Free Forgotten Fears by Michael Bray Page A

through the darkness to the edge of the bedroom door frame.
    The man was now at the study door, and paused, tilting his head as he listened. Billy held his breath, sure he would give himself away somehow, that he would cough or scrape a wall. Angeline and Tyler flashed up in his mind’s eye, and as cold as it felt, he pushed them aside. He couldn’t deal with it right now. His entire reason for carrying on was in the hope they were alive and the freak in the hallway was either toying with him or so deluded that he really believed the things he was saying.
    “Are you in there Sniffer?” The man cackled as he knocked on the study door. “Are you hiding in there, pissing and waiting to die?”
    Billy tried to stay calm, which was easier said than done with his heart beating its own tune in his chest at a tempo way higher than he would have liked.
    “Come on out of there Squeaker. Come to Grant.”
    Billy found it strange that the man stalking through his house had a name. He was sure he had, in fact, introduced himself by name when he first arrived.
    “Name’s Grant,” He said, pointing to his chest, where, indeed, his name was embroidered in a tatty red font. “Power Company sent me. You need a fix, right?”
    He wasn’t Grant to Billy. He was just the man from Trans Energy, the one who had chosen him to inflict his reign of terror upon.  A memory that had been long forgotten suddenly came to stark clarity in his mind, so clear and vivid he wondered how he could ever have forgotten it.
    It was when he was a boy, back when his father had taken him to a turkey farm to choose a bird for thanksgiving that year. He remembered standing there beside his father, watching the turkeys gibber and gobble as they went obliviously about their business.
    “Which one do you want to get Billy?” He had asked, watching his son carefully.
    Billy remembered turning his attention back to the birds. Trying to choose one. There was one in particular that caught his eye. It was set apart from the others and had a strange skitter to its walk.
    “That one.” Billy had said, pointing to the bird with the gimpy walk. “He looks like a Joey to me dad. What do you think?”
    He remembered how his father’s face had soured slightly, perhaps because he had underestimated how much his nine-year-old child understood.
    “Oh, you can’t give it a name son.”
    “Why not?”
    “Because it makes it harder.”
    “What do you mean?”
    “If you give it a name, it makes it harder to kill when the time comes.”
    He remembered looking at the bird in a different light, perhaps for the first time seeing it for the purpose it was intended. He recalled the guilt at choosing the fate for this animal he had chosen because he liked the quirky way in which it walked. He never considered that he had sentenced the animal to death. His father had seen the doubt on Billy’s face and smiled as he ruffled his hair with a cracked, calloused hand.
    “Don’t think of them as animal’s son. Think of them as food. That’s why we don’t name them. We might keep them at the house for a couple of weeks, but come thanksgiving, that bird is gettin’ its neck broke n’ goin’ in the oven.”
    Billy never thought as he crouched there in his own bedroom, that the advice he received twenty-five years earlier would resonate now, but those wise words of his father, fit with his current plight perfectly.
    “If you give it a name, it makes it harder to kill when the time comes.”
    Billy made the conscious decision to not think of the intruder as ‘Grant’ or anything else which might humanise him. He was an animal, an insane thing dressed in a blood-drenched Trans Energy uniform which seemed hell bent on tearing him open to see if he had a Squeaker or Snifferblob inside him. An animal he would kill if he had to.
    He watched as the man entered the study. Billy was grateful he hadn’t bothered to tidy it of late, and it was going to mean his stalker would have to go