Chapter one

 Chapter 1

In a tiny little spiky bush, in a skinny little street, in a wee town that no one really knew about, in a country that doesn’t appear in most Atlas’, there lay a little boy.  It was a balmy summer evening in the town so he was wearing shorts and a T-shirt, which were little or no protection against the spiky bush and it’s dastardly poking thorns.  Pointy things stuck into him through his thin clothes and did even more damage in the places on his body that weren’t covered in cloth.  Sweat dripped from his nose because he was using so much energy in the huge task that was trying to keep very still and very quiet. 

The little boys name was Frank and he was scrawnier than most people his age, he was a good few inches shorter too.  He had twiggy little arms and legs but a much bigger head than was natural.  It made him look very awkward, like at the slightest knock his big noggin would pop right off his body and bounce off to the nearest dark corner to hide from whatever had knocked it.  He had jet black hair and big round goggly eyes that made him look worried, even when he wasn’t worried at all, which was hardly ever as worry was a thing that went with him wherever he went or whatever he did.

There wasn’t really much of a reason for Frank to be hiding in the bush.  There was nobody around on the quiet street, no scary things, no menacing animals or giant monsters.  The problem with Frank was that there didn’t really have to be any reason at all for him to be scared most of the time.  Frank was of such a delicate nature that he could even get scared of his own shadow, which was, of course, exactly what had happened here.

An hour ago his Mum had sent him to the shops to pick up some potato chips, lettuce, bread and chocolate shavings.  Frank’s Mum was little strange and was always coming up with outlandish ingredients to put in sandwiches.  Potato chips, lettuce, sardines and chocolate shavings were today’s experiment.  Frank didn’t have to buy any sardines as his Mum had won a competition a few years ago.  The prize was a lifetime supply of sardines.

Frank was learning to hate sardines.

He had taken a long time to get to the small local shop, as he always did.  The shop was only a five minute walk away from his house but Frank was such a cautious creature that he would crouch in every available hiding spot along the way and make sure that there wasn’t any unpredicted surprises or dangers between where he was hiding and the next hiding place.

His Mum had sent him to the shops later than usual and by the time he began the horrible journey home the sun had begun to go down.  Frank was scared of most things but the dark, well, the dark is scary to most people at some point in their lives, and very uncomfortable for most children, so to Frank the dark was almost crippling.  He got so scared of the dark sometimes that moving around in it would make his thin little bones creek and crack with the tension, often freezing him dead still.

He’d learned that one of the first signs of darkness outside was long shadows.

On his way back from the shops the shadows had started to get very long indeed but he hadn’t noticed too much as he’d been walking toward the setting sun.  This made him squint and dazzled him.  As he approached his first hiding spot he’d glanced over his shoulder to make sure that no monsters had decided to come out before nightfall and there, on the pavement, stretching back five meters, was a terrifying dark moving shape.  It had huge long gangly arms and legs and a positively gigantic head.

Panic gripped the poor little boy, he lost all control of his reason and he started screaming uncontrollably.  He ran and ran in random directions.  If you can imagine a solid rubber bouncy ball being fired out of a canon, boinging off the walls of a long narrow corridor, then you’d probably get a good idea of what Frank looked like, except with a skinny body attached to it.  He boinged and bounced off walls, went spinning off lamp posts, fired off gates and fences until, all of a sudden, he noticed the bush and hurled both himself and the bag of sandwich ingredients into it.

Most people, when throwing themselves into a spiky bush, would do everything they could to get out of it, but for Frank the bush and its prickly nastiness was a relief from the blind terror he’d felt just milliseconds earlier.  He lay there in pain but with no desire to be anywhere else.  At least in the bush the huge, black, gangly big headed monster couldn’t see him.

Nobody in the history of human kind has ever been as scared of their own shadow as Frank was on that balmy summer evening.

 

Anyone who has ever played hide and seek knows that when you’re trying to be still, quiet and unfound, that you’re breathing is at its loudest.  Every breath in blows a gale and every breath out sounds like a hurricane.  It’s a strange ocurrance and there has never been a good reason as to why this happens.  Some people believe that there are things called hide and seek goblins that have invisible megaphones.  They invisibly hold them up in front of your face to make sure that the seekers can hear where you are.  Hide and seek goblins love being secret and don’t like other beings stealing their thunder by trying to be secret too so they go out of their way to try and spoil things for hiders.

This, of course, is why people hold their breath when hiding, so as to avoid the goblin’s megaphones.

Frank’s Mum believed in hide and seek goblins and had told Frank about them on many occasions.  Frank believed that Hide and seek goblins were why his head was so unnaturally big.  He had spent so much time hiding and holding his breath that his head had been blown up like a balloon and his eyes had gone all bulgy.

Frank wasn’t very fond of his big head but couldn’t do very much about it as his cowardice was much more powerful than his feelings toward his massive melon.  He had mastered the art of tiny breathing however.  Tiny breathing meant that he could would keep the air supply for his body down to its minimum, still keeping himself alive but he could remain quiet enough to avoid any meddlesome hide and seek goblins and their megaphones that might happen to be in the area.

A lot of people think that hide and seek goblins aren’t real, but then some people still believe that the world is flat so not everyone can be trusted in these matters.

 

It wasn’t long before a new fear started to creep up on Frank.  He’d been laying in the bush for so long, doing his tiny breathing so that the big black ground monster (or as we know it to be, his own shadow) wouldn’t get him that the sun had started to sink down over the horizon.

“Oh my goodness!” Frank’s shaky voice muttered inside his head, “Oh dear deary me, the shadows are getting awfully big!  Will they take over?  Will all the monsters come out to play?  What a silly question Frank, of course they will.  That’s what monsters do.  Mummy says so.  Oh my deary deary me what am I to do?”

He braved a turn of his head to look back at where the monster had been.  The bushes thorns bit him, scraped him and the rustling of it’s branches were far too loud for comfort.

“Oh crikey… oh my goodness gracious what a nasty situation.”

He waited for a little while longer to see if the shadows that were getting bigger and bigger would slow down a bit.  He hoped against hope that they might even start getting smaller again, which was a ridiculous thing to try and believe as it would have meant that the sun would have to stop going down, and start coming up again, which hardly ever happens.

The shadows got bigger.

He twisted his head again, desperately trying not to make any rustling sounds.  It felt like the thorns would burst his balloon like head, particularly with all the pressure that was building up inside it from being so scared.  The fear of having a popped head, however, was no match for his fear of the dark.

“Perhaps Mummy will come and find me, oh don’t be a silly sausage Frank, you know that Mummy can’t go out of the house.  There are things outside that want to get her, that’s why I have to go to the shops.  I move faster than her and they have problems getting hold of me as I’m such a strange shape.”

He turned his head a little more and finally managed to turn it far enough to see where the monster had been.

It had grown.

It was big enough to cover the whole street now and Frank’s eyes got even bigger and wider that they had ever been before as his bulbous head felt like it would swell until it got to the size of a hot air balloon.  He was terrified.  He turned his head the other way and the monster was there too.

“Oh crikey, oh blimey, oh good grief it’s everywhere!  What if it already caught me?  What if it’s already eaten me?  What if I’m in it’s tummy right now?  Oh Criminy cripes!”

He started to shiver with the thought of it.

“Oh no… oh criminy and cripes… I’ve gone and ended up as dinner!”

If panic was a person it would have slapped Frank hard on the cheek.  He yelped like a dog being smacked on the nose after having a poo on a brand new living room carpet, yanked and scratched his poor prickled body out of the bush and ran home harder than he’d ever run before, which was a bit of a shame because he didn’t get to see all the purples, reds, oranges and pinks of one of the most beautiful sunsets anyone in the tiny town had seen for many years.

Author's Note

Honest opinions and if you can, find a child to read it to. They are always the most honest critics.