Children of the Static
By
Richard Clive
There’s something primal about our fear of the forest, of being lost in the suffocating darkness of an untamed wilderness. Our ancestors knew that was where the wolves and bears lived. The things with claws and teeth.
I remember looking out my bedroom window, the wind howling, the autumn leaves swirling, and being afraid of the woods beyond the back gate of our home, Briarwood Place.
Each night, as darkness set in, it was as if the trees crept closer to the house, the branches scratching at my windowpane. The wind whispering my name:
Sally…
Sounds like a children’s ghost story, doesn’t it?
A cliché. But didn’t we all live in a scary house when we were kids?
Looking back, I don’t know which was worse, the house and its haunted TV or Briarwood Forest. It was like a fevered dream, as if the house was sick, the forest a source of disease.
But Briarwood Place wasn’t the only thing that was sick.
Dad got ill too. You could say it was of his own making, of course.
But what father wouldn’t turn to drink after what he went through? But that was later.
Alfie was seven when we lost him. I had turned eleven.
The house had been vacant a long time before we moved in.
It sounded empty too, the lack of carpets and wallpaper hardening the echoes.
Dad was always banging away with his hammer, said he was fixing the place up.
The house certainly needed it: peeling paint, crumbling plaster… rotten wood.
The best times were when Alfie and I used to squish onto the old armchair and watch He-Man cartoons on the dodgy television set. Only trouble was the house was in the middle of nowhere, and reception was poor, and the TV would frequently blank out and snow with static.
“It’s just playing its own electronic noise,” said Dad one day. “The TV picks up radio wave frequencies, and even gamma radiation from the big bang! Amazing, hey?”
I thought it was creepy and imagined the universe talking to us through our old television set.
But that was what the stick was for: The static.
The garden cane leaned against the wall nearby, and when the dusty screen fuzzed, we would pick up the cane and whack the top of the TV—hard, and if we were lucky, the screen would blink back into action.
If we were lucky…
Other days, we’d switch off the old analogue and go play in the woods, and that was where the trouble started.
***
“Bruce, here boy,” shouted Alfie.
“Shit,” I said.
“Mum said don’t say that.”
“Mum says worse. Why did you let him off the lead?”
“Would you like a rope tied around your neck?”
“I don’t chase squirrels.”
The day was warm, the sun bright. It was about time too. We’d had a week of heavy rain and thunderstorms. It was good to be out, enjoying the fresh air.
“Which way?” said Alfie, scowling against the sunlight.
I shrugged. The dog had bolted into the trees the second the squirrel had gone for the acorn. Briarwood Forest was full of them, both acorns and squirrels. It was late September, but the ground was already carpeted with fallen leaves.
“How big is this forest?” said Alfie.
“Big.”
“If you listen carefully, you can hear the road,” he said.
“Roads don’t make sounds. Cars do.”
“Listen.”
“That’s the river.”
“River?”
“Yeah, the one Dad said not to go near.”
Alfie remained silent.
“Kid died in it. Few summers ago,” I said. “Some say he haunts the riverbank, crying for help and shouting he’s drowning in the dead of night.”
“You’re lying.”
I smiled.
Alfie shrugged, pretending he wasn’t frightened by my story. “Dogs love water anyway, especially labs,” he said.
So off we trudged, deeper into the woods, following the sound of the rushing water that grew louder as we approached. When we finally reached the river, Bruce was nowhere to be found. After the recent storms, though, the water flow was high and dangerously fast.
“Stay back.”
“You think Bruce would try and swim in that?” said Alfie.
“Bruce’s pretty stupid, but… no, I don’t think even he’s that dumb.”
Turned out, though, he was. We found the dog upstream where the channel was narrower, but the constriction caused the current to form a roaring, bubbling white water rapid.
Bruce had somehow managed to leap across a series of small islands and found himself stranded on a moss-covered landmass in the river’s centre. But even as I watched, the riverbank was crumbling, widening the watercourse by degrees, leaving Bruce further and further from safety.
My heart thudded as adrenaline surged in my blood.
I could swim, yes. I’d been awarded my twenty-metre badge two summers ago.
But it was one thing to lower yourself into a tepid, over-chlorinated swimming bath where lifeguards looked on, and another to fall into this thundering ice-cold rapid where even fish were being smashed against cold rocks.
My imagination was plagued by images of drowned dogs and my mother crying at my freshly covered grave. Bruce was getting even more irate, barking and hopping around in circles, desperately seeking a way back.
“Alfie, stay here,” I said, clutching him by the shoulders. “Promise me you’ll stay here.”
“Where are you going?”
“To help Bruce.”
“But—”
“No buts. Anything happens, run and get Mum and Dad.”
He nodded.
“You promise?”
“Promise.”
The river continued to widen as whole chunks of the bank tumbled into the water, but if anything, the current quickened.
Frantically I searched the area for anything I could use to help Bruce.
If a person were stranded, a strong branch might have been enough to haul them to safety.
But I needed something Bruce could walk across… a bridge. Then it caught my eye.
I spotted a steel panel jutting from a tangle of reeds at the river’s edge.
It looked like an old corrugated roof, perhaps once belonging to a shed or coal hut.
I grasped the rusted sheet’s jagged edges, attempting to pull it free from the thick vegetation, and sliced open the palm of my right hand.
Undeterred, I yanked again, and the panel sprang free, and I fell back, feeling a flash of pain as I sat down hard on cold rock.
The steel panel was thin and light and maybe six feet in length but pitted with jagged holes caused by the brittle steel’s degradation, holes large enough to fit soft paws. Bruce’s barking was becoming ever more frantic as the river continued to thunder as loud as a freight train.
Holding on to a bunch of reeds, I lowered myself down the steeply sloping riverbank. I swung the panel from behind me as the freezing river frothed and splashed my bare arms.
Bruce was far from the brightest dog in the world - he’d already proved that - but I saw from the glint in his eyes he knew what I was attempting. Still, he waited, anticipating my command as I positioned the panel, bridging the gap between the riverbank and the island where he was stranded.
Something momentarily distracted my concentration, and I glanced back towards Alfie, who was no longer watching me. Instead he faced the trees holding what looked like a yellow cloth. A scarf? I caught a split-second glimpse of a small figure disappearing into the trees behind him.
I wondered who he’d been talking to, out here in the middle of nowhere, but then Bruce barked, and I felt the reeds starting to give. A spike of adrenaline returned my focus, and I kicked the corrugated panel into position.
“Now, Bruce.”
Our old dog hopped to safety, his paws evading every jagged hole, the brittle metal holding out long enough. When he was safely across, I felt the reeds finally break, and again I kicked the makeshift bridge, this time to reverse my momentum away from the water, back towards the riverbank.
I hauled myself back up the bank, still breathless and clammy.
Bruce had already seemingly forgotten he’d come close to chasing his last squirrel and was sniffing the entrance of a badger sett.
But Alfie was still standing at the brink of the forest, oblivious to the drama that had played out.
He was still holding the yellow scarf and staring into the trees.
“Alfie.”
No reply.
“Alfie.”
Still out of breath, I marched over to where my little brother stood and grasped his shoulder, and he startled as if awoken from a bad dream.
“She gave me this,” he said, holding out the yellow scarf.
It was knitted and decorated with a stitching of little red kites running along its edge.
“Who gave you that?”
“A girl?”
“Girl?”
“Little girl.”
“Well, it stinks,” I said, sighing. “You can’t keep it.”
“Yes, I can,” said Alfie, clutching the scarf tighter against his chest.
The smell was faint, cloyingly sweet yet faecal in its offensiveness.
“Tell me… about the girl.”
“She’s my friend.”
“You’ve never mentioned her.”
“You never asked.”
“When?”
“When we watched her on the TV.”
There was little point in arguing with Alfie when he was like this. He’d always experienced vivid dreams and nightmares, the legacies of which often plagued his thoughts for weeks. He had a wild imagination.
“Come on,” I said. “Let’s go home.”
Then something stirred within the trees, over to the left. I thought I saw a shape disappearing into the forest.
“Hello,” I called out. “Anybody there?”
No answer. A crow perched on a nearby tree ruffled its feathers.
“Why did the girl leave?”
“The man,” said Alfie.
“Her dad?”
But Alfie remained silent.
Bruce had wandered back down the path leading us home, as if he’d had enough of this remote place. I certainly had. I felt a deep sense of unease. Contaminated.
“I want to go,” said Alfie.
We hurried back home along the path, Alfie clutching the scarf. I glanced back into the forest where the figure had disappeared and shivered.
***
Like I said, the TV reception at Briarwood Place was poor.