It had been a dreadful year. My Uncle had sadly drowned the previous April, and my Aunt and young cousin Thomas were staying with us over Christmas and into the first week of the New Year.

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Thomas was only seven and easily bored. He wasn’t used to the countryside, its stillness, its weathered moods and dark days. He’d never heard the call of a hunting owl, the sudden glottal rasp of a pheasant or a barking fox. He was weaned on television, with a background of traffic and artificial light. His hair was still baby white, and his skin had an unhealthy anemic pallor. He moaned a lot, had tantrums. We didn’t possess a television and I encouraged him to play games or build something with Lego to which he remained indifferent. I showed him how to build a catapult and magically shrink crisp packets under the grill.  He cried at bedtime when the lights went out and the darkness wrapped us up.

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It was Tuesday, ‘New Years Eve Eve’ when Mother suggested I take Thomas for a walk, to get some air, to ‘put some colour in his cheeks’, “Perhaps take him through the woods to the old bunker, you could catch newts by Bomb Crater Pond?, Be careful”, she added smiling, as a vaguely responsible afterthought. She packed us ham and pickle sandwiches and slices of Christmas cake wrapped in foil and I took my new Polaroid camera along with a colander and two jam jars.

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Thomas hardly spoke as he kicked at frosted leaves in the woods; he barely looked up, his chin sunk into his scarf and hands sulked deep in his pockets, reflecting his displeasure. When he did speak, he moaned about the wind and whimpered that the cold hurt his eyes. 

Bomb Crater Pond was a hundred yards across a fallow field from the edge of the wood. You couldn’t see it directly but next to it was an old octagonal concrete bunker built during World War II. I was always apprehensive about the bunker with its dark narrow entrance and small recessed windows. Inside, the floor was uneven with years of dirt, empty cans and bottles. The walls were scribbled with graffiti, ‘Yeah Maan’, ’Clapton Is God’, ‘Up The Gunners’, ’Black Sabbath’. I didn’t know what any of these things meant, their phrases belonging to the older boys from the nearest village, but they held a sort of uneasy power; a line between childhood and adolescence.

Last summer, I dragged a broken straw bale inside and set light to it using a half empty can of red diesel and the big kitchen matches that mother used to re-light the Aga. I sat on the roof as flames licked through the windows and purged the graffiti with soot. I worried that the fire would spread, that some stray glowing stalk would be lofted into the air and set fire to the stubble. My ear was tuned searching for the distant sound of a fire engine, but no one came. Still, a little panic rose in me and I carefully jumped down when I heard bottles crack in the heat and went to stand by the bunker entrance to watch. At its most intense, the fire sucked air through the door with a breath that moaned. 
Regretting my action, I waited until dusk until I was sure it was out; tentatively stepping inside with the soot-caked walls still radiating heat. Peering round the corner to where I'd dragged the bale, I was met with a pulsing sea of red eyes; embers in the blackened dark, like I'd awoken a monster.

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~

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Gratefully, Thomas's demeanour changed when we got to Bomb Crater Pond. He strode around the ponds’ edge where the water was shallow and threaded with decaying rushes; and delighted in breaking areas of ice with his heels. He watched, fascinated, as liquid bubbles moved strangely under the broken ice. It was there that I took the photograph of him standing between the dark entrance to the old bunker and the pond. The camera whirred and spat out the grey Polaroid, and I quickly hid it under the dark of my new coat for a minute to let it develop.

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Thomas walked up to me with his head on one side smiling in anticipation. His cheeks were flushed red and his breath was visible in the air. Without looking, I took the photograph from under my coat and showed him. He took a half step back and his eyes flickered in confusion as if looking beyond the image to somewhere else, as if a long forgotten memory had been triggered, and then he screamed in wide-eyed, raw terror, emitting a noise which I didn’t think it was possible for a person to make. Thomas ran. As the sound of his footfall receded across the field, I turned my hand slowly to look at the image.

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~

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I ran too, across the empty field away from the overgrown, crooked bunker and the half-frozen hollow of Bomb Crater Pond, into the cruel spindle of trees, looking for the trampled mark of the bridleway that led back to the road. My black coat, undone, flapped at my back, and the shallow incline into the darker trees carried me with a greater momentum than my legs could barely keep pace with. Headlong through the twisted wood, looking straight ahead, my imagination conjured unnatural movements at the edge of my vision.

This wasn’t the way we came, but desperate to escape to the light, I vaulted a stile in a fence line, towards where the trees looked less threatening, thinner, the sky brighter, but my boot caught the top of the stile, and I fell face first into the cold leaves and hard mud. Blood pulsed in my ears.

For a moment, I was too frightened to move; my eye took in the close detail of the ground, the patterns of frost on a brown skeleton of a decaying hornbeam leaf; the pale afternoon winter sun flickered through the empty trees and the world felt distant and still. It was then that I realised I’d left the colander, the empty newt jars, and my camera by Bomb Crater Pond. I’d have to summon the courage to go back or face the daunting prospect of Mother’s wrath.

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Then I heard it, a shuffle in the cold leaves coming closer. A dragged foot. I tried to stifle my heavy breathing when the wooden stile behind me creaked. I must have passed out; my memory of exactly what happened next, shut down by terror.

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~

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Thomas was never found. It was national news. Bomb Crater Pond was grimly dredged. Hedgerows, still ditches, thickets, dark weirs and rivers were searched for miles around. Suspicion fell on us all and the tabloids heaved with unhelpful and sensationalist speculation.

Police tape cordoned the area off for weeks while every tyre mark, footprint, and item of fly-tipped discarded rubbish was forensically turned over by teams of people in masks and white suits. Police were keen to trace the owner of a white van and two local men were independently arrested ‘on suspicion’ but eventually released without charge.

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I was interviewed with an appropriate adult in attendance, a mousy social worker who only spoke in calm, reassuring tones and a senior detective who read some vetted, pre-prepared questions, suitable for a minor from a card; "Did you see anyone else while you were by the pond?", "Did Thomas ever talk to you about his Dad?", "What was Thomas wearing?". I felt like the questions were designed to catch me out and remember feeling threatened; but I maintained my best butter-wouldn't-melt expression, and shook my head.
I never mentioned the photograph, and when pressed further about my thoughts and had a chance to make a statement, the words all tumbled out at once. I explained that Thomas was acting strange, which was entirely believable; and that something has spooked him and he had ran off. I chased after him but we became separated.

Emboldened and leaning into my story in the moment with my mind galloping, I speculated that perhaps Thomas was thinking of his father and maybe it hadn’t been the best idea to take him somewhere close to water and maybe that’s what upset him.
I didn’t believe this and didn't expect any one else would either, fully expecting everyone to see through this deception. I thought my explanation was childish and naive. Eventually though, this idea became a fragment of an accepted narrative, a definite cause that led to some terrible unknown event, a papered-over version of the truth.

The social worker and the police reassured me that I wasn’t to blame; following the unexpected death of his father; 'he was a troubled child after all'.

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The guilt and shame were hard. I hated Thomas for being so indifferent, thoughtless for how he had vanished and upended our lives, but at the same time, knew it wasn’t his fault. Maybe it was mine. It was I that took the photograph. I who had played a part and felt complicit in manifesting that horror that made him run.

There were whispers, both real and imagined. It was all just too terrible to contemplate what might have happened to him, even though I sort of knew.

Over time, I tried to embrace normality and mundanity, and with greater frequency, it became easier to sidestep the experience in my mind. As I healed through the years of my adolescence, the memory of that late afternoon in the woods, as I lay in the frost and turned tentatively to look back at the stile, became hauntingly clearer.

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Months later, my aunt, barely composed, appeared on light news shows, sometimes with my mother, who held her hand; publicly accusing the police of negligence. “Thomas vanished into thin air. Someone must know something”, she implored, which, of course, they did.

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The camera was taken as evidence, but no one ever questioned that there were only nine blank Polaroids left in the cassette.

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~

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When I got home that day, I called out to Thomas around the house, hoping that he’d made it back home, but I already knew that he wasn’t there. It was a false display both to myself and to anyone I hoped would be within earshot, a way of willing a better truth into being because the one that I had experienced defied causality.

Before I’d even taken my shoes off, I hid the photograph, behind the dust jacket of a random book on a shelf in my room. I couldn’t look at it and no one could ever find it.

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I suffered years of anxiety whenever I was away from the house lest it be found. I spurned school trips and sleepovers. The weight of it grew worse. The clues of what might have happened were there. I thought about burning the photograph or cutting it up with scissors, drawing over it or perhaps scratching it until it was unrecognisable, but every time I contemplated this, it felt as if I would be manifesting more horror on what was already there. Besides, I couldn't bring myself to look at it.

Sometimes, during the day, I’d imagine I would see Thomas; I’d look for his shock of white hair amongst shoppers when we went to the big town. I imagined that perhaps he was well after all, and if we ever recognised each other, it would be our secret. Sometimes, at night, when the wind blew from the east, I’d lie in bed and listen to the dreadful fingernail scratch of the hawthorn against my bedroom window, asking to be let in.

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~

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Years later, when finally I left home for university, and without really consciously thinking about it, I packed the book with the aging photograph hidden inside, into a box of possessions and took it with me.

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Once, I was tempted to share what happened with our family therapist, but as I went to speak my voice faltered into a stutter as if my nervous system forbade me from speaking some fragment of truth. For a moment my eyes would burn and it was during these moments of near confession that the therapist would write something down with a pencil into an open notebook on his lap. Instead, we discussed how to get rid of the past by writing it down and destroying it, which is why, one day, I took the book with the photograph inside and hid it in a corner shelf of the university library. Perhaps, in time, I wanted someone else to find it. Somebody else to carry the horror of it, who might try and put the pieces together, maybe even connect me to the photograph. Maybe that’s what I deserved.

 

~

 

I remember now. That bleak dreadful afternoon while laying half dazed on the cold ground in the wood and the thin light; the trees sucking time from the earth.

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Unbearably, I shifting my body and turning my head slowly towards the shuffling leaves and the creak on the stile. It was Thomas of course, there was no one else in the wood that day, but not Thomas as he had been just 15 minutes before, laughing with delight as he broke the ice with his heels. This was Thomas barefoot and starved thin, covered in scratches, his anaemic hair wild, matted and stained ochre, missing his coat, muddied and bruised with a bloodshot left eye that wasn’t straight, his arm bent at an impossible angle at his side and a strange, horrible misaligned jaw. A desperate, animalistic noise arose from his throat behind malnourished receding gums and a broken grey tooth, a dry rasp and a wet slap as if his lungs were struggling through fluid. His good arm extended slowly, the broken filthy bloodied nails, pointed, accusingly, terrifyingly, at me.

 

The same Thomas from the photograph.