He Slashed some Lines for Whiskers MP3
Read by Gloria Sanders
Once there was a boy who built a den beneath his house. He did not set out to do this. In fact, he fell into the foundations of his house by accident. He had been hiding from his father in the cupboard beneath the sink. But the floorboards had rotted from a leaking pipe and they gave way under his weight.
The reason the boy had been hiding in the cupboard was that his father had come home roaring drunk. The boy knew from bitter experience that the best thing to do when his father was as drunk as this was to find a good place to hide. He still had faded yellow bruises to remind him what happened if he didn’t.
The boy could see flecks of red blood on the shirt collar that hung open around his father’s bullish neck. “You don’t say nothing to no one,” he’d warned, and ran his big hand over the bristles on his shaven head. “A man’s house is his castle and I don’t want social services sticking their noses into my business.”
So the boy kept quiet and kept out of the way.
The hollow beneath the house was deep and dark and dank. It was the perfect hiding place. When his father drifted into drunken unconsciousness, the boy dragged down a sleeping bag and pillow and some of his glow-in-the-dark toys for nightlights.
From then on, whenever his father staggered through the front door the boy would run to the kitchen cupboard, pull the door shut and drop down into the safety of his secret den. Sometimes his father would be angry, smashing things and kicking the furniture around. Sometimes he’d be remorseful, and beneath the floorboards the boy would catch little hints and snippets of what might have befallen his mother.
“What have I done?”
Or.
“Why did I do it?”
The boy would listen in silence.
He was not alone down there in the foundations. A family of rats had built nests beneath the joists, from twigs and bits of plastic carrier bag. They befriended the boy and brought him gifts to cheer him up – pink wads of bubblegum from the pavements to chew on, bones from the gutter outside the fried chicken shop to gnaw upon.
After a while they brought other rats to see him. Fat black rats from the city dump with sleek dark hides. These rats also offered him tributes – bits of burger with ketchup dried into them, stale crusts of pizza and chewed off bottoms of cardboard cups with dregs of warm cola still in them.
They helped him dig a sloping tunnel from the side of the house to the back garden. At night while his father snored before the TV in a stupor the boy would crawl out from beneath the house and prowl the back alleys, the rats seething in an undulating mass about his feet. They taught him how to scare the neighbourhood cats and how to fight the neighbourhood dogs.
The more time he spent with the rats the more it seemed to the boy that he could sense the colours of their moods inside his own head; marshmallow white for hunger and liquorice black for sadness. Rage a poker-hot red and lust a shimmering shade of blue.
He experimented and found that he could transmit colours as well as receive them. If he sent them billowing clouds of white the rats would scurry off and return with scraps of food scavenged from the bins. If he oozed an oily black they would huddle around him and meow a discordant lullaby as they caressed him with their tails. If he chose lightning forks of red they’d rise on their haunches, hissing and spitting and snarling, black eyes gleaming in the eerie glow radiating from his luminous toys.
One night, huddled in his sleeping bag with all his rats gathered drowsily around him, the boy overheard his father’s paranoid drunken ramblings.
“He knows – he knows – where is the little bastard? He knows!”
Unable to restrain his curiosity, the boy crawled through the cobwebs and cockroach husks till he was directly beneath the sofa. His rats assembled around him. He heard the chink of a whisky bottle against the edge of a glass.
“He’ll tell,” slurred his father. “One day.” The bottle chinked against the glass once more. “There’s nothing for it,” he went on. “I’ll have to shut him up. If people ask I’ll say she took him with her.”
The boy felt black despair descend on him like a shroud. He wanted to scream for someone to help him but instead bit down on his lip. The rats raised their snouts to the floorboards and hissed in sympathy.
“He’s only little,” came the voice from above. “It won’t take much. No-one will ever know.”
Later, when he was sure that his father had fallen asleep, the boy crept up to his room. He knew his days were numbered. When his father was sober next morning he'd forget all about what he’d said. But as soon as he was drunk again the dreadful notion was bound to occur to him anew.
The boy took a fat black crayon and stood before the mirror. He slashed some lines for whiskers on either side of his face and admired his handiwork. “Better a live rat than a dead boy,” he whispered and experimented in baring his teeth.
At dusk the following evening the rats discovered the battered body of the boy’s mother in a shallow grave behind the garden shed. He covered her pitiful remains with fresh soil and placed one of his toys on the mound as a headstone.
Holding the flowers he’d stolen from the garden next door, he solemnly recited a prayer he had learned in the half-forgotten days when she'd taken him to school each morning. Then, concentrating harder than he had ever done before, he warned his rat battalions that she should not be disturbed. The rats lowered their heads in promise of obedience.
A month went by.
The boy scowled as he concentrated on re-sharpening the bloody points of his little wooden sticks against a boulder. He had forged his rats into a ruthless army and led them into battle against a clan of urban foxes whose territory encroached upon the row of restaurant skips they had long coveted.
In victory he was hailed as a warrior prince. Rats bowed before him and hung on to the colour of his every thought. Now it was time for him to slay the monstrous beast that had blighted his life. Holding up a cracked piece of mirror he took a shard of glass and slashed whiskers of blood into his flesh. He wanted these ones to last. They looked like war paint. His lip curled to a ferocious snarl.
Beneath the dull light of a fingernail moon he crept into the bushes and concealed himself there. A legion of rats fell in behind him, breath vapour rising in streamers from panting mouths, dark eyes watching, noses twitching. The curtains to the back of the house were open. He could see his father on the sofa, nursing a glass of whisky. He picked up a stone and threw it at the window.
Click it went against the glass. His father’s head snapped round instantly. The boy threw another stone. Click again. His father stood up and lurched drunkenly to the window, sloshing his whisky about. The boy threw a third stone. This one caused a hairline crack to snake a jagged path across the glass.
When his father turned and headed for the kitchen the boy ran swiftly out to the lawn and carefully placed the jack-in-the-box he’d retrieved earlier from his room. He hoped to sow confusion in his enemy in order to benefit from the element of surprise. Setting the internal working of the box in motion he dashed back to the cover of the bushes, sending calming clouds of gentle hues before him to stay his troops.
The kitchen door opened.
A wedge of yellow light fell on the green lawn.
His father came out to the doorstep and stood there swaying.
“Who’s there?” he called into the darkness.
On the lawn the jack-in-the-box let out a sudden high pitched squeal as it crashed through the lid. “Jesus Christ!” cried his father, stumbling back and dropping his glass to shatter on the doorstep. The Jack yawed creepily back and forth on its spring, toothy smile like the cemetery grin on the skull of a skeleton.
His father swayed some more, then clenched his big, tattooed fists and puffed out his chest in defiance. “Think that’s funny?” he asked the darkness. “Show yourself and I’ll make you laugh on the other side of your fucking face!”
The boy held his breath as he watched him. He was truly a monster, crooked nose and freshly shaved head, fat beer belly that belied the sadistic power that rippled in his biceps.
The boy felt his confidence begin to waver. Fear came to him. Its colour was purple. Like the hideous blooms on some tangled and thorny briar its vicious spines pierced his bravado. He began to shiver. He wanted to cry.
“C’mon!” roared the beast. “Show your face.”
This wasn’t the time to falter.
The boy thought of his mother and a mighty wave of crimson came at him. It smothered the purple briar and filled him with a righteous fury. He stepped at last from the bush onto the lawn and stood on what he now considered to be his hind legs, bare knees scabbed and scratched, uncut toenails curved into claws on his filthy feet. There was a ragged white-tipped foxtail passed through the belt loops of his shorts and a leathery fox ear medal pinned to the breast of his threadbare shirt. He had blood on his hands and blood on his teeth. He gripped his little sticks and let out a confrontational snarl.
“Son?” said his father, seeming somehow to deflate. “Is that you?”
The boy ran at him, weapons held high above his head, cold air biting at the swounds he had slashed for whiskers. His father crouched down and hold out his big arms. The boy wasn’t sure if his father intended to embrace him or throttle the life out of him. But he knew that he could not afford a moment of hesitation.
With a yell he brought down his sticks and plunged them deep into the neck of the beast. The beast slumped, blood gurgling over his beefy shoulders. The look on his face was one of surprise and terror. The air that gushed from his mouth was rank from the raw stench of booze.
The boy fell down hard onto the cold concrete of the patio and pushed back with his heels. The brute lurched forward and grabbed his skinny ankles with his big hands. He began to haul him back to the step. “Like mother like son,” he rasped, spitting pink gobs of blood. “If I’m going to go I’m taking you with me.”
The boy twisted his head around and hissed a command to his waiting army. They came now, bounding powerfully across the lawn, jaws spread wide, black lips drawn back over razor sharp teeth. When they fell upon the beast they showed him no mercy. Once they had brought the boy snacks, now they had a banquet as reward.
Later, when he set light to the house and his father in it, the smell was like fried chicken. From two streets away he could still see the flames rising in yellow fingers to the night sky. He turned and descended with his rats down into the sewers.
(c) David Turnbull, 2014
David Turnbull lives in South East London. Hisshort fiction has appeared recently in Salt Publishing’s Best British Fantasy 2014 as well as Girl at the End of the World II (Fox Spirit) and Horror Uncut (Grey Friar Press).He is a member of Clockhouse London Writers.
Gloria Sanders’s work includes audio-book narration for the RNIB and frequent collaborations with Cabinets of Curiosity. She has performed her devised one-woman show with Hide and Seek Theatre, The Clock, at the Brighton Fringe, the Pleasance, Islington, and the Artscene Festival in Ghent. She is fluent in Spanish.
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