Mike Philips wasn’t doing a very good job of unpacking. One moment he was absently thrusting another drab pullover into a drawer, and the next he was staring out at the old concrete structure in the park, for the third time in as many minutes.
Behind the weary youth, a suitcase sat open and neglected on the bed, displaying a selection of clothes he would rather forget he owned; clothes his mother had bought for him over a year before, back when he considered himself still a boy. These days she gave him the money and he bought what he damn well wanted, but she still wouldn’t let him throw away the old stuff.
A new home, a new start. They had left Mike’s father living 200 miles away─the minimum distance his mother would tolerate after the divorce. The boy and his mum had lived in no less than three temporary homes over the past year. He hoped that, now, they might finally be able to put down some roots. Mike needed the stability. And God knows he needed some friends.
Oh, he had scores of acquaintances dotted all over the southeast corner of England, and he kept in touch with all of them on the internet, but he desperately wanted some real friends; kids his own age that he could communicate with in the flesh, and on the same level. Perhaps even a special friend to whom he could open up his heart.
He and his mother had arrived at the house about three hours earlier. After instructing the removal men to place things roughly where they belonged, they had concentrated on sorting out their respective bedrooms. Mike had glanced out of the window the moment he first entered his room, but hadn’t noticed anything much: just a sparsely planted back garden and, behind that, a recreation ground of some kind.
Sometime after he began to unpack, Mike heard a knock on the front door and his mother’s hurried footsteps on the stairs as she went to answer it. After that, the youth caught several mumbled snatches of conversation─she was talking with a man─but he neither knew nor cared about the topic. After a few minutes he heard his mother close the front door and start back up the stairs.
“He was a nice man, Mike” she called from the landing.
“Really,” he replied, his voice tinged with sarcasm.
“Neighbourhood watch. Just wanted to say hello and welcome to Yellowbridge.”
The youth rolled his eyes. “Well, that was quick, wasn’t it?”
Mike’s mother had halted outside his bedroom door but she made no attempt to open it. “He says the yob situation is virtually non-existent in these parts.”
“Yellowbridge has something going for it, then.”
“Oh, don’t be so scornful, dear.”
Mike heard her move off down the landing.
“He reckons the neighbourhood watch is both pro-active and pre-emptive,” she finished, opening the door to her room.
“Well, good for them,” the youth muttered indifferently. “How positively wonderful for them.”
Later, when seeking relief from the boredom of unpacking his clothes, Mike had looked out of the window again, and it was then that he had first seen the old concrete structure. Now, he was gazing out at it once more, wondering just exactly what it was.
Over the garden fence, the park’s lawns stretched away towards a distant wood. Mike saw at least two football pitches marked out, and, over on the far side of the park, he observed a children’s play area complete with brightly painted structures. Very close to that stood the hulking grey construction that had grabbed the boy’s attention. He squinted, cupping a hand above his eyes to shield them from the evening sun. The old building certainly appeared to be made of concrete. He thought it might be an old WWII air raid shelter.
And was that a lone figure stood in its shadow? A man in dark clothing, hands pressed firmly against his sides. Mike couldn’t be sure but he fancied the figure was looking his way.
Something about the entire scene just didn’t feel right to the boy.
Suddenly filled with an overwhelming urge to check out the old building, Mike grabbed his jacket from the bed. “I’m off out to get some air,” he cried. The youth had descended the stairs, slipped his jacket on and yanked open the front door by the time his mother shouted a reply.
“Mike? I need a hand with this wardrobe . . .”
“I won’t be long,” he promised. But the boy was well known for making promises he couldn’t keep.
“Mike?!”
When he set off down the garden path, the door slammed shut with what seemed like an air of finality.
The youth came across a high-fenced alley between two neighbouring houses and followed it through to the recreation ground. A warped steel gate stood permanently open at the entrance, a lamp post towering above it. A sign had recently been strapped to the post: Neighbourhood Watch – Yellowbridge. Some astute hooligan had crossed out the word ‘watch’ with a marker pen and scribbled ‘clock’ in its place. Another kid (or maybe the very same one) had scrubbed out the letter ‘l’ from ‘clock’ and sketched a part of the male anatomy above it, complete with a little cartoon face.
Smelling the aroma of newly cut grass, Mike made his way towards the play area. As he headed across a manicured cricket pitch, the youth remembered what had earlier struck him as strange about the park: it was halfway through the Easter school break and yet there were no children to be seen anywhere. Where were all the carefree boys, kicking footballs around or practising cricket moves? What had happened to all the chirpy girls, taking the evening air, dissecting the latest fashions with their friends? And there should be younger kids too, caterwauling with unabashed glee as they charged about the play area. The park’s facilities seemed half-decent and yet it remained deserted.
The boy’s mother reckoned it was all a sign of the times. These days, parents were afraid to let their younger offspring out of the house, thereby denying them the opportunity to mix with their peers and form meaningful bonds; legions of pasty-faced brats, content to sit on their arses, tapping buttons, shunting useless light patterns around PC screens.
Well, Mike thought, my mum always let me play outside as a kid.
In fact, the woman had positively encouraged it; she had shoved him out of the house every morning, not expecting to see him again until the evening meal.
It didn’t do me any harm, did it?
It hadn’t exactly done him much good, either. Mike had been a rather lonely little boy. And now, through no fault of his own, he had become a lonely youth.
Nearing the silent playground, Mike noted the motionless seesaws and roundabouts, the eerie, skeletal climbing frames, their layers of sun-faded paint sloughing away like ancient skin. He suddenly recalled a TV documentary he had watched about the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear disaster. A couple of years back, a camera crew had visited Prypiat, a town near Chernobyl, evacuated at the time of the disaster and still deserted to this day.
Mike had seen bizarre shots of an abandoned funfair─the giant Ferris wheel frozen in time─and emotive pictures of a number of children’s playgrounds, the swings hanging dead on rusted chains. The play area lying before Mike at that moment reminded him of the desolation that had become of Prypiat. All around the abandoned play equipment, he sensed a ghostly hush─the same pregnant silence that seems to lie in the aftermath of all great disasters.
And who had come up with the idea of siting the playground adjacent to a hulking air raid shelter? The two structures elicited entirely different moods, lending a surreal quality to the scene.
Looking over at the shelter, he realized that the dark figure he thought he had seen from his bedroom window was, in fact, a concrete pillar, detached from the main building and projecting up from the smooth ground like an ancient monolith.
Mike turned his attention back to the play area; it was circular in shape, with a lamp post towering at the centre like a giant spindle. The post carried a neighbourhood watch sign just like the post at the park gate─although this sign was a pristine one, untouched by devilish little hands.
“The Neighbourhood Watch”, Mike muttered to himself. “What the hell are they watching out for? There don’t seem to be any kids in this bloody neighbourhood.”
But even as the thought entered his mind, Mike saw movement on one of the climbing frames. The structure had been fashioned to resemble a helicopter, its bright orange ‘blades’ dropping to the ground at their horizontal extremities to form a quartet of play ladders. As the youth looked on, a tiny figure detached itself from each of the ladders and stepped to one side. They stood there watching him: four silent children, no more than eight or nine years old. Mike wondered why he hadn’t seen them earlier.
“Uh, hi kids,” he ventured. “I just came over to look at the old air raid shelter. Can you tell me anything about it?”
The children remained silent, unmoving.
The sun was kissing the horizon, now, and the youth had difficulty distinguishing the figures’ faces from the shadows. The nearest child, however, suddenly stepped forward, allowing Mike to see its features: a little boy. Although he was far from unpleasant looking, there was something awful about his countenance─something about the look in his eyes. Vacant. Like someone who had been exposed to the full horrors of war and suffered massive sensory overload.
One by one, now, the other little ones were stepping into the sun’s dying light. Mike saw their horribly blank expressions, the empty zombie-like stares.
“You should go,” the first boy said, his voice toneless, without inflection.
“Why should I leave? I’ve only just come out.”
“Go away from here. Leave this town.”
“You’ll die if you don’t,” another child muttered. Her pretty face was tarnished only by the complete lack of expression there.
For Mike, it made the words seem all the more frightening.
“Oh, just forget it,” cried the youth. He twisted to inspect the brooding shelter again, in an attempt to dismiss the obnoxious kids; after all, it was the shelter that had brought him outside in the first place. At close quarters the structure reminded Mike of a giant shoebox: flat roofed and featureless. Undoubtedly a relic from WWII. Too costly to demolish, it had remained there─a building without a purpose─a folly to mankind’s greater follies.
Mike began to navigate his way around the outside of the building. No grass grew in its immediate vicinity: the bare earth was smooth, compacted by more than sixty years of curious footsteps. The shelter wasn’t quite as bland as he had first thought; the walls were covered with graffiti, from absurd declarations of love to infantile attempts at smutty humour. The words and doodles were faded now, as if attempts had recently been made to scrub them all away.
When he turned the first corner of the old building, Mike glanced back to discover that the four miserable children had vanished, like phantoms in the dusk. He shrugged his shoulders and carried on.
Upon reaching the other end of the shelter, the boy came across the concrete projection he had earlier mistaken for a man. Two metres tall, it looked like the letter ‘V’ in section. Its open end faced the main structure and terminated a metre from the shelter wall. The pillar had obviously been placed there to deflect potential bomb blasts from that part of the building. Sure enough, Mike spotted a bricked-up doorway in the wall, directly opposite the ‘V’. He guessed it had eventually been sealed up to keep out tramps and delinquents.
The youth moved on, intending to do a full circuit of the old shelter before calling it a day. As he turned the next corner, however, he again spied figure. It stood near a lightning blasted tree at the very edge of the park: a man, hands in pockets and dressed in dark clothing. And he appeared to be looking in Mike’s direction.
“Not again,” the boy murmured.
He glanced away. When he looked back, the dark shape had vanished.
Only to reappear somewhere else. Mike was sure he could now make out the figure amongst some shrubs further along the wood’s edge. The man seemed to have company, too. There appeared to be another form stood beside him.
Mike suddenly changed his mind about walking all the way around the shelter. Instead, he swallowed hard and turned, heading back to investigate the bricked-up doorway. The evening light was fading fast but he could plainly see that some of the bricks near the base of the sealed opening were a different shade to the others. The mortar, too, looked fresher there. Maybe it was just an innocent repair job but it had aroused Mike’s suspicion. The area taken up by the different bricks was roughly square, and, if those bricks were to be removed, the resulting space would be just big enough for a man to squeeze through on his belly.
Could somebody have gained access to the shelter recently and then sealed it back up? What if something valuable was stashed away in there? The boy had to know.
The mortar flaked away too easily when Mike scraped at it with his fingernail. He found a stick, and, sitting on the bare earth in the gathering darkness, scooped away at the sandy mixture. Before long, the boy had loosened a brick and pulled it out, setting it down on the ground before him. Soon after that, he had removed three bricks. Hesitantly, he reached for the hole in the wall.
A long sigh issued from somewhere behind the youth. He peeped over his shoulder but there was only the ‘V’-shaped pillar, yawning towards the boy as if to enfold him in its concrete embrace. He crawled over and poked his head round the corner of the pillar. Nothing there. No-one to be seen anywhere. Turning back to face the shelter, he took a deep breath and poked his hand through the opening.
At first, his fingers touched only a bare concrete floor and he began to suspect that his search would be fruitless. However, after feeling around a little longer, his hand suddenly brushed against a number of objects: thin, cold and damp. He strained and reached further inside, probing and squeezing the items in an attempt to figure out what they were.
Sticks. Nothing but smooth, damp sticks wrapped in cloth. After a few seconds of struggling, the youth managed to curl his hand around a bunch of the smaller ones. He gripped and pulled. The bundle shifted a little but seemed to be caught up in some larger mass.
Bracing himself against the shelter, Mike tugged harder. The bunch of sticks still wouldn’t budge. He tensed his muscles one final time and yanked as hard as he could. Something gave way with a tearing sound. His hand shot out of the hole, clutching a skeletal arm. The limb was sheathed in a mouldy sleeve that might once have been pale blue. The skin had peeled back from the hand like old vellum, exposing withered muscle and tendon.
Mike dropped the thing with a strangled cry. He staggered back, the contents of his stomach poised to leave his body.
Another sigh emanated from somewhere over the boy’s shoulder.
Mike twisted and spotted the children; not the little ones he had seen in the playground but a dozen or more hunched teenagers, their faces obscured by hoods. They began to advance towards him. Closer. Closer. The boy saw no limb movements─the shapes seemed to glide inexorably across the ground. Aghast, he stared at the ghostly youths, unable to move, subject to their unfathomable scrutiny.
And then they were close enough for Mike to see the expressions on their waxen faces, to see their pleading eyes, and their dead-fish mouths fixed open in silent screams.
“W-what do you want?”
He was answered only by a frightful silence as the figures halted before him, arms rigid, fingers splayed, like puppets without a master’s hand.
“What have I d-done to you?”
Only silence. Mike remained rooted to the spot, transfixed by their penetrating stares.
And there were others ranged around him, too─shapes lurking behind the hideous youths─several groups of two or three. The demeanours of these newer figures somehow seemed relaxed, as if they were merely participating in some pleasant social function.
“Oh, leave me alone!” he cried, falling to his knees on the compacted dirt. “Please! Please!”
The last sound that Mike heard was the soft whoosh of an axe as it slipped through the air above his head. The youth dropped to the ground and knew no more.
Barely an hour later, the missing bricks had been replaced in the shelter, together with fresh mortar. The old building and its surroundings were silent, the park as deserted as ever.
All that Mike Philips had ever wanted was company and friendship.
Well, the boy would never be alone again. He finally had the company he always wanted. Because now, he was embraced in the arms of the local youth, snug in the silent depths of the old air raid shelter─the latest victim of the pro-active, pre-emptive, Yellowbridge Neighbourhood Watch.

BACK TO TOP