A Holiday To Remember (Completed)

That summer, we drove up to the cabin in the hills. My parents liked to ‘get away from it all’. What they meant by ‘all’ was stuff my brother couldn’t do without, like broadband and TV and pizza delivery.

On the fourth day we went ‘exploring’. It wasn’t exactly a Burke and Wills type project, seeing as how we had four-wheel drive, satnav, a map, mobile phones and an Esky the size of a coffin. Plus a whingey twelve year-old with his head wired to an iPod.

After an hour or so Dad said “Let’s give this a whirl,” and turned off the road onto a downward-winding dirt track. Eventually it levelled out and we found ourselves in a valley. It was hotter down there. Mum cranked the air-con up. The track ran alongside a dry creek; off among the scrub I glimpsed sag-roofed buildings and the ribs of old fences.

“What is this place?”

“Dunno,” Mum said.”There’s nothing on the map.”

And then we came to a stretch of crooked, bleached-white fences, and standing behind it was a horse with a boy on its back. They were completely motionless, even though flies clouded the horse’s head. The boy had hair like black snakes, and wore only a frayed pair of cut-offs. We were past them in a second. I looked back, but they were lost in our dust. No one said anything, which I thought was kind of weird.

I dozed off, I don’t know for how long. I woke up when the Toyota lurched and the first thing I saw was the same rickety fence and the boy on the horse. His dark eyes met mine as we passed.

“Are we lost?” I said. “We’re going round in circles.”

“No we’re not,” Mum said.

“Yes we are,” I said. “We passed that kid on the horse a while ago.”

Dad squinted at me in the mirror. “What kid?”

Mum turned and looked at me. “What horse?” she said.

“You know the kid with the black snake-like hair and the rugged brown horse he is riding,” I mumbled trailing off to a stop when the sentence was over.

Mum and Dad eyed me with worried eyes and even my brother paused his iPod just to check that I wasn’t sleep talking again.

The ride home was very slow and wet. It had begun to rain along the muddy back road. It was the start of a storm, a very big and dangerous storm, with great gusts of wind and loud roars of thunder and lightening.

We got back to the house in the middle of the afternoon. It had already gotten dark from the big storm, so we had to enter the very old, groaning front door and find our way back to the rooms that we bagged at the start of the trip.

My room seemed oddly different in a strange sort of way, like someone had been in here while we were away. Some of my things were on top of my bed even though I remember putting them away in the top draw of my dresser. I turned on my light and on my bed with eyes as black as night, was the boy with the snake like hair.

He stared at me without blinking or saying a word. He seemed to want something, but didn’t know how to ask. He began to say something in his screechy voice. It sounded like a threat meant to frighten someone off. He spoke in an unusual tongue that fit very well with his voice. And without another word or sound he vanished.

In the morning my Dad came in to wake me up, he had a fantastic idea to go out to the farm house with the crooked bleached-white fence. My face turned to horror and I could hear the sudden scraping of the air coming in and out of my throat. For a brief second I could have sworn I saw the boy at the side of my dads’ right arm with a face splitting smile on his very skeleton like face.

To my dismay the trip was much shorter then I remembered. When we got there no-one wanted to waste time listening to me making excuses about not going in. Instead they just rushed inside, pulling me along behind them. Hesitating a bit I took the first steps into the old, white house.

The house was dark and creepy. Every time I took a step I could hear another pair of feet close behind me. I came to a small, dark room, almost hidden behind a closet door. When I flicked the light switch on all I could see and smell was the reek and oozing of blood smearing the walls and dripping onto the floor.

To my surprise the blood spelt out two very strange words, ‘THE LAKE’. There was a big window right next to where this was written. I looked out the window and there it was a beautiful lake in the houses backyard.

I walked outside in a sluggish sort of way, with my eyes locked on the boys’ skeleton like face. He stepped closer to me and croked my name, before he took another step. Every step he took made his face turn more and more skeleton like. To my surprise he started to speak English. He said to me. “You are the key. I can’t go to the after life unless you say some special words.”

While he was saying this he continued to walk closer to me. By now his face was just skin and bones. He and his horse were just two skeleton creatures stalking closer and closer.

Before I could think I whispered the words. “I am not afraid of you”.

At that moment, their bodies started to crumple and within seconds they both had turned to dust.

I ran to the car. “I will never forget this holiday”, I thought.

And I never did.