Alone For The First Time

Alone For The First Time


Danny hears a knock at the door. He dismisses it. He's alone tonight. So probably the neighbours...at 12 midnight. Or maybe it's his mind taking him for a fool. First night nerves, he thinks. It happens sometimes. People getting anxious being alone at night for the first time. Tucking yourself in. No mommy or daddy to kiss you goodnight, no warm embrace, shining with love. Oh no, you're alone tonight...Danny. All by yourself.

         The whole house, five bedrooms, a bathroom, and a living room, airy dining room, cellar, loft looming overhead, a large study across the hall, spacious garden. And encircling are rows of large open windows glaring into the night. Embroided with vast spreading corridors and hallways like veins to this huge anatomy.

         Then in this mass of space, this expansive building, in the smallest quarter...in the smallest room...in the smallest bed...in the smallest corner, is Danny, all curled up into a ball. His five year old body all tucked in tightly with his bedlight by his side table - his only solace, Scooby Doo being chased from behind by a figure in a white bedsheet, upright, looming.

         So here he is in this corner of his bedroom, cocooned into the smallest mass, so what is the rest of the house doing? How is it coping, he thinks. Unattended. Left to its own devises.

         Maybe the shadows are playing hide and seek, black figures running frantically across the walls. Or maybe the furnitures playing chasies, rumbling across the floorboards creating tremors. Or someone playing foosties with Danny at the foot of his bed. He didn't know. But he's thinking. He's thinking with sharp fear, his anxieties preventing him from screaming at the top of his lungs, begging the darkness to let him be.

         His timid mind then turns to the noise he heard at the door. He's in disbelief? Is this real? How can he be hearing this? No ghosts? No! Only the ghosts in your head!

          Suddenly his thoughts are shattered. What a key? In a door? Turning? NEVER! Stop it! Only parents!

          Or maybe it's a pin. Breaking in. Maybe...

         Danny daren't think about it. He can hear it faintly. Though it's echoing throughout the house. Streaming through the walls, distruptingly beaking it's silence.

         His mind lingers on the noise for a while before it goes silent.

         Had they gone?

         Then crack! His small mind didn't have time to think. One last disturbance it seemed, but this one louder and disturbingly abrupt. It stuns him. He goes up and moves closer to his bedroom door when he hears something hit the floor shortly after, breaking his spell of rigidness.

         His shaggy blonde hair cast a shadow on the wall. He didn't realise at first, but he catches sight of his shadow to the left of him, and he realises he is crouching forward listening intently, and he is shaking.

         He is autistic. He has behavoural problems resulting in temper tantrums. His parents are very aware.

         Poor Mindy, he thinks. All alone down there with the strange noises. He didn't take her out much, he didn't care for the cold weather of Farthamptom. Days always chilly and nights much of the same. This night especially.

         Then the unthinkable happens. A voice! A stranger! He hears it through his slightly opened window to his right. A youthful, gruff, deep shout. Then another, throaty and common! He follows the sounds as they come from outside and enter the other-side of the front door and into the house.

         "Oy! Hold it," the youthful voice comes form the corridor of the house.

         "Be quiet, there's no one home," comes the common voice in reply. Both are hoarse whispers, desperately trying to reach each-other but not wanting to alarm.

         They move forward cautiously towards the kitchen under the archway, keeping out of sight of the window at the front door. Not daring to be seen. As they come to the painted walls of the kitchen, the youthful voice calls out, "What the hell's that," he points to a small furry body curled up fearfuly in a corner of a small plastic bed, "whats that hairy thing, haha! Come on Tony, this is cool."

         The two figures rush forward with their cotton hats covering their faces and necks. And gloves covered in grease and oil, and slightly frayed from the rain outside.

         They advance destructively.

         It was ten long minutes since the lock broke at the front door, he thought. He hadn't known what had happened. Just a lot of noise. He had been lying on the bed with his hands clasped firmly over his ears - refusing to hear anything yet pricked up and listening out of mysterious curiousity.

         The ten minutes stretched into eleven when he advanced slowly down the stairs as quietly as he could manage. The noises he heard, muffled behind his hands, were racing through his mind, nearly as fast as his heart beat, the thuds, the bangs, the sound of furniture being thrown around, the sound of glass breaking.

         "Huh," he gasped breathlessly as the living room came into view; chairs were turned with legs broken, tables upturned, drawers flung from their original places with their contents scattered across the floor, creating a carpet of smothered paper, shardes of glass scattered, ornaments smashed and broken, dancing ladies with their dresses destroyed and the remains dancing with the flames of the fireplace.

         He advanced, his knees no longer trembling but numb and void of any feeling. His eyes suddenly caught sight of something in the passageway before the kitchen. It was a ball of fur with disjointed limbs portruding at obscure angles that were now smothered in red liquid. His horror spurred his knees forward towards the creature that was nailed and bludgeoned onto the wall.

         The autistic boy picked up an object covered in liquid of similar fasion.

         The front door opened, but more freely than before. The autistic boys parents walked into the kitchen with expressions of hilarity and elation. The mother with a burned out ciggarette in her hand and a handbag across her shoulder, the father with his deflated wallet in his jeans.

         They looked up. And they noticed the house, like a bombfield, they were in aghast. They turned left to find their son stood in the centre of the destruction. Amidst the wreckage under the archway, he stood, with a blood soaked knife in his left hand and Mindy the dog lifelessly in his right.

         His parents stared on motionless, thinking:

'He's done it again'.