CHAPTER ONE
By now, you are probably wondering why I did it. Or, perhaps, you are just here for the ghost story. Either way, I shall start from the beginning.
It all started with a mirror. A long mirror, taller and wider than I had been when it greeted me at four years old, locked out on the front porch of the House on North Lane.
With my back pressed against the door, knees secured to my chest, I watched the mirror drift closer until it paused in front of me, hovering above the ground as though it were a ghost unable to touch the Earth.
I had been banished outside for not finishing my supper, throat still aching from the meat that had been forced down with rough fingers and sharp words.
The screaming, the crying, the begging—it earned me a night spent in darkness, with only a pair of black shorts and a thin grey singlet ruffled around the neckline from where I had been yanked to my feet.
“If you’re going to behave like the Devil,” my mother hissed, throwing my thrashing body out into the cold autumn night, knees meeting the wooden deck with a sickening crunch, “then you will be treated like the Devil.”
The mirror’s thick, golden frame was arched like the entrance of an old church, decorated with angels sharing baskets of fruit, one reaching for a single apple dangling from a thin tree branch.
Scenes of merriment and delight were juxtaposed with golden feathers that fell from angel wings, their bodies descending to an Earth they would never reach.
My reflection peered back at me with red-rimmed eyes, a mess of untamed brown curls, and a swollen cheek. Dry tears stained my pale skin, cracked lips spattered with blood. I turned my head, but the mirror followed.
“Go away,” I whispered.
The mirror stayed.
I opened my mouth to confront it again, prepared to raise my voice, if necessary, but words evaded me as pools of darkness corrupted the mirror.
The reflection that once shared my hazel eyes now stared back at me with black ones, darkness eating away at the white circling the iris. Slowly, they sank into my skull, leaving nothing but blood pouring from my empty eye sockets.
The Devil, I thought to myself, he’s got me.
Children were inherently evil. They were born with the original sin—a sin shared by all of humanity when Adam and Eve devoured the forbidden fruit, disobeying God’s command.
I had been baptised, cleansed of this sin, but my mother had always said I had the Devil inside of me. And she was right.
My lips parted in a scream, yet I made no sound. In silent horror, I watched my mouth open wider, jaw dropping lower, until a deafening snap resounded in my ears. There was no pain, only untamed terror as my jaw dangled at an inhuman angle.
Insects crawled out of my disfigured mouth, snakes slithering over my shoulders and down my body to form a puddle at my feet. Spiders, cockroaches, beetles—they choked me, smothered me, ate away at my flesh.
A faceless shadow materialised behind me, clawed hands wrapping around my throat. It leaned down to whisper in my ear, my name pouring from its lips in a menacing hiss.
I willed myself to scream, to alert someone, anyone, of the danger I was in. The sound that erupted from me instead was laughter. Cold, wicked laughter. As my body shook, drops of flesh melted from my face, devoured by the hungry creatures crawling at my feet.
I wanted to cry, I wanted to scream, I wanted to breathe. But air no longer ventured into my lungs, and my voice had long since abandoned me. This was the end.
The mirror vanished when I awoke. In its place, darkness glared back.
The dark and I had never been friends. In the dark, the Devil hid in the shadows, waiting to plunge his teeth into flesh and bone. The light drove him away, but there was no light when I sat up on the front porch, locked outside just as I had been in the nightmare I escaped from.
North Lane was surrounded by trees, and in the endless black, they morphed into leering monsters threatening to tear me limb from limb. One tree stood guard by the entrance, shielding me from its hungry brothers while I stood to slam my firsts against the door.
“Mumma!” I cried. “Mumma! Let me in!”
The gentle whistle of the wind was the only response.
Punishment upheld, alone in a darkness threatening to consume me, I slid down the door and turned to the one being us Christian children were told would never abandon you. God.
“In the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit,” I signed the cross and clasped my hands together in prayer, straightening my posture just as I would in church.
The Lord’s Prayer had been ingrained in me from the moment I said my first word, as familiar to me as breathing in through my nose and out the mouth. And so, without a second’s hesitation, I recited, “Our Father, who art in Heaven, hallowed be Thy name…”
The prayer spilled out of me, desperation lacing each and every word as my gaze lifted to the heavens, pleading for salvation. Stars winked back, a lone cloud sailing past the pale glow of the moon. The Devil’s cold grasp was near, and God’s warmth so, so far away.
“Please,” I whispered, “I’m…scared. I want to…to go inside. Please help me. I didn’t mean to be bad for Mumma. I will be good. I promise. Please help me.”
The problem with being raised on the belief that God was an all-powerful, omniscient being, was that when your prayers went unanswered, you knew He had abandoned you. Why wasn’t He listening? Why would He not save me?
“Please,” I repeated, “I don’t want to be out here all alone.”
An owl hooted, a bat landed on a tree, and a cool breeze caressed the hair out of my eyes. But still, no response from God.
“I don’t want to be alone anymore,” I continued. God may not have been listening, but maybe someone was. Maybe an angel was sitting up in the clouds, my voice carrying through the wind that drifted up to Heaven. “I want a baby brother or sister. Someone to be with me when I’m out here on my own.”
I wanted someone to face the shadow monsters, a brother or sister to stand by my side as we fought the Devil, sharing the burden of being good.
God did not answer my prayer that night.
I remained out in the cold, haunted by tree monsters and sinister shadows until the sun rose, its light finally banishing the darkness.
But He answered my prayer nine months later, delivering a baby boy—his piercing wail hauling me from my slumber, my paper aeroplane falling to the floor to be crushed by a nurse hurrying into the maternity ward.
Dressed in a pair of dark green dinosaur pyjamas that barely fit, I shifted upright, blinking repeatedly to adjust to the waking world. I didn’t know where I was, or how I got there, only that my wrist ached and that the metallic taste of blood assaulted my tongue.
I had been in a hospital once before, and recognised the distinct, bitter scent of antiseptic and chemicals.
As I slipped off the bench where I slept, my gaze drifted to a door on my right, open just enough to reveal my mother holding a white bundle in her arms. There were muffled voices all around her, drowned out by the beeping of machines and alarms from other sections of the ward.
I approached the door, lured in by the faint, yellow glow around the newborn. Everything in the room was a blur of motion as people scurried in and out, but my attention remained fixed on him, as if there were nothing and no one else in the world.
“Hey, baby,” my mother greeted me with a small, tired smile, her untied hair drenched with sweat, “come meet your baby brother. Isn’t he just a precious little gift from God?”
I risked a step closer, avoiding the tubes connecting my mother to the machines beside her bed, slithering up her arm until they disappeared beneath her gown.
The baby cried, and I barely saw a wisp of dark hair before I was scooped up and settled on the edge of the bed, my father holding me up to secure a better view.
“Why is he sad?” I asked.
Despite my mother’s attempts to soothe him, his cries did not cease. I was not allowed to cry. The second I did, I would be threatened with something to really cry about. And so, I avoided the tears, knowing it would not grant me the same compassion or sympathy it granted others.
“I think it is because you haven’t introduced yourself yet,” my father said.
My mother cracked a smile, though it did little to hide her distress as she rocked the baby back and forth in her arms. I waited for my father to offer his help, but he didn’t.
“Hello,” I said, reaching for the baby’s small, fisted hand, “my name is Augustus. I am your big brother.”
The newborn, of course, did not respond.
His crying did, however, cease. And when he opened his eyes, a sea of ice blue peered up at me.
In those eyes, I saw the two of us galloping through a field of flowers with sticks for swords, drawing together by the lake behind North Lane, and reading under the stars, writing our own stories of heroes and villains. Finally, finally, I wouldn’t be alone.
But it didn’t feel as though we were meeting for the first time. He was not a stranger; more an old friend that had finally found his way home. This was indeed God’s gift, and I would never forget it.
“What is his name?” I asked, a small smile growing on my lips as the baby’s hand curled around my index finger, grip tight.
“Auden,” my mother answered.
“Au-den,” I tested the name. “Au…it sounds like Au-gustus.”
“Yes,” my father chuckled. “You already have something in common. Isn’t that great? Are you going to be a good big brother?”
I nodded without really knowing what the role of big brother entailed. But I was determined; determined to protect him, to love him, to guide him.
I hadn’t known then, as I held his small hand, that I was meeting the second half of my soul. I hadn’t known, as his fingers curled around mine, that I was meeting my salvation. I hadn’t known, as his eyelids fluttered shut, that I was also meeting my doom.