13 Tales To Give You Night Terrors by Elliot Arthur Cross

said. “I can think of a
good one. It wouldn’t be difficult.”
    I’d watched Laura spiral for years. I
had no idea whether she was happy or not wherever she was, but
wherever she had gone, she’d gone by choice. Love wasn’t something
that was coherently expressed in our family, but I knew that I
cared more about my sister than anyone else. As I felt the
combativeness build, I realised that I had no idea what this figure
was capable of. As far as I knew, his powers didn’t stretch beyond
speech and intimidation.
    “ No.”
    He nodded and closed his eyes. Behind
him, shadows began to appear. In the course of a few seconds, every
figure I had seen in that house stood behind him, their backs
straight, their eyes closed. When he opened his eyes, so did they.
He was grinning again, and so were they. Rows of white eyes and
white teeth in the darkness.
    “ Final answer?” he asked. I
nodded. “Right. You stubbed your mum’s fag out, didn’t you?” I
nodded, less sure of myself this time. “No, son. You
didn’t.”
    By the time I got to my mother’s room,
it was engulfed in flames. I tried to get to her, I really did. But
I wasn’t supposed to.
    I went to stay with my godmother, a
nice, well-meaning woman who was busy enough to never push me too
hard on anything. The apparitions I saw there were nothing like the
ones at the old house. They were mostly lost or confused and didn’t
have time for anyone’s problems except their own. I did my best to
move on, but I never forgot.
    I heard from Laura every now and then,
and we met up for a pint if we were ever in the same city.
Happiness was something that seemed to always be a few steps away
from her. If I saw her in person she did her best to act natural,
to ask the right questions, and to answer mine in vague enough
terms that I didn’t really learn anything. I heard that she’d tried
to go the same way as Dad once or twice, but whenever I saw her she
stressed that she was moving on, doing better, getting better. When
she moved to London, I stayed in Nottingham. I was doing
OK.
    So getting into my car and driving
into the countryside was something that I had to talk myself into.
I had no desire to go back to the old place. Laura, though. Laura
meant that I didn’t have a choice. It looked pretty much the same.
We’d paid to have the fire damage fixed out of some vague notion
that we might resell it, but something always came up, or we
actively avoided it.
    I was standing outside the front door
when my phone rang. It was Laura’s number, but she wasn’t the one
on the other end of the line.
    “ Is this William
Fitzgerald?” asked a woman whose voice I didn’t recognise. There
was a slight pause after I confirmed, then an audible deep breath.
“I’m calling from the hospital in Lewisham, it’s about your sister
Laura. I’m afraid that she’s hurt herself.”
    “ How bad is it?”
    “ Mr Fitzgerald, you should
really try and get here as soon as possible. I don’t think she’s
going to be here very long.”
    “ I’m leaving now,” I told
her, and hung up before she could answer. I tried not to think too
hard about the lie I’d just told and went inside.
    They didn’t put on a show. The
familiar faces stood along both sides of the corridor, waiting for
me to walk past, but they didn’t give any sign of seeing me. They
just stood there. I moved quickly past them and into the kitchen.
There he was, standing by the oven. The man in the suit was nearly
translucent; he had become wispy around the edges. Dissipating or
not, he managed to grin at me.
    “ What do you want?” I
asked. He pointed up the stairs and was gone. I went cautiously. I
took the steps one at a time. The place still smelled of smoke. I’d
been back here during the day, but at night, everything was
different. There was my old bedroom. There was my mother’s room,
where she’d… And there was the bathroom, where the light was
on.
    Laura lay in the bath. Her eyes were
open. Her