My therapist says getting this all out will somehow be helpful. To me, maybe. To other people, hopefully. She says to put it down in words, like a story, might help me process it. I’m struggling, if I’m honest. To keep it light and factual, instead of ranting about the horrors awaiting the unwary and the things lurking in…
No. She says not to get ahead of myself. I’ll tell you the story as I see it. Step by step, how it happened that night. The ending is how I remember it, not that anyone believes me. Coping mechanism, they say. Reaching for answers because I won’t accept it’s a clear-cut case of a runaway teen, especially since my (now ex) wife refuses to say anything about it. She says she didn’t hear. Didn’t see.
Well. He didn’t run away. I can’t tell you how offensive the suggestion is on top of everything I’ve…
Ok ok. Here we go. Read and remember.
The bottle cap fell into the Bolognese, and the chilli sauce followed.
‘Dammit,’ I muttered, quickly fishing the cap out and holding up the near-empty bottle to the light. I peered with half-hearted hope at the now overly-red sauce and gave it a tentative stir. It would be fine for me, since I love hot food, but not for Callum. I sighed, casting resigned eyes over the little rack of spice jars on the other side of the kitchen. When none seemed to present themselves as an antidote to insanely hot Bolognese sauce, I put the bottle down and marched to the fridge.
‘Dammit,’ I muttered again, cracking open the last beer and considering the wine chilling in the vegetable drawer. That was supposed to be for Melony, but after the day I’d had I was thinking of abandoning my attempt at being a thoughtful husband. She wouldn’t like it, if she got back and found me tipsy, but given she’d been at a conference on medical instruments for the last two days she wasn’t likely to be in a good mood anyway. Having wine to offer might prevent her from throwing pointed questions at me about Callum the moment she walked in.
And speaking of…
With a flash of inspiration I grabbed a tub of natural yoghurt from the fridge, thinking it might absorb some of the heat from the chilli sauce and feeling like one of those chefs on TV.
‘Worth a shot,’ I said aloud, crossing to the bubbling dinner and spooning some yoghurt in. I watched with dismay as it broke apart, separating into tiny little chunks like curdling milk. The sight brought back the memory of the last time I’d done this exact thing just before Melony’s friends arrived for one of her dinner parties.
‘Oh yeah,’ I chuckled as the highly amusing memory played itself back. I took a slurp of the beer and regarded the congealed mess that had been dinner. It seemed to smile at me mockingly; a gloating, untouchable adversary. I smiled back at it and flicked the heat off, giving it the finger as I turned and grabbed the latest amongst the many fast-food menus that had been shoved through their door recently. It featured a cartoon panda stuffing its gleeful face with what looked like nightmarishly long noodles.
Seemed so funny to me, at the time. Maybe the beer had something to do with that.
‘Callum!’ I shouted, reading the name ‘Golden Tasty!’ along the bottom of the menu, ‘we’re having Chinese!’
There was no sound from upstairs, where my fourteen-year-old was firmly locked in his dungeon of existential, though in my opinion greatly exaggerated, angst.
‘Callum!’ I shouted again, before realising the kid probably had his earphones in or was on the phone. Or both. Technology isn’t something I keep up with these days, especially now, for reasons you’ll soon understand. But even then the older I got the more like voodoo it all seemed.
‘I’m coming up, Kiddo,’ I called, managing to bite back such jokes as ‘get your pants back on’ just in time. Perhaps in a few years I could get away with that, but at fourteen that would be some kind of mortal insult and a blow to the already shaky relationship we were currently navigating.
Apparently teenagers are harder work than toddlers. Who knew? Worth every single moment of that work, of course, I now realise. How viciously sharp loss makes that terrible realisation.
Callum was currently grounded, after we’d been called into the school to explain why he’d turned up that morning with a huge kitchen knife. He’d claimed at first that it was for ‘protection’, but eventually admitted he’d done it because an online friend told him to, in order to prove some kind of point. A point, I thought, that could only make sense to an adult if they recalled the peculiar shifting reality of their teenage years. Callum had taken the knife to school to prove the rules against knives were unfair. As though rules like this were designed by adults to needlessly restrict teenage individualism out of spite, rather than to prevent any of their insane, hormone-fuelled arguments over whatever was deemed important that week from becoming blood-soaked crime scenes.
I had tried to be reasonable and to understand the point that Callum and his friend, some kid named Sammy, had been trying to make to themselves and those around them; apparently an objection to unreasonable interference with their liberty. Not so Melony. She had gone ballistic, calling the boy stupid, reckless, dangerous even, making herself into the avatar of everything Callum had convinced himself, or Sammy had convinced him, was wrong with their world. An unthinking, rule-obsessed maniac with no consideration for their individual ability to think.
And so he’d been grounded. And I had been left to deal with a resentful, angry, misunderstood teenager whilst his mother swanned off to play with medical instruments and swap long-suffering-mother stories with her friends.
I knocked on the door, waiting a good minute before knocking again, remembering very well the horror of being a young man and having someone walk in on you.
‘What?’ came the grudging reply.
‘Callum we’re having Chinese,’ I called, looking down at the gluttonous panda again. It was wearing a tutu.
‘I know!’ my son said, in a voice that suggested he’d made this clear at least ten times already.
‘So what do you want?’
I heard a muffled thud as something heavy was placed on the floor, and the tell-tale squeak of springs. The door opened.
Callum was wearing a blue t-shirt, which I thought was encouraging all things considered, and jeans. His skin looked pale, except for the cluster of angry red spots on his cheeks which I tried very hard not to look at. In his ear a little device blinked with a blue light, some sort of headset for the phone or a game, I deduced. His laptop, the top half pulled down low so as to obscure the screen, was whirring away and blazing with a blue light.
‘Dad, I’ve had the same thing from that place every time since I was like ten,’ Callum said, perfectly accurately, in fairness to him.
‘Yeah but this is a new one, look,’ I tried to hand the menu over with a grin, panda-side up. Callum made no move to take the menu, just glanced at it before rolling his eyes in exasperation.
‘Just get me the same as always Dad they all do the same sh–stuff.’ My son turned back to his room and picked up the laptop, adjusting the device in his ear as though preparing to re-join an important conference call. As he settled back on the bed he looked up at me with a strange, hesitant expression.
‘So, what are you doing?’ I asked, not liking that look on my son’s face. The haughty teenager had vanished, replaced by a glimpse of that child I’d thought long gone, frightened and unsure.
‘Talking to Sammy,’ Callum replied, after a pause. Something cold settled into my stomach as Callum turned to his screen and started typing. His eyes seemed to glaze over, his attention lost in the silent conversation with the unseen ‘Sammy’. The sight was disturbing, knowing that weird kid was on the other side of the screen, the one who had suggested my son arm himself with a knife. Reaching out through that blue light, infecting Callum, absorbing him…
I shook my head, shaking the horrible thought away. They were teenagers, that’s all. Nothing more sinister was going on, surely.
How I wish now that I’d had the guts to give in to my fear. That’s the tragedy of this world we live in, that we think fear is something to be ignored or laughed at when it’s kept us safe and alive or thousands of years from the things that grin and salivate in shadowy places just beyond the reach of light…
Alright enough of that.
The Chinese arrived half an hour later, and Callum was reluctant to come down from his room. I eventually started eating alone, pouring the wine for myself and not caring what Melony had to say about it. When my son had finally appeared, he looked even paler and more exhausted than before. He ate his food more or less in silence, ignoring my increasingly desperate attempts to engage him in conversation. Finally I refilled his glass and said angrily, ‘So what’s Sammy want you to do now? Blow something up?’
I regretted it as soon as I said it, knowing it was the wine loosening my tongue. The same wine that now colours everyone’s thinking when I tell the story. I can see them all thinking it, but I wasn’t drunk. I was not.
But anyway, the effect of my crass comment wasn’t what I expected. Callum had stopped eating, and stared at me with that same peculiar expression on his face. Like he wanted to say something, but wasn’t sure of himself. He looked drawn, drained even.
‘What is it Cal? What’s wrong?’ I asked, putting the wine down and wondering where the cold sensation of fear creeping up my spine had come from. Callum’s lip seemed to tremble, just for a moment. A quiver there and gone again so fast I wasn’t sure I’d seen it. Without a word Callum pushed back his chair and stood up, sweeping his hair away from his face as he walked slowly out of the kitchen. At the foot of the stairs he turned back, his face bleak.
‘Dad…I…’
I hesitated, almost holding my breath, feeling a terrible distance between the two of us. I wanted to reach out to my son, to hug him and tell him everything was ok, but the uncertainty of how he might react held me back, and I hate myself for that now. Callum finally shook his head and bounded up the stairs, leaving me to ponder alone in the kitchen like the coward I am.
I was still there an hour later when Melony walked back in, looking as harassed and bad tempered as I’d expected. After pouring her a glass of wine, or as much as was left in the bottle and ignoring the pointed look she gave me in response, I filled her in on the peculiar events of the evening.
At one point she rolled her eyes and shook her head at me.
‘How much of that have you had?’ she asked, nodding at the empty bottle on the table.
‘Huh?’
‘Callum can’t use his laptop or his Bluetooth headset. I confiscated the cable for the charger before I left, look,’ she fished in her bag and pulled out a thick black wire alongside a slim battery, ‘and this was for the headset.’
‘Well obviously it didn’t run out of power yet,’ I said flatly.
‘No, I made sure it ran out before I left. I’m not a moron.’
‘Well then how do you explain him sitting there talking to that Sammy boy on the machine? He was all lit up like a Christmas tree in that blue light when I saw him before dinner.’
It was only then that it hit me that I had never actually seen this Sammy in the flesh. I’m not sure anyone had. It was a strange, frightening thought.
Melony stared at me, and I could see she was angry that Callum had somehow managed to subvert her punishment. I sighed inwardly as she stood up from the table and marched upstairs.
‘Mel, Mel come on –’ I began, but she waved at me impatiently and I fell silent, following her up the stairs as she shouted for Callum in her most pissed-off voice.
At the door she didn’t wait, just barged in without knocking. I cringed for him just in case.
‘Callum Lowe you answer me when I –’
She stopped, looking around the room. It was empty. The laptop sat where I had seen it last, that blazing blue light still pouring from it, but there was no sign of Callum. His cell-phone sat on the bed, his shoes were by the wardrobe.
‘He’s not here,’ Mel said in a slightly shaky voice.
The icy terror I’d felt before rose up and gripped my heart.
The phone began to ring. The screen flashed with the name ‘Sammy’.
I approached it cautiously, glancing at the laptop screen as I passed it. It was pure blue, the light so bright it hurt to look at it, and there were shapes within it, barely glimpsed patches of darkness in the brilliance making up what could have been a face –
I slid my finger along the phone screen and the call connected. There was a burst of static, then the sound settled down into a deep, unpleasant chuckle. I felt the horror overtake me, the phone dropping from my shaking, nerveless fingers.
A tearful voice called out to them from beyond the cruel laughter, and my eyes locked in frozen horror on the blazing laptop screen, on my son’s silently screaming face trapped within.
So yeah. Watch yourself online, I guess. And remember me.