Our mother dies and the old man locks himself in the rusting pickup for days at a time. We eat store-brand breakfast cereal for almost all of our meals; sometimes our Travelling cousins drive down to check we haven’t gone the way of their aunt and they drive us out to the fried chicken place up on the hill.
We do not have words to tell the teachers or the other children at school what has happened to us, to our mother, to the old man. Ashamed, we feel our mother’s death will reflect badly upon both us and our surviving parent, and we know instinctively that this intrusion from the world would make him angry, or, more correctly, angrier.
The old man, when not confined to the pick-up, alternates between a black bitter anger which he barely suppresses and a sort of vast disconnect in which he stands pawing over old pictures, stroking the frame, repeating our mother’s name, sometimes for hours at a time. When we are home from school he cannot find time to give us work; we idle and spoil.
He gathers clothes from the wardrobe, makes a maudlin pile on the uneven concrete that separates our cramped, shabby bungalow from the Yard; he makes a bonfire with some petrol he’s got out of a scrap car, but before he lights it he selects an item, proffers it to us—watching mute and puzzled, sulling in the drizzle, holding the dogs back—as a keepsake. He offers me the school jumper I grew out of two years before and I fill up so completely with rage that I can’t even manage the words to tell him that it’s my school uniform, can’t even set him right.
Sudden wrath destroys his grief. He pushes me with such force that I fall to the rough concrete. He stands over me, quivering, wounded and hateful, my faded school jumper hanging limp from his hand.
I never, ever tell him his mistake.
Later, staring into the flames, my sister—who has dutifully, gratefully received one of her own cardigans for a memento mori, and will sleep with it taped to the peeling wallpaper above her bed—tells me that he didn’t know about the jumper, that it’s not his fault he doesn’t know such things. My sister is older than I am and bigger, but her words fills me with such hate that I leap at her, claw at her, dig my fingers into the flesh of her shoulder and twist, trying to do something to her so she feels as awful as I do. I hurt her, but she hits me on the jaw hard enough to rattle my brain. I let her go.
She sees the old man’s shadow turn the corner of the rotten portakabin that serves as the Yard’s rudimentary office and looks at me: as hate-filled as myself but infinitely slyer.
She waits until he will hear then screams in agony and throws herself to the ground, rolling and weeping and he comes stomping around the portakabin, face curiously blank, and he lets it all out on the back of my legs. I writhe and grovel and cry, but the feeling of betrayal I feel towards my sister is worse than the pain.
After this I fall into a hole inside myself. I pass the days hiding in the Yard spying on the dossers who sort the scrap metal and cut up the cars. I steal ancient dusty bottles of gin from the wooden sideboard in the front room and swallow it until I puke hot and bitter, stomach acid and flowers.
I slip through the barbwire fence that divides the Yard from the waste ground beyond—dunes and twisted trees and polluted scrub and then the ground falling away to a huge pit filled with water, ringed with dying willows and diseased birch. I hide in the bushes, sipping more gin, listening to the metal clamour from the Yard, the traffic going by on the road.
My Travelling cousins are a colourful pair. They have glossy black hair and dark eyes that drowned somewhere in me and my sister’s gene pool. They drive us to the fried chicken shop, a place that before our mother died we were never allowed to frequent.
Afterwards, they like to tell ghost stories as we sit stuffing ourselves in the backseat of their car.
There was a boy, my younger cousin says.
(Her sister leans back, checks her reflection in the rearview, applies a moist lemon-scented towelette to her mouth to wipe away the remains of her chicken dinner. In my imagination, my memory, I will always see her like this: beautiful and twenty-five years old, leaning back in the Recaro seat of a Belmont SRi.)
This boy, foolish and prone to stray, was wilful, and he was—she grins—maybe a little fucked-up. He wandered to places haunted by hungry ghosts, to the edges of the wild. Out in the wild places there’s little shelter, and when it began to rain he began to despair, because he was the sort to go about without his coat.
The boy cast around, trying to find shelter, and, desperate to keep out the rain—for now he was shivering and cold—he found a hole.
Into the hole he went.
He sat there at the mouth of the hole, not daring to go any further in, watching the rain come down, shivering and cold. Then, behind him, he heard a noise. A voice called out his name.
He turned around, and behind him was a choviar.
“What’s that?” asks my sister. Though our podjeri chib is more broken than most, she is not ashamed to admit it.
“She ain’t said it right. She means chowvahawn,” says my older cousin, bored perhaps, at the turn her sister’s tale has taken.
My younger cousin shrugs.
“If you like.”
My sister says: “But what does it mean?”
“Witch,” I breathe. “It means witch.”
My older cousin rankles.
“No it doesn’t.” Her face softens. “Well. Not exactly. Not, like, an old woman on a broomstick who melts when you throw a bucket of water over her.”
My younger cousin nods.
“It’ll do, though.”
So, she goes on: this chowvahawn, this thing that haunts the dark, she asks the boy why he’s hiding out in her hole, all alone in the rain and the dark of the night.
“When did it get dark?” My sister is a born sceptic.
“Shut up,” suggests my younger cousin.
The boy said:
I am sad, and I am lonely. I don’t have anyone to play with and I’m hurting, and I don’t know what to do with this pain and it’s got nowhere to go, and sometimes I feel it eating away at me.
He said:
Sometimes I feel it burning bits of myself off, and sometimes I feel it pouring into me, filling me up like a glass. It makes me do things I shouldn’t. I don’t know what to do with it, and I don’t know how to deal with it.
And the chowvahawn said:
When I was alive, I felt a lot like you.
“Wait,” says my sister. “The witch is a ghost?”
“Kekke. Your brother’s a dinlo.”
“Will you please both stop interrupting me? Thank you.”
Wouldn’t you like to come and live in the darkness, asks the chowvahawn. Stay here with me. Nothing can hurt you when you live down deep in a hole.
The boy thinks about it for a while. He’d like to stay in the hole. At least it’s out of the rain. He thinks, also, about how lonely he’d be, alone with the ghost. He thinks of the family he’s left behind. He thinks about his sister.
The chowvahawn, she can see him waver. So she puffs herself up, ready to gobble him down, and she spreads her wings—
“Wait, wait,” says my sister. “Wings? It’s got wings? And how is there room to spread its wings? How big is this hole?”
My eldest cousin gives her an old-fashioned look.
“Maybe the chowvahawn isn’t alone in the hole,” says my younger cousin. “Maybe there’s another chavi in there with her already, one who doesn’t know when to shut up.”
My sister settles back into her seat.
So the chowvahawn spread its wings and it loomed up over the boy, and its face opened like a door and out of it came terrible mouths all ringed with teeth and it smelled like carrion and the boy wailed and he turned to run, out into the rain and the dark and then he saw a hand, reaching down to him from outside and in desperation he grabbed it.
Out of the hole he tumbled, into the dark and the rain. The chowvahawn leapt for him, reaching out with terrible claws and those awful mouths spread wide but where it had puffed itself up to swallow him whole, it was too big to get through the entrance—
“Thank you,” says my sister, under her breath.
—and his kin, it was his kin who reached into the hole and pulled him out, and it was his kin huddled him under their coat. The chowvahawn lashed and screamed, but the ghost was too angry at being cheated to think about shrinking itself back down. And the boy was safe, and he followed his kin home.
Silence in the car. My cousin starts the ignition, checks the mirrors, pulls back out carefully on to the empty rainslick streets. They drop us back at our front door. The lights are off, which means the old man is sitting up in the front room, talking to a picture of our mother.
My cousins wave then drive away, blip of wheelspin and around the corner. My sister fumbles for the spare key, under the flowerpot.
“You go in,” I say to my sister. “I’ve got something to do. I’ll only be a minute.”
She shakes her head, then shrugs.
I turn around. The stars give enough light to stumble by.
On the waste ground, ferns and bracken rustle. I catch my foot in the clay-y soil as I skirt the edge of the slope. Things move stealthy through the undergrowth, scurrying on their business.
Down by the water it’s cold; I’ve come out without my coat. The surface of the tarn breaks into expanding ripples, and then the rain’s coming down so hard: stair-rods. Somehow there is still moonlight and the bare spidery arms of the willows around me and above me the white-slashed-black of the twisted birch trunks at the top of the rise and I look up at the torrential rain pelting out of the empty star-strewn sky and then I run.
I don’t see the hole. I’m falling, sideways and down, tumbling over and over until I hit something. I lie there gasping, waiting for the pain.
A noise, I think behind me—though it’s so dark, I can’t tell which way is up—that resolves into a voice.
I feel her cold hand on my shoulder, soft as the breath of the dead.
If I was to stay here, what would I do? What would you do, here under the ground?
A shifting in the darkness, an unseen parting beneath the world.
Atch here kokkero.
I shake my head in the dark, for all the good that does.
I stop here alone, it says.
I think on this. I think of the old man, his face twisted empty or twisted with disgust. I think of him locked in the pickup. I think of my sister. I think of returning to school.
The ghost says: I am here for you.
The ghost says: I will take care of you.
The ghost says: I am so hungry.
The ghost says: Don’t move. Close your eyes.
Open yourself.
Wide.
Wider.
Yes.
THE END
Nelson comes from a Romany family & lives & works in Bristol, UK. He’s had short fiction published recently by venues such as The Dark, Weird Horror vol. 9, Old Moon Quarterly, Kaleidotrope & Vastarien.
