Tricky Dicky

Arnold had seen the shadow man before. Though these days, he couldn't believe it.

It was a Christmas that stood out in the otherwise fuzzy snapshots of his childhood memory.

Withered tinsel in the dining room, strung limply from tobacco-stained wallpaper. A table littered with the remains of a meal and smudged half-empty glasses. Tornados of laughter, shouting and strained conversation overpowering a small staticky television in the corner.

Later, the itch of thick wool blankets and the soft amber glow of streetlights through a bedroom window.

And a shadow, looming over the foot of his bed. 

Mum always hosted at Christmas and their tiny terraced house was packed with aunts, uncles, distant cousins and grandparents.

Arnold huddled under the dining table, with his race cars and his copy of Match magazine, hoping they’d all forget about him.

That’s how you got to stay up late. Make yourself as small as possible and find somewhere out of sight. Stay quiet.

He wanted to watch Zzzap! To watch Tricky Dicky, the cartoonish private eye and prankster with the oversized hat and featureless face. But it was grown-up time and Only Fools and Horses blared through the TV, ignored by the guests.

After a gargantuan meal and a seemingly endless flow of wine and whiskey, they were fixed to their seats indefinitely. Their bellowing rattled around Arnold's skull and made his eyes throb. The atmosphere crackled with volatile energy.

In big families, arguments are like rats, they’re never far away. And as the brittle holiday cheer began to crumble into sniping and recrimination, he was scooped up from beneath the tablecloth.

“Come on, Arnie. Time’s up", mum said as she ushered him out of the room, unnoticed. 

Hoots of laughter followed him up the narrow, creaking stairs and across the landing. The drab brown carpet scratched the soles of his unclothed feet. 

Arnold’s room was reserved for the nearest or drunkest relative, too 'tired and emotional' to make the drive home. So he was getting an upgrade, to the old wooden king-size that dominated his mum's bedroom.

Flakes of hospital green paint drifted off the doorframe as she opened it.

Inside, discarded clothes were draped across chairs and the dresser like huddled tramps. Their shadows cowered and recoiled as the harsh artificial light flooded in. 

He said, "Leave the door open. Please...just a crack."

The huge bed was in the center of the room, with a narrow passage running around its edges to the bay window that overlooked the street. As she hoisted him in and tucked him under the weighty blankets, the ancient mattress sagged. 

"Goodnight darling", she said as she eased the door closed behind her. It left a thin bar of warm light cutting across the middle of the room.

Bass voices and skittering giggles reverberated up through the floorboards and the covers pressed his slight frame into the hollow in the middle of the bed. 

For as long as he could, he kept one eye on the figures crouched around the room, still as scarecrows. But he soon dropped into an exhausted and dreamless sleep.

When his eyes opened again, the thin bar of light from the door was gone. 

Echoes of the party still rang in his ears though the house was now silent. The glow of the streetlights seeped through the curtains, meeting formless dark.

He lay still, limbs heavy and not yet fully awake, waiting for his eyes to adjust.

The foot of the bed began to emerge in outline and he could almost make out the clothes and chairs when movement caught his eye from the corner of the room.

Cast against the wall, just next to the drawn curtains, was a figure. A shadow.

“Mum?” he whispered.

He watched as the form grew clearer and coalesced into the imposing figure of a tall, heavy-set man. The outline of a long raincoat and a large fedora hat in profile, projected across the wallpaper.

The shape of a comic book detective. The shape of Tricky Dicky. 

And it was moving, getting closer. It rose and fell as though placing slow, deliberate footsteps across the carpet. Creeping towards Arnold and blocking out the only light from the window.

A frost hardened in his stomach and extended through his fingers and toes. His eyes stung, reminding him to blink.

The shadow continued to grow, becoming ever more solid and tangible. An empty tenebrous mass, gliding and bobbing silently across the room, as though riding a wave.

The hunched figures around the edge of the room flanked it like henchmen.

Arnold's every muscle, ligament and sphincter clenched. His eyes were hard like snooker balls. He wanted to scream but panic tightened around his neck, and no sound escaped above a terrified wheeze.

He gazed into the pitch black hole where the shadow's face should be. He saw no eyes but felt a hungry glare nonetheless. 

As it reached the foot of his bed, he heard a high-pitched and girlish tee-hee. A giggle of fiendish amusement and boundless malice.

Tricky Dicky. 

Something warm and wet released underneath him, a pool spread out under his pyjama pants. He lay, cold and rigid as a headstone. Terror mixed with shame at the thought of being found the next day. Cold and lifeless in piss-soaked sheets.

A tear rolled down his cheek.

The warmth brought feeling back into his arms and legs and he yanked the coarse winter blankets over his head. Trembling and whimpering, he drew his knees to his chest and curled up as small as he would go.

Just beyond this flimsy cocoon, he sensed the shadow bearing down on him.

He was waiting for the inevitable. To feel the slow and insistent pull of an unseen hand on the covers. To feel the icy touch that would carry him away from his mum and his family forever, to somewhere they’d never find him. 

He waited to stare into that soulless void and lose himself in it entirely. 

And that’s where the memory ends.

Scene missing. Roll credits.

Whatever happened next, he lived to see another day. To see the morning sun pooling in the corners of the bedroom and the hunched scarecrow henchmen, once again just piles of clothes tossed across chairs.

“It was a bad dream. No more X Files for you. You’re obviously not ready for it", mum said.

He didn't argue. In the harsh light of day with the indignity of wetting the bed still so keen, it seemed too impossible. 

The years wore the edges off his humiliation. With adulthood, the story became just another anecdote.

Friends would tell him that it probably was The X Files or Tricky Dicky invading his dreams that night. Or maybe he'd overheard something he shouldn't have, once Bushmills had loosened the lips of his unhinged uncles.

Sometimes their eyes would widen with fear or narrow with scepticism. Some thought he was telling a ghost story. Others thought his childhood anxiety was mundane.

Mostly, Arnold rationalised it to himself as a simple case of sleep paralysis. All the pieces seemed to fit.

It was why he'd chosen a degree in psychology. And how he'd met Catherine. She'd taught him about the science of dreams and in return, he'd taught her how to make an Old Fashioned. His lack of enthusiasm for genetics and statistics ended his interest in psychology early, but his interest in Catherine never waned. They were married within a year and within four they had a son with the same green eyes and fiery auburn curls as his mother.

Catherine had scrutinised and then followed her dreams all the way to becoming a professor. Arnold had found he was happiest at home with their son.

But sometimes, on nights like this one and when he least expected it, that hollow would open up again in his chest. A gulf that the fullness of his waking life was unable to bridge.

He would dream of the shadow. Of that malevolent silhouette with its jittery giggle, advancing on him in the night. He'd ask himself, what did it want?

He woke in darkness and silence.

The bed creaked timidly as he sat up. Catherine stirred next to him but didn’t wake. The sound of his son shifting in his bedclothes crackled through the bedside monitor. He paused for a moment to make sure all was still before creeping across the room. Side-stepping cushions, charger wires and the stool in front of her ornate dresser.

Moonlight spilled in through the small window by the open bathroom door. He caught sight of himself in the mirror, bathed in an eerie glow as he passed by.

After pulling the door shut behind him to mask the noise, he freed himself and closed his eyes with relief as his bladder emptied.

He finished up by washing his hands and tiptoed back towards the bed. 

As he did so, he glanced out the window. Tall trees bordered the quiet lane that stretched away from their home and back towards town. The breeze skittered leaf litter across overgrown lawns. Empty cars, parked up on the pavement, gleamed under the streetlights.

And there, beneath the moon and cascading foliage stood the shadow.

Motionless. Silent. A figure with broad, angular shoulders and that eerily familiar fedora hat perched on its head. Where a face should've been, a featureless lacuna.

Tricky Dicky.

Electricity danced up the back of his neck. His hair stood on end.

It had to be a coincidence. It had to be a neighbour out for a late evening stroll. Or a local kid, out for a smoke or a clandestine meeting.

Turning away he tried to collect himself. He returned to his bed and lay down softly next to Catherine.

His heart pounded in his ears and he couldn't keep still.

He tried to think about something else, to control his breathing. Breathe in, count to three. Breathe out, count to three.

He tried to name all the American states in alphabetical order or count backwards from fifty in French. But the image of the shadow, standing out there under the streetlights, was burned into his mind like an old TV with a broken tube.

He had to know if it was still there. If it was waiting for him. Watching his house, his family. He wondered what he might do if it was.

If only to prove himself a nervous fool, he resolved to find out.

Again, he tried to move in silence, skipping over the same wires and pillows but his legs trembled like a newborn fawn. As he passed the corner of the bed his toe struck hard oak and he doubled over, his mouth stretching wide into a silent scream. He rubbed furiously at the toe to ease the ache.

The sharp pain plummeted him back to earth. This was ridiculous. There would be nothing and no one there. Whoever it was would be gone by now and if he even remembered this episode in the morning he’d laugh.

He stood and walked quickly to the window and there, much closer than before, stood the shadow man.

Lurking behind a streetlight. His blank face stared straight through Arnold’s bedroom window and deep into his soul.

In the look they shared Arnold sensed a deep malevolence. He imagined a vibrant, toothy smile. A fiendish, demented grin.

A cloud of anxiety blew over his mind and exploded fireworks across his vision. He snapped his eyes shut and shook his head. It had to be a dream, a hallucination, a trick of the light.

He wished, prayed and begged for it to be all in his head. For the shadow to vanish into memory like a bad dream. But when he opened his eyes again, there it was.

It was enjoying this. Taking pleasure in his terror. Gleefully reanimating the memory of the shame and embarrassment he'd felt as a small boy lying in a warm, clammy pool of urine.

At that moment, he was a child again. He decided to deal with the problem as only a child can when the dark of the night frightens them more than anything else.

He ran, covering the short distance between the window and his bed without taking a breath, and buried himself beneath the covers.

Catherine woke with a start and turned to face him. Lifting her sleep mask to expose one eye, she delivered a swift kick to his shin before rolling back over.

He lay there for hours. His body was stiff with adrenaline, unable to close his eyes.

Every so often, he'd emerge from under the duvet. His gaze drawn to the small window where the moonlight shone into the room, projecting dancing shadows on the wall.

Eventually, the burning in his eyes coaxed him into a senseless slumber.

He awoke the next morning in purgatory.

It was obvious to Catherine that he'd barely slept and that something was wrong. He was sullen and withdrawn and saw a mask of shock whenever he looked in the mirror.

“What's wrong?" she said. "You look terrible.”

“Just a bad night’s sleep" he lied.

Work emails, casserole for dinner, drawing animals with his son, bad TV. He couldn't concentrate. His mind replayed the same image over and over. The shadow, regarding him from far down the lane. An abyss of hopelessness. A fissure in reality, wanting to claim him for the darkness.

He just needed one night without waking. A night to put between him and his fear. One period of unbroken sleep and this whole thing might fade back into memory. He could get on with his life again.

That night he took a 12yr old Glenfiddich to bed with him, but he still couldn’t bring himself to switch off the light.

He read and drank until his vision swam. The itching in his eyes was the last thing he remembered when he woke again in the dimness.

It was calm. The was room silent and Catherine still. An empty glass, clasped loosely in his hand. His son snoring lightly over the baby monitor.

A full moon beamed in through the window in the corner and as the room came into focus, he realised he felt nothing. No unease, no anxiety, no pounding heart. His short rest had done him some good. It had cleared his head.

A sense of well-being settled across him like a light snowfall. It began to feel like it had all been in his imagination.

There was no shadow stalking him through his life, waiting outside his window or toying with his fear and shame. There were just memories and sleepless nights. Just work stress, long days, and frazzled nerves.

While this sense of calm and level-headedness endured, Arnold decided he was going to prove it. He placed his glass on the nightstand and stood up. With calm resolve, he made his way towards the window.

A flash of giddy panic rushed over him as he drew near and began to turn towards the lane outside.

Nothing. Nobody there.

Just autumn leaves lit dimly by streetlights. An empty lane and dark, quiet houses.

A warm wave of elation washed over him. He let out a deep sigh and a smile began to curve at the edge of his lips.

All the exhaustion and the weight of the last few weeks lifted and felt he might float away.

Time to get back to sleep.

He turned to walk back to his bed and, in the doorway of his bedroom, stood the shadow.

Arnold's mouth dropped open to scream but there was no sound. His eyes bulged from their sockets and his muscles tightened painfully across his chest.

He stared into the chasm beneath that hat and watched as it slowly, surely began to move towards him.

Paralysed, he glanced at his wife asleep in their bed and heard the small sounds of his son asleep in the next room. But there was nothing he could do to help them. To help himself.

The shadow man came on. Deliberately, inevitably.

All these years it had waited. Waited for him to feel safe. Waited for him to forget. Now the time had come to recover what it had left behind. To carry Arnold back to whatever hell it had sprung from.

In these last moments, he heard a small, girlish laugh.

Tricky Dicky.

His final memory, the last feelings of Arnold’s life, were shame and embarrassment.

The shame of standing in a steaming pool of his own making as he watched the shadow come to claim him forever.