Steve was scared of the cellar. It was dark and dank and his brother, Charlie, had told him chilling tales about people dying down there, their ghosts lingering still and waiting to attack those who dared to disturb them. So he was very scared when, alone with only Charlie in the house, Steve had been locked down there.
After crying and screaming in vain for his release, Steve sat on the steps and looked down into the cellar at the piles of boxes that formed menacing shadow casting towers, the webs spun and hanging between them and the big-bodied spiders that sat in their centre waiting for him.
But Steve would not give them the pleasure of his blood. He would just sit it out. He would stay on his step and ignore the scurrying sounds. It would be boring but eventually Charlie would open the door. The only question would be how long before their parents’ return?
The answer was that it would be quite soon because Charlie was bored. Once his brother had stopped crying the fun had dissipated and Charlie began to think about how else to torture Steve.
Upon making a decision Charlie opened door and advanced on his brother, forcing Steve to back down the steps then turn at the bottom. When Steve was backed up against one of the box towers, looking up fearfully into Charlie’s face, a wicked smile spread across it and with a menacing light in his eyes the elder brother raised his hand and pointed to the cellar’s far corner.
And he coldly commanded, “Go get my ball.”
“My ball,” thought Steve, though he daren’t say it out loud. Charlie didn’t care much for the ins and outs of who gave what to whom. All is fair in any arena when you are the biggest of the children and no adult is around to mediate.
However, Steve had saved up for and bought the ball some months before. While playing with it for the first time in the back garden, Charlie had taken it and proclaimed it his in recompense for one he claimed Steve had lost when they were younger (such things always seemed to have happened before Steve was old enough to remember).
During the following struggle for the ball it had broken free and rolled through the broken window into the cellar as they fought. With their parents around at the time, it was only now that Charlie had decided to task Steve with retrieving it.
Steve thought also of punching Charlie in the balls, running up the stairs and locking his brother in the cellar but knew he didn’t have the strength to down his brother for long enough. And that any satisfaction gained would not be worth the repercussions.
Instead Steve turned and made his way into the box tower town, crouching low to avoid the first spider web as his brother grinned his usual wicked grin. Steve moved slowly and carefully using what light there was to avoid further webs and other creepy crawlies. He didn’t even think about those scurrying sounds.
Whenever Charlie put him in a situation like this, Steve always imagined that he was somewhere far away and more exciting.
On this occasion the boxes became trees and the hard concrete ground the jungle floor, his dirty jeans and t-shirt topical gear (complete with an imaginary helmet that would protect him from the poisonous spiders above), while his face was wet and dripping with sweat. Steve imagined he was trying to locate the Lost Orb of the Incas- hidden away from the Conquistadors by a wily priest who knew its secrets.
He was not a willing adventurer though: a mild mannered archaeologist, Steve was being pushed into this by an evil megalomaniac who sought to use the Orb’s power for evil ends (already he had tortured the priest’s ancestors to reveal the Orb’s secrets). Steve could hear that power-hungry maniac behind screaming at him to go on and recover the Orb quickly. Or else.
Onward Steve travailed, urged on from behind, until he called out, “It’s in sight! It’s in a clearing; a shaft of light is highlighting it!”
By the time Steve told Charlie he could see the ball below the window it had fallen through, the older brother had grown bored again. His brother’s initial sounds of discomfort had drained away and he seemed to be enjoying himself.
Only one course of action presented itself: Charlie took a small run-up and shoved the nearest tower of boxes over causing a domino effect heading in Steve’s direction.
Stabbed in the back, Steve drew in a breath as he heard the rumble and turned to see the trees falling one by one in turn, a ripple of terror coming toward him quickly; but not so quickly that he couldn’t leap aside, only narrowly avoiding the fall of the final tree as it came down, falling apart and covering the lost orb- now to be lost for much longer, maybe forever.
Having only just avoided the falling boxes, Steve found himself on the floor at the far side of the cellar underneath a set of shelves fixed to the wall running all along it and right up to the cobweb-covered ceiling.
On these sat the first items to have been stored down there, back when the cellar had also been used by their grandfather to homebrew beer and before the forest of box towers had started to grow.
Steve raised his head and heard Charlie laughing under the assumption he was underneath a pile of boxes. He rolled his eyeballs and moved to look up at the shelves.
They were laden with boxes full of goodness knows what and Steve was initially intrigued by the faded writing on the sides advertising goods of various kinds. On some he recognised the names but not the old-fashioned logos, while others were completely new to him.
They did not intrigue him for long, though, as a box on the bottom shelf caught his eye. It was the size of a cigar box and made from a dark-coloured wood that had been decorated with brightly painted carvings.
On the end facing Steve, a border ran around the edge made up of a long, thorny vine from which grew little blue roses in bloom. Within this border were four squares each filled with the carving of a curiously-shaped face that came to a point at the chin, the ears were pointed also.
What Steve found more curious, however, and a little creepy even, was the fact that each face had its eyes closed- “In sleep or death?” wondered Steve, a chill running through him.
The poor people looked at peace, Steve felt, but also blank as if their life had been extinguished rather than because they were resting. “But perhaps that’s because of my surroundings.”
Steve felt that he shouldn’t but picked up the box to investigate it further all the same.
The edges each featured further carved and painted faces with their eyes closed- four on either side and eight at the front and back. The lid featured much the same format- a thin border showing vines bearing blue roses, within which was a second border made of those eerie face-filled squares- twenty in all.
Within this band of faces, though, was a rectangle left uncarved for the most part.
Except for two words in an unusual script and painted with a black inlay.
They read: “Pixie Dust”
Inside the was full of a grey powder that smelled a little. Steve wasn’t sure what of to begin with, as dust was clogging his nostrils, until images of fireworks, hot dogs and a bonfire came to him and Steve realised these were ashes.
Steve remembered those faces with their eyes closed and promptly dropped the box on the floor, spilling its grisly contents and creating a dust cloud that partly settled on his trousers.
The sound of the box striking the floor brought Charlie out of his cruel laughter fit and his face instantly started to turn red at having been made a fool. But before he could even speak the front door slammed shut and Charlie shot up the cellar stairs without a second thought. He was unable to run fast enough to claim he hadn’t been downstairs and so they were both in for it now.
The cellar was strictly off limits so once Steve had picked his way across the strewn boxes, all the while trying to brush pixie dust from his trousers and climbed the cellar steps, he was greeted with angry shouts and sent to bed without tea.
Steve fell asleep with his parents’ words still ringing in his ears, his mind’s own words angrily cursing his brother while his stomach complained loudly too. The earlier din and this internal din, though, were nothing compared to the din that was occurring nearby.
Within the woods in which Timothy Harris claimed to have captured and tamed a unicorn lived a community of pixies. For centuries they had hidden from humans in fear for their lives.
This had been the case ever since some unknown villain had first decided that the ashes of pixies, when eaten a teaspoonful at a time once a year, could prolong your life; stretching it over hundreds of years, perhaps forever. This belief had caused frequent raids on their kind, each one taking scores at a time in nets and never to be seen again.
The only magical thing about the box Steve had found was that it kept the whereabouts of its contents hidden, for pixies can sense and then find the earthly presence of all other pixies from their community, alive or dead.
Pixies are both patient and vengeful creatures who will happily wait many years, for their lives are far longer than that of humans, for their chance to gain revenge on those who have committed crimes against them. And this community had been waiting to recover the stolen pixies who had ended up in a box in Steve’s cellar for some thirty years.
So when Steve had dropped the box of pixie dust these woods pixies had sensed it, causing a great din of excitement as a lynching mob was quickly formed and dispatched through the woods and across human suburban settlements to capture and prosecute the child covered in the ashes of pixies.
Upon falling asleep Steve began to dream about the poor pixies whose death portraits he had seen carved on the box he had found. He dreamed that his brother had been their murderer. That he had chased after them, grabbing and crushing them in his hands to dust before dropping their remains in the box, each portrait magically burning into place upon the box as he did so.
Steve then dreamed that his brother pushed him once more into the cellar but that that dreaded death box was the only item down there and that when Steve approached and picked up the box, the portraits began to speak to him, their eyes still closed; and they pleaded with Steve to tell him why: “Why did he kill us, why did he crush us? Why?”
And then those faces left the box becoming 3D and whirled round and round Steve’s head continuing to ask and ask; but Steve didn’t know, he could only tell them, “I don’t know why, I’m sorry I don’t know why you had to die.”
“Really?” asked the voice that woke Steve from this nightmare.
“I think we both know that you know perfectly well,” it continued, as Steve’s eyes adjusted to the dark and a tiny winged person standing on his chest came into focus.
“Allow me to introduce myself.
“My name is Dadd, King of the pixie community that you devastated, and I am here with my armies to imprison and then execute you forthwith.”
Some thirty years previously Steve and Charlie’s grandfather had taken their father, then about the age Charlie was now, into the woods near their home to hunt pixies.
“Their dust will make us live forever,” the father had told his son and, impressed, Steve’s father happily swung his net alongside his old man, catching a good few himself.
At home they suffocated their catch in jars and laid them out carefully. This came as quite a shock to Steve’s father, who had expected that the dust would fall from them as with Tinkerbell in the Disney film.
He did not cry, though, for fear of his father’s reaction and consoled himself as best he could by watching his father carve and paint a wooden box with images of the dead pixie’s faces.
Once the paint was dry, the two eternal life seekers burned and crushed the corpses they had created, filling the box with the dust they had made.
Later that day, Steve’s grandfather choked to death while trying to imbibe a teaspoonful of his prized dust. Or so most had thought: Steve’s father and grandmother had seen a lone pixie (a scout sent out from the woods) exit his mouth shortly after his last breath.
Before the scout had returned to alert his community of the dust’s whereabouts, however, Steve’s grandmother had locked the box away in the cellar and neither her nor Steve’s father had ever sought to find it for fear of what might happen to them.
Assuming the pixie on his chest to be a part of his dream, Steve closed his eyes and fell back to sleep. When he woke up again he found himself bound by many tiny ropes and in the woods his father would never take him and his brother to. Initially his only view was of the tree branches above him, black and foreboding against the night sky.
Then Steve was suddenly hoisted up into a sitting position and before him was a great crowd of pixies stood holding tiny torches burning brightly. Above them upon a platform sat King Dadd on his throne, before whom was a row of twenty pixies wearing black hoods and holding long lances, each of which dripped a clear liquid.
The king took to his feet and addressed Steve: “Some years ago you, you ugly human child, did come to this place with your father and, with great nets, did wilfully and ruthlessly capture and slay forty-four of our people to burn and crush into pointless powder.
“Like your father we shall kill you in return,” he gestured to the pixies bearing dripping lances, but here and with poison that will draw your life out slowly.
“Then we will burn and crush you, allowing your human dust to blow away in the wind as you did to our kin today.”
“Now!” King Dadd pronounced and the executioners began to step forward.
But before they could pierce Steve’s feet, he said, “No, stop! It was my brother!”
Steve wasn’t sure where that lie had come from- he was sure that it must have been his father that King Dadd was talking about- but Steve felt no qualms or guilt pangs about this attempt to trade his brother’s life for his own; and so continued.
“He was bragging about it, saying how clever and brave he was and how Dad would never choose a weakling like me for such a task. Then, to get back at him I tipped the ashes on the ground- that’s why they were over my trousers. Sorry if that was disrespectful. I can bring him to you, if you like.”
“That won’t be necessary,” King Dadd replied, “We shall give you a small pouch of ashes to spread over him. It is still night time- go back to sleep and we will take you home. I had a feeling you didn’t look quite right… not old or big enough, maybe.”
The king then motioned for Steve to be lowered and gave the order for the pins to be replaced. Steve closed his eyes and started to try and regain sleep only, about a minute later, to feel a sudden moment of pain as twenty pins were thrust into his heel and blackness came once more.
Steve came round back in his bed, his fist clenched around a pouch containing a little of the pixie ashes. With his free hand he peeled back his duvet cover and began to move as slowly and quietly as he could.
Steve and Charlie’s mother’s ears had become finely tuned over the years to hear any night-time movements and so Steve’s journey needed to be a long and careful one. (Not helped by the need to travel on the front of his feet thanks to the twenty wounds in his heels).
He eased the door open to lessen the volume of the cries it made; carefully placed footsteps to avoid the moaning floorboards, yet keep to the soundless strip of carpet; gently he opened Charlie’s door to ensure he stayed asleep and no extra streetlight fell on his face; tiptoed fairy steps across to his bed, eyes ever watchful for signs of disturbance until he drew level and paused.
Was this the right thing to do? He thought of his life that had passed, of the torture inflicted by his brother daily, the favour shown toward him by his father- this would be his punishment too, Steve thought, at least until he replaced Charlie- and Steve knew that this was right.
He sprinkled the ashes carefully onto his brother’s duvet cover before silently making the return journey to his own bed for one last round of sleep.
The next thing Steve knew, his mother was waking him up in tears.
The police spent years searching for clues relating to Charlie’s disappearance but never found a thing. “It’s as if he was spirited away,” one paper put it. “Funny that,” was Steve’s reaction.
Steve’s mother cried almost non-stop throughout this time and his grandmother returned to her old home to look after him.
His father spent most of his time in his study staring at the empty carved box which he had recovered from the cellar and placed on his desk, whispering again and again, “It should have been me.”
Something his wife agreed with when her husband came clean over the whole affair.
Then memories of Steve’s exit from the cellar brought them both to the conclusion of what had happened and both parents left Steve, though in different directions.
At school Steve was always treated differently after his brother’s disappearance and the desertion of his parents. Rumours circulated about his involvement after neighbours overheard arguments and children started to only ever stare at him and never dared to speak to him.
His friends, and the few others who did, did so carefully, always treating Steve with kid gloves. Somehow this would always be the case.
The worst thing, though, was his grandmother- the woman who stayed because she could see no alternative. The woman who would occasionally get angry by his presence and tell him coldly, “It should have been you.”
Slowly Steve, looking around at all that had happened, could only concur. A moment’s rash decision had cost him dear.
