My Grandpa lived under my bed. Until I was eight he had lived in a residential care home; he seemed happy there and even had what my mother ruefully referred to as a ‘sweetheart’, a lady who lived in a room a few doors away and had blue rinsed hair. I didn’t understand this at the time. I now realise that there was a lot I didn’t understand. I didn’t understand why my father wasn’t around. I didn’t understand why my mother could never afford to buy me new toys, or why she cried all the time.
Although I was certain that he loved me, I also didn’t understand my Grandpa; he had had a cordectomy when I was very young to treat his cancer, and whilst the cancer remained his vocal cords did not. Although he had an electronic device which enabled him to speak, the shrill and robotic voice that it produced frightened me so he didn’t use it when I was brought over to visit. I therefore knew my Grandpa only as a kind, silent figure in an armchair, always ready with some sweets and a smile for me.
I felt guilty at the time but I rather enjoyed that he could not speak and so didn’t expect me to sit quietly whilst he talked endlessly about boring things like my other elderly relatives did. We would pass whole afternoons in companionable silence, me playing with my toys and him reading the paper, until my mother came to collect me. I loved my Grandpa.
When I was eight he moved out of the care home. A week later I was taken out of school for the day and dressed up by my Mom in tight, smart clothes which I hated, and shoes which pinched my heels when I walked. I would have whined and complained but I saw that she was crying even more so than usual, so I kept quiet. We went to a church and I remember looking at the pretty glass in the windows, the pictures of saints and how the light shone through them so that they glowed. I didn’t listen to the service as it was very boring but I knew, in a vague way, that it was about my Grandpa. I suffered my mother holding onto my hand too tightly as I could see she was upset, but I didn’t understand why. Grandpa hadn’t left us, as my Auntie Val had said when she spoke at the front of the church. He had just moved in underneath my bed.
He must have been very busy during the day, because he was only ever there at night. I wouldn’t have minded his new residence – as I said, I loved my Grandpa – but he did keep me awake at night. Seemingly having found his voice in the move, Grandpa now spoke to me through the mattress; I couldn’t always hear what he was saying and only caught odd words like my name, my mother’s name, and strange guttural sighs - like he was cursing or praying. It calmed me to have him close and on many nights his breathy murmuring lulled me to sleep.
‘Grandpa?’ I called down to him before I slipped into my dreams that first night. He didn’t reply but I knew he was listening. ‘How did you get here?’
‘Your mother whistled for me, lad. She whistled and I came to her.’
‘Oh. Huh. Do you want me to bring you some food tomorrow? You must be hungry after spending days in that box.’
Grandpa laughed, then, a high keening chuckle which made me feel cold beneath my heavy blankets.
‘No need, child. No need.’
He would ask me to do things, my Grandpa. Only little things at first. Sneak into my mother’s room and look through her papers, that sort of thing. He was searching for something but I didn’t understand what. He would mutter to me about how he had been given him a ‘helping hand, come the finish’ and how he needed to know whether his suspicions were correct. I had no idea what any of that meant and told him so, and he chuckled in a voice like an empty grave.
‘It means that you don’t have to worry about money anymore, child. Your Aunt Valerie saw to that, as I heard whilst laying in my hospital bed.’
‘Auntie Val?’
‘The very same. But I couldn’t cry out. Do you know why that was?’
I swallowed and hoped, in the darkness, that Grandpa couldn’t see how I winced.
‘Because you had no voice, Grandpa.’
He crowed in delight and I quivered. I couldn’t help thinking I had liked him better before he could speak.
‘That’s right, child! I had the voice taken out of me, torn right out of my throat. A decision I made an age ago, when I sincerely thought it mattered when and where I met my maker. I know better now. I am… much altered.’
As far as I knew an altar was what had been standing beside my mother whilst she sobbed and shook in the church, the light shining through the stained glass giving her a sickly green tint. I knew no other meaning as a child but, looking back, I am inclined to agree with Grandpa on this one. He had changed and not for the better.
Although I loved having my Grandpa home with us some things he said and did began to worry me. A kid at school was giving me a hard time and I spent many nights telling Grandpa all about it, my angry tears soaking into the pillow where no one could see.
My nemesis’s name was Harry and he was a real down-and-dirty brat who would do anything from biting my arms to tattling on me for not doing my homework. Harry made my days a misery and I could never see an end to it. That is, until my Grandpa advised me in his sickly-sweet purr to fight back.
That’s what I knew he would say. That was what all my male relatives had always said, and it never worked. ‘Punch him back even harder than he punched you and he’ll respect you for it’ – yeah, right. I’d think about that whilst I was picking my teeth up from the floor. Grandpa’s suggestions were different though. He didn’t tell me to punch Harry square in the mouth. He told me to cut out his eye.
‘You know where your mother keeps the knives, don’t you my lad? The really sharp ones with green handles. The ones she uses to cut meat.’ He seemed to relish this last word and held it too long on his tongue.
‘But I can’t do that!’ I squeaked, my pre-pubescent voice shrill with alarm.
‘You hate this boy, don’t you? Want him to leave you alone? He won’t bother you again in a hurry if you take his sight. Come, I’m not telling you to pluck them both from their sockets – just the one, to serve as a warning.’
‘I don’t think I can do that, Grandpa. I’m not brave enough.’
He tutted, annoyed, and I heard the rustle of something dry and leathery from the shadows under my mattress.
‘I can see that. I had hoped that you would have more of a spine but, well… We must all begin somewhere. You must cut him a little, boy. Cut him ‘til he bleeds. Then,’ he seemed to relax and gave one of his rare happy sighs, ‘then I think you will have the taste for it.’
I recoiled from his words and yet, in some warped way, I wanted nothing more than to please him. I felt so desperately lonely. I recognise that now. I was a sad little boy with a mind ripe for the picking. And I would have done anything to end my bully’s reign of terror.
So when I walked to school the next day my backpack was a little heavier, the large serrated knife that I had concealed within it burning through my clothes and making my skin hot with pants-wetting dread. More disturbing to me, though, was the discomforting excitement I felt at the thought of the blade.
As Harry cornered me after class, his big wide mouth slack with arrogance, I stood my ground and struck out at him blindly. He bellowed like a bullhorn and I saw murder in his piggy little eyes. In that moment my Grandpa’s advice came back to me and I grabbed the knife from out of its hiding place. Did I cut out his eye? No. I still had some semblance of sanity and virtue, no thanks to my Grandfather. But I sliced him a good deep gash across his cheek, desperate and ragged and bloody.
We both stood panting, my bulging eyes full of panic but also a strange elation, a dark kind of joy singing through my veins. Harry just raised his hand to his face and stared at the coppery rivulets that ran down his fingers, and he was still standing like that when the bell rang and I trooped back into class.
When I told my Grandpa what I had done that night he crowed with happiness, positively cackling and shaking the bed springs so jovially that I almost rolled straight off.
‘Good boy, precious boy! Not everything that I had hoped but still more than I expected. And you got away with it?’
‘Yeah!’ I retorted, a little stung by his ‘more than I expected’ comment. ‘Harry didn’t tell.’
‘Too ashamed no doubt. A coward. Not like you, my boy. You have impressed me. I had been despairing but… no. I think you have the potential to be exactly what I need.’
I yawned. The long and frantic day had really taken it out of me and, as I drifted off to sleep, I listened to my Grandpa’s voice trailing off into a whisper.
‘And don’t you worry. The boy will never trouble you again. I guarantee it.’
Around a week later Harry was reported missing. I don’t remember it too well – by that time my life had become a Hell of policemen and social workers and my Auntie Val’s tear-stained face, so I had little time to pay attention to what was happening at school.
But I do remember thinking about that night that my Grandpa had promised he would never bother me again, and about the perfect rose of blood that bloomed on Harry’s face after I slashed it open, and screaming and screaming until my Uncle got me out of bed and hugged me close.
In the days that followed my attack on the ill-fated Harry, my Grandpa’s pride swelled huge and heavy. Honestly I loved the attention. My Mom was always distracted with this and that – with bills and money and with what my Auntie Val referred to in hushed tones as ‘what Dad owed us.’ He was so pleased with me, he said, he wanted to give me another task to perform for him.
The little things that he’d asked me to do in the past had confused me – why did he want me to tell him what my mother did all day – who she saw, where she went and who with? Or to watch as my Aunt and Uncle walked to their car, laying and listening and absorbing their strange whispered conversations like a sponge? I would report everything back to him later, in the dead of night, tucked up in my blankets like a blood-sucking tick buried in flesh. I didn’t like doing it. I felt like a traitor to my mother, a no-good spy for a person I was increasingly afraid of. But I was a child with a child’s willingness to please, so I never said no.
Previously he had taken the treasures I brought to him without much comment. I would slide the binders full of letters, bills or final statements into the dark space lurking beneath the bed and jump away quickly, careful not to touch the shadows but never knowing why. I always heard my Grandpa take them into his hands, the crackly shuffling of paper filling the stuffy air - although that sound was almost indistinguishable from the usual noises his skin made. He would always throw it back out though, skidding whatever I had brought him across the floor in frustration.
He was looking for something specific, he said. Something that would prove that Mom was as much to blame for him having to move house as Auntie Val was.
Then, one day, he found it. I had brought him a letter addressed to my Mom’s lawyer – not that I had the faintest idea what that was at the time. I thought of Mr Clare as my Mom’s ‘law man’, like the sheriffs in the Westerns that aired on sunny Sunday afternoons. I felt so safe curled up watching those old movies with my Grandpa, back when he lived in the residential home and was wordless and happy.
This letter to Mr Clare the Law Man made Grandpa extremely unhappy. He screeched with an almost jubilant rage and I felt the bed shake and shudder with his cries.
‘Stop it Grandpa! You’ll wake Mom up!’
‘No, boy!’ He squealed with poisonous pleasure. ‘You are going to wake her up! Now I know, you see! And now I can act… I couldn’t before, I was prevented. I was weak, as weak and powerless as you were when I first found you. But now… But now!’
He giggled, then, like a gleeful schoolchild. I didn’t like that. Nothing good ever came of Grandpa being happy.
‘Do you still have that knife, lad?’
‘Yes,’ I muttered. It was languishing in the bottom of my bag, guilty stains turning to a rusty brown on its blade.
‘I want you to take it out and show it to your mother.’
‘You mean… hurt her?’
‘I’m not asking for her eye, lad, just that you give her a message from me.’
‘Tell her yourself!’ I snarled. The memory of the feel of the knife in my hand was making me panic – but not so much as the realisation that the memory excited me. I felt sick. What had my Grandpa done to me?
‘Oh I can, I can, but I want you to act for me boy. The last stage of your training. To take a knife to the soft flesh which gave flesh to you.’
I shook my head fiercely, cracking my neck and barely caring. But to my horror I felt my hands begin to move of their own accord, pushing back my blankets. As if in a dream – a nightmare – my legs threw themselves off the bed and I landed with a thump on my tip-toes, flailing like a marionette.
Silent tears streamed down my cheeks as I tried to fight the urge, but I couldn’t. I was being led out of my bedroom and across the hall, into my mother’s room, my bare feet barely whispering on the wooden floorboards. And I was more afraid than I had ever been. Not afraid of my Grandpa but afraid of myself. I approached her bed like a boy in agony, a sinner in Hell.
I stood in the gloom. My tiny frame barely reached higher than the headboard of her bed but in that moment, standing in the dark over my sleeping mother, I felt like a looming monster. I tested the weight of the knife in my hand and suddenly felt sick. But even sicker was the excitement I felt rising in my belly at the prospect of feeling the same rush I felt when I hurt Harry. A low chuckle came from behind me and almost made me drop the knife in surprise and terror.
‘Grandpa! You’re out from under the bed?’ I hissed into the blackness. I had never known him to leave in all the time he was living with us and I hadn’t believed him able to. Perhaps he never could before that night, before I gave him what he was looking for.
‘Where are you?’
‘Behind you, lad. Don’t turn around. Just listen to my voice.’
A restless creaking sound came from behind me, like the shuffling of old bones. I whimpered. I didn’t feel excited anymore. That strange mad elation had passed as soon as it had come and even my Grandpa’s lulling voice couldn’t draw me back. I think he sensed my hesitation, even in the blind dark. In fact, now I reflect on it, maybe he wasn’t so blind in the dark after all.
‘You see your mother there, boy?’ Continued the dread whisper. ‘She may look as innocent as a maid but her heart is black, boy, black as tar.’
‘What are you talking about?’ I quavered.
‘Open your eyes, lad! How do you think I came to be here? She whistled for me, oh yes – she called out for me, in her terrified mind and wide open heart, guilt running through her worthless veins. She did me in, did me in for the money I had and would never give her whilst there was breath in my body. Greed and debts lined my coffin, boy, the one belonging to your aunt and the other to your mother.’
‘No, no…’
‘Yes! The coroner may not have seen what I saw as the light left my eyes, but I saw enough. And I’ve read it in your mother’s own words, thanks to your help, my boy. Prepared to turn herself in, wracked with guilt, oh yes. A likely story.’
I looked down at my mother in the darkness. I remembered her loving arms around me, and wondered when I had last seen her smile. When I had last seen her without a worried frown creasing her brow, or without Auntie Val at her side, whispering frantically in her ear.
‘She deserves to be punished for what she did to me. For what she’s done… to us. You’re with me now, child. And you will do as I say…’
There was a mirror hanging over her bed. It was old, or seemed old to me at the time; a wedding present from another age. As I stood beside my mother’s sleeping body, gently breathing and unaware of the threat that she had birthed, I glanced up into its cool depths – and recoiled. I could see the shape of my Grandpa rising behind me, the first glimpse of him I had caught in all that time. He was tall, a huge shape in the murky shadows. Too tall. He seemed to unfold himself up and up, a gangly monolith, his bones cracking and popping like the candy I loved to chew. And even in the dark I could see he was smiling, and his mouth was all wrong.
A hand - no, a claw - hovered over my head in some sick parody of a blessing. The other was slinking its way around my neck. I screamed then, screamed so hard and loud and long that I saw stars behind my tightly shut eyes. I regret so many things but that I regret the most.
The noise woke my mother, made her scrabble for the light switch with an irritated rebuke on the tip of her tongue, and I knew my Grandpa wouldn’t be happy. So I ran, and as I ran it was my mother’s screams which filled the air, although it wasn’t until I was quivering under my bedclothes that I realised the sounds weren’t coming from my own mouth.
I wasn’t conscious when the police found me. A concerned neighbour had heard the sounds… the sounds… and called them. I have no idea why my Grandpa spared me. Although as I grow older a suspicion has grown in my mind like a pearl. Oh, I have no proof, but sometimes I remember how he so effortlessly took hold of my mind and moved me like a puppet, and I wonder. Perhaps he’s not done with me. I no longer use knives in my waking moments but in my dreams the blade ways so heavy in my hand .
After that night I moved in with my Aunt and Uncle and only ever heard whispered slivers of conversations which they refused to have in my presence. Like: ‘A wild animal the police are saying, but how could an animal rip the room apart like that?’ Like: ‘The poor little mite. Does he even understand? And oh, all that blood.’ And like: ‘They still haven’t found her head, you know. Oh God.’
I listened to them talking about me and curled my arms around my knees, hugging myself tight the way I knew my mother would never hold me again. They thought I was oblivious because I wasn’t afraid, even after what had happened to Mom, but I knew what they didn’t. I knew there was no reason to fear anymore. My Grandpa had left and I didn’t see him ever again, and for that I was deliriously glad.
No, I never saw him again. I’ve heard him though. Over the years, from the dark places in the corners of the room, from behind the curtains and from the gap in the wardrobe doors. Even now, so many years later, I am older but no safer. Hearing him brings a terror which grows more intense with every year that I age, and come to understand what really happened when I was eight years old. I throw the covers over my head and hide like the child I once was.
I’ve tried to tell various people over the years, to no avail. The closest I ever got was with my first – and only – serious girlfriend. I found myself lying beside her in bed, the terror of five years trembling on my lips but struggling to give mouth to the words, before… before I heard a leathery chuckle from the space below my head.
I don’t know which prospect scares me the most these days, as I lay down to sleep in my brightly lit room, four lamps surrounding me and a backup flashlight under my pillow. Is it the thought that whatever was under my bed wasn’t my Grandpa after all? That it was something else, something dark and opportunistic, something that still lurks just beyond the safety of the light? Or it is the other possibility which fills me with more dread; that what whispers to me really is my Grandpa, after all?
I am grateful for one thing in this hollow existence that I now call a life. I’ve never heard my mother’s voice joining my Grandpa’s in his nightly lullabies. I haven’t whistled for her and I don’t think she will ever come, merciful God. Although I can’t say for sure that she isn’t there. I’m too afraid to check underneath my bed.