by Jay Stringer
The horror finally set in when the screens went blank on day four. Our news, our voice. Our knowledge, our comfort. We woke up one day to find it had been taken away without warning.
No television.
No internet.
No phones.
There were no battles or dust clouds, no speeches and no sirens. Just silence.
A few hours after that we lost the street lights. All of them. We’d gone to bed in our own world and woken up in a whole new one, a world of darkness. People ran out into the streets and hallways, forced to talk to strangers for the first time in decades. We all asked the same questions;
“Are we under attack?”
“Has the economy collapsed?”
“Are we at war?”
A city full of people asking questions, and we’ve still not heard any answers. We got scared in a hurry and soon forgot how to be anything else.
On the fourth day I tried to open a tin of beans. The electric opener wouldn’t work anymore, and all I had was a pen knife. It had an attachment on it that I knew, somehow, was meant to be a tin opener, but I didn’t know how to use it. I had to hit the tin with a lump hammer until it burst open.
And it started getting really cold at night. More than usual, though I don’t know if it was because the world had ended or just because the electricity was off. An apartment block down the street burned down, because the family in 14C started a fire in their living room to keep warm. There was no fire service to call, and we couldn’t spare the water. People just watched it burn.
A week later the noises started. Shrieks and howls after sunset. They were distant at first, but they got closer of the next few nights until they were coming from down in our streets. My neighbour said he saw some of them. He said they were us, “Just people like us, but crazy lookin’. Like animals.” I guess silence can do that to you, if you listen to it for to long. People got too scared to go out at night. We stayed in our apartments and listened to the crazy people as they screamed.
My boyfriend went out to get some food.
That was three days ago. He hasn’t returned.
I think I heard some of the howls a moment ago, but it’s still daylight. That can’t be, can it?
I’m scared. I’ve forgotten how to be anything else.
Mouse’s Courage
It was Bobby Buddha’s idea.
At least, that’s the way I’ve always remembered it. We called him Buddha because he was Asian, and that was about the only funny thing we could come up with. Later on we realised how stupid it was, but nicknames are nicknames, you cant go changing them.
That was back when we all had to have nicknames. There was Bobby Buddha, the only kid I knew who managed to be both skinny and pot bellied. There was Toast, a chubby kid who’s real name was David. I forget why we called him Toast. There was Keano, a tall wiry kid a little older than us, his family was Irish, but there was already someone at school called Spud.
My nickname was Mouse. It was because I was the smallest.
I hated it; it made me sound like a coward. I kept trying to think of better names, I even thought ‘Rat’ would be better; it was darker and cooler. But nicknames are nicknames.
Girls were the exception, they didn’t have nicknames. We spoke of them only in hushed tones, and only if we were sure nobody was listening. It wouldn’t do to be overheard talking about girls. People would laugh, they’d make jokes, or write your name in black permanent marker on the wall in the school toilet.
The girls got nicknames later. I think it was by the next year; maybe as early as the winter, they went from hushed tones to being the subject of lewd jokes and innuendos. Lying to your friends about who you’d fucked, and where she’d let you do it.
It was Kelly I fancied, Kelly Green, who lived in the same street as Keano. We’d be sat on the field rolling the football between us, or sharing a pack of cigarettes, and she would walk past. The other kids would all look at me and I’d do my best not to look in her direction. They’d nudge me and say things like ‘go and ask her out,’ or ‘see if she wants to smoke.’ Because of course, that was the thing. We didn’t like smoking but we hoped it made us look cool and grown up. And we hoped nobody ever noticed when we coughed after each drag, or how our eyes would sting and run when we left the cigarettes hanging out of our mouths to look like rock stars.
This was slightly before rock stars of course, but after Pop music, so we knew what we were looking for.
So one time Kelly walked past and I decided I was going to do it. To prove to them once and for all that they should let me change my name to Rat. No, not just Rat. They should let me change my name to ‘THE RAT’. I walked over to her, having to walk double fast because she wasn’t stopping to pay any attention to us, and I was worried about looking cool while walking as fast as a maniac.
‘Hey Kelly.’ I shouted.
She stopped in her tracks and turned to watch as I walked over, slowing down to a trot, taking my time, the Rat takes his time.
‘Hi Mouse.’ She said, ‘What’s up?’
‘I, ummm.’
I could feel her looking into me, her expression going from interested to bored in ten seconds flat. I could feel the lads staring into my back.
I could feel them smirking, their smirks turning into laughs.
‘Well, I was wondering, if you wanted to, you know, come and smoke, with us, maybe?’
She pulled a face.
‘Smoking’s disgusting, my sister says it makes you smell.’
She started to walk off again.
‘Yeah, me too. Disgusting, I mean, I think it’s disgusting.’
‘Then why are you smoking over there?’
‘Yeah, I uh-’
I ran home. It was all I could think to do.
I could hear the laughter, I could hear my friends singing songs about me. Shouting ‘mousey, mousey’ after me as I ran. I had tears in my eyes.
I didn’t go out for a week after that. The summer holiday was slipping away, but I didn’t care. Sometimes Bobby and the others would call up to my window, or knock on the door and talk to my parents. But I couldn’t face them.
When I did go back out again it seemed everything was back to normal. We spent the days playing football until we were dirty and tired, then lying in the grass as the cigarette was passed around. I didn’t take it; smokes made you smell.
Toast started to fancy Sarah Yates, the girl who lived next door to him. She was four years older than us, and soon we would all fancy her, but he got there first and it was his turn to get teased. For most the rest of the holiday, we would kick the ball around and tease Toast about Sarah, and I felt much better, quite happy that the Rat wasn’t getting teased, that my failure had been forgotten.
It hadn’t though, and it soon came back.
Although I’d been the first to fancy a girl, and the first to go and talk to one of the mythic species, it was Toast who got a girlfriend.
Sarah Yates was out of his league. She was above every boy in the school. Years later there was a rumour about her and a PE Teacher, but who ever believes those rumours?
But Sarah had a little sister, and in all the time Toast spent hanging around outside their house, kicking a ball against his wall or playing basketball with the rubbish bin as the hoop, all the time he spent trying to get a look at Sarah Yates, her little sister Lisa started to notice him.
She noticed the way he kicked the ball, and the way the puppy fat was dropping off him. She noticed the way he could hang a cigarette out of the corner of his mouth. The girls were way ahead of us when it came to discovering rock stars.
So in the final few weeks of our summer, the last holiday before our bodies and our lives and our friends really started to fuck with us, Toast and Lisa started going out together.
And we hated him.
Not that we came straight out and admitted it. We still played with him, when he wasn’t to busy sitting somewhere with Lisa, or going to the cinema. We still let him si
t and smoke with us. But you could tell in the way we talked about him when he wasn’t there, we didn’t like him. He’d betrayed us. He had a girlfriend.
It got even worse when he started bringing Lisa to hang out with us. She would sit and watch us play football, and joined in our group afterward, talking about her friends, and what was on TV, and what her favourite song was that week, and who her sisters wanted to go out with.
The smoking stopped. And we couldn’t talk about girls anymore, because there was one with us.
Keano was next. He started going with Kelly. My Kelly. Looking back I’m surprised it took him so long. We couldn’t know it at the time, but his frame, his manner, and his Irish looks were far better than anything the rest of us had to offer. He was very nice about pulling my girl. He’d asked me if he could ask her out. So they were an item, and for a couple of weeks she came and sat with Lisa as we played football, and shouted at us, and sang pop songs. That was when my failure came up again, when it grew up bigger than before like a monster you can’t outrun in a nightmare. Bobby started it, Toast soon joined in. When I was on the ball, they would shout ‘mousey,’ in the long whiny way they’d done it the day I fucked up. And ‘Mouse’ was no longer about my size, now it was about me being a coward. And the girls laughed, and the boys laughed, and everyone laughed.
At me.
Kelly laughed. Her laugh was different; hers wasn’t out of meanness, or spite. It wasn’t out of jealousy, or frustration, or any of the other things that fuel teenage boys. It was pity. She knew why they teased me, and her part in it. And she pitied me for it. That made me mad. It made me so mad I could hit somebody. It made me so mad I wanted to break something. It made me so mad that I kicked the football harder than I’d ever kicked it before. It went high over where our imaginary goal posts were, for the park keepers always took the goalposts away during the summer holidays, it went over the trees, and over the fence beyond them. It landed in the garden of the haunted house.
And everyone went quiet. Everybody was scared.
The haunted house wasn’t haunted. Of course it wasn’t. We were too old to believe in Father Christmas, or Ghosts, or Godzilla. We still had a few years of maybe believing in God, but one thing we definitely did not believe in was haunted houses. And yet we were scared.
Every town has them, this I know for a fact after growing up and seeing more than my one little town. Every park has a dilapidated house on the edge of it. Or somewhere near it. Near enough so that when you get a bunch of kids sitting around in the field late at night, taking the piss out of each other and trying to put the shits up themselves, they can point in the direction of the house and say ‘that ones haunted.’
And all the kids always know ghosts don’t exist. And that the house just needs repair. But deep down, whether they’ll admit it to anyone but themselves or not, they are afraid of that house. For my part, I was terrified. A few years before, in my last bout of wetting the bed, I had dreams about dying in that house. The first real dreams about death I’d had, the dreams where the darkness changed from childish things like monsters under the bed and Darth Vader to very real things, like being alone, or dying.
As haunted houses go it was a good one, it looked twice as old as all the houses around it, and the bricks seemed to have aged to a very dark grey.
‘Shit.’ Said Bobby.
‘Mouse, you gotta get it back,’ said Toast, apparently forgetting the need to look tough in front of Lisa.
‘No way.’ I said, ‘Its your fault, you were laughing at me.’
‘I’ll go,’ said Keano, taking us all by surprise, ‘I’m not scared of that place.’
He was just so effortlessly cool. He was also impressing my girl and I couldn’t have that.
‘No, its okay,’ I said too quickly, making it obvious, ‘I can go, im not a baby.’
‘Mousey.’ Bobby said, again in the mocking tone, ‘Mousey the hero.’
‘Fuck off,’ I shouted back at him, and regretted it.
This was after swearing, but before we felt adult enough to do it casually.
“Well, you two can go if you want, but I’m not going anywhere near that place. It gives me the shits.” Bobby. The only one oft us who wasn’t worried about impressing girls, and the only one who they seemed to agree with. Bobby sat down and the girls sat with him. They watched as first Keano and me, then Toast, began the slow walk across the field to the driveway of the old house.
Keano made the first move, pushing hard on the gate, it creaked open a lot faster than we expected, the hinge not as rusted and seized as it looked. Looking at each other, we all made the silent agreement to try the doorbell, see if anyone actually lived there, before climbing the fence into whatever lay in the garden.
Keano rang the bell, but we couldn’t hear whether or not it made a noise, and there were no sounds of stirring inside.
After a pause, I hammered on the door, but still there were no sounds inside. We looked at each other, still holding off from climbing the fence. It seemed we grew progressively bold in turn, for Toast, behind me, turned to bang on the living room window at the front of the house. He let out a startled little noise, something that died well short of being a shriek, and both Keano and me turned to see a small old man framed in the window looking at us. I made a feeble little wave, and he waved back, and then vanished back out of sight with surprising speed, in the direction of the hallway and the front door.
We heard laughter, and turned to see Bobby and the girls, Bobby laughing and giving us a royal wave.
We turned back as the door opened, the little old man looked even smaller up close, like someone who’s body was slowly giving up on him. He was shrinking back into loose skin and thinning hair, but his eyes were bright and alert as he smiled at us.
‘Sorry Lads,’ he said, ‘I was watching telly.’
‘Um, Yeah, sorry, our ball is in your garden,’ said Keano, stepping forward slightly, ‘Can we, uh, fetch it?’
‘Oh sure, no problem,’ the old guy said, as he smiled again, ‘Follow me through.’
‘Through there?’ Toast still hadn’t regained his courage.
The old man just smiled again, patient, as if he knew what everybody said about his house. I wondered what it must be like to live in the house that everyone is scared of.
‘Yes, please, come in. I’ll show you the garden and you can find your ball.’
He stepped back into the hallway and we followed him in, gingerly at first then more at ease. Toast was still nervous and he left the front door open.
There was a slight optical illusion about the house; it all appeared to be level, but to get to the back garden we had to follow the old man down the hallway to the back of the house, then down a short flight of stairs. The old man went first, followed by Keano, then me, and Toast came last. The house was quite nice inside. Old, and dusty, sure, and decorated during the war from the look of it, but all was tidy and well kept. I was just thinking what a nice house it had turned out to be as we reached the bottom of the stairs. I saw the old man reaching for the back door, I saw a mirror opposite us at the bottom of the stairs and I caught Keano’s reflection as he looked ahead.
Then I saw a look of total panic flash across his face as he turned to stare at me, white as a sheet.
There are certain things built into us. Most behaviours are learned. They are programming that we pick up. But there are a few things that come with us from birth and one of them is fear. It doesn’t matter how calm you are, if you see a look of total panic on the face of the person in front of you, you do a very simple thing.
You bolt.
I turned back on myself at the foot of the stairs and ran up them, which was good because Keano himself was doing exactly the same thing, and he would have had to run through me. Toast joined us. We raced back along the hallway and practically flew out the front door. We were still running when we got to where Bobby and the girls were sat in the field, watching us with bemusement. I dropped down to my kne
es gasping, Toast hopped from foot to foot, the panic wearing off, muttering;
‘Shit, shit, shit.’
Keano stopped and looked back toward the house, he yelped and carried on running away. I looked toward the house, saw the old man standing in the doorway waving us back, and the panic built in me again and I took off after Keano. Clearly everybody else was spooked as well, because they followed behind.
We all finally stopped, gasping for breath, outside the corner shop. We sat against the wall for a few minutes in silence.
‘What the hell was that all about?’ Asked Bobby.
‘You put the shits up us.’ Lisa said, looking straight at me.
‘Me?’ I said.
‘Yeah.’ Toast said. ‘The look on your face, I’ve never seen anything like that.’
‘Me?’ I said again, ‘No, I mean, yes, I was scared but it was-‘
I calmed down again slowly, and caught my breath.
‘Keano, what the fuck happened down there, you scared the hell out of me.’
‘You didn’t see?’ He said.
‘See what?’ I asked, the bottom beginning to drop out of my stomach again.
‘It was the mirror,’ Keano said quietly. ‘He had no reflection in the mirror.’
That day really killed the holiday for us.
Nobody wanted to do much of anything after that. And the girls didn’t come out with us very much. It wasn’t until the last couple of days that we turned a corner, the next step in our lives.
We invented drinking.
One day Bobby came down the road, to the corner where we’d taken to sitting on a wall, far away from the field, and he had a bottle in his hand. He said it was vodka, that his brother had given it to him. We all took a swig in turn. We all pulled faces and felt sick, then took another swig.
Just like that, we were adults.
It was in the last night, the last night of the summer holiday, before our bodies and our lives and our friends really started to fuck with us, that the alcohol had us bold enough to reclaim our patch in the field.
