The Monster Man of Horror House (28 page)

This
was it. This was the end of my road.

But
then I’d thought that before and I’d found my way out of tighter scrapes than
this and so it was to be again. For this was my moment. This was my time to
leave. Just beyond the shadows of the church Alex was playing hopscotch with a
pebble. He hopped and skipped across a charcoal grid and then back again, only
to suddenly stop and look over at me. It was the first time he’d acknowledged
me all day and I recognized the significance. I looked to the dirt track I’d
been watching and at last saw my way out.

It
was as clear as day.

I
suddenly remembered.

It
was my way back to the world.

The
sun, having sunk beyond the trees in the west, now shone directly through the
arcade of overhanging branches, like a light at the end of a tunnel. This was
how it had been when I’d first blundered into Long Fenton twenty-four hours
earlier and it momentarily vanquished all the shadows from the dirt track. I
sprinted towards the sun, praying for all my wretched soul was worth that I’d
not end up back outside The Black Fox again, and the demons swiped and spat
their fury at me as I stumbled and bumbled my way back to the main road.

“Uoy tonnac epacse! Ew lliw dnif Uoy!”
they snarled as I passed, but try as they might they
could not reach me and I reached the end of the track to find the road I’d lost
the day before.

I
could’ve wept with joy as I stood there basking in the last few rays of
twilight but my celebrations were cut short when I noticed the car I’d left in
the ditch. As I drew closer I saw the car wasn’t empty as it should’ve been.
There was someone in the driver’s seat.

It
was me.

I
looked down at myself through the shattered windscreen and wondered how this
was going to affect my no claims bonus, only to be startled by the banshee
screams of a thousand hurtling demons as the sun now vanished beneath the horizon.

Alex
shouted at me from beyond the track to: “Go back! Go back the way you came!”
and I just about dodged the first of a forest of claws by tumbling in on
myself, through the windscreen, through the car…

…
and through myself.

xii

“Come back to us mate! Come back!”

“Okay,
that’s it, we’ve got him. 1cc of Atropine and increase the oxygen.”

“Can
you here me, mate? Can you here me?” a voice kept asking somewhere beyond a
blinding white light. “Can you respond? What’s your name?”

The
light finally moved away from my eyes and a man in a blue shirt clicked off a
little torch and slipped it into his top pocket before asking me again; “Can
you say something?”

“Like
what?” I spluttered, choking on the words as if my throat were full of sandpaper,
which wasn’t necessarily beyond the realms of possibilities.

“Good
enough,” the man smiled and beyond him several others voiced their approval.

“What’s
your name, mate?” the man now asked.

“John…
John Coal…” I coughed, suddenly aware than every inch of my body was in agony.

“Well
John, I’m Phil, okay. Now listen to me, you’ve been in an accident, but you’re
okay. You’re in an ambulance and we’re going to get you to hospital so stay
with us and don’t go back to sleep, okay?”

Phil’s
mate said something about me having a weird blood type, which wasn’t the half
of it, and he hooked me up a bag of plasma to keep me going. Phil now locked
down the stretcher to stop me rolling about in the back of the ambulance and
thanked the assembled yokels who’d dragged me from the wreckage of my Cortina and
phoned 999, then he pulled the backdoors closed as his pal got us underway.

They
even sounded the siren just for good measure and I realised with a heavy heart
that try as I might I would be spending the night in Lincoln in spite of my
best efforts. But then again I guess that’s just what happened when you came to
Lincolnshire.

“You
should be careful on these roads, mate,” Phil advised, some might argue a
smidgeon too late. “Treacherous they are. Deadly.”

“Get
away,” I tried to reply but it was lost to the oxygen mask.

“That
stretch where you crashed, that’s particularly bad that is – a right
black spot. Claimed dozens of lives over the last twenty years, it has,” my
cheery ambulanceman said, and it was a wonder he didn’t take out his torch and
hold it under his chin for his next snippet of trivia. “It almost had you an’
all, it did. You know, you were officially dead for almost a minute back there.
Oh yes, if we hadn’t got to you when we had, you would’ve been just another
statistic, you would’ve , mate. You’re a lucky boy, you know that?

“A
lucky, lucky boy.”

Chapter 6:

And then
there was one

“I spent the next couple of nights in Lincoln County General just to get my
strength back, but as soon as the nurses weren’t looking I did a bunk,
wheelchair and all.”

“Why?”
asked Colin, unable to take his eyes off the shadows that hung all around us.

“I
had to, full moon was on its way so I had to get out of there and back home to
my basement before I hurt anyone,” I explained, taking a puff on my pipe and
noticing it had turned stone cold again. I tapped it on my oil drum to knock
the ash out and looked for my baccy pouch, refilling it, lighting it and savouring
its flavours. “Ahh, nothing like a good shag,” I sighed, prompting the kids to burst
out laughing for some unknown reason. “What? What’s so funny about an old man enjoying
a good shag?” I asked, but none of them could breath any more, let alone speak.
“Bloody kids!”

When
they were over the worst of it, Barry wiped the tears from his eyes and asked
me what had happened to everyone at Long Fenton. “Were they real or were they
ghosts like?”

“Bit
of both,” I replied, standing up to shake the cramp from my legs before picking
a faded newspaper cutting off a pinboard over my workbench. “There, read that.”

Tommy
snatched it from me, though there weren’t many details to the cutting

“SITE
TO BE REDEVELOPED” it read and went on to describe how a holiday complex was to
be built in the remote Lincolnshire countryside. At the end of the piece it
said: “… the areas to be developed include the derelict village of Long Fenton,
which was evacuated following a chemical spill in 1951 by the then newly built
Connaught Watson Processing Plant. The plant closed in 1984 and this site will
also be redeveloped.”

“That
don’t say nothing about no monsters killing no one,” Tommy objected, waving my
cutting in my face. “See, he’s full of shit, he is,
facking
shadow monsters and all that.”

“People
did die,” I insisted, “about twenty families, but they died because a brash
young man broke into a plant and smashed a load of pipes not knowing that this
plant also made pesticides, not just fertilisers, and he poisoned the whole
village with his folly.”

“So
what were the shadow monsters?” Farny asked, unable to join the dots for
himself.

“I
dunno, but I reckon they were from hell,” I said, giving them my best scary guess
as I stamped my feet and rubbed my buttocks to kill the pins and needles that
were now eating away at my legs. The kids stayed where they were, four-square
on my old knackered sofa and showed not a flicker of discomfort. Oh to be young
and supple again. “No see, I woke them up I did, by stumbling into town like
that when I had my crash. Well, not me, but my spirit like. And them old
demons, well they came up from hell and dragged them all back down again.”

“But
why?” Farny persisted.

“I
don’t know. I ain’t no expert. Perhaps the place gets reawoken every time a new
soul wanders into it. Perhaps it even acts as a magnet for new souls. Judging
from all the accidents on the roads around it, I wouldn’t be surprised, but
either way I reckon that weren’t the first time Brian and his mates slugged it
out with the shadow monsters, and I reckon it won’t be the last either. The
poor lost souls.”

“But
this happened in 1951,” Tommy said, snatching up the cutting and unscrewing it
to nail my bullshit to the wall. “And you said it happened to you in 1975.
You’re a liar.”

“No,
don’t you see,” Colin interjected on my behalf, “they were ghosts. It was still
in the past, but it happened then too, like when all them Roman soldiers walked
through that building site in my brother's ghost book. Remember?”

But
Tommy didn’t remember and he didn’t want to. He wanted me to be a “dirty old liar”
and so that’s what I was. At least, that’s what I was to him. To the others
however I was a man who’d had a near-death experience and who’d returned with
tales of ghosts and demons to show for it.

Of
the kids before me, I wondered who was the more satisfied?

“But
that don’t say nothing about no one dying from no chemical leak either, it says
they was all evacuated,” Tommy continued to nit-pick, despite losing the popular
vote some time ago.

“Of
course, it were covered up at the time. Too much money involved. Can’t sell carrots
to the public when they’ve been sprayed with the same stuff that’s wiped out a
whole village. Oh no,” I said, trying to take my cutting back from Tommy, but
unable to without it ripping because Tommy was purposely pulling on the other
end. “If you don’t mind,” I asked politely, but a smile spread across Tommy’s
face and he would’ve torn my cutting had I not picked up the Browning off the
floor to remind him who ran this basement.

“If
you don’t mind,” I reiterated, this time a little more insistently.

Tommy
relinquished both the cutting and the smile and slumped back in the sofa to
sulk. Barry, Colin and Farny all looked at their brethren disapprovingly, as if
to say, “what was all that about?”

“No,
so the Government covered it up, records were lost and the village was boarded
up and forgotten about for half a century, that was until Mickey Mouse bought
the land,” I said.

“Mickey
Mouse?”

“Well,
whoever them holiday people were, log cabins, nature trails and waterslides and
all that. Ain’t no place for that sort of malarkey,” I lamented, although the
real reason I disapproved was because they’d moved all the graves from the
churchyard, including Alex's. I’d gone back there once every few years since my
accident to plant fresh flowers around his headstone, only to find it had become
a bike shed at some point in 2003. Nobody seemed to mind except me and I was
pointed in the direction of Lincoln’s municipal cemetery where all they’d been reinterred,
but I never went up there to see Alex up there because Alex weren’t up there,
just his old bones. And bones don’t make a person.

It’s
a soul that does that.

I
looked at my watch. It was coming up to midnight and I figured I’d kept the
boys here long enough to learn their lesson. Farny, Colin and young Barry I
could tell were good kids at heart and seemed to have enjoyed my old stories so
I didn’t think I’d have any more bother with them, but Tommy was another
matter. He was the rotten apple in their barrel and the ugly fly in my
ointment. No amount of ghoulish horror stories would ever reach him because he
was a horrible kid. Some people say there’s no such thing as a horrible kid,
that it’s all down to the parents, and this does have some merit, but only to a
point. Some kids have it harder than most and become the best amongst us. And
some have it easiest and become the dregs. I think we should give our
caterpillars a little more credit for the butterflies they become and not defer
entirely to God, Darwin and video games.

My
own little girl was a case in point. She’d had a terrible start in life and the
worst of all mothers, yet she’d overcome the most formidable of obstacles to turn
into an angel. How I admired her for that. How she had saved herself with her
choices. And no one had dictated these to her. She’d done it by herself.

The
boys were finally starting to shift in their seats and I told them it was all
right, they could go home if they liked.

“About
bloody time! Sitting here all
facking
night!” Tommy predictably snorted, but the others were more gracious and thanked
me for my stories, and in Colin’s, case even apologised for breaking into my
home in the first place.

“That’s
okay, Colin. We all make mistakes. I just didn’t want you boys putting
yourselves in the way of harm, that’s all,” I explained, opening a drawer in my
work desk and dropping my Browning inside. I saw Tommy’s eyes lingering on
these actions so I figured I’d better head off the inevitable break-in by
getting it out again and pulling the trigger. A little flame appeared at the
end of the barrel and Tommy’s face turned to thunder.

“It
ain’t even real?”

“Of
course it ain’t. You think I’d point a real gun at kids? What sort of a man do you
think I am?” I asked, causing Tommy to swear all the colours of the rainbow while
the others giggled with delight, partly at their own relief and partly at Tommy’s
ignominy. “Go home, go to bed, it’s gone midnight already,” I told them.