redskyatnight
Every week, as Lizzie and her mother took the eggs to market, they passed the cottage of a little old lady, wizened and bent. She had a habit of pinching Lizzie’s cheek with thin, onion-skinned fingers as she told her what a bonny little thing she was.
The first time Lizzie’s mother sent her to market alone, the old lady called Lizzie into her cottage for fresh gingerbread. Lizzie was wary when the old lady locked the door, and more so when she began to sharpen a knife, sparks flying from the whetstone.
When she first saw the figure, standing at the end of the garden on the night of her fifth birthday, it was indistinct, fuzzy – obviously human, probably male, but foggy and featureless. She screamed for her parents, who said they could see nothing, but grudgingly allowed her into their bed after her ‘nightmare’.
Every year after that, the figure appeared again, and each year, he grew clearer. When she reached eighteen, he was, while still grey and somewhat translucent – very clear indeed, thin and bald and hollow-eyed as he stared at her from then end of the garden, beside the shed.
After that, he stopped becoming clearer. But he started coming nearer.
Every winter’s night when the moon is full, you will see a white mountain hare lope across the snow on Braeriach. She pauses and gazes, dark eyes wide and fearful, at the moon as it shimmers in the silent sky.
Once, more years ago than you or I could count, she was a little girl. A little girl who gazed at the moon. But she gazed once too often, and the moon took her.
I knew that he expected me to be overjoyed when he proposed through a haze of beer breath, but unfortunately, I wasn’t. Not only did I not want to get married, but he wasn’t even the man I wanted not to get married to.
I’d like to say the proposal was the beginning of the end. In actual fact, though, it came somewhere in the middle.
He would have slept, but for the rustling. The rustling, scritching, static that hissed from the walls seemed to whisper wordlessly over his face, taunting him as he closed his eyes. At 3am he sat up, switched on the grimy old bedside lamp with a stuttering flicker, and pressed his ear to the wall.
Silence.
The rustling began again as he switched off the light, and somewhere, encrypted into its jarring, agitated non-rhythm, was a thin, cruel laugh.
The blast was so loud that the noise encompassed me entirely, dwarfing me with its magnitude. As debris rained down, the dying rumble was replaced by a cacophony of car alarms, giving way in turn to screams. What I didn’t hear was the faux shutter-click of a camera-phone. I never expected my bloodied, dust-encrusted face to be on the front page of every newspaper the next day, and I never even found out the name of the paramedic pictured helping me to the ambulance.