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Short Fat Stubby Finger Stories PRESENTS:

Episode 25

“You saw the thing in the photograph … the thing in the room that attacked me?”  Mary was astonished by Frank’s revelation and was uncertain what to say to him.   She had so many questions to ask, but she knew to do so may easily provide her with answers that her brain was not ready to accept.   Regardless of the fact that she now seemed safe and out of danger, Mary was uncertain that her brain could protect her sanity if Frank described the situation as she currently remembered it.   She needed to know the truth; the facts, but in digestible measures.   In doses small enough for her currently perplexed brain to comprehend and analyse.

   “Yes … I did,”   Frank replied, “and it wasn’t a pretty sight I can assure you.”

   “Why didn’t you tell the doctor?”

   “He didn’t ask me.”

   “If I had said anything, would he have believed me?”

   “I don’t know … maybe.”

   “I am glad that you didn’t say anything.” Mary admitted.

   “Thought you might say that,” Frank said with a wry smile, “Sometimes it pays to be quiet about things out of the ordinary.   Stops people offering all sorts of explanations … or thinking you’re a bit crazy.   Might have thought you were suffering from concussion or something after banging your head on the nail and sent you off to hospital for psychiatric assessment or something.   That would have put a damper on your holiday weekend in Trenthamville, I reckon.

   “Yes,”   Mary agreed with a sigh, “that’s a definite possibility.   My problem is that I am not really sure that I know what I saw … and I am not certain my mind could cope with understanding if what I think happened, actually did.”

   “I will be as gentle as I can, Mary, though I doubt that I can answer all your questions.”

   “That photograph …” Mary began, turning her heads in the direction of the print nailed to the wall.

   “Yes?”

   “Where did you get it?”

   “Old Laurie gave it to me, that was him that I was talking to just after you arrived.   When he saw the light on the farm, he rushed back inside to get the fancy digital camera that his son in the Navy had bought for him for Christmas.   Thought that it would make a good shot, he did.   Something that he could show his son, he thought.   You can put those photos straight onto a computer with that type of camera, you know, and send it anywhere in the world via the internet … or print it yourself if you have the equipment.”

   Mary nodded her head in vague understanding … computers, and the internet in particular, were not her forte, nor were they of much interest to her.   And a sudden image inside her head of the creature jumping out of somebody’s computer screen and attacking them didn’t do her brain much good either.   Mary’s entire body shivered momentarily as she involuntarily relived the moment when the creature had emerged from the photograph … and barely stopped herself from screaming in absolute terror as she had done earlier just at the thought of the creature.

   “His son had bought him a computer too,” Frank went on, ignoring the contortions that were exploding across Mary’s face, “so that they could keep in touch by something called e-mail.   Seventy five years old is old Laurie, and sharp as a tack he is.   He can use the computer as good as the school kids. Me! I have trouble finding the right button to press on the cash register.  But old Laurie can do just about anything on it.   He and his son love each other, and they’re always keeping up to date on things no matter where the son is, so old Laurie just had to let his boy see this phenomenon.

   He was disappointed with the result, though.   He can print photos on his own printer as easy as eating pie, but the image came out all foggy and distorted after Old Laurie transferred it from the camera … as you saw.   However he said the original version that was still on his camera was still perfect, so sent a digital copy to his son and kept the printed copy of the photo here at the garage to show anybody in the village that wanted to see it.    

   It was funny, you know.”   Frank continued, “I had my hand pressed on the front of the picture to retain alignment while I hammered the nail through the picture and into the wall, when I felt a sharp pain and my hand began to bleed.   I was only doing it this way to make sure that I didn’t tear the picture itself.   Sometimes, when you put the nail into the wall first, then press the picture onto the nail and apply a bit too much pressure it results in a tear in the photo and it never hangs straight after that.   I was being extremely careful, and I never hit my hand with the hammer … it just started to bleed for no apparent reason.   I thought that it must have been a paper cut, though I have never seen one so deep before.  I didn’t think that you could cut yourself on photo paper.   Now, after what I saw tonight I doubt very much that it was a paper cut.   I’ll show you what I mean … look at this.”

   Frank rolled his hand over, and exposed a scar that ran almost the entire length of his palm, and even now, after it was almost healed, it appeared far too long, and too scarred, for a normal paper cut … and certainly was not the result of being hit with a hammer.

   “So what was it?” Mary asked out of adrenaline induced curiosity.

   “I have no idea.  Perhaps old Laurie captured the soul of the Devil himself on his fancy camera.  I never thought too much about the cut because I didn’t think that anything unusual had happened, just a bit of bad luck, but now … .”

   “What did happen, Frank?”

   “From where I stood when I first entered the room you appeared to be looking very closely at the photograph, your head bent forward, your eyes only inches away from it.   Suddenly a thick grey smoke began to emerge from the wall just above the top of the photograph and instantly rose upwards towards the ceiling.  However, you seemed to be deeply concentrating on something in the middle of the photograph and appeared oblivious to the smoke.  The smoke came out slowly at first, but it quickly expanded as it neared the ceiling … and suddenly this huge creature was hovering above you.   Something attracted your attention to the presence of the creature and you looked up, lost your balance and fell down backwards.   I ran over before  you hit the floor.   I had a devil of a job not losing my own balance and pulling you out of harm’s way as the creature struck down at you with a sharp looking knife and tried to stab you.   It was only a matter of luck that I reached you just in time.   He still managed to nick you, though.   It was pretty close.”

   Mary automatically placed her hand on the band-aid that now protected the cut and inwardly agreed with Frank.   “So I didn’t fall forwards onto the nail?”

   “No.”

   “So where did the blood come from?”

   “My hand, I expect.   It wasn’t all that fresh.   Would you like to see it?” 

   “No, thank you.   I would rather not go anywhere near that photo for quite  some time.   What happened to the creature when you dragged me away?”

   “It just withdrew back into the photograph.”

   “And you had never seen it before today?”

   “No.   But I hadn’t really been near the photograph since the day that I put it up.   As I said, I only put it there as a memento.   And I had never considered that the cut was not a paper cut until today, so I had no reason to look out for anything.”

   “What do you think it was?”

   “I have absolutely no idea.”

   “Has anything like this ever happened around here before?   I mean first the light at the farm, and now this.”

   “Not recently, but I’ve heard the old folk talk about the days long ago.   There were strange things that happened around here, they said.   There was talk about witches and things, but I never saw anything myself … except once … .”   Frank’s voice trailed off for a minute, as a long forgotten memory slowly resurfaced in his mind.   “It was about fifteen years ago.   I was about fifteen or sixteen at the time.   I’d been down to Kingstown on an errand for my dad.   I had to take the train from Farville, which is about two miles from where I lived back then because it was the nearest station to Trenthamville … still is actually.   And because we never had a car back then, and  there wasn’t any bus service to the station, I had to walk it.

   So. of course, there had been no-one to meet me when I got back, and seeing as how I was the only passenger that got off the train at Farvale I had to walk home all alone.   It was well after four in the evening and being winter the light began to fade almost as soon as I started off.   But, I was only young and didn’t have any fear of the dark, and there certainly wasn’t going to be any traffic on the road at night in those days, otherwise I would have gotten a lift.   People around here are like that.   Not like in the bigger cities.   They’d most likely run you down – rather than give you a lift.

   Anyway, to my surprise there was a car parked at the side of the road near Lowman’s Woods.   It was not a car I had seen before and there was nobody in it so I kept on walking.   I knew that it was empty because I had taken a peek through the windows out of curiosity as I was passing.   I was about halfway home by this stage; the sun was almost set, and the fading light was slipping and sliding through the trees in the woods spraying random bursts of red and yellow on the branches.

   I thought it looked rather pretty, but my attention span soon wavered because I was much more interested in getting home and eating my supper.   It had been a long day and the walk was giving me a hearty appetite.    But as I walked, I thought that I could hear something like singing coming from the woods … well not actually singing, more like chanting – you know, like the monks do.   All of a sudden it stopped, and there was some yelling.   Then everything went deadly quiet.

   I kept walking, only a lot faster than before.   I could see the outline of the Grisham Creek Bridge about two hundred yards away and was trying to make it the focus of my concentration when I heard a rustling sound coming out of the bushes not too far from me.   I wasn’t scared, mind you.   I thought at first it was a rabbit on the run, and if it was running from a predator it may not have seen me in its panic, and if I could catch it, I could have rabbit stew the next night.   But nothing came out, so I moved on.

   There was another short burst of movement in the shrubs, but it ceased almost immediately.   This time I became a bit more nervous, though I didn’t know of anything that would be in there that could harm me.   It would only be a fox or an owl that would chase after a rabbit – nothing larger than that existed around here.   Nothing that I knew of, anyway.

   It was almost completely dark on the road by now.   The sun had all but set, the moon was rising, and it was full moon, so it would eventually have provided more light than I would need, but at the moment it wasn’t quite high enough to be of any real use to me.   What light it was giving out was being filtered through the trees, causing shadows and light to fuse together in an unnerving pattern.   There were no streetlights back then.   Mind you, there aren’t too many now either.   But I still felt safe enough.   I didn’t have too far to go.

   Then I heard the noise again, and it sounded far too loud for a rabbit … or even a fox for that matter.   A cold shiver ran along the back of my neck, and I could feel a drop or two of sweat running down my forehead.   The noise got louder still.   And this time it sounded a lot closer to where I was walking – and I was getting ready to run if it happened again.

   Though, mind you, if I did start running I would have had to been very careful in the poor light that I didn’t run off the road and into the bushes.    If I did I would have had to be very wary of rabbit holes, and the occasional traps that poachers had set.   As you can imagine there were all sorts of thoughts and things whirling around inside my head.   But at the moment traveling the road ahead relied on me giving it my full concentration because of the shifting light through the trees from the fast disappearing sun and the slowly rising moon.  The road could be seen clearly one second … then pitch black the next as I walked … and it was a very narrow road, where the grass and bushes grew parallel with the bitumen.    One false step in a dark patch and I would be off the road and into the bushes.

    I heard the noise again and my heart began beating so hard it was giving me a headache which was making it hard to concentrate on the road … and then my heart threatened to burst when the bushes just in front of my line of vision suddenly sprung apart … and a huge white blobby thing jumped out in front of me and frightened the life out of me.   

   I couldn’t stop in time and walked straight into it.   The next thing that I knew I was tangled up with it, and we rolled back into the bushes.   My arms were trashing, as I tried to free myself, but the harder that I struggled, the more entangled in the strange thing I became.   I found myself screaming in fear and panic, and somehow, above the din that I was making, I could hear this beast screaming as well.   A high piercing sound it was too.

    The thing and I rolled and struggled and twisted in the bushes, finally becoming bound together, with a mixture of legs and arms, and broken branches from the bushes, and whatever matter the creature was covered in.   By now I was terrified.   This monster and I were wrapped together, trapped together closer than skin to a snake.    Suddenly we were so bound together we couldn’t move an inch.  We lost balance and fell to the ground … and I ended up face to face with my tormentor.   My eyes refused to close no matter how hard I tried.    I didn’t want to look.   I was terrified that I would find myself looking into the blazing red eyes of a demon.   I expected to see saliva drooling, razor sharp teeth, only inches from my face, ready to snap the life out of me.   I expected my head to reel in agony and nausea being so close to its hot and putrid breath.   My short and uneventful life flashed before me in those few seconds .. and then … .”

   Frank stopped talking for a minute in order to wipe the sweat off his face.   Mary was unsure whether she felt relief at the chance to catch her breath, or frustration awaiting the conclusion.

   But regaining his composure Frank went on, “Instead I found myself looking into the most frightened, yet beautiful blue eyes that I had ever seen.   They glistened in the moonlight, its fullness reflecting within them.   The face was not that of a demonic monster, not a raging devil from hell, but that of angelic young woman, not much older than I was.

   When our eyes met, and it registered in her mind that I also was not whoever, or whatever, she thought that I was, she gave a sigh of relief, before gently hushing me quiet and whispering that if we rolled the opposite way to each other we should unravel.

   I did as I was told, and within a minute or so we were free from each other.  The outer garment that had brought us together turned out to be a white sheet that she was wrapped in that was by now fairly ripped to shreds as a result of our skirmish with the bushes and the ground, and beneath those that tattered rag she was stark naked.  I felt embarrassed and nervous.   I had never seen a girl in a bathing suit, never mind totally naked.   I suggested that she should cover her self the best she could, but she refused, saying she would be too easily seen wearing the white sheet in the occasional brightness of the fast rising moonlight.   I quickly took off my coat and she gratefully accepted it, wrapping it around herself tightly.   Fortunately for both of us, even though I was a couple of years younger than her, I was both taller and bigger than her – otherwise the offer may have been a bit futile.

   I went to speak again, to ask her what had happened to her, but again she indicated that I should remain silent.   We listened, and we could hear voices and people moving through the bushes and heading our way.   She moved closer to me, indicating with her movements that we should keep low and we rested on our knees as we hid behind some bushes on the other side of the road.  

   Eventually the voices subsided, and she spoke, indicating we should leave while we could.

   We cautiously checked the road to make sure that there was no one there.   The moon, by now, had risen sufficiently high enough to light the road for us to safely make our way towards the village, but keeping ourselves to the darker side of the road so it would be hard for anyone to see us.   After we had travelled some distance, she swore me to secrecy, and told me that she had accidentally stumbled into a witches’ coven.   It was her car that I had seen earlier.   It had broken down, and when she saw smoke coming from the woods she assumed that it was the loggers who had been working in the forest, so she walked towards the fire that was burning in  a small clearing in search of help.   Instead of loggers, however, she came across people, all of whom were dressed in white sheets that covered them from head to foot, with slits for their eyes, who were throwing some powder like substance into the fire, and chanting something that she couldn’t understand.   She decided it might be safer not to make contact and decided to turn around and go back to the car, but before she knew it she had been overpowered, stripped of her clothing, dressed by several of the witches in a white sheet and forced to lie on the ground at the edge of the clearing.

   She had been too frightened to try to fight them until she overheard them saying that she would be perfect for the sacrifice.   She was from out of town and nobody would miss her, somebody had said with great enthusiasm, while someone else was arguing that it would still be too dangerous.

   This had helped her to find the courage that she needed, and while they were debating their actions, she took advantage of the situation.   They had left one hooded person to ensure that she didn’t escape while the others had moved to  a spot somewhere out of her sight, but she used the oldest trick in the book by yelling out ‘Over here!   Help met’ to an imaginary, would-be, rescuer loudly enough for the guard to hear her, but not the others.   As the guard turned in the direction she had been directing her voice to, the girl had gotten up.   She picked up a small, but solid, branch that had fallen from a tree and whacked it as hard as she could at the back of the guard’s head.   The guard fell forward an pain and confusion and the girl ran into the darkness of the treed area as fast as she could manage in her bare feet before the guard could retaliate.

   In the semi-darkness of the dense forest she had managed to escape them, but she had trouble finding the road until she ran into me.

   She had just finished telling me about what had happened to her when we found ourselves approaching the edge of the village. ‘I go this way,’ she had said, pointing to a lane-way on our right.   I wanted to walk her to her door, to make sure that she was safe, but she insisted that she would be alright –‘her uncle lived not far up the lane, and he would look after her’, she had said.   ‘Come around tomorrow and collect the coat.   But not before ten.’ 

   Then she gave me a quick kiss on the cheek before she began to walk up the short path to her Uncle’s house.

   ‘But what about the witches,’ I called out, ‘will you go to the police?’

   ‘It’s all right, Frank,’ she assured me as she walked back to where I was standing, ‘I recognized one of the voices.   My uncle will know what to do,’ and then she reached over and gave me a hug, ‘Thank you for being my brave friend,’ she said, giving me a smile before quickly making her way up the lane.   It made me feel like a hero, though I hadn’t actually done anything particularly brave.”

   “Oh, I think you were too, Frank.   You were very young the time,”   Mary said, smiling.   “And was she alright?    Did her uncle go to the police?”

   “I guess so.   Her uncle turned out to be my friend, old Laurie.   Mind you, he wasn’t my friend back then though.   I went around to the house the next day to see how she was and get my coat back, but old Laurie said that she had gone back to the city to live.   When he asked me how I knew her, I said that I had met her on the road the night before, and walked her home when her car had broken down.   He accepted that and said no more on the subject.  But he did invite me in for a cuppa, and as we got chatting we both discovered we had a lot in common and went on to become good mates.”

   “You didn’t say anything about the witches, even though they had threatened his niece?”

   “No … and neither did he   I think that is how our friendship started – because I didn’t press on about something that he didn’t want to discuss.”

   “But you believe that she was safe?”

   “Yes.”

   “Wow. That’s some story.”

   “I’ve tried my best to forget it over the years.” Frank replied rather forlornly,  “I worried about who those witches really were for a quite a few years afterwards, in case they realised what I knew about that night.    Not that I knew that much, but …”

   “And you told nobody what happened that night – not even your family.”

   “Nobody would have believed me. It’s a small town and I would only have ended up with a reputation for making up stories – or possibly gotten myself into trouble with the witches, whoever they were.   So I kept it to myself”

   “I guess that it wouldn’t have been easy?   Have you been back to the farm, Frank?   Since the recent events I mean.”  

   “Quite a few of us went up there the next day.   I hadn’t been there for years. I used to go there when I was a child to play with Harry and Jeffery Andrews.   They were the farmer’s children.   They always had a lot of chores to do, like feeding the chickens and the pigs, and collecting the eggs.   I used to like to help them.   I liked that kind of thing when I was a kid.”

   “Yes,” Mary smiled.   “I think that you would have made a nice gentleman farmer.”

   Frank took it as the compliment that it was meant to be, and thanked her with a smile.  “We all decided that whatever had happened at the farm could wait till morning before we went to investigate, and we would go as a group – just in case …”

   “Just in case of what?” Mary asked, hoping there was more than ‘Just in case’ which seemed to be all he was going to say on the matter.

   “Just to be on the safe side … we didn’t know what was going on up there, and we had no intention of putting ourselves in danger, if any existed.    A cautious lot we are here at Trenthamville,” he laughed.

   “Did you find anything strange inside the house?”

   “We never went inside.  As far as we knew at the time the professor was still living there, though, mind you, we never actually saw anybody at the farm that morning.   We just wanted to look a round a bit.  If somebody from the farmhouse had have come outside to see what we were all doing there we could have asked them what had happened, but nobody came out of the house or the barn, so we just had a look at the tree we had seen burning and things like that.   Then we all went home.   We found out about the professor later.”

   “You just went home, Mary asked, shaking her head in disbelief, “Did you ever find anything that explained what had happened?”

   “No.   At first there appeared to be nothing amiss on the farm, only the burnt out tree, and some dead birds – and a terrible smell, like sulphur.    But there was no trace of where the light had been.   We thought that it should be near the tree that caught fire, but we could find nothing there.   All the ground around the area seemed normal and fully grassed, except for one patch.”   

   “All bare, was it?”

   “No.   There was grass alright, but it was red – bright red – like blood had been spilt there.”

   “Blood!”  

   “Could have been … might have been paint, or something else, but nobody wanted to touch it.   The point is, Mary… is that I heard … .”

   “Heard what, Frank”

   “I heard … .”

   “Frank … for goodness sake, what did you hear?”

   “The thing is, I heard those chants again, recently.”

   “What!   When?”

   “The night of the long lights at the farm … and that’s where they were coming from.   I had just gone outside for a breath of fresh air and happened to be looking in the direction of the farm, for no real reason, when I could hear an unusual sound floating through the air.   As I said earlier, it was a still, quiet night and sound travels far and wide on nights like that.   There’s not much traffic around here at any time of the day … and at night-time virtually nobody goes out.   Except for a wedding bash or a birthday party, but funny enough I had to listen hard at first, because Bert and Joyce, at number seventeen, were having a bit of a barney, and patches of their conversation kept interrupting my train of concentration, but eventually a door slammed shut, and I heard footsteps on the gravel.   I guess that Bert probably took himself down to the pub.

   Once their voices stopped, I was able to concentrate on the strange sound, and when I picked it up again, it took me a while to recognise where I had herd it before, but I knew that it sounded familiar.   Then suddenly I felt a chill down my spine like I have never felt in my entire life, and my mind immediately flew back to that lonely stretch of road, the witches and Malena, old Laurie’s niece.   So many years out of my mind, then suddenly it was like yesterday.   Funny time for it to happen I thought, a very strange coincidence indeed.”

   “What was, Frank?”

   “Malena had arrived back in the village that night, the night of the light – for the first time since that night that we first met.”

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