The old man had died three months before she bought the house and it had lain empty. Only one careful owner for a 1935 semi! - well two, a couple, old Tom outliving his wife.

The pre-war house, a three bedroomed semi-detached, appealed as a dead ringer for the stuccoed house of her war-time childhood; in the alarms and excursions of that time of bombs and air-raid shelters, she’d been childishly happy. This was cheap - lethal gas fires, shudderingly awful bathroom, tiny scullery kitchen with a rotted floor.

She camped in one room after another as the house was slowly renovated to a standard acceptably healthy. She tidied the overgrown front garden, planting a rosemary hedge to divide her mossy greenery from her neighbours’ immaculate paving-with-pots for their two gleaming BMWs. Her battered estate lived in the road; she wouldn’t sacrifice even a few feet of shabby green/flowers space for the benefit of a metal utensil.

But the back! - in amongst brambles, blackcurrant bushes and greying lavender squatted THE SHED, like a cave, a hermitage, a tumbledown blackness of slipping indeterminate outline, edges blurred, an old shape-shifter hunkered down against East Anglian winds and rain. She avoided it for months.

Finally, one bright sunny day, she pushed open the low sagging door against unnamed obstacles and bending down peered into the grey light and dark shadows. It smelt of damp and decay, a musty vegetable smell - or rats, mice? Ducking her head, she stepped down over the rotted threshold. Nervously she switched on her torch, dreading to see its light reflected in little glittering eyes. Everything inside had the same shapeless outline, blurred by layers of anonymous rags, clothing, dirt, nests? She stamped one foot, gently, on the earth floor and waited. Nothing seemed to scuttle or rustle or flutter - she was prepared to run. She slowly turned her head and her torch. Inside the door an upright, shoulder-high shape made her start and flinch away. It didn’t move and in the torchlight she could see it was an old mangle propped up on bricks and dressed in layers of grey-green, blackish clothes - she could make out cardigans and jackets, rotting as they hung, waiting to be worn for a stint in the garden. She ‘d leave that for now - old Tom seemed a bit too close.

Steeling herself she swung her torch round: cans, pots, buckets, broken tools, seed packets on nails, rags and string, festoons of dead plants, all darkened with dirt and cobwebs, pushed and hung and piled up to fill every wall, ledge and floor space. Anything could lurk in or under anything, live undisturbed for years. She glimpsed a few bricks, an old sledgehammer, a few terra-cotta plant pots - these could be rescued, if she could bring herself to disturb the blackened heaps and piles to reach them.

She gritted her teeth and shuffled, edged forward with both feet to get nearer to an old enamel bucket which was sitting upside down in a bit of a space. She reached forward the full extent of her right arm, her left hand ready, shakily, with the torch. She gripped the rusty base of the bucket, trying to lift it towards her but it slipped out of her grasp and fell over. Her torch shone into the black space and she swallowed a scream, registering a huge sickly yellow slimily pulsating something where the bucket had been...

She backed out through the door into the sunlight, breathing heavily, her mouth dry, her heart thumping so heavily she felt sick. What the hell was that?

After a horrified moment or two she forced herself slowly back into the gloom, letting the shaking torchlight slowly scrape the cluttered floor towards the yellow horror, squinting through slit eyes, wanting/not wanting to see. With that small shock we get when we recognise another unexpected living creature in our space, she saw it was an enormous toad, flat, squat, pulsating, ugly, hideous, malevolent, alien. Sickness in her throat, she backed out again very slowly and jammed the door as firmly shut as she could, breathing deeply in the sunlight.

She couldn’t go back in. She warned the builders hired to pull the shed down about possible livestock. She stayed away all day.

ASmith © February 2002

^return to top