Things

A story that came from asking someone what they'd done at the weekend.

 Things

 

Most stories start with a bang.

This one, however, starts with a very definite whimper. Namely, my whimper as I cowered in terror from the encroaching rage of the Thing Under The Stairs. I would’ve hidden somewhere far more logical, like the wardrobe in my bedroom, but I knew that that was already occupied by three other Things, all of whom constantly jostled one another for supremacy. There’s nothing quite like being woken up at four in the morning by one of the Things In The Wardrobe being thrown out on its ear by the other Things. You’re probably going to have to take my word for that. If you’re lucky, it’s not something you’ll ever witness.

So the wardrobe as a hiding place wasn’t really an option. The Things in there would have been glad for a visit, I’m sure, but the Thing Under The Stairs would have caused all sorts of Diplomatic Incidents, as I’d come to think of them over the years.

And although the Thing Under The Bed had moved out several years earlier, I still reserved that space out of habit, because you never really knew when a Thing would get bored and decide to come back to you. Odd, really: the Thing Under The Bed, the first one that made its presence known to me, had gotten progressively smaller and decidedly more docile over the years until eventually it had just emerged one day, packed a small (pink) suitcase and left for what it said would be ‘someone more appreciative’. The other Things, however, hadn’t left and were still very much a part of my life.

All of this kind of behaviour is very well, although cause for an arched eyebrow or two from the parental units, and is perfectly acceptable behaviour if you’re a six year old boy, but I was thirty six on my last birthday – and quite frankly, I’m getting a bit fed up of the lot of them cramping my lifestyle. My parents have refused to visit ever since the Thing Under The Stairs had ripped my mother’s best jacket to shreds in a fit of pique because I wouldn’t let it out to watch ‘Desperate Housewives’ whilst they were visiting. It’s not that my parents would even have noticed it – after all, the ‘gift’ (if you can call it that) is mine exclusively, but even invisible, the Thing Under The Stairs takes up a lot of room on a two-seater sofa. Mum and Dad would’ve been suspicious.

As it was, they blamed me for it whilst the Thing Under The Stairs got off scot-free. That’s always been the way though. Even when I was a little kid and my parents were prepared to accept that I was genuinely frightened by what they called the ‘possibility’ of monsters under the bed/in the wardrobe/under the stairs (and, for a thankfully limited time, the Thing In The Toilet Cistern), they would still never accept that breakages and property damage in the form of graffiti on the bedroom walls was their handiwork and not mine.

“Nicholas,” they would say, sternly. (That’s me, by the way, I probably should have mentioned that, but I’m new to this book-writing lark). “Nicholas, you have to stop this. You’re not a baby anymore.”

Funny. They said that on the doorstep when they visited, with Mum standing there in her now-ragged jacket.

Nowhere I go is devoid of Things. I left home at the age of eighteen to go to university in Manchester. Without fail, a minimum of two of the Things came with me and squashed up in the top drawer. You’d be amazed at how flexible they can be when it’s necessary. I took a year out and travelled round the world. The Things came with me. Believe me, you haven’t lived until you’ve seen a Thing From Under The Bed crammed into an overhead luggage locker, or wandering around the Duty Free shops at O’Hare International.

I can’t get rid of them and I’ve tried. So many times. I’ve tried to acknowledge they don’t exist, I’ve tried psychiatric help. I even tried drinking copious quantities of alcohol. That just made me see double the number of Things. They’re intrinsically a part of me.

Me. Yes, I’d probably better deal with the fundamental stuff before the Thing Under The Stairs catches up to me and rips my limbs off. If that happens, it’ll make writing decidedly difficult.

Nicholas St. John Mark Spencer Williams is my overblown and slightly embarrassing given name, but nobody uses that except my parents. And just to settle your curiosity, because I know you’re wondering, yes, I was delivered by a St. John’s ambulance man in the Crawley branch of Marks and Spencer. Oh, my psychiatrist tends to call me Nicholas, but he has a Thing Under The Couch, so I try to avoid going there. The last thing I want is a psychiatric-indoctrinated Thing trying to blame everything on my mother.

Anyway, I digress. I do that a lot, you’d best get used to it if you’re going to stick with me. Most people just call me Nick. I have Things.

The medium of writing doesn’t convey that last sentence so well, but imagine that I just said ‘Most people just call me Nick. I have brown hair’. It’s the same thing. I have Things.

Actually, I have black hair, but that’s an incidental point. I’m tall, over six feet and not exactly what you’d call ‘buff’. In fact, I’m about as far down the other end of the scale as it’s feasibly possible to get. I’m pretty pale given that I spend most of my life in front of a computer screen and avoid the sun because I only have to stand in a sunbeam to get third degree burns. There are words in everyday vernacular for people like me. ‘Geek’ is one. ‘Nerd’ is another. Neither particularly flattering, but it’s water off a duck’s back to me. When you live with an infestation of Things, names are the least of your worries.

I was married until recently, for about five years. Jenny was – is – a lovely girl – but she discovered that living in a house where weird things (or indeed, weird Things) happened on a regular basis was too much to bear. So we moved house, despite the fact that I told her it would make no difference.

The Things came too. They loved the packing crates, I can tell you.

So there I was, hiding under the kitchen table as the Thing Under The Stairs rampaged up and down the hall, wondering just what it was I’d done in my early life to deserve this. The Thing Under The Stairs has been with me since I was five and is the most intelligent of all the Things that I’ve come into contact with.

Incidentally, I tried moving to a bungalow once in an effort to find a way of getting rid of it, but the Thing Under The Stairs kicked up such a fuss that in the end I withdrew my offer on the place. Turns out it’d have just become a Thing In The Attic.

“Attics are so passé,” it had said when it had calmed down a bit. “Look at me, Nicky, can you really imagine a Thing like me living in an attic?”

I could have imagined it, yes, but I just agreed. It’s easier.

 

This particular fit of pique had no obvious underlying cause. The Thing Under The Stairs was just in a foul temper, which meant hiding. It was during this session of tantrum-throwing that I finally reached the end of my exceptionally long tether.

 

It was time to deal with the Things. Time to take them in hand. Time to show them exactly who was boss in this household. Time to put them in their place. Time to…

 

Time to get grabbed out from under the table by the Thing Under The Stairs.

 

Perhaps I should describe what a Thing looks like to you, but what you have to understand is that the Things don’t really have a physical form, at least not until my mind has settled on what it is that they look like. It’s sort of like Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle, or Shrœdinger’s Cat.

 

For those of you who haven’t ever attempted to understand the fundamental nature of quantum physics, (and I can’t imagine why you haven’t, John Gribbin’s ‘In Search of the Edge of Time’ makes a fantastic table leg), let me summarise Shrœdinger’s Cat for you. Understand that this experiment never actually happened, it was only one of those in potentia things. Shame, really. I hate cats.

 

So there’s this cat. (It probably says a lot for me as a person that when I was first told about this experiment that I wanted to know the cat’s breed. And colour. And name).

 

So anyway, they take this cat and shove it in a box with a vial full of radioactive material and the potential exists for the vial to break and thus kill the cat. The premise of the ‘thought experiment’ as they call it is that you have no way of knowing whether the cat is alive or dead until the moment you open that box. Thus, the cat exists in a state of flux inside the box until the moment the lid is lifted. It actually ceases to exist until that moment. The outcome of the experiment is thus determined on the opening of the box. The cat is dead, the cat is alive. You decide! Personally I always wanted Radioactive SuperCat to leap from the box and claw Shrœdinger’s face off, but I have problems, OK?

 

The key points to this experiment can be encapsulated thusly:

 

1. Nothing in quantum physics is so complex that it can’t be explained away as impossible. Therefore, Shrœdinger’s point was that quantum physics is a complete waste of time, money and resources. You know, like encouraging otherwise sensible scientists to come up with experiments that involve the maiming of innocent cats.
2. Not that cats are ever innocent, I’ve never seen such guilty-looking animals.
3. Nothing happens until you decide that it happens. Which is clearly rubbish. But only because I decided it was rubbish. Touché.
4. Shrœdinger was a sadistic cat-hater. Which is worthy of respect in my book.

 

So the Things are like that. They only exist as possibilities until my mind finally settles their shape. Let me explain.

 

The Thing Under The Bed had always looked like a pile of blankets with a pair of rather sad, cow-like brown eyes that peered out dolefully. The Things In The Wardrobe have coat hangers for arms and brass handles for noses. The Thing Under The Stairs is best described as a pile of assorted junk that you never knew where else to put. But a really big pile of junk. And when I say big, we’re talking seven foot plus. A really big pile of junk with rather disturbing-looking razor-sharp teeth and claws (which are used to shred the lining of coats or, in the given earlier example, my mother’s best jacket).

 

The one thing – sorry, Thing – that they all have in common is the accent. Received Pronunciation at its best, all my Things sound like they’ve just stepped out of a 1940’s news reel. Frightfully well spoken, the lot of them. The Thing In The Toilet Cistern never spoke, mind, it was too busy trying not to drown. Probably why it didn’t stick around. The only glimpse I ever got of it was brief, but in that moment I can confirm that it took the form of a Toilet Duck.

 

And they’re constantly evolving. I have to be really careful what I’m thinking when the Things are nearby. If, for example, I find myself thinking that the Thing Under The Stairs should really have an electricity meter in the middle of its chest, you can bet your life it’ll happen. The only things that don’t happen, are they don’t get any smaller, they don’t disappear by the power of thought alone, and they never, ever take the form of Kylie Minogue. I know. I’ve tried all three.

 

So. Picture the scene. There I am, being held up against the wall by the shoulders by a creature made out of junk, red eyes blazing malevolently, razor sharp teeth catching the glint of sunlight and somehow managing to look as though they’d just been specially polished for the occasion and a low, threatening growl emitting from its throat.

 

If my life had a soundtrack, which I often think it should do, this is where the sinister music would start up.

 

The gaping maw came closer and whilst the fangs weren’t dripping ichor – at least until I’d told myself how fortunate it was that they weren’t, at which point they obligingly began to drip and I swallowed nervously. I’d never seen the Thing Under The Stairs so angry about anything before and I had no idea what it was going to do to me. Evisceration was a possibility – those claws looked like those Japanese kitchen knives they advertise on late night TV, you know, the ones that can slice through a breeze block and still make a pretty flower out of a soggy tomato.

 

None too keen on the thought of my insides becoming my outsides, the time had come for diplomacy.

 

“It was a joke,” I hazarded.

 

“Do you hear me laughing?”

 

No. No, the growling from the creature before me definitely didn’t resemble laughter.  Not even with a following wind.

 

“It was just an offhand comment,” I added, gasping to get my words out. The Thing Under The Stairs had a pretty strong hold on me. “I didn’t mean to insult you! I wasn’t thinking!”

 

The grip relaxed just ever-so-slightly, freeing up my voicebox and making conversation slightly easier. Only slightly, though. I continued with my feeble explanation of why I had said what I had said, and what I meant by it.

 

“You have to understand, Thing Under The Stairs, sometimes it’s necessary to say a particular word in a sentence. Just because, when my mate on the phone asked what I was doing this weekend and I said I was getting rid of a few things…”

 

The grip tightened again.

 

“A few things! Not a few Things!” My voice came out as a squeak.

 

It’s not that easy to pronounce a word and emphasise the capital letter, but over the years, I’d perfected it. “Just getting rid of some old clothes and my Beano albums, that’s all I meant.”

 

There was a pause, during which my world started to turn black due to lack of oxygen. Then my world was filled with a lot of pain as the Thing Under The Stairs let go of me and somehow succeeded in looking sheepish. Looking sheepish is a hard thing to do when you’re a monster, but it managed quite well.

 

“I thought you meant…”

 

I flailed slightly as oxygen pushed the kinks in my neck back out again and my system remembered what it was to breathe. The Thing Under The Stairs picked me up bodily and set me down again on my feet, absently dusting me down.

 

“I’m sorry, Nicky, I thought you were going to get rid of us.”

 

Chance would be a bloody fine thing, the single rebellious brain cell left in my cranium shrieked. The rest of the brain cells sat on it and I patted the Thing Under The Stairs’ hairy paw.

 

“Now why would I want to do that?”

 

It mumbled something incomprehensible and made a gesture that could only have been a shrug. I tipped my head on one side and considered it. The moment of temper had fled, replaced by the sort of burning shame you’d normally associate with a eight year old who’d been caught with his hand in the jam pot. Or as was the case with me, the jar of horseradish. I said I had problems, didn’t I?

 

“Thing Under The Stairs, I’m surprised at you!” I scolded it and I swear it drew a circle on the floor with its toe. “We’ve been together for thirty one years and when have I ever tried to get rid of you? The bungalow episode notwithstanding,” I amended hurriedly before it could comment.

 

It mumbled something again and I put a hand to my ear indicating that I couldn’t hear it.

 

“Never,” it acknowledged, grumpily.

 

“So why are you so on edge all of a sudden?”

 

Another shrug.

 

I sighed heavily. “Go get back under the stairs,” I said. “I’ve got several thousand lines of code to debug today if I want to get paid on time. I promise we’ll talk about this later.”

 

With a faint grunt, the Thing Under The Stairs shambled off. Several minutes later I heard it clattering about in the impossibly small space under the stairs, shook my head and headed to the study to get on with my work. This was the way it always was. I got prepared to take them in hand, to contemplate a way of getting rid of them…and then I treated them like you’d treat small children.

 

Ladies and gentlemen, my name is Nicholas St. John Mark Spencer Williams. I have Things.

 

And it looks like they’re going nowhere.

 

(c) 2008, S. Cawkwell

Author's Note

Looking for general feedback.

Reviews

Wow, I really loved this. Really entertaining in general. It made me laugh a few times out loud.
My family gave me strange looks after the laughing fits ended.
This is great. I'm hoping to hear more.
- em_sleepingsickness