The Monster Man of Horror House Read online

  The Monster Man

  of Horror House

  Danny King

  e_3

  Contents

  1: Second to last house on the left

  2: Nocturnal visitors

  3: Basement fears

  PART 1: Like Father Like Son

  4: The flicker of interest

  PART 2: The Killing Moon

  5: Opinion is divided

  PART 3: The Black Spot

  6: And then there was one

  PART 4: Like Mother Like Daughter

  7: Good night and God bless

  Epilogue: Monsters in our midst

  Chapter 1:

  Second to last house on the left

  In any neighbourhood, in any town, there’ll be a scary old house. It’ll be overgrown, run down, uncared for and forgotten. And more often than not it’ll be occupied by a scary old man who will more or less fit this same description. Time addled, weathered, blistered and peeling, this old man will shuffle around the district keeping himself to himself, harvesting his neighbours’ skips and thinning out Post Office queues whenever he wafts in to collect his pension.

  He’ll also be blissfully ignorant of the fact that he’s the local oddball.

  He’ll think of himself as quiet, unassuming, frugal and sage, a maverick to be sure, but a wily one at that. And he’ll make the classic mistake of thinking that if he minds his own business, everyone else will mind theirs.

  If only.

  It took me a few months before I realised I was the scary old oddball in my street. I’d always thought of myself simply as John: hard working, conservative, thrifty and solitary, if occasionally ripe on hot days, but what did that matter when I lived on my own? It was my house; I could smell how I liked in it. Besides, I remembered reading somewhere that soap clogged up your pheromone holes and it was them that got women hot under the petticoats, not Daz and Old Spice and all that load of old poof’s water. Not that I went in for any of that sort of nonsense any more either. My libido was like my old army sidearm, in a box somewhere under a load of old crap and it hadn’t fired a shot in anger since Aden. No, I was happy to potter about in my shadow, keep the world at arm’s length and save a few pennies towards my dotage.

  I’d moved into this house in 1972. Back then it had been a smart two-bedroom end-terrace bungalow with a side garage and front and rear gardens. It had cost me the princely sum of three thousand pounds at the time, and despite the fact that I hadn’t cut the lawn, cleaned out the guttering or wiped the windows since, I reckoned it had probably kept its value.

  Of course, I didn’t plan to end up this way, a lonely old buzzard whose sole purpose in life seemed to be ridding the world of Oxtail soup, one tin at a time. I mean who does? But life had simply got the better of me. When I was young, and I mean waist high to a cricket, I’d dreamed of being a sailor, of seeing the world and of exploring new lands, which is about as far away from how I’d ended up as it’s possible to get. I guess I'd just been shipwrecked against a different fate, that’s all. Most people are if you think about it.

  But as I say, because mine had been a gradual decent, rather than a spectacular plummet, I was oblivious of the fact that my reputation was somewhat on a par with the scrap metal merchant’s dog. That was until the neighbourhood kids started taking an interest in me – a telltale sign of one’s standing in the community if ever there was one. Of course, I didn’t understand why they’d singled me out for their intrigues at first, but single me out they had. Spectres knocked on my front door all hours, whispers emanated from the knotted jungle that was my back garden and my milk was no longer left to be collected from my front door step, but rather poured through my letter box in the small wee hours of the morning. What wags they were.

  After four weeks of this nonsense I decided to take a long hard look in the mirror and realised to my dismay that I was Thetford’s kooky old oddball.

  Like I say, all neighbourhoods have at least one. In my day he was called Harold and he lived in a cottage at the end of my road. He’d got on the wrong side of a German shell in Ypres and looked a fearsome monster, with hooks for hands and a face screwed on all wrong. Me and my pals were terrified of him and made up stories of what fate befell any child who tumbled into his clutches. This inevitably led to us venturing into his garden after dark to test our mettle and trample his tomatoes. He used to roar at us as we scarpered away, over the wall and into the night, and we took his roars to be the homicidal rages of frustration at missing out on catching us to fill his pies with, when really he probably just wanted us to bugger off and stop pissing in his watering can. Poor old Harold; he’d gone through hell and back on the battlefield only to find it had followed him home and into old age.

  It’s funny, I hadn’t thought of him in some fifty odd years. Not until the pranks began in earnest on my own doorstep. And that was when I realised I was his reincarnation.

  Of course, none of their parents would do anything about the little bleeders when I tried complaining to them.

  “My Tommy ain’done nothink I’m telling ya and you can’t proov nothink otherwise, you fackin’ stirrin’ old caant. Go on, fack off away from my haas, you faackin’ old scarecrow, you stink!”

  Not like in my day. In my day had one of my neighbours come to the door with a complaint about me, I would’ve felt the lick of my dad’s belt across my back without so much as a right to reply. Oh yes, children learned to respect their elders in my day and no mistake – except poor old Harold now that I come to think of it. He’d complained to everyone but no one had taken the blindest bit of notice of him. I guess at the end of the day no one likes an oddball, young or old, because oddballs are always complaining about something, whether it be kids in their vegetable patch or Catholics in the town planning office, so why pander to ’em? Short shrift and the bristly end of a broom is all they understand.

  I can appreciate this. I honestly can. In the cold light of day, after a period of cold and careful reflection, I can genuinely see how I might not have listened if I’d lived next door to myself either, but this didn’t make my neighbours’ indifference any easier to bear, especially when my bins started doing handstands on the garden path the night before they were due to be collected. Little bastards!

  Things got so bad that I even daydreamed about going to the law, but I quickly got over that. Me and the authorities don’t make for good bed fellows, (I don’t like those nosy parkers knowing my business – particularly those fish-eating bastards down at the local town planning office), so I took the one course of action left open to me and decided to do something about my pest problem myself.

  One of the many benefits of living the way I do is you always have the materials for any job, be it knocking together a chicken coop in the garden, repairing an old vacuum cleaner from parts or building a guillotine in your basement, whatever you like really, so I set about knocking nails into walls, rigging wires on pulleys and fixing bolts to doors until I’d engineered a solution to my woes.

  I’d built a trap.

  “That’ll do,” I concluded to myself, admiring my handiwork as I freshened up with a post-toil handkerchief bath. “Now all I need is a drop of bait.”

  I left a fiver in plain sight on the sitting room table for three nights running but no one broke in to swipe it, so I figured a more obvious approach was called for and dug out my dad’s old bowler hat.

  My dad had worn a billycock all his life and it was one of the few things I had to remember him by. I’d never worn one myself, because the fashion had come and gone by the time it had reached my head, so I’d simply stuck it in the back bedroom and left it to gather dust for the last four decades. But finally, some forty years to the day after it had last seen action, I reached it down from atop the wardrobe, gave the brim a wipe with the back of my cuff and set it upon my crown at a jaunty angle. And you know what, as I admired myself in the hallway mirror, I have to say I looked a right pillock. Well they didn’t go out of fashion for nothing, you know.

  I grabbed my coat, dug out my shopping basket and headed for Tesco’s.

  I had a fair idea of the hoodlums who were responsible for my torments and knew whereabouts they liked to congregate too, so I sounded general quarters and set course to put myself in their sights.

  One of the fringe benefits of being the town oddball is that you can get away with dressing like one, so no one paid me or my fetching new headgear any heed – not until I passed the little scummers bumming smokes in the alleyway by the side of the supermarket. The stifled sniggers and hoots of derision that tumbled from their direction told me they approved, so doffed my peak at a couple of confused Tescolites and headed inside to see what treasures awaited me on the dented tins shelf.

  I was out and about a lot over the next few days, always in my bowler and always in sight of my persecutors. They followed me around, giggled hysterically and took to shaping McDonald bags on their heads to match my hat. They were very excited by this latest development indeed, so I kept it up until they were champing at the bit to knock it off my head and take it for a spin.

  Satisfied the groundwork had been laid, I set the hat on the front windowsill of my bungalow, in plain view of the street (once you got past the overhanging hazel branches of course) and settled in for a busy night.

  Chapter 2:

  Nocturnal visitors

  “You get it yet?”

  “Nah, fackin’ knocked it on the floor. Hang on, hold the window open, I’m going i
n.”

  “Tommy don’t!”

  “Fack off bottler.”

  “Shut your maaf, I ain’t no bottler!”

  “Fackin’ make me.”

  “Fackin’ all a’ yous lot, shut it or you’ll wake the old scarecrow up for fack’s sake.”

  “Ain’t me, it’s Farny.”

  “Fackin’ grasser.”

  “Fack off!”

  The leader of the pack climbed through the window and dropped into the gloom of my front room. Barely able to contain his squeals of delight he grabbed my dad's old hat and stuffed it back through the open window to his mates outside.

  “Got it! Here, grab it will ya!” he told them excitedly, clambering back up onto the windowsill to make his escape. The boys outside giggled triumphantly and started passing it from head to head when they noticed their leader had yet to join them.

  “Tommy, you coming or what?”

  “Hang on. Look at this!” he said, spotting what else I'd left for them amongst the clutter.

  A few yards from the window, I’d pushed back a couple of my taller scrap heaps to air a stretch of carpet. My poor old Axminster hadn’t seen the light of day since 1982 and it didn’t get much of a respite now because I heaved my bait up from the basement and set it down amongst the shadows. It would’ve been difficult to make out what it was from the overgrown weeds of my front garden, but once a person was inside, my front room’s newest feature stood out like a horrifyingly sore thumb.

  “It’s a coffin!” Tommy told his mates .

  “What?” came back their reply.

  “It’s a coffin. Scarecrow’s got a fackin’ coffin in his living room!”

  “Where?”

  “I can’t see.”

  “You’re lying.”

  Tommy steeled himself and edged towards it, watching his footing amongst the clutter and bracing himself to run at the first creak.

  “What’s inside it?”

  “Tommy don’t, let’s go.”

  “Shut it bottler!”

  But Tommy ignored his mates’ and continued towards the coffin until he was within touching distance of its scratched cedar lid.

  “Ho-ho-hoo,” he chuckled to himself with ghoulish delight as he felt along the lip for a finger-hold.

  “Tommy, what are you doing?” a needy anxious voice called from outside, but Tommy was feeling reckless and he heaved at the heavy lid, cracking it open an inch until the bolts I’d screwed into the hinges stopped it from opening further.

  Inside the coffin a sudden movement had him dropping the lid and soiling his socks as he tumbled back in fright. “Jesus!” he squawked, scrambling back across my front room and up onto the windowsill before recovering his courage. His friends outside had done considerably better than he and had practically made it back home and into their pyjamas in the same space of time, but curiosity and a lack of a reaction from the bungalow’s resident “Scarecrow” soon had them back and sniffing around my casket once more.

  Only now there were two of them inside my house.

  “You lift it, I’ll look inside,” they concocted as Tommy dropped to his knees and pushed his peepers against the crack.

  “Fackin’ Jesus!” he yelped once again when something spun within, tumbling back onto his buns and scrambling over his chum who was already halfway through the window.

  This time, it took them a full hour before they returned, but return they did. Three of them climbed in through the window this time – Tommy, the one they called Farny and a Ginger lad – leaving the littlest outside to sniffle and blubber to himself in protest.

  “What is it?” asked Farny holding the lid.

  “I don’t know, but it’s horrible,” Tommy replied, and Ginger who was on his knees beside him echoed these sentiments.

  “D’you fink it’s the scarecrow like, and he sleeps in the box or somefink?” he asked, prompting the Farny, who was holding the lid, to pull his fingers out, much to the dismay of his pals’ noses.

  “Fackin’ conehead twat!” Tommy groaned, holding the wet squidgy mess that used to be his face before realising his fingers were full of tears and not blood. “Stupid twat.”

  “It’s a girl,” Ginger said, pushing the lid up long enough to take another peek.

  “Tommy, please let’s go home,” snivelled the fourth musketeer through the open window.

  “Barry, get in here,” he was told for his troubles.

  “No, I don’t like it,” he replied.

  “Fackin’ bottler!” was Farny’s assessment and Ginger agreed.

  “Pissin’ his pants he is.”

  “I ain’t, I just want to go home,” he pleaded, but Tommy wasn’t having any of it.

  “Barry, you get in here right now or you ain’t hanging out with us no more.”

  “I’ll tell mum,” Barry threatened, prompting a chorus of chicken clucks until Barry silenced his tormenters the only way he could – by climbing through the window. He was supremely reluctant I can tell you that. I’ve seen panicking bluebottles who’ve found their way through open windows faster than Barry, but he eventually joined his peers, only to continue his protestations at close quarters, though he was now so fear-pitched that only dogs and Superman could hear him.

  “Look inside Barry the coffin,” Tommy told him, cranking open the lid and inviting as much fear as he could muster into his little brother’s life.

  The gang went through another round of “bottler” “no I ain’t” “shut it” “jus’ fackin’ do it” before Barry finally took a gander, and when he did his gasp all but silenced the others.

  “Who is she?” he quivered, but the others didn’t get a chance to answer for at that perfect moment I yanked the first of my strings and slammed their point of entry closed behind them.

  Eight pairs of socks were left on the carpet behind as they fled to escape, but the window was now sealed and the glass reinforced with clear plastic in case they tried to smash their way out.

  “WHO’S IN THERE!” a tape recording boomed from the darkest shadows of the room, buffeting them towards the open door and they broke en masse, clambering over each other in heart-wrenching panic as they tumbled out into the hallway. Naturally, a whole heap of boxes barred both exits, front and back, but a third door invited them to step inside, offering them a hiding place from the increasingly heated recordings that were blaring out from the half dozen different speakers dotted around the house.

  “WHERE’S MY AXE?”

  “This way!” Tommy ordered and the rest all followed without a second’s independent thought.

  They got two steps into my basement when they realised it offered no way out, but by the time they knew this it was too late, the door slammed shut and the steps fell away, plunging them down a long slide and into the darkness below.

  “Gotcha,” I chuckled to myself, locking home the heavy steel bolt as I listened to their howls of terror.

  Chapter 3:

  Basement fears

  I left them to stew in the darkness for thirty minutes before returning to the door. Imagination is a powerful weapon and I wanted their little minds primed for the night’s entertainment.

  I cracked back the bolt and shone a torch into the blackness. Huddled on the floor and sobbing their eyes out were Farny and Ginger; they’d waved the white flag and were resigned to meeting their makers with as little dignity as possible (well fair enough, they were only twelve), while Tommy was clutching a hand trowel he’d found and shielding his baby brother behind him. The torchlight temporarily blinded them all and Farny and Ginger cranked up the volume while Tommy tried to kill the air before him with scything swings.

  “Let us out you facker! Let us out or we’ll call the cops!” he warned.

  “Why haven’t you already?” I asked, knowing full well why not. I’d stacked most of my lead on the floor in the room above, meaning they had as much chance of getting a signal on their mobiles as I had of getting a column in Ideal Homes. “Phones not working boys?” I cackled.

  “I want to go home,” Barry blubbed, unable to hold it in any longer.