Joanna

Joanne

As a kid, I used to babysit for a family friend. They lived in an old terraced cottage. The road on which the house sat only had houses on one side. To the back they had a garden that disappeared into a sloping decline, which led to what we used to call, as kids, a dell.

The house itself was old-fashioned even then; they hadn’t painted, so the walls still had old white paint, and there were exposed beams painted black with a tar-like substance.

On the walls, there was one of those pictures of a woman that you used to get in the early 80s. On either side, there were these brass trinkets. Something to do with horses, I think. Just that really.

At some point, they’d had a picture of a boy, a creepy thing it was. They got rid of it when a rumour went around that anywhere housing such a thing had burnt down.

I would always be dropped off by my parents, and at the end of a night, the parents of the children would pay me and for a taxi to take me home. It was a good gig. There was always food, and they gave me cigarettes as well.

 

 

… First, I heard a voice, faint, shaky….’ Mark?’ too distant sounding to be real, too thin… I heard a creak on the stairs, unnerved, I looked at the door. The handle started to move, slowly. Then the door swung open, and there stood William, 6 years old, fully clothed.

 

‘William, ’ I said, ‘Are you ok?’

He looked at me and pointed up the stairs,

‘Joanna’, he said quietly.

 

I got up from the couch and walked over to where he stood.

I looked up the stairs and saw nothing, and then came Joanna, she walked to the top of the stairs, looked down at me and held 1 finger to her lips.

 

‘Shh’ she was telling me, and then she was gone, disappeared by a shadow.

 

I tried to run up the stairs, but my legs betrayed me. My knees buckled. I turned to William and said, ‘I’ll be back in a minute, William. You stay there’

I then started to make my way up the stairs.

I then felt the cold; I saw my breath in the air before me. A chill ran down my spine. This isn’t real, I thought.

 

It felt like a lifetime walking up those stairs. I finally got to the top and opened Joanna’s bedroom door, and there she was, in bed, soundly asleep. Relieved, I breathed out and turned around. I waved at William at the bottom of the stairs to say all is fine when I heard a voice, ‘Mark?’ I turned to the source and saw William in his pyjamas, rubbing his eyes, standing in his bedroom doorway.

 

Panicked, I turned my head to the bottom of the stairs.

N,o William, just a silhouette of a man fading to shadow.