Home Sweet Home Read online

that they were nearby, but he still felt scared. He had to spend an entire night in this, frankly terrifying room. He tried to rationalise his fear by persuading himself that he had only to shout out and his parents would come running to him. It helped a little bit.

  Ben had no idea what time it was. He must have fallen asleep and then woken. He lay absolutely still and projected all his senses out around him into the darkness. He strained as hard as he could but there was no longer any sound of voices, so his parents must be in bed by now. At this realisation he felt his skin begin to crawl and he lay stock still, petrified and clammy with sweat. He decided that it must be the dead of night, maybe 3 am, because the total absence of noise was so profound. It was like an unbearable weight of silence pushing down on him and slowly smothering him. He wanted to clear his throat just to make a sound, just to prove to himself that he could still hear and that noise was still possible in this enclosed little micro-universe of his. But he was too frightened to make a noise, in case it aroused unwelcome attention. He could hear nothing and yet he was certain there was something; something silent out there in the room. Whilst he had been lying in terror, his eyes had been slowly adapting to the darkness. He was torn between, on the one hand, pulling the blankets over his head and trying to get back to sleep and on the other, looking around the room and making sure that everything was as it should be. Bravery won out in the end and without moving a muscle he peered out across the room and tried to make sense of the vague shadowy shapes he could see. The room would have been scary at the best of times at this time of night, but now … well, his heart was pounding inside his chest so hard that he was certain it was about to burst.

  After a couple of minutes of intense scrutiny of the shadowy netherworld within which he lay, he felt reasonably certain that everything was as it should be and this calmed him, just a little. He dared to make a very small sound in his throat and the reassurance of the familiar noise settled him further. He had been lying on one side for so long that he was feeling quite cramped and uncomfortable so he flipped over onto his front and turning his head the other way, he immediately felt his scalp crawl and his body go clammy with cold sweat, but for several seconds he lay in almost total paralysis whilst his wide staring eyes gazed in horror upon the image of two bodies lying stretched out on the floor with another, half-seen figure crouching over them. Suddenly, with a piercing yell, Ben launched himself backwards away from the figures so violently that he capsized the camp-bed and in his blind panic he couldn’t coordinate his movements and ended up thrashing about in his blankets helplessly and with each passing second his dread built as he imagined the crouching figure rising and moving towards him and … finally, he freed himself and with a cry of terror made straight for the door without a backwards glance, whilst just behind him, or so he imagined, unseen claw-like hands reached out towards him grotesquely and silently.

  He ran, still screaming, from the room and made straight for his parent’s bedroom. At least such was his intention, but he came to a confused halt where the stairs should be, for there were no stairs and underfoot was nothing but rubble and broken glass. By now Ben was crying for help at the top of his voice and running pell-mell, crashing through shards of glass, through the door that hung from just one hinge and out into the garden. He ran down the lawn away from the house and crouched in the bushes at the end of the garden sobbing in fear and without any clue as to what he should do.

  The apple tree was a towering and sinister presence looming close by and seemingly growing larger and more frightening each time he looked at it, and all the time the image of what he had seen so recently was emblazoned on his mind. There had been two bodies lying side by side on the floor with the unmistakeable figure of Mrs Smith crouching over them. It had been dark, but he was nevertheless quite certain of what he had seen.

  Ben crouched, shivering, at the end of the garden for an indeterminate length of time. He was exhausted, frightened and terribly lonely and he wasn’t entirely sure that this wasn’t all just a terrible dream. But, if it was, he had no idea when it would end, or how he should end it. He had never been in a situation before, where his parents couldn’t help him and he missed them terribly. He had an emptiness inside him that longed for the succour of his mother’s smiling face and reassuring words.

  As he sat, damp and miserable, the events of the night went round and round in his head until it slowly dawned on him that his previous theory about the house must be flawed, because he clearly hadn't entered the house from the rear garden on this occasion. He went back over the day in his mind and assured himself that he had come in through the front door with the rest of his family. Something wasn't right. His theory had seemed to fit the facts so well, but now he felt that he didn't know what to think. When he saw his parents he would have to convince them that they couldn't stay another night in the house. He knew that he couldn't. Whatever else happened, he just couldn't sleep again in that house.

  In due course the sun's first feeble tendrils cast upwards from the horizon and the inky night sky was slowly softened to a milky grey, but it failed to provide the least shred of comfort to the small boy, as he lay huddled on the dew-sodden lawn, knees tucked tightly up into his chest and knuckles thrust painfully between his clenched teeth.

  Ben had spent the night in a fitful and interminable state of semi–wakefulness. He was stiff with cold and lack of movement and had been staring for some time through half closed eyes at an object that, perhaps his eyes or mayhap his torpid brain, could not quite resolve. As the cold early morning hue turned by degrees to the warmer tones of incipient sunrise, so the image took on a clearer form. Slowly it moved, by mere inches, to and fro, to and fro. Metronomically, hypnotically it swung, whilst Ben’s sub-consciousness followed the rhythmic motion, poised, as it was, midway between wakefulness and sleep. Finally and with a great flourish, the sun entered its domain and piercing shards of light brought Ben to cruel and sudden wakefulness. At first, he merely stared uncomprehendingly but then he jumped to his feet and gasped in horror, for the moving shape was none other than a large man swinging lazily by the neck up in the Apple tree. As the body swung, so it turned until there could be no further doubt; Ben found himself staring straight into the bloated and grotesquely distorted face of Mr Smith.

  Ben fell backwards, away from the dreadful apparition, and crashed through the shrubs at the rear of the garden and out through the gap in the fence onto the road behind. The accumulation of that night’s events had sent him mindless with terror and he ran back towards the village in great stumbling strides, his only coherent thought being to reunite himself with his parents and bring this relentless nightmare to a close.

  After a couple of minutes, he came to the junction of the lower road and the main road into the village. He stopped momentarily and stood, fighting for breath, but he knew not what nameless horrors still pursued him and, though his legs would scarcely carry him, he turned left and continued his desperate run up the gentle incline of the road to the village, before careening sharply left up the garden path to the front door of his house, where he fell to his knees in exhaustion and hammered on the door with both fists, whilst screaming for his parents continuously at the top of his voice.

  Mrs Smith sat beneath the branches of her beloved Apple tree and gently swung herself backwards and forwards on the homemade swing that her husband had put up for their daughter Josie, twenty years before. The swing had been a feature of the garden for so long now; that it seemed it had always been there. It had hung unused through the long cold winters only to be reawakened each spring by the shrieking laughter of Josie and her friends as they rediscovered the endless possibilities for imaginative play that the swing could provide.

  Of course, as time passed and Josie grew up, the swing had seen less and less use and eventually it hung idly from its branch for most of the time.

  Mrs Smith had such fond memories of this Garden. As she swung gently on the swing so she remembered the summer that Josie had
arrived. She used to position Josie’s pram in the dappled shade beneath the Apple tree, whilst she went about her daily chores and sometimes she just sat contentedly beside her baby and gazed in wonder at the little miracle that brought her such unending pleasure.

  Later on, when Josie was maybe two or three years old she began to help her mum to gather up the windfall apples before they rotted on the ground and when she was much older she helped her mother to harvest the apples from the tree itself, climbing the ladder and leaning across to reach apples that were almost out of her reach with an assurance that made her mother’s heart swell with pride.

  Mrs Smith had always wished for a fruit tree and when she and her husband had first set eyes on this house, with the apple tree in the garden, everything had seemed so perfect about it, that they bought it there and then and never even considered moving again. It was to be as it were, their ‘forever’ house.

  She remembered the very first time that Josie had brought Archie back to the house. She had brought one or two casual boyfriends back previously and Mrs Smith had