X2: Another Collection of Horror Page 3

  It had all started when Brian was a little boy. He would sneak out of the house after his parents had put him to bed, and walk the streets of his town, always looking for something but never knowing what. After a while, he started noticing how many ground floor windows were left partially open at night. Almost like an invitation. After that, it was only a matter of time before he climbed through one.

  Being so small, he didn’t need much of an opening to squeeze through. Even when he grew up, he didn’t get much bigger. He was only five feet one (five feet one-and-a-half if he wore his bulky trainers) and weighed just over seven stone. Small. Not dwarfish, but small. Impish, you might say. It really was incredible how many people left windows open. Especially in summer. Sometimes, he would visit three or four different houses in a single night.

  When Brian got older, he moved out of his parent’s house and into a little flat that social services paid for. He stopped looking around his home town for places to visit after dark, and started looking further a field, riding his bike for hours through the night in all weathers until he found a suitable place. Somewhere that he liked.

  He was wise enough to know that you shouldn’t shit where you ate. By that point, he had been in probably half the dwellings in his village and was getting bored anyway. He had been in some homes over a dozen times, and knew their layouts off-by-heart. He knew where the owners kept things, what time they were likely to retire for the evening, and whether or not they liked company. What they wore to bed. The position they liked to sleep in.

  By this time burglar alarms and wall-mounted security lights, activated by motion sensors, were becoming more and more common. They were affordable, and easy to install. However, burglar alarms were mainly just used as visual deterrents. Everyone knew that. Some malfunctioned so much that they caused endless problems and people only turned them on when they went on holiday. Some weren’t even wired up at all. They were just plainly-visible empty metal casings with tiny blue or red flashing lights fixed to the wall above the front door.

  As for security lights, well they were so commonplace that when they were triggered, no one ever paid them any attention. When a light clicked on in a garden, people automatically assumed it had been set off by a a prowling cat or a gust of wind. In fact, those lights were more of a help than a hindrance, especially when visiting a new property. They enabled you to see where you were going.

  As he grew older, Brian also became more adventurous. If he couldn’t find an open ground floor window, he would either force an opening, always being careful not to cause too much damage, or look for a second-floor window. Gaining entry through an upstairs window usually involved shinnying up a drain pipe or climbing over a porch, but that was no problem. He was lithe. Using this route, the chances were that the point of entry was going to be someone’s actual bedroom. It meant you had to be especially careful not to make any noise.

  It was the excitement and the danger that appealed to him most. The fear of getting caught gave him an adrenaline rush like nothing else. There was something about the exalted thrill of doing something wrong, being somewhere you shouldn’t be, that appealed to his most primitive instincts.

  He also enjoyed the challenge. People think of their homes as castles. Impenetrable fortresses. They were so wrong. Most houses were easily accessible. You didn’t even need any special equipment or training.

  Because Brian never hurt anyone or stole anything, most people woke up in the morning completely unaware that he had been in their homes. There was another special skill involved in covering your tracks and remembering to leave everything exactly as you found it.

  Sometimes, if he was in a mischievous mood, he played little tricks on people. Just for his own amusement. There was no malice involved, but sometimes the temptation was just too much and he couldn’t resist moving things around a little bit. Maybe he would hide any remote controls he came across, or take the batteries out, leave a tap running in the kitchen, take the toilet paper out of the holder in the bathroom and leave it in the middle of the floor, re-arrange the books on the bookshelf, or take DVD’s out of their cases and put them all in different ones.

  Once, he found a room which had lots of expensive-looking paintings hung on the walls. Oil paintings, mostly. Very old and probably quite valuable. So he carefully took them all down and stacked them in the corner of another room. One on top of the other. When he took them down, the outlines of the frames were left on the walls, which meant that they hadn’t been moved for years. He left the house chuckling to himself, wondering what the owners would think when they woke up.

  In a way, he was actually doing people a favor. If they woke up in the morning and found that some of their belongings had been played with, in future they may pay more attention to home security and look beyond decoy burglar alarms and stupid security lights. If Brian could gain access to their homes without them knowing, anyone could. They should thank him for highlighting their weaknesses. Sometimes, he thought of himself as some kind of superhero, going from house to house, wherever he was needed, solving mysteries and helping people. One day, perhaps somebody would make a movie or write a comic book about him. They could call it Night Visitor.

  He liked playing with toys, too. He would know immediately if a family whose house he was in had children or not. Sometimes he could literally smell them, the sweet scent of baby oil or nappy cream. Other times, he would find clues; miniature clothes drying on radiators, finger paintings stuck on the fridge. Then he would look for the obligatory toy box. Kids these days usually had a lot of toys. Even the poor kids who lived in the council houses on the estate. He preferred older toys to baby toys, they were far more interesting. More often than not baby toys were just stuffed toys or lumps of soft plastic. Boring.

  If he found a toy box, he would take the toys out and play with them, especially if they were boy’s toys. Boys usually had lots of cool toys like cars and action figures. He didn’t like dolls so much, but he would play with them if there was nothing else. Of course, he would never tell anyone. That would be a bit strange.

  He knew how much children valued their toys, and how they would instantly know if anyone else had played with them. But the good thing was that if they told grown-up, no one would believe them. Their parents would perhaps take a quick look around the house, see that nothing was amiss, and then disregard what their beloved offspring was saying as a product of fantasy and slip back into their chaotic daily routine. Who would break into a house just to play with some toys? Soon, any notion of an intruder would be forgotten.

  No one ever believed children. Even when they were telling the truth.

  Brian often thought that maybe he should buy his own toys. But it wouldn’t be the same if he did that. Most of the fun was in playing with things that didn't belong to you. Besides, the society he was trapped in dictated that he was too old to play with toys. He had no choice but to play with other people’s.

  It hadn’t all been plain sailing. There had been some hairy moments during his career as the Night Visitor. More than once he had been forced to hide in a cupboard when people got up unexpectedly during the night to use the toilet or get a glass of water, and he had encountered no less than six sleepwalkers.

  Six!

  They were weird. They just stumbled around in a daze like zombies, oblivious to his presence. Sometimes, they even had their eyes open and others muttered away to themselves. He came across one lady who chanted like she was doing magic or something.

  He had been caught a few times by people who were awake when they should have been asleep. Once, he went in through a downstairs window to find an old man sitting in an armchair in the dark, wide awake, smoking a cigarette. Strangely, the old man didn’t freak out. Brian thought he must have been either blind, drunk, or senile. Maybe even all three. When he realized that he was no longer alone, the old man actually seemed quite happy about it and they had a short chat about the weather. The poor old chap seemed to think that Brian was somebody else,
he kept calling his Edward. If the visit made the old man happy, where was the harm in it? It made Brian feel warm inside. Like he was doing a good deed.

  Another time, while he was playing with some toys, a little boy had come tip-toeing down the stairs. Brian thought the worst, thought that the boy would start screaming and wake up his parents. But he didn’t. Instead, the little boy sat down next to him and played with him quietly for a while. He didn’t say much, but the little runt had insisted on being the ‘good guys’ when they played soldiers, making Brian represent Germany and killing his quota of soldiers in a variety of increasingly inventive and blood-thirsty ways.

  After a while, the little boy just got up and left without saying a word, presumably to go back to bed. That had been a fun night. Brian kept meaning to pay a return visit one day.

  There was one time, though, long ago, that things had turned nasty.

  Really nasty.

  It was never good to get caught because, as small and non-threatening as Brian was, the moment somebody found a stranger in their house in the dead of night they usually assumed they or their family were in some kind of danger, and lost their temper. Instinctive self-preservation kicked in, and the desire to protect their loved ones turned them into would-be heroes. Or killers.

  One man in particular had Brian pegged as a burglar. He had been a huge mountain of a man, probably a rugby player or something, with short cropped light-colored hair. He was very muscular, but deceptively quick with it. He could quite easily have ripped Brian limb from limb with his bare hands should he have wished. He wouldn’t even have needed to use the weapon.

  Brian had been in a lounge with a shiny new wide screen television, having just gained entry through a fancy set of glass patio doors that the owner had helpfully left unlocked. He was looking around when, on the wall amidst the gloom he thought he could make out a face. Not a painting or a photograph, but an actual face! Even from a distance he could make out the contours, and the contrast between light and shadow lending it definition.

  Slowly, silently, Brian crossed the room, stood underneath the face, and looked up.

  Not a face, after all. At least, not a real face. It was some kind of mask, fashioned from dark wood and decorated with garish, coloured feathers. It looked Native American, or maybe African. Some kind of war mask?

  Interesting.

  As Brian was admiring the war mask, a door was suddenly flung open and the man mountain came charging into the room, screaming and swearing and waving a vicious-looking claw hammer in the air. As quiet as Brian thought he had been, the man must have been awake and heard him enter the property.

  Brian didn’t want to fight. He had never been in a fight in his life. So he just turned and ran for the patio doors, heart thudding in his chest.

  Unfortunately, he wasn’t quite quick enough.

  He heard a strange whistling sound behind him as the big man swung the hammer. Then he felt the impact on the back of his head. The blow knocked him off his feet and sent him sprawling through the patio doors with a crash. There was the sound of breaking glass, and thud as Brian hit the pavement outside. He struggled to his feet, dazed but feeling no pain, and ran off into the night.

  A lucky escape!

  As he ran, Brian had ruefully put a hand to the wound on the back of his head where the man had hit him with the hammer. There was a gaping hole there. His skull was dented and splintered, bits of what he presumed to be his own skull clung to his hair, which was matted with sticky, warm blood.

  In the middle of the hole, his fingers went into something soft and mushy and he withdrew them quickly.

  Was that....

  It's your brain!

  No, it couldn't be.

  It was bad.

  Very bad.

  Brian was also bleeding from a dozen cuts caused by crashing through the doors, and a large shard of glass was embedded deep in the side of his neck. It came out with a wet squelch, and blood sprayed from the hole. There was blood everywhere. Brian was drenched in the stuff, and now he was standing in a spreading pool. He put a hand to his neck and pressed down on the wound to stop any more coming out.

  Luckily, the man mountain with the claw hammer wasn’t chasing after him. So around the corner and out of sight, Brian stopped for a little rest.

  Now he had a headache. In fact, his head hurt so much he could barely open his eyes, and he was suddenly tired. So tired. Maybe that was the shock kicking in. He had heard shock sometimes did that to you. Made you sleepy.

  He lay down on the pavement in the deserted street, bathed in his own blood. It looked black in the glow of the neon streetlights. There, he closed his eyes and went to sleep with the sound of his heart beating in his ears, the pavement cool and damp against his cheek.

  That was the last thing Brian remembered for a while. When he came around some unknown time later, he simply dusted himself down and went home to his empty flat.

  It was still dark.

  Things haven’t really been the same since then. He knew he had been hurt, and knew that he should probably get himself to a hospital. But what would he say? He would have to tell people about his eccentric night-time habits, and that might get him in trouble. Better to say nothing and deal with things on his own.

  By then the blood had stopped spurting from the hole in his neck and he couldn’t feel pain any more, so he guessed he was already on the mend.

  Since that incident, he found that he slept more, and sometimes lapsed into fugues. Sometimes he didn’t even know if he was asleep or awake. The two states of consciousness seemed to merge into one. It must have been that bang on the head. His memory was a hazy mishmash, and his mind struggled to form any coherent lineage. He would often find himself in some strange location with no recollection of how he got there. He couldn't find his bike, and didn't know when the last time he had eaten was.

  It didn't matter. He was never even hungry anymore. Or cold. Or tired. In fact, he couldn't feel anything at all.

  One more thing was that it was always dark.

  Thinking about it, he couldn’t even remember the last time he had talked to anyone. Being the Night Visitor meant that he was awake most of the night, so then tended to sleep most of the day. Like a vampire. That wasn’t good for social interaction.

  He didn’t know what else to do. He had nothing else to do. So he just went visiting constantly. It was the only thing that filled his time.

  Sometimes, he found himself in a area he vaguely recognized. But usually he was in strange places that he couldn’t remember ever going to before. Who knew the local area was so big? Lacking purpose and direction, he usually just followed his instincts. Often, it was more compulsion than instinct. He told himself he was still a superhero, so he went where he was needed, playing with toys that weren’t his, moving things, and carrying out the odd little practical joke. He had to teach people the error of their ways. People really should be more security-conscious. If he could get into their houses while they slept, anyone could.

  But things were different now. All the years of practice must finally be paying off. It was almost as if he was invisible. Oh, people looked at him, like when he made a noise or moved something in their house. They looked, but they didn't see. They just peered straight past him.

  He found he could even touch people as they slept, run his hands over their skin or gently smooth their hair. They stirred but never woke up. It was just like having real superpowers.

  Tonight, he was somewhere that felt familiar. He recognized things.

  Walking quietly up to the large fancy glass patio doors at the back of a dark house, he softly pulled down the handle.

  It was unlocked, just like he knew it would be. He opened the door and quietly walked through.

  The ground floor of the house was immaculate, a place for everything and everything in its place.

  Brian went from room to room looking at stuff, picking things up and putting them back down. In the lounge, he lay a palm on the back of
a huge, expensive wide screen television. It was still warm, meaning that the people hadn’t long gone to bed.

  Then he noticed some kind of war mask decorated with garish, coloured feathers on a wall. Was it Native American? African?

  The sight of the mask made Brian feel funny. He walked over and stood underneath it, gazing up whilst trying to organize his muddled and fuzzy mind into some kind of order.

  Then he noticed a large cardboard box tucked discreetly in the corner of the lounge, overflowing with toys.

  Yes!

  The war mask instantly forgotten, Brian felt a rush of excitement as he hurried over to the toy box and started rooting through the collection. They were mostly unisex baby toys... fluffy bunny rabbits and thick plastic grinning monstrosities. Baby toys didn’t interest him much. Boring, boring. There must be a new arrival somewhere in the house.

  A very new arrival.

  Brian put the toys away almost as he had found them, and went off in search of the baby. Sometimes, he liked to watch them sleep. If they woke up they never screamed, babies didn't seem to know what fear was and they were too little to know that Brian shouldn't be in their rooms. To babies, everything was normal. Everything was accepted.

  After he had seen the baby, maybe he would hang around for a while and play a few practical jokes. It would serve the homeowners right.

  Hero of the Day

  Nathan walked briskly down the street, whistling a simple tune as he went. He was feeling good about life; he had no real worries, and his future was bright. It was a clear, crisp night, and the stars were out in force. The nocturnal streets were deserted in this mainly residential area, most people safely tucked up in bed or watching late-night TV.