Extract Three

But later, in the cold light of day, she laughed at the thought of her fear, for was not the family home, built in keeping with the plan designed by David, her paternal grandfather, and counting on its heavy iron gates and thick brick walls, as inviolate as a fortress unless, through some oversight, a door had been left unbolted or window slightly ajar?

And so, for all her wild imaginings, she was at peace in her conviction that Boogy the Bogeyman had found no such chink in the armor of their dwelling, and she went about her days safe in the certainty that her anguish had seeped out of a bad dream.

In the course of her childhood, and later her adolescence, and even into womanhood, she had asked her parents, for all their patience, exasperated by her constant questioning, why, when there were just the three of them, they had continued to live in such a large house, with most of the rooms a testament to neglect.

It was not so much the discolored paint that was flaking off the walls, or the outdated furniture that had lost its luster, or the convoluted cobwebs long untouched by any human hand, as that the untenanted rooms, each one no doubt a witness to spectral stirrings, had come to ransack her peace, and so she would refrain from entering any door that, far from forming a part of the daily fabric of her life, was out of bounds for her.

She could hardly begin to count the row upon row of empty rooms that, like well-worn lovers who had outlived their useful purpose, had been cast aside without a trace of contrition. And then there was the cold, and not only winter's curse, for even in the early spring, with just a few rooms barely heated, a chill, cutting into one's core as keenly as a long-drawn-out abandonment, ran through the house.

And so much so that even in her bedroom, where a clapped-out radiator emitted a feeble warmth, the better to protect them from the freezing draught, she tucked up her dolls who would one day grow up, and into her daughters, and ever so tightly, that only their tiny alabaster faces could be seen, protruding from under the heavy padded quilt.

And reclining there, and with their eyes wide-open, they lay low, and especially at night, to launch their ambush, and if Boogy the Bogeyman should ever again have the gall to desecrate her lair, her battalion of babes-in-arms would be sure to leap to her defense, first scratching, then biting, and finally kicking, to repulse the invading enemy once and for all.

She wondered down the years what could have possessed her paternal grandfather, a well-to-do lawyer who could have bought land in any part of the county, to have chosen such a setting, so often prey to the forest's insidious shadows, for his new abode that had, by all accounts, become his heart's desire.

Her parents later joked that the choice of location was due to David having his sun in Capricorn, and that the house's stark spirit was nothing more than the reflection of his Saturnine, and often severe, nature.

And that was how she remembered him, as a man who, for all his considerable wealth, on the few occasions that he gave, and begrudgingly, an apology for a party, would offend his guests by serving a few sips of cheap wine and the smallest of small eats: a bone-dry, minuscule biscuit; a wizened olive long past its sell-by date; a paring of processed cheese fit for a mouse.

And woe betide any desperate visitor who, with a shamefaced expression, might feel the need to grovel before the host, Grandad David, to ask whether, in his boundless charity, he might stretch, if ever so slightly, to a small, short-term financial loan for, in such an event, the luckless petitioner would be escorted forthwith, in a sullen, recriminatory silence, to the back door.

And with his own granddaughter, he was no more benevolent, refusing in the course of their few joyless outings to buy her a single ice-cream cone or stick of candy.

And nor could he disguise his utter jadedness when she, as a girl, frolicked around the living-room, and every time that she approached him to ask if she could sit on his lap, he would fend her off with some unlikely excuse, such as that he had errands to run, or urgent business to attend to.

But the one thing that she had never been able to forgive was the day when, one of her dolls having fallen off a chair, her grandfather, in a fit of rage railing at her for having cluttered up the floor with worthless debris, had hurled the poor, little dear towards the far end of the room.

How could he have stooped so low as to commit that wicked deed, throwing such a sweet, well-meaning soul, and ever so pretty too, into a far-flung, dusty corner, as if she were a rag, fit to be trodden on.

Dashing as quickly as she could to the scene of the crime, she bent down to gauge the damage that had been wrought.

Noting that the doll's head was still attached to her spine, and that no body parts lay strewn there, she heaved an immense sigh of relief as, moved to besotted tenderness, she stroked her baby's golden locks.

As for her grandfather, bound to him only by name, she cursed him under her breath.

Even at such a tender age, he gave her the creeps, he really did, and almost as much as Boogy the Bogeyman.

A Dark Forest: Extract One
A Dark Forest: Extract Two
A Dark Forest: Extract Three

"The Power of Prose"