’d gone on a downward spiral of exhaustion and anxiety.

In her notes, the counsellor used the word delusion more than once.

On her sixth session, Bryony had said she thought her night-time intruder had progressed beyond touching her, possibly even to having full-blown sex with her. She’d talked about being able to smell a man’s sweat, and his aftershave, on her bedclothes. She’d found scratch marks on her body, even the trace of a small bite on one shoulder. All of which, the therapist had noted, could easily have been self-inflicted.

I got to the end of the file and sat back to think. According to Joesbury, I was going to Cambridge to keep a lookout for any unhealthy subculture that might be unduly influencing young people. It was to be a routine, low-key operation, not really expected to unearth anything. He hadn’t actually said it was being done to placate the head of SO10 but I was pretty certain that’s what he thought. Now, it seemed there might be more to it.

NO, NOT A bone man, it couldn’t be a bone man. Bone men were a silly, rural custom, in a place she’d left behind, hundreds of miles from here. This was nothing more than a child’s toy. A six-inch-high skeleton with a wind-up mechanism like clockwork. Just a simple, common toy, the sort that was popular around Halloween. Wind the key and let the toy go. It would walk across a hard surface until the mechanism ran out or it hit an obstacle.

Hardly knowing whether she was still frightened or not, Evi picked it up. A small piece of Blu-tack was stuck to one half of the key. It looked as though the toy had been wound up tight, then stuck to the inside of the wardrobe with the Blu-tack. When the mechanical force of the key trying to turn had become too great, the toy had broken free of its sticky blue handcuffs.

There had been a child here today, it was the only explanation. The cleaner, who had come on the wrong day, had brought a child. Maybe a child too sick for school and with no one else to take care of him. He’d played in the house, left a toy upstairs, put the fir cones along the path, left a heap of them on the kitchen table.

Evi looked through the rest of the upstairs rooms, found nothing, and let the lift take her back down. She left the skeleton toy on the hall table and made her way into the kitchen, knowing that even she didn’t believe her sick-child theory and wondering what on earth she was going to do about it.

If she’d switched on the light straight away, she almost certainly wouldn’t have seen the black-clad figure perched on one of the lower branches of the cedar tree, staring in through the kitchen’s uncurtained windows. Even with the kitchen in darkness, she might not have noticed the crouching form, so still it was almost melting into the shadows. She might never have known it was there, had it not been for the mask.

The mask was black too but with fluorescent paint picking out the contours of the human skull. There was just enough light for Evi to be absolutely sure that a bone man was less than two yards from her kitchen window, watching her.

West Wales, twenty-three years earlier

‘ HUMPTY DUMPTY SAT on a wall .’

The boy flopped down the stairs, scratching his head, his armpit, his arse, in the usual way of teenage boys fresh out of bed .

‘ Humpty Dumpty had a great fall .’

His overlong jeans slapped on the polished wooden boards of the downstairs hall. The tall old clock by the front door told him it was somewhere between half past eleven and twenty to twelve in the morning. It couldn’t be relied upon any more accurately than that. He vaguely remembered Mum saying something about going on to campus for a meeting; Dad would be in his study. His three-year-old sister was somewhere close, if the warbling was anything to go by. She’d want him to play fairies again. The latest craze. To dance round the garden and build fairy dens under trees .

‘ Humpty Dumpty fell off the wall .’

She hadn’t quite got it yet .

The boy stopped outside Dad’s study door and sniffed the air. Stale coffee? Normal. Well-done toast? Normal. The loo his sister had forgotten to flush? Normal. Gunpowder? No, not normal .

A year ago, when he was twelve, his father had started taking him out shooting and his mother always complained that they brought the harsh cordite smell indoors with them. Not cordite, Dad had corrected her, cordite hasn’t been used since the Second World War. Gunpowder is what we smell of .

But Dad hadn’t used his guns for six months now. ‘I don’t want your father taking you shooting until he feels better,’ Mum had said. And so the guns were locked away in a secure cabinet in the study and the boy had no idea where the key was kept. ‘Guns and teenage boys don’t mix,’ his mother reminded him regularly .

‘ All the king’s horses and all the king’s men .’

His sister was in the study. The boy pushed open the door, stepped inside and saw what was left of his father .