Wise Child

 

 

The rain blew against the picture window of the apartment like a wet blanket; looking out through the drifting clouds of droplets Alice could see the deserted suburban street below. Across the road behind a white painted fence and a tall hedge was the new school, where she was standing was opposite the huge window letting light into the foyer, on the wall of which was written the school motto : ‘My open eyes desire the truth’, in letters the colour of blood.

 

When Alice stood back from the window the glass showed her a ghost image of her face, she looked pale, unwell and afraid. Far off over the horizon thunder rumbled as it had been doing for the past hour, it did nothing to improve her splitting headache.

 

The truth, she thought with a touch of hysteria, wasn’t that the last thing most people really desired; even if it had a habit of finding them anyway.

 

It, the truth, the awful inescapable truth, had found her only two hours ago when Ben, her sister’s son for whom she was babysitting had said in an utterly matter of fact tone of voice ‘They promise to be kind to you.’

 

There was, Alice had to admit, something ‘not right’ about Ben. He was an unnaturally quiet toddler, where other children of the same age whined or had tantrums he seemed to inhabit his own little self contained space. Perhaps that was as well since he had never been more than a fashion accessory for his high flying mother, one more thing along with the huge apartment in a good part of town, the wafer thin tablet computer and the condo in Florida that proved she had climbed are enough up the corporate ladder to see the clouds above.

 

In the way of all lonely children Ben had developed the muscles of his imagination and used them to create an imaginary friend. Not a bad thing in itself Alice thought, but in Ben’s case his imagination seemed to have taken an early swing through the dark and produced Pigman to share his loneliness.

 

She had tried to raise this with her sister, but she had dismissed the whole thing as a ‘phase’ before returning her interest to the emails whizzing into here i-phone every second. Alice wasn’t sure if Pigman counted as just a ‘phase’, not least since he seemed to share an identity with that other favourite of childhood; the bogeyman.

 

Alice thought of the first time she had heard Ben talk about Pigman, it had been a year ago and she had been babysitting for him while her sister was away in New York. He had been playing some game on the floor with his toy cars that had involved making noises that represented explosions and police sirens. All of a sudden he stopped and sat looking at nothing with a quizzical expression on his face.

 

‘Did you get all the baddies?’ she asked ruffling his hair.

 

‘Pigman says they illsusery,’ he’d replied.

 

‘Illsusy, that’s a funny name, is she Pigman’s friend?’

 

Ben had frowned, as if frustrated by the slowness of adults at grasping important things that were obvious to children.

 

‘Pigman says they all illsusory, the cars and stuff, illsusory; like on TV, only the cloud is really for real,’ there had been an intensity about Ben’s voice that had made Alice shudder and think of a  lifetime of therapy, medication and stays in expensive clinics that might lie  ahead for him.

 

Alice knew most children had an imaginary friend at some stage, she’d had three herself, their names had been Leonard, Prune and Coffin. What she’d thought they’d looked like or why they had come and gone she couldn’t remember; what she was sure of though that none of them represented anywhere near so malignant a presence as Pigman.

 

He seemed to be ever present, an invisible stone at the centre of expanding ripples of trouble. When she caught Ben covering his food with a snowdrift of salt it was because Pigman had told him to; when he had somehow managed to break the huge old mirror that hung in the hallway it was clear who had given the instructions; Pigman.

 

These and the dozens of other strange little accidents and instances of misbehaviour that had made her increasingly uncomfortable around her nephew seemed to be part of an attempt to induct him into the ways of the ‘cloud.’ This, needless to say, was where Pigman lived.

 

The ‘cloud’ bothered Alice; it seemed to operate, as far as she could understand it from the understandably confused explanation given by Ben as a sort of anti-everything, an overwhelming negative that derived its existence from everything that seemed to be real actually being false. Even garbled by the limited understanding of a toddler this sounded like an exceptionally bleak idea, where could he have got it from?

 

Her sister was in the habit of indulging a clique of almost intellectuals who worked in the media and would happily provide the sort of table talk that made her feel clever without the trouble of having to learn anything for a free meal. Perhaps Ben had heard their chatter drifting through the baby monitor that rode on the dinner table like an ornament and mangled bits of it into the ‘cloud.’

 

Even so it wasn’t right, children should fantasise about pleasant things, their birthday, superheroes, the characters on their favourite cartoon show; not the existence of a cloud that represented an ultimate full stop to everything.

 

The wind blew another blanket of rain against the window to break apart and run down the glass in individual drops. Behind her the television, which had been quietly playing some mindless sitcom where people in expensive casual clothes mouthed wisecracks in coffee shops, suddenly blared out the ‘breaking news’ jingle of one of the news channels.

 

Alice turned round to see on the screen a wide angle shot of the London skyline, between the brightly lit towers drifted trails of what looked like unnaturally black smoke. The camera cut back to the studio and a news anchor saying “Reports, confirmed there by the footage you’ve just seen, are coming in of a series of explosions in central London and several other locations. A spokesman for the Home Office has urged the public to remain calm, anyone concerned about friends or relatives in the central London areas should call…”

 

The well modulated voiced of the news anchor was suddenly drowned out by the blare of a police siren, startled Alice turned back to the window in time to see a patrol car sweep into the street in a wash of flashing blue lights. For a moment she thought the driver would lose control on the corner, then the tires gained traction on the slick tarmac and the car raced on into the night, leaving a bow-wave that splashed momentarily against the kerb.

 

Looking out into the darkness Alice noticed, seemingly for the first time, how through the wet glass the reflection cast on the clouds by the lights of the city looked like that of flames.

 

On the television the news the cityscape had changed, as had the reporter standing in front of it, a confident looking woman in a belted raincoat, a tag in the corner of the picture told viewers that she was in New York.

 

‘A statement given by the White House press office says the President has spoken to the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the Department of Homeland Security following the incidents in Chicago and Minneapolis earlier today…,’ as she read from her notebook her voice betrayed no emotion beyond professional curiosity.

 

Alice felt the air pressure in the room change making her ears pop as if she were in the cabin of a plane that had suddenly gained altitude. The television picture dissolved instantly into a frantic buzz of snow accompanied by the manic hissing of static, the lights went out momentarily before coming back on at half power.

 

Over the next hour she tried all the television channels several times, every one was dead, so were the radio stations; mostly.

 

Just once as she flicked through the dead channels she caught a change in the pitch of the hissing static, it sounded, just for a second, like a human voice screaming. It couldn’t have been, of course not the rational, adult section of her brain told her. Whatever unlikely shapes imagination gave them everything ultimately had a logical explanation.

 

Even so she switched the television off before resuming her place at the window, because even if it wasn’t real whatever she had heard had frightened her more than she had ever been frightened before.

 

It took Alice some time to notice that the lights of the city which were spread out from the hill where the apartment building and the school stood seemed to be fewer than before. She thought distractedly about the huge turbines that must spin away somewhere out of sight providing electricity for the city, perhaps they were switching off one at a time; maybe something was switching them off.

 

Outside it was still raining hard; the street below was empty save for the shadow like form of a cat slinking through the railings of the school. It turned and looked up at the window where she stood and for a moment its eyes glittered like two burning coals of feral animosity.

 

Beyond the rain spattered glass the number of lights scattered across the city seemed to have reduced dramatically, there were huge expanses of darkness, some of which were starting to link together like water from a flood running in under a door. Something was switching off the power relay by relay.

 

What would happen then? Darkness would come, the primal fear human beings drive off with a chain of electric lights wrapped around the world would be everywhere and be everything; like a single vast cloud.

 

There was a barely perceptible creaking sound from the floorboards behind her, Alice turned round and screamed as her spine turned into a column of ice.

 

It was Ben, in the fading light his face looked pale and unnaturally smooth; like the carved face of a child in the wall of a tomb. His eyes were as dead and black as two stones.

 

He reached out to her and in a voice as still and emotionless as that of a computer said:

 

“Don’t worry; they promise to be kind to you.”

 

Outside thunder suddenly tore the sky apart.

 

  January 2014.