Looking for Jake and Other Stories

The little terrors.

The terrors.

They will not leave me. They croon at me and mock my shuffling old-man walk. They scribble obscenities on the wall opposite, and on the bricks of my house, my other house that I cannot see. They piss and hurl stones.

I do not leave the study now. I am learning what I need to know for my defence. I wait for the ghost city to wax back to me, and when it comes I investigate it to the limits of my vision.

There is a drainpipe by my window, on my other wall, my ghost wall.

I have heard them scrabbling a short way up it, scraping the rust and mortar. I have listened to them whispering, daring each other to climb it. Calling me names, gearing each other up with hatred and poison to break my window and scare me to death.

I do not know what I have done or what he did—the man who lived in that other house. Perhaps he was just old and funny and stupid and lived where no one could hear him scream and beg.

I will not call them evil. They are not evil. But I am afraid that they are capable of it.

14 October

I sat in the study and waited all day and they came at last at night, and I cried for them to stop and stood on the chair with my pyjamas flapping idiotic around my ankles. I watched as one pulled chalk from its trousers and began to scrawl on the wall opposite my window.

It was too dark to see. But when they had made me cry they fled, and the ghost city stayed beyond my window until just before dawn, long enough for me to read what had been written for me.

YOUR DEAD OLD MAN.

15 October

I have gone out and looked around, and everywhere, in all the parts of the city, wherever I have been, youth seems to fill London.

I have heard animated swearing from girls and boys on bicycles and buses. I have seen signs that read

“Only two children at a time” on the doors of small groceries. As if that were a defence. I have wandered the streets in a strange state staring around me at the little monsters that surround us.

For the first time in my life I see people look at me and glance away embarrassed. Perhaps I have not showered recently enough—I have been preoccupied. Perhaps it is just my broken walk. They could not know that I am newly like this. I was not this derelict thing until a week ago when the children came.

I am afraid of all these unchecked unbridled younglings. None of them are human. They are all like the ones who come to torment me at night.

I cannot look at them, at any of them, without this horrible fear, but also with a jealousy. A longing. I thought at first that this was new, that it had come through the window with that alien moonlight. But when I look at other adults looking at children, I know that I am not alone. This is an old feeling.

I have prepared myself.

I returned to the hardware shop, where the man who fixed my window in place did not remember or perhaps recognise me. I bought what I will need for tonight.

I have spent this day, this perhaps last day, walking slowly around with my hands behind my back (they sought out that old-man grip to go with my old-man limp). And when I saw that it would soon be time, that the afternoon was nearing its end, I shambled home again.

I am ready. I am writing this as the light wanes. So far the old pane, the haunted pane, shows the same sky as its siblings.

I am sitting just below the window with my walking stick by my feet and my new hammer across my lap.

Why me? I have pondered. I was not especially cruel I do not think, in any measured or repulsive way. I have had little to do with children.

During the night visitations, I have seen glimpses of flapping, ridiculous shorts half a century out of date, and discerned the old-fashioned, clipped voices of my merciless besiegers (the tone is not disguised even when sneering in wide-eyed sadism). And yes of course I have thought of the years when I was like them.

Perhaps it is as simple as that, that I look out at my own times running in those hordes. Is this to be that sort of banal morality tale? Am I my own abuser?

I do not remember. I can see myself running through rubble with others, and sifting for prizes and smoking vile things and torturing stray animals and all the rest, but I do not remember singling out some old man to be his personal harpy. Perhaps I deceive myself. Perhaps that is me, out there.

But I cannot believe that Hell is so trite.

I believe that I am just an old man, and that they have a game they have waited sixty years to finish. A game that makes them drunk with contravention. With wickedness.

I am watching and waiting. And when the sun has gone and the light behind that intricate pane flickers and changes, when I look down to see those spirits scamper to their stations with all that monstrous baleful energy, then we shall have a race.

Why not just break it now and have done? Shatter the damn thing.

I have thought of it a thousand times since this began. I have imagined hurling my shoes or books or self at that old glass and sending it into the sky in hundreds of pieces. Pattering down onto the grass so far below.

Or I could simply have it taken out again. I could replace it with a pane like all the others. I could return that glass trap to the bemused shopkeeper. I could leave it carefully in a skip for some other unsuspecting soul. I could sink it in the canal, a piece of disintegrating debris among so many, emitting its ghost light to the fishes.

But the children would still be waiting.

They are not in the window but beyond it. And they have not yet had blood. They have picked me. I do not know why, perhaps there is no reason, but they have picked me. They have me in their sights. I am to be the victim. They have been poised on the brink of this all my life.

Wherever I hide the window, they will be waiting. And if I break the glass into my own world, then nothing will have changed for them in theirs. They will stand in stasis in that hidden city and wait, and wait, and I am afraid of when and how they might find me.

They are just out to see how far they can go.

But if I watch, and strike at the right moment, if I am fast enough, I will take the fight to them.

I will strike a blow for old men.

If I can shatter the glass when their alley waits beyond, if I can smash it into their city, then things might be a little different. It might be a way in.

I want to emerge from the ruins of that window and drop (a short drop if you hang from the rim) into the alley (into the ghostland, immersed in the dead city, but I will not think on that) and I will wave my stick and run for them.

Bloody little hooligans.

If please God I catch one I shall lay it over my knee and by God I shall give it a hiding, a bloody good hiding, I shall teach it a bloody lesson, I will, I will thrash it, and that will, it will put an end to all this nonsense. I can’t run away. I have to put a stop to this. They need to be taught a lesson.

(Oh but even as I write that, I feel so stupid. It is an idiot’s plan. Insane. I catch a glimpse of the rucked skin on my old hand and I know that I can no more climb from the window and drop to the ground in that other city than I can leap mountains. What can I do? What can I do?)

I will try. I will do my damnedest.

Because the alternative is untenable.

I know what they are gearing up to. I know their plan. When the window changes, I will look out once more over that dingy alley, and their message, their chalk threat, will still face me. And I must make it up and out and at them tonight because if I do not, if I hesitate or I am slow, if I fail, if they are faster, if I do not go out...

They will come in.

AN END TO HUNGER