The Friend

There once was a boy named Craig who was very unfortunate. One of these misfortunes was that his name was Craig, and not something like Daemon, or Link or Zuko (as his fellow classmates were named). Other misfortunes involved said classmates with whom he went to school, and if he were to really pity himself a final misfortune would be that his family were a band of disinterested dullards.

Craig was the boy hunched under an umbrella at the bus stop, who was so rake-thin that he disappeared among crowds, trees, even signposts. When the days wound to a close and the bus returned Craig home, he was the boy who trailed behind the other kids, the older neighbours, who jeered and shrieked and seemingly had grand things to do. Craig did not. Craig would go home, curl into his beanbag and play his Xbox until he suspected dinner had been made (One had to go looking for dinner in Craig’s house, because nobody bothered to call out that it was ready).

Such was Craig’s life, such were his misfortunes.

Craig often had nightmares too, but despite some of the horrors his brain would conjure, this phenomenon was among the least troubling in his life. Even as he would wake in a shivering sweat, the imagery would fade with the gleam of sunlight through his window, reminding him that ahead was another day of school, mean people and mean parents. Truly, if he could only befriend the demons in his dreams, sleep would be a respite.

On one special morning, he awoke screaming, and only realised he was awake when his mother burst through the door –

“Would you shut up?” she snapped. “I can’t hear the Morning Show over yer crying!”

He nearly screamed again just at the sight of her. He clutched his throat and swallowed. “Sorry, Ma. I had a bad dream again.”

“I don’t care what you had. Be quiet.”

It was interesting, being constantly told to be quiet, as though Craig was not already a master at that. He said nothing more as his mother left the room and he resigned himself to getting ready for school.

His day went – full of misfortunes, as usual – and he returned home to find that there was a gaping hole in his wall, next to the door. Slipping his bag off and dropping it onto the floor, he stared at it, trying to remember if it had been there yesterday. No, he decided, it was new, it was fresh. He stepped closer and looked at it. It was a fist-sized hole, and through it he could see the bare, dark, brownish wood within the wall.

“Ma!” he shouted. “There’s a hole in my wall!”

He shouted a few more times before there was finally a response.

“Well, fix it up then!”

“But I didn’t do it, Ma!”

“I don’t care what you did or didn’t do! Shut it!”

He sighed and turned back to the hole. He wondered if cold air would come into his room through the hole. He kneeled and peered through, into that wooden, dull darkness, then put his hand through, to feel for cold. He felt something furry, like the fuzz on a peach, and pulled back with a jolt.

“Animal?” he whispered. His heart was beating– he was afraid of big, dirty rats. He peered in, angling his face to where his hand had touched the thing, and he saw… he saw… a face.

He let out a squeak, tumbling backwards.

“MA!”

“Shut! Up! Boy!”

He pressed his hands, clammy with fear, to his face and rubbed. If his mother wouldn’t come – and there was less chance his father would – what could he do? Well, perhaps he had misperceived the animal. He leaned forward and peered again, narrowing his eyes into that blackness, and indeed, saw the furry outline of a face, long, oblong-shaped with a pointed chin and a large, thin smile and, worst of all, wide, glassy eyes. They stared at Craig, unblinking, as though unseeing, but most certainly seeing.

A squeal escaped his throat, but he didn’t move, and neither did the face.

“What are you?” he whispered.

It did not move. It gave nary a twitch. The smile stayed the same, in that stretched, lipless look, as though it had been sliced into its furred skin by a knife. The eyes looked on, right into Craig’s eyes, and somehow through him. After several beats, filled with the rush of blood in Craig’s ears, he felt his panic simmer into a morbid calm.

“Maybe you’re a prank from my brother,” Craig whispered, feeling cross. Somehow, somehow, that was worse. Maybe he wasn’t as bothered by a creepy face in his wall as he first thought, because the idea of being frightened by a prank from his brother was far more humiliating. And a prank by his brother belonged to his brother. If the face were a face of its own accord, then perhaps the face could belong to him. It was in his wall, after all.

“Do you have a name?”

It kept on staring, soundless. Its eyes, though they had tiny specks for pupils, had the translucent effect of thick glass.

“Well, if you did talk,” Craig said, feeling bitter, “I wouldn’t tell you to be quiet.”

The face had no opinion on this, and Craig left it to play Xbox. His stomach grumbling two hours later reminded him that he had to eat, so he left the room to grab some oven-heated meat-pies. When he returned to his room, he checked the hole once more, and found the face, just as it had been. This time he said nothing and went back to his beanbag. Oddly, he felt aware that he had company, although the face in the hole could not see him from where he sat. When he went to bed, he wondered for a moment if the face would kill him, but decided it was a thing to either find out, or not, in the morning.

He woke, very much alive. This was interesting, but he didn’t have time to examine it. He glimpsed the face, still in his wall, on his way out to get breakfast.

At the breakfast table, his brother jeered at him, “That’s what you get.”

“What do I get?” he mumbled.

“The hole.”

“You put the hole in my wall!” Craig said. His voice sounded whiney to him. “Why?”

“Coz. That’s what you get.”

“Why didn’t you fix it, Craig?” his mother grunted as she passed through the kitchen.

“Coz I didn’t do it!”

Neither his brother nor mother responded to him, making him feel oddly guilty. He went to school, endured it, and came home, thinking that he should patch up the wall, somehow.

Only, once he was crouched before it, with some glue and cardboard in his hands, he was met with the face and faltered, indecisive. “I have to patch this up,” he told the face. “I don’t know how you’d feel about.”

The face said nothing. It stared, its mouth stretched wide.

“I don’t even know how to fix walls,” Craig sighed. He held up the implements of craft for the face to see. “Ma won’t tell me, and my brother just laughed when I told him I should fix it.” The face stared. “Oh,” Craig continued. “My dad, well, I guess dads are meant to fix things in the house. But there’s no use asking him. He’s a bit scary. I know I got scared when I saw you, but that was a different scared, coz I didn’t know what you’d do. But I know what dad would do if you bugged him so it’s better not to.”

He leaned his back against the wall and rolled the glue over. It was a white bottle with a blue label, and he suspected it wouldn’t stick the cardboard very well. “Are you bored in the wall?” he asked. “I wouldn’t mind it, I think. Coz no-one knows you’re there. I mean, until someone punches a hole in the wall.”

Talking came easily to him when he spoke to the face, he realised. He began to tell the face about school, about the boys in his class (Daemon, Link, Zuko) who liked to push him in the corridors and laugh and say that his clothes came from the rubbish bins at the back of the school. He tried to avoid them but it’s hard to avoid people who are in your class. There was a girl named Violet, who talked to him for a bit and was nice, but then Zuko started shooting spit-balls at her and teasing her for having a crush on a “stinky-garbage-boy,” so she stopped talking to him or sitting near him. It made him so sad that he cried on the bus once, which was embarrassing, but thankfully no-one saw.

“You wouldn’t tease me if you saw me crying, though,” he said, twisting to look back at the face. The face was the same, so he felt assured.

That night, he had a pleasant, well-rested sleep for once. He woke up, went to school, endured it and came home, excited to speak to the face.

“I do wish Ma would buy me good school clothes because even though mine are washed I guess they do look old and bad,” he said. “They itch a lot. And my shoes are falling apart. It’s embarrassing and makes it hard to play sport. Zuko is the biggest boy in class and he’s good at football, but he likes to hurt people when he plays. Our teachers tell him off, but it doesn’t stop him. I came home with a sprained wrist once coz he pushed me into the ground and mashed my arm with his shoulder. Ma said medicine was only for important people so I couldn’t take anything for it. It hurt so bad. I feel like my wrist is weak now. It’s my writing wrist too, so I feel like my handwriting is bad.”

Against his will, he sniffled a little. It wasn’t nice to recall moments of the boys being angry and pushy and laughing at him. He kept talking, though, because the face listened so well. He told the face about the school picnic day at the park and how he saw that Zuko’s parents and Link’s parents were very different from his own parents. They talked loudly and wore very interesting clothes and the teachers liked them a lot. Even when Zuko and Link pushed a girl off a swing and the girl cried, the parents didn’t tell them off the way that Craig’s ma would have. He felt so confused sometimes by everybody that it made him want to scream. But the last time he screamed from frustration (when his brother pulled his pants down in public) his ma had slapped him and shocked all the scream out of him.

“Do you think I should scream more?” He asked the face.

In the darkness inside the wall, the face’s glassy eyes reflected Craig’s own face back at him, and when he saw this, he jumped. The face could see him. Craig felt a burst of excitement.

“You wish you could scream too, don’t you! I know how that feels. The boys at school are always yelling and being noisy and they get away with it. Why not us? It’s not fair.”

That night brought another well-rested sleep and he woke revived. He knew school would be awful but at least it would end with him talking to the face. He told the face to have a good day before he left.

But this day was especially bad. His bagged lunch, an apple and a Vegemite sandwich, was snatched from him by Daemon, who threw it over the fence. Angry, he tried to climb the fence to retrieve it, but Link called the teacher, who yelled at him for being “especially bad” and would not listen to his cries that it was the other boys who threw away his lunch. He went without food, and suffered a torrent of spit-balls (and potentially boogies) during class and when he arrived home he was quivering with an intense hunger and newly-knocked confidence. Instead of going to the face first, he went to the kitchen to search for food, but Ma lopped him over the head with a newspaper roll.

“Did you buy this food! No! Get out!”

“Ma, I’m so hungry, my lunch was thrown away–”

“And whose fault is that? Why did you let that happen?”

“I didn’t! They snatched it off me.”

“You’re lying. You just want attention and I won’t give it to you. Get out! And you’re making too much noise.”

“Please, please, please!” his voice burst through his chest and throat and rattled his light head. At last, he had screamed again! For a second he was stunned, amazed at himself, but then Ma grabbed his hair and marched to his bedroom, dragging him as he shrieked and flailed his arms.

“Shut up right now or I will get your father.”

He was crying too much from the pain in his scalp to speak.

Ma threw him into his room and stared down at him with an intense disgust. “You are such a disappointment.” She slammed his door shut.

Craig touched his tender head, whimpering, and wiped snot from his face with his sleeve. He peered up at the face in the wall and couldn’t decipher what it meant by that large, psychotic grin or those bulbous eyes.

“I’m so hungry,” he wailed. “I’m so hungry and no-one cares about me and I wish I wasn’t alive! My brother gets to raid the kitchen for food but not me! I don’t get it! Nothing makes sense!” He rubbed at his eyes, unable to stop the flow of tears. “I wish you could speak and tell me if maybe I’m better off dead or something. Or maybe we could swap places – no! I’m sorry I said that– I’m not thinking straight. I wouldn’t let you put up with the boys at school! Or my ma, or my dad. I’m so sorry. Please don’t hate me.”

His crying ceased as exhaustion gripped his body. As a delirious calm set over him, he began to feel that maybe death was near. Perhaps all the torment from the boys at school would amount to them killing him and he would finally be free. Or maybe he was one more scream away from his father coming out of the basement. He was too tired to think about it. He curled up against the wall with the face just above him and slipped into a weak, shivering sleep.

*

When Craig woke up, he felt strange, as though his head was floating above his body. He looked into the hole in the wall and was shocked to see that the face was gone.

He stuck his hand into the wall, then fed his entire arm inside, feeling for something furry, but there was nothing. Where had the face gone? Dread rippled through his body. Surely the face had not left him?

Then he heard the scream. It carried on for a long time, a sound that made him cringe, before cutting off to a strangled gurgle. This was followed by a thump. Thump, thump, thump. Hack. Like the sound of an axe going into wood. Hack. Hack. Hack. Then something was being dragged across the floor. Another scream, coupled with the sound of alarmed running, violent footsteps pounding across floorboards, ending with a horrendous slamming noise, a crunch of substance, bodies against bodies. A tear. Teeeeear. Short bursts of screams that became muffled and turned to nothing. Emptiness through the house. A reek of something acrid.

Craig pushed a finger between the door and the doorframe, peeking through. His eyes travelled down to see the smears of blood, thick in places, across the floor. He let the door open and stepped over the blood and crept down the hallway. Matts of hair, clots of blood, a finger. He picked up the finger, baulked, and dropped it. It belonged to his brother.

Further along the hallway, he noticed a strange clump of grey, wiry hair, held together by a thin membrane of bloody skin, and recognised it as belonging to his father. He didn’t know what to think or feel about that, so he moved now into the kitchen, and gaped.

The dining table was laden with a steaming, gleaming course of meals. There were plates of lushy green and red salad, with eggs and avocado, smelling of some sort-of dressing. Most incredible of all, though, were the silver plates holding the meat. Chunks of it, medium-rare, a beautiful red, mouth-watering, cut into portions, ready to eat.

He had no coherent thoughts – except that he had to check his room. He ran back down the hallway, dodging the carnage, and burst back through his door, whirling to see the face within the hole in the wall.

It stared back, grinning, saying nothing.

Oh, to have a friend.

 

*This was originally published in the ‘Tertangala: Horror Issue’ (2023)

Image Credit: Foad Roshan on Unsplash