The most terrible scream: 

 

this is the noise that woke us from our sleeps. 

 

It broke the night, it got us out of our warm little beds. Some of us even came out and onto the street - dressed just in our nightclothes. I did. 

 

Others leaned out of windows. Some peeked through tiny gaps in closed curtains. 

 

Someone, somewhere, on this street had made that noise. Screamed that scream. Were they in trouble? Were they in pain? Were they - ? 

 

We were all very concerned. So concerned that we all went immediately back into our homes, closed the door behind us, and locked it tight. 

 

 

 

There’d been no sounds after that that night, but the echo of the scream lingered. Lingered a long time. An unanswered question; a loose end, dangling.

 

We all knew - in our deepest part - where it had come from. The Hargreaves house, at the street’s end, where the terrace abruptly stopped and the old wood started. It was the oldest house and the couple who lived there the street’s oldest residents.

 

They must’ve been in their 80s, maybe even more. You never saw them, and they kept the shutters - big dark wooden shutters, over every window - shut tight, always. They said his legs had gone and so they never left the house. Survived on deliveries. Survived on memories. 

 

Some nights you’d hear the muffle of a vinyl playing from an upstairs room. Sometimes. Not since the night of the scream though. 

 

Now a silence clung to the old house thicker than any you’d ever felt. Because you did feel it. In your bones. 

 

 

Nobody wanted to knock. Nobody wanted to even ring the little brass bell almost rusted forever quiet by the front gate. I mean, you must understand, we all wanted to. To knock, to ring. But which of us? When? Perhaps we’d left it too long. Too long to check in on them.

 

I remember thinking: if I were to jingle that bell, and the old woman - Mrs Hargreaves - feels compelled to come answer, and if she’s maybe upstairs - far away from the door and maybe bathing her invalid husband or cutting coupons out of a periodical or - or - 

 

She might do herself an injury rushing to answer, and that’d be - that’d be just - awful. 

 

So best just to leave it. 

 

And time passed. And one by one we all forgot about the scream, or rather, we put it from our minds. We tipped our hats and smiled at one another in the street, all the while ignoring the darkness growing at the end of it. The garden of the Hargreaves house growing out of control; baskets of deliveries left to go rotten by the gatepost. A silence getting deeper, getting heavier each day - like a sinkhole. 

 

But: best just to leave it. 

 

A cycle of the Moon passes. The nights are thick with fog - the sweaty close kind that really consumes you. Rumours started to fill that fog, breeding in the wet murk like bugs, scuttling house to house, spreading their insidious gossip. 

 

Have you heard? At night - the heart of it - they say you can hear movement. Movement? Yes [!] In the Hargreaves house. That old house? The empty old pile where that ancient couple live? Yes. Yes. By day, not a pin heard to drop. But at sunset… the band strikes up!

 

They say it’s like - like - scraping. Like many little mouths or feet. But sharp ones, whichever. It’s like a burrowing, and sometimes - imagine - no it couldn’t possibly be - but they say it is - it’s like a fluttering. Great leathery wings. A hell-bat. Or roosting pigeons. Or the great velvet cape of the Devil himself as he stalks those cursed halls. They say those old folk dabbled you know, the black arts, the unholy scripture. After what happened. Didn’t you hear what happened, to their son? Just awful. 

 

Or maybe it’s roosting pigeons. 

 

Smile. Tip your hat. Best to just leave it. 

 

 

 

Soon, the children started having nightmares. Our boy wet the bed. I took the belt to him for that but stopped halfway through; his terror was hazing off of him. It reeked. It smelt sweet and pungent like a flower on the turn. 

 

Then the dogs ran away. One morning we woke up, and - poof - vanished. Clawed their way out in some cases. Headed for the hills. The cats lingered longer but soon they too disappeared. Quieter, subtle-like, slipping away like ink, as befits them. 

 

When did we start noticing her in the gardens? A good question, but harder to answer. I can only speak for myself:

 

you know the sensation, as you go to close the blinds and look out into the darkness and you’re struck by that absolute certainty that you are being observed? Unseen eyes, in the black.

 

That.  

 

Every night they seemed to be there, and getting closer. 

 

One night I was brazen; I wanted to catch the peeping-tom so I concealed myself by the coal house and I waited, and I had a hidden lantern, and I’d taken no risks and armed myself with a poker

 

and I waited till I heard something coming through the bushes [it seemed to drop almost from above] and I burst out and held the lantern aloft ahead of me as though I might dazzle it but it was I who was dazzled - or should I say, struck cold, horrified - by what I had cast into the light. 

 

It was Mrs Hargreaves. Her skin was like porcelain - beneath the pearly white I saw the blue-pop of every vein - but her mouth disturbed the pallor - it was a slash of gaping red, puckered and sucking at me. Though this moment lasted mere seconds I fixed my gaze long enough to spy something bristling within. Within her mouth, I mean. Far back, deep within, past the brown gums and shrivelled tongue. 

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What is that?? 

 

But fright has me and I turn away, I shriek, I hide my face, I thrash out with the poker and hit some mark. There is the dull thud of iron finding flesh and Mrs Hargreaves cries out but - dear Christ believe me when I say - I knew it then - when I heard her cry - as if her face and that mouth and those silvery dead eyes weren’t enough to know - but that cry - 

 

Have you ever heard the sound of the Pit itself?? 

 

It seemed to draw me back to her, pulling me, pulling me - 

 

but then I saw she was gone. 

 

The bushes shivered at her recent departure. I swear I briefly spied her spindly white frame o’erleap the roofs of the terrace beyond me. 

 

 

Tell anyone what I’d witnessed? Lord above! Pray tell, would you simply tar yourself and roll in feathers, proclaim yourself a king and parade up to the madhouse’s door?? I might as well’ve tied myself into the straitjacket. 

 

No. No. And also: something more. In those moments, those moments when I went to tell my wife, or my most closest friends, I stole myself back. I would remember suddenly [powerfully] the thing in her mouth. And it seemed 

 

to calm me. To soothe me and whisper trust. Patience. And I - - 

 

 

 

The first children went missing soon after. Their mothers found their cots empty come daybreak, blankets strewn in distress across ruined bedrooms, windows prised open from without, curtains billowing. Was it three or four who vanished before our own boy was taken? I don’t quite recall… My wife would know; you could’ve asked her if she wasn’t…

 

And people were so so very worried about the children that they missed the more important things. I did not; I kept a small notebook, an account in the hopes I might begin to learn. Predict. Track.

 

I noted: the broken branches; the pantries emptied of sugar and other sweetnesses; the dust. Once you noticed that - the dust - the golden traces all about the neighbourhood, they shone out. Like beacons. They lit the way. The lit the path. 

 

It was quite

 

really quite

 

beautiful. 

 

And yet still people ranted and cried about the missing children! And my wife became so obsessed that I had no choice, absolutely no alternative, but to lock her in the attic.  

 

 

 

The dust was blinding now. Great swooping rivers of it - a glowing honey - pouring down the terrace and into the jungle behind the Hargreaves gates. It sunk into my eyes and filled my dreams. I had no choice. 

 

I had to follow it. I had to see. 

 

 

 

That final night was still. The fog was dense and milky; it smelt of smoke and mulch. I waited till I heard it [don’t ask me how I knew; there’s deeper wisdom isn’t there] till I heard the soft crackle of vinyl coming through the earth-cloud. Calling me. 

 

I passed through the gates - burnt orange with rust, crumbling - and into the green. It was lush and thorny and fat with a trembling silence that willed me onward, inward, to the very throbbing core of it. 

 

The house seemed vast - painted black and gold with shadows and glimmering dust. There were cobwebs - masses, like great galleon sails - but the spiders long left. Escaped before anything else. Wise creatures. 

 

I followed the music. I ascended the stairs. I crunched on something underfoot; looking down I saw it was a knee bone. A fox’s? Too big. A child’s? Yes, that’d be it.

 

And the air was nothing but the smell of something growing. 

 

I find myself in a room. It could be the size of a broom closet or a cathedral, the dark warps it beyond comprehension. I light a match, and the glow immediately finds a sorry sight. 

 

Mr Hargreaves - the late Mr Hargreaves, forgive me, where are my manners - curled into a stiff twist of terror, yes really quite dead and his face still coiled with the scream that broke the night all those nights ago. The scream that woke us up from our slumbers, and from my slumber the most of all.  

 

He was misted in a fine film of something which was tacky to the touch and dissolved at the merest brush of my fingertip. It beguiled me. I reached out to feel it again - 

 

A shuffling behind me; I am no longer alone. I drop the match in shock, it extinguishes. I fumble for another, strike it and - 

 

She has found me again. Mrs Hargreaves, or whatever she is now. And her eyes fix me tight even though they are pupilless and her breathing rattles like her lungs are full of broken pottery. Her hands clench about my shoulders with an ungodly strength and hold me fast. 

 

But I am not afraid. 

 

I see now - this close - that she is coated in that same misty film as her late husband, but it seems alive upon her eggshell skin; it dances in tiny seeking wisps, curious or hungry or both. 

 

Her mouth creaks open. In the gummy moist of her throat I see something advancing. Long flitting legs and perhaps that is an eye? Shiny and green like the deepest part of the most ancient pool in the most ancient cave… 

 

And it sees me. For the first time truly, it sees me. 

 

It explodes out of her. Her head is split clean in two, though still hinged at the jaw, and from the meaty chasm it has sprung, soaring upwards in a flurry of wings. Without her pilot, Mrs Hargreaves drops. Is forgotten. 

 

And I do, instantly forget her. I forget them all - my wife, my boy. I forget myself. There is only this magnificent terrible absolute thing. 

 

I want it. I accept it. I open my mouth and it acknowledges and it extends its proboscis and it unfurls down and down and into my very soul and it begins to feed and fill and feed and fill. 

 

I feel the mist rising, out of my every pore. It covers me and my being is extending now. The winged thing is wasted, it’s eyes have gone glassy; it falls to the floor, a husk. This matters not. It is within me now. 

 

I have been chosen. Inside me, a foundation stone has been laid. I sit. And I wait. And I begin to grow. 

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First performed by me at The Knock Knock Club's first 'Tales of A Frightful Nature' storytelling night at the Old Red Lion Theatre [potentially London's oldest - and most haunted - public house].

 

My attempt at melodramatic turn of the century horror, told or read by candlelight, perfect nightmare-fuel. Night night. 

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