22. Aug, 2020

'Burglar Alarm'

She brushed her face with powdered pearl before turning from the dark glass, princess pale, her white veil falling behind her, its bandeau of flowers faded.  He knew that next she would come to lean over him in bed in that terrible way, her face coming closer and closer to his.  Struggling in his dream, he startled awake to the sound of a house alarm sounding down the road somewhere, a dismal, electronic shrilling.  When he had the nightmare, it seemed he always awoke to this and he waited for it to stop and then start again after an interval, while his eyes adjusted to the dark, mistrustfully checking the shapes in the bedroom.  Then he got up to go to the bathroom, switching on the landing light which he would leave on for reassurance despite knowing he’d be told off for wasting electricity in the morning. 

The dead bride dream hadn’t been with him for a while, though he never did like the alcove in the bedroom where she lurked at her dressing table with her pots and potions, even though to his waking eyes there was nothing in it but a big Spider-Man poster, keeping vigil for him.  The faulty house alarm of some neighbour a few streets away always sounded loudest at night to him, although it sometimes kicked off in the daytime too when it was windy.  The hearing of the adults in the house wasn’t disturbed by it and Matt didn’t mind it himself, because it meant he had woken up in time if he heard it.  In fact, he often thought it saved him.

He would be tired again when it was breakfast time, which in his house did not resemble at all those of the programmes he watched, where bright-eyed and bushy tailed exchanges were made over platters of pancakes cooked by cheery adults in a kitchen awash with morning sunshine and optimism.  In his house, everyone was in a rush and a bit grumpy.  His friend Brian arrived at the door to walk to school with him.   Brian, to look at, was like one of the children in those programmes, a boy with a blond crewcut and  smooth freckles over a short nose, who belonged behind a white picket fence, like Tom Sawyer.  

“I had the dead bride dream again last night, “ he told Brian.

“Cool.  How gross was she?”  

Brian was impressed by levels of grossness and so Matt embroidered his vision, the true horror of which (seeing the ritual of the dusting of her face with crushed pearls which shimmered on her dead skin and knowing what came next, that rising and turning, that leaning down closer and closer while he was trapped there unable to move)  he couldn’t begin to try to put into words.

He knew they were crushed pearls because she walked on them too, and they cascaded from rotted necklace strings as she came towards him.  Matt had no idea where this dream had come from or why and the only pearls he had ever seen were the string of cultured pearls his mother had in her jewellery box, rarely worn.

“Maybe she was murdered in your house!” suggested Brian, as they had ghoulishly concluded before.

“I don’t know but I hate that dream.  It’s well creepy.”

“Did you hear the burglar alarm again?”

“Yeah.”

“Maybe that’s haunted, too.  Maybe that’s where she was killed, not in your house.  Maybe she’s not even dead yet!”

“Maybe,” agreed Matt but the dream was fading from his mind and they turned to scuffing their polished shoes along so as not to look too neatly turned out when they arrived at school.

Those kinds of things were important.

“I think we should find out which house the alarm belongs to,” Brian suggested before they went in.

“If you like,” shrugged Matt as they turned in the gates and their attention turned, or was meant to turn, to school.

Matt’s attention was always slightly elsewhere unless he tried hard to concentrate and then he would find that he was thinking about concentrating instead of concentrating, but because he was quiet and looked focussed, this daydreamy absence was not always noticed.  It was when he came to homework and complete gaps in his knowledge that Matt would realise that he hadn’t been listening after all.  As a result, ‘could try harder’, was a frequent refrain on his reports where his written work was sketchy. 

If he really tried, he could switch off completely from what was going on around him and enter the internal world of imagination where he would always have dramas playing out that he was part of.  This came in particularly useful when the house was full of visitors he was required to sit quietly and politely in the company of, which was often, his parents being social people who were always heavily involved in organising things, things that were more important than being at home all the time and besides, Matt was now old enough not to need playing with and was more than capable of entertaining himself. 

It was often said of Matt that he was ‘no trouble’ by his parents, fondly, and yet, in spite of that, they seemed to pay indulgently amused attention to the more exuberant offspring of the visiting friends, who were allowed, it seemed to Matt, to be as much trouble as they liked, roaring about the place noisily, being rude and, over the years, breaking many of the toys they helped themselves to, to play with, toys which were his and which he looked after.  These children were always spoken of as being ‘very bright’, which seemed to make this kind of carry on all right in everybody’s view, except for Matt’s.  He had soon learned, though, that if he made a fuss about it, this was seen as being rude to guests, so he just retreated into himself wherever possible, or elsewhere in the house, if he could get away with it.

Brian had raised the question of finding the house with the haunted alarm, as he now called it, again on the way home from school.

“Come on,” he said.  “Let’s you and me go out after tea and look.  I’ll call for you.”

“Well, I don’t know,” said Matt, who was tired but he knew that Brian would come anyway and after tea, it turned out his parents had people coming to a meeting again in the front room and so he thought he might as well.

Brian was a regular playmate and they were allowed out unsupervised on the basis of specific destinations, football in the park, swings, or Brian’s house, say, until half past eight and at this time of year, by then it was falling a bit dusk but not properly dark.  Where they actually went was where they felt like going but they didn’t often venture very far.

“Can you hear it now?” asked Brian, who was skipping alongside Matt on and off the pavement into the road, dodging traffic.

Matt listened.

“No, not yet.”

“When you’re at your house, where do you think it comes from?”

“A few streets away, over the park, I think.”

“Come on then, let’s go to the park and see if we can hear it.”

They played for a while on the swings and roundabout and the metal poles were getting cold on their hands, the moon visible as daylight began to falter.  It was then that Matt heard it, as if it had been going on already all the time somewhere but  only just now could they hear it themselves.

“There!” he shouted out to Brian, who was upside down, hanging by his knees from the climbing frame.  “I can hear it.  Can you hear it?”

Brian swung to and fro listening.

“No,” he shook his head.

“Get down and listen properly.”

Brian righted himself and jumped down beside Matt, screwing up his short, freckled nose and squinting with the effort of listening.  Unlike Matt, Brian lived in the moment and every bit of the moment was vivid to him.  Matt could hear the dirge like tone clearly -  electronic, empty, a whirling siren of blank noise sending its signals out into the evening.  To him it seemed to be getting louder.  He tried to work out where it was coming from. 

“You must be able to hear it.  It’s really loud now!

Brian shook his head, listening intently and then cried,

“Yes, I can!  I can hear it!”

A frisson of scared excitement had entered into this game now.  They turned about trying to guess where the sound was coming from.

“There!  Over there!”

“No, it’s over there!” they told one another.

Leaving the park, they followed the sound, turning down streets that became further away and less familiar, then not familiar at all but they were no nearer to where the house alarm was ringing out into the evening.  It would stop in its cycle for five minutes as they headed towards it and then when it started again, would seem to be somewhere else.  The boys became giddy and silly, reckless and lost, caught up in the search.  Night began to fall so that they knew they should go home now.

“We’ll look another time,” Matt said, uneasy because something in him, now that their giddiness was wearing off,  felt he was not supposed to find the house where the alarm sounded at all.

It was like a lighthouse on a distant rock, there to warn him but not a real destination, not a safe place to go to.  The sound stopped altogether as if in rebuke to him.

“We should go home.  Where are we?”

They looked about themselves and weren’t sure, turning up and down roads until eventually, the shape of the park was discernible in the street lights.  They had been in it only a short time before but this was not a place they were supposed to go to after dark, full of nameless possibilities.  Instead of going through it, they skirted around it, jumpy, scared of the stranger danger they were warned about and it took even longer to get home.  They arrived at Brian’s first where they were ticked off for staying out too long.  Then Brian’s dad rang Matt’s dad, who had to come and pick him up and was annoyed at being interrupted in the middle of the front room meeting, so Matt was sent straight upstairs to get ready for bed.

When he was going and Brian was saying goodbye at his front door, blond crew cut safely haloed by the hall light behind him, Matt had said,

“See you heard it too, now!” and Brian had  nodded and made a ‘whoo whoo’ noise more like an imitation of an ambulance siren so that, now alone in his room, Matt realised that Brian might never have heard the house alarm calling to them at all.  He had only wanted to think he had and persuaded himself that he had really heard it because Matt could.

Matt stared at the alcove where the Spider-Man poster stood guard, red and powerful.  What if he had done wrong going with Brian to look for the house where the house alarm sounded?  What if he had the dead bride dream again tonight and the house alarm didn’t ring to wake him up in time?  Matt left the light on when he went to sleep, something he hadn’t done in years now.  He woke again to find his room was dark, so his parents must have come in and turned the light out.  In fear, he saw the bride’s silhouette,  powdering her face with crushed pearls at her dressing table in the alcove. She turned her dead shimmer towards him and he knew that she was coming.  As always, he struggled to wake and couldn’t cry out as she lowered over him, closer and closer.  In terror, he finally managed to scream out and he came to with the light in his eyes, his mother and father standing over him instead and his father was saying, twitching a curtain aside to look out.

“It’s that damned house alarm again.  Everybody’s been complaining about it for ages.  No wonder it woke you up, Matt.  Hey, it was only a dream you were having, buddy.  That noise probably just got in your head.  Come on, snap out of it.  You’re a bit too old for this kind of thing now, you know.  School tomorrow.”

“I’ll get you a drink of water, Matt, “ his mother said.  “Settle down, now.  I think he needs some thicker curtains, Mike, as well.  That moon’s shining right in.”

He was left alone again, disturbed, afraid still but knowing that he couldn’t tell them about his fears.  So none of it was real after all.  Or, rather, it was real, the burglar alarm that was, and so the rest of it must  just be a dream, mustn’t it?  Matt knew imagination would win over reality every time, though, and so he turned the light back on and watched the Spider-Man poster, his eyes closing and jerking open again until it was daylight.  He might not be able to see her now but he knew that the dead bride was still there, waiting for him.