u/LikesToRaveDave

Hello!

I was looking for a Minecraft of all things for my kid, and suddenly I get popups saying "Critical Error", "Virus Found" etc. However, clicking the X on a couple of them just created tabs on my browser for McAfee etc. The url's for the web addresses both on the alerts and on the pages that opened (I stopped clicking as soon as I noticed what happened) do not look legit at all.

How do I get rid of this?

It's been a week or so since I posted about the burglary at my grandparents' house.

When I started posting here, I thought this would be somewhere to collect my thoughts. Somewhere I could put them down in front of strangers who didn’t know me, who couldn’t look at me with concern or pity or that careful expression people use when they think you might be losing your grip. I thought I might get some outside perspective.

A few questions to ask myself. A way of making the whole thing feel less like it was happening entirely inside my own head.

I wasn't planning on writing again this quickly. Part of me still feels stupid writing this out at all.

Two posts ago, I was talking about an old neighbour I barely remembered. Last time, I wrote about an event that my family had spent years turning into an anecdote. I keep telling myself I'm connecting things because I want there to be a pattern. That if you stare at any part of your childhood for long enough, you can probably make it look sinister.

I've been trying very hard not to do that. To step back. Turns out that's harder than it sounds. I haven't been able to get it out of my head and the thought that I'm missing pieces to the puzzle persists. I need to know.

I'm also very conscious of how I'm coming across to Mum. She is the most understanding woman I've ever known, but she has always worried about me. Even now, with me approaching thirty, there is still a part of her that hears a tremor in my voice and turns me back into the little boy who couldn't sleep unless the hallway light was on.

I don't want to keep asking her about my childhood. Not like this. Not with the same probing questions. After my last post I decided I wouldn't bring it up to her for at least a few weeks. That way, it would seem like a new-found curiosity regarding my younger years, not the obsession it has become in my mind. That way, maybe she wouldn't worry.

But I needed more gaps filling in, so this time, I decided I would try talking to my Dad.

I mentioned him in my previous posts, but I need to explain something before I go any further. When my Dad stayed in London, he stayed in London.

That sounds obvious, but it wasn't to me as a child. Back then, I thought things would go back to normal eventually. That some time would pass and he would come back to me. That we would soon be kicking a ball around in the local park, just as we used to.

I thought he was away for work, then away because grown-ups were sorting out things I was too little to understand, then away because that was just what Dad did now. By the time I understood that he wasn't coming back, it had already become normal. If I'm being honest, it made me feel like I wasn't good enough for him.

Like I'd done something wrong. The lies and manipulations later on didn't help. But that's another story.

Suffice to say that we aren't close. We haven't seen each other in years.

We speak every few weeks, maybe. The conversations are never unpleasant, exactly. Just thin. I tell him what's been happening with work and family life, and he spends half an hour telling me about some DIY he's done or someone at work who has annoyed him, usually in a situation where, from the outside, he sounds like the problem.

That's our pattern. It feels comfortable, in our own way. Safe because it doesn't go anywhere. I broke that pattern when I asked him about the bungalow.

There was a pause on the other end of the line when I said it. Not long, but long enough.

"The bungalow?" he said.

"Yeah," I said, "The one next to Rex."

"Christ," he said. "That place."

I told him I'd been thinking about it. That I'd spoken to Mum. That I was trying to piece together a few things from when I was little. I didn't tell him everything. I didn't tell him about the hand on the fence, or the eyes at the bottom of my grandparents' stairs. I definitely didn't tell him that I was starting to worry some of the things I'd called nightmares might not have been nightmares at all.

Instead, I asked him about the tyres.

That probably seems like a strange thing to ask about, but let me explain. In my family it's another one of those stories. Not funny like the Spider-Man lunchbox. Not exactly. But familiar. The sort of story my Mum's side speaks about on the rare occasion my Dad comes up in conversation.

Dad was unfaithful when I was younger.

I don't know the details, but I know it was multiple women and it happened over a long period of time. My Dad would never admit it, and always blamed the issues at home on something else. But there were signs. Signs that in my teenage years, I remembered, and connected the dots. Now I'm not so sure I ended up with the right picture.

Someone put nails under Dad's tyres.

That was how I always remembered it. Not that he drove over one by accident. Not that he picked one up from a road or a building site. Someone put them there.

Deliberately. Several times, in fact. Mum never knew who did it, but reasoned with me that it was likely the husband of one of the women my father had been seeing when I was little.

I must have been five or six. The same age I was when we still lived beside Rex. The same age I was when I was apparently telling my parents someone was watching him.

I don't remember the first time it happened, not clearly at least. I only have pieces. Dad crouched beside the car on the driveway. Mum in the doorway, wearing her red dressing gown.

Rex out the front, messing with something behind the hedge, watching without watching. And me, small enough that the top of the car still seemed high, trying to understand why a few little pieces of metal on the ground had made the adults go quiet.

The bungalow was all on one level. I know I've said that before, but I don't think I appreciated how important it was until recently. There was no upstairs. No landing. No sense that the bedrooms were tucked away somewhere separate from the rest of the house.

Everything was close.

My room and the living room at the front. Mum and Dad's room and the kitchen at the back. My sister's room somewhere in the middle with the bathroom. The hallway that connected these places seeming longer in my memory than it ever could have been in real life.

At night, every sound felt like it happened beside you.

The driveway ran out in front of the garage, with a narrow path between the garage and the house. That path led past the front door, which was on the side of the bungalow just behind my bedroom, and carried on towards the back gate. Dad's car was usually parked on the driveway. From my bedroom window you could easily see it. From the living room you could see it if you stood at the far end with the curtains open. The bonnet. The windscreen. Sometimes the side mirror catching a bit of streetlight in the darkness.

One of the reasons I mentioned the tyres to my Dad, is because I can barely remember the sight of the car from inside the house during daylight.

But I have a vivid memory of it sat there, on the driveway, slightly illuminated by the lamppost on the path at the end of the small cul-de-sac we lived in.

At night.

That was the part I couldn't get away from.

When I think about Dad's car during the day, the memory is vague. It could be any car. Any driveway. Any morning from that part of my childhood. Dad crouched down, Mum in the doorway, Rex behind the hedge. All of it has that washed-out quality old memories get when you've handled them too many times.

But the car at night is different. I remember the shape of it.

The way the windscreen reflected the lamppost at the end of the cul-de-sac. The way the bonnet looked pale in the dark, almost blue. The way the side mirror caught a thin line of orange light whenever I moved my head.

I don't know why I remember that so clearly.

Or I didn't.

When I asked Dad about the tyres, I expected him to be dismissive. That would have been easier. He could have told me Mum had exaggerated it, or that I was mixing things up, or that it had happened once and everyone had turned it into something bigger over time. That would have been very on-brand for Dad.

But he didn't. He went quiet. That bothered me more than I expected.

Dad isn't good with silence. He fills it. Usually with jokes that aren't funny, or complaints about work, or long explanations of things nobody asked him to explain. But when I mentioned the tyres, the line went still.

"Who told you about that?" he asked.

"Mum did," I said. "Years ago."

"She still talks about that?"

"Not really, it just came up."

He made a sound under his breath.

"What?" I asked.

"Nothing."

"Dad."

"It was a long time ago."

"I know."

"You were tiny."

"I know that too."

Another pause. Then he said:

"They weren't just nails in the tyres."

I sat up a little straighter.

"What do you mean?" I asked.

"I mean they weren't in the tyres when I found them."

For a second I didn't understand.

"They were under them," he explained.

I thought about that. Under them. Not damage discovered later. Not a slow puncture noticed after a trip to the shops. Not a nail picked up by accident on some road or building site.

Under them. Waiting.

"Like someone had placed them there?" I asked.

"Like someone had placed them there," he said.

His voice sounded different then. Flatter.

"The first time, I thought maybe I'd driven over something and only noticed when the tyre went down. Second time, I checked properly."

"And?"

"They were lined up."

I didn't say anything.

"Under the back tyres," he said. "Tucked in close. Like someone wanted them to go in when I reversed."

I looked across my own living room as he said it, miles away in another part of the country where I sit and write this now. But I wasn't really seeing it. I was seeing the bungalow. The driveway. The car under that orange light.

"How many times did it happen?"

"Twice for definite"

"For definite?"

"Maybe three. Maybe more. Depends what you count."

I hated that answer.

"What does that mean?"

"It means there were other things".

The room around me seemed to narrow. I asked him what other things. Scratches down the side once. Wing mirror pushed in. Nothing major, he said.

But despite his words, his voice still seemed different. Small, and reserved.

"That sounds like kids," I said.

"That's what I told myself."

"But you didn't think it was kids?"

"No," he said. Too quickly. I waited, but he didn't say anything else. So I asked the question I had been circling since I called him. Something even now I hate mentioning to him, scared he will get defensive and angry again.

"Was it because of the affair?"

It felt strange saying that word to him. Affair. Like I'd taken something ugly and adult and placed it directly between us. Dad didn't answer right away. When he did, he sounded tired.

"That's what your Mum thinks?"

"She said it was probably someone connected to one of the women you were seeing."

He let out a breath through his nose.

"I'm sure she did."

"Was she wrong?"

Another silence. Then quietly, he said, "Not about me."

I didn't know what to do with that. He carried on before I had to.

"But about the tyres? I don't know. Maybe. I wondered the same thing later, when everything came out, but it didn't make sense."

"Why not?"

There was another pause. Then he finally responded.

"The timing was off,"

I remember pressing the phone harder against my ear.

"What do you mean, off?"

"I mean the first time it happened, nobody would have had a reason to do that."

"But you were already seeing someone?"

He didn't answer directly.

"That wasn't known."

"Maybe someone found out?"

"Maybe," he said. But he didn't sound convinced.

I thought of Mum in her red dressing gown. Rex behind the hedge. Me in the front garden, staring at the bits of metal on the ground.

"Did you report it?"

"No."

"Why not?"

"Because I was an idiot."

It was such a simple answer that I nearly laughed.

Then he added, "And because your Mum was already frightened enough."

The laugh went away.

"What does that mean?"

He sighed, and for the first time in the conversation I had the sense that he regretted answering the phone.

"She didn't like that house."

"Because of Rex?"

"I don't know."

"You don't know?"

"I don't think it was just Rex."

That sentence has been sitting in my head ever since. I don't think it was just Rex.

I asked him what he meant, and he did what Dad always does when a conversation gets too close to something real. He stepped sideways.

"She used to say she felt watched," he said. "That's all."

A feeling.

I thought about Mum laughing softly when I asked about Rex. No more strange than any other old man. I thought about her telling me I used to say someone was watching him. I thought about the hand on the fence.

"What did Rex say about the tyres?" I asked.

Dad gave a short laugh.

"Rex always had something to say."

"What did he say?"

Dad was quiet for a second.

"He said he heard something that night, that it sounded like someone shuffling down the side of the house, and that I should stop leaving the spare key under the mat."

I didn't understand why that made my stomach turn. Not immediately.

It was too ordinary. Too specific. The sort of thing neighbours say to each other when they want to sound helpful but also want you to know they've noticed more than they should.

"You had a spare key under the mat?" I asked.

"Everyone did back then."

That wasn't true, probably. It was just one of those things adults say when they want the past to excuse them.

"Where?"

"By the front door."

The front door was on the side of the bungalow. Not on the front like most houses. You had to walk down the narrow path between the garage and the wall, past my bedroom window, to reach it.

The mat sat there, apparently. Right beside the door. Right beside the wall of my room.

I tried to picture it. The path in darkness. The garage on one side, the bungalow on the other. The mat by the door. Someone bending down. Someone lifting it.

"Why did Rex say that?" I asked.

"Because I was locked out. I mentioned it to him."

"What?"

Dad sighed. "That morning, after the tyres, your Mum was inside with you and your sister. I'd gone out to the car, found the nails, made a fuss, all of that. At some point the door must have clicked shut behind me."

"So you went for the spare."

"Yeah."

"And it was gone?"

Another pause.

"Yes."

I felt the same coldness again. Not sudden this time. Slow. Every time I'd had one of these conversations, I would hope that some more information would leave me feeling relieved. But every conversation. Every thread pulled. Tightened the knot in my stomach.

"What do you mean gone?"

"I mean it wasn't there."

“Had Mum moved it?”

“That’s what I thought.”

“Did you ask her?”

Dad gave a short laugh, but there was no humour in it.

“Not properly.”

“Why not?”

“Because things weren’t exactly great between us.”

I waited. He didn’t continue.

“Dad.”

“What?”

“Why would you think Mum had moved it?”

This silence was different. Longer. More embarrassed.

Then he said, “Because she’d threatened to before.”

“Why?”

“Because I kept forgetting my keys.”

I didn’t say anything. He knew I didn’t believe that. Or maybe he knew I believed exactly enough of it.

“And because sometimes,” he said, more quietly, “I came home when I shouldn’t have been coming home.”

There it was again. That ugly adult thing laid across a childhood memory like a sheet over furniture. I thought about Mum and how horrible that time must have been for her.

“So you thought Mum took the spare key to lock you out?”

“Maybe.”

“Maybe?”

“I don’t know what I thought. I thought a lot of things back then.”

“But you didn’t change the locks?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“Because I didn’t think someone had stolen it.”

“But it was missing.”

“I thought your Mum had it.”

“Did she?”

He didn’t answer quickly enough.

“Dad.”

“No,” he said.

The word was almost too quiet to hear.

“No?”

“She said she didn’t.”

I sat back.

“She said she didn’t have it, and you still didn’t change the locks?”

“You’re looking at it like it happened now,” he said, and for the first time he sounded irritated. Defensive. More like himself. “At the time, it was one more stupid argument in a house full of stupid arguments. Your Mum thought I was lying. I thought she was lying. Neither of us trusted the other one enough to be worried about a sodding key.”

That shut me up.

Because I could see it. Not forgive it, exactly. But understand why in that situation something like a key might seem like a small thing he didn't want to bring to the surface.

Two adults in a dying marriage, both convinced the other one was playing some petty game. Mum thinking Dad had taken the key so he could come and go without her knowing. Dad thinking Mum had taken it so she could catch him out or lock him out or punish him.

And somewhere in the middle of that, a key was missing from under the mat beside my bedroom wall.

“What did Rex say?” I asked.

“I told you.”

“No. After. When the key wasn’t there.”

Dad breathed out slowly.

“He said kids were always messing about down that path.”

Kids. There it was again. Kids put nails under tyres. Kids scratched cars. Kids stole keys from under mats. Kids made noises outside houses at night. Kids became the explanation.

“Was Callum there?” I asked, before I really knew why.

“What?”

“Callum. My friend. Did he ever play down that path?”

“I don’t remember.”

I did.

Not clearly. Not as one whole memory. But I remembered Callum crouched by the garage once, poking a stick into the gravel along the edge of the path. I remembered him telling me he’d found something secret. I remembered not caring because Callum was always finding something secret. I almost asked Dad if the key ever turned up.

Then I realised I didn’t want to know.

I asked anyway.

“Did you ever find it?”

“No.”

The answer came quickly this time.

Too quickly, maybe.

“So there was a key to the bungalow missing,” I said.

“For a while.”

“What does that mean?”

“It means we stopped using that one. We were moving to London a few months later anyway.”

“You stopped using the key?”

“We stopped leaving one under the mat.”

“But the missing one still opened the door.”

He didn’t answer.

“Dad.”

“Yes,” he said eventually. “It still would have opened the door.”

I looked around my living room again, but once more I wasn’t really seeing it. I was seeing that narrow path. The mat. The wall of my bedroom. The car on the driveway under the lamppost.

“And you never changed the locks?”

“No.”

“Why?”

This time, when he answered, his voice sounded smaller than I have ever heard it.

“Because I didn’t want another argument.”

I don’t know what I expected him to say. That wasn’t it.

I wanted to be angry with him. Part of me was. Part of me still is. But another part of me understood something I wish I didn’t. Fear is easy to miss when it arrives dressed as something familiar.

In our house, it dressed as marriage trouble. It dressed as Dad being selfish and Mum being suspicious. It dressed as Rex being nosy. It dressed as kids messing about down the side of the bungalow.

It dressed as every explanation that was already waiting to be used. I couldn't stop thinking about that missing key. I thought about the bungalow being on one level. About the front door on the side of the house. About my bedroom just beyond it. About the path outside my wall. And I thought about the memory I have always called a nightmare.

I nearly wrote it here.

I’ve tried to, more than once, but every time I start, it comes out wrong. Too neat. Too much like a story. Too much like I’m arranging things to frighten you. That isn’t what I want to do.

The truth is, I don’t know where the memory starts.

I know there was a flash. I know there was the living room. I know I woke up somewhere I shouldn’t have been.

But there are pieces around it that don’t fit anymore. Pieces I used to leave out because dreams don’t need to make sense. Real things do.

Before I ended the call with Dad, I asked him one more question.

“Did I ever sleepwalk?”

He was quiet for a moment. Then he said, “Your Mum said you did once.”

“Once?”

“That I remember.”

“At the bungalow?”

“Yes.”

I closed my eyes.

“What happened?”

“I don’t know,” he said. “I wasn’t there when she found you.”

“Found me where?”

Another pause.

“The living room.”

I didn’t say anything. Dad cleared his throat.

“You were little. Five, maybe six. You’d probably had a nightmare.”

That was the explanation. There it was again, waiting exactly where everyone had left it. A nightmare. Sleepwalking.

A strange child doing strange child things in a house where everyone was already too tired and too unhappy to ask the next question. But now there was a key missing from under the mat.

Now there had been nails under Dad’s tyres. Now Rex had heard something on the path outside my bedroom and told everyone it was probably kids.

And now I know I didn’t invent waking up on the living room floor.

That part was real.

I’m going to speak to Mum before I write about the rest of it.

Not because I want to drag this out.

Because I need to know whether she remembers the curtains being open.

Firstly, thank you to everyone who read my previous post. 

I wasn't sure whether to write a follow-up. I only wrote the first part because visiting my childhood home and talking to my Mum about Rex had left me feeling unsettled in a way I couldn't explain. I thought putting it somewhere might help.

It didn't.

Over the last twenty-four hours or so, memories have started surfacing. Some came after conversations with family. Others arrived while I was doing completely ordinary things, as if they had been waiting for me to stop looking directly at them.

The difference with this memory is that I've always remembered it.

And it has always scared me.

Not in the way the memories of Rex scared me. Those felt distant. Half-forgotten. Like trying to recall a dream after waking. This one was different.

This happened when I was old enough to understand what a burglary was. Old enough to know someone had entered our home while we slept. For years, I'd tell the story the same way people tell old family anecdotes. The sort of thing that gets brought up over Christmas dinner.

"You remember when we got burgled?"

Everyone would nod. Someone would mention the police officers that came to the house, the way they dusted for fingerprints. Someone would laugh about one of the stranger things that had been taken.

And I'd laugh too.

Because children are remarkably good at normalising things they don't understand. We all are. The strange things had explanations. Or at least, they seemed to. I'd carried those explanations with me for twenty years. It never occurred to question them.

Until now.

Because after writing my previous post and speaking to my Mum, some of these details no longer feel strange. They feel frightening.

By the time I was six, we had moved away from the house next to Rex.

My Dad's work took us to London for a few years, and as children do, I adapted quickly.

New house. New school. New friends. Life moved on. Or at least I thought it had. 

Three years later, when I was around nine, we moved back.

Not to the same house.

My parents' marriage was coming apart, although I didn't understand that at the time. All I knew was that Dad stayed in London for work, while Mum, my little sister and I moved in with my grandparents.

At nine years old, it felt less like my family was breaking apart and more like the world had been rearranged while no one was explaining the rules to me. Moving back felt strangely familiar. The village hadn't changed. Or at least not in the way adults mean when they say that. 

The roads were still where I remembered them. The little parade of shops was still there. The smell of wet leaves after rain still hung around the footpaths in autumn.

And Callum was still Callum.

He lived just around the corner from the bungalow next to Rex, where he had always been and still is in my mind. Before we'd moved away, we were inseparable. The sort of friendship children form without really understanding why. One day you're sat next to each other in class, and the next you're playing Halo together every weekend or riding around the neighbourhood on your bikes, trying to find somewhere to make a den.

When I came back, it felt like no time had passed at all. 

Callum was funny. Loud. Endlessly energetic.

And a liar.

Not in a malicious way. Not usually. Callum lied like life just wasn't interesting enough. His uncle worked for MI5. He had found a secret tunnel in the woods, although he could never remember where the entrance was. He had played games months before they came out. Every week there was something new, and every week the details changed.

Nobody believed him.

Not my parents. Not our teachers. Not me.

The older I get, the sadder that feels. Because children don't always lie for the same reasons adults do. Sometimes they lie because reality isn't exciting enough. Sometimes they lie because they want attention. Sometimes they lie because they want people to like them.

Despite the lies, Callum and I were really close for much of my childhood. When I returned to the area, we connected again instantly and now we were older, we were finally allowed to venture out and explore beyond the little grid of streets our parents considered safe. We could get on our bikes and ride around, go to the park behind my house on our own, head to the woods, it felt like the world had opened up for us.

Exploring with Callum did a lot to distract me from the problems at home for the first few weeks.

Unfortunately, that feeling of relative distraction was shattered one night as I lay in bed.

I'd always suffered from nightmares. But I'd also always suffered with "nighttime" in general. I would lie awake and hear the house move, pipes in the walls creak, animals outside, and as a child it all sounded terrifying. When I was younger, Dad would hear my cries and come into my room. Sometimes he would get into bed beside me and stay there until I fell asleep.

I think a lot of it came from living next door to Rex. The smell, his laboured breathing through the wall, the eerie glow of a light on his living room cascading across the grass in front of his house. I could see it from my window then, and the shadows it created formed monsters in my mind I couldn't rationalise.

At nine years old, I wasn't completely defenceless to it. I'd developed enough self-soothing techniques that I could usually calm myself down, convincing myself it was just my imagination.

My grandfather always did, and still does, call me "Space Cadet" - always daydreaming, always overanxious about the mundane. That's all it was, and usually at that age I'd realise I just needed to focus on getting some sleep.

That night my defences betrayed me.

I awoke suddenly, jolting into consciousness at the sound of the bottom stair creaking its signature creak. My room was at the top of the stairs straight ahead, and my door was slightly ajar. I sat upright and swung my legs round to dangle off the side of the bed.

I had one of those high sleeper beds: mattress on top, futon and desk underneath. It was pretty neat, but the metal frame was a bit roughed up and so any sudden movement made a bit of a racket.

My feet felt the carpet as I slowly descended down the ladder to the floor. I stopped halfway as I heard a faint muffled sound like somebody in another room was trying but failing to stifle a cough. Probably just Grandad. As I reached the threshold of the doorway, I peered down the stairs into the darkness.

Nothing.

Silence.

I stood there for what felt like ten minutes. It was probably less than two.

Part of me was trying to calm down. The rest of me was busy filling the darkness downstairs with every impossible thing a nine-year-old mind can invent.

I thought about yelling for Dad, but the realisation hit me. He wasn't here.

I find it hard to describe the feeling that hit me in that moment. It wasn't loneliness exactly. It was worse than that. It was the sudden understanding that the person who usually made the dark less frightening was somewhere else.

Gazing down the steps brought on a feeling of dread. Not because I saw anything in particular, but because I couldn't. I could barely make out any details, only the very faint outline of a bookcase to the left as you got to the bottom.

But I needed to go for a wee.

Fortunately, there was a bathroom just over the other side of the hall. I didn't have to think about venturing downstairs on my own.

I remember deciding that night I'd had enough of letting my imagination get the better of me.

"Was I just going to sit here and wet myself? No. I'm nine, not four. Just go to the toilet you wuss". I imagine I told myself.

I opened my door wider, still keeping an eye on the stairs, and felt for the light switch on the wall.

*click*

The upstairs landing erupted into light.

Nothing happened.

I saw the landing carpet. The bathroom door. The wall outside the room Mum was sharing with my sister. The framed picture my Nan had hanging there that I never really looked at, but could still recognise in the corner of my eye.

The stairs themselves were only half-lit. The first few steps fell away beneath the landing light, then the rest disappeared into the dark below.

I stood with my hand still pressed against the switch. Listening.

The house was silent in the way houses become silent after making a noise. As though whatever had creaked or shifted had realised it had been heard. I told myself it was nothing. The same way I always did.

Pipes. Floorboards. Grandad getting up for a drink. The fridge clicking on downstairs. A branch against the window. Some ordinary explanation that adults would have reached for without thinking. I kept my eyes on the stairs and stepped across the landing to the bathroom.

I remember trying to be quiet.

That detail has bothered me more than once over the years. I was in my own house. My Mum was asleep in the room behind me with my little sister. My grandparents were in the other bedroom. There were people all around me. People who would have come running if I'd shouted.

But I didn't want to shout.

I didn't want to be heard.

I went into the bathroom and left the door open a few inches. Just enough that I could see the strip of landing outside. Just enough that if something moved between my bedroom and the stairs, I would know.

I sat there, barely breathing, angry at myself for being frightened and more angry that I couldn't stop.

Childhood fear comes with shame when you think you're too old for it.

I was nine. Not four. I had told myself that already.

Nine-year-olds didn't wake their mothers because a stair creaked. Nine-year-olds didn't go running into their grandparents' room because the downstairs hallway was dark.

At least, that was what I told myself while I sat there with the bathroom door open, staring through the gap like something might stare back.

Then I heard the cough again.

Not above me.

Not from one of the bedrooms.

Downstairs.

It was low and muffled, the sort of cough someone makes when they are trying to hold it in and fail. It came from somewhere below the landing, past the bottom of the stairs.

Everything in me tightened.

For a few seconds I couldn't move at all. I just sat there, listening to the blood rushing in my ears, waiting for another sound to follow it. There wasn't one. That somehow made it worse.

I finished as quickly and quietly as I could, washed my hands without turning the tap on properly, then stood in the bathroom doorway with my fingers curled around the edge of it.

The landing looked the same.

My bedroom door was still open. The light was still on. The top of the stairs still waited in front of me, bright at first and then darker with every step.

I remember telling myself not to look. That if I didn’t look, there would be nothing to see.

I could go straight back into my bedroom. I could climb into bed, pull the duvet over my head, and in the morning the house would be normal again. Mum would be tired. Nan would be making tea. Grandad would be complaining about something in the paper. My sister would be watching cartoons too loudly.

Everything would be fine as long as I didn’t look down those stairs. So of course I looked. I stepped out of the bathroom and moved towards the banister.

Slowly.

Not because I was brave. Because I was afraid any sudden movement would make the floor creak.

The light from the landing reached a little further than I remembered. It touched the first few steps. It caught the edge of the wall. It showed me the shape of the bookcase at the bottom, or at least the top corner of it.

Beyond that, the hallway was black.

And in the black, off to the side towards the living room, I saw eyes.

Just eyes.

That’s how I’ve always remembered it.

Not a face. Not a body. Not even the outline of a person.

Two eyes in the darkness, looking straight up at me.

They were set level, almost unnaturally so. Perfectly still. Perfectly awake. Not wide with surprise. Not narrowed in anger. Just open.

Watching.

I think I made a sound then, but I’m not sure. Not a scream. More like the beginning of one that never quite escaped.

The eyes didn’t move. They didn’t blink.

That was the worst part.

I stared at them and they stared back, and for a few seconds my mind did what children’s minds do when reality gives them something too large to understand. It tried to make it into something else.

A reflection. A toy. The shine of something on the bookcase. The glass front of the cabinet in the living room catching the light.

Anything. Anything except a person standing in the dark at the bottom of the stairs, looking up at me.

I wanted to call for Mum. I wanted to run into my grandparents’ room. I wanted to do anything other than stand there.

But I had nightmares. Everyone knew I had nightmares. I had always been the child who heard things, saw shapes, imagined monsters in corners. The Space Cadet. The one who needed calming down. And even then, terrified as I was, some small, stupid part of me was afraid of being wrong.

Afraid of everyone coming out into the landing, switching on lights, finding nothing, and looking at me with that exhausted kindness adults use when they don’t want to be annoyed.

So I didn’t shout. I backed away.

One step. Then another. The eyes stayed where they were.

I kept my own eyes fixed on them until the angle of the wall swallowed them from view. Only then did I turn and walk back into my bedroom, although walk is too generous a word for it. I shuffled backwards through the doorway, afraid that if I moved too quickly the thing downstairs would move quickly too.

Once I was inside, I pushed the door almost closed.

Not all the way. I couldn’t bring myself to close it all the way. To make the door click shut.

I climbed back up the ladder to my bed, every metallic creak from the frame sounding impossibly loud. I left the hallway light on. I left my bedroom light on too. I sat with my back against the wall and the duvet bunched around my legs, staring at the gap between the door and the frame.

I don’t remember deciding to stay awake. I only remember being certain that I would.

I told myself I’d sit there until morning. Until Nan got up. Until the kettle boiled. Until cartoons started. Until the world became loud and ordinary again.

But children can be terrified and exhausted at the same time.

At some point, after what felt like hours, I fell asleep sitting up with both lights still on. The next thing I remember is my Nan shouting.

Not screaming exactly. More like the sharp, panicked voice adults use when something has happened and they don’t yet know how bad it is.

The back door was open.

That was what she kept saying. The back door was open.

At first, everyone thought Grandad must have forgotten to lock it. Then Mum found her handbag emptied onto the kitchen table. My Nan noticed the little pot by the phone had been tipped out, the coins gone. A few drawers in the living room had been opened. Some jewellery was missing, though not much. Nothing like what people imagined when they heard the word burglary.

The police came later.

I remember two officers in the house. I remember one of them dusting for fingerprints by the back door. I remember feeling strangely important when they asked me if I had heard anything during the night.

I told them about the stair. I didn’t tell them about the eyes. For years, I thought that was because I’d convinced myself they hadn’t been real. Now I’m not so sure.

I think maybe I knew exactly how it would sound.

The burglar had gone upstairs too. That was the part Mum had always hated.

My bedroom had been searched. My school bag was open on the floor, exercise books and pencil case tipped out beside it. My clothes drawers had been pulled open. The plastic box under my bed, the one I kept old toys and bits of broken action figures in, had been dragged halfway out.

I remember standing in the doorway while Mum looked around my room, trying not to cry.

I thought she was angry with me.

She wasn’t.

I know that now.

For a long time, the story became one of those strange family anecdotes. The time we got burgled at Nan and Grandad’s. The time someone broke in and barely took anything. The time some idiot ignored the telly and the video player but stole my Spider-Man lunchbox.

That was always the funny bit. Everyone remembered the lunchbox.

I remembered it too. Bright red and blue, with Spider-Man crouched on the lid like he was about to leap out of my school bag and save someone. For years, that was the detail people laughed about.

Who breaks into a house and steals a child’s lunchbox?

I laughed too.

I don’t anymore.

By the afternoon, the house felt wrong.

Adults were speaking in lowered voices. My Nan kept cleaning things that weren’t dirty. My Grandad had checked the back door so many times that even I knew he was doing it because he didn’t know what else to do.

My bedroom had been put back together, but it didn’t feel like mine anymore. My school bag was back by the desk. My clothes had been shoved into the drawers. The box of old toys had been pushed under the bed.

But everything felt touched.

That was the word I had for it, even then.

Touched.

So with everything happening at home, I asked Mum if I could go over to Callum’s and play Halo. I think she was relieved to have something normal to say yes to. She called his Mum, then told me to be careful and come straight back before tea.

I took my bike from the garden and rode over.

Callum’s bedroom was cramped and too warm, with game cases stacked beside the television and clothes pushed into corners his Mum clearly hadn’t found yet. For a while, we played like nothing had happened.

Then I told him about the burglary.

I expected him to be shocked. Instead, he looked excited.

Not happy exactly. I don’t want to be unfair to him. But there was that look he got whenever life became interesting enough to turn into a story.

He leaned closer and told me he’d seen someone near my grandparents’ back gate the day before. I asked him what he meant.

He said there had been a man standing there.

Just standing.

I asked him what the man looked like.

Callum shrugged and said he hadn’t seen his face. Then, because he was Callum, he added that the man had probably been a spy, or a murderer, or someone from MI5 watching the house.

I didn't tell Mum what he'd said.

Why would I?

Of course he did.

Callum always saw things.

I didn't think much would come from visiting the first of many of my childhood homes. My family still lived in the village, but through the twists and turns of residential streets and with it sitting on the other side of the town, I had no reason to go back there.

The place looked smaller than I remembered. The front garden where I had spent entire summers seemed barely big enough to turn around in.

It was a semi-detached bungalow with a garage and driveway, alongside which ran a narrow path that led to a gate into the back garden.

I'd visited my parents like I did a few times a year, but for some reason this visit was different. I hadn't thought of this house for a long time, but for some unexplained reason it popped into my head as I went to go to the shop for my Mum, so I drove over to see it.

Part of me wishes I didn't.

I stood there outside the house for about ten minutes. That should have been the end of it. Instead it was only the beginning.

A couple of days later, having returned home to my wife and kids across the country, I called my Mum, unable to get the thought of that place out of my head.

I don't even remember why. Something about standing outside that house had unsettled me. Not frightened me exactly. Just... unsettled me. It felt like standing there I had done something really wrong, and like I had forgotten something important.

While we were talking, I mentioned my old neighbour.

"Do you remember Rex?" I asked. "God", Mum said. "I haven't heard that name in years".

For a moment neither of us said anything. I was surprised she remembered him at all. I barely did.

The memories I have of Rex are strange. Not strange in the way ghost stories are strange. Strange in the way childhood memories are strange. They're incomplete.

I remember his cigarettes. Not him smoking them. Just the smell. The smell seemed to seep through everything. Through the hedge between our gardens. Through the wall that separated our houses. Through his clothes.

When I think of Rex, that's the first thing I remember. Then the sweets.

I couldn't tell you what he looked like with any certainty. I don't remember the colour of his eyes. I don't remember how tall he was. But I remember the sweets.

They always seemed to appear from nowhere. One moment his hands would be empty. The next there would be a boiled sweet resting in his palm. My parents never liked me taking them and I remember Mum telling me not to bother him.

"Was he odd?" I asked to bridge the silence.

"What?"

"Rex, was he... I dunno.. strange?"

Mum laughed softly. "No more strange than any other old man".

I don't know why that answer disappointed me.

Maybe because standing outside that house had stirred up a feeling I'd spent years forgetting. A feeling that something wasn't right. Not necessarily with Rex... Just... around him.

I told Mum about the smell. She laughed again.

"He smoked forty a day"

"Forty?!"

"Probably more"

That explained the smell. At least it explained some of it.

There were other memories. Little flashes. I remember him coughing through the wall at night. I remember the orange glow of his living room window after dark. I remember being convinced he never slept. But none of those explained the feeling of dread that was coming up within me. Mum punctuated my thoughts with what she said next.

"You used to talk about him all the time."

"What do you mean?"

"You were obsessed with him for a while."

I frowned. "I don't remember that."

"No, you were four. Maybe five?".

"What did I say?"

There was another pause. Then she said something that made the hair on the back of my neck stand up.

"You kept telling us someone was watching Rex".

I laughed when she said it. Genuinely laughed. It sounded ridiculous. The sort of thing a child would invent. The sort of thing that belongs in a dream. But after we ended the call, I sat in silence for nearly ten minutes. Because although I didn't remember saying it...

I suddenly remembered the feeling.

Not someone watching me.

Someone watching him.

The experience was terrifying, but also frustrating. I simply couldn't piece together a single memory that fully explained the feeling I was having. This was a feeling that I had, for all intents and purposes, completely erased from my mind.

There's something different about childhood fear. Something that feels raw. Distilled. You don't understand the world, so when something scares you, that feeling of the unknown overwhelms your mind and sends you right into terror.

I tried to comfort myself by dismissing it as childhood imagination. I tried to move on. But I'd opened a door by visiting the house and speaking to my Mum about Rex. An open door that now wouldn't let me forget that feeling.

I found my mind wandering to other fragmented and broken memories from that time in my life, and today I spoke to Mum again. I asked her if she remembered a day in the garden.

At first she didn't know what I was talking about. Then I mentioned the grass seed.

That made her laugh.

"Oh God" she said. "You used to throw it all over your father."

As soon as she said it, something shifted. Not a memory exactly, more like the outline of one. A shape emerging from fog. I remembered the garden. The sunlight. Dad was bent over the lawn while I followed behind him, convinced I was helping.

I'd take handfuls of grass seed from the box and sprinkle them onto his shoulders. Every time he stood up it would fall to the ground and I'd laugh.

It's one of the happiest memories I have from that house, and for a moment I felt warm. I hadn't thought about that for a long time. But then I remembered the fear again.

For years I couldn't remember why I had become so upset. I only remembered that I did.

Not a tantrum. Not a scraped knee. Real fear.

The sort that arrives so suddenly that your body reacts before your mind does. As I spoke to Mum, another piece returned. Just one.

A sudden feeling of being watched, then looking up toward the back fence.

Seeing a hand.

Even writing that sounds ridiculous. A hand, nothing more.

No face. No body. No monster. Just fingers resting on the top of the fence for a second before disappearing. There was something odd about them. The skin looked uneven. Marked. I remember staring at the knuckles because they looked wrong somehow. I couldn't have explained why then, and I still can't now.

Then they were gone. I don't know why that terrified me. It shouldn't have. Even now, it sounds completely harmless. But the moment I remembered it, I felt that same knot in my stomach as I had stood outside that old house.

Because I knew something else. Something I hadn't realised until that moment. The hand wasn't what was frightening me.

It was the recognition.

Not the fence. Not the garden.

The hand. I'd seen it before.

I just couldn't remember where.

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