The Sister(10)

He wanted to scream, but his voice wouldn’t come. It was stuck in his throat. His legs felt disconnected from his body. The man was almost upon him, and he couldn’t even run away.

Something wet and warm ran down Bruce’s leg. Oh, now he’ll be in trouble with his mum! He checked his pyjamas and felt considerable relief at knowing it had only happened to the 'other Bruce'. Wait a minute... It did happen to me! Suddenly, he was travelling...backwards and upwards, faster than falling, faster than he’d ever imagined he could move – then stopped – hovering like a bird of prey, looking down. His father and grandfather burst through waist-high ferns, leaving a trail of flattened fronds behind them.

Bruce cowered on the ground as the man bent over him.

Distracted by the voices calling out, the stranger stood, stared hard at the frightened boy and locked eyes with him. He put a finger to his lips and whispered, ‘Shhh...or I’ll kill them all.’ Then he turned and sprinted away, back to where he’d left the woman, and swept her up over his shoulder with one arm. Her head came upright, balanced for a moment at the point of flopping back down. Eyes bulging; tongue stuck out of her beetroot face; she seemed to fix Bruce with an angry expression.

He tried to look away, but failed in this version as well, the look on the woman’s face burned itself into his memory.

Then the man was gone.

He suddenly remembered the shell! It had saved him again. In the dream, he was telling them what had actually happened, and he was afraid the man would know and come to kill them all. His father checked the bump on his head while his grandfather walked further down the slope to see if there were any sign of what Bruce had just told them he’d seen. There was none.

They spoke together rapidly, too quickly for him to understand. What he could tell though, was that his father didn’t believe him. ‘It is the bump he has had on his head!’

His grandfather disagreed. ‘No, I feel him...somebody bad.’ Squatting next to him, looking deep into his pale blue eyes, he said, ‘Bruce, remember when you hear this?’ His arm extended and came around in a semi-circular sweep.

‘I can’t hear anything.’ Bruce said, confused.

In his heavy Eastern European accent, his grandfather explained patiently. ‘Yes, you hear nothing. Remember, when you hear no birds in the forest...the birds, they warn you it is a bad place. You understand?’ Bruce nodded; his brain jarred, making his head throb.

His eyes snapped open. The room was dark. He was back in his bedroom. Closing them again, his fears subsided; it was only a dream. Something made him open his eyes once more; part of his dream was still with him.

There was a presence in the room. He knew it sensed him. Not moving, hardly breathing, he didn’t dare cross the room to turn on the light. He wasn’t sure where this thing was. It was everywhere around him; it was in his head just like when the garage-suited man was after him. His voice paralysed; he remembered what his mother had told him about the living and the dead. You don’t have to worry about the dead – only the living can hurt us. Whatever it was in his room with him, it wasn’t alive. He reached for the seashell that had protected him since he was four years old and, holding it tight, crossed the room to switch the light on; the urge to check under the bed quickly countered by the fear of what he might see. At last, exhausted and feeling safe with the light on, he slept.

A black fly started up, buzzing around, knocking against the lampshade. The droning announcement of its presence made him fearful. If the room were in darkness, would it settle? Can I find it and swat it the instant the light goes back on? He extinguished it, turning the room inky-black. The fly cut its engines. Silence. Then something cold and wet settled on his lips. He spat furiously, fumbling for the light switch. He crossed the floor and opened the window, hoping the fly would go out. Its abominable noise stopped. Sleep crept into his worried mind and took over.





Something wormed its way into his subconscious. Teeming sounds, distant and surreal, like a tiny Middle Eastern bazaar, drew him from his sleep. He opened his eyes. The spotlight that the lamp shade threw up onto the ceiling, revealed a moving carpet of tiny insects, moths, midges and mosquitoes, and at the centre of it, unmoving ... sat the orchestrator of it all. The bluebottle.

Suddenly, Bruce knew he was not alone; the presence that had previously intruded on his thoughts was back in his head, and he knew something else lurked in the shadows under the bed, waiting for him. In stark terror, he shook as his imagination took flight.

Too afraid to look, he tried emptying his mind the way his grandfather had taught him. Deeply breathing in and out, he calmed himself, thinking about his father and grandfather. They always knew what to do, no matter what.

He floated in the transition between sleep and wakefulness.

Clunk! The sound reverberated through the bed, jolting him upright. A few weeks before the same thing had happened, and his mum said it was only the springs settling in the mattress. Uneasy, he tried to relax again.

Clunk! This time, he looked under the bed.

He screamed.

The whole household came running to investigate. In a small voice, he told everyone he was okay; it was only a nightmare. He dared not tell them the real reason.

The following nights, Bruce would lay there like that, fighting sleep. He’d see what happened over and over again, from perspectives that couldn’t have been his. Sometimes it felt as if someone else was in his head; he kept seeing the woman’s beetroot face, and the killer, finger on lips – ‘Shhh…’ he fought to keep the thoughts down until exhaustion forced him into sleep, and then he’d wake in the grip of a nightmare, stifling a scream, afraid of the darkness in his room.