Skreak
After the accident, Raymond Amrak went to pot, and lost his knack for drawing new and interesting comic book characters. It was as if his head had put a closed sign on the back of the door, and it frustrated him terribly. He had always been flattered about compliments of how his creations came alive.
The bosses at Armageddon comics were quite sympathetic about it, after all, his imagination had been responsible for some of the most popular stories they had ever printed. Such as the Soul-eater, the self-replicating Duploman and Staticus, the silent assassin capable of getting vengeance on evildoers, by entering their homes through their TV screen.
Raymond, thought he was through. He believed that what happened that fateful rainy night, it had wiped away all of his creativity. His editor told him not to be so stupid, to go away to somewhere quiet and ridiculously remote, and come back in a week or so, fresh and reinvented, strong and fighting fit. Raymond was dubious about this ever happening, but went along with it. He knew better, than to argue with Bryony Baron, the woman who gargled every morning with nitroglycerin, and flossed with barbed wire.
In a matter of hours, he was in a creaky cottage, in the heart of the West Country, cut off from the rest of the world. This suited him very, very much. It was called Rowan Tree Cottage
Even on his first night, he tried to draw something. He ended up with some meaningless squiggles and colours, in no particular shape. He placed his pad by the window, where the shafts of moonlight landed in the room. He had some crazy notion, that it was somehow lucky. There, it remained for for three days and nights, before he tried again.
One afternoon, he went for a walk in the woods to get some fresh air back into his system. For a city guy, he found the winding paths were quite inviting, and the fact that they could lead him just about anywhere, didn’t seem to matter to him. It was like life, whichever one you choose, leads to a situation that can dramatically alter your life. The one he chose, or the one that fate seemed to lead him to, lead to a lonely cottage by a stream. There, a woman with ragged jeans and a green tee-shirt three sizes too large, was wiping the condensation from her windows. She knew he was watching her, without turning around.
‘The water get’s into the wood and rots it,’ she said, ‘it’s old like me. It goes to pieces. I try plugging the gaps with chewing gum, but it keeps coming out.’
‘I might have something at the cottage, that might help,’ said Raymond.
‘Ah,’ said the old lady, picking out a rotten piece of wood, ‘so which one might that be then?’
‘The one on the other side of the woods,’ replied Raymond.
‘That’ll be Rowan. How long have you been there, then?’
Raymond told her.
‘And you still feel alright?’ said the woman, ‘you must be made of sturdier stuff, than the last lot that rented the place.’
‘I’m an artist,’ said Raymond, ‘what happened to the last lot?’
The lady stopped what she was doing, and invited Raymond into the house, to share a pot of tea with her. While she was pouring it out into two cracked china cups on the table, she began.
‘It was nothing much really, just that folks who come from the towns and the cities get funny ideas about places like this. Their minds begin to wander and they start to imagine things.’
‘Like?’ Raymond stirred in some sugar.
‘It’s a different pace out here, less stressful, nothing much to distract you. There ain’t much to look at but trees and rolling hills, and so you start seeing things where there ain’t things. You hear stories and off goes your head, thinking.’
‘What stories?’ said Raymond. ‘Is there anything about Rowan Cottage I need to know?’
‘Hetty Wattle!’
Raymond was puzzled. ‘Who?’
‘She was a witch, or at least they thought she was. She had a shiny black cat, but that was all. She kept herself to herself, lived off the things in her garden, never bothered anyone. She even grew her own medicines for when she was ill, so she would never need to bother the doctor, unless things got really bad.’
‘And where is she now?’
‘Dead,’ said the old woman in between sips of her tea,’ died five-hundred years ago or thereabouts.’
‘Dare I ask how?’ said Raymond.
‘They tied her to a tree and set fire to her, a Rowan tree to be exact. That’s why they renamed the cottage.’
‘So why do I need to be concerned?’
‘You don’t,’ said the woman, ‘unless you are the superstitious type. They do say that when she died the spirit was transferred to the cottage. They say sometimes you can hear the place breathing in the night, like it’s got lungs.’
‘Anything else?’
‘Things have supposed to have gone missing, like they’ve come to life and walked off, things have appeared, that weren’t there when they arrived. But like I say it depends on what you want to believe. I think you are a practical, down-to-earth person by the look of you, so you have nothing to worry about.’
Raymond wasn’t so sure he hadn’t. If he didn’t come up with something soon for Armageddon Comics, they would fire him. There is no such thing these days as job security. So he told the old woman all of this.
‘Dried up have you?’ she said when he finished. ‘Well, there is one thing you can do.’
‘What’s that?’ said Raymond, ‘don’t tell me you’ve got a magic potion?’
The old woman slammed her cup down onto the saucer and glared. ‘Are you calling me a witch?’
‘No,’ Raymond apologised pathetically, ‘I’m sorry!’
‘Cos if you are, you can leave this place, before I shove my broom up your arse!’
Raymond waited for things to settle down, before he said anything else. He finished his tea quickly and got to his feet.
‘Before I go,’ he said in the doorway, ‘what is it I need to do to get inspiration?’
‘Ask her!’ said the woman.
‘Ask who?’
‘Hetty!’
Raymond didn’t know what to think of that, but thanked her regardless. It occurred to him that he might have been the victim of a prank. Perhaps it was a common notion around these parts, that townies will swallow anything you tell them. Nevertheless, he was so desperate for a result, that he was obliged at least, to give it a try.
It was getting late when he got back, and he began thinking about it again. He gazed at his pad on the table, practically willing something to appear. He considered throwing it in the bin and going to bed with a good novel. Then something inside him, the warrior draughtsman, came to the surface and he allowed himself to cave in. He’d decided what he wanted, a new foe for Duploman to face.
‘Hetty,’ he said to the rafters, ‘please can you put an evil character on my page?’
He glanced at the pad again and there was no movement.
‘Well,’ he whispered, ‘it was worth a try anyway.’
He tried drawing some basic shapes, an egg shape for a face, and then a rough artist’s cross inside it, where the eye-line and the nose would be. But he couldn’t develop it any further from there. He gave it a name though, in the sheer hope that it might invent itself, the Skreak, an onomatopoeia word, that sounded as if it could be something that could sneak out of no- where and slash your throat.
But looking at it, somehow reminded him of the accident, so he walked away from it and dived into the bottle of Glenlivet, he’d packed for a one person arrival party.
The fine malt, did nothing to drown his thoughts. In fact, his thoughts appeared to be very strong swimmers.
In the night, he saw the boy’s face again, so stark and white against the windscreen. He should have stopped and phoned the police. He should have told the truth. He was speeding and rowing with Nadia at the same time. Wanting to know why she wanted to dump him after two years.
In a sweat once again, he went down to the kitchen for a glass of water. Normally when he calmed down it would be perfectly saf
e to go back to bed. He never had the nightmare twice in the same night. He was thankful for that.
He felt a little better in the morning, somehow, as if all of the bad feelings had been purged from his body. He didn’t even have his usual hangover.
He was even confident that with a good breakfast inside him, he would be perfectly fit to tackle his sketch work.
With a regained smile he developed the face, two piercing eyes; a jutting pointy nose like Jack Frost. He added long, bony arms with not just one elbow, three joints, so that his wonderful new creation would have a slight robotic appearance. It would also make snatching its victims a whole lot easier.
Yes, the Skreak was finally taking shape. He glanced at his phone lying on the sofa where he left it last night and gave a thought to calling Bryony.
‘No,’ he said to himself, ‘not yet, let’s hit her with a surprise!’
He soon had it finished, the Skreak, the curious creature who possessed the ability to alter its shape to pass through the least possible spaces.
Pleased with himself, he took a got out his laptop and his portable USB scanner, and made a JPEG image of it to send to Bryony Baron. Then he drove into Taunton where there was an Internet Café and emailed it with some notes about the character’s background.
‘One week, in a broken down cottage,’ he muttered to himself, ‘and it all comes back. Thanks Hetty!’
He perused the library and noticed that there were numerous books about the pagan arts and black magic. Suddenly, what the woman had said was ringing true. If there were dark tales attached to the cottage then it was bound to attract interest in these types of things. Neither was there anything about Hetty Wattle. He was surprised that the chap he was renting from didn’t say anything about it.
It didn’t matter now, his time was almost up, and he was thinking about his last night and getting back to work on Monday, fresh and revived like Bryony wanted him to be.
In the morning, he started packing. He pulled out the large travel bag he arrived with, and threw in all of his clothes. He slid his laptop into its case and snatched the scanner from the arm of the sofa. He thought about the picture he’d sent and pulled the sheet with the Skreak on it, but when he looked at it there was nothing there.
‘Surely I haven’t sent a blank page to Bryony?’ he said and rushed to the table where his artists’ pad was still. He flicked through all of the pages, and they were blank too. He then pulled out the top page and held it to the light to see if the score marks were there.
Nothing.
He tried calling Bryony but all he got was her answering machine message.
‘Damn!’ he exclaimed.
He went through every room in the cottage like a whirling dervish, like the Tasmanian Devil from the TV cartoons. He lifted everything, looked under all of the furniture and there was absolutely no sign of it.
‘I didn’t imagine it did I?’ he said and went through the motions of the previous night in his head. ‘I definitely did it.’
He decided to go and talk to the woman again. He remembered her saying, that things disappeared. But when he tried the door it wouldn’t budge. He turned the key in the lock, both ways and nothing worked.
He pulled the handle with all his might, jerking it roughly. When he had convinced himself that it had probably warped, he tried the back door in the kitchen.
He had the same lack of result there.
Raymond tried the windows one by one, undoing the latches and giving them a shove. Suddenly things were getting mighty claustrophobic.
Then, as he was eyeing the glass panes something weird happened. They all simultaneously became covered with a dark film. The more he stared at it in absolute horror, the more it looked red and sticky, like blood.
He screamed at the top of his voice for help, throwing things at the windows, chairs, vases, ashtrays, anything, everything.
Suddenly the house started shaking. Pictures fell from the walls, rafters became dislodged and cement dust and debris fell onto his head. The ground rumbled and bubbled under his feet, knocking him off kilter. The fireplace too, rumbled and spat out a thick shaft of fiery embers into his face.
Gripping his face and wracked in pain Raymond rushed to the door again, and hammered like mad and screamed for help. Then, he became aware that the hammering on the door, was not his and he stepped back in panic.
The door flew open, as if by some freakish wind and Raymond’s heart almost stopped beating, when he saw who was on the other side.
One slash of razor-like fingernails across his throat and Raymond fell to the floor clutching his neck.
It took Raymond a whole hour to die, and he felt every second of it.
By the morning, the cottage had returned to its original health, not a crack on a wall, not mark on the furniture. The owner arrived at two o’clock to show the next renters around. Raymond’s body was nowhere to be seen. It was as if, it had just vanished, just as his drawing did.
When Bryony Baron received the email on Monday morning with the new character in it, she was confused. What she was looking at on the screen of her desktop computer wasn’t a drawing at all, but the picture of a small boy with a ghostly white rain-washed face.