Figures of Fear: An anthology Read Free Page A

hanging on it except for his red-and-white football scarf.
    His moaning became a soft, subdued mewling in the back of his throat. He was so frightened that he squirted a little warm pee into his pyjama trousers. He looked over the end of the bed but his dressing gown wasn’t lying in a heap on the floor, as he would have expected.
    Perhaps Mummy had at last understood that it scared him, hanging up on the back of the door like that, and she had taken it down when he was asleep. Perhaps she had taken it away to wash it. He had spilled a spoonful of tomato soup on it yesterday evening, when he was sitting on the sofa watching television – not that he had told her.
    He didn’t know what to do. He knelt on the end of the bed, biting at his thumbnail, not mewling now but breathing very quickly, as if he had been running. He turned around and looked down at Sticky Man, but Sticky Man hadn’t moved – he was still lying on his back on the rug, his arms and legs all splayed out, glaring balefully at nothing at all.
    Whatever David did, he would have to change his wet pyjama trousers, and that would mean going to the airing cupboard on the landing. Mummy always liked to keep his clean pyjamas warm.
    Very cautiously, he climbed off the bed and went across to his bedroom door. He looked around it. The landing was in darkness, although the faintest of green lights was coming up the stairs from the hallway, from the illuminated timer on the burglar alarm, and that was enough for David to see that his parents’ bedroom door was open, too.
    He frowned. His parents never left their door open, not at night. He hesitated for a few long moments, but then he hurried as quietly as he could along the landing until he reached his parents’ bedroom, and peered inside. It was completely dark in there, although he could just make out the luminous spots on the dial of his father’s bedside alarm clock.

    He listened. Very far away, he could hear a train squealing as it made its way to the nearest station, to be ready for the morning’s commuters. But when that sound had faded away, he could hear nothing at all. He couldn’t even hear his parents breathing, even though his father usually snored.
    ‘Mummy?’ he called, as quietly as he could.
    No answer. He waited in the doorway, with his wet pants beginning to feel chilly.
    ‘ Mummy? ’ A little louder this time.
    Still no answer.
    He crept into his parents’ bedroom, feeling his way round the end of the bed to his mother’s side. He reached out and felt her bare arm lying on top of the quilted bedcover. He took hold of her hand and shook it and said, hoarsely, ‘Mummy, wake up! I’ve had an accident!’
    But still she didn’t answer. David groped for the dangly cord that switched on her bedside reading light, and tugged it.
    ‘ Mummy! Daddy! ’
    Both of them were lying on their backs, staring up at the ceiling with eyes so bloodshot that it looked as if somebody had taken out their eyeballs and replaced them with crimson grapes. Not only that, both of them had black moustaches of congealing blood on their upper lips, and their mouths were dragged grotesquely downward. Two dead clowns.
    David stumbled backward. He heard somebody let out a piercing, high-pitched scream, which frightened him even more. He didn’t realize that it was him.
    He scrabbled his way back around the end of the bed, and as he did so he caught his foot and almost tripped over. His brown dressing gown was lying tangled on the floor, with its cord coiled on top of it.
    He didn’t scream again, but he marched stiffly downstairs like a clockwork soldier, his arms and legs rigid with shock. He picked up the phone and dialled 999.
    ‘Emergency, which service please?’
    ‘Ambulance,’ he said, his lower lip juddering. ‘No, no, I don’t need an ambulance. I don’t know what I need. They’re dead.’
    The red-haired woman detective brought him the mug of milky tea that he had asked for, with two sugars. She