Madison Cape

Madison Cape

One

Loudly it split the night. Without warning or care the thunder came, making a terrible rumble somewhere over Madison Cape, this compelled ten-year-old Ben Kitch—Benny to everybody that knew him—to spring from the top bunk of his bed and dash to the window at the other end of the room. As Benny ran, he counted out in loud Mississippi’s.

“One Mississippi, two Mississippi, three Mississippi, four—” and then the crack of lightning fizzed its neon blue, illuminating the Winterburn Orphanage in a brilliant phosphorescence that brought a smile to Benny’s pinkish round face. He stood at the window, inebriated with awe, and swaying on legs weakened from his abrupt awakening.

Narrowing his sleep-filled eyes, he turned and looked at the three rows of bunk beds behind, each with their cocooned occupants, quivering under the bedsheets, they were frighted hedgehogs trapped under a rush of passing cars, thought Benny and he allowed himself a wry smile.

Once the lightning had stopped and the room had been reclaimed by darkness, Benny counted again.

The thunder roared out in the empty night, accompanied by an abhorrent wind. Benny watched as the storm shook Madison Cape, it was the apotheosis of lightning storms, one that struck a fear into the heart of the Cape, but one that sparked a light in the heart of the small ten-year-old boy.

“One Mississippi, two Mississippi—” and again the room burst into the blinding blue light, turning Benny’s soft pinkish features into a wicked blue. It had been close, a burst of lightning close enough to force Benny to bar an arm across his eyes to shield him from looking right at the forks of light. He did not reach up in time and for a moment he stumbled blind seeing only the scars of lightning behind his closed eyes.

“One Mississippi—” shouted Benny, reaching back at the window frame for support. He was like a child on a fun fair ride, exhilarated by the madness of it all. Whip went the lightning blade before the words had left his lips, and again it forced him to jump back. He dashed forward hoping to see some havoc reaped by the fatal blue stab of light. It had been close enough to taste. Benny had the window open and leaned out to feel the storm against his skin.

“Close the window.” A voice hissed amongst the bunks, it came across strained and muffled from under the bed covers, but Benny ignored it. He knew he would pay the price in the morning when the other boys felt brave again, but for tonight, he was fearless.

The air tasted of something sour, like a burnt pan on a gas stove. The plastic handle dripping into the flame leaving only the most rancid of smells lingering in the air. Benny felt that he could grasp the smell with his hands. It was thick, like a sandstorm and it seemed hang where the lightning had struck. His ears hummed and his eyes were bleached with flashes, giving him the start of a headache which he was sure would last the night.

The storm passed and his Mississippi counts grew longer as the fading fingers of blue scratched the horizon and then disappeared. Benny stared into the night, seeing only the storm that had come and passed and left behind an unrelenting, unsettled darkness. That was not all it had left.

The first strange thing to occur following the storm had appeared at the end of the garden, moments before Benny would call it a night. Madison Cape could be seen in perfect view from the window, and Benny looked out over its different layers of darkness that stretched far out, each black, grey and midnight blue layer stitch into one another. Benny looked down at the long dark run of the Orphanage garden and it was there, behind the wall he saw it rise. As Benny’s eyes traced the darkness they fell on a palled milk-white face peering over the wall looking up at him with grey stormy eyes. The ill looking face, gaunt and bald, with its eyes that had sunken deep, like miniature islands surrounded by ringlets of shadow.

It smiled at Benny, but the smile brought no comfort, only a fear that was too hard to swallow.

Benny could not see the rest of the body, just a chalk white neck dropping behind the dark stone wall. The man reminded Benny of some ghostly apparition of his mum, she had died of cancer earlier that year; the face wore the same thinned expression, like life hung on a thread, only this face was smiling and the smile carried the electric danger of the storm.

Over the wall appeared a hand, thin and bone white, it waved, slow and arcing over the man’s bald head. It slapped down onto the plateau of the wall. The second hand appeared, this time not waving, just slapping the wall, fingering the brick to make a solid anchorage. Benny watched the figure, his heart seemed to skip from comfort to fear. He had never felt so unsafe until now.

The figure pulled himself up onto the wall and then dropped over the other side. A thin crooked frame made it over with surprising and unsettling ease, and it seemed to drift across the garden instead of walk, each metre getting closer and spawning a deeper fear that Benny knew was inescapable. As the man—and it was quite clearly a man though it reminded Benny of the vampire from Stephen King’s book, Salems Lot—moved forward, he drilled his eyes into Benny, never pulling them away, until he finally went out of sight.

Benny slammed shut the window, hoping it had been loud enough to wake up the other boys, though none stirred. It was his time to hide under the covers now.

He ran across the room, jumping to the top bunk, a place he had always found homely, though now it felt alien and cold. Under the sheets he found the closeness of his breath stifling, thick enough to choke on, and a sinking weight of regret filled his stomach. He realised that he had trapped himself, and the fear of removing the blanket would unveil the bone white man standing beside his bed, head peering over the top bunk and his storm-grey eyes watching him, never leaving him. The man would not blink for he had no eyelids, just the sunken islands of stormy-grey.

Benny heard the door to the room creak open in reverent tones that only just broke the silence. The tightness in Benny’s chest was a cold dry weight, his lips were also dry, and his throat cracked with each swallow; the pain of it making his body pop as though his skin was plagued by tiny coniferous spiders. Benny could feel those cold grey eyes on him, the frost bitten glare burning through the bedsheet and into Benny. He could hear the gentle tap of the bone white mans fingers on the wooden frame of his bed. He wasn’t sure why he didn’t scream, but something within him refused the right too. Orphan boys don’t cry, he thought, they have no one to cry too.

There was no exact moment he remembered falling to sleep, but it had happened and he could only guess it was the fear that had done it. Perhaps he had become so frightened that he had passed out, or perhaps in his attempts not to breathe loudly it caused him to black out, either way he had slept an uncomfortable sleep. He woke under the blankets and rose from them like a drowning man breaching the surface of a great turbulent sea, gasping for desperate breaths. The air tasted good, but the sight of all the boys clambering at the window to get a view of what was outside left an unnerving choke at Benny’s throat.

He slipped from the bunk landing heavy on bare feet. The wood floor was cold and made no attempts at creaking. He moved over to where the other boys stood.

“What is it,” said a small boy with orange hair and freckles that looked like specks of mud.

“Come on let me see,” said another boy, this one a gangly thing with a nose that fell from his face, and he wore a gawping expression as he spoke.

One of the bigger more brutish boys pushed a few of the smaller ones away, letting them know how insignificant they were in the hierarchy of orphan life. “Right get in line, you can all av’a look once we’ve worked it out.” The brutes moved in a pack of three, each as wide and stupid as the other.

“We’ll be waiting all day then,” sniped a voice from somewhere in the mass pyjama’d boys.

“Who said that,” whipped the words from a fat faced brute that was lent against the window, his fists balled and his searching eyes lost inside a thick brow. The other boys laughed, some with nervous undertones and others with a more reserved joy, but none as candid or as loud as Benny, though no one turn to look at him.

“Can I have a look?” Said Benny, but he wasn’t asking anyone in particular, he was only saying it hoping some of them would move out of his way, but no one did, they all tussled to get closer to the window. Benny repeated himself, something he hated doing, but he did it anyway and again it fell on deaf ears. All the boys acted as thought they did not hear him, or see him.

It all got stranger when one boy began questioning as to the whereabouts of Benny.

“Yeah,” replied a bigger kid, “Where is the little piss ant. I owe him a dig for opening that bloody window during the storm last night.” This was echoed by a chorus of disgruntled boys. Clearly Benny’s love for the storm was not reciprocated.

Benny pushed through them. One by one the boys skipped out of the way as if pricked by a rouge cattle prod.

“What the bloody hell was that,” said a black boy with a pinched face. He rubbed his arm where Benny had brushed past and the look on his face was one of genuine dismay.

“Sorry,” said Benny, though he was unsure on what he was sorry for. The boy didn’t even look at him, in fact he looked right through him, and it was then that Benny began to worry.

He pushed past all the boys, and they all acted like the ebony boy had. Each one: tall, short, fat or thin, each jumped like a startled cat. It was as though Benny was a fog of static. They parted as Benny made it to the window, the boys shared looks of confusion and panic as their small feet shuffled in no real direction, just away from danger, and hoping not to tread on one of the bigger kids toes. They had given Benny his own ring of space which they edged around, none of them made a move to the window now for fear of receiving another shock. A handful of the boys grew too weary to try to get back to the window and so retired to their bunks. Others waited for the stronger kids to make a move, all the while skulking around the fleshy ringlet they had made. The bigger boys had an example to set, and they were the first to try their luck, each one recoiling with a zap which made Benny jump as much as it did them. It became somewhat of a game for the more daring ones, taking turns to see who could get closest to the window and withstand the most shocks, all the while Benny feeling a hopeless abandonment and deeply perturbed at the game they were playing at his expense.

“Seriously guys, what’s going on.” But again no one payed any attention to Benny. They could not see him, and all Benny could see were their eyes looking through him.

When Benny got to the window he cast his eyes out far past the Cape and then reeled them back in, unsure of what it was the boys had been so drawn to before their attention turned to him. The garden was its usual unimaginative-self and beyond the wall there was the Cape, which was unchanged and unmemorable. Benny thought how much better it all looked at night, under the illusion of darkness, its bright reveal in the day was always a disappointment. What was not the same and neither a disappointment, and the thing that stole Benny’s breath like a punch to the gut, was the giant lightning fork etched in the sky in thick blue veins.

Clear as day and as neon as a Vegas sign post was the electric split from ground to sky. It was a little way past the wall at the end of the garden, and it went from the ground up by two to three hundred feet. It crackled and spat little blue luminous sparks and every so often a bull whip of lightning would spit from its core, up the line and down to the ground. The best way to describe the phenomena would be to say that it looked like a scar left behind from one of the lightning bolts that struck the night before. It was then, as Benny was thinking this, that he realised that this was the exact place that the bolt had struck, the one which tasted bad and left him momentarily blinded.

‘It has cracked the earth so badly that it had left a laceration in the sky.’ Benny thought. It was also, as Benny so unwillingly remembered, the place where the bone white man first appeared.