Tumbledown

 

Dave Fawcett

 

 

 

The stone rolled down the hill gathering moss, mud, grass and insects as it went. Satisfied that it was on course Peter bent down to pick up another missile, aimed it at his target and let it roll.

 

Peter was eleven; bright-eyed, red haired and freckled. His skin, much of which was exposed by his skimpy shorts ant tattered vest, glowed with youthful health and a touch of sunburn. He was supposed to be at school but an accident a few months previously had left him with a slightly faulty memory. It could be very convenient when there was something he didn't feel like doing; which was most of the things he was supposed to do.

 

Peter was fey; that was something else the accident had left him with. He could see fairies at the bottom of the garden – or at least that's what he told his Grandma. In fact he could see all the little hobgoblins, demons, imps and gnomes that inhabit other people's minds - again that's what he told his legion of doctors, psychiatrists and counsellors.

 

The reality was that he could ‘see' other people's fears and to an extent he could manipulate them. That he saw them as hobgoblins and demons was of no consequence. Peter didn't think that his shrink would be able to comprehend the distinction anyway. Keep it simple for them he reasoned. That way it made things easy for them and they thought that they were really helping him. That kept them pretty much out of his way.

 

The little gnome he was playing with at the moment was typical of those he met almost daily. It had a lumpy, warty face with a huge nose and a soft floppy body that always seemed to be on the verge of tumbling down in a heap. It was for that reason that Peter had named this particular manifestation Tumbledown. It had conveyed to him that it's friend – its host really for these things didn't have friends - had an overwhelming terror of falling stones. Not surprising really since the poor boy had once been trapped in a house that had been demolished in a gas blast.

 

Right now Peter and Tumbledown were enjoying their game of bowls. Peter was winning. He had scored five hits out of six' a good strike rate. Tumbledown hadn't scored any but that wasn't really surprising since he wasn't able to bowl the stones. ‘After all he's just a figment of my imagination or something' peter reflected smugly as he released the seventh stone accurately towards the target.

 

It was peculiar how Peter divined the fears of others from their personal goblins. They never spoke to him; never conveyed any information in a tangible way. It just ‘was'! A slight deformity of an ear perhaps or an odd hue in the colour of the eyes gave him all the information that he needed.

 

With Tumbledown it had been very simple. A dint in the top of his skull had been the only clue that Peter had required. ‘Perhaps it was caused by a falling stone' he had reflected.

 

Suddenly Tumbledown was no longer there. Simultaneously the target stopped moaning and became still and lifeless. “Shit” Peter groaned! He knew that this particular game had finished. When the other player took his bat home the game was always over for good.

 

Still what the hell! It was no great loss. As games went this one hadn't been any more than average. Not as good as some of them anyway.

 

The first time Peter had played hadn't been a good one at all, but then he hadn't known that it was a game till it was all over so it didn't really count. He'd been too scared of his nightmare – for that's what he saw it as at the time – to play an active part.

 

It had happened a few days after his accident. He hadn't been badly hurt; just a nasty bump on the head; and the doctor had allowed him to come home from the hospital – only he hadn't got a home to come to. His mum and dad had been killed when he had been injured so he'd gone to live with his grandparents.

 

Peter had been playing in his grandparent's garden with the boy next door when he saw the fairy; at least he assumed it was a fairy. It was sitting on a mushroom at the bottom of the garden. He watched it in fascination.

 

For a while nothing had happened. Then he got a sudden terrifying feeling in his guts; something to do with cats. Looking round in panic he saw his playmate standing by the garden fence. The boy was rigid with terror, pinned against the railings by a kitten that was rubbing its body against his legs affectionately.

 

Peter could feel the terror in the boy's head – and in his guts; definitely in his guts. He heard the long wet sound as the boy emptied his bowels into his trousers and he had a struggle not to follow suit.

 

Peter had realised almost immediately that he could understand the reason for his friend's terror. It had something to do with having been almost smothered in his cot by a kitten. The funny thing was the terrifying emotions weren't coming from his friends head; or not directly at least. They were coming from the thing at the bottom of the garden.

 

Peter could see the fear and the reason for it on the gnome – it definitely wasn't a fairy! He could see the thick black beard that covered the creature's mouth. It had the sheen and texture of cat fur.

 

Scared out of his wits, Peter had run into the house to fetch his Grandma. When they got back to the garden the gnome and the kitten had disappeared and his friend lay on the ground, a rictus mask of terror still on his face. He was dead.

 

After the incident Peter had been placed in the children's home where he now lived. No one had blamed him for his friend's death but he was considered to be traumatised by another death so soon after those of his parents. He knew that because he had heard the psychiatrist talking to his grandfather. The one thing that he had been told was that his younger brother Tim would be joining him when he came out of hospital.

 

Peter had seen his second ‘bogle' – for that's what he had since decided to call them – a few days after his arrival at the home. This time it was a proper little devil; horns, tail, the lot! It wasn't as well defined as the first one; a little fuzzy round the edges and slightly translucent, but he could see it well enough. He had come across it in a corridor and immediately recognised it for what it was. At first he wasn't sure what it was or who it ‘belonged' to but then a little girl came running round the corner and he was able to put the two of them together immediately.

 

It had been perfectly obvious from the moment Peter saw them together that this kid – her name was Sarah – had to be scared of fire! He couldn't have told anyone how he had reached this conclusion but having done so he decided to store the ‘fact' away in the private filing cabinet of his mind. ‘You never know when it might come in useful' he thought.

 

Over the next few weeks he built up quite a collection of bogles. One of them was linked to his social worker. She was terrified of flying and her personal imp wore a large leather flying helmet with goggles and a long scarf that seemed to be permanently blowing out behind it. Another of the bogles seemed to lurk in the vicinity of the house-mother most of the time though sometimes it would drift away and hover near Darren, one of the younger boys.

 

Peter couldn't understand this anomaly for a while. The house-mother had a fear of darkness while Darren had a fear of being locked in. Then he finally realised! They both suffered from claustrophobia. Having sorted that out in his head he was content to see the bogle with either person.

 

Another thing bothered Peter for a while. Some of the bogles looked very solid although he could walk through them without feeling anything. Others were insubstantial will-o-the-wisps, barely perceptible except in cigarette smoke or dust motes reflecting in sunshine.

 

It took a while but he finally worked out what the difference was. One of the less substantial bogles - it was attached to Jane, one of the care workers – began to appear more and more solid as the weeks passed. It also became more and more warped as if something was growing on it and destroying its form. Peter instinctively knew that Jane's worry was about cancer. By didn't of much snooping around the doors of the staff's quarters he found out that Jane's boyfriend had cancer and was dying.

One night while everyone was in the dining room there was a phone call for Jane. As she listened she went white and almost fainted. At that moment her bogle popped out of existence.

 

So that was it! As the fear got stronger so did the apparition. When the fear peaked and someone died the bogle died too. Simple really.

 

Peter realised that he would have to put his theory to the test; but how to do it? Again the solution was simple. He lured Darren into a broom cupboard and locked him in. Then he settled down to see what Darren's bogle did. At first nothing much happened but as Darren began to get more and more frantic his bogle began to take on real solidity. What a horrible thing it was too; all squashed and deformed as if it had been squeezed into a small box; which in a way it had!

 

Peter let a terrified and screaming Darren out after a few minutes and calmed him down. \the experiment wasn't really scientific proof or anything but it did seem to show that the bogles got stronger as the fear got worse, as if they fed on it. It didn't show if the bogles ‘died' when their partners did but Peter was convinced that this was what happened.

 

He wanted to try out his theory, but how to go about it? The only way that he could see was to watch the bogles and concentrate on the more solid ones; the ones where their symbiotes had the greatest fear – symbiotes was a word he'd found while looking for a word to describe the human- bogle relationship.

 

Peter's chance came sooner than he'd expected. A couple of days after his experiment with Darren he spotted Sarah's bogle in a corner of the kitchen. Sarah was one of the other children in the home. Her bogle was so solid looking that it seemed completely real. It glowed with the knowledge of imminent disaster, bright little flames dancing along its arms, an evil and malignant witness to Sarah's fears.

 

Then Peter saw Sarah herself. She was by the kitchen hearth frozen in terror before a small fire that had caught on some drying clothes that had been left too close to the flames. As he watched in fascination the clothes flared up and little devils of fire, reminiscent of the little flames on Sarah's bogle, jumped the gap to the dress she was wearing, turning her instantly into a torch of fire.

 

The searing heat tore Sarah out of her trance. Screaming in agony she writhed in agony on the floor, the bogle whirling and cavorting around her in a hideous counterpoint to her wild frenzy.

 

The obscene ballet finally stopped. The bundle of seared flesh and charred dress that had been Sarah became still and the bogle popped out of existence.

 

Peter was jubilant! His assumption about the bogles was correct. As soon as the fear was realised in its ultimate form – death – the bogle ceased to exist. Oblivious to the mess on the floor he did a little jig around the kitchen before skipping back to his room. When Sarah's pitiful remains were found a few minutes later no one knew he had been there.

 

Over the next few weeks Peter observed his little coterie of bogles and their symbiote siblings. Nothing much had happened. The auras ebbed and flowed around the bogles as the fears of the staff and children waxed and waned. He forgot about Sarah except at a subconscious level so deep that he was hardly aware of its existence. It was one of the conveniences of the knock on his head that he'd had in the accident. He knew that he had forgotten something – pushed it away might be a better description – and if he tried really hard he could vaguely remember it, but in the end it wasn't important. He was playing a long and complicated game, the only hard and fast rule of which was that when a bogle disappeared the game was over.

 

That particular thought reminded Peter that he had just been playing a game and that it had ended. However he couldn't for the life of him remember what the game had been or who he had been playing with. The wind on the top of the hill was getting a bit nippy and he was starting to feel cold in his shorts and thin vest. He decided it was time to go home.

 

Jogging down the hill, Peter noticed a funny bundle of rags under a little clump of bushes. He felt that he ought to know what it was but he couldn't remember and he was getting to cold to hang about. He kept on running for home.

 

Under the bushes the wind stirred the little bundle of rags. Bloodstained and torn they clothed a small body; a body battered and broken by the stones clustered around it. At the side of the body, half pinned, half clutched under it was a scruffy rag doll. It had an ugly head, lumpy and deformed by the heat that it had been subjected to. The dolls body was a soft floppy sack stuffed with cotton wool and old socks that flopped every which way. It had been given the name tumbledown because it was always falling over.

 

Tumbledown had been with its owner Tim when he'd been trapped in the collapsed house after the gas blast. Tim had been found by his older brother Peter. As Peter had tried to pull him from the rubble a falling brick had struck the doll awkwardly sending it careening into his head with great force.

 

Peter would never remember any of this though. After all his accident had left him with a faulty memory!