Company - a short story.

Company

A short story by Steve Conoboy

It ate the cat last night, but I forgive It. I did like that cat, but I guess I can get another. Not right away, of course. Wouldn’t be much fun for the cat if I did, although the Greyling would probably be happy. Quite an appetite it’s got. Gobbled down all of my cat, fur and everything. Happened pretty quick. The cat was lolling about on the rug, the Greyling was listening to me rattle on, all calm and normal. Then the Greyling’s eyes bugged out of its head. A split-second was all it took. It was on the cat in the blink of an eye. Would have been me next if I hadn’t got over the shock and started talking again.

  Poor cat. Judging by the way the It looks at me, it’s got a similar fate lined up for my furless hide. Hasn’t tried to eat me yet, and I think I know why.

  I’ve had to learn a lot about the Greyling pretty quick. It loves the sunlight, thrives on it I think, which you wouldn’t expect to look at it. Sleeps from dusk till dawn. Precisely too, so I have to be on my toes there.

  Can’t sleep in, or I reckon that’ll be all for me. I’ll go the same way as the cat. Excuse me talking with my mouth full but it’s unavoidable. It’s become habit. No, more like a survival technique. While we’re awake, me and the Greyling, I talk. Constantly. Only thing that keeps the It at bay. It presses itself against a wall and listens, like it’s doing now. Follows me around the house to keep me in earshot and drinks in every word. It’s like some odd kind of hypnosis, not really like talking, filling the air with inane rubbish. It’s a spell, a really long spell I’ve got the Greyling under, and it’s easily broken. That’s why I don’t turn the television on any more. You can get distracted and forget. I’ve had a couple of close calls like that.

  I’m forced to sing to it while I’m in the shower. Quite loud so it can hear. I’m not a singer, I wasn’t built for music. At least it doesn’t come in the shower with me, just lurks in the room. It could do with a wash, though. Smells like an old attic. Not sure how to approach the washing of the Greyling. Or how it would react if I did. That’s why I haven’t done it yet. Neither would you if you’d been anywhere near those teeth.

  It’s not a looker. Man shaped, if that shape had been stretched and buckled. All its joints seem like they’ve been screwed inwards. Makes you think it must be slow and weak, looking at it. It’s not, though. Definitely not.

  I don’t know where it came from. I was putting the bin out one night, only takes a few moments so I left the door open. By the time I got back in the house it had snuck in. I leave the front or the back door open whenever I can now, but it doesn’t seem interested in leaving. Knowing my luck I’ll end up with another one creeping in at some point.

  I hate this time of the year when the days start getting longer. The winter wasn’t so bad, when the Greyling was getting itself off to sleep around four, five o’clock. Meant I had the evenings to myself. Could stop talking for a few hours too, although I’ve got to admit I still end up nattering on to myself. Force of habit. I think the whole experience has made me a bit eccentric. It would do the same to anyone, I suppose. These later evenings mean I have to keep my mouth going for longer. It’s a hell of a lot of time to fill up with talking. Sometimes I end up babbling nonsense just for the sake of stringing words together. The way an old person might coo and chitter to a beloved pet.

  The first couple of weeks were… fractious. I couldn’t work out what to do about the Greyling. Still haven’t really. I thought about reporting it to the police, but something tells me that wouldn’t work out very well. I’m not sure what I’d tell them to be honest. All it has done so far is menace me and eat the cat. There’s no doubt that it’s got more murderous intentions in mind… but if the police came round I suspect the Greyling would simply hide, and do a good job of it. That wouldn’t make me look very good. And it might be angry after.

  A while back I got tired of it following me around, always being in the corner of my eye. It’s just creepy. So I locked it in the bedroom. That’s why I don’t have a bedroom door any longer. It went completely berserk. For the sake of my doors I haven’t tried doing that again. I’ve never seen anything that furious. It could quite easily pluck my arms and legs out of the sockets. When it comes to the Greyling, I just don’t know what to do.

  Cleaning and talking to yourself seem to go together, don’t they? You know, it went mad when I locked it in the bedroom, but it’s fairly calm when it comes to me leaving the house. It has to be done at some time, going to shops and whatnot. Mowing the lawn. Posting a letter. Essential things you can’t get away from. Work, when I used to. I was invited to a meeting, and invited to leave. A result of my recently-developed eccentricities, I think.

  The bloody thing sets traps for me sometimes. They’re crude, but that makes them no less disturbing. I came home one time and the It had left me a sandwich on the stairs. A sandwich. There was a tube of superglue inside it. You can imagine what it had in mind. On another occasion it stuck a strand of gaffer tape across an open doorway at what the It guessed to be mouth-height, presumably for me to walk into. I got it across the neck. That gave it the idea that I’m garrotable, means I have to check all doorways whenever I get home.

  I tried to find out a bit more about the It, but where do you begin? I’ve never seen anything like it before in my life. It’s like a horrible cross between a human and a shaved lemur. I spent a while at the library on the internet, looking through websites of weird and wonderful creatures and mythical beasts and that sort of thing, sites about yetis and other things that don’t exist but people have photos of. There was nothing that looked or sounded anything like the Greyling. Maybe this Greyling is the only Greyling there is. Which isn’t very helpful for me, because it means I’m stuck without a handbook or instructions of any kind.

  I could take my own pictures, and I’ve tried. They don’t come out very well, though. It would be great if I could get a good clear picture of the Greyling, send it off to… whoever you send such things to. The news, a science magazine, I don’t know. But it doesn’t like to pose. And any pictures I do get come out smudgey. When you look at them it might as well be a gaunt old man diving out of frame. A better camera might produce clearer results, but I can’t exactly afford one of those when I’ve been invited out of my job.

  And what if this Greyling is the only Greyling? Wouldn’t that mean I held some sort of responsibility for it’s safeguarding? That worries me a lot. We’ve all heard what these sciency-types get up to, all their poking and prodding and cutting and after all that the It will be dead. Yes, it ate my cat, but perhaps cats are one of the main things it eats. I like chicken and beef and things like that. Cows eat grass, birds eat insects, that’s just the way things are.

  I’ve got neighbours on either side of me. I figured it might eventually get tired of waiting and slope off for an easier meal. There’s Mrs. Whitby out in her garden, hanging out her washing. She’s seventy-six and getting frail and has about as many visitors as I do and there’s nothing stopping it sneaking into her house when she isn’t looking. Horrible thing to think, that is, isn’t it? I’m not making excuses, but when you’re having to watch where you’re going all the time and you’re talking to yourself all the time and it’s been going on for months, well, sometimes you don’t think right, do you? It doesn’t really matter what dark thoughts I might have had. The It shows no inclination to go anywhere. Pushing it out with the broom seems unwise. The It seems to be easily riled up. And Mrs. Whitby might be going deaf, but not even she could fail to her it shrieking if I tried to shove it out while she was tending to her azaleas.

  I’d miss the Greyling if it went.

  Can’t believe I just said that. With all this nattering on, I come out with the funniest things sometimes. It often strikes me that I’m quite lucky there’s only the It around to hear me droning on. Anybody else would’ve had me locked up by now. Quick call to the funny farm, and off I go.

  I wonder if it would follow me there?

  When it comes down to it, I don’t really mind the Greyling so much. There’s no woman in this life of mine, no children pattering across these floors, just me and these walls that the Greyling clings to. There’s never a question these days whether it will be there, my strange and terrible companion. Always listening. Always attentive. Never boring. It chose to come here, and chooses to stay.

  A lot like a friend.

  I, er.

  Oh.

  I don’t know what to say.

            Er…

Get off the damn phone

So A Graveyard Visible doesn't have a phone in it. 

I've only just realised this. In amongst everything that happens, nobody's gone anywhere near a mobile. It was such an odd thought that I had to stop and go back through the story and double-check. 

As it turns out, AGV is told in a fairly tight space (not in terms of Time, though - we've got a bit of drift there, back and forwards). There are a few sets, all relatively close to each other. Graveyard, garage roof, playground, Gramps' house, and that strange old Manor at the end of the road and round the corner.

It happens that the story is such that the presence of a mobile phone would not affect the outcome in any way. Have I created this situation on purpose? No. But yes.

Mobile phones are a part of life. I need to shove them in. How do I fix this then? I pondered moving the whole lot back in time, to the 80's. No mobile phones there. In fact, the original idea was to base the story in the era of my childhood. A part of me really wanted to talk about being a boy back then, with the technology we had. This turned out to be the reason why A Graveyard Visible took so long to take off. I wanted to talk about things that did not fit with the story that needed to be told.

I realised that the characters had the answer. Caleb, you see, he doesn't really have anyone he'd call. Father is barely present, Gramps is going a smidge loopy and wouldn't be able to work the dang thing, and Mum... well, she's not with us any longer. Misha? She spends as much time as possible as far away from people as she can, so why would she want to be contactable on a phone?

The AVG universe, quite simply, does not have mobiles. And that's fine.

Real life does. It's utterly unavoidable. Leave the house, have a very short walk, go to the shop, and you absolutely will see someone on a mobile at some point doing something. On the bus to work, you use it to listen to music and read a book at the same time (if you're like me). Waiting in the doctors, there's always time for a quick flick through your Instagram feed. Whenever you get a second, you're checking for an email about that publishing contract (maybe, maybe...).

But the thing is, I'm not in the middle of an adventure wherein graveyards are expanding and strange men are lurking in the rain. Would I be phoning people up to say that I've just measured a fence and it's about two metres longer than it was yesterday? Unlikely, because it's far too weird. Would I be calling the police to tell them I've seen some people looking vaguely suspicious in suits around a grave? Doubt it, because what's so suspicious about them anyway? And no-one's going to believe anything about paranormal stuff because that stuff's not real so who would believe it?

I don't really need to add in scenes where Caleb takes a minute to muck about with Snapchat filters while he waits for the revenant to turn up. It won't bring anything to the story if I have him scouring the internet for information on strange old Manors. I think I'd be wasting everyone's time if I chucked in a bit where Crosswell tries and fails to get Google Maps to work while he's out hunting for murderous things. (Actually, I quite like that last one. Back off, I've bagsied it.)

So, here's the thing. Did I choose not to write the latest smartphone tech into my story, or did my story make that decision for me? I guess we writers have to see what's good for the story, what keeps it going, and allow those decisions to happen. The story will drive itself on, and our job is to throw as few obstacles in its way as possible. Any author knows that they themselves are an obstacle to the telling - the poor story has to go through us to get out into the world.

Laters