The Despair Zone (2024)

25/10/2020

Here's the text for one of the new stories coming in Episode 2 of the podcast, Garden Creeping in Ashton by Hugh Scott:

When I was younger, I wasn’t allowed to go outside after night, even with friends. Every day I was expected to be back home before sunset. I was never allowed out after school in Winter. This may seem fairly normal, but this went to the extent that I had a little book given to me by my Dad detailing every time, precise to the minute, that the sun would rise and set in our area. By the time I was 11, I started hanging around with older kids, and I realised this was odd.

So, I started breaking the rules. Guess my teenage years came early. I started coming in five minutes later, ten minutes later. My Dad would grumble and I’d receive the odd stern word about how important it was to manage my time, but nothing more. That was until I stayed at Jubilee Park, convinced by my mates to stay out longer so we could share our first ever can of beer. By the time I was back, it was past 9pm, two hours past sunset. I didn’t dread coming home, I was confident, I was young and foolhardy and wanted this confrontation. I was going to tell my Dad about how I was old enough to stay out after dark, about how I was basically an adult now. When I arrived home, my Dad was waiting for me, standing in the living room. He nodded towards the sofa, motioning me to sit down. The look on his face made my confidence drain and I sat, head bowed, ready for the telling off of a lifetime. Instead, he told me a story about when he used to go out at night, garden creeping in Ashton.

Garden creeping, my Dad explained, was the game of hiding in people’s gardens, peeking through windows in an attempt to scare people in the well-off suburbs. With little else to do in 80s Britain, this was how they kept themselves busy. The kids used to try to outdo each other by being more and more daring; scaring people through their living room windows by just standing still? Sure that was good, but scaring people by climbing over their back garden fences and staring through their wide, patio doors? That was where the real fun was had.

Soon, they had begun to exhaust all possibilities, frightening the same people again and again, until they were no longer scared. People now drew their curtains closed as soon as night came, and the previous stomping ground around the suburbs was growing boring.

So they had to branch out. Some went for more elaborate scares in the same areas, putting on balaclavas and masks and climbing houses to peek through first floor windows. Others just went back to the working-class area, where it was easier to scare but also easier to be recognised. A lot of kids were grounded and belted doing this. My Dad, wanting to avoid his father’s lash, went with the former. He enjoyed the thrill of it, he explained. He continued.

My Dad was out with four of the wilder boys, in a street mostly filled with bungalows and the elderly, one of their favourite areas to scare. It was past 1am and they were bored, kicking a deflated football against a bungalow’s wall. The inhabitants either didn’t hear the ball, or were too scared of the boys to tell them to head off. The boys kicked the ball harder, trying to get some sort of confrontation. At this hour, there was nobody to scare, but no one wanted to head home. Each boy had their own reason to not want to return home. My Dad was just happy to be there; they were all older than him and he was desperate to impress, so when he noticed a light switch on in a bungalow down the street, he made sure to point it out. He vividly recalled them ruffling his hair and saying “good spot, Scotty”.

They skulked along the street until they were outside, hiding behind a bush at the edge of the front garden. Light radiated from the house, as if every light was on. No curtain was closed; it didn’t even look like the bungalow had any. They hadn’t scared here before, and the prospect of getting a new victim was tantalising. Without considering how odd the situation was, the boys went straight to planning.

It was decided that my Dad, being the youngest, was to keep watch. He was upset by this, as who was he to keep watch from at near two o’clock in the morning? But they didn’t care, and it was clear that the boys just wanted to assert their authority over the youngest member of their group. They donned masks. The first had a balaclava, the second a werewolf mask that he had stolen during a school play, and the third had a paper plate with eyeholes stabbed in and a smiley face drawn on top. The fourth had nothing, as he was “ugly enough”, they all used to say. Two were to take the front windows, one on either side of the bright red door. Around the back were two windows also, and that’s where the other two would go. The two at the back would throw the football over as a signal for all of them to pop their heads over the windows, staring in and scaring whatever lonely old lady was in. Whoever scared the inhabitants first won. My Dad was left out at the edge of the garden.

They dashed to their positions. The boy with the paper plate and the werewolf climbed over the garden gate to get to the back. The boy donning the balaclava and the ugly boy knelt underneath their adjacent windows, trying to stop each other from giggling. It was at this point my Dad noticed the light grow brighter; it looked like it was pulsating, throbbing. He felt uneasy. The ball landed in the front garden with a muffled thump after it was launched from over the back, and both boys at the front of the house immediately jumped to their feet. But they did not react; they didn’t say a word. My Dad didn’t know there was something wrong until their bodies started to press against the glass and their feet left the floor, suspending them against the glass. The light grew brighter.

My Dad emerged from behind the bush, covering his eyes from the now blinding glare before it dulled suddenly. When he looked now, there was light blazing only from the right window; the other was now almost entirely covered by a black form of writhing mass. The left window had three panes. The top pane opened from the inside with gentle precision. An ink black te****le emerged, snaking downwards towards the balaclava clad boy. My Dad watched in horror as the te****le wrapped itself around the boy’s neck, languidly hauling him through the window. The night was so deathly still that the sound of the snap of the boy’s neck cut through the cold air. The ugly boy didn’t react, body pressed against the window, unable or unwilling to move. Once through, the boy’s body was lost from sight. The mass moved from the window and the light once more shone through, causing my Dad to turn his back to the glare.

Terrified, my Dad couldn’t help, but he also found himself unable to run, and instead soiled himself. I smirked when he said this, causing him to uncharacteristically shout.

“This is not a GAME, Hugh, people DIED. KIDS DIED.”

That was my first and final input into his story. I found myself staring at my shoes, shamefaced and teary-eyed. It was at this point that my Dad doubled down, a tumble of words spilling from his mouth. His words seemed to overlap one another. It became obvious that he had not told this story in years, or perhaps never had, and he spoke as if he would be stopped at any second. From here, I listened, and I can account most details as well as my father spoke them.

The light dulled once more, allowing my Dad to look back towards the house; the mass was now covering the right window, directly in front of the ugly boy. My Dad found his courage and couldn’t bear to see another one of his friends taken by the creature, and dashed towards the boy, shielding his eyes from the light blazing again from the left window. Keeping his head down, he threw himself against the house, between the front door and the right window, turning so his back was pressed against the wall in a sitting position. He looked up and left towards the levitating boy, and only now noticed the true extent to his trance. The boy’s whole body was pressed against the window with such force that his face was not visible. His nose had been flattened, his chin and brow had cracked. His eyes could not be seen, the eye sockets effectively destroyed. Bone visibly pushed through the malformed flesh of his face, which had been stretched from the pressure creating rolls of fat and skin along the boundaries of his head. He drew himself away from the boy’s face, and looked at the boy’s legs, which had been slammed against the stone window sill with such force that they had dug straight through the bone, shattering it to pieces, and now was lodged deep into the flesh. He swore he could hear the boy gurgle as he tried to scream.

From this angle, the monster was not visible inside the house. My Dad believed, or at least convinced himself that it was unaware of his presence. His mind raced to think up a plan, but it soon emptied when the window’s top pane silently lumbered open. A black tendril descended soon after. Knowing what would come next, my Dad scuffled under the window so that he was between the boy’s stiff legs, which he wrapped his arms around and braced for the slow pull upwards; the boy was not going to go, he was going to save him, he had to.

He couldn’t see when the te****le roped around the boy’s neck, but he could tell by the boy’s muffled screams. He gripped tighter, pushing his back against the wall, heaving on the legs as they slowly began to rise. The jeans the boy was wearing, became drenched with a deep red. The immense pressure from being pressed against the window sill caused some sort of rupture, emptying blood down the boy’s legs as he was dragged upwards. My Dad said the sound of the boy’s shin bones scraping and cracking against the stone sill plagues his nightmares. Thick blood poured onto my Dad, spilling thickly through his hair, down his back and onto his trouser legs. Still, he clung on to the boy.

Holding on, my Dad was brought to his feet in a crouch. Forced to make his head visible, he locked his shoulders underneath the sill in an attempt to stop the slow, relentless rise. By this time, his arms were only around the boy’s blood-sodden ankles. They had become swollen with a mounting pile of ripped flesh from the boy’s shins. My Dad, aware that his head was now within view of the monster, found his lungs out of fear for his life and began to scream. He screamed for help, screamed for the police, screamed for his Mum and he even screamed for his Dad. Lights began to turn on in the street as people woke to his cries, before a sudden and aggressive yank tore the boy from my Dad’s grip. He fell to his knees, his legs and arms burning from the ordeal. He turned to look just to see the boy crammed through the open window with such a quick and violent motion that the pane tore from its hinges with a crash. An impossible clamber of countless te****les ripped and tore at the boy until there was nothing left, completely and utterly devoured. Once complete, its attention fell to my Dad on the ground.

My Dad couldn’t tell me what it said to him, only that he knew he would never be safe again. It didn’t matter that it disappeared as soon as the first adults reached him. It didn’t matter that he spent the remaining part of his childhood being told that he suffered from an extreme delusion brought on by PTSD and trauma. It didn’t matter that the police found the bodies of each child in the basement of the home, or that the owner of the home was arrested and charged with murder. It didn’t matter that the window had been smashed from the inside. He knew what he saw, and he knew from then that no one else could suffer the same fate as him; and that is why I wasn’t allowed to leave the house after dark.

The Despair Zone

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25/10/2020

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