Revenge of the Manitou

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He woke up during the night and he was sure there was someone in his room.

He froze, not daring to breathe, his eight-year-old fingers clutching the candy-striped sheet right up to his nose. He strained his eyes and his ears in the darkness, looking and listening for the slightest movement, the slightest squeak of floorboards. His pulse raced silently and endlessly, a steeplechase of boyish terror that ran up every artery and down every vein.

“Daddy” he said, but the word came out so quietly that nobody could have heard him. His parents were sleeping right down at the other end of the corridor, and that meant safety was two doors and thirty feet away, across a gloomy landing where an old grandfather clock ticked, and where even in daytime there was a curious sense of solitude and suffocating stillness.

He was sure he could hear somebody sighing, or breathing. Soft, suppressed sighs, as if they meant sadness, or pain. It may have been nothing more than the rustle of the curtains, as they rose and fell in the draft from the half-open window. Or it may have been the sea, sliding and whispering over the dark beach, just a half-mile away.

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