Eleven New Ghost Stories (21 page)

Didn’t I know that he could get
himself killed? Didn’t I know that children often suffocated in
chests like that because they didn’t understand that air might not
be able to get in? I couldn’t understand what he was getting so
angry about; I might’ve thought he’d gone mad if it hadn’t already
almost happened!

But I couldn’t admit that, I was
feeling already like I was a terrible mother. I tried to calm him
down; that sort of thing had to be exceptionally rare. Death by toy
chest; it’s not high up on the child fatality list. It’s hardly
tuberculosis or… playing with matches.

He was sweating, I could tell
something else was wrong. I thought maybe he’d found Benjamin lying
in the chest again and had been scared witless. He told me that
when he grew up someone he knew had died like that. They climbed
into a chest and their parents had found them hours later, their
face blue, their body cold and lifeless.

That explained it a little, but
I knew there was more. Peter was usually so damn unflappable. We
had a very frosty dinner; Benjamin was cheerful and talking again
but he could see his father was upset so that didn’t last long. We
had pizza, usually a nice treat, but it wasn’t fun.

After I’d put Benjamin to bed I
made Peter tell me what had really happened. He didn’t want to at
first, but I could tell I’d stumbled across something terrible from
his past, and I couldn’t leave that sort of thing alone. I was his
wife; he’d shouldn’t be hiding things from me.

Eventually he started to tell me
a story. When he was a kid, there were three children on his street
and they used to play together. Having children roughly at the same
time had made all three families very close and it was not unusual
for them to have each other over to their houses or for them to
play in the street and go on days out together.

There was Peter, Oscar and Nils
– the Lundgren family were Swedish but had lived in England for
over a decade. The three children played together all the time from
when they were very young, but by the time they were seven or eight
most of them had siblings too. Peter had his little brother Lance,
who lives in Canada, and Oscar had brothers and so on. The
Lundgrens had had a second child, after many problems. Nils had
almost died in birth and they’d been told that they might never
have another. That’s probably what made Nils so shy and scared,
Peter had said, that his parents were over-protective of him.

They’d had a little girl they’d
called Sigrid and they were going to have a big party after her
christening. It was being held at the Lundgren’s house and all the
three families plus relatives were there.

Out of the three of them, Oscar
was sort of the leader, bossing the other two around. Peter was
usually happy to go along with it, but Nils was shy and cautious
and he’d sometimes get pushed around. Peter said he used to try to
stand up for Nils, stop Oscar from picking on him. But often he
would become impatient with Nils too and they both might pick on
him, maybe bully him a bit.

On the day of the christening
the three of them were playing together at the party after, along
with Lance who was the oldest of the next generation of kids. They
were playing hide and seek around the Lundgren’s house, which was
the biggest on the street, and somewhere where they didn’t normally
have the chance to play.

Nils wasn’t good at playing hide
and seek, despite living there. Oscar kept pestering him that it
was because he was afraid of the dark. Nils was getting upset by
this and even Lance was starting to tease him too. Peter was trying
not to tease him, but he didn’t want to defend him too much because
he didn’t want to look bad in front of Oscar or his brother.

After a while of teasing him,
Nils said he could find somewhere to hide, somewhere where no one
would ever find him. So Oscar told him to go; it was supposed to be
Nils’ turn to go look, but Oscar would let him have another go at
hiding if he had such a great place to hide. So off he went, but
instead of Peter and Lance going to hide too, Oscar thought it
would be really funny if they just left him. That they’d pretend
he’d found a place to hide so good, that they just couldn’t find
him.

Lance thought it was hilarious
but Peter thought it was harsh. But then Oscar starting laying in
to him, telling him he was a baby and that it was funny. Peter went
along with it, but after a while, when Nils didn’t show up, he went
looking for him. He went all over the house looking, but he
couldn’t find him.

At one point he went into Nils’
father’s office. None of them had hidden in there, because they
thought they might get in trouble. Nils’ father was a lawyer and
his office was full of paperwork and case files and in there was
this chest. And Peter wondered if Nils was there inside. But when
he went to the box he noticed there was a latch on the front and
that it was on really tight.

He couldn’t open it, so he
thought Nils couldn’t possibly be in there because it couldn’t be
opened. So eventually he gave up too and went on playing with the
others. He had no idea something terrible had happened. So when,
after more than half an hour, no one had seen Nils, their parents
started to ask about him. And when they started shouting and he
didn’t answer, they started tearing the place apart looking for
him.

Peter said it was almost an hour
before they found him. He suffocated to death in that chest. They
pulled him out and he was bright blue and ice cold.

His parents blamed it all on
Peter and Oscar and their families were no longer friends. Nils’
father started to drink heavily and he would shout and yell at
Peter and his brother in the street. He and Peter’s father got into
fights. Nils’ father said he’d take them to court but he never did.
Eventually they just moved. But it drove a wedge between them and
Oscar’s family too. While Nils’ family blamed both of them, Peter’s
family blamed Oscar’s. He never saw them again after they
moved.

Peter told me all this with
tears flowing down his face, obviously he had buried these memories
away deep and hadn’t thought about them or faced them in years. He
was less than ten when it all happened.

I listened sympathetically, held
him as he cried. But while he told the story one question burned
deeply in my mind. A question that had me all in a panicking
through what he was telling me. When he told me everything and he’d
pulled himself back together a bit, I asked him about Nils’ name. I
asked him whether anyone had ever called Nils Neil?

“All the time,” he said. People
didn’t get that it was a foreign name and people often called him
Neil by mistake.

Apparently I fell off the bed
and fainted. I don’t think I was out very long; I woke up on the
bed with Peter standing over me with his concerned face on. Peter
wanted to know what had happened, was I alright?

I wasn’t alright and I told him.
I started to tell him everything about Neil and Benjamin. He didn’t
believe me at first. He started ranting and raving again about how
there was nothing wrong with Benjamin and how he thought I’d got
over all this. So I lashed out back at him and told him about the
chest, and how I’d found Benjamin inside; threw it in his face to
show him I’d been right all along. That our son was acting strange,
that he was lost in a world of his own, that there was something
else in the house with us!

I mean, what kind of kid has an
imaginary friend called Neil? It’s not very imaginative is it? And
Benjamin had a wonderful imagination.

We argued all night. Peter kept
trying to escape the truth; that the ghost of his dead friend had
come back and now he was trying to take Benjamin away from us. I
know that sounds crazy, but there was no other explanation. It all
added up; insane though it sounds, it all made sense.

That next morning, the two of us
sat Benjamin down and Peter asked him about Neil.

But Ben said he didn’t know
anyone called Neil; that he didn’t have an imaginary friend and
that he didn’t know what I was talking about.

I practically screamed the place
down; how could he lie like that? And straight away my loyal
husband started to doubt everything that I had said. I shouted at
Benjamin; he started to cry, tears pouring down his face. The
perfect little manipulator.

I was livid, I was screaming the
place down. Peter took Benjamin away to his room and then came back
down to me and all hell broke loose.

He said I was going insane, that
I wasn’t the woman he married, that I was making it all up, that I
was delusional. He couldn’t see that Benjamin was lying to him.
That his perfect little son wasn’t so perfect. How would he know
anything about him; he wasn’t even there half the time.

But they’d played it so
beautifully – I could prove nothing. Everything I was saying could
be disputed. My word against Benjamin’s; against the perfect little
angel who did nothing wrong when Peter was there. Not a damn
thing.

We argued for hours. Peter said
I was the one who needed help, not Benjamin. And what’s more, I if
didn’t get it, he was taking Benjamin away from me. He was going to
take away my son because I couldn’t be trusted with him any
more.

I exploded; he said that there
was nothing I could do about it. I said I’d call the police, he
said he would tell them everything, about all the lies and
delusions and about how unstable I was. I had a choice, either I
could seek help voluntarily or he would report me to social
services.

He was going to call his parents
and take Benjamin there while I made up my mind. I was a wreck,
bawling with tears, prostrate on the floor. How could he do that to
me? My own husband, my own husband!

That bastard. He made me doubt
myself again. Could I be imagining it all? Could I be making it all
up? Was I really ill? Was it really all my fault? I just didn’t
know any more. I just didn’t know.

All I know was that I didn’t
want to be alone. That I didn’t want to be without my family. They
were my life – I didn’t have anything else. Without them I had
nothing. I was nothing.

Peter couldn’t get hold of his
parents; that bought me some time. He could hear me crying my eyes
out and I think finally he began to feel guilt, and shame, and
horror. He came back into the kitchen and sat down with me and he
tried to say sorry. Said that this was his fault, he should’ve
known earlier that I was breaking down. He shouldn’t have left me
alone. He had plenty of warning signs and he was too stupid not to
have acted on them sooner.

He didn’t know what he was
talking about, but I was so near suicidal that I would’ve taken
anything. Any small sign of affection, from anyone.

We sat on the floor crying
together for more than half an hour. We were going to get help
together, we were going to get through this. Fucking idiot; he
couldn’t see what was staring him in the face.

After a while he said he was
going to go upstairs and see if Benjamin was alright. I wasn’t
crying any more, I was fatigued and barely able to stand up; I had
been that emotional. I washed my face and tried to look normal in
the vain hope that Benjamin might be convinced that everything was
going to be alright, that I was going to be alright.

Peter came back downstairs. He
said he couldn’t find Benjamin.

We both started shouting. Loud,
at the top of our lungs, we yelled his name. We screamed his name.
We couldn’t find him. He was nowhere to be seen.

We both panicked. Frantically we
started tearing the place apart. Opening cupboards, searching under
beds, wardrobes anywhere. Peter searched upstairs, I searched
downstairs. But there were only so many places to hide. I looked
down behind the sofas, behind the television. I opened all the
kitchen cupboards, under the table, behind the curtains. I searched
under the stairs, pulling out all my canvases; he wasn’t there.

I heard Peter pulling down the
attic stairs. I checked my phone; he’d already been missing for
more than ten minutes! I rushed to the stairs to help Peter.

As I put my foot on the bottom
step I got that feeling. Cold shivers up my spine – I was being
watched. I threw my head around. There was no one in the corridor,
like always, there was nothing there.

But this time, I wasn’t so sure
and I was desperate, and in a state of panic, I yelled, “Benjamin”
knowing, deep down, there was still no one there.

Then I saw it. Just the tiniest
of glimpses of a foot, a child’s shoe, just protruding from behind
the kitchen door frame.

“Benjamin,” I screamed.

A child peered from inside the
kitchen; he stood half behind the doorframe, just his left side
visible to me.

His hair was blonde, his eyes
were brown, his clothes were old and faded – it wasn’t
Benjamin!

He was smiling at me,
malevolently, and then disappeared.

“Benjamin” I screamed and ran
into the kitchen. The back door to the garden was wide open. It was
pouring with rain outside. The boy was nowhere to be seen, but as I
stood in the doorway I saw the door to the shed was not closed
either.

I ran across the soggy wet lawn
towards the door. I pushed it open and staggered inside. The shed
was empty, except for all the tools and sacks of compost.

Compost – I looked towards the
windows, below which stood the two compost bins where me and
Benjamin used to toss our leftovers and vegetable peelings.

The lid of one of them wasn’t
properly closed; it was propped up like it had been
over-filled.

I ran to it, threw open the lid
– two feet pointed out at me from the soil.

I screamed and dug my hands in
and pulled at Benjamin’s feet. He was dug in so deep I couldn’t
even pull him out. I dug more, screaming, crying. I tipped the bin
over; as it spilled out I was able to get my arms in and pull him
out.