Dark Places

There Be Dragons

That's how the dragons get in and out. My cousin told me so.

I think I was 9 at the time. He was older than me. 16 and loving scaring his younger protégé. Of course I believed him. I also believed in Santa and the Tooth Fairy.

Even now, an adult, I can't sit in the bath with my back to the taps. I have to be facing it. I have to be able to keep watch on it.

At the sink, it's the same - though I don't get a bath in the basin. But, when I'm brushing my teeth or washing my face, I'm always a little wary.

The overflow. A little hole (or group of holes with the grill on the bath). An innocent aperture happily guzzling the excess water from when you fill up the sink or bath too much.

The overflow. Dragon swallowing entrance to the Underworld.

You'd think that, now I'm all grown up, it wouldn't worry me. You'd think I'd be fine. Technically, it's just a hole to prevent the water overflowing. It kind of does what it says on the tin - or the ceramic. It's nothing. A rather ingeniously simple method of ensuring you didn't have to swim out of your bathroom.

What is there to be afraid of, hmmm?

Well. There's the voices, of course.

Low. Not much more than a whisper. Just enough to be able to understand what they say.

Voices that tell me I'm going to die. Voices that tell me my world is going to end. Not the world. My world.

Subtle, yet significant, difference there.

I'm not paranoid. I don't hear voices. OK, perhaps I do. But I mean, I am not one of these fruit-loops who say the voices in their head are telling them to take a knife to their wife. Or a gun to the local shopping centre. I'm not a lunatic.

Besides, the voices are not in my head, so I can't be crazy.

They're in the overflow.

No, really.

Of course, I don't really believe there be dragons in that there overflow. Not at all. I told you, I'm not crazy. That'd be silly. Besides, it's too small to fit a fully grown, fire breathing dragon in there. But there ARE voices.

The first time I heard them was about three weeks ago. It was morning. I was brushing my teeth, probably wondering if the cup of tea I'd already made was going to be too cold. I often did that. Made a cuppa and got so tied up in doing 'stuff' that it wouldn't be warm enough to drink by the time I got back to it.

I was spitting and rinsing. Leaned over. There was no 'Hello, how are you?' or any such introduction.

"You're going to die."

Succinct, don't you think? Why use ten words or more, when a snappy little phrase would do just as well.

I almost hit my head on the tap, I stood so fast. I looked around. I was alone in my house. My wife had taken the children to school and I didn't have to leave for a good twenty minutes. Still, I looked out onto the landing.

"Hello?"

There was no answer. There wouldn't be. I'd imagined it.

Two days passed. Two silent days of normality, when I realised my mind had been playing tricks and was just trying to scare me, the little tinker.

Then.

"You're going to die."

It was evening. I was washing my hands after a particularly long stretch on the loo. Well, I will take my phone in there and jump between Facebook, Twitter and whichever book I'm reading at the time.