Emily Black

‘Night Creatures’

‘What’s a widower?’ I asked.

‘It’s a man who’s lost his wife,’ Mum said, dabbing the film of sweat on her forehead with the sleeve of her white dress. 

‘Does Uncle Colin have a new wife now?’

‘No, he doesn’t.’

‘He lives alone,’ Dad added. He shifted the steering wheel, catching my eye in the rear-view mirror. The sliver of his face was yellow in the light. I sat in the back and scuffed my feet against the seat in an effort to make my toes touch the floor. The candle-wax sky was beyond reach, so I had to strain against the door to see out the window.

We drove against the sun, from Cork to Northern Ireland. Mum kept repeating, ‘Careful, watch that car!’ whilst Dad drove. I spent the journey on my Nintendo. 

In the final few minutes of the journey, we turned off the infinite motorway to cut along small lanes with sharp corners. We followed the edges of fields and sunk under railway bridges. Dad almost hit a rabbit. Mum held her breath as the creature hopped into a hedge and out of sight. 

Uncle Colin’s house was made of grey stone and had a crooked roof. Uncle Colin himself had grey skin and a crooked haircut. He had to lean over to speak to me, so his spine arched like a bent coat hanger. ‘Lovely to see you! Gosh, aren’t you big? You must be six now?’

‘Seven,’ I corrected him. 

He laughed, then turned to my parents. ‘Couldn’t speak a word, last time you were all here!’ 

They sat down and drank cups of tea, then talked about double glazing. The TV in the corner chattered to itself. I picked a scab on my knee and went to look out the window. The garden was framed by a low stone fence and overgrown with silver grass, interrupted only by a path which cut through the middle. At the bottom of the path was a grey shed. It had no windows, only two rotten panels which plastered over cracks. They looked like eyes. 

Colin caught me staring at the hut. ‘Let me show you,’ he said, lifting himself from his seat. My parents eyed one another. ‘Are you sure, Colin?’ my mother said. 

‘Yes, yes, kids love it. Fascinating stuff.’

We followed Uncle Colin to the shed. Bugs bit at my ankles in the long grass. I slapped them with my hand and jogged to keep up with the adults.

Colin unlocked the shed with a small, rusted key. His thumb looked like a giant’s against the padlock. It opened with a clack, and he pulled the door outwards. The air smelt of vinegar and meat. 

My mum walked in first, ducking her head, although she wasn’t even close to the doorframe. Dad followed, and Uncle Colin stepped in before me. I followed him, glancing over my shoulder at the house behind. There was no light in the shed; the shelves lit only by the ashy summer sky. It took my eyes a moment to adjust to the darkness; hundreds of eyes welcomed me. 

‘Gosh, this is quite something,’ my mum said. She crossed her arms, and leant into my dad. 

‘I know, five years of collecting. Five years of work.’ 

‘Work?’ I asked. 

‘Well, you see, it takes a lot of practice to get to this level of skill. Not everyone can do what I do. It’s a craft. A dainty craft.’

A weasel lunged towards me, its body suspended forwards and tiny claw at eye-level on one of the lower shelves. It had a thin pole running through its stomach. Its eyes were dead and mean. Next to the weasel was a robin.

‘Yes, my finest,’ Colin announced, though no one had asked. ‘My pheasant and my badger.’ 

Shelves ran to the ceiling. At the top was a large, grey-black badger, suspended in a flat pose. A red pheasant strutted beside it, beak to the ceiling. Next to the pair was a raven, and a large bullfrog. The shelves formed a macabre hierarchy. 

‘The jubjub!’ I pointed at a large, skewed bird.

‘Hah! Lewis Carroll…very good,’ my uncle nodded. 

The shelves were packed with resolution and rebirth. All the creatures were both moving and still; caught mid-walking, then frozen in an eternal Rigor Mortis.

My parents chatted in hushed voices to Colin. He told them about the process: the gutting, the stuffing, the sewing. He pointed to his large desk on the right, which glinted with scalpel blades. They were quiet, as if not to wake the sleeping creatures.

‘Did you kill the mouse?’ I asked, interrupting their conversation. I was looking at a brown fieldmouse. Its long tail resembled a worm. Colin paused, looked at me, and then turned back to continue his chatter. 

There was a tray of insects next to the mouse; iridescent beetles, large moths, and blue butterflies, all fanned out in a crucifixion: the artifice of preservation.

‘I wouldn’t want dead friends,’ I said to myself. ‘Only real ones.’

‘They are real,’ Colin said, breaking away from his conversation. 

My mother laughed and blushed, patting my shoulder in a way that appeared light, but hurt. ‘They’re lovely, Colin. Such a fascinating project.’

For the rest of the afternoon, I played in the empty garden, slapping at the bugs that bit my knees. I picked strands of grass, tried to catch white butterflies and found a wooden plank which I rested on the low stone wall to create a seesaw. I had no one to teeter with me on the other end.

All the time I played, I was aware of the shed watching me, severed from the house.  It was a limb floating in formaldehyde, rising from the dead grass. The door remained unlocked, the padlock hanging in an anti-gravity ‘U’.

I was convinced that death didn’t happen in the summer. Instead, birds shook their feathers, fanned out like dealer’s cards; robins nested in shrubs and fruit formed, full and swollen. The dust-grey pigeons of the country sat against blue-black skies. 

The twilight crept in from behind the farmhouse, swallowing the shed first. The shed swallowed everything else. I went back inside to play on my Nintendo.

On Saturday, Colin took us to a nearby lough. I was happy to escape the house. The lake was grey and boundless; I saw myself reflected on the surface, like I’d seen myself in the eyes of those creatures. Mum and Dad walked in front, leaning on one another like a pair of cards. Uncle Colin told me how to skim a rock upon the water. ‘You want to aim sideways, with the edge of the stone, you know, catch the surface.’

I tried it. My stone landed with a single, large plop. I asked him to show me how to do it, but he raised his eyebrow and said, ‘I can’t do it myself!’ as if it were obvious.

On Sunday, Colin took us to Auntie’s grave. It was at a cemetery two miles away from his house, arranged around a tiny, pointed church. Mum bought yellow flowers to put on her sister’s headstone. They looked silly amongst all the grey and brown, but I smiled because she smiled. My dad held her hand. 

Uncle Colin said, ‘That’s why I don’t own a car anymore. It’s walking, the bicycle, or nothing.’ His voice cracked when he spoke. I tasted a fear that rose from somewhere low in my gut. In the distance there was a small, brown rat by the church door, flitting around the guttering.

That night I dreamt of the great red pheasant and the seaweed-green bullfrog. I saw stone moths and lurid beetles, mice with beads for eyes and butterflies with pins through their wings, like Jesus. My eyes closed to grainy imprints of the creatures which paraded upon the shelves of the shed: a Noah’s ark of the restless. 

I woke at three in the morning, sweating in the hot night, unable to get back to sleep. My dad snored in the room next door. The farmhouse quivered. 

I got up to look out of my window which faced back into the garden. The grass was flooded in white moonlight, thousands of needles which all led to the grey square at the back: the shed which sat under the great, unbearable weight of unrest. I shivered. The window was open, and I could hear the hum of crickets and sigh of night-birds. I shut the window and went back to bed. I still couldn’t sleep. 

After a long pool of twisted dreams, I got up again. Nature ruptured the dark; the noisy army of the night. Termites chattered in the wood as I crept downstairs and through the kitchen, opening the split barn-door. Too short to reach the lock at the top, I made a cat-flap for myself – sliding under the bottom panel, and out into the garden. The sky was tissue paper that night, high and unreachable. The fields beyond the stone wall stretched taught, like sheets of silk. I walked through the milk-white grass, barefoot. Everything was nebulous. I ran to the bottom of the garden. The house watched.

The padlock came off easy, still unlocked and skewed from our earlier visit. I propped the door open with a brick, so that the white light glazed the small beady faces of the mice and the birds. Stepping inside, I surveyed the shelves once again. The pheasant loomed above, on the top shelf near the ceiling, and the bugs remained at eye-level, unmoved. I reached out, gently, to stroke the back of a particularly soft looking bird. It had a few golden-yellow feathers and a dash of red. It felt cold and rigid. 

Spider corpses collapsed in on themselves, suspended in sleep from the ceiling where they were excluded from the deliberate display of death. A scattering of flies littered their webs, but the spiders had died anyway under the mass of the shed.

I fixed my attention on a snake. It was small and brown, and un-exotic looking. I pressed two fingers over its back. I imagined how it would hiss. 

At the far right of the shed was Uncle Colin’s desk. There were two books on the desk, both wearing green dust jackets. I read the names, but I didn’t know who these people were. There was dirt on the covers, and a scalpel sat neatly over the title that read K-e-a-t-s. I sounded the letters out to myself – quietly, as not to wake the creatures. Strung with cobwebs, tucked below the desk, was a blue-grey doll’s house. It was covered in cigarette-ash sediment from years of neglect. I wondered if Colin ever used it, or if it was meant as a gift. I crouched down and opened the front panel of the house, to reveal the resident: a large, brown, rat. Frozen. Its black eyes saw nothing. It was huge, and inanimate. 

‘Hello there,’ I whispered in the dark. 

At that moment, a gust of wind blew across the front of the shed. I turned to watch the door slam, then bounce, leaving nothing but a sliver of light pressing into the room.  

My heart drummed.

Eeeeee.

I looked back. The rat leapt from the middle floor of the doll’s house, and I now noticed tiny claw-prints in the dust. The door slammed again. I turned around to the thousands of eyes which saw me gasp. The dry, empty animals saw the colour drain from my face. The rat scarpered around the floor, frantic, trying to escape. I shot off my haunches and into the air. It brushed my feet, desperate to escape the fate of its fellow rodents. I became dizzy; the shed was all eyes. I couldn’t tell where the door was. ‘Ow!’ A shelf hit me in the face. Three different frogs fell from their mounts. The rat squealed and I squealed with it. 

There was a clatter, then a moment of clarity. I saw a pinstripe of light to the left of me and fell into the door. ‘Ouch!’ I yelled again. The rat bit me. 

I opened the door for the creature. The lock was heavy. The stinking rat ran out through the gap and vanished behind the silver-green undergrowth. The moon hung like a fingernail, and I could see the house waiting for my return. The crooked roof said, I told you so.

I ran back through the murmuring grass, shut the barn-door behind me, then crawled back into bed and pulled the blanket over my ears.

We drove home the next morning. It was Monday, and my Nintendo was blank-screened on the backseat, neglected. I pressed my fingers against my ankle, feeling the dull ache of the bite.

After breakfast, Colin had locked up the shed and complained of the wind knocking over his frogs. 

My mum laughed – I think at the obscurity of it. 

‘It was a still night, no wind at all,’ my dad said, chewing his toast. 

‘No, it wasn’t,’ Uncle Colin and I said in unison.

Mum bought three postcards from a local shop to send to our relatives about our weekend away. She held them out over the back seat of the car, twisting her arm to show them to me. They exhibited primary-colour landscapes, with sunny Irish coasts and buttercup fields. 

‘We didn’t go to these places,’ I said to her. 

‘Just write them for your grandparents, please.’ She gave me a bloated smile. 

I looked out of the window, at the yellow thread of sunlight in the sky, and wondered if there was a heaven. We drove past a dead bird. It had been hit by a car. The vast mass of white feathers and flesh was placid on the tarmac; mangled and flat, it was beyond repair, peaceful.