Black Flowers by Steve Mosby

flick off the light switch and go back to the living room at one end, and close the door. I would lie there, the covers drawn up to my chin, hearing the dulled sound of the television and the throb of silence coming from the
other
direction. From the empty part of the house. Except, the more I listened, the less empty it seemed. It felt as though something was forming in the shadows down there, and then creeping closer along the hallway. I’d stare at the doorframe, the whole time waiting for fingers of some kind to wrap slowly around it. For a face to peer in at me. And when it did, I knew my parents would be too far away to reach me in time.
    Other times, I’d manage to drop off to sleep, only for something to startle me awake again. This was one of those nights.
    Something had woken me up.
    Something had happened.
    ‘Dad!’ I shouted.
    Then I listened intently, my tiny heart thudding. Normally, I would hear hushed conversation from the front room –
was that Neil?
– and eventually the door opening. But not tonight. Instead, I heard silence for a few moments, the sound of someone holding still, and then quiet footfalls as that person made their way to my bedroom. For some reason, one of my parents had already been in the corridor.
    It was my father. He appeared in the doorway now, still carrying whatever book he was reading, and then walked over and switched on the feathered lamp. His voice was quiet, soft.
    ‘What’s wrong, Neil?’
    ‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘There was something.’
    ‘A noise?’
    ‘Maybe.’
    He glanced back at the hallway.
    ‘Do you want me to go and check?’
    I shook my head; I knew enough by that age that checking wouldn’t solve anything. Logic didn’t work. There might not be anything there
now
, but that didn’t mean there wouldn’t be something there
after
. Children’s logic, perhaps, but, deep down, my father understood this too. He certainly never got impatient or angry with me.
    He sat down on the chair beside my bed.
    ‘Do you want me to read to you?’
    I thought about it. ‘Yes please.’
    ‘Okay.’
    He put his book down on the floor. The one he’d been reading to me recently –
Archer’s Goon
, by Diana Wynne Jones – was on the nightstand. It was resting face down, splayed open, creased. Despite being a writer, my father had always been careless with books.
It’s the stories inside that matter
, he would tell me.
You can’t bend them back
.
    But he didn’t pick that one up. Often, instead of returning to a story we’d been reading, he’d make something up instead. When that happened, he always started slowly – tentatively – but, as he went on, the story would gather pace and flow more quickly. I would watch his eyes glint with excitement, and I’d believe, in my naïve, childish way, that the story he was telling was something magical: that it had been there all along, waiting to be discovered and claimed.
    He rubbed his hands together slowly now, as though washing the ordinary world from them.
    And said, ‘This is not a story about a little girl who vanishes.’
    And I woke up with a start.
    The bedroom was dark; the main street outside was quiet and empty. It was still the dead of night. I turned my head and saw Ally asleep beside me. She was lying on her front, her naked back shifting slowly and gently as she breathed, her face peaceful and clear. As far as I could tell, after lying still for a few moremoments, nothing was wrong or out of place. It was just the dream that had woken me. And yet my heart was punching as hard now as it had when I was a little boy, scared of darkness and silence.
    This is not a story about a little girl who vanishes
.
    I remembered that from the back of
The Black Flower
, but everything else in the dream might as well have been pulled straight from my childhood. Had my father ever said that? It was impossible to know; I couldn’t remember what had happened in any of the stories he’d made up. The content was