***
Kim and his brother maintained an edgy surveillance of the path sweeping neighbour, kept her constantly in the periphery of their vision, whilst the younger gave the elder information on those who continued to vanish.
The man from the Murco garage, which closed for three weeks until the company worked out that it was unattended.
Mrs Fairweather, the mum of the baby who disappeared from across the road was gone as now as well; leaving a behind a bemused husband, wondering whatever had possessed him, a merry bachelor, to buy a three bedroom home in a village in the middle of nowhere.
Then there was no post for a week, after Sam-the-postie dropped some small cerise coloured elastic bands on Mrs Hitchcock's doorstep and declined to clear them away.
Only Kim could see these things, these absences, and lately, as he watched the old lady out of the corner of his eye, he sensed piercing stares from her amid the constant sweeping, like she had picked up the scent of his, or their, fear.
The sense that he alone was aware of her talent and her hunger. Kim wondered if she moved through the country like this emptying village after village of its inhabitants, before moving onto the next unsuspecting town to feast.
He would keep his family safe from her. He would protect them.
And then, and then...
He'd always been needled by her, his idiot little sister, but then he saw her from his bedroom window, pursuing the pink hello-kitty football, towards the fence, then after looking furtively to make sure Mrs Hitchcock wasn’t around, over after it, ignoring Kim’s previous warnings.
He suddenly felt her worth, and knew how much he'd miss her cheerfulness, her cacophonous laughter, and he screamed at her, her cries soundless from behind double glazed glass installed by his DIY mad dad.
"Nooooooo! Alice, don't!"
She couldn’t hear him. She dropped over the fence as he struggled futilely to open the child-locked window, watching as Mrs Hitchcock stepped out from behind Old Man Rab’s potting shed, her broom in hand and a look of utter hatred in her eyes.
For a moment Mrs Hitchcock lifted from the ground and floated above the scene, as Alice shrank from the fanged cloaked thing which transformed and fell upon her in a rage, beams of darkness exploding from the scene pouring her from reality.
Then she too was gone. Leaving only Mrs Hitchcock, now watching Kim, weeping, framed in the upstairs window.
Johnny looked with blank terror at the boy when he found him. He had found his brother prone on the green carpeting, sobbing Alice's name.
"Who?"
Kim explained the latest abduction, and the scene he'd witnessed.
"I can't have a little sister, I'd, remember her..."
Kim was weeping again now; he hadn't known it, but he'd grown up in a community, a family, and it had nurtured and raised him, but it was being torn away from him by this monster. Slice by slice. How long before she got him, or worse, got Johnny or his Mum?
"What can we do though Kim?"
Despite the precariousness of their circumstance, Kim bristled with pride at being asked for his brother’s advice. But he had not answered, hugging his Nirvana t-shirt closer to his skin.
In his comics she'd have had some fatal weakness that they could exploit and defeat her with, but sweeping aside, he had no idea even how she did it.
"Does she bite them? With that fang thing?"
"Dunno, I suppose; the people just go, like this," he gestured with his hands, miming a black supernova, "and then no-one even remembers them. Not even Dad."
He resisted the urge to call him Daddy, a moniker he'd ceased to use as soon as he realised his big brother didn't use it. He wanted his Daddy badly. He missed him so much.
Of a night he'd lay sobbing into Red Bear, unable to talk to Mum without her looking terrified, and too proud to cry again in front of Johnny.
John Jr, named for his Daddy; his face reminded him of Dad’s sometimes.
“What do we do?”
The words hung in the air.
There was only one solution; they both knew it, but one of them had to voice if they were to survive.
"We could," Kim looked around his room, as if searching for spies, "we could kill her."
Johnny sat stunned.
He was increasingly convinced by his little brother, and the absence from his missing father had become tangible since revealed to him. A space which had been full was now an empty room. He was starting to understand, she'd taken him, his heart and a life that he didn’t remember.
But he longed for that life, and he now knew they going to have to kill her.
They plotted to draw her to them.
In Bloom’s band practice had become more muted recently, and Johnny's friends had been voicing the opinion that their lead man Johnny had lost his edge, and maybe they needed to find a new lead singer with a garage they could properly let rip in.
Tonight was a return to form for Johnny, it seemed he'd been holding in the sound for so long, but the emotional loss he was experiencing vicariously broke the sound barrier, roaring into Drain You five times, one after another, then after a moments silence ten minutes of Territorial Pissings frantic guitars and drums cacophonous, looping, expanding to fill the universe.
Kim had been allowed into the sanctum today, which drew comment from the rest of the band, but who forgot this youthful infraction when they heard the passionate solo of their band leader returning to form.
He couldn’t hear it, but he knew that behind the sound would be the angry swoosh, swoosh, swoosh of next door sweeping.
But for now all he could hear was the glorious three piece and his brother shrieking and sweat drenched on the garage floor, and Kim felt certain he would never hear a more wonderful sound.
Later, when the noise tailed off, once top-end Mercedes and BMWs had entered and left the drive to collect their wannabe rock star children, they were left alone in the dark, dusty gloom, last rays of the summer sun fading out, cutting impossible slices of brilliance through cracks in the roof.
Awaiting the monster next door.
Johnny continued to play in the gloom, his guitar scream increasingly deafening and his brother Kim sitting on the gaffer-taped drum stool, doing his best to keep some rhythm with drumsticks which the elder had sharpened into vicious spikes.
Mrs Hitchcock kicked the garage door open with a bang.
Silhouetted against the glorious setting sun, head scarf pulled tight she screamed at them.
"Enough! Enough of this noise, I have lived too long to have to put up with this now," and Kim had a vision of Mrs Hitchcock ten thousand years ago, feeding upon humans as they emerged, chalk in hand, from caves decorated with bison and smoke and fire.
Johnny was screaming too, and before he knew it, a drumstick had been snatched from his hand and plunged into her throat, Kim following with the other, slamming it into her chest, piercing the heart, Mrs Hitchcock’s eyes wider than the universe, as Kim watched and waited and hoped for the harm she had done to be put right.
Would everyone now return he wondered; hoped. My they at least remember, or would they all just live on in him. So many lost voices.
Nothing was ever put right.
Wherever Dad and Alice and the others had gone, it appeared there was no coming back.
***
The police arrived around an hour later, called by the bachelor across the road, who was concerned by the teenaged boy sitting twitching on his drive, covered in blood and holding two bloodied spikes in his hand.
He went with the police without complaint, as a young boy watched silently from an upstairs as another presence was removed from his life, although not permanently this time. He'd been shocked by the blood, partly because he had thought the monster might explode in dust and blackness, as the good people were returned to their lives.
She didn’t, and they weren’t.
She just lay motionless and twitching, bled onto the concrete, mouth
in an O of horror which revealed no fang, but which he figured that was retracted, just out of sight.
He was just glad no one else would lose their life through her hunger, lose their existence; Johnny had done a brave thing and taken all the blame. Saved them.
His mum said his brother might only do eight years before his release, and although that seemed a lifetime to the young boy, he’d seen enough to know there were greater losses. Eight years to save everyone who left. Not fair, Johnny was a hero, but he’d saved them.
Then it happened.
Around three months later, another boy from his class, Brendan, disappeared and was forgotten by everyone except Kim, and he knew it had started again. He sat behind the hydrangea on the drive and stared intensely at the people passing in the street, and wondered, if maybe Mrs Hitchcock had, had the chance to turn one of them before her demise.
Thanks
Thanks for taking the time to read my story and I hope you’ll forgive the odd typo or grammatical error which slips through. Feel free to tell me about any you find, via @edgarmillion . As much as I try to proofread everything, I know I miss errors here and there, and I’ll remove them if you tell me.
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Acknowledgements
Thanks to Eddy Van 3000 for their cover image Why Are You Fearful? (https://www.flickr.com/photos/e3000/4218438157 )
In Bloom Page 5
