APPARITION

The keening was a knife scraping on a plate. It was the moment the chalk breaks on the blackboard and the next sound you hear after the crisp snap of the stick is the sound of the teacher’s nail grincing on the board.

But it is more than that.

It is cotton wool snagging on the jagged bit of tooth that the dentist has created.

It is the higher part of the sound of his drill.

It is the smell of burning hairs when the dog has sat too near the fire.

It is the wire of the staple going up under your fingernail.

It is that piece of grit that some bastard at the Thai place has dropped into the soft noodles that cracks when you bite it. Or is that a tooth breaking?

It is a Greek Wedding with plates smashed and littering the terracotta tiles. The guests, who are running full tanks of retsina and metaxa, are dancing the Twist, the Froog and the Mashed Potato on broken shards of crockery. They grind them into grit on the floor of the taverna.

Timothy’s teeth are on edge. A skeletal finger has just drawn a line down his spine.

Timothy wonders if his hair is standing up as straight as it feels. He wonders what his hair looks like. He wonders what he must look like.

The Apparition is the same colour as the glow-in-the-dark silly putty that Timothy used to put on the lampshade of his bedside light. He would switch the light off and watch the gloop ooze itself down the lampshade and into the plastic eggcup where it lived.

He knew that the green glow would keep the gorillas away. The gorillas wouldn’t dare to come out from behind the curtain. Timothy could go to sleep. The green glow would keep him safe.

–

The Apparition flickers like a faulty neon light.

It looks something like Jane, but Jane would never wear a spiked dog collar or a leather jacket. If it is Jane, then Timothy is secretly pleased that she is wearing such a short skirt and that her eyes and mouth have been sewn shut. Mind you, with all that black shadow around them the eyes still looks they are open. Only they look like the eyes on a marble sculpture.

White.

Pale.

Blank.

Empty.

But Timothy knows that they are looking at him.

He has seen the stare before. It is the way that Jane’s cat would stare after it had done some careful scraping in the flowerbed and gathered itself up, a furry accordion, tail straight out pointing to some cardinal point of the compass.

The Apparition oozes toward him. Why him of all the people in the checkout queue?

No-one else seems to know that it is there. No-one but Timothy sees that it is passing through the mesh at the end of his shopping trolley.

He feels the trolley go cold, but his hands still grip the handlebar.