Myerscough & Skelton

SHORT FICTION

by Tim Jeffreys

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They came only on grey days, or so it seemed to Victor.

Foreshadowed. They came on quiet days. Damp days. Tuesdays. Nothing days. They came on days when the sky was overcast and the color seemed bleached out of everything. Days when a fine misty rain fell, the kind of rain you hardly noticed but which soaked you nevertheless. Days when awnings dripped and puddles formed. Days when old people complained of aches in their joints, as if these pains were a premonition of them. They came on days of no wind. Of silence. Stillness. Those were the days. Oh yes indeed. Those were the days to expect a visit from Myerscough and Skelton.

In Victor’s house, on a high shelf in the kitchen, stood an old tin that had once contained teabags. Rusty around the rim. Every Friday, after Victor’s father got home from the factory, his mother would put money into this tin. For the rest of the week, sometimes while standing at the window, she would fret about the tin and say to herself, “Is there plenty of money in the tin? Have I put enough by?’ 

The money was for Myerscough and Skelton. Victor knew this without having to ask. He also knew that this money kept in a tin was why his mother had lines around her eyes and around her mouth. It was why they had spam for dinner on Thursdays. It was why his father drank, and it was why his mother had to glue his school shoes when the sole started to peel away, and why she had to sew patches on his trousers, and mend his coat when it tore.

“Can’t afford new,” she’d say. “That money has to go in the tin. That money’s for them.”

As if they were devils who would materialise when mentioned, his mother never spoke out loud the names Myerscough and Skelton.

* * * * *

Victor didn’t know which was which. Which was Myerscough and which Skelton. One was tall and long and pale, like something stretched. The other was short, and bald and chubby like a baby, or like a bloated corpse fished out of the canal. Ghouls. When they appeared around corners, pigeons scattered, dogs ran home, and cats found high places from which to watch. Women called children in from the street and shut their doors, and men whispered it under their breaths: Myerscough and Skelton.

Both men wore long flapping black coats over smart grey suits. Victor thought they looked like crows, like carrion-birds. The tall one carried a brown leather doctor’s bag. All the children on the estate, including Victor, were both terrified and fascinated by this bag. In a corner of the schoolyard, Victor and his friends speculated endlessly about what was inside. They even had a rhyme about it.

Myerscough and Skelton
Steal the flowers, swipe the sun
Grab the smile off a baby’s face
Carry it away in their big brown case.

Added to this were the things the adults said to frighten them.

“Make sure you work hard at school,” Victor’s father warned. “Or Myerscough and Skelton will get you and put you in their bag.”

“Make sure you work hard at school,” Victor’s father warned. “Or Myerscough and Skelton will get you and put you in their bag.”

One time when Myerscough and Skelton had visited Victor’s house, this bag had been left on a chair in the hall, and whilst the two men spoke to his mother in the lounge, Victor — heart pounding — had crept past the door, gone to the bag, undone the gold clasp, and looked inside. Within he saw a fathomless black, a bottomless hole, a void. And there were faces, hundreds, maybe thousands of faces; trapped, helpless souls, all screaming in the dark. And among those faces…there among those faces…

Snapping the bag shut in horror, and reeling around, Victor caught the short one watching him from the lounge. Watching him, nodding his head, and snickering.

That night he dreamt of being chased by Myerscough and Skelton. “Put him in the bag with the others!” the short one shouted, grunting as he pursued Victor. “He hasn’t learned his times tables! He hasn’t learned his spellings! Get his little sister! Get his little friends! Get them all! Put ‘em in the bag with the others!”

* * * * *

Victor had seen pictures of his mother laughing. Once she’d been a bright young woman, full of joy. Full of laugher. Nowadays she never laughed. She hardly smiled. All she seemed to do was frown and fret. She had become grey. As grey as one of Myerscough and Skelton’s days. As grey as pebbles on a beach. Grey and silent. She sighed more than she spoke. The expression on her face remained resigned. No matter what. And her eyes — her eyes were always far away. He wondered if she even saw him at all. 

One night, as she tucked him up in bed, Victor could no longer contain the secret of what he’d seen inside that doctor’s bag that belonged to those two crows, those fiends, those devils: Myerscough and Skelton. He could no longer keep it inside himself. The thing that had frightened him the most of all.

“I saw you,” he told her. “Daddy too.”

But his mother appeared not to hear him. It was just as he thought. Her ears didn’t hear. Her eyes didn’t see.

“Sweet dreams,” she said, kissed him once on the forehead, and turned out the light.

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