I wrote this on the 6th February 2019 at the Wear Valley Writers Workshop in Bishop Auckland, County Durham England. The prompt was a set of odd words of which I chose ‘Bobowler’ which I discovered meant moth. Having not used the word before, I set out a story where one suddenly appears.
Enjoy,
Erratic
The scraping, shushing, sighing Shhh-Shhh-Shhh sounded from somewhere upstairs. With the power out, the darkness swelled and amplified the sound. Angela grasped the arm of the armchair so hard her knuckles cracked as she listened for it again. But there was only silence.
Silence.
Shhh-Shh-Shh. The noise scraped a silhouette of an image in her mind, sweeping horrific forms to the mystery music sometimes playing, sometimes not.
Angela Barnfather was, to not too fine a point on it, too shit-scared to move. The power-cut had rendered redundant all the protections the modern world afforded her from things that went bump in the night. In the dark, science meant nothing – superstition ruled. Now, the black was like a vacuum and sound rushed in to take the place light had vacated, painting a world lit by threat and danger.
Only, the sounds came intermittently. She tried counting, silently, the lengths of quiet and thought at first she might have found a pattern.
“Seventeen,” she had said.
Then, “Twenty.”
Then, “Twenty three.”
But then she’d been surprised with a ‘sixty-two’, and far more alarmed with a ‘Seven’. She felt like a child counting the time between the flash of lightning ad the rumble of thunder.
Angela Barnfather wasn’t easy to scare either – Her role as headteacher to a Primary school where the kids had been raised by hard knocks meant she had seen plenty, faced plenty. Plenty more than she could ever have wanted to. Sh described herself as ineffable. Unflappable. Her staff might have added incapable too, but not within earshot.
Shhh-Shhh-Shhh.
An image of a long, leathery body with scales scratched over the wallpaper of her imagination and made her recoil deeper into her armchair.
“One, two, three, four,” she counted under her breath. “Five, six, seven, eight.”
“Had Tommy Raskin felt this afraid?” she wondered to herself. Had he wanted, with every fibre of his being, to escape the darkness.
Forcefully, she shoved Raskin and his mother from her thoughts. She embraced the new monsters of the night her imagination was birthing. They were far less frightening.
Shhh-Shhh-Shhh.
She gave up trying to count the thunder, though it was quieter than thunder and far more sinister. She chided herself instead.
“Silly old woman, to be scared of noises in the dark,” she said. Her voice was loud in the night and she thought she could hear her own fear in her words. She pretended to herself she didn’t await the creature’s reply. After all, Angela Barnfather liked to think of herself as unfaltering, unflappable.
Silence. Maddening silence. More and more, the quiet stretched out, building like a pressure behind Angela’s eyes. She willed for it to make a sound as hard as she could. If she could hear it, he knew it was near -but not too near. She knew she wasn’t alone. Thomas Raskin had been alone in the end but she deliberately did not think about that, about the distorted isolation. Instead, she stood up.
Her house was laid out in much the same fashion as her office – that is to say there was no organisation at all. Her divorce meant she had no husband to keep, no standards to have imposed on her, or for her to impose on herself for the sake of appearances. She didn’t need to maintain a pretence of order except at work, where the thin skin of her lies manifested as bullying and vindictive lectures to staff, children and parents alike.
Her husband had used to complain about the cupboard under the stairs – he called it the cupboard of doom. Each time he’d opened it, something always fell out and nothing could be found in the clutter. Now, that cupboard had become her whole house. She couldn’t think of him either, though. Angela pushed aside her fond memories for George, and tried to think of something, anything, else.
Shh-Shh-Shh.
An owl with feathers as course as sand and as tall as a bull stretched at the walls. A wolf’s rough fur brushed against the wooden doors. Angela sighed, no longer terrified of her own imagination, just scared.
Stumbling through the minefield of discarded shoes, books, papers, bottles and glasses, Angela fumbled through the hall into the kitchen. She used her fingers to locate the sink, her digits sliding into something sticky and soft. Her brain screamed ‘BRAINS!’ in bold, neon letters. She closed her eyes – something about them being closed helped, despite the fact that it was pitch black in the house. She lifted a finger to her tongue and tasted jam, not the grey matter of some unknown victim.
Opening a kitchen cupboard under the sink loosed a landslide of things inside crashing to the floor. She jumped back, panting, heart hammering in her chest. Secrets, lies, shames – they spilt over the floor to be lost in the darkness.
“Fuck,” she hissed to herself.
Fumbling, she finally found the torch and turned it on. Soft, welcome light filled the room and dispelled her imagined demons.
Shh-Shh-Shh.
The noise was still coming from upstairs.
Barnfather was not fragile or prone to timidity. he described herself as rugged, respectful. The news had called her reckless and reprehensible. Angela picked her way to the staircase and listened, head cocked to one side.
Silence.
Silence.
Silence.
Just like Thomas Raskin had heard. Underground, in the caves as the rain fell. Only the trickling of flood water and the ice cold to keep him company until-
Silence.
Suddenly, a huge bobowler flapped and flustered into the torch which made Angela scream. The giant moth was limp grey but bloody huge, like Raskin had been when they dragged him out of the caves, tongue protruding, eyes huge and dead. She described it as disgusting., deplorable, despicable. She was well used to these words.
It had been an accident. Accidents happen, she told herself.
She brought the torch down on the moth and crushed it against the wall with so much force the torch smashed in her hand. It broke apart and disintegrated in her hand, leaving her alone in the dark. With only her tears.
And silence.
Imagine Erratically 