Ghost Story

As I've gotten older, I've realised that a lot of what I thought of as memories were no such thing. The first time it happened, it was an odd moment of clarity, telling a friend about a childhood anecdote involving a treehouse. I vividly remember the tree, and to this day, if visiting my childhood home, I could walk you to it.

The thing is, I have never built or been involved in the building of a treehouse, ever.

I'm terrified of heights. It's pretty much the only actual fear I have, and just for a moment, I remembered that the treehouse was never real, and even if it was, I doubt I would have ever gone up in it.

I remember it being huge. Too big really, for the tree, but it needed to be for all the people that were in it. I remember the people; childhood friends and relatives, all of them real people, and most of them lived close enough to the house near the tree that it made sense for them to have joined me there for some childhood fun and games.

Some of the people though, mad no business there, and certainly no business with me. So, it wasn't real, even though it was vivid, and I must have day dreamed about many times after its initial creation in my sleeping imagination.

Then there's my Auntie's house, which for years I recalled had a huge grass slope leading down to it from the street. It was gargantuan, and terrifying; the kind of hill that would halt a charge of a battalion of foot. In reality, there was a small patch of green.

Sure, it was on a slope, but there was no way me and my cousins could have rolled and slid down down it in huge groups, whooping and hollering with unbridled exuberance. They might not all have been my cousins, the dozens of children who joined in our games, but I recognised enough of them, that for years, I thought we had dared the monstrous slope for no other reason than it was there.

There's another memory I really hope isn't real. You see, I'm sceptical, rational, don;t believe in the supernatural and I cannot stand even vaguely superstitious behaviour. It's that very rationality that means I can't quite convince myself this memory isn't real, even though it seems so unreal to me.

Once again, it's back to my childhood. We moved around little as my dad got better jobs and could afford better houses, and when he hit paydirt, he got a mortgage on a brand new semi detached on the outskirts of a city in the Midlands. Everything was new about the area, with the far end of our road being one of the furthest points you could get out of the city centre and still be part of the city.

Our house had been completed only a few months earlier, and the lot next door was for a bungalow under construction. There was no fence or locked gates stopping all the kids who lived nearby from playing on the building site, just a couple of A4 signs and the disapproval of any adults who were not working during the summer days we'd climb scaffolding and jump onto piles of sand.

It wasn't the only house under construction, and on the opposite side of the small green that we used to play rounders on - pile of jackets for home base, and three very randomly placed trees from the other bases - there was a few old houses that were lined up to be demolished to make room for modern housing in the affluent area we'd moved in to.

Like the building sites, there were signs on the doors forbidding entrance. Like the building sites, the signs did nothing to dissuade us from exploring.

I was in infant school at the time, but other than knowing I wasn't in the first year, I couldn't tell you how old I was. A lot of childhood memories have a nebulous position in time though, so the fact that I can't remember exactly when this happened, isn't enough to convince me it did not in fact happen.

There were other people who explored the house. There would have had to have been though; I was too young to plan something like this. My sister was two years older than me  - still is, really - so she might have instigated it, but I think it might have been one of the neighbor kids.

A couple of doors down a family had moved in before us out of Belfast. They had three daughters, Shelley, who was my age, Stacey who was a couple of years younger, so wasn't involved in this, and Sam. Sam was a bit older than my sister, and even as a kid that young, I crushed on her from pretty much the first time I met her.

If any of you bring up that it's probably her fault that I've had a thing for girls with Irish accents ever since, you wouldn't be far wrong.

Sam, although still in single digits age wise herself, had the air of an elder stateswoman with all the kids who lived nearby. She was taller than all of them, even the boys, and her family had moved in before most others on the street. I can't be sure, but it makes a lot of sense that she'd have been the one to suggest breaking in to one of the abandoned houses.

She was old enough that most of the kids would have gone along with the idea, even though the houses were scary, and our youthful imaginations had already started creating the kinds of myths that would ensure we should go nowhere near the property, if they were actually true. The thrill of proving that we weren't scared was another factor, and in my case, I would have done almost anything to impress Sam.

There was another kid there too. I think he was called Matthew. When I was in high school, and for long complicated reasons was back in the same house, I went to the same school as Matthew, and wanted to ask him if he remembered what happened in the house. That first time he saw me though, he looked at me like we'd never met.

"Spooky", you're probably thinking, but I was disastrously uncool through all of highschool, so more than likely it was a simple defense mechanism that stopped him admitting he knew me as a kid. I wanted to talk to him about it, rather than the girls or my sister, because we had never been friends, and I thought I could trust him to tell me the truth,

My sister, being who she is, would have just wound me up, made me out to be an idiot, regardless of whether what I remember happening ha actually happened; she'd just that kind of person. I couldn't ask Sam, because if it was all a figment of my imagination, I'd look like a fool in front of her, and Shelley gre up to be part of the cool crowd, and even though she was friendly enough around our parents, she was more than distant at school. Talking to her even about classes we shared got me a scornful look, so something like this, something so weird... No.

It was sunny when we went across the green, a few distant clouds maybe, but as warm as you wanted a summer school holiday to be. Sam and her sister lived two doors down from us, and if their parents or ours had been at any front facing windows, they would have seen us, opened a window and shouted us back as crossed the road on the far side of the green, admonishing us for attempting something so daft. We wouldn't have been in real trouble though, as we would have been stopped from doing anything actually wrong.

The road was badly maintained over there, nobody lived in the houses, and until new builds were put up, only work vehicles needed to get where we were going. There was no pavement on the side of the road with the old empty buildings. The house we had chosen had a garden wall and a gate with peeling red paint. There had been a latch at some point, you could see the holes in the rotting wood where it had been screwed in place, but without it, a quick push and we were through, walking the short path to the door.

With no one to tend it, the garden had long been reclaimed by the wild plants that filled the nearby fields. With the cows that grazed those fields, the grass was higher than I was. Sam was at the front of our advance party, and she was excited to see that the door was unlocked and partly open.

Was there a reason she hadn't used the door handle? It wasn't really a handle though, a doorknob, old and worn brass. Who knows why she didn't use? Instead she planted her hand firmly on the no trespassing sign that had been tacked to the door and pushed it open.

As bright and joyous as it was outside, it was a shadowy and dust filled inside. The door opened up onto a dim hallway, the living room at the end and a door on either side. The right hand side door was closed. Nobody even touched the door. The pale wood was unremarkable, but no so much that we would ignore it.

We did though, as if that part of the house wasn't even there. On the left, with gloomy light seeping in through small pains of dirty glass, we could see the kitchen. No formica work surfaces or stainless steel wash basin. It was old wood, warped with damp and neglect, a thin veneer peeling from every panel.

The light was so dulled, I couldn't tell you the colours of the cupboards, or the broken mugs that had fallen from them. The broken remains of who knows what crockery littered the floor, but the threat of small cuts on sharp shards would not dissuade us from our mission!

All of us crowded into the kitchen, and it did feel like a crowd, even though there was less than half a dozen of us, and we were all slim. The kitchen in our new house was twice this size! We laughed a little, feeling sorry for the people who had moved on from here, but mostly just being spiteful, like pretty much all kids are. Monsters, really.

It was three floors, with likely a cellar, and almost certainly had a loft too. Not just that, but it was almost as wide as the building we lived in, which was two house, a set of semi detached homes. I couldn't tell you how far back it went, but the kitchen wasn't just small, it was too small. We should have had more room to move.

Shelley saw the spider first, and although it's going to sound sexist, she responded in pretty much the manner you'd expect a young girl to. The scream was a shriek, and she lunged away, colliding with my sister who fell hard against Matthew, who stumbled on something, got his foot caught in between the legs of a chair that had been left on the floor, and went down.

One of the joys of being a child is how much you bounce; bend rather than break, when you hit something. If a grown up had taken the spill he did, it would have meant more than a bruised hip and a sprained wrist. He fell with a thud, and if he had a dozen more years on him, and the extra weight that went along with it, I think he'd have broken that arm.

The sprain was enough for him to start crying too though, joining Shelley, even if his cries were of a more bubbling snot filled nature. My sister helped him up, and the simple brownian motion of people in a confined space had moved me closer to the sink.

It was huge, and white, cracked porcelain, stained with watermarks and soap scum, grime running from the overflow to the drain, and in the bottom was the biggest spider I've ever seen,

I don't mean up until that point, as a child, I mean, ever. I mean bigger than anything I've seen on TV that wasn't a puppet or computer generated effect. I've seen big spiders since, but the kind you see crawling up walls in this part of the world are more leg than anything else, and apart from any initial shock of seeing one when you wouldn't expect it - killed one with a TV remote once that snuck up on me while I was watching Pinky and the Brain - spiders don't really bother me.

Hell, I'd rather spiders than flies, so live and let live is what I say!

This was a horror movie spider though. A huge, segmented body, almost completely hidden by thick hair. Not hidden enough though, and as it moved, lazily trying, no doubt for at least the thousandth time, to find purchase on the smooth porcelain, I could see it's joints slide against each other.

There was something robotic about the movements, like machined joints, working perfectly, smooth metal sliding over worked plastic, but it was definitely alive, and that made it worse. Have you ever seen a spider face up close and personal?

I didn't need to be close, it seemed so huge that it took up the entire front half of the thing. Before I could even take in the details, I knew why Shelley had screamed. Just as languidly as it's legs moved, bits of its face did the same. Mandibles, raising and lowering, as if it was chewing something slowly, but with no bottom jaw, no mouth at all that I could see. Slow, but deliberate, and never stopping.

This is one of those moments that feels so damned cliche as I'm typing, but cliches become such for a reason I guess. It could only have been seconds, but it felt a lot longer.

Gah! I know exactly how that sounds! I swear though, I'm writing exactly what I remember, as much of it as I can, and I promise, I was transfixed by the thing. As I watched, it tried again to move up, and lost its grip, rolling slightly sideways and towards me, exposing more of the face, more of the eyes.

Gravity isn't a slow force, and it didn't have far to fall, no matter how big it was, so I'm talking about seconds passing. The amount of movement I saw though, must have taken minutes; each step with a couple of long, multipart legs, each bite that looked soft but unrelenting must have taken minutes.

The fact that everyone else was scrambling not only out of the kitchen, but back down the hall, it could only have been seconds though.

Their footsteps on the floorboards wasn't enough to jolt me out of my observation, but when the front door slammed shut again, I didn't jump a little. I heard them leaving, wailing and screaming, but already tinged with laughter at what had happened. They were on their way out, they didn't need to be scared by the thing in the sink.

I could see them through the window, just about, being as short as I was. They were pushing and pulling each other, trying to be the first away from the house of horrors, seemingly not aware that they were a man down. Being left behind was a common occurrence in my childhood, and even back then, I never even thought to be disappointed by them forgetting me.

The spider hadn't scared me like it had everyone else. I can't say it didn't bother me. Even thinking back to it has my skin crawling in such a fashion that I've brushed my hand down the back of my legs twice, sure I could feel something gentle moving against my skin inside my jeans. I hadn't ran though, I hadn't screamed and fell, [ushing my friends in panic, and that meant I was alone.

I couldn't bring myself to stay in the kitchen though, even if I didn't want to leave the house. It was still moving, and the silence of it was unnerving.

Leaving the kitchen, the door opposite a blank in my memory now; had I tried to open it but found it locked? Had I thought about it all as I turned left and carried on towards the living room?

This room was bigger, and felt more like a part of the house I had seen from outside. The bay windows were made of small panes of glass, like the kitchen, but a lot were cracked and broken. It didn't seem to help the room get any lighter though, but maybe it was just because even more dust seemed to hang in the air.

You've heard the thing about dust, right? It's skin.

I mean, like most great stories, that's not true. It's mostly just dirt particles, and back then, I was too young to have either heard the story, or to have know, macabre as it was, it wasn't true. One thing that did occur to me though, was that dust meant people. Even with a few broken windows, the movement of air wasn't enough to keep this much dust floating eerily through the darkness.

You don't see light. What you see is what light touches, and the amount of particles in the air meant I could see each beam, frozen perfectly in front of me as I stepped on to the thin, threadbare carpet. It seemed that all the light could do, was shine of the dust, as shadow had taken over the rest of cavernous space.

Another couple of steps, each creaking a floorboard as my weight moved and I stopped again, hoping to see my friends through this window, but they had gone by now. The next squeak had my heart in my throat. I was still. Maybe I'd gone on tiptoes to see further, maybe that had caused the squeak?

And when I managed to lower myself down, the floorboard must have moved again against dry wood, and that was what had caused the noise.

If it wasn't me, if the noise was caused by something else, I wasn't alone. I was alone, they'd run off after the spider, and even though I couldn't see where they had run off to, I would have heard them if they had come back in. I would have heard more than a slow repetitive creak of wood moving against wood,

The door would have opened. They couldn't have stayed this quiet. There was four of them, and they would have tried to sneak up, maybe, but the house was old and rotten, and noisy.

The house was noisy, creaking, back and forth, back and forth. Rocking on old wood,

I was alone in a house that creaked, back and forth, rocking.

My breathing was getting heavy, in and out through my nose, whistling, quicker and quicker and I had to turn around to leave, but if I turned around I might see something, rocking back and forth, squeaking on wood.

If I'd have turned left, I would have just ran out the house, probably falling on my way, scraping an elbow on chipped paint and grazing my knee on a door frame or something. To the left was the window, out the window was the green, and just out of sight was my new house, with blue painted walls in my bedroom and familiar He-Man bedspread.

I can think of no reason but a burning curiosity for why I turned right, but that's what I did. Was that creak because I moved?

Everything was dark in the back of the room, maybe red, or burgundy, or maybe even green, but all that those words do is try and cover for the fact that in my head, all I could see was the colour of shadows moving. The movement and the noise came together in a familiar way that still shook me.

I knew what a rocking chair was. It was the item of furniture at Auntie Sue's that I wasn't allowed to sit on because they had it right in front of a glass fronted display cabinet, and I couldn't be trusted to maintain a dignified rock that wouldn't endanger the glass.

I knew that for a rocking chair to rock, you needed to sit in it and make it move.

I knew that wasn't alone.

It was a woman, old and grey, long hair falling over her shoulders and down into her lap. Her hands were on her knees, fingertips and nails just over the bend at the joint. Her feet were moving, the toes on the ground, but the heel rising and falling, pushing up and coming back down rhythmically.

The clothes were grey, her hair was grey, her fingers were grey, but I couldn't see her face.

She was surrounded by shadows, but not so much that I couldn't see the rest of her. Her hair was over part of her face, and I could see the hair clearly, why couldn't I see her face? Did I even want to?

Back and forth, squeaking and rocking, staring out of the shadows at the young boy who had broken into her house. At least, I thought she was, but her eyes were just as lost as her nose and her mouth. Just shadow, blank and unreadable.

It didn't stop, there was no sudden movement. No jump scare that shocked me out of my dumb staring. Back and forth, squeak after squeak, back and forth, squeak and squeak and back and squeak and forth and squeak.

The hands didn't move, the hair did nothing but sit against her clothes and her face. Just the feet, up and down and back and forth.

I moved then, but I don't know why. The spider hadn't scared me, and this was just an old lady, sitting at home, enjoying a warm day in her rocking chair, back and forth a squeak and back, but I have never been more scared.

I didn't fall over on my way out, I didn't scrape skin of a knee or elbow, and I didn't stumble and have to steady myself on a wall with peeling paint, I just got out, and ran, didn't even think to close the door or the gate. Didn't think of anything until I got home and after a few minutes I realised that my sister was in her room - she got the bigger room because she was older, and as a girl, had more clothes, and I hated he for it - with Shelley and Stacey.

Sam must have gone home already, Matthew the same, and no one had noticed I wasn't with them. I wanted to go and talk to them, but they'd left me, and I was angry and cross and terrified, and if I didn't talk to them about it I could play with my figures instead, and it didn't happen.

And I still don't know if it happened. Everything makes sense about it. All the people who went into the house with me are real, and I've spoke to them a lot - never about this - since. The house I grew up in is real, and my dad still lives in it, next to the bungalow that was being built when we were kids.

The green is still there, but rounders is out now as the trees are too big to be bases. The house is long gone, and I have no idea if it was ever there. I remember it though, and it made sense. There was a village before the new money came in, and they did destroy some old houses, I'm sure of that.

The spider couldn't have been real, although I remember it so well.

And who was the woman?