Please? 
I knocked this up the other day and am quite happy with it…well, as happy as I ever am with my own stuff, which is to say, not particularly, but happy enough that I haven’t deleted it in embarrassment. I’m thinking I might send it off to a few horror magazines, maybe get some money from it. Before that, though, I think it prudent to get a little feedback. Have a quick read (it’s very short, less than 1000 words) and let me know what you think. Any constructive feedback is much appreciated.
Cheers.
BAD DREAMS
“Mummy!”
Christ. Again? Second time that night, and fifth this week. Oh, bollocks to it. Let her sort it out.
“Mummy! Daddy! I’m scared!”Nathan’s voice, still new to him, tore through the wall separating their rooms as though it wasn’t even there. And in a weird way, the fact of the wall, the separation itself, seemed to somehow amplify it.
Keith sighed, rolled, and curved the pillow around his head. If he could only get some sleep.
But it wasn’t his night. Moira’s arm withdrew from around his shoulders. She tousled his thinning hair. It was his turn. He knew it. And she knew he knew it.
“Mummy! There’s a monster in my room”.
“He’s calling for you”
“He won’t care. Now get up before I divorce you.”
“Christ…”
“Love you too” she murmured, snuggling back under the duvet.
Keith groaned, braced himself for the cold, and yawned his way out of the bed and into the hall, feeling for the switch. His back ached.
He took a moment outside his son’s room to brace himself. He wanted to stride in with a smile. Big and confident, to show there was nothing to be afraid of. Nathan had just started his “monster phase” as his friends called it, knowingly. Lasts a few months, they said. Get him a night light. Well they had gotten him a night light and it had done fuck all. If anything it had just gotten worse. Time for Big Keith to save the day.
He opened the door, flicked on the light, and opened his arms out wide in one practised motion.
“Hello boyo!” he boomed, grinning like an idiot. “What’s all this then?”
Nathan was sitting up, the bedclothes pulled tight around his throat.“Daddy.” he sniffed “I’m scared.”
“Ahh, what’s the matter, eh Nathan? There’s nothing to be frightened of in here”
“There is” he whispered, dolefully. “There’s a monster in here”
“Well, I don’t see any monster. Where’s he hiding then, eh? Is he…behind the cupboard?” Keith crouched down, shaded his eyes with a flat palm, and made an exaggerated pantomime of creeping behind the cupboard, like a poacher stalking prey in the Serengeti. Usually this dumb-show made Nathan laugh. Not tonight.
“No” Nathan whimpered “He’s not here now. You turned the light on and made him run away”.
“Ah!” exclaimed Keith triumphantly “So, if this scary monster is so scared of the dark, how about we take old mister Spongebob here and put him in behind the cupboard? Eh?” Keith felt a strange pride at the speed at which his son’s fantasy had wilted in the face of implacable adult logic. Indeed, he’d already started toward the night light. But something in his son’s voice stopped him.
“No. That won’t work. He’ll just go over to where it’s dark”
Keith threw up his arms. He’d given it his best shot.
“Well, what do you want, Nathan? You can’t keep going to bed with the light on.”
“But daddy I’m scared!” His voice had leapt an entire octave, and the words came out in hitching breaths. Jesus, he was really upset. Keith sat beside him and drew him in.
“Listen” he said patiently. “Have you ever seen this monster?”
“No” Nathan said.
“Have you ever heard this monster”
“Yes. Sometimes”
“Oh really?” Keith said “And what does he say?”
“He says he wants to exsanguinate me”
Keith froze. His fingers tightened around his son’s shoulder and with his free hand he turned his head up to look him in the eye.
“Where did you hear that word?”
“He wants to exsanguinate me daddy. He tells me every night. He wants to drink all my blood. And then he wants to do it to you and mummy” Nathan’s voice dissolved into puling sobs.
“He said he wants to take us somewhere time stands still. That’s darker than outer space and where they’ll never find us”
That was when the lights went out. The room collapsed under the weight of the darkness. The tortured geometry of shadows drawing Keith’s eyes to enclaves of pitch black. Places in a child’s room where anything is possible…
Keith devoted much of the rest of his long life to reconstructing just what happened after the lights went out - in his mind, with detectives and fire marshals, with private investigators, priests, and psychics, and then with doctors, psychiatrists, and anyone else who had time to listen, but mostly in his mind. He died before he could finish. Died with just one question unanswered. Which came first, the laughter, or the smell of smoke? Some days, the answer seemed so obvious. Of course the smoke came first. The acrid, sulphury cloud which billowed out of the darkness, scorching his lungs and stinging him blind. On those rare days, he’d laugh at himself for being so stupid as to believe otherwise. He’d recline on white linen sheets, basking in an approximation of peace.
Other days, he’d confine himself to his room and pace to the rhythm of that terrible laughter. That babyish gurgle which echoed round Nathan’s room as though it was tumbling through a sewer pipe. Surely, he reasoned, his face creased with furrows of furious concentration, the laughter must have come first. Could it possibly have been otherwise? .Everything else was fixed deep in his mind. The shock of the smoke, the shattering of his momentary paralysis, picking up Nathan, and his and Moira’s empty bed. The curtain billowing in the breeze. The scream of a scorch-mark on the mattress.
Keith Walker lived a long life. The hospital let him see Nathan once a month, and Nathan had never stopped visiting. He was buried in the hospital’s communal grounds. He died in his bed, with the light on.
