The January Featured Writer is John Forth

Please feel free to email John at: forth.john@gmail.com

SKELF

by John Forth

A mile or so from her grandmother’s house, Sarah finally flagged down a ride. At least she would spare herself the worst of the rain. It came on without warning late in the afternoon, the heavy drops stuttering hard against the bonnet and windscreen, almost drowning out the casual chatter of the woman who had picked her up.

“Caught you by surprise, eh?” the driver said. “Nothing worse than being stuck out in the weather like this when you’re not dressed for it. Doubt it’ll last, though. Looks like it’s just going to blow over. See the skies ahead?”

Sarah glanced through the glass at the melting world. The road had the consistency of damp mud, the trees on either side bent and weeping under the onslaught from above, but ahead the cement-shaded clouds broke to reveal a clear, if darkening, sky.

Each dip in the road left Sarah's stomach hanging somewhere behind, despite the woman’s relatively relaxed speed. Every fresh corner revealed a new tangle of ugly branches, but before long, Sarah noticed the first of the wooden posts that marked the edge of her grandmother’s property. If there had ever been a fence attached to those rotted stumps it was long gone, but at irregular intervals forgotten tangles of yellow police tape fluttered in the wind.

As they crested a fresh rise, the car stereo emitted a grunt of static, a fragment of voice, then died again. “Almost had it then,” the woman said with the glee of an amateur butterfly catcher, flailing at the signal only for it to flutter out of reach again. “Must be coming back to civilization. I guess you like living out here, though.”

“It’s just over this next hill,” Sarah said, straining forward against her seatbelt. They were almost beneath the cloudless patch of sky now, and the rain was beginning to ease off. Through the streaks on the glass, she could just make out the muddy turn-off which led to her grandmother’s house. As the woman rolled her vehicle to a halt, the stereo barked out a few seconds of a news broadcast. Having to control the shaking in her hands, Sarah fumbled with the seatbelt release.

“I can take you up to the front door,” the woman said, looking through the driver’s side window at the ragged, overgrown path. “I don’t mind.”

Sarah, free of her restraint, shook her head. “It’s okay, thank you. Believe me, if you went down there you’d never make it back.” The mud; she meant the mud, of course. Sarah reached for the door handle, keen to be away before the radio found its voice entirely. “You’ve been too kind.”

Outside, the rain had abated, but constant streams still poured from the branches above. The strong scent of damp wood and vegetation was almost overwhelming, the air so much fresher than the sweat-tinged halls of the institute. As the red tail-lights of the car disappeared behind a shimmering curtain of rain, Sarah turned to the cave of branches and leaves that hung over the path, and stepped across the boundary onto her grandmother's territory.

All around, the woodland sighed as it allowed itself to drip dry. What little light made it through the clouds failed to penetrate the densely locked fingers of the canopy. The path was a minefield of puddles waiting to slop their icy water over and into her stolen trainers. Sarah walked carefully over ground which bubbled and crackled beneath her feet. Once she almost stumbled off the path and into a black gap between the trees and she had the sense that her surroundings were trying to trick her. There were many paths through these woods—her grandmother had shown her just a handful—and some led to places where it wasn’t safe to wander alone. The last time Sarah was here, fleeing blindly away from the house, she’d almost tumbled onto one of those shifting paths. From time to time over the past nine years she wished that she had.

Was the house built on one of the strange clearings which dotted the woods? Spotting its tainted white walls through gaps in the foliage, she couldn’t help but wonder. There certainly didn’t appear to be any sign that the broad space in which the house sat had been cleared by man, no tell-tale trunk stumps or irregularly cut-back branches. If anything, the woods gave the impression that they had grown around the house, scared to come any closer. The structure slumped at the centre of its domain like a massive albino toad with white columns in place of arms, a half-dozen windows instead of eyes.

She’d worried that maybe someone had bought the house during her absence, but one look told her that it had lain neglected all these years. Around the porch, overgrown grass snaked and writhed; scabs of brickwork were visible where the plaster had cracked and fallen away. The front door lay open, the interior of the hall stained by the elements. The wind through the open house leant a voice to the structure, though Sarah couldn’t tell if it were calling to her, or warning her away.

Pulling her oversized sweatshirt tight around her twig of a body, Sarah walked up the cracked and leaning steps to the porch. Inside, the sounds of the woodland were muted but still they groaned, as if the trees were leaning forward to see what might happen next. The hallway was as she remembered it—floral wallpaper, sideboards sturdy enough to survive a nuclear blast nonetheless creaking beneath a weight of incongruous crockery and ornaments—but the color had been drained by the elements.

Whoever had been through the house last—the police, forensics, an estate agent doomed to have the property on his books forever—had left all of the doors open, and as she passed through, Sarah caught glimpses of the various rooms. In a small parlor, two high-backed chairs faced each other eternally; only cobwebs hung from the hooks in the cupboard. In the living room, she saw the grand wood and leather chair in which her grandmother used to sit. With her white moss of hair and thick wool blankets, the old woman sometimes appeared to be a part of the chair, the lines of her face as defined as those on the grain of the wood. Many times Sarah would sit on the rug in front of her grandmother, listening to croaked stories of the wood and the marsh and the things—things with names Sarah could barely pronounce then or now—she claimed to have seen when she was a child.

Sarah had been rapt, but her mother was less impressed. “Don’t listen to your grandmother’s tales,” she’d told Sarah. “The things she thinks she remembers, well, she’s an old woman. There are her memories, then there are stories she heard, things she read, things that happened to other people. Sometimes she gets confused.”

Reaching the stairs to the second floor, Sarah started to ascend. There must have been a window open up there somewhere, permitting a draft to ruffle her straw hair. Drifts of dead leaves lay against the skirting of the upper landing, and the banister had rotted away to the point of collapse.

The door to Sarah’s bedroom, last on the left, stood ajar and from the noise which came through, she fancied that it may well have opened straight on to the woods. But no, the room beyond was much as she remembered it: the heavy bed, crouched against one wall, ready to pounce; the dresser, triptych mirror displaying the room in dust-softened outline.

And the doll’s house, with its front wide and welcoming, was just as Sarah had left it.

According to Sarah’s grandmother, the doll’s house had been built by Sarah’s great-grandfather out of wood taken from the surrounding trees. It may once have been intended as a replica of its parent home, but the likeness was crude and time had altered it. It sat on an ottoman stool in the far corner of the room beneath a tear in the grey wallpaper which revealed the faded blue sky and yellow globe sun of the previous occupant’s choice. Water pattered into the sodden carpet from a leak in the ceiling, just missing a stack of books and annuals slumped against the wall.

Lying on the cover of the topmost hardback, like a black scratch against the jolly color illustration of two girls laughing by a forest stream, was Skelf.

*****

She had found Skelf when she was a child, on one of the rare occasions her grandmother had managed to drag herself from the chair in the living room and out into the woods. Following the old woman along paths that seemingly only she could see was hard work for Sarah’s small legs, and she had trouble concentrating on what her elder was saying. It was something about ‘cages’ and ‘binding circles,’ things that made no sense to Sarah.

When they reached the edge of one clearing, Sarah made to run forward and rest on the hollow trunk of a toppled tree, but the old woman had thrown out a large hand and clawed her back. “We don’t go there,” she said, brittle voice as full of fright as it was with anger. “We never go there. Rest at the edge, then we’ll follow the path around and back.” And with that she slumped against the nearest tree and closed her eyes, breath coming in long, wheezing gasps.

With nothing else to do, Sarah rooted around the bed of leaves and stone, upturning rocks to disturb the beetles and worms which sheltered beneath. Exposed to sunlight, they would scurry and squirm across the ground, always away from the clearing. Once, she picked up a single worm and threw it towards the empty patch of ground where it writhed briefly before lying still. She was watching for further movement when, right on the edge of the clearing, she saw Skelf.

Of course, he wasn’t Skelf then. He was little more than a crooked finger of wood, topped with a single, knotted ball, clusters of woodland mush clinging to his splintered body. She had later named him Skelf after the Scottish word her grandmother used to describe the tiny green needles which jutted from his ‘body,’ threatening the soft skin of Sarah’s tiny fingers. To this day, Sarah didn’t know why, out of all the other broken twigs scattered on the ground, she chose to pick up Skelf. Nor did she know why she decided to take him back to the house.

Perhaps it was the shock of the abrupt cough her grandmother emitted, as she pushed herself away from the tree, which startled Sarah into stuffing the little shaft of wood into her pocket and leaping back from the edge of the clearing. Perhaps something else was at work. Whatever the cause, she took Skelf back to the house, and he had been there on that last night at the centre of the tiny drama that young Sarah played out within the walls of her doll’s house.

As she had done that afternoon in the clearing, Sarah lifted Skelf from where he lay and held him up in front of her face, careful to avoid splinters. He had bit her that day, leaving tiny needles of wood under the skin of her small finger. Why she hadn’t thrown him away then, Sarah didn’t know. Instead, Skelf had become just another of her toys, living in the painted wood garden of her doll’s house.

Was it something in one of her books that made her dress him the way she had? She remembered how exciting she found stories of highwaymen, and assumed that was why she'd clothed Skelf’s body with a swash of black fabric, a tiny, poorly-stitched brimmed hat on the knuckle of wood that served as his head.

The face was another matter. Sarah had no recollection of gouging eyeless sockets into the wood, nor was she responsible for the ragged diagonal mouth which almost divided Skelf’s 'head’ in two. She could only assume that the features had been there all the time, and wondered—as she had as a child—if Skelf had once been part of a larger figure, perhaps something left abandoned amongst the roots until only a fragment remained.

*****

Holding Skelf securely in a tight fist, Sarah negotiated the slim pillar of water still pouring from the ceiling and stood before the doll’s house. The remnants of her last game, the one she had been playing that final afternoon, lay where she had left them. The four other dolls were less crude than Skelf, but still basic, not much more than colored wooden columns topped with globular, grinning faces. There was a mother, a grandmother, a girl, and a boy. All of them lay on their sides in different rooms. If there had ever been a father to go with the set, he was long gone.

Kneeling down in front of the bare open rooms of the miniature house, Sarah regarded the toppled figures. Then, one by one, she stood them up, arranging them as best she could in their old positions. She felt like a scientist, attempting to recreate the exact conditions of an experiment.

Sarah almost laughed. That wasn’t too far from the truth. Time and time again she had been told that her actions had held no bearing on what happened to her mother and the others, but she’d never believed. What had the doctor said? “To get better, you have to accept that you were not responsible.” Well, she’d come to the house to find out once and for all what really had happened, whatever the consequences.

Holding him between her thumb and forefinger, she raised Skelf to the doll’s house and tapped his head against the soft wood of its outer wall. Voice no more than a rasped whisper, she said: “Let me in, let me in.”

The four occupants of the house remained silent and inert.

Reaching forward, Sarah curled her arm around the back of the house so that Skelf’s face leered in through one of the back windows. The brim of his hat folded against the plastic, covering one pit of an eye. “Let me in,” Sarah said again. “Let me in.”

Had the wind outside picked up, or was something else pushing through the trees?

Sarah tried to ignore the sounds and concentrate on finishing her game. Her hand was trembling too much, though, and she was forced to grip Skelf tighter. As she moved the little effigy back to the side of the house, near the kitchen door, she became aware of a static smell in the air, sharp and penetrating.

A beam of amber light shone through the open window, casting shadow leaves onto the far wall before travelling across the room and flickering out. Surely the house was too deep in the woods for any car headlights to reach. She had an urge to rush to the window before the source of the illumination disappeared, but she held back because that wasn’t what she had done before, and it would break the spell to do so now. Face fixed in determination, she pushed Skelf against the doll house door. “Let me in,” she said. “Let me in.”

Something slammed downstairs. A door caught by the wind, or a piece of furniture thrown aside?

Immobile, Sarah listened carefully as the old house breathed in and out. Irregular, heavy creaks came from below, the tentative footsteps of something that hadn't walked for a long while.

She glanced at Skelf, now standing in the dollhouse living room, so tall that she had to hold him at an angle to prevent his head from brushing the ceiling. The shaking in Sarah’s hand had traveled the length of her arm and was now sweeping through her body. She longed to let Skelf go, to let him roll from her hand and fall to the ground, but the muscles of her hand were rigor-tight. If she gripped hard enough, would he splinter and fall apart? Sarah hoped so, but somehow she doubted it.

In the real house, there was another crash from the ground floor. In the dollhouse, unbidden and untouched, one of the child-dolls toppled over onto its face. Sarah stared at it, certain now that the doctors had been wrong all along: everything had been her fault.

The mother doll spun on its base before falling against the wall. Sarah jolted the hand holding Skelf back, fingers free. The figure of wood and cloth stood where she had left him, at an angle that should have caused him to fall. If she were stronger, Sarah might have lashed out, cast Skelf away from the dollhouse and onto the soft marsh of the carpet, but she could not move. All she could do was wait.

She could hear Skelf breathing, a dry, brittle noise which reminded her of the wind through a hollow log. And then he disappeared from the dollhouse.

In her grandmother’s house, the stairs complained as a great weight was pressed down on them. A rustling, like fingers through foliage, accompanied the footsteps as they climbed, steadier all the time. The steps softened as they reached the landing carpet, creeping ever closer. Sarah imagined—or was it a memory—how Skelf would fill the doorway, how his body would creak and groan as he ducked to enter the room.

That was enough to galvanize her into action. Sarah threw herself backwards, twisting towards the door to the hall. She caught the briefest glimpse of the thing that filled the narrow passage before she ran back into her bedroom and slammed the door. Sarah pushed her weight against the door but it felt insubstantial; weak.

At any moment, she expected the giant Skelf to smash through, reducing both the door and her bones to splinters. She waited for the impact, trying to remember how she’d escaped before, but nothing came. Behind the door, she could hear the scratching of fingers along the wall, scrabbling for purchase to wrench the door away. Then there was silence, and Sarah braced herself.

And then a series of gentle taps sounded on the other side of the door. A voice followed, dry as a summer day, the words passed through vocal cords formed from strands of grass and taut reeds. “Let me in,” it said. “Let me in.”

John Forth’s short fiction has appeared in Midnight Street, The Journal of the British Fantasy Society, Estronomicon and the Monster Book for Girls. Although a Scotsman by birth, he has lived in Brighton, England for the last five years. He can be stalked with impunity at www.twitter.com/johnforth, and his occasional ramblings on all things horror can be found at www.johnrforth.wordpress.com.