Beneath the Boards

by David Haynes

  “Anything the matter?” she called over her shoulder.

  “Nothing, just had enough reading for one day. I think I might take a walk.”

  “Want me to come?”

  God no. “I’d rather you finish those cookies, they smell incredible.” It was a wonder he wasn’t as big as a barn door and it was no surprise she was almost as big as one.

  “Don’t be too long, it’ll be getting dark in an hour or so.”

  He grabbed his coat from the back of the door. “I won’t be.” He heard her speaking to him as he closed the door. It was probably something about keeping warm and not getting his boots wet in the lake. He sighed again, she couldn’t just let him go without saying something else, could she? No, there always had to be one last thing, one last inane comment just so she could have the last word.

  He looked back at the house and started walking. As beautiful as Stormark was, he didn’t intend to go anywhere near the lake today. Nope, today he was walking along the road, back toward a house with a new owner.

  *

  Stokes shone the little torch into the hole. The stench had subsided a bit but not enough to risk sticking his head all the way in. The beam of light arrowed into the darkness, collecting dust motes and small flying insects as it went. Unfortunately it wasn’t strong enough to penetrate into the farthest reaches and he could see precious little. He coughed and waited for an echo but none came back. The space, however large it was, appeared to be dead.

  He bit his lip. Should he go in and have a better look? He didn’t particularly relish the idea, it looked like the sort of place spiders liked and he wasn’t their biggest fan. Besides, he couldn’t see where the floor was. What he really needed was a decent torch to light it up properly, a torch like the one he’d used when he was a copper. It had gone the way of the rest of his kit though – into the bin at the station on his last day. That torch had been everywhere with...

  A scratching sound came from the hole. It was distant at first and then it grew louder and louder until it was beneath him, right beneath the hatch. He shone the torch directly down and peered a little closer. The sound stopped immediately.

  Two little amber gems burned like coals in the darkness before vanishing again. The sound of scuttling and scratching grew fainter again.

  “Rats,” he hissed.

  Rats came a close second to spiders in his league table of dislikeable creatures and now that he’d found them living in his house, they were apt to move up a place. The ammonia indicated there was at least one nest down there and God alone knew how many rats that meant.

  He grabbed the hatch and slotted it back into place. He couldn’t see the bottom of the pit but rats were good climbers, he just hoped they weren’t any good at lifting heavy objects. Tonight wasn’t the right time to be investigating it and tomorrow he’d have to go back to town and pick up some traps, or was poison the weapon of choice? He pulled his chair over the hatch and walked to the front door. The house needed a good through-draft to clear the stench. Sooner or later he’d have to go down there and put an end to them one way or another. His skin crawled at the thought.

  He unlocked the front door and allowed fresh air to come rushing in. It was dusk and the landscape that had been alive just a few minutes before was now becoming a lifeless silhouette. The road was elevated from the house by a couple of metres but he seldom heard any traffic during the day and it was even rarer after dark. It would be a while until he was accustomed to the silence and lack of humans.

  He squinted and peered into the half-light. Was that a person standing up there on the road looking down at the cottage?

  “Hello?” he called out. The road was not only elevated from the house but it was also a good twenty metres away. With the light fading, it was difficult to see any detail. He edged forward to try and see better but before he’d moved more than a step the figure started walking away, down toward the village.

  “Hello?” he called again but his shout went unanswered. Was it one of the villagers? If it was then why hadn’t they simply answered him or waved? Presumably he’d met most of them by now so he wasn’t a curiosity anymore. Whoever it was had just been standing and looking down at the cottage, at him. He suddenly felt very cold and exposed and went back inside. It was probably just some rambler taking in the view, that was all. He locked and bolted the door behind him.

  *

  Stokes lay on top of the duvet with his Kindle in his lap. Before he’d left for the wilds of Stormark and a house without broadband, he’d loaded up the device with over a hundred books. Some had been on his wish-list for years and some were just random purchases. He had no idea how long it would take to get through them all and some, in particular the classics, might take a little longer than others.

  He flipped through the library and although his genre of choice had always been horror, he hadn’t read anything like that in a year. He stopped at the Stephen King collection and paused. You couldn’t just stop reading horror stories because your life was more horrifying than anything ever written. That was almost as bad as not facing up to the event itself.

  He closed his eyes and pressed the screen. “Surprise me if you can, Mr King.”

  *

  At first the sound was easy to ignore. It was like a gentle rain on the window, tap-tapping in a soft and easy rhythm. Stokes turned over and pulled the quilt around his bare shoulder. The sound would soothe him back to sleep if he allowed it to wash over him, if he didn’t open his eyes. But now he needed the toilet and the more he thought about not really wanting the toilet, the more he needed it. Besides, it wasn’t really raining outside was it? That sound wasn’t really the mellow dance of rain drops on the roof.

  It wasn’t tapping either. It was scratching, harsh and aggressive scratching. He felt his mind lurch from half-sleep to awake in one leap and he was powerless to stop it. He’d spent enough nights wrestling with his mind’s will to know it was futile. If his mind said that two hours of sleep were quite enough, then it was, and there was no point trying to argue. Especially not when it sounded like something was trying to eat the insides out of the cottage.

  He rubbed his face and felt the burgeoning beard beneath his fingers. It had been several days since his last shave and his face felt itchy and uncomfortable. He blinked rapidly to bring his eyes into focus and listened.

  The noise stopped for a moment and then continued.

  Scretch, scretch, scretch. A pause and then, scretch, scretch, scretch.

  He knew what it was even before he started down the stairs but he went anyway. He instantly regretted not putting his shorts on or a t-shirt at least, the little cottage was icy cold.

  He pushed the recliner to the side and stamped on the hatch.

  “Shut up down there!”

  Rats didn’t understand English because the scratching continued. There wasn’t much he could do about the racket tonight, he’d just have to pull the duvet a bit tighter around his ears and hope for the best.

  Stokes dropped to one knee, he had no intention of lifting the hatch but he wanted to make sure they had all heard him. He lowered his head and spoke to the metal ring. “Make the most of your little party. Tomorrow you’ll all be dead.”

  “So will you,” a voice hissed from beneath him.

  Stokes staggered backward, away from the hatch. His breath came in short gasps. No, he hadn’t heard that, he hadn’t heard Natalie’s voice.

  “No,” he whispered and took another step back.

  Scretch, scretch, scretch.

  But the sound wasn’t from the hole in the ground. It was from the window – from the patio window. He didn’t want to look up, with all his soul he didn’t want to look up. He wanted to stare down at his naked feet for the rest of his life, he wanted to count the wrinkles on each of his toes because if he did that he wouldn’t have to face Natalie Sutton ever again.

  Scretch, scretch, scretch.

  He raised his head and looked at the window. Natalie’s disembodied
head loomed out of the darkness and pressed against the glass. Her face was hideously distorted as she pressed it harder and harder against the glass, harder and harder until she threatened to push through.

  Stokes breath came in ragged gasps. “How long are you going to torment me?” his voice cracked.

  “As long as it takes,” she hissed back and ran her tongue along the glass, leaving a dark smear.

  “You’re mine,” she laughed and was gone.

  Stokes wiped his mouth with the back of his shaking hand. How long was this going to go on for? How long before he couldn’t cope anymore? Before the little cracks in his mind turned into a fragile crazy paving and he fell right through to... to where?

  He looked down at his feet. He wasn’t sure but Natalie was winning. It didn’t matter if he moved to the other side of the world, it didn’t matter if he moved to the moon, she would always be there. She would always be a part of him, a dirty, sordid and violent part of him and he would never escape. She wouldn’t let him.

  He dropped to his knees and then rolled onto his side. The bare boards were cold against his naked flesh but he didn’t care.

  Scretch, scretch, scretch.

  The rats had no interest in him or his ghosts, they just wanted to bite.

  6

  Stokes peeled his face up off the floorboards. A mixture of sawdust and spittle had dried in the corner of his mouth and it tasted terrible. He’d woken up with worse hangovers but his body felt in a similar condition. He shivered involuntarily and stood up. At some point last night he must have fallen asleep. Was it sleep, or was it his mind shutting down completely?

  Like before.

  He wasn’t going down that road today or any other day, once was enough. This had been sleep, plain old sleep, and Natalie’s deformed face pressing against the glass was just another hallucination. He walked to the doors and looked out. Morning had broken but not that long ago, and a thin mist tried its best to cling to the lake’s surface. He looked at his wrist but his watch was lying on the floor beside the bed.

  The rats must have slept too because he didn’t remember being disturbed by them again but... What if he had shut down again? What if his brain had decided that it was safer just to flick the switch than to try to process another nightmare? He opened the door to let some of the rats’ stink out and felt the cold air caress his naked crotch with cold and spiky fingers.

  The doctor said he was suffering from post-traumatic stress. No shit, Sherlock. And that the brain often came up with its own solutions for keeping someone alive in high stress situations. That was right after he’d written a prescription for some heavy-duty tranquillisers. The doctor clearly didn’t trust Stokes’s body to shut down at the right time.

  He hadn’t shut down when Natalie stabbed him though, and things didn’t get much more stressful than that. Oh no, dear old brain had given him the pleasure of feeling each and every millimetre of steel as it was driven into his body. Stokes pushed his own face against the glass.

  “Bitch.”

  He turned around and looked at the hatch. “And you lot can get ready.” Today was not going to be one of those days. Today was not going to be a day of regret, reproach and bitterness. Today was going to be a day of action and of extermination.

  “New start, Stokesy, new start.”

  *

  Stokes was at the hardware shop before it opened but he didn’t care. He sat in the car and ate breakfast while he waited. There was a McDonald’s restaurant just across the road and something a bit greasy fitted the bill perfectly. One day he’d have to register at the doctors, but then there would be the pre-registry health check and the history run-down.

  “And how do you feel now, Mr Stokes?”

  “Just fine and dandy, thanks. Now if you can carve Natalie’s nasty little face right out of my mind, I’ll be on my way.”

  He swallowed the last mouthful of muffin and sipped the scalding tea. Two workers let themselves into the shop and disappeared inside, laughing.

  “What’s the worst you have to contend with, then? A cold and uncaring wife? A slow day on lawnmower sales? Try seeing the ghost of the woman who tried to kill you each and every day, then we’ll see how much you’re laughing.”

  He tipped the rest of the tea out of the window and dropped the cup in the passenger foot-well. It was exactly eight o’clock and the shop should be open. He wiped his mouth on the paper napkin and tossed it beside the cup.

  “I want rat poison and I want a lot of it.” He climbed out of the car and walked across the deserted car park.

  These places were the same in every town and city across the country. They smelled the same, they sold the same things and they all piped the same headache-inducing music. He walked impatiently up and down the aisles until he finally found what he was looking for… at least he thought he had. The music was starting to really irritate him, even more so because he’d started to hum along.

  “Stop it,” he whispered to himself.

  The selection of poisons and traps was astounding and at the same time utterly confusing. He stared at the boxes, lifting them off the shelf randomly. What he really needed was a big box with ‘I kill rats’ and a red X on the front. But that wasn’t the case, the word ‘humane’ seemed to feature heavily on all the packaging. For Stokes that came down the list and several places behind ‘extermination’.

  “Can I help you, sir?”

  Stokes turned and was faced by a grinning adolescent.

  “Err… what do you know about rats?”

  The youth smiled back. “Quite a lot actually. I have several as pets.”

  “Oh.” Stokes looked at the assistant’s name badge. His name was Danny and beneath his name were the words Just ask!

  “I’m looking for poison or traps, or both. Anything that can get rid of them really.”

  Danny looked horrified. “Get rid of them? Do you need to, I mean do you really need to? Most people don’t understand them, they’re actually clean ani...”

  Stokes held up his hand. “Look, I know you mean well but I’m not a fan and I’d just like some advice, please.”

  Danny looked at him as if he’d just crapped on the shop floor. “I really couldn’t tell you which is the best, they all do the same thing, kill animals.”

  Stokes heard a trace of something in Danny’s voice, something disapproving.

  “How old are you, Danny?”

  “Twenty-two but I don’t see...”

  “A bit of advice for you, when someone asks for something in your shop, don’t give them your opinion, just help them.”

  Danny turned and walked away but this time Stokes definitely heard something, he heard a tut. A rage erupted from nowhere.

  “Did you just tut at me?”

  The youth turned around and looked at him. His expression was a barely disguised sneer. “No.”

  Stokes took a step toward him. “Yes you did, I heard you tut.”

  Danny stayed exactly where he was. “No, you misheard.” His tone was one of defiance.

  Stokes took another step forward. You tutted at me, you little shit. It had been a while but he knew what adrenalin felt like when it slipped silently into his bloodstream.

  “I don’t think so.” He drew his lips back across his teeth.

  Danny stepped back. Stokes felt a brief wave of pleasure as fear flashed across the other man’s face.

  “Sorry, I didn’t mean anything by it. I just... I just...”

  “But you tutted.” Stokes was now just a foot away from Danny. Who the hell did this little shit think he was? Judging him like that. “Now you’ll apologise to me.” Stokes clenched his fists. If the kid wanted to get clever with him then he might have to teach him some manners.

  “Apologise,” Stokes demanded. There wouldn’t be another request. He closed the gap and they were now face to face. Are you ready for this, Danny? I’ve had one hell of a year and I’m ready to pop. You just might have the lucky ticket for some special audience parti
cipation…

  “Sorry, I’m sorry.” Danny backed away two or three steps then turned heel and ran down the aisle.

  Stokes watched and his grimace was replaced by a smile. That’ll teach him. He stood there for a moment and then as his fists unclenched, he cringed. Oh God, that wasn’t right. That wasn’t Jim Stokes. Why had he behaved like that? It was like an animal.