Mike Dobing

The clock ticked, heavy hands slowly marching forwards on their relentless journey around the dial.

Outside, the night drew in rapidly, bringing cold and wind and rain. The windowpanes shook in their concrete housings, resisting the assault of the elements with a grim resolve. In the hearth, a small fire burned, giving the room its only light. The television was off. The ticking of the clock was the only sound to penetrate the silence.

In her chair, Lizzie hugged the picture frame close to her chest. Dark trails of mascara scored her face, drawn there by torrents of fresh and salty tears. She sat there, watching the clock through eyes clogged with tears, waiting for the hand to strike midnight, waiting for them to come again, like they always did.

Looking back, she never thought that the spell, casually purchased from a gypsy vendor at a recent funfair, would have had such terrifying consequences. The gypsy had told Lizzie that the magic would help bring her closer to the children that had gone missing, to give her luck in the search for her abducted brood. Lizzie didn’t know then that her children were already dead, murdered by their abductor, and that by their own deaths the spell had triggered a cycle that had plagued her and her husband for the past few weeks.

They came every night at midnight. The tiny squeak of their rubber sneakers emanating from the silent road as they made their way from locations unknown to their former home. They stood at the door, calling for the mother and father that they thought had abandoned them. Their voices sounded distant, like someone calling across a river through turbulent winds.

At first, Lizzie and her husband had sat in abject fear, listening to the desperate voices of their children, begging to be let in from the cold and the dark. The same children whose bodies they’d identified only days before.

Eventually, the temptation had proven too much, and Lizzie had run to the door, tears of joy streaming down her face, screaming for her babies to wait for her, that Mummy was coming, and that everything would be okay soon. Outside she’d found nothing but an empty street. However, the howls of pain, of anguish, as the supposed spirits of her own children were drawn back to the void from whence they came, caused her such pain that it would forever mar her soul.

She’d caused them this nightmare, she knew. She had drawn on a magic she did not understand, and now her babies were being tortured night after night, forever being denied a peace that such innocents so deserved.

This sequence of events had been going on now for nearly a month. She and her husband had tried everything – crucifixes on the door, services held by local vicars to expedite their children’s souls to the afterlife, even leaving notes on the front door, telling the spirits to move on the next life, that their time here was over. However, none of their solutions, no matter how imaginative or drastic, had any kind of effect at all.

Tonight though, things were different. As Lizzie sat in her chair, watching the clock tick another minute closer to midnight, she felt – ‘knew’ was too strong a word – that the actions she’d taken would be sufficient to save her children from their eternal torture. All they needed was guidance, she’d told herself when the plan had occurred to her as she picked up her repeat prescription for Valium. That’s all they need, just someone to show them the way.

The clock struck midnight. Her stomach convulsed and her heart thudded against her ribcage as she heard the sneakers coming down the road. Two sets of footsteps, one for her daughter, Lisa, and another for her elder son, James, the two of them forever immortalised on the photo that Lizzie clutched to her chest.

The wind grew, and now she could hear the voices, distant and musical, of her children as they skipped and ran towards the front gate. They sounded so happy, so alive. It brought a hot pain to her throat knowing that they didn’t know they were dead, that every night they had to endure the pain of being rejected by their parents for a reason they did not understand.

She never heard the gate open, she never did. She imagined they simply glided through the iron barrier, and stood before the unyielding front door, crying out for the parents that would never come.

The sneakers stopped at the front door. Lizzie braced herself for the appeals, the pleadings. Lisa, scared of the dark, would cry loudly, begging to be let in, saying that she wouldn’t be naughty anymore and she just wanted to be with her Mum and Dad. James, more stolid, would not cry. He would not beg. He would simply call, matter-of-factly, asking for the door to be opened.

‘Mum…the door…please…it’s so cold here…so cold,’ came Lisa’s trembling voice, intermingled with the wind.

‘Come on Mum, Dad. Open the door. Lisa’s crying,’ James would always say, the voice of reason against Lisa’s raw emotion.

‘I can’t. I’m sorry, my babies,’ Lizzie whispered to herself, more tears pouring down her face. Just a few more seconds, she hoped. Then everything would be changed forever.

As if on cue, a fresh set of footsteps, heavier sounding and less in frequency than her children’s, could now be heard on the pavement outside. Lizzie hoped that it was who she thought it was, that this wasn’t some simple walker, passing by on the way home from a nearby pub.

The footsteps grew nearer, and slowed as they got nearer the front gate. Lizzie couldn’t help smiling, she recognised the footsteps quite easily. After all, she had been married to the owner of them for thirty years. She clutched the frame tighter against her chest as she heard the children’s pleadings stop.

‘Dad!’ Lisa’s excited voice carried loud and clear through the wind.

‘Hello there, love. Hello James,’ Frank, Lizzie’s husband and father of her children, said.

‘We can’t get in the house, Dad. The door won’t open,’ James said in his usual calm voice.

‘I know son. That is the way of things now. We don’t live here anymore. We have to go someplace else.’

‘What? Have we moved? What about Mum, is she coming?’ said Lisa, excited at this turn of events.

‘We have. Although your mother won’t be joining us just yet. She will be along in a few years. For now, us three have someplace else to go.’ Frank’s voice sounded sad, and Lizzie struggled to stifle a sob.

‘Is it a nice place, Dad?’ asked James.

‘It is the place we belong,’ Frank said, with a note of finality. ‘We do not belong here anymore.’

Lizzie listened as she heard the footsteps of her children, led by their father, tail off and vanish into silence as they walked back down the road. She knew now, beyond all doubt, that the spell had been irrevocably broken, that her dead children would no longer return to haunt her.

With a smile, she turned across to the chair next to her, where her husband sat. The cushion that she’d pressed against his face whilst he slept, starving him of oxygen, was still there. The dents in its soft surface caused by her fingers as she pressed the cushion with all her weight remained, a testament to the dark deed that she’d undertaken tonight.

She was sure Frank would understand. She hadn’t told him because she didn’t want to alarm him. He was already worried about her mental health, saying that she should see the doctor more often about the voices she was hearing in her head. He wouldn’t have understood the plan, she knew. It was best that she carried it through herself.

All they needed was a guide, she would tell the police when they arrived. And who better to escort lost children to their new home than their own father?

Holding her husband’s cold and lifeless hand in her own, Lizzie turned over in the chair and fell into the first restful sleep that she’d had in weeks.