We stared up at the spoon balanced on the top edge of the mirror frame.

‘What’s it doing up there?’said Freddy

‘It’s being a spoon,’ I said, ‘but in the wrong place. The question is, Freddy, why did you put it up there?’

‘Me? I didn’t put it up there. You must have.’

‘No, not me. Why would I do that?’

‘I don’t know. I only know that I didn’t put it there.’

‘If you didn’t and I didn’t, who did?’

‘The cat?’

We both looked at the cat, asleep on the sofa, paws in the air. We agreed that he was an unlikely suspect. Mr. Socks had never shown any interest in spoons, unless they were being used to serve him food.

I pulled a chair over in front of the mirror, climbed up and got the spoon down. I thought that would be the end of it, but then there was this other problem.

‘It isn’t even one of our spoons.’

Freddy took it from me and made a face.

‘Torquay,’ he said.

I took it back. It was a cheap souvenir spoon, with a shield at the top of the handle which had a sailing ship on a white enamel background and a banner underneath in blue enamel, reading ‘Torquay.’

‘I’ve never been there,’ I said.

‘It’s nice,’ he said. ‘The English Riviera.’

‘How did it get here?’

I looked up thinking that there might be a crack in the ceiling it had fallen through, but there was no such thing. I shrugged my shoulders.

‘I’ll put it in the bag with the things for the charity shop. Unless you want to keep it.’

Freddy shook his head, and that was all we said on the matter. Freddy took the bag to the charity shop that afternoon and we forgot our little mystery.

The next day the spoon turned up in the cutlery drawer — a more reasonable place to find a spoon, but still.

‘I thought this went to the charity shop,’ I said. ‘Why did you put it in here?’

Freddy dropped the toast he was eating.

‘I didn’t,’ he said.

He came over and took it from me.
‘Are you playing tricks?’ he said.

‘I am not. Why would I do that? It’s a bloody silly trick. What’s the point of it?’

‘So who put it here?’

‘There’s you, me and the cat. It’s not me, and Mr Socks doesn’t have the energy for tricks.’

‘It isn’t me.’

‘Then who is coming into our house with strange spoons, and why?’

Neither of us had an answer to that one.

On my way to work I stopped on the bridge over the River Lost and dropped the spoon into the water, followed by a couple of pennies because I was brought up in a superstitious household, and knew that if you took a liberty with a river you had to make a payment to it, one way or another.

I should have paid more.

The river did not keep the spoon.

In the morning I was dressing when I head Freddy shriek. I ran downstairs without my trousers on and found him standing in the kitchen staring at the breakfast table. All around on the floor lay the bits and pieces we had left there the night before — some of my papers, a mug, a tulip and the vase it was sitting in, the last survivor of a bunch from a few days ago. The only thing on the table was that spoon.

Its shallow bowl was filled with water, and a scrap of water weed clung to the handle.

We stared at it for a while, then rationality took hold of Freddy at last.

‘It’s only a spoon, what are we afraid of? Just a cheap, ugly teaspoon. Fear of spoons. There’s probably a word for it.

‘Koutaliaphobia,’ I said. I had been giving all of this far too much thought.

‘You’re right,’ I said. ‘What are we afraid of? A bloody stupid spoon.’

Freddy picked it up, took it outside and dropped it into the dustbin. We had a good laugh at ourselves, and I went back upstairs to put on my trousers. Freddy found me there a minute later, staring at the bed.

The spoon. On Freddy’s pillow.

He swore more in those few seconds than I have ever heard him swear before. Grabbing the spoon, he strode to the window, opened it and hurled the thing into the garden as hard as he could.

‘And stay out!’ he yelled, slamming the window shut.

He turned back into the room and took one step away, then the window shattered behind him. when we finished screaming we saw the spoon embedded an inch deep in the ceiling above Freddy’s head.

**

The glazier was just finishing the new windowpane when I brought him a mug of tea (strong, two sugars). He pointed upwards.

‘Why is there a spoon in the ceiling?’ he asked.

‘Good question.’

‘Shall I pull it out for you?’

‘No,’ I said. ‘It’s best to leave it alone.”

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘It’s in pretty far. I suppose it might bring the ceiling down with it.’

‘Yes indeed, it might.’

‘I’m here to chop off your head’ the bloody butcher said.

Elaine Edgeworthy did not know who the middle-aged man she allowed into her office, but she was mildly intrigued. A few minutes ago he had arrived at he entrance to the museum, which was the gift shop, of course, and said he had a donation for the museum. It was a very irregular way to donate, but his surname got him through to her office.

‘Mr Bird,’ she said, ‘do come in.’

He did so with difficulty, as he was carrying a large cardboard box, which he deposited on her desk, scattering paperwork.

‘Ms Edgeworthy,’ he said, ‘good of you to see me.’

‘Forgive me for asking,’ she said, ‘but are you related to Anthony Bird?’

‘My grandfather.’

The smile that came with his answer was not filled with pride, but was ambiguous and with a hint of pain as it faded, probably due to the family history, thought Elaine, but she regarded the box with hungry curiosity. Whatever was in there, if it was in any way connected with Anthony Bird, Shuckleigh’s only respectable famous person, a painter of international repute, then it would be of real importance.

‘You won’t survive the night,’ said the dame by candlelight.

‘I beg your pardon?’

‘These are some…toys my grandfather made for my father. I want the museum to have them, but only on the condition that they stay here, and aren’t lent out anywhere.’

Though she was quivering with excitement, Elaine tried to retain an appearance of calm and grace.

‘May I?’ she said, indicating the box.

‘Of course.’

Elaine pulled away the tape holding the top flaps of the box together. Mr Bird, she noticed, took a step backwards, as if he was afraid that something might jump out at him.

‘Oh,’ she said, surprised at the jumble of things in the box. They were glove puppets with papier mache heads and fabric bodies. She reached in and took out the topmost one.

‘Be careful,’ said Mr Bird. ‘That blade is quite sharp.’

The puppet had a lumpy red face. He wore a striped apron spattered with red paint and, stitched to one hand, a cleaver cut from a piece of metal and liberally painted red along its blade.

‘Um,’ said Elaine.

‘That’s the butcher,’ said Mr Bird. ‘My grandfather didn’t believe in childish children’s toys — but you know, when you’re a boy, you do like horrors.’

Elaine laid the butcher on her desk, not sure she liked the look on his face, and finding it hard to reconcile this somewhat barbaric object with the cool, tightly controlled elegance of Anthony Bird’s abstract paintings. Something else was at work here.

The next puppet was an evil-faced woman. In her hand was a candlestick, complete with a wax candle that had a flame made from a bit of yellow foil.

Bird had taken another step back.

‘Are you sure you want to part with these?’ asked Elaine. They were a real win for the museum, but she felt uneasy. ‘They must have been an important part of your childhood, and your father’s.’

‘No, no. They’ve been in the attic for years, but then they started talking to me, and I just don’t want them around any more.’

‘Talking?’

He shook his head and laughed, a jagged sound.

‘You must think — no — memories and all that, I suppose. There was a rhyme went with them. I could hear it in my head. Memories and all that.’

He had taken another step backwards as he spoke, and avoided looking at the puppets laid on Elaine’s desk. She peered into the box and reached for the next.

‘Well, I’ll be going,’ he said. ‘Must rush, and all that.’

Elaine parted her lips to offer him coffee so that they could talk about the donation and any ideas he might have for display, but he was out of the door before she could form a single syllable.

‘Your nightmare’s come to play,’ said the devil of the day.

Bird could still hear them, even as he walked away.

Elaine reached into the box for the next puppet, and almost dropped it in surprise. The face of an angry red devil grinned at her, his face twisted and misshapen. A red heart was stitched to one of his hands — not a sweet symbol of love, but a small anatomically correct bodily organ, painted blood still dripping from its arteries.

Bird said that boys like horrors, but Elaine wondered what sort of father would supply horrors like these to his son.

There was a sheet of paper in the box, yellow with age. Elaine picked it out between finger and thumb and turned it over. On it was written the rhyme that Mr Bird had mentioned. Whose handwriting, Elaine wondered. If it was Anthony Bird’s then this was quite a valuable piece of paper. Research would have to be done. In fact, there might be a book in this — a reappraisal of the artist in the light of these disturbing pieces. Both Anthony Bird and his son had committed suicide at the age of fifty-one. A disturbing light shone on these ‘toys’.

She thought she heard a noise from within the box, a thin whimper. Imagination, surely. Inside was one remaining puppet, lying face down.

Bird drove to the east, away from the town and his obligations, with nothing in his car that was not his and his alone. He could still hear them but the further away he drove, the fainter their voices became. The family house and all its contents were sold to some crazy people who wanted to make a museum of it, the home of the great artist. The money, he wouldn’t keep it, going to a suitable charity. He wanted nothing to link him back to that place.

Elaine noticed a tremour in her hand as she reached for the last puppet. It had the face of a boy, not misshapen like the others, but almost a portrait. He was wide-eyed, his mouth open in a silent scream, and in the middle of his chest there was a painted gaping wound as if his heart had been torn out.

The demon puppet seemed to laugh and wave its bloody trophy, and then the boy really did scream and Elaine heard the final piece of the rhyme.

‘The boy will not grow old, his heart is dead and cold
And once it stops a-beating, will make for finest eating.’

The puppet twisted in her hand. She felt a black tunnel closing in on her and for the first time in her life she almost fainted. The piece of paper crumbled into a hundred pieces.

‘No, no, no,’ she murmured, dropping the puppet and scrabbling to gather the bits of paper together, to salvage a valuable document.

Crossing the border into the next county, Bird felt peace fall upon him, and knew he was free to enjoy life beyond his next birthday.

There was something slithering around my bedroom in the dark, a fragment of nothingness whispering across the walls. I sat up. There it was again — darker darkness on the periphery of my vision, sliding away. I clicked on the bedside light and it was gone.

For a couple of weeks now I had been half seeing this thing. A black spider running across a surface near my hand, a mouse shadow running into a corner, something falling from the ceiling — and always nothing there when I turned to look.

There was something wrong with my vision.

The optician said everything was fine.

So. There was something wrong with my mind.

I could have sought help, but it seemed a trivial matter, the illusion of small shadows. I chose to try to ignore it.

Sometimes I thought it might have been a real spider — one that ran very fast and hid when I looked for it. At other times perhaps it was just a misinterpretation of ordinary shadows moving as I turned my head. After all, the world as we see it only exists inside our minds. What is actually out there — well, I don’t want to think about that.

I began to manage the problem of the moving shadows quite well. When I noticed them, and you can’t not notice movement in the corner of your vision, I trained myself not to look. I hoped to train myself not to see it at all, but it wanted to be noticed, and hated to be ignored. The little black scrap started to scurry across the desk in front of me too fast for me to see what it really was, or to run over my feet and into the corner of the room.

I am not a nervous person, but this was turning me into one. I began to think I saw it even when it was not there. Any little unexpected movement would make me jump. It was like having mice, except that it didn’t eat my biscuits. The only thing for it was to get the exterminator in.

Charlie the exorcist moved around my flat as if looking for the spoor of my infestation.

‘I’m not picking anything up,’ he said. ‘That doesn’t always mean there’s nothing here, though. I’ll give the whole place a good clean out.’

He spent four hours chanting, ringing bells, thrusting smoking bundles of ritual herbs into every corner. The place seemed different when he left, calmer, emptier. I relaxed.

But he had missed a spot.

The shadow was back again that night, flitting past my feet while I was trying to watch TV. The more I ignored it the more often it appeared. This thing meant for me to pay attention to it, which suggested it had thoughts and feelings — a suggestion that I placed firmly out of sight at the back of my mind.

I refused to look at the racing black spot. Then it stopped on the floor in front of my feet. I kept my eyes on the TV screen, but my whole consciousness was focussed on the tiny patch of darkness on the carpet. Even so, when it moved it took me by surprise, darting forward onto the toe of my slipper and up my leg.

I screamed and jumped up, dusting away at my trousers to get the thing off me.

After a minute of noisy panic, I searched for it. I couldn’t see it on me, or on the floor. Running into the bedroom, I pulled off all my clothes and examined myself all over in the mirror, but found no dark marks. I threw my clothes into the bath and ran the cold water until they were drowned. Over the sink I combed my hair through and through and looked in my eyes and mouth for any sign of it. If I had swallowed it what was I to do?

Shivering, naked, my clothes soaked, I stood in the bathroom wondering what the hell was wrong with me. I have never been afraid of spiders or insects yet here I was becoming hysterical over a tiny patch of nothing.

Later that night I was made aware of my mistake. It was not in my drowned clothes or in my hair, but had made its escape into my bedroom when I threw my clothes onto the floor. Now it was running over the walls, mocking me. I slept on the sofa instead, waking every now and then to check whether it had followed me. Whatever it was, inside my head or outside, it was not going to be easy to get rid of it. I could move house, but I suspected that it would be as persistent as bedbugs, hitching a lift in my luggage. Whatever it was, it was mine.

The next evening I sat on the sofa reading a book and watching it out of the corner of my eye, scooting around the room, approaching closer and closer until it stopped by my feet again. Holding my breath and my nerve I waited. I was terrified — a little black dot and it took all my strength not to run away.

It hopped onto my slipper and rested there a moment, then began to climb my trouser leg. I gritted my teeth and did not react. It went out of sight for a second, then popped onto the right hand page of my book. I stared directly at it, a speck of dark awareness focussed on me, nothing but an absence of reflected light.

‘Hello,’ I said.

I held my hand out to it and it zipped across the page, coming to rest in the centre of my palm. There was nothing to feel, no tickle, no tingle of presence, but I swear it curled up a bit tighter and made itself at home there.

Sometimes other people see it on me for a fleeting second. They take it for a spider or other bug.

‘There’s nothing there,’ I say, but there is, always scooting across my skin. My companion. I am still afraid of it. One day it may burrow into my flesh and show its true purpose, but until then I must think of it as a friend. I call it Spot, and try to smile.