Apologies for the length of post and the fact that this may not - TopicsExpress

Apologies for the length of post and the fact that this may not really be Folk Horror but its a story that really happened to me (albeit slightly stylised for narrative) and its come back into my head ever since the group started. I hope you like it... ---------------------------------------------------------------- When I was at University, I became friends with a fellow student. He wasn’t on my course but we kept bumping into each other because of similar interests and the more we bumped into each other, the more we bumped into each other until we started to bump into each other intentionally rather than accidentally. Let’s call him Gareth, because that was his name. Gareth was, to put it bluntly, clumsy. He could hardly operate in the world without knocking into something or having things knock into him. One day I met him in the student union to find him black of eye and bandaged of wrist. ‘Stairs,” he said. no further explanation was required. He took it with good humour but obviously found the whole thing tiring. One day it’ll be a car, I thought to myself later on as we walked into town and instantly regretted it as his ankle went and he stumbled off the curb… One weekend, as with many weekends, we went to a party. This particular party had the heady vibe of joss-sticks and Ozric Tentacles. There was the lingering worry that Tarot cards were being read nearby. Bangles rattled. The people who’d invited us were friend-of-a-friend types who seemed to have not turned up yet so we lingered in a corner, talking, and I tried to suppress my innate, punk-indoctrinated abhorrence of the hippy. I was trying not to smirk at someone actually wearing flares when… When a scream, a scream of genuine and unbound horror, pierced the smokey flat. Gareth, predictably, dropped his drink and I spun round to see a girl, eyes flaring, standing in the middle of the room and pointing directly at us. Pointing at Gareth. “HIM! HIM!” It wasn’t really words, just a shrill howl. “HE…!” Her voice broke at the same time as her nerve and she fled the room. Fled the party and then the building, it turned out. The mood soured quickly and we made our easily-accepted excuses before leaving. Gareth’s fingers were bleeding from where he’d tried to pick up the pieces of his broken bottle. He rubbed them on his trousers as we waited for a bus. It was a week before I saw him again, not an unusual gap but notable. He caught up within me in a corridor outside Social Sciences and coughed. “That party,” he said. “The one with the girl”. I remembered it, I told him. “She got in touch. Well, she didn’t. A friend of hers. She had a message for me”. I chuckled. Well done, I said. Not the normal way of meeting girls but whatever works. “It didn’t work. Not at all”. Go on. “The message said that she was sorry about what she’d done but I’d frightened her!” Really? “Yes, I think. I don’t really know what to make of it but she said that she turned around and could see me, but then see somebody else with me as well. She actually said ‘homunculus’ but I’ve only just looked up what that means. ‘A black homunculus wrapping its arm around my throat’, she said”. I stopped and looked at him. She said what? “Yeah,” he nodded. “I know. Weird.” And that’s it? He coughed again. “Not really, no. She said that I was in danger and that this…homuncu-thing’s arm was tightening around me, strangling me. She underlined danger. Twice.” Very helpful. “Yes. She…um…she said I should get exorcised, or blessed, or something.” I sighed and resumed walking. If this is going to get much more far-fetched then I need a drink, I said. Your round. He followed me and we trotted down the stairs to the bar. So you got exorcised? The words sounded ridiculous. “No,” he replied and then hesitated before continuing. “Just sort of baptised. The other day. I thought that, if I saw her again, it’d at least be a way of starting a conversation. Seemed weird to just ignore it.” Weird, I replied. Yes. Yes, I can see how you’d think that. Speaking of weird, you made it down those stairs unscathed! “Oh! Hah! Yes, I did. Well, long may it continue!” And so we drank and then drank more and then term ended and long weeks of home and other friends and then back once again. I next saw Gareth in the library but he didn’t look up. He didn’t seem to be reading but I left him to it, whatever it was. He didn’t seem to want to be disturbed and I knew that feeling well enough to assent. The next time I saw him was just after I walked straight into him as I left a seminar. I remember that disturbed me; I walked into him, not the other way around. I wasn’t ready for what was to disturb me next. “You! Good. I need to talk,” he gabbled. “I thought it’d go away but it won’t. Not here, though. Let’s go to a pub”. A pub? A real pub? A rare occurrence due to the comparative expense but less rowdy, less public. So we ended up sitting in the back booths of a nearby, almost deserted pub and staring at each other. “I told my Mum went I went home,” he started abruptly. “I told my Mum apart the party, about the girl. I thought she’d laugh about the whole baptism thing”. She didn’t? “No. She just went white and then started crying. She wouldn’t stop for ages. I thought she’d lost it.” He was shaking, tapping his knee nervously. I just nodded, unsure of where this was going. “But then she calmed down, said there was something I needed to know. I had…” He let out a long, wavering sigh and gulped down lager. “When I was born I wasn’t well. I was in an incubator for a long time and it wasn’t guaranteed that I would make it. I knew that. What I didn’t know was why I’d been in an incubator. Mum told me.” He stopped. Rubbed his eyes “I had a twin, a stillborn twin.” I shivered. The way he said it made it sound like an awful thing. Not the stillbirth, but the stillborn itself. “It was him! It was him all the time…” He trailed off, fell silent and stared down at the table. Him what, I blurted out. He looked up at me, fixing me with eyes that sat deep in darkened sockets. “I didn’t fall down stairs. I didn’t stumble into roads. I was pushed. He pushed me. He was jealous of me being alive and clung to me, taking every chance to try and kill me. It was him! It was my twin all along!” I sat there, with no idea what to say. I wanted to laugh, for him to wait a few moments and then laugh with me at a joke well-played. But the cold, piercing clarity of his eyes told me that would never happen. What would happen, what could only happen, is that he would say these words. “She told me that when I was born I had a stillborn twin. She told me that when I was born I had to go in an incubator for a long time because when I was born my stillborn twin, black and shrivelled, had its arm around my throat and was choking me…”