By David Maynard, from Wokingham Writers’ Group
David is the winner of this month’s Wokingham Writers’ Group short story contest – this is his successful entry
Something creaked. A floorboard perhaps? Shifting his head onto a cooler patch of the unfamiliar pillow, the boy closed his eyes again.
He longed for sleep, willing the tiredness to well up from aching limbs and float him into oblivion. But some primal instinct snatched him back from the brink, the instant he began to…
Crack. What was that? The sound echoed through the old house. Surely, he had dreamed it? Or was somebody – or something – moving around down there?
He lifted his head from the pillow, straining his ears for the shuffling tread on the stairs, but froze, appalled by the rustle of his own movement. His heart thumped, sounding huge in his ears.
Dim moonlight flickered and danced as the patterned curtains shifted in the chill night air. The scent of the moor filled his nose. Hadn’t he checked the window before collapsing into bed? He stared at the shadows, searching for meaning, until they began to leer like skulls, and he screwed his eyes shut.
Traitorous memory supplied fearful images from the day. Cadaver tombs, his father had called them. Skeletons, half-veiled in flesh, reminders of mortality, from an age when life was nasty, brutish and short. Rendered with clammy precision in veined white marble.
The distant howl sliced through his thoughts. His eyes snapped open. An involuntary gasp escaped him.
It came again, closer this time, high and wild in the quiet of the night. The curtains billowed. Tears rolled from his eyes. Whatever it was, it was outside, he told himself. It couldn’t get in. It was just a fox, or a cat, or a…
With a clatter, the sash window of the next room was thrown up.
“Get out of it.” His father’s voice yelled into the darkness. And he was the one who’d said a rural break would be relaxing.
