Fleg
by Keith Coleman
Genre: Horror/Supernatural
Swearwords: A couple of mild ones.
Description: The distorted memory of strange childhood friends in the ‘closies’ and tenements of a few decades ago. The incident of the bin lids and black fingerprints is a remembered piece of urban folklore.
_____________________________________________________________________
Mum said I should stop telling lies, but I think dad believed me in the end. After I’d told him, he sort of tightened up and asked me loads of questions. He didn’t give me any answers though. Fleg would have explained to me what happened, except him and his mum moved away. I thought I saw him again yesterday outside school, but it couldn’t have been him. When he was here he went to a different sort of school. I used to tease him about it until mum made me stop. And when I told Fleg about this he laughed and laughed. You had to tell him everything: he used to stop breathing if you didn’t give him your secrets.
It began on the first day of the holidays. Me and Fleg, with Jimmie and Fat Paddy, were mucking about in the park. It was okay until some big kids chased us and we had to hide in the trees on Reith’s Hill. Usually we avoided the hill because it was a bad place. But we had no choice. We all hid in different places. I dived into a ditch and saw Paddy shin up a tree. He fell down twice, then Jimmie poked his bum with a pole and he disappeared into the branches.
We stayed there a long time. When it got dark and darker I heard Paddy crying. But we didn’t dare move because the boys were still crying in the park. Fleg was angry with his noise, shushing him from the bushes behind me.
‘Shut up,’ he said, ‘or he’ll know we’re here. Then he’ll come and get me.’
‘Who will, Fleg?’ I whispered.
‘Him,’ Fleg hissed. The way he said it set Paddy off wailing again.
When we wheeshed him, Fleg carried on: ‘He’s been after me a long time, but I always managed to trick him till now. Don’t any of you make a sound, or break a twig or anything – then he’d get me for sure.’
‘What is he, Fleg, a monster?’ Jimmie asked, excited.
‘That’s right,’ Fleg answered him. ‘So just watch yersel’, Jimmie Kerr, he’s got these claw things. I’ve seen them as well, they’re this huge.’ And he made an impressive rustling in the bushes.
Jimmie managed to kid on he didn’t believe it, but me and Paddy did.
‘Go on then,’ Jimmie taunted Fleg. ‘Bet you can’t prove it right now.’
His voice was shaking really badly. Fleg said he didn’t have to prove it, the Thing would come and show us all soon. ‘Just stay and wait here, Paddy. Soon it’ll get properly dark and I won’t be around to see.’
Next minute we were tearing through the bushes towards the park. I was too scared to think about everything Fleg said. Anyway, everyone said there were monsters everywhere, but I never saw any of them. I think I believed Fleg because he said the monster was just after him, not the rest of us. Nobody else would have said that, just in case it came true.
I didn’t stop running till I hit the flat park grass. Then I fell down puffing and panting. Fleg and Jimmie were beside me, but there was no sign of Paddy. Jimmie realised what happened first.
‘The bugger’s got stuck up that tree,’ he laughed. But when we thought about it, it wasn’t funny. None of us looked at each other. We got up and walked home as quick as we could. It was a rotten thing to do, but we were sick scared and couldn’t have gone back for Paddy if we wanted to. Anyway, it was his fault for crying like that, though I didn’t think that later.
Just as we got back to our road the streetlights switched themselves on. ‘That’s a good sign,’ I said, ‘when the streetlamps come on when you walk near them. It’s bad luck when you walk along and they go off suddenly.’
Fleg smiled with his sharp teeth, shadows under his eyes like a real-life vampire. ‘And you have the cheek to go on about my monster!’ he said, then laughed and smacked my arm.
‘I’ll tell you something else,’ I said. ‘Know that orange streetlamp in the backies beside the bins? Well tonight it’s gonny glow purple, like it does sometimes. It will tonight, I know it. And that means something strange is going to happen soon.’
‘Strange good or strange bad?’ Jimmie asked.
‘Both!’ said Fleg.
Any other time I would have felt strange telling them about the change in the streetlight. But then seemed the right time.
‘Race you up the stairs,’ Jimmie said, and he was bounding off before we could catch up. His ma must have been waiting for him in the shadows of the close, because we heard a yell, then a sort of scuffling down the stairwell as she dragged him into their flat and slammed the door. Fleg and me laughed as we climbed the stairs, but he went quiet when we reached our landing.
‘What did you mean about the monster just chasing you, Fleg?’ I asked.
Maybe it was just the flickering light in the close, but I thought I saw Fleg grin at me in a funny way. Just when I thought he was going to say something I heard someone inside one of the flats drop something. I looked away for a second, then when I looked back Fleg had bolted up to the attic flat where he lived.
‘I’ll tell you everything soon,’ he hissed down the stairs, then he gave his owl hoot and he was gone.
I went to sleep quickly, hoping I would dream about the monster. But all I saw in my sleep was Fleg turned into a great black buck hare in the woods, running and running. I woke up with my brother Davie shaking me. He was going on about how he had to get up and puke up at midnight.
‘I went through the living room and puked out the window, and there was a van down there with flashing blue lights. I thought it was an ambulance for me being sick, but it was only a police van.’
I knew he had more to say, so I punched him in the belly. He was sick all the time, so it was easy making him talk. The police van brought Paddy home, he said. His mum came out and Paddy said me and Jimmie and Fleg had left him up Reith’s Hill and she was spitting mad and after me and Fleg.
‘Did dad see her? What did he say?’ I asked.
‘He said he’d tan your arse in the morning for what you did to Paddy,’ he said.
It wasn’t too bad in the morning. Mum made me eat porridge and talked at me for a while. Dad was late for work and just gave me an awful look before he left. As soon as I could I met Fleg and went to the park. The grass was still soaking wet when we sat down on it. I asked Fleg if he got told off that morning.
‘What for?’ he asked, chewing a bit of grass.
I told him about the police bringing Paddy back and his mum being mad with us. ‘Didn’t you hear nothing last night?’ I asked.
‘The attic’s a long way up.’
‘Is there any rats up there?’
He scowled. ‘No rats,’ he said. He lay down on his back. ‘My ma would have smacked Paddy’s ma if she dared come to our door.’
I thought about Fleg’s mum and believed it. She was skinny and manky looking, always walking up and down the street like a chicken, with her arms folded, looking for fights.
‘Fleg,’ I said, ‘are you a tinker?’ I only said it because Fleg looked different from anyone else I’d ever seen. He was short and dark and strange looking. His face went white as paper when I said it. He stood up suddenly and so did I. Then he punched me hard right in the mouth. I was too surprised to cry. He walked off a bit and tried to spit back at me. Then he pulled up loads of grass and tried to chuck it at me. It was ages before I could think of what to do.
‘Your mum’s like this,’ I said, and began to imitate her, walking up and down with my face screwed up and bum sticking out. He had to laugh eventually because I’m good at imitating people.
‘She better watch herself when she gets to the end of the street,’ I said. ‘Mr McIlroy stands there when he’s drunk. His wife doesna let him in the house till he’s sober. Even the polis are scared o’ him.’
‘I remember he grabbed me once,’ Fleg said.
‘He gets you if you go too near. Then he gets your arm like this…’
I pounced on Fleg, getting his arm in a tight squeeze. But he yelled so much I thought I’d hurt him.
‘Don’t do that!’ he screamed. ‘It’s just the way he does it, him on the hill!’
‘Tell me who he is, Fleg.’
‘I can’t.’ He shook his head sadly. ‘I want to, but I can’t.’
‘Why not?’
‘Because I really don’t know. All I know is that he’s real, or used to be.’
That was everything that day. After that we just went home.
Doctor Mackenzie was in the house to see my brother. Dad was there too, and he gave me a smack when the doctor left. But he did it quick and quiet because of Davie.
It was Fleg’s idea next day that we should build a den. We needed a hiding place, he said, so we could hide from Paddy’s mum and the big kids who were after us. But Jimmie said that other gangs always found dens and knocked them down.
‘Not where we’re gonna build ours,’ Fleg said slyly.
‘Where abouts?’ Jimmie asked.
‘Reith’s Hill,’ Fleg whispered.
None of us believed him at first, but when we saw he was serious we all shouted at him, saying he was mad. In the end though we knew he would go through with it anyway, so we followed him. It was a place on the wildest side of the hill, all rocks and bushes and twisted trees.
‘Nobody could find this in a hundred years,’ Paddy said, impressed. I wondered how Fleg had found this place.
On one side the land dropped away like a wall, right down to the land that cuts the hill in two. Over to the right was the old iron bridge that joins our half of the hill to the graveyard on the other side. Jimmie said somebody hung himself from the bridge fifty years ago.
We carried all our planks and corrugated iron and got started building the secret den before the rain came on. And when we finished we all crawled inside to see how it felt. Jimmie said he didn’t like the bridge being so close; anything might cross over and come to get us. I heard Fleg suck in all his breath, as if he wanted to say something but was too scared. When I got the guts up to ask him what was wrong, he turned a funny colour and ran out and left us there.
That was the first time I felt that Fleg had betrayed me somehow. Me and Jimmie talked for a while huddled in there, how we thought he was wrong bringing us to this bad place, and this and that. We even put a bit of a curse on him, but that had nothing to do with what happened later.
After tea that night mum sent me out to get ice cream for her and Davie. When I got back to the close I saw the big cupboard under the stairs was open. It was dark inside there, but I heard a noise from inside and when I looked inside, there was Fleg crouched up in the back. He backed away a bit, so that I couldn’t see him properly. But I could see he was shivering madly. He was locked out of his house, he said. It made me shivery, his voice was so small and sad.
‘Where’s your mum?’ I asked him.
‘Gone to go and look for dad. She’s been gone for hours.’
‘I thought she always left the door open so you could get in.’
‘Not this time.’ He gave a sob and shuffled forwards. ‘She doesn’t like me any more. I don’t know why.’
‘Of course she does,’ I said quickly. His face was all manky, streaked with dirt from crying. I didn’t want to look at him now. ‘You can always come round to ours.’ The way I said it made it sound like I didn’t mean it. ‘Wait a minute,’ I said, then ran upstairs to tell mum. She said I should bring Fleg up, and even called Fleg’s mum a hussy, or something. But once I got downstairs again, there was no sign of Fleg.
When I climbed back up again, Davie was mad because his ice cream was melting. I punched him in the head and he ran and told mum, but she took no notice of him for a change. I still felt pretty bad and went to bed with a banging head. It was early in the morning when I woke, so I got on my clothes and shinned down the drainpipe to the back green. One of the bins fell over when I landed on it, and Mrs Gurty’s cat fell out of it, landing on all four feet. All its fur was on end and its eyes popping out. I went to laugh, then I saw the cat was stone cold dead on its feet. Someone had cut its belly open and all his raw red guts were hanging out.
I shoved it out the way with a bin lid. But then I noticed big black marks, like huge fingerprints, on the metal. I got scared, so I chucked it down and ran away down town. Everything was closed and there were no people about. It was a weird feeling, like somebody was hunting me. When I looked in all the closed shop windows, someone else looked back at me without a face.
Somehow I managed to find a way back to the den. It was all smashed to bits, with the walls and the roof ripped apart. There were big scorch marks all over the shattered door. I chucked my guts up all over it because there was this horrible smell like a butcher’s shop. When I got back to the street there were loads of people standing around, all staring up at the tenement. I didn’t know what was happening. Then I heard my name shouted and mum ran out of the close, a big cloud all round her. Just before she reached me I looked up and saw black smoke pouring out of the high windows. I dodged mum and ran into the dark doorway. It was dark and full of fumes, but I had to get to the house. Another voice was calling me – maybe it was Fleg’s – saying that Davie was up there.
Later it turned out that I did find Davie, but it was too late. I didn’t ask how we got out and stuff. Somewhere I heard Fleg’s voice again, but that was it. Paddy and Jimmie came to the hospital. They said they built the den again, better than before. Jimmie even boasted that he’d run across the bridge for a dare. He got stuck on the graveyard side for a minute because he thought he heard something there. It made a crying or laughing sound but he didn’t stay to look.
Loads of kids were playing up Reith’s Hill now, they told me. No one was scared of the place anymore. But it made me scared thinking about it, how they all knew where the den was as well. Fleg was gone. One night Jimmie saw a removal lorry and thought it was being loaded up with strange black furniture. Neither of them would say any more. But I think they were hiding stuff because I was sick.
Dad came to see me and he was okay. Mum was too sad about Davie dying and never visited me, even though dad says it was me that got him out of the house. But she blames Fleg above me for everything, even the fire, but how could he? When I asked him, dad said Fleg should have gone away a long time ago. I cried about this for some reason, but I didn’t cry for Davie.
So Fleg has gone and I went back to school last week. I still think I see his face everywhere, always unhappy and hungry. I won’t tell anyone yet. Maybe Paddy and Jimmie later, when I know what he wants. During the night I half dream and hear him, among the bins or on the street. Last time he came crawling like a spider up the drainpipe towards my window. He always laughs when he gets close, and whispers sometimes.
I’m afraid for him and what he’ll do, but I’ll never tell on him as long as I live.
Swearwords: A couple of mild ones.
Description: The distorted memory of strange childhood friends in the ‘closies’ and tenements of a few decades ago. The incident of the bin lids and black fingerprints is a remembered piece of urban folklore.
_____________________________________________________________________
Mum said I should stop telling lies, but I think dad believed me in the end. After I’d told him, he sort of tightened up and asked me loads of questions. He didn’t give me any answers though. Fleg would have explained to me what happened, except him and his mum moved away. I thought I saw him again yesterday outside school, but it couldn’t have been him. When he was here he went to a different sort of school. I used to tease him about it until mum made me stop. And when I told Fleg about this he laughed and laughed. You had to tell him everything: he used to stop breathing if you didn’t give him your secrets.
It began on the first day of the holidays. Me and Fleg, with Jimmie and Fat Paddy, were mucking about in the park. It was okay until some big kids chased us and we had to hide in the trees on Reith’s Hill. Usually we avoided the hill because it was a bad place. But we had no choice. We all hid in different places. I dived into a ditch and saw Paddy shin up a tree. He fell down twice, then Jimmie poked his bum with a pole and he disappeared into the branches.
We stayed there a long time. When it got dark and darker I heard Paddy crying. But we didn’t dare move because the boys were still crying in the park. Fleg was angry with his noise, shushing him from the bushes behind me.
‘Shut up,’ he said, ‘or he’ll know we’re here. Then he’ll come and get me.’
‘Who will, Fleg?’ I whispered.
‘Him,’ Fleg hissed. The way he said it set Paddy off wailing again.
When we wheeshed him, Fleg carried on: ‘He’s been after me a long time, but I always managed to trick him till now. Don’t any of you make a sound, or break a twig or anything – then he’d get me for sure.’
‘What is he, Fleg, a monster?’ Jimmie asked, excited.
‘That’s right,’ Fleg answered him. ‘So just watch yersel’, Jimmie Kerr, he’s got these claw things. I’ve seen them as well, they’re this huge.’ And he made an impressive rustling in the bushes.
Jimmie managed to kid on he didn’t believe it, but me and Paddy did.
‘Go on then,’ Jimmie taunted Fleg. ‘Bet you can’t prove it right now.’
His voice was shaking really badly. Fleg said he didn’t have to prove it, the Thing would come and show us all soon. ‘Just stay and wait here, Paddy. Soon it’ll get properly dark and I won’t be around to see.’
Next minute we were tearing through the bushes towards the park. I was too scared to think about everything Fleg said. Anyway, everyone said there were monsters everywhere, but I never saw any of them. I think I believed Fleg because he said the monster was just after him, not the rest of us. Nobody else would have said that, just in case it came true.
I didn’t stop running till I hit the flat park grass. Then I fell down puffing and panting. Fleg and Jimmie were beside me, but there was no sign of Paddy. Jimmie realised what happened first.
‘The bugger’s got stuck up that tree,’ he laughed. But when we thought about it, it wasn’t funny. None of us looked at each other. We got up and walked home as quick as we could. It was a rotten thing to do, but we were sick scared and couldn’t have gone back for Paddy if we wanted to. Anyway, it was his fault for crying like that, though I didn’t think that later.
Just as we got back to our road the streetlights switched themselves on. ‘That’s a good sign,’ I said, ‘when the streetlamps come on when you walk near them. It’s bad luck when you walk along and they go off suddenly.’
Fleg smiled with his sharp teeth, shadows under his eyes like a real-life vampire. ‘And you have the cheek to go on about my monster!’ he said, then laughed and smacked my arm.
‘I’ll tell you something else,’ I said. ‘Know that orange streetlamp in the backies beside the bins? Well tonight it’s gonny glow purple, like it does sometimes. It will tonight, I know it. And that means something strange is going to happen soon.’
‘Strange good or strange bad?’ Jimmie asked.
‘Both!’ said Fleg.
Any other time I would have felt strange telling them about the change in the streetlight. But then seemed the right time.
‘Race you up the stairs,’ Jimmie said, and he was bounding off before we could catch up. His ma must have been waiting for him in the shadows of the close, because we heard a yell, then a sort of scuffling down the stairwell as she dragged him into their flat and slammed the door. Fleg and me laughed as we climbed the stairs, but he went quiet when we reached our landing.
‘What did you mean about the monster just chasing you, Fleg?’ I asked.
Maybe it was just the flickering light in the close, but I thought I saw Fleg grin at me in a funny way. Just when I thought he was going to say something I heard someone inside one of the flats drop something. I looked away for a second, then when I looked back Fleg had bolted up to the attic flat where he lived.
‘I’ll tell you everything soon,’ he hissed down the stairs, then he gave his owl hoot and he was gone.
I went to sleep quickly, hoping I would dream about the monster. But all I saw in my sleep was Fleg turned into a great black buck hare in the woods, running and running. I woke up with my brother Davie shaking me. He was going on about how he had to get up and puke up at midnight.
‘I went through the living room and puked out the window, and there was a van down there with flashing blue lights. I thought it was an ambulance for me being sick, but it was only a police van.’
I knew he had more to say, so I punched him in the belly. He was sick all the time, so it was easy making him talk. The police van brought Paddy home, he said. His mum came out and Paddy said me and Jimmie and Fleg had left him up Reith’s Hill and she was spitting mad and after me and Fleg.
‘Did dad see her? What did he say?’ I asked.
‘He said he’d tan your arse in the morning for what you did to Paddy,’ he said.
It wasn’t too bad in the morning. Mum made me eat porridge and talked at me for a while. Dad was late for work and just gave me an awful look before he left. As soon as I could I met Fleg and went to the park. The grass was still soaking wet when we sat down on it. I asked Fleg if he got told off that morning.
‘What for?’ he asked, chewing a bit of grass.
I told him about the police bringing Paddy back and his mum being mad with us. ‘Didn’t you hear nothing last night?’ I asked.
‘The attic’s a long way up.’
‘Is there any rats up there?’
He scowled. ‘No rats,’ he said. He lay down on his back. ‘My ma would have smacked Paddy’s ma if she dared come to our door.’
I thought about Fleg’s mum and believed it. She was skinny and manky looking, always walking up and down the street like a chicken, with her arms folded, looking for fights.
‘Fleg,’ I said, ‘are you a tinker?’ I only said it because Fleg looked different from anyone else I’d ever seen. He was short and dark and strange looking. His face went white as paper when I said it. He stood up suddenly and so did I. Then he punched me hard right in the mouth. I was too surprised to cry. He walked off a bit and tried to spit back at me. Then he pulled up loads of grass and tried to chuck it at me. It was ages before I could think of what to do.
‘Your mum’s like this,’ I said, and began to imitate her, walking up and down with my face screwed up and bum sticking out. He had to laugh eventually because I’m good at imitating people.
‘She better watch herself when she gets to the end of the street,’ I said. ‘Mr McIlroy stands there when he’s drunk. His wife doesna let him in the house till he’s sober. Even the polis are scared o’ him.’
‘I remember he grabbed me once,’ Fleg said.
‘He gets you if you go too near. Then he gets your arm like this…’
I pounced on Fleg, getting his arm in a tight squeeze. But he yelled so much I thought I’d hurt him.
‘Don’t do that!’ he screamed. ‘It’s just the way he does it, him on the hill!’
‘Tell me who he is, Fleg.’
‘I can’t.’ He shook his head sadly. ‘I want to, but I can’t.’
‘Why not?’
‘Because I really don’t know. All I know is that he’s real, or used to be.’
That was everything that day. After that we just went home.
Doctor Mackenzie was in the house to see my brother. Dad was there too, and he gave me a smack when the doctor left. But he did it quick and quiet because of Davie.
It was Fleg’s idea next day that we should build a den. We needed a hiding place, he said, so we could hide from Paddy’s mum and the big kids who were after us. But Jimmie said that other gangs always found dens and knocked them down.
‘Not where we’re gonna build ours,’ Fleg said slyly.
‘Where abouts?’ Jimmie asked.
‘Reith’s Hill,’ Fleg whispered.
None of us believed him at first, but when we saw he was serious we all shouted at him, saying he was mad. In the end though we knew he would go through with it anyway, so we followed him. It was a place on the wildest side of the hill, all rocks and bushes and twisted trees.
‘Nobody could find this in a hundred years,’ Paddy said, impressed. I wondered how Fleg had found this place.
On one side the land dropped away like a wall, right down to the land that cuts the hill in two. Over to the right was the old iron bridge that joins our half of the hill to the graveyard on the other side. Jimmie said somebody hung himself from the bridge fifty years ago.
We carried all our planks and corrugated iron and got started building the secret den before the rain came on. And when we finished we all crawled inside to see how it felt. Jimmie said he didn’t like the bridge being so close; anything might cross over and come to get us. I heard Fleg suck in all his breath, as if he wanted to say something but was too scared. When I got the guts up to ask him what was wrong, he turned a funny colour and ran out and left us there.
That was the first time I felt that Fleg had betrayed me somehow. Me and Jimmie talked for a while huddled in there, how we thought he was wrong bringing us to this bad place, and this and that. We even put a bit of a curse on him, but that had nothing to do with what happened later.
After tea that night mum sent me out to get ice cream for her and Davie. When I got back to the close I saw the big cupboard under the stairs was open. It was dark inside there, but I heard a noise from inside and when I looked inside, there was Fleg crouched up in the back. He backed away a bit, so that I couldn’t see him properly. But I could see he was shivering madly. He was locked out of his house, he said. It made me shivery, his voice was so small and sad.
‘Where’s your mum?’ I asked him.
‘Gone to go and look for dad. She’s been gone for hours.’
‘I thought she always left the door open so you could get in.’
‘Not this time.’ He gave a sob and shuffled forwards. ‘She doesn’t like me any more. I don’t know why.’
‘Of course she does,’ I said quickly. His face was all manky, streaked with dirt from crying. I didn’t want to look at him now. ‘You can always come round to ours.’ The way I said it made it sound like I didn’t mean it. ‘Wait a minute,’ I said, then ran upstairs to tell mum. She said I should bring Fleg up, and even called Fleg’s mum a hussy, or something. But once I got downstairs again, there was no sign of Fleg.
When I climbed back up again, Davie was mad because his ice cream was melting. I punched him in the head and he ran and told mum, but she took no notice of him for a change. I still felt pretty bad and went to bed with a banging head. It was early in the morning when I woke, so I got on my clothes and shinned down the drainpipe to the back green. One of the bins fell over when I landed on it, and Mrs Gurty’s cat fell out of it, landing on all four feet. All its fur was on end and its eyes popping out. I went to laugh, then I saw the cat was stone cold dead on its feet. Someone had cut its belly open and all his raw red guts were hanging out.
I shoved it out the way with a bin lid. But then I noticed big black marks, like huge fingerprints, on the metal. I got scared, so I chucked it down and ran away down town. Everything was closed and there were no people about. It was a weird feeling, like somebody was hunting me. When I looked in all the closed shop windows, someone else looked back at me without a face.
Somehow I managed to find a way back to the den. It was all smashed to bits, with the walls and the roof ripped apart. There were big scorch marks all over the shattered door. I chucked my guts up all over it because there was this horrible smell like a butcher’s shop. When I got back to the street there were loads of people standing around, all staring up at the tenement. I didn’t know what was happening. Then I heard my name shouted and mum ran out of the close, a big cloud all round her. Just before she reached me I looked up and saw black smoke pouring out of the high windows. I dodged mum and ran into the dark doorway. It was dark and full of fumes, but I had to get to the house. Another voice was calling me – maybe it was Fleg’s – saying that Davie was up there.
Later it turned out that I did find Davie, but it was too late. I didn’t ask how we got out and stuff. Somewhere I heard Fleg’s voice again, but that was it. Paddy and Jimmie came to the hospital. They said they built the den again, better than before. Jimmie even boasted that he’d run across the bridge for a dare. He got stuck on the graveyard side for a minute because he thought he heard something there. It made a crying or laughing sound but he didn’t stay to look.
Loads of kids were playing up Reith’s Hill now, they told me. No one was scared of the place anymore. But it made me scared thinking about it, how they all knew where the den was as well. Fleg was gone. One night Jimmie saw a removal lorry and thought it was being loaded up with strange black furniture. Neither of them would say any more. But I think they were hiding stuff because I was sick.
Dad came to see me and he was okay. Mum was too sad about Davie dying and never visited me, even though dad says it was me that got him out of the house. But she blames Fleg above me for everything, even the fire, but how could he? When I asked him, dad said Fleg should have gone away a long time ago. I cried about this for some reason, but I didn’t cry for Davie.
So Fleg has gone and I went back to school last week. I still think I see his face everywhere, always unhappy and hungry. I won’t tell anyone yet. Maybe Paddy and Jimmie later, when I know what he wants. During the night I half dream and hear him, among the bins or on the street. Last time he came crawling like a spider up the drainpipe towards my window. He always laughs when he gets close, and whispers sometimes.
I’m afraid for him and what he’ll do, but I’ll never tell on him as long as I live.
About the Author
Originally from Dundee, Keith Coleman has managed to slip down Britain and end up in Cornwall.
Keith prefers to write supernatural short stories, many of which have a Scottish setting and some of which have been published. With a long-time interest in the folklore surrounding the Scottish kings, he is also in the final stages of writing a book about the legends associated with King James IV of Scotland.
Keith prefers to write supernatural short stories, many of which have a Scottish setting and some of which have been published. With a long-time interest in the folklore surrounding the Scottish kings, he is also in the final stages of writing a book about the legends associated with King James IV of Scotland.