Beneath the Boards

by David Haynes

  “Melody?” He always tried to sound friendly but it didn’t work. There was a hint of annoyance in his tone, like when a teacher was impatient.

  She crouched a little lower and watched him drop into the cellar.

  “Are you there, Melody? I’ve got some sandwiches for you.”

  She could see the plate in his hand but as he pulled the hatch back over he was just a shape, just like always. Everything was a shape now, a dark shape. The rats were just scurrying little shapes which sometimes possessed shiny black gems if a fragment of light touched them. The Vicar was just a featureless shape which shuffled slowly and awkwardly around the cellar. If she had never seen him, never seen a human being, she might think he was a shambling beast from one of the story books in her room.

  In her room?

  Wasn’t this her room?

  “Melody, come to me, please. Come and have something to eat.”

  She hissed back at him. She’d heard the rats do it to each other, especially when they were about to fight and bite each other. Her effort didn’t sound as good as the rats and it made a wet noise but she was pleased with the result. The Vicar turned in a circle to face her direction but she could tell by the way he quickly moved his head from side to side that he couldn’t see her.

  “I can see you,” she whispered and scurried to the other side of the cellar.

  “Melody, now is not the time for silly games. Come and get your dinner.”

  He hadn’t taken a step in any direction yet but he swivelled on his toes, searching in the darkness for her.

  “Was that my mum and dad?” she whispered and went on the move again.

  She watched him turn to the last place she’d been in. “Your parents were here, yes. They came to see how you were getting along. They wanted to see if you were ready to go home.”

  She felt a heaviness in her tummy and it made her want to cry. She swallowed it back, the way she’d done when she’d first seen Daddy’s face after the incident at church.

  “Why did Mummy scream?” She didn’t move this time.

  The Vicar turned again and this time he looked directly into her eyes. “She was frightened, Melody.”

  “Frightened of me?”

  The Vicar edged forward. “If you come and eat your dinner we can talk about it properly.”

  “I’m not hungry.” She really wasn’t either.

  He took another step forward. “You must be, you haven’t eaten anything for four days. Come on Melody, this isn’t funny now.”

  She ran toward him, shoved him as she ducked under his outstretched arm. “I said I’m not hungry.” She was past him and hidden by the darkness again before he’d even had time to turn. This was fun.

  “I’m going to leave your food for the rats then,” he shouted.

  She watched him tip the plate, allowing the sandwiches to fall to the floor. She didn’t mind, she didn’t expect to feel hungry again, ever.

  He turned and took a step toward where the hatch was.

  “What don’t you believe in anymore?”

  He stopped dead.

  “You had the word ‘faithless’ written across your face in the church. There were other words too but some of them flashed too quickly and I couldn’t read them. ‘Faithless’ and ‘adulterer’ were the clearest and the brightest.”

  He span around quickly. His face was bright red but not with words, with anger and it painted the walls of the cellar a deep red.

  “It means I fucked your dear mummy, Melody. I fucked her and we both loved it.”

  She hissed at him and then laughed. “Oh I know that, I’ve seen it on both of your faces. Daddy knows too. Why are you faithless?”

  “I’m not!” he almost barked.

  “You are, I saw it. Just the same as I knew the doctor liked to touch his niece, just the same as I knew the other children in the playground hated me. It was written all over them. Is it God?”

  He took a step toward her. “Come here, Melody.”

  She backed away. He sounded angry, really angry. “Is God down here with me?” she asked.

  He took another step.

  “I wonder what God has got written on his face?”

  “Shut up!”

  She sat down, beside the rats’ nest and slipped her hand inside the warm hole. “I don’t think he’d have anything there because he isn’t real. Is that what you think too?”

  “You better be quiet or...”

  “Or what, you’ll send me to see for myself?” She dragged a baby rat from the hole. It squeaked at her and tried to wriggle free.

  “Oh, I might just do that.”

  She jumped up and threw the baby rat at the dark shape she knew was his head. It wobbled through the air and hit him. She giggled and started to run toward the other side.

  “You’ll have to catch me first!”

  He lurched forward and made a lunge for her but she was too quick and avoided him easily.

  “Come here!” he roared.

  She laughed and picked up a lump of damp earth. “You’re too slow.” She hurled the mud at him and saw the black star-burst as it hit him.

  He lumbered toward her, a great hulking monster from the shadows.

  “Why don’t you believe in him? Is it my mum’s fault, did she make you stop?”

  “I do believe, I do. Stop it!”

  “Why? Would you let me leave if I did?”

  He stopped. “I might.”

  She laughed and scooped up some more dirt, this handful had spiky stones in too. She hurled them and ran back toward the rats.

  “I don’t want to leave. I like it here, I want to stay.” She was giggling. This was like a game she used to play with the other children. Was it called Tag?

  “Then you’ll die and it’ll be soon.”

  “I know I will, it’s written in big letters all over me. I can feel them scratching away at me, from the inside.”

  She sat beside the rats’ nest again. The nest was like a factory, it just kept producing more and more babies, more and more and more. She plunged her hand inside again and pulled one free. It was a little older than the others and it hissed at her. It was angry and if she loosened her hold on its neck just a bit, it would bite her, they’d done it before.

  She squeezed its throat just a little bit but hard enough to make those beautiful gems bulge. She knew what would happen if she squeezed too hard – those jewels would just pop right out and land on the filthy ground. She moved her head closer, close enough so the rat’s whiskers brushed the end of her nose. Those deep dark eyes were like bottomless ponds of ink. She could stare at them for hours and never was there anything but darkness; no red-flashing neon with spidery words written in them. They were perfect.

  “Perfect,” she whispered.

  She brought the rat a little closer. That was strange, there was something written in them this time. It was faint but it was creeping closer, rising to the surface of the pond. She couldn’t make it out but there were words, lots of them and all of them had spiky little tails trailing from the letters.

  Closer and closer.

  “Fear,” she whispered and turned around.

  The monster vicar loomed above her and in his eyes a thousand words flashed in an instant. They were so bright they stung her eyes.

  “Will you kill me now?” she asked. It was in his eyes, not written, but there for all to see.

  The cellar was awash with red and it dripped from the walls like blood pouring from a deep cut.

  “I can’t help you.” His voice sounded sad but not shaky like it did when people were crying.

  She felt his hands around her throat. His thumbs pushed against her windpipe and his forefingers dug painfully into her jaw. She tried to keep her feet on the ground but she felt him lifting her upward until she couldn’t even reach with her tip-toes. She stared into his eyes and the words kept spinning like a crazy fruit machine. Over and over again the same words appeared and in the same order. Fear, hate, suicide, faithless a
nd dead.

  Were they his words or were they a reflection of the words painted across her own face? Was she seeing what he was seeing? Were they seeing the same thing?

  “Am I doing the right thing?” She saw his mouth move and yet the words seemed to come from another place, from another person in another time. His mouth was an ugly snarl and a froth gathered at the corners where his top and bottom lips met. It wouldn’t have surprised her to see a vile little insect crawl out from the foam just like it did with cuckoo-spit.

  The room grew darker now, even though the words burned brighter still in his eyes. Darker and darker. Darker and darker.

  Dead. That was the brightest word. That had always been the brightest word.

  14

  Stokes awoke with a start. Where was he?

  Ah yes, he was in bed, in his new and comfortable bed down in the cellar. He groaned. It was the pain that had awakened him. It seemed his whole body now trembled in fear at each passing beat of his heart. Make this the last one, please. One last pump of that good old Stokes blood around the hectic helter-skelter track and then be still.

  In the last three days, he’d only stepped out of the hole on one occasion and that was to fetch his hammer. He ran his tongue across the jagged tombstones he’d made of his teeth. His upper lip felt swollen and grotesque. The first blow from the hammer had been far too tentative and his lips had rolled over the teeth in some pathetic protective gesture. Somewhere deep down, his body wanted to help him scramble back out of the pit. Too little too late. The steel smashed into the lip and the incisors. The pain had been staggering but as he choked back blood, his own metallic blood, he smashed the hammer into his teeth again.

  Melody had helped him through it. She’d held his hand and urged him on when he could barely hold the hammer’s wooden handle for all the blood. She’d whispered to him and told him how much it would mean to her if both of them looked the same; if neither of them had teeth anymore. That way nobody would ever doubt they were father and daughter. She was right.

  He looked down at her and smiled. Addicts with blackened and missing teeth from all the sugary methadone they took had better smiles than him. They probably felt better than him too.

  She sat up and hugged him, and for a moment the pain vanished into the darkness.

  “There’s someone here, Daddy,” she whispered into his ear sending a shiver through his body.

  “Where?” He eased her away from him so he could see her.

  She put a finger to her lips and pointed to the floorboards above their heads.

  Stokes looked up, dazed and confused. He opened his mouth to speak but stopped instantly at the sound of creaking… the sound of footsteps.

  His eyes widened. Someone else was in the house. Was it Natalie? Had she come back to ruin his life again? He followed the footsteps above until they stopped on the hatch.

  “We have to move.” He spoke in a whisper but it sounded like a bark. “Come on, we have to...”

  He turned to where Melody had been just a moment before, but she wasn’t there.

  “Melody,” he whispered as loud as he dared and scampered across the dirt away from the hatch.

  A hazy shaft of light pierced the darkness and created jagged patterns in the dank air as the hatch lifted slowly open. He was transfixed by it. It reminded him of how Natalie’s blade must have ignited in the afternoon sun just before it ripped into his flesh.

  “Natalie…”

  But it wasn’t Natalie who descended into the cellar. It was much too large to be her, much too bulky for someone on the H-plan diet. Whoever it was pulled the hatch back over their hooded head and in doing so, gave themselves the gift of disguise.

  He looked around. Where was Melody? Things felt confused, in fact they’d pretty much gone to rat shit, but he had to keep her safe. He knew that much. That was his purpose now.

  The man, because it had to be a man from the sheer size, had a torch and he flicked it around the darkness like a lightsaber. But he didn’t do it in a random sweep, he shone the torch quickly but without care or pause before he settled on his direction.

  He was shuffling slowly but definitely toward the spot where Stokes had just come from, where not two minutes before he’d been sleeping as soundly as he had in months.

  “He’s come to take me away,” Melody again whispered in his ear. It was almost as if she’d been inside his head and seen the question forming in his brain.

  He bit down on his bottom lip as pain erupted in his gut. It was all he could do to stop himself from crying out.

  The other man stopped and flashed the torch in their direction. The beam of light hit Stokes and travelled right through his flesh, burning his nerves as it went. How could he not have seen them? Either of them.

  “Stay still.” He turned to Melody but she’d gone again.

  The torchlight whipped back across the room and wobbled away again. Why would they have come to take Melody away? It didn’t make any sense. Worse still, it frightened him. Nobody had the right to take her away… to take her away from him. If they took her then what would he have left? Nothing except an old house, a poisoned body and a ruined mind. No, nobody was taking her away from him or this house, not now, not ever.

  He pushed himself down into the dirt and slithered across the mud like a snake.

  Stokes’s eyes had adjusted to the blackness but even so the man was nothing more than a dark shape, hulking and distorted. The intruder dropped the torch to the ground and lowered himself slowly to his knees. This was an older man who suffered with his joints, or his back, or maybe both. He hunched over and began frantically scratching at the earth.

  Stokes watched intently. This was almost the exact spot where he’d been lying, he was positive. He crawled closer. The man grunted as he sunk his hands into the ground but he worked with a frenzied pace as he threw the earth to one side. He was like a deranged treasure hunter. Deeper and deeper he dug until the grunts slowly turned into a pathetic whimper. Was he disappointed by his lack of success?

  “He’s found me.”

  He didn’t turn this time – he could see Melody was already in the man’s arms. He cradled her with a tenderness Stokes had only seen before from new fathers on a maternity ward. The same fathers who had beaten their pregnant wives to within an inch of their miserable lives only a week before and it was sickening. He could see Melody clearly, her light and fragile frame sinking into the monster’s arms as if she were nothing more than a bundle of twigs. It was heartbreaking. She looked toward him but she said nothing. She didn’t need to. The word written across her poor face was clear enough. It was scrawled in the same colour as the blood which Natalie had extracted from him and it was too much to see.

  Dead.

  He scrambled to his feet. “Leave her alone, you bastard!” His tongue and lips were swollen and the words scraped against the shards his teeth had become on their way out of his mouth.

  The other man turned and even in the darkness, Stokes saw the whites of his eyes. He dropped Melody instantly and she fell to the earth without a sound.

  “You just leave her alone or I’ll kill you.” He clenched his fists and felt the adrenalin surge through his body. It sent a horrible spasm through his gut but his mind pushed it aside. Now was not the time to double over, now was the time to fight.

  “Mr Stokes? Is that you?”

  He recognised the voice but the echo made it sound like a demon speaking in tongues. He took a step forward.

  “Mr Stokes, I’m sorry, I’m not sure I know...”

  “You shouldn’t have come here, you won’t take Melody.”

  The other man took a step back. “Melody?” His voice trembled. “You know... How…?”

  Stokes stepped forward again. He knew the voice from somewhere, he’d spoken with its owner before.

  “She’s staying with me. I won’t let you take her.”

  The other man started snivelling but Stokes felt nothing except a fierce sense of protection.


  “He’s a nasty man, Daddy. Don’t let him touch me again.”

  “I won’t let him, sweetheart. Don’t worry.”

  “Mr Stokes, Jim? It’s me, Edward Willis, from the village.” He was crying properly now.

  A flash of the man walking along the lane in the rain flashed across Stokes’s memory. He was a miserable man, a dejected man.

  “Willis,” he murmured.