The Dark Corners Box Set

by Robert Scott-Norton

  “Idiot!” Johnny cried.

  Alisha yelled, then she was flying back across the room, crashing into a wall opposite the doors. Arjun rushed to her side, yelling, repeating her name.

  “What was that?” Glenda was frantic.

  Johnny scrambled to grab the planchette from the corner, not realising that the damage had been done.

  Seth ran to Alisha, Judy clung to his arm. Arjun was helping Alisha to her feet. She was shaking. They both were. “What the hell was that?” she said tearfully.

  Arjun held her steady. “We’re going now. No way are we spending any more time here.”

  But Johnny hadn’t finished with the Ouija board. He had set the planchette back in its centre, but this time only he was placing his fingers on the disc, the others no longer wanting anything to do with it.

  A loud bang came from the corridor on the other side of the morgue doors. Seth ran a jerky hand through his hair. He needed time to think, to work out how he would save all these people from the dangers they’d invited upon them. Peter and Michael went to the doors and opened them tentatively before poking their heads into the corridor and shining a torch.

  “Nothing,” they said together as they re-entered the room. Peter strode to his wife. “We’re going.”

  “Give us a sign that you want us to stay!” Johnny was almost shouting at the board.

  The three candles all tumbled to their sides and expired. The torches failed.

  They were in the dark. Seth held back a cry of alarm. His heartbeat was running away from him. A line of ice drew across the back of his neck and he held his breath. He couldn’t function like this. He banged his torch with his palm, willing it to work again.

  Someone was running around the room's perimeter. Small footsteps.

  Shrieks from the party. Yells to get the lights back on.

  “Use your phone!” Glenda’s voice.

  “It’s dead.” Arjun’s voice.

  Seth stepped forward, pushing the darkness from his mind and bumped into the Ouija board trolley. Johnny had left the matches he’d used to light the candles on the second tier. Seth searched, feeling around for the box.

  Judy’s voice was telling everyone to keep calm.

  More running footsteps. Breaking glass.

  Seth’s hand eventually found the edge of the matchbox; a second hand grabbed his, and he had to stifle a scream.

  “Sorry,” Judy said, letting go. “Looking for the matches.”

  “Great minds,” Seth muttered, then hurriedly struck a match.

  The chatter from the rest of the group faded as they focused on the light in front of them. “We’re going to leave now,” Seth told the group. He passed the matches to Judy who struck a second and used it to light one of the fallen candles.

  In the flickering light, Seth saw them again. The entities were back amongst them, lurking around the edges of the room. He tried to count them but they constantly shifted, never quite there. Red points of light burned then blurred back into the dark. Eyes.

  The group hadn’t seen them, couldn’t notice them.

  But Judy had seen them.

  She screamed and Seth didn’t think she would ever stop.

  11

  Interlude

  They were arguing again. Seth’s parents did that a lot. Usually around bedtime when they thought he would be fast asleep but more and more often, the rows were happening at other times of the day. He didn’t think he was in any trouble—the rows were never about him, although he sometimes wished they were, a bit of attention would be nice. Kelly got all the attention.

  Seth sat on the upstairs landing, listening to his parents in the kitchen. They’d forgotten to close the kitchen door and his mum’s sharp voice rose up the stairs and echoed around the walls. She was upset about her dad, Seth’s grandfather. Seth’s dad, a meek quiet man in the day, turned into a shouty man at night. This transformation happened every evening when he poured himself a drink from the dining room sideboard. Tonight, he was arguing about wanting to move house. Seth had heard this argument before and he silently wished that this time, his mum would relent and listen to his dad. Moving house would mean getting a new view from a new bedroom window. That was automatically a good thing.

  Kelly wasn’t home. His older sister had gone missing again and the policewoman had come to the house for the second time that month. Seth hated seeing the police car outside his house. The first time the policewoman had come, Seth had heard the doorbell and stood sleepily at the top of the stairs when the front door was opened. The woman without a soul peered up at him and tipped a finger to her forehead in acknowledgement. He’d run back to the lines in his room. They suddenly seemed less scary.

  The lines had arrived the first night that Kelly had gone missing and Seth at first wondered whether the two were connected. Maybe Kelly had drawn on his walls and knew she’d get shouted at so had left the house waiting for Mum and Dad to miss her so much they’d forget to be angry at her.

  Seth’s room was the second largest of the bedrooms and Seth loved to spend time in there. His bed faced the window, hidden now by the Star Wars curtains Mum had put up for him last week. A bookshelf overflowed with paperbacks that his sister had no need for, and large picture books, which were his favourite, took up all of the bottom shelf. He had no problem reading them. He had no one else to read to him so had picked up reading pretty quickly with the help of his grandma.

  A plastic chair on a swivel base lurked in the corner, at the moment his teddy bear Sebastian had the throne. Seth tried to make sure that all of his toys got a chance to run his toy kingdom, but he’d found that Sebastian often got to be king more than the others. Dad probably let Sebastian have the chair when tidying up the room. Sometimes, all of his other toys would be shoved under his bed in the large storage space that he never went in. There were sliding doors to the storage space. Once, his parents had shouted at him for borrowing the tape so he could seal it up. They didn’t understand why it was important. But then, they didn’t have to sleep above it.

  But the lines were something else again.

  He knew that Kelly hadn’t drawn them. Thin lines on his Black Hole wallpaper. It looked like pencil but they wouldn’t go away even when he tried really hard with the rubber. All that happened was he once managed to rub away too hard and tore the wallpaper. Only a fraction mind, but it was enough to show that Kelly hadn’t done it. The line was on the bare plaster wall as well. How it could have been on the wall, and yet on the wallpaper that had been put on top of it, Seth couldn’t fathom.

  He’d been shouted at for wearing away that bit of wallpaper—a nice novelty—but neither of his parents had said anything about the pencil lines.

  It was clear that his sister wasn’t going to be making an appearance that night, his parents were still shouting, and the police car with the friendly policeman still hadn’t turned up. He rubbed his eyes and plodded back to bed, he’d hear when the doorbell went and could wait at the top of the stairs again when it did.

  He glanced at the lines on the wall—only now did he see that they’d changed. He’d suspected as much over the last few days. Something was different about them and it had been hard to tell exactly what.

  But now, it was pretty obvious even to him that the lines were deeper, and squared, and what at first had seemed like random lines, actually looked like a door.

  Kelly had turned up whilst Seth had been sleeping. More shouting woke him before the sun came out and he trudged downstairs to see Kelly at the kitchen table, parents across from her, and the policewoman sipping tea and pretending not to notice the arguing going on before her eyes.

  “I’m thirsty,” he said, and the shouting stopped. Kelly left the table, got Seth a drink of Ribena and gave him a squeeze.

  He loved a hug from Kelly. It made him feel like there was nothing wrong in the world, that despite all the tears and the shouting, things might be OK. Only this morning, Kelly smelt funny, like she’d not had a chance to shower
or change her clothes.

  He thought about showing her the transformation that had happened to the lines in his bedroom, wondered whether she’d somehow altered the lines into a door shape as a trick, only Dad called her back to the table and Mum told him to put the television on and watch cartoons.

  There were no cartoons on. Seth sloped back up the stairs to his room, a curious tingling ran along his arm—it made him want to giggle, but laughing didn’t seem like the right thing to do and instead he shuddered and hugged himself tightly. Going upstairs on his own didn’t normally bother him, especially not whilst he could hear everyone talking downstairs. He wasn’t alone, so why did he feel as if he was?

  The door, for there was no denying it was anything other than a door, was now a true solid object resting in his bedroom wall. He remained in his doorway watching it for a moment. It didn’t look like any of the doors in their house. Cautiously, he stepped into his bedroom. Feeling like perhaps today this wasn’t entirely his bedroom anymore. The thing against his wall owned this space now; Seth was trespassing.

  The door wasn’t like anything he’d quite seen before. It looked heavy which was an odd thing to think as it was inset flush to his wall. It was old—he knew it was old. The paint was a deep forest green and had peeled in places leaving an even darker green beneath. This door had had many lives, refreshed so many times. How many owners had it had? The door handle was round like an acorn had risen through the surface. He determined not to go near the handle. That would be bad in ways he couldn’t think about but just felt at the seat of his soul.

  He didn’t want to cry down to his parents; they were unlikely to come up anyway, unless Kelly stormed upstairs and then they would undoubtedly chase up after her. Perhaps he should call to her. He glanced at his bedroom door—the real one—and felt miserable. Sometimes at school his friends would run off and leave him but that loneliness was nothing compared to what he felt right now.

  He would sit and observe the door for now. That would be enough. It felt like it needed watching. That might make things feel safer, take away the fear. Seth grabbed his chair from the corner of the room, threw Sebastian to the floor and sat facing the green door.

  His parents found him like that two hours later.

  “What are you doing?” Mum asked delicately, her anger from the last few hours finally exhausted.

  Shame rose in Seth then. He felt dumb. They would see the door and tell him off for not coming to get either of them sooner.

  “I’m taking care of it,” he explained and nodded at the wall.

  His parents followed his gaze and Dad said, “Taking care of what?”

  “You can’t see the door?”

  “No,” Dad intoned. “Is this a new game you’re playing?”

  Arguing seemed pointless so Seth smiled and nodded. That made them all a bit happier and his parents took him downstairs and made him breakfast.

  The door didn’t change for a week. Every night Seth went to bed and watched the intruder until his eyes couldn’t help but close on him and he fell into drifting dreams of hollow spaces and wailing voices. His parents didn’t notice that he spent more time in his bedroom; they were just glad he wasn’t under their feet causing them headaches. Kelly was hogging the spotlight as usual but Seth didn’t mind. He had a new diversion, a job of his own.

  Kelly sensed something was wrong. She was the closest to Seth and the two of them had rarely argued. One night she sat beside him on the floor, staring across the room at the wall.

  “Mum and Dad are worried. They think you’re becoming reclusive.”

  “What does reclusive mean?”

  “That you keep to yourself.”

  “I like myself.”

  “That’s not what it means. It means you’re spending too much time by yourself.”

  “But they know where I am. They can sit with me if they want.”

  “Why do you sit here? What are you looking at?” She sounded worried. Funny that, his big sister worried about him. For as long as he could remember it had been the other way around. He’d thought of talking to Kelly about the door. Out of the household, she was the most likely to understand.

  “Have you ever seen something that wasn’t there?” he asked.

  “That’s an odd question.”

  “It isn’t. It’s simple.”

  “Then, no, I don’t think so. Why, have you?”

  “There’s a door in my wall. I’m looking at it now, but I’m the only one that can see it.”

  Kelly grinned, confused. “Your door’s over there.” She pointed at the main bedroom door and Seth shook his head.

  “No,” he said pointing at the intruder door in front of him. “It’s there, and it’s green and I think it wants to be opened.”

  To Kelly’s credit she didn’t dismiss him. Instead she stepped over to the door that only Seth could see. “Whereabouts? Here?” she said, placing her hand on the wall right in the heart of the door that she couldn’t see.

  As she removed her hand, her handprint remained as a white shadow against the green. It burned brightly then faded so that just the green paintwork remained.

  “I’m not sure you should have done that,” he said. He wasn’t sure what it meant, but he knew that he must be extra specially careful to not touch the door.

  “I’ll get you a drink if you’re planning on staying there all day.” And she left the room, a bemused expression on her face.

  Seth woke in the night to giggling. He snatched his bedside torch and flashed it at the foot of his bed, striking the darkness.

  “Who’s there?” he asked softly, so as not to wake his parents.

  But the light didn’t find anyone. He knew that didn’t mean a thing though. When getting ready for bed and pulling his shirt up over his head to get his pj's on, in that moment of blindness when the shirt was in front of his eyes, he sensed a presence before him; waiting to reveal itself once the shirt was clear from his face.

  He’d heard of madness. He knew that the building across the field at the back their garden had mad people in it although he’d never seen any of them. He knew there was a difference between being mad at someone like his parents were at Kelly and being mad like the people at the hospital. Mad people spoke to themselves. Mad people saw people that weren’t there, or did things to others to hurt them.

  Seth wondered if perhaps he was going mad. No one else could see the door, not even Kelly who’d touched it and left her mark on its surface. Before school every morning he placed his chair in front of that spot in the wall to prevent Mum from accidentally brushing past it when she came in to clean his room, but every day he’d come back and the chair would be back in the corner—Sebastian in charge of the toys from his throne.

  It was cold in the room. Much colder than when he’d gone to sleep. The weather had been balmy, and he’d even been to school in his shorts which was something he rarely did as he was prone to fall over and hated the sight of bloodied knees. But now, his breath hung before him in microcosmic clouds. He wanted to hide back under his bed but there were two things that bothered him enough to stay up.

  The first thing was a feeling of hopelessness. If hope was a real thing you could carry in your arms and feel the weight of, his hope had been ripped out of him leaving him empty.

  The second thing was the light shining from the edges of the door.

  He inched to the end of his bed, using his torch to scour the room, making sure he was alone. He thought of thumping on the wall for Kelly but he still worried about the day she’d touched the door and the part of him inside that knew things, knew for sure that bringing her into the room with the door shining like that was a bad idea.

  The door itself wasn’t glowing. The door was ajar. The light came from behind the door, on the other side. Whatever was behind it—which should by all rights have been his parents’ room—was burning the brightest emerald green he’d ever seen. And as Seth sat and watched, he realised that the illumination was getting bri
ghter. He no longer needed to use his torch so switched it off, the whole room soaked in this unearthly green light.

  He didn’t know what to do. The hairs on his arms stood to attention as if someone had blown across his skin. Seth began to cry. Silent crying. The safest kind.

  This was a bad dream. He’d wake up and then all of this would be gone, but he knew he wasn’t dreaming. His dreams were worse than this. A door with light shining beyond it was nothing compared to the terrors he saw when his eyes were closed.

  The door was opening.

  He couldn’t let that happen.

  Scrambling out of bed he shivered even more against the chill. And then he heard the scraping, like fingers against wood.

  “Kelly?” he cried, no longer caring what might happen, only never wanting to be alone again. “Mum!”

  Snoring from the direction of their bedroom. Seth could run. Perhaps running was the safest thing to do, but what was he to do if the thing on the other side of that door could run faster?

  He stepped closer to the intruder. That rectangular weak-looking piece of wood was all that was stopping the scratching thing from getting into his room and ripping him to pieces. He had to do something.

  Suddenly, he ran at the door, shouldered it with all his weight. He fell back to the floor astounded by the pain from the impact. But the pain was good, it was keeping him focused. He didn’t want to get help anymore; he could do this on his own.

  He approached the door a second time, this time more cautiously. The scraping noise intensified as he got closer, a noise like long nails, or claws tearing at the wood. He wanted to look through the gap, see what was making that noise. Carefully, he lent against the wall, bringing his eye-line round enough so he could see through the gap, only as he did, the shapes changed. The door seemed less like a door, and more like a flat object painted on his bedroom wall. He couldn’t see anything.

  Instead he did the one thing he’d never attempted before, the thing that had scared him most about Kelly or his mum coming into the room when he wasn’t there. He reached for the door handle and grabbed it. The handle proved to be solid, and wooden and cold, but a real tangible thing in his hand. He could turn this, turn it and push and close the door and stop it ever opening again.