The Darker I Fall

The darker I fall

By Sebastian H. Alive

Published by Sebastian H. Alive

License Notes

This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are fictitious. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

This eBook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This eBook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

Copyright 2015 Sebastian H. Alive

The Darker I Fall

Prologue

When you were a child, did a fear of monsters keep you awake at night? Did your ability to imagine such fearsome creatures without the ability to reason them away grip icy hands on your young beating heart? Were you possessed by a fear so terrifying that barely a croak could escape your dry, trembling lips as you stared at the dark shadows dancing slowly, suspiciously, against your bedroom wall? Did you keep your door open to help you remember a family member was close by for reassurance as you hoped and prayed this wasn’t going to be a long, long night?

Let me be very clear, there are no monsters lurking in your closet or hiding patiently under your bed keeping you from sleeping peacefully. They really are all in your head. There is no such thing as monsters, at least not in the sense that you believe, although I cannot assure you that your fears were completely without basis.

See, a monster potentially lives in all of us; we’ll create it, nurture it and allow it grow. We need to accept that. You let the darkness in and it will encompass you and you will become one with it. When the absolute becomes too much, when your soul is at its blackest and it needs to be emptied or replaced you will learn the truth and that truth is that sometimes, just sometimes the reality is equally as scary as fantasy. But then I like the darkness.

I can sense you’re thinking. Trying to comprehend what I am and I can see I have your attention now. Are you ready? For what I will tell you will change you forever and I’m not sure you are ready for that.

My name is Lleyland Hickey.  I am a monster.  This is my story.

Chapter One

27 years ago, the commencement

It started slowly at first. I remember the year vividly though I just can’t say the date exactly. It was the year my world as I knew it began to fall slowly apart, a mere point in time in which something started which I had no control over and when one bad thing followed another.

The year was 1986. A lot happened that year and quite a number of events took place though I didn’t pay much attention to most of it, and why should I? I was just a 13 year old boy entering middle adolescence and coming to terms with my own struggling development and identity. I had my own problems, probably more than most of the kids at McCartney Secondary School and not least because puberty was beginning to run its course.

The other boys in my year group were getting taller, their voices deeper and more pronounced but I wasn’t growing like the rest of them, in fact I was pretty sure my growth spurt would never materialize and I would remain 4 foot 11 and 84 pounds throughout my academic education. That period was a miserable transition that I just wanted to end but eventually, mercifully, I began to notice pubic hair and body odor and I welcomed every single new spot on my oily-skin that I could see. To my mind it was good news and meant I was eventually catching up. Though it didn’t mean I was going to be as tall or as muscular as some of the other youths, but it could.

One thing I can tell you is that being smart certainly doesn’t make you popular. My report cards were always good bordering on excellent and I always achieved good grades. But being intelligent was like I was wearing a permanent hi-vis vest so the bullies knew where I was at any given time. For one in particular, Wayne Deakin, I was nothing more than strategic prey and an easy target. He was one of the hardest kids in the school, physically at least a foot taller than me and who just so happened to live at the top of my street in a convenient cul-de-sac of which there was no escape except through woodland.

He held a very effective role in my life which was nearly as effective as his ham shaped fists he routinely slammed into my stomach. The other thing I want to tell you is that when a bully attacks you, let him. Do not run because when he catches up with you, and in my experience that was mostly the case, the beating will be so much more painful and severe. If you are knocked down, which I often was, cover your face with your hands and make yourself as small a target as you can, which I often did. I never fought back with bullies, just curled into the customary fetal position and just rolled with the punches, I was good at that. But I would never come home to my ma and tell her that ‘Everyone was mean at school today and I was picked on or hit upon,’ I would just smile and say ‘I’m doing great and I was popular with all the other kids,’ It was easier that way and the perception of being a grass would be almost as painful as the bruises.

People didn’t think I was cool and I didn’t think I would ever achieve that accolade; I was just nothing to them. The height of my popularity was back when my father died suddenly of a heart attack 2 years previous, but then all I became was the boy whose father had died and who was just above the poverty line. It didn’t stop the bullying and I was still teased incessantly. Wayne reserved extra-special treatment for my frail body to help me through this difficult landmark period in my life. It really struck a chord with him and he became a healthy mentor in dealing physical and emotional pain.

As much as I excelled academically I was the direct opposite in competitive sports. I could breeze though Science, Biology, Geography, English and Mathematics but anything involving physical exercise of any description and my body, acting like a separate entity from my brain, shut down and refused to co-operate. It was almost like my body had to sacrifice athletic prowess for brain development as I could only be good at one thing and not the other. I also believed that gym class was also just a means to prove how useless and inept I was in the eyes of the other boys. Not only was I desperately unpopular but it seems I was also pre-destined in my DNA to be un-athletic. Maybe I could have understood and possibly gained a little sympathy if I had been overweight but I wasn’t, far from it, I was geeky, nerdy boy, loosely built and awkward in movement at sports.

As much as night follows day and spring follows winter you could guarantee more often than not that I would be last to be chosen in a lineup for a team by the captain or designated ‘picker’. Within mathematical science it was almost a certainty and in modern biology it was pretty much a sure thing. Those evolved towards perfection were picked first and the weaker of the species was always last. It was natural selection or something; the stronger must dominate the opposition and not mix with the weaker genetic offering. This formed the basic mechanisms of evolution and what is evolution but a form of survival of the fittest and most dominant.

Usually during the predictable selection process I could be found at the end of the line looking to the ground and shifting my trainers uncomfortably while blushing furiously until my name was eventually called out. On the odd occasion I wasn’t picked last but usually and most frequently towards the end in the bottom 2 or 3, it felt like the captain or designated ‘picker’ had somehow seen some kind of stand-out skill that defined me as a prospect worthy of drafting me into a place in their team. Then I would stride forward, pushing my shoulders back with a look of grim determination on my acne-ridden face and secretly will my body to perform, to discover that hidden talent that would lead the team to victory and thrust me into the pantheons of sporting greatness. I so wanted to do something absolutely miraculous and prove that at least on this occasion I was deemed more deserving of a place than Harold the fat kid who was caught in a vicious cycle of ridicule and overeating, or Derek who suffered with asthma and was often with a cold and generally more sickly than the others.

Sure enough I would lead the team into a humiliating defeat or play a huge contributing factor to our downfall and I would feel the accusing eyes of the other boys burning into my sweat-soaked back at the end of the session. Maybe I had an exaggerated sense of my physical flaws but I do remember I always had a hard time at Dodgeball and I floundered at the back of the pack with Derek keeping pace at cross-country running.

Like I said, I didn’t care what happened around me in the world in 1986; I didn’t care who was born, who died or what major news stories were happening at the time as I had my own problems to deal with on a grand scale. It was the year that ‘Papa Don’t Preach’ by Madonna was riding high in the Billboard Hot 100 and the year that the actor Cary Grant died in late November at the age of 82. People still smoked on airplanes, the ozone hole was discovered, a British TV Journalist was kidnapped in Beirut and Chernobyl dumped vast quantities of radioactive material across most of Europe. The M25 motorway was finally completed; BSE was first identified in British cattle and the space shuttle Challenger disintegrates after launch killing all 7 crew members on board.

But I was a 13 year old kid and none of this mattered because it was the year I first began to see the darkness at the edge of my vision and feel its dense suffocating presence cajoling and whispering seductively into my ear, but that was to come slightly later. First was the discovery.

Ma and I lived in a small, three bedroom brick terrace house on a cul-de-sac street named Grange Park at number 37. The suburb we called home was Kirk Sandall which was a small civil parish just northeast of Doncaster in South Yorkshire, England. The village stretched to the outskirts of another smaller community called Barnby Dun and was sandwiched in-between Armthorpe and Edenthorpe. It was a nice enough place with a burgeoning glass making industry right in the heart of the settlement where my father used to work as a glass technician up until he passed away unexpectedly.

There wasn’t much to do but I never complained, my time was spent watching television, reading comic books or hanging around with my only friend in the world, Vic Tracey. There was also a woodland area just near to my house that was inhabited by squirrels and birds which also quite importantly was within running distance when Wayne was hot on my heels as my trainers pounded the cement. Over the years I was pretty sure I knew every nook and cranny in that woodland, every fallen log or thick branch I hurtled over, every rot-hole and ditch I crossed and every pocket of thick brush to hide behind and use as a vantage point. It was valuable information as it was my safe haven and also completely exhilarating.

According to census figures the town had a population of around 7,000 but to me there was just my ma and me. That was my whole world until it started to fall apart in chunks around me. That day in particular was a mid-week day like any other and I was sat cross-legged on a paisley rug holding a ball of blue yarn in my hand with my neck craned up to the Zenith 25 inch color television that was housed in its majestic walnut surround cabinet. Ma was sat in her armchair a few feet behind me as she often did, knitting while softly humming to herself with a slight smile on her careworn face as the ball of yarn spun lazily in my hand as she looped and pulled at the fabric.

The A-Team was showing and my eyes were glued to the set unblinking. The A Team was my absolute favorite show on television and the opening theme tune is forever ingrained in my memory banks, because as long as I can remember it always makes me think of my late father. That catchy tune does something to me, it has a melancholy feeling for me, bittersweet almost because it feels like he’s watching it with me by my side and sharing in the entertainment like he used to. The truth was ma didn’t like me watching such violence through car chases, explosions and gun fights. But she knew that father had loved to watch it with me when he was around and she knew as a parent that it was something I had latched onto and was passionate about and somehow still felt connected to him.

I couldn’t watch an episode at first, the pain initially was too much and it took me around 3 months to get over that and finally watch one. Gradually it got better over time and ma silently understood. Plus I think ma had a secret liking for Templeton ‘Faceman’ Peck, I was sure of it, and if I had to suffer through The Golden Girls and Moonlighting and watch 4 old women sharing a home or a private detective show then she had to sit through the soldiers of fortune on the run from the Army for crimes they didn’t commit. It was give and take.

It was on that particular night, with the rain drumming a soft pitter-patter against the windows as I was settled down comfortably on the floor watching my favorite action program when ma first noticed it. I felt the yarn string loosen and the ball stopped rolling on my palm and I glanced quickly back at ma who was staring at me quizzically with the knitting needles poised in the air.

Turn your head back around, Lley, she said curiously peering at me.

I did as ma asked and heard her groan in pain as she pushed herself gingerly up from the armchair and steadied herself for a moment. My ma suffered terribly with secondary Osteoarthritis in both knees and in her hips and when she wasn’t sitting down taking away the stress from her joints she was usually walking aided with her cane to stop overusing the joints. She wasn’t obese or old my ma, she was only 42 with only a hint of grey in her long brown hair but she moved like someone 30 years her senior. The doctors said she had something called ‘leg-length discrepancy’ which basically meant she had one leg that's a tiny bit longer than the other which developed her condition because she had been putting more weight on one side over the years. I used to watch her limp when she would walk or struggle going up and down the stairs as her symptoms gradually worsened over time. But back then we had father to help and now there was just me and ma and this progressive disease.

What is it ma? I asked, watching as the A-Team constructed an elaborate tank-car hybrid inside a small ramshackle shed while the army inevitably closed in on them.

She placed the needles down on the armrest and patted and slightly parted my brown hair at the back of my head.

Ma, I’m trying to watch, I cried shrinking away from her touch.

Hmmm I don't know what's caused it? she murmured to herself.

Ma!

Stop fussing, Lley,