Out of the Woods

CW: Contains themes and/or references to dementia and supernatural horror

“Your Pa’s been out there at ‘imself in the hedgerows again.” says Sara.

You’re halfway to the window before you can fully decode what she’s telling you, her Hull accent thick as soup in your ears. And then you’re standing at the kitchen counter, staring out to the garden like a kid at a zoo, as if keen to see a 78-year-old frantically abusing himself. You look out to an empty lawn, bordered by neat flowerbeds of fuchsia, salvia and carnations, with a row of conifers separating the main garden from the forest that encircles the house. For a moment you imagine you see something milky and sputum-like deposited on splayed fronds.

“Well he’s not still there,” she says, furiously mopping the muddy footprints you’ve just walked through the kitchen. As if you should know how long he lasts. He is, as confirmed, no longer there. You jump as he announces himself at the utility door, bouncing off it like a pigeon knocking itself out, his cock now bright and soft as a robin.

You make another limp apology to Sara as you pull off your running shoes, close the interval analysis on your phone and cover the hallway in a few long strides, wet socks shrieking on hallway tiles.

“Come on Dad, you’ll frighten the neighbours.”

He mumbles something to himself about a Dr Knob as he steps inside, an epithet he’s had for Dr Todd at number 31, ever since he had offered your father some advice on how to construct his rockery, more than twenty years ago. You see that his cheap slippers are covered with mud and studded with gravel, as his psoriatic hip brushes the back of your hand. He’s freezing. You can hear Sara’s tuts before they leave her teeth.

You get him upstairs to his en-suite, grateful that, for now at least, he’s still able to shower for himself. Although last week he managed to complete a full shave using toothpaste for shaving foam. Something you failed to mention to Sara, or to anyone but your wife, as perhaps the only person in the world less interested in the prospect of becoming his full-time carer. You had only noticed when he came downstairs hissing curses, a dozen nicks in his neck and chin all dabbed in tricolour. You’ve since locked away all the bleach and cleaning sprays, just in case, but you know that his (and more importantly your) days of independence are numbered.

In the bedroom, you wait for him to shower, the haze of stale sweat settling on you like flies in a fruit bowl. On the shower radio, you can just make out through the static and water Heaven by Bryan Adams, your father humming along.

He hadn’t always been like this. Always a bit right-leaning, bloody-minded and inclined towards self-destruction, but so far as you could tell from looking at your friends’ Dads, that was about par for the course. Always drinking, always smoking, always insular, never learning new things or open to anything more than a new Spanish holiday resort that looked just the same as the last and hardly different to the worst parts of home. Joking about his own memory loss and dementia long after the process had already begun. But it was the rate of decline that had caught you off guard. But the more you thought about it, he’d been filling his risk factor bingo card his entire adult life.

Your mind drifts to your next story for the Wrangleby Post, half-ideas circling the drain as they had been on your long run here through the wood. Lingering on your feedback on the last two stories; one on speed bumps brought in by the council ahead of the local elections. Another on the increasing moral imperative to impose a higher rate of tax on non-domiciled residents. Neither being anything like what Tony, the editor, was looking for, but both apparently sufficient to fill the space immediately before the sports pages. Next to zero clicks on the new website, but he tells you it’s something wrong with the views counter, and insists that you run something on stock car racing or the old hotel that’s being used to house asylum seekers in Werrington Point.

The bathroom door swings open behind you as if blown by a draught and bounces off the wall, taking a chunk out of the plaster and shuddering to a stop, shards of paint cascading in shimmering flakes onto the floorboards. The radio in the bathroom cuts out. The shower has stopped. Dad is no longer humming. For what feels like a long time nothing happens. You sit, frozen, fixed to the bed, staring at the empty doorway as clouds of steam tumble through into the room.

“…Dad?” all at once you wake up to the danger and suddenly you’re on your feet, moving towards the open door.

“Dad?” Your voice is small and pathetic. He must have had a fall, or the safety glass has exploded, or he’s found a way to electrocute himself on the shower unit. The house remains still and silent as if all life within has been placed on pause, and you alone move through it.

With one hand on the outside you peer in, the steam parting briefly around you. You flinch, thinking you see a dark shape hunched in the corner. But you can’t see or hear anyone. The steam dissipates slowly, a curtain drawing back on the cubicle one cirrus layer at a time. Something white and fleshy reveals itself under the parting spirals.

“Dad.”

A hand flings out, catching the end of your nose and soaking your shirt.

‘Get OUT! Peeping dickhead!’ The sound pulls you as if from a dream. Besides being fully naked and a pain in your arse, he appears to be full of life.

Once dry and back in his room, your father settles into one of his trances before you’ve had a chance to question him. Before you can make any attempt to chastise him, he’s transfixed, watching the window, blank and mute. A short while longer and spittle begins to curl from his top lip, hanging as a veil, translucent and full of bubbles, over the pale fluff that peppers his chin. It frays as it stretches, threads in a cobweb.

Unable to find anything more suitable, you wipe it away with your own salty sleeve-end. It’s tragic to see what he’s become. The Head of the Family. Hunched over in his lap, eyesight fading, often farting without comment or reflection. You spend too much time thinking about how to approach the conversation, that the silence sets firm. Opening your mouth to speak feels momentous, your voice deafening, your words plaintive and redundant.

“Dad. Can you tell me what you were doing in the garden?” You watch him carefully for a reaction, but there’s nothing. No indication except your own burning cheeks that you ever spoke. You sit with the question for a while, looking for a better way to approach it. “Sara’s done a lot for us as a family, don’t you think, Dad. We should pay her back.” By not having to catch an eyeful of your bare cleavage every time she looks up from her cooking. It sounds patronising even as you say it, but you continue. “Dad, neither of us wants to see you lose your independence. I don’t want to put you in a home-”

He shifts in his armchair and you wait, expecting some vitriolic retort, some jab in response. Neither comes and instead he frowns like a newborn, hard into his knees, saying nothing. Past the open doorway, something creaks in the hall. You watch the empty space, waiting for Sara to appear, but she never arrives. As you turn back, he’s leaning forward in his chair, beaming at you, conspiratorial.

“She’s still here, son.”

‘What did you say?’

“She’s still here. Yunno. Your Ma. How else should I say it for godsakes. Are you simple, son?”

The first drops of rain start on the bedroom window.

‘I just. I don’t-’

“She’s here, look.” He nods past you, to the air at your shoulder. “She’s still as organised as ever. Loves a tidy house does your Ma. Puts my clothes away sometimes.” He stares happily into the golden swirls stippled onto the magnolia wallpaper as if they’re a benevolent caregiver, nurturing him into convalescence. “Come home, son. Mother loves you.” There’s a softness in his voice that doesn’t belong to him. He smiles as he says it, banal, of the kind usually reserved for children of cult families.

You’ve had enough. With a lame hand on his shoulder, you put your lips to his bald spot and wish him goodnight.

“Has Dad mentioned anyone being upstairs with him?” you ask Sara on your way out.

‘Asides from you and me, you mean?’

Lost for any way of framing your question outside of the clearly ridiculous, you settle on “…He thinks someone’s putting his washing away.”

She watches you blankly, as if trying to process whether she’s misheard you, she’s missed a punchline, or if, this is final, conclusive evidence of your idiocy.

‘His washing.’

You shouldn’t have said it. You shake your head, burning with embarrassment as you head for the door. She grips your forearm.

‘Sometimes I hear voices down the hall, you know. I stop and listen. It’s none of my business, of course, but there shouldn’t be anyone in the house. They stop every time I go into the room. He barely even sees me. He’s convinced it’s her doing everything. Apart from the odd accident in the night, then he tells me I’m getting in the way. Last night he actually told me she’s going to get rid of me soon. I said he should let her, cheeky old misery that he is. I know it’s not professional of me, but respect runs both ways.’

You apologise again. Explain that in case it’s any consolation, he was never much better with his own children. But it’s much worse than you thought.

* * *

A few days later, Sara calls you a little after 5am, as you lie awake, lit by the dimmed glow of your laptop, wallowing in the shame of another empty page and another article deadline you’re almost certain to miss.

It’s your Dad. You should come and see him, is all she says.

As you pull into the driveway, something feels off. The house you grew up in is watching you arrive, without warmth or familiarity, the woods that encircle seeming to close ranks about the place, dragging it down into the forest floor, reclaiming the dark oak beams and peaked archways as their own. Its render infected with spreading moss, speckled with lichen blooms.

The hall is cold, dark and empty, touched only by a sliver of dawn in its northern aspect. Sara appears from the living room, face ashen and downcast.

‘I think we should call the police,’ she says.

Moaning carries into the hall and reverberates above you. The weakness in it cuts through you. The muted wail of a wounded animal rushing between the stones in the wall, surging at you through the house in a tide of desperation. Instinctively you go to call to him but the words snag in your throat. Somewhere behind you, you imagine that something sniggers.

The air feels damp as you enter his room.

“How long has he been like this?”

Sara doesn’t respond. She’s waiting out in the hallway, her hands shaking uncontrollably.

Dad shivers in his bed, his body curled up, crumpled like a car accident, too shaken even to pull the covers over his shrivelled legs, soaked with perspiration. He whimpers like a thing beaten.

You’re reminded then, of Mother. And of the boys at school who used to call her Witch. Of the detention you sat in after school for bursting Paul Bishop’s lip, after he shouted it in front of the class. Of how she’d laughed when you got home, when told her why you were late for dinner.

The marks in his back, bright at their centre, are faded to dull red at their edge. They glow like embers with every exhale. You have questions, too many to count, but all of them start to disappear without having fully formed, swelling like welts before settling into the skin, painful and unresolved.

You take a careful look over the rest of him. There’s nothing else to indicate anyone was ever here, but for the look in his eye. As you kneel at the bedside, you know then that the look will stay with you until your final day. Like a flutter of wings, something unseen shifts in the space behind the bed. You draw the quilt cover over him.

Outside, Sara grinds her teeth slowly. She sees you checking her fingernails, which of course are short, sensible and above all, immaculately clean. You curse yourself. An hour later she’s gone home. It took offering her a lift for you to realise you don’t even know where she lives.

The rest of the morning you spend walking circles through the house, first upstairs, making a single route of every room as if mapping them together with your feet, and then down, just the same, walking you think aimlessly. But it’s not until maybe an hour later, making coffee and staring out to the garden that you realise.

You’ve traced every step of her morning routine. Every day for more than thirty years the same. She would wake at 6, and until she had cleaned the entire house, she would do nothing else, rarely surfacing before the afternoon. Dusting every ledge and surface. Vacuuming every fibre in every carpet. Scrubbing anything which had been bold enough to contaminate itself in the twenty three and a half hours since it was last purified.

An email from Tony. You feel what’s coming before you open it, but you don’t hesitate. There’s no subject line.

It’s made to sound like redundancy, but you know what it is. Fired from a job you didn’t even want.

You’ll never be good enough. All the proof you need is in that email, in this room. Why else would you be back here after all this time? It’s been blindingly clear to everyone who knows you, probably since you first moved to London to ‘make it’ as a writer, whatever that meant. Even the phrase fills you with shame. The laziness and brazen self-assurance of someone who was told one too many times you can be anything. And eventually, sure as the sunrise, in steps reality like a soiled incontinence pad to soak through your morning. About time you got a real job, as your father would have told you if he wasn’t scared out of his skin.

It’s almost nine before you realise that neither of you has eaten a thing all day. When you take him a bowl of soup, he’s already asleep with the curtains open. You pour it down the sink with most of the coffee you made earlier.

In the back room, you hardly sleep, staring instead down the long, darkened corridor of your childhood, your hair raising at every shifting pipe and every barking dog two streets over. At some point you fall asleep, which you only notice because you start awake to the sound of someone tugging at the back door, the handle thrashing in place.

You’re out of bed and descending the stairs, your phone out in front of you to light the way, at once reassuring and impotent. The door stands wide open, still in the night air. You take a jacket and step out.

It doesn't take long for you to see him. Standing on the lawn, under the light of the moon, his torn-up bare back in stark relief against the shadows of the conifer row and the woods that loom beyond.

And a sound like feet tramping down mulch, in a slow, continuous rhythm.

“Pa…” it’s only as you say it that you see the shape pulsating beyond him. Like a black cloud. The pale fingers hooked about his waist.

He turns to stare dimly back at you, swaying and unsteady on his feet. The space between his hips is only a stump, his thighs streaked with flashes of red. Behind him, wings explode outwards like a pulled parachute, their vast frame reducing him to a maggot at their centre blinking, blind on a heap.

The creature in the woods grins. You imagine you see rows of teeth, long and fine as pencil lead. Grinning with the face of your Ma.