The long dark night of little Tommy Foster

Little Tommy Foster peeked out from underneath the covers of his bed. His duvet was thick and solid and able to deflect anything that the night could throw at him. He was nearly eight years old and this duvet had kept him safe from everything until now. The night had been cruel at points and given him nightmares. The house that he lived in had been mean and played tricks; sometimes he thought that he had heard laughter after his parent had left him to sleep but his mother always told him that he was hearing the television, or a conversation between guests downstairs.

He had never been a nervous child. His parents often brought guests round and Tommy was always most courteous, greeting them with a ‘pleased to meet you’ or a, ‘I’m Thomas, who are you?’ and a smile. The adults seemed to like this in him, although he didn’t understand. It seemed strange to Tommy to tell strangers things like this; he didn’t know if he was pleased to meet them or not, after all. He often wondered if they were secretly cruel people who had forgotten who their friends were, their real imaginary friends that is. He had had one for a while and had heard his parents say that it was ‘just a phase’ but to him it seemed very real.

William (the imaginary name for the imaginary friend) told him that he shouldn’t worry and that he was allowed to do what he wanted, as long as he didn’t make mother or father angry. He believed William whenever he spoke about these things, but he also knew that William wasn’t really there. Mother set another place for him at dinner, but Tommy knew that his meal would never get eaten.

That was the worst of all, watching the meal go cold every day. Tommy could see William and could also see that he wouldn’t eat. But he could also see that mother didn’t like watching the food go to waste. He thought she was terribly practical and that she couldn’t see how important it was to talk to your friends. He sometimes thought about mother’s friends, but he also had trouble understanding what they talked about so he found it hard to concentrate on their chatter.

It was in the middle of one of his mother’s ‘evenings’ that Tommy made his mistake. He was being quiet around the house – father was out – and making the most of William’s company, however this wasn’t really enough tonight. I hope that everyone reading this understands when I say that Tommy was a little restless and that he needed something more than the house he had grown up in to quiet his imagination that night. William was misbehaving, that much is true.

It must have come as quite a shock to watch this young Thomas, nearly eight years old, come barrelling though the lounge at such a pace without warning. You and I know that William had let loose a mouse in the room and that Tommy was doing everything that he could to retrieve this tiny little creature before it escaped and took up permanent residence underneath the sofa forever more. His mother, however, had no such idea of the selflessness of Thomas’s actions and only saw him pelt around the table, his hand catching cups and plates, throwing teas, coffees, garibaldi biscuits and the precious fondant fancies into the air.

Her fury was perhaps shocking to adult eyes. Her guests, however, kept their lips tight and provided no more comment that to turn their heads away. None turned them down, a few looked upwards, and one brave soul dared to tut in disapproval – of the mother or child I do not know.

****

And so little Tommy Foster peeked out from under his thick duvet. It was solid and definite above him, pressing down on his shoulders. William had long since been put away and for the last hour he had tried to gain the remedy of sleep – he had not succeeded.

When he shut his eyes he was struck by the strangest of sensations. It seemed that as his eyelids closed he swelled in size and, with his eyes shut, he could look about his room as though he were a giant. He could see his chest of drawers with the mirror on top, and could gauge how far they were away, but the slightest movement of his hand towards them seemed to cross miles. With his eyes still shut he looked at his feet and though he knew he could see nothing they fled from his sight – with every second they got further away and his body felt longer and longer.

He fought off a sudden dizziness by looking forward again, but with his eyes shut it was no good. He looked forward and pictured what he knew. It was still all there, but something was different; he felt so much larger than the simple objects around him. He knew if he opened his eyes this would change, so he clenched them tighter, but the longer he kept them shut the more dizzy he felt.

Eventually, his head swimming with the strangely delightful effects of this, he opened his eyes and looked around the room. Everything was normal except that his closet was open. This wasn’t of itself unusual as little Tommy Foster was a busy boy, often far too busy to be concerned with the state of his closet – except that there was now a strange blue-white light coming from behind it.

Thomas knew that there were no lights in his closet, only toys, shoes, and boxes of things he had made when he was too young to remember. Strange trinkets and crudely daubed drawings and sculptures of people from the Bible featured heavily, along with what apparently was a picture of a sheep. The sheep stood most clearly in his memories as at the time it was meant to be a forest – the first goal proved impossible after his careless hand had smeared the blank potential of the page with heavy browns. Even at his young age he was starting to understand that his memories of these things were made up largely of his parents telling relations the stories associated with them and he was unsettled that the rest of his life would continue in the same way, though he lacked the means to express this.

Having grown up in London, walking through the season-less metropolis every day, he had never seen the moonlight reflect off the snow before. Thus it was that he was scared straight away by this light, because it was something completely new to him. Please don’t judge little Tommy Foster too harshly for this, because it is something that we all take for granted these days. Think how unsettled you would have been barely 130 years ago to wake in the night from a bad dream to know the fire had died and that you were some considerable time and effort away from creating the simple comfort of light. Why then, reflected moonlight would have been your friend and the lamp on Tommy’s bedside table a piece of wicked sorcery.

Afraid or not, Tommy lifted up the covers and slowly turned himself out of bed. He had heard rustles and slight noises from the closet but remembered everything his mother had told him about there being no monsters and nothing to wake you in your sleep. He slowly put his feet in to his slippers, shivering briefly with the cold, and turned to face the closet. Where during the day William’s care-free influence had dominated, right now there was no voice in his head but his mother’s.

“Tommy, my love, don’t be silly. It’s just a closet, there’s nothing in there but your shoes and toys. You know that, don’t you my little darling.”

With every passing step he slowed himself down. It wasn’t a big room, but it seemed to take forever to cross it. For the giant that Tommy was when his eyes were closed this only heightened his discomfort. The floorboard at the end of his bed creaked as it always did, but this time there was the hint of an echo, or the sound carrying farther than it should. Indeed, with every passing step it seemed a little colder. His mother’s voice was still there, but he found it harder to believe that it was right.

With just two steps to go Tommy failed to realise that tears were now running down his face and that his breath was coming faster and faster. Like the most clutching of nightmares, he was bound in its snare. Had he thought he would have realised he could no longer feel his toes, but with the innocence of a child he continued forwards, not calling for his mother, not reaching for lights, not even reaching for a blanket or some material comfort. Shivering with the cold, not yet understanding his fear, he reached for the door.

Beyond the door was nothing more than an arctic wilderness. I fear that our generation may have come beyond the point of comprehension in respects to strange worlds bordering our own but Thomas saw it for what it truly was. Beyond the door was nothing more than ice and snow. The weather was calm indeed, so this landscape stretched on for countless miles; the whiteness defied perspective and scale in every sense. The poor child was hypnotised – as indeed you or I would be had we discovered this in our closet – and remained frozen, in the face of this other world.

You might think this child’s ordeal enough, being like me of the mundane ilk, but there was more. Time lost its urgency in this situation as the freezing apathy of this world started to seep into our own. The ice was building up on the floor of Tommy’s bedroom as he continued to stand there transfixed. Later, thinking back to this time, Tommy could never quite put his finger on what it was that held him so. He did remember looking out across the waste and feeling like a giant again, but even then he was aware of being minute in the face of the infinite. His eyes had scoured every inch of the whiteness and found nothing more than occasional hints of drifts to give him reference. No doubt the sun would have risen and freed him from this freeze should he have been left long enough, but this wasn’t to be. Instead, something reached out to him.

To question how many hours he had stood there is perhaps irrelevant. Suffice to say that some time after he had first touched the door and stared out over the white wilderness a flash of grey shot across his vision. He picked up his feet and shook off the layer of snow that had gathered there and blinked the blink of a man waking after being mesmerised. From the corner of his eye he could see his bedroom, and now he could feel the warmth on his back as well. He wasn’t sure if this was a comfort or not though as this both meant that the world as he knew it existed, and that the one he didn’t also did.

For the briefest of seconds, had you been there to see him, you would have noticed that he seemed many years older. Shaking himself out of this hypnotism, however, he refocused and saw another flash of grey, this time closer.

Suddenly he felt so very awake. He felt cruelly aware that perhaps he had not come this far on his own and that he did not understand everything that had happened thus far. This was a momentary feeling though, as more grey enforced the sense that he was not alone and had very little time to react. His eyes tracked every movement with instinct and the more primitive parts of his brain knew that whatever it was, it was getting closer.

Looking properly now, he saw some distance behind the flashes of grey he had seen some smaller and much faster flashes of orange. There was a strange smell in the air too, the tang of frost, but also sweat and something like raw steak. Everything started to happen so fast now – as Tommy felt himself swell like the giant he was with his eyes shut he felt himself shrink inside in the face of these things rushing towards him. The lead... thing... looked like a wolf and the closer it got the more he thought it was talking to him:

“Prince Thomas, please help me! The Reynard’s troops are upon me, you must save me or all is lost”

Tommy shook his head and crushed his offending eyes tightly into a ball, muttering to himself “No, no, no” repeatedly. The voice persisted, however. It was soon joined by the bales and high pitched howls of strange creatures though and he forced his eyes up into the adjacent sounds of suffering and mortal pain.

Below him were three foxes, smaller than those he had seen about the streets of London at night. Smaller as they were though, these terrible creatures looked up at Tommy with shrewd eyes. They paced around him impatiently, with only one of them briefly trying to brush against his leg.

“Why you must be Thomas,” one of the foxes said.

There was a long pause, during which Tommy saw the flash of grey turn into a wolf lurking behind a ridge barely fifty metres away. He did his best to ignore it.

“Yes, yes I am. Pleased to meet you, and who are you?”

“Why, I’m Veritus the Fox. These are my delectable colleagues Caritas and Spero. I must ask, what are you doing all the way out here in the cold? After all, being human, don’t you belong in one of the cities?”

“But I am in a city. I’m in London, or at least I might be.” He risked a glance behind himself to make sure that the city was in fact still there.

“Well perhaps you may be right. There is a strange smell in the air and you are awfully warm given you have no furs. I would offer you my own but I am afraid that I’m rather attached to it.” Caritas gave a sharp bark at this, Thomas almost believed it was laughter.

Veritus had decided to sit himself down on his haunches at this point, directly in front of Thomas. He looked up at such an angle that his teeth seemed in a permanent grin to him. Caritas and Spero were pacing around behind him, alternately looking around or seemingly casually sniffing the air.

Spero spoke next; “perhaps, if you would be so kind, we could have a look at your city? It seems so unusual to my eyes, with so much made of wood and your trapped glow-worms. Pray tell, how do you keep so many of them alive to make so bright a light?”

Tommy’s brow furrowed at this and with the innocence that charmed his parent’s guests so said, “But we don’t have glow-worms in London. It’s a light bulb; don’t you have electricity in your cities?”

“We have all sorts of bulbs, but they grow into flowers and not beacons for the night. We have wonderful flowers though, such blooms as to make even Caritas here turn selfish in desire for them.”

Caritas seemed moved to interject at this point, greeting with a mock-offended tone, “Why Spero, I have denied you, for which you have my eternal apologies”, their eyes met with this as Spero suppressed his own laugh-bark, “but you are a vulgar cad in any garden. You would dig and root in search of food, or some forgotten coin. Thomas here would do nothing more than stare in wonderment, or perhaps take a delicate sniff.”

Tommy found himself more and more perplexed with every passing second, faced with these eloquent hounds. Another glance over his shoulder suddenly threw to the front of his mind William. Something magical was happening, foxes were talking to him from the arctic in his closet, so couldn’t it be that maybe William was real here and now? “You’re very kind to say all of that, I think Mr...”

“Caritas, good sir” The fox eased the confusion between these indifferent kin.

“Caritas, thank you. You are very kind indeed. Could you please tell me something though? Do you know anyone called William?” It was something of a shame that Tommy clenched his eyes so tightly at this point and thought of William as hard as he could for had he not he would have seen Spero and Caritas shoot a panicked glance at each other. He clenched his fists though, and wished and prayed and thought and dreamed and called out with the voice in his head until bright lights flashed in his eyes, even though they were shut.

Veritas patiently watched Tommy for the few seconds it took him to complete this task and then, when he opened his eyes and looked around with visible disappointment, smoothly picked up the conversation: “Why Thomas, there is something interesting you should know about me and my brothers and that is that we are bound by our names. Caritas must give away all he owns and Spero, well Spero is something of a fool.” His head cocked and he truly grinned as he said that. “I, however, I must always speak the truth. I must tell you that we have not seen William for... some time.”

Caritas and Spero ceased their pacing and looked intently at Thomas, awaiting his answer. Tommy, however, was caught up trying to understand how all of this could be before him but he could not make William real. Had he not been so caught up with the limitations of his own imagination, which he knew from long experience anyway, he would have noted his second clue that something was not right with his new companions. For every child knows that a fox is cunning and that you should always listen very carefully to what it says, and Veritas had said that he had not seen William for some time.

The tears, which had stopped whilst he had been hypnotised started again. Tommy suddenly felt very alone – he knew that William wasn’t real in London but if he wasn’t real here and he couldn’t make him appear then that meant that he was changing and that he would soon be like his parents. He didn’t understand jobs, or looking after things. He didn’t know how to cook, or to look after a house. Last year when his dog had got ill he hadn’t known what to do then either. But here he was, without William and on the cusp of being thrown into this world were magic seemed to be a joke.

Now it was Veritas’ brow which furrowed – he had not expected this response. He was poised to deflect more questioning and to draw Thomas further into the arctic, not to comfort a weeping child. He found himself shocked at what he said next. “Thomas, I... I am sorry. I did not mean to make you cry, I only meant that I will not see William again.” This, finally, sparked something in Thomas.

“What does that mean...?” he sniffed, wiping his nose on the sleeve of his pyjamas. “You have seen him then?”

Veritas stood up and started to proscribe a small circle himself. He was back on the more familiar front of trickery now, much more his forte. “Why yes dear friend, I can take you to where he was if you would like?”

Tommy was stuck between many considerations when the next thing happened. Past his tears and concentrating anew, he was suddenly thinking how utterly strange it was that a fox should talk to him. Indeed, also how strange that this fox thought it odd that he was in the wilderness when he was in his bedroom, or that he claimed to have met William – and Thomas was sure that it was his William, of that he had no doubt. Perhaps it would be nice to think that he was thinking about the foxes name when events took this turn...

...for all of a sudden, from behind a snow drift that had barely existed till then, the wolf-shaped piece of grey threw itself amidst the foxes. It was a small wolf and so grabbing one of the foxes (Spero, Thomas thought) by the neck from the outset and shaking it so violently that its neck instantly snapped was most fortunate for it. It was too slow however, as the other two leapt upon it. Jaws, blood and claws flew furiously as Tommy watched for barely a few seconds but with childlike terror (the giant-like feeling forgotten) He grabbed the lip of the door and slammed it shut with all his might. As the wolf was being devoured, the last scraps of its voice, above the tearing and yelps of pain, carried through decrying “Without you we are lost – step through the gate and lead, you must claim this land!”

After he had slammed the door there were two solid thuds against it, separated by a few seconds. He tried to think of something other than a wolf being thrown against the door, but nothing else could match the sound in his mind. Some frantic scratching and high snarls ensure that he was too scared to open the door again, despite the wolf’s protestations. He scurried back to bed as fast as he could and desperately tried not to think of the low hanging shoulders of the foxes and high, proud gait of the wolf. Something had changed in a heartbeat in the foxes and where before they were civilised and courteous with the arrival of the wolf they had wasted no time at all with displays of strength, gauging their opponent, or compassion. They had wanted only blood.

****

The chill descended on Tommy’s chest the next morning, making him ill for several weeks after his event. The events of that night were something that he would never talk about again for the rest of his childhood and, once he had achieved the dubious heights of manhood, something that he would remember only as a story. The closet never re-opened in the way that it had and the wilderness never returned. Years later he wondered if something important had died in him that night (or elsewhere? But he wasn’t a frivolous man...) and his mother had seemed happier afterwards. After all, William seemed to pretty much disappear overnight from his antics and whilst there were still scraped knees, broken ornaments and ominous stains now Tommy had the good sense to try his hardest to conceal the truth from his mother instead of blaming the intangible.

Something about Thomas became much easier to handle from then on. He became more grounded, as perhaps every parent wants at sometime – only sometime after they have been worn ragged by the boundless exuberance of their progeny, of course – and seemed to take stock of his responsibilities in the world much earlier than other children.

In conversations with his first love, and later his wife, he confessed that it was through fear that he made himself face up to the realities of life and drove himself to a successful career. They both thought that it was a fear of failure and of insignificance, but they were wrong. And so it was that only Tommy knew that his fear was that there had once been another world, a world of magic and wonder, and that he had sealed it away behind a closet door. He was afraid that if he didn’t strive to grasp the only remaining world he knew with all of his might that it too would be stolen from him, a door slammed in his face, and he would be left in the dark; a crying giant with nothing more to run from.