Figures of Fear: An anthology Read Online Free PDF Page A

outside, either. There must have been a power cut, which might explain the clicking noise that had woken him up: the sound of the central-heating pipes contracting as they cooled down.

    As he laid his head back down on the pillow, he heard more clicking. More like clattering this time. He strained his ears and listened. There was a lengthy silence, and then a quick, sharp rattling sound. He thought he heard a door opening.
    He sat up. Something was outside his bedroom, in the hallway. Something that made a soft, dragging noise. It sounded as if it were coming closer and closer, and then it bumped into his bedroom door. Not loudly, but enough to give him the impression that it was big and bulky.
    His heart was hammering against his ribcage. ‘Who’s there?’ he called out. ‘Is anybody out there?’
    There was no answer. Nearly half a minute went by. Then suddenly there was another clatter, and he heard his door handle being pulled down. His door swung open with the faintest whisper, almost like a sigh of satisfaction.
    He waited, listening, his fingers gripping the bedcovers. What had somebody once said about bedcovers? Why do we pull them up to protect ourselves when we’re scared? Do you think a murderer with a ten-inch knife is going to be deterred by a quilt?
    ‘Who’s there?’ he called out, hoarsely.
    No answer.
    ‘ For God’s sake, who’s there? ’
    It was then that the power came back on again, and his digital bedside clock started flashing green, and the central heating began to tick into life again, and he saw what it was that was standing in his bedroom doorway.
    It was his navy-blue duffel coat, with its hood up. It looked like a dead Antarctic explorer, somebody whose body had been found in the snow a hundred years after they had died.
    Beside it, tilting this way and that, as if it couldn’t get its balance right, was Sticky Man. Sticky Man must have opened the door to the closet, in the hallway, so that the duffel coat could shuffle out, and Sticky Man had opened his bedroom door, too. There was nobody else in the flat, so who else could it have been?

    It was then that he realized that on the night his parents had been killed Sticky Man hadn’t been trying to warn him. Sticky Man had probably been trying to wake him up, so that he too would go into his parents’ bedroom, to be garrotted along with them.
    ‘ You traitor, Sticks ,’ he whispered, but of course Sticky Man wasn’t a traitor, because Sticky Man was a creature of the dark, just as much as his dressing gown, and his duffel coat. It wasn’t them , in themselves. They were only inanimate objects.
    David’s duffel coat rushed across his bedroom floor toward him. He lunged sideways across to the other side of the bed, trying to reach his phone.
    ‘Emergency, which service please?’
    ‘— dark —!’
    Then a struggling sound, and a thin, reedy gasp, followed by a long continuous tone.
    It was what the dark does.

SAINT BRÓNACH’S SHRIFT
    ‘G od has forgiven you, Michael,’ said Father Bernard. ‘Now you have to find it in your heart to forgive yourself.’
    ‘And do you honestly think that I haven’t tried?’ Michael retorted. ‘I’ve even tried mortification of the flesh. Stubbing out cigarettes on the back of my hand. Hitting my head against the wall again and again until I couldn’t see for the blood running down my face. I had to tell Kate I hit myself on a cupboard door.’
    Father Bernard shook his head. ‘That’s not the way, Michael. Castigating yourself now isn’t going to change what you did all those years ago.’
    Michael was standing by the window, looking out over the steeply sloping garden. It had started raining again, and he could hear the raindrops crackling through the hydrangeas. At the bottom of the garden ran the River Lee, the colour of badly tarnished silverware, and beyond the river rose the misty hills that led to the airport, and beyond, to Riverstick and Belgooly and Garrettstown. And of