A Vague Attitude

When I was young, I used to dig up worms and pretend I was making a castle for them out of the mud around me. I made a pile almost half as tall as me, which was not all that big, then poked out windows and a big door in the front, being careful not to let the pile collapse in upon itself.
I sectioned out the best rooms for each worm and placed them in the narrow holes, allowing them to crawl inside, out of the cold.
I did not, at the time, see anything wrong with digging them up and forcing them to move into the construct I had made. I thought I was being kind.
It's peculiar how such a childish attitude can remain with a person for a long time.

When I stood next to my dying father he asked me to remember him.
I'm unsure if this was something you should ask of a four year-old, but I smiled and said I would even though I didn't really understand the situation. I could feel something was changing, but as of that time I did not know what it was.
I remember that my mother buried a little glass bottle necklace with my father. She hung it on a golden chain around his broad neck. It looked so small in comparison to him. I had found it a disturbing thought that the tiny bottle would outlast my father's corpse.
I did cry at the funeral, but I only did so because I was confused and afraid, because other people cried, my mother cried.
I don't remember much from back then, but I do remember my father. I think that means I kept my promise.

We had a window in my house, a small one at the end of the hallway, which was permanently covered in a frost. The neighbours said we were being haunted, that we were cursed, and avoided us all.
I liked to look at the intricate patterns in the window. Everyday, they changed to form something new, like snowflakes falling.
One day, I saw a cat standing in the centre of the frame which, only an hour later, became a lion. Another time I saw a smiling face that, after only a few moments, changed to scowl at me.
The window became like a friend to me. It had it's own personality and, if I had offended it in some way, no image would be discernible in the pale fingers grasping the glass.

I was not a popular child and my mother, before my father's death, had been very concerned about my lack of friends.
I was not bullied by the other children, just avoided. If I had bothered to ask them to play with me, I am certain they would have smiled politely and allowed me to join in.
However, I felt no incentive to even talk to my peers. It wasn't arrogance, just something inside of me, something that everyone else had, was missing.

I was the only one who appeared surprised when my father walked back in through the front door, brushing dirt from his black jacket, and sat at the dinner table.
My mother merely smiled politely and said she'd get him some food warmed up.
He sat in his usual seat. I sat net to him and I could see dirt under his nails. There was damp mould in his hair which my mother brushed out as she returned with a plate full of dinner.
My father smiled briefly at her, then me, then he ate the meal like a man on the verge of starvation.

The children began mocking me.
They laughed behind their hands and pointed at me as I walked through the quickly cooling corridors. If I went near them, they moved away, giggling in the cruel way that children do, when they do not understand how much they can hurt others.
It became almost unbearable as I realised that I now wanted to be with them. I did not like being alone anymore. I felt alone where ever I was, even when sat in the arms of my parents. The loneliness was like ice growing inside of me, spreading it's fingers over my stomach, my lungs, my heart.

As I turned ten years old I began to cry myself to sleep at night.

Autumn's transition to Winter had more of a meaning this year. My father had returned but in order to do so, the rest of the world had changed. The window no longer had any frost even if the weather was cold enough to make the rain water in the drainpipe freeze. It seemed that the window itself could no longer freeze. It had lost the ability to do so.
As death had become life, the world had inverted itself.

I thought I saw a young girl standing in the playground of my school. She was alone, watching me from afar as I sat inside the building. Her hair was a similar colour to mine, that was all I could see of her as she was standing too far away.
I found myself smiling as she took a single step towards me.

I woke one night to the sound of something empty crying out. A horrible, hollow sound, longing for what it needed to fill it. I could hear the wind pushing around the empty space, banging on it's four mud walls and screaming in rage past my window.
I could see it in my mind: the deep darkness, something not of this world, not of any world. I could hear loneliness, anger, apathy all in one voiceless sound.
When I told my mother about it, she patted my head and told me it was just the wind blowing through the trees.
When I told my father he stared at me for a long, long time, then smiled a little and told me to clean my room. I noticed a worm curling around his ear.

When we moved house, I wasn't sad.
I wasn't sorry about not having to attend my school anymore, not having to see the children who were not my friends, not having to learn things I had no interest in.
I wasn't sorry to leave the house where I had lived my first twelve years, no longer having to see the defrosted window, the darker corridors, the empty eyes watching me from the holes in the walls.
I was sorry that I had not been able to stop that roaring before I left. The roaring of an empty grave that needed a body to fill it. A mock-grave, unreal as it did not fulfil it's purpose.
I was sorry that I had seen the worm that hung from my father's ear disappear inside his head as we left.

The new house was bigger than the last.
My mother had been given some money by her parents to allow her to leave her old job as a cleaner and move to a new neighbourhood, 'to start over'. She told my father and I that she wanted to run her own business.
“I thought a little shop would be nice.”
My father nodded, although I knew he couldn't hear her. There were maggots inside his ears, feeding off the now dead worms. He hadn't been able to hear anything we said for a long time and I had long since decided not to talk to him.

I was an adolescent who was corrupted by everything and everyone.
I seemed to absorb the enthusiasm, sadness, joy, anger, love and hatred of others and unjustly lash out at those who had not done wrong to me.
I watched television programs about dreamlands and hauntings and believed them to be real. I would sit up in bed, torch in hand, watching the thin panel doors to my wardrobe, knowing that sooner or later something would emerge. I used to sit up like that until I fell asleep so suddenly that when I awoke the next morning, I was still clutching the torch in a cold, claw-like hand.
The influences of my severe empathy and imagination left marks on my mind like dark stains. I believe, even now, that if someone were to open up my head, they would see little black marks covering my brain.
Harmless though they appeared to be, invisible to the human eye, they spread like a cancer. I felt too much and was hurt too often.
My new school was the source of much of this.
The teachers seemed not to see my hand in the air, while the children saw me much to clearly. They used to run past, shoving me down so that I cut my knees and palms on the touch, black gravel, pretending they were just playing a game.
They used to walk past my desk and knock over pots of water so that my artwork was ruined. They used to break my pencils and draw in my textbooks.
When I turned fifteen I was living the life of one who is cursed.

I found a way to stop this cursed life when I was sixteen.
I had been having recurring dreams for several years, of the hollow moaning, the roar of the wind within those four empty dirt walls.
My father's grave calling out for the body that had removed itself of it's own accord.
Recently in the dreams, my own voice could be heard screaming alongside the angry gusts, announcing my own desperation to be rid of this curse.
When the wind began to answer my desperate cries, I knew how to be free.

I had caught my father several times drinking out of the small, empty glass bottle my mother had buried with him, consuming the emptiness inside. I had been contemplating how to persuade him to go back to his grave, to die once again. Now I knew how.

I waited until the darkness crept gradually over the hills and through the trees surrounding the town, like a deadly gas seeping in, unnoticed. I waited until the moon rose to the middle of the sky, balancing there, a white oval contrasting the deep, dark blue surrounding it.
It was at this moment I made my move.
I slipped from my heavy, sleepless blankets, bare feet touching the ice cold floor tentatively at first, then with confidence as I began to pad silently towards my parent's room with all the care of a cat stalking invisible prey.
I knew exactly what I would do once I reached my sleeping father. I would take that bottle from around his neck, using the pliers I had stolen from the hardware cupboard to cut the chain, then I would take it back to the grave. I would throw it in and then I would wait for him to come for it. After he had climbed down into that deep, dark, empty grave, I would bury him alive.
It seemed to take a painfully long time as I progressed gradually along the cold tunnel of the corridor. I felt that I had aged a hundred years before I reached the thin, wooden door to my parent's room.
As I was about to push the door, already open a crack, I found myself staring at a window I had not noticed before, situated at the end of the corridor. It was remarkably similar to the window in the old house that had frosted expressions, except it was perfectly clear.
I saw a face reflected there, but it did not look like my own. It was gaunt, pale, withered like an old, dying flower. In this ghostly reflection a skeletal hand reached up, brushed the paper skin gently, fell out of sight.
As the reflection showed tears sliding down the dying face, I felt my own cheeks become damp.
Time was running out.

It was at this moment that I heard a muffled crash from downstairs, as if something heavy had been dropped upon a cushioned surface. It caused me to jump, startled, and turn to see what the source was. I edged slowly, slowly, along the corridor, the landing, the top of the stairs, then, crouching, peered through the railings of white-painted wood to see into the hallway below.
Another face peered back at me, but it was not my own this time. No, this time the face, bloated and discoloured, grinned back at me with the rictus of death, gruesome and full of irony.
My father waved to me, so slow, as if he had little energy remaining within his corpse of a body. I wondered for a moment why he did not talk to me as he usually did, to question my presence, until I saw his mouth moving.
It was not his mouth, to be precise, but the worms within that were moving. They wriggled with a furious intensity that turned my stomach. One fell from the gap where my father's teeth should have been and knocked into the bottle dangling before his stained shirt then landed on the ground only to be crushed beneath his heavy, black boot.
I stifled a scream of terror as I heard the worm cry with a pathetic, mournful squeak as it was squashed flat, into the floorboards.
My father merely continued to smile at me, bearing his rotten gums and waving.
I knew what had to be done, but it was too much. He stood like a demon in a fairy tale and I wished with all my might that he might vanish like one with the morning light.
I knew this was not so, and my childish thoughts had only caused him to become angry. He no longer smiled, but grimaced with a peculiar pain rising into his rotting, unseeing eyes. The only sense he had left to him was smell. He could smell my fear, my hate. He was angered by it.
I ran.
I ran down the stairs, I ran towards him. I took him by surprise, pushing him back as hard as I could and pulling the bottle from his neck. I wrenched the container of his life from him as easily as if it had been nothing more than a cheap toy I had snatched from another child.
I ran down the corridor, out the door, hearing his moaning cry from behind me. He knew what I was doing. He knew he had to stop me.
The chase began.

It was a long time, seemingly endless, until I reached the graveyard where my father's grave remained empty and unused. The moon was high, bright like the sun, yet only a vague imitation. It cast a pale, unhealthy glow upon the pavement, the grass, as I rushed through the thousand standing stones and monuments, like a forest of death.
The grave was deeper than I had anticipated, at least six feet deep with smooth sides as if they had been cut cleanly with a shovel to prevent escape.
I did not have time to think of an alternative to my plan however, as I heard my father's cry behind me, close. It was heart wrenching and hurt me to my core, but I knew that was I was doing was for the best. He could not continue to live and pull the life from those surrounding him.
I turned to face him as he stumbled towards me, half dragging his one bad leg and his arms reaching out to grab me, it seemed. I did not feel fear or anger anymore, but rather a sense of resignation, of acceptance, as I raised the bottle above my head.
He paused when he saw it, a glint appearing in his dull eyes. Then he sniffed once, twice, and, roaring, flung himself at me.
I crushed the bottle between my fingers, as easily as if it had merely been made from sugar glass.
His corpse – for that was what it now was – kept it's momentum and plunged straight into me, knocking me backwards into that deep, dark grave.
I lay there, sinking a little into the mud, my father's body across my legs, and sighed.
I felt a relief I had not felt before as I closed my eyes and finally, after so long, fell into a deep, dreamless sleep, regardless of the pain caused by my fall.

When I walked back through the front door the next day, my mother did not question me on where I had been, despite my clothes being covered in mud. In fact, she seemed not to notice as she offered me a cup of tea and gestured for me to take a seat.
I sipped the tea, but it did not taste good and there appeared to be a long strand of something in it that curled around my teeth.
Placing the cup down on the little grey coaster, I used my fingers to pull the strand out.
I dropped it, horror filling my chest, as I saw the worm wiggling across the floor in desperate search of another corpse to hide in, to devour.
My mother tilted her head, looking at me in a sort of confusion, and smiled.
“Nice tea isn't it, my dear?”