Christmas, 1942

It was the thunder that woke her up. She opened her eyes slowly. Then rolled on to her back, and stared into the ceiling. She listened as the low-pitched groan faded away and silence spread itself across the darkened room. It was cool and clear and, it seemed to her, that she had not heard such quiet in such a long time. A few moments passed and she felt herself drifting back into sleep, but then the thunder rolled again. It was louder this time and the storm, she decided, must be almost upon them.

She did love a storm. She got out of bed and pulled on a heavy jumper over the pyjamas she was wearing. Barely worn, exchanged for cigarettes she didn’t want, from an officer who slept in the nude. Or so all the girls said. The room was crisply cold, but she didn’t mind it. Her senses prickled with excitement at the strangeness of the dark room, her anticipation of the storm to come. She pulled the curtain aside, ready to watch the lightning that would surely cut through the pitch black sky. But there was nothing.

Nothing at all. Only the black of the pub’s garden. Trees, lit by the moonlight, blew gently in the breeze. The dark was thick, but the night was clear, and the stars sprinkled the sky with sharp lights. It was the sort of Christmas Eve night she would have loved as a child, watching for Father Christmas. Now she only watched for planes, listened for engines. There it was, the thunder, rumbling again.

She stepped back from the window, confused, looking around her as though she had missed something. Perhaps something in the room itself. The thunder turned to a kind of groaning, and then ceased. She found herself moving back to the bed. As though it might offer some protection, some thinking space, from the unease she suddenly felt. She pulled the blankets up around her, protectively, and lay back down.

She thought about it logically, to calm herself, to convince herself that it was not so strange. Old buildings made noises. And the strangeness of their time made noises she would never have imagined before. Mechanical noises rumbling through country lanes, unexpected, and chilling. Maybe it was just a plane. That she didn’t recognise? That she couldn’t see?

The noise came again, and she concentrated hard. Like thunder, but groaning more now, and seemingly echoing from right above her. It was clearer now, like the people above her were moving furniture. But then, there was no one above her. The two girls meant to stay up there had found it too cold, too remote. One had gone to stay in Jenny’s room. The other, she was sure, had snuck into the room of one of the officers from the base.

She tried to outthink it, listed possibilities, distracted herself with less wild, more realistic origins. She tried to remember her room in the plan of the pub. She was above the kitchen, could that be it, but what reason could that give? The noise groaned, even closer, and clearer. Her breath caught in her chest. No, it was definitely above her. She sat up in her bed, and stared at the ceiling, as though watching might mean she heard it better. But nothing helped.

She pulled her knees up to her chest and breathed deeply, not admitting to the small amount of panic she felt. The groaning was long, grinding this time, as though the wood in the ceiling itself was twisting. She took a long breath out and tried to steady herself. She backed herself into the headboard as though it might offer her some guard, something sturdy to brace herself against.

The noise ceased for barely a moment before it came again; louder, twisting, cracking the wood above her head. She wrapped her arms around herself in a tight grip, trying so hard to reassure herself. When silence followed she took the moment to think. Should she run? Where would she go? Could she go to Jenny’s room? What would she tell her?

When the sound came again, it was very close, as though it were climbing down the wall to reach her. She clenched her eyes shut, her fingernails dug into her arms. She could hear her own breath quickening, and she longed for the silence that would follow. But the noise did not stop this time. It kept coming. From the wall now, right behind her head. She jumped away from the headboard and scrambled to the end of the bed.

She wanted so hard to run away, but her limbs felt weak and useless. She dragged herself as best as she could, against the end of the bed. She pushed against the blankets with her feet, as though they might offer some feeble barrier between her and whatever was coming down the wall. And it was coming, halfway down the wall, it gripped the wooden paneling and in the darkness she sensed it squeeze and tear at it.

She heard herself breathing. Everything about her body now seemed far away, cold and foreign. She stared into the darkness, watching where she knew the headboard would be. And there the noise came again. Not just groaning, or twisting, or ripping, but of something like screaming. As though a low guttural scream was reaching out to her across the length of the bed. She could no longer hear herself breathe.

Through the darkness she felt sure a breeze was billowing through the sheets. She could feel the cold air on her feet, as it moved through the blankets, working its way up her body. She could not move, could only watch through the darkness as something unseen crawled towards her, up her body, to stare into her face.

Every nerve ending in her body tingled with fear, her throat seizing in shock, at the invisible presence that pinned her to the spot. And then she heard it again, the scream. Loud, and deep, horrific. She felt it, in her face, in her mind. It was an attack that took her breath away, so much so she could no longer breathe, no longer swallow. The scream got louder and louder and louder, her eyes squeezing against the force of it.

Then she no longer felt it, but heard it as something quite ordinary, echoing about the room. She felt her throat straining and heard her own voice vibrating through her head. It was her, she was screaming. She heard a hammering at her room door, and her body sprang to life. She ran to the door, wrenching it open, running into – no one.

There was no one there. She panted, panicking, scared all over again. The hallway was terrifyingly dark, and empty. The nearest room was down on the next level, maybe no one had even heard her scream. She turned back to the room, looking through the open door. She stood in the door frame, assessing the dark emptiness within. She was tired and confused. As though the last few minutes of her life had been made up; a nightmare she had conjured.

She stood in the dark, in the cold, until she began to sway with exhaustion. Then she walked carefully back into the room, eyeing every corner, as though the thing that came for her may be hiding there. Once she was satisfied she was alone she put out a hand and gingerly ripped one of the blankets from the bottom of the bed. She wrapped herself in it and sat in a chair by the door, watching the bed until morning broke.

It was Christmas Day, and a mix of colleagues and friends had gathered together in the pub below, to drink and eat whatever was provided. Rations, and goods pilfered from the base, were pooled together to make something like the Christmas lunch they were all once accustomed to. The alcohol was flowing freely and she was shaken from her state by Jenny, knocking on her door, a mug of laced coffee in her hand. She had not known how to reply to her friend’s greeting, and instead, followed her lead. She got up, got dressed, and followed her downstairs. Still tired, still confused, and even a little scared.

She did not know what to say to the cheery faces who asked if she had slept well, who smiled a Merry Christmas as she appeared downstairs. She drank what she was handed and ate when it was time. But she was tired, and it made everything seem strange and far away. All the same, her senses were heightened, as if in anticipation of what might come next.

The day was a foggy blur. She lost her way in conversations, and movements. She went to the loo and when she didn’t come back after half an hour Jenny had to come and find her. Eventually she grew sick of her fear and her worry. And she drank too much, hoping the memory of the night before would grow farther out of reach.

It wasn’t until she opened her bedroom door that night that the memory emerged again. A kind of blurry remembrance of a bad dream, but still real somehow. The blackout curtains already shut, she turned on the dim lamp by the door. She sat back in the chair and stared at the bed, readying herself. But she was as ready as any drunk person might be, preparing to fight some unseen foe.

Eventually she grew tired of waiting and began drifting off to sleep in the awkward wooden chair. She had drunk too much, and she was exhausted. The memory of the night before had evaporated from her thoughts and she wanted nothing more than to sleep. She walked over to the bed and fell on to it, fully dressed, falling into a deep sleep.

Sometime later she heard a noise, like thunder, a low rumbling in the distance. She listened to it as through cotton wool. A muffled noise, growing louder, and louder, before it seemed like it was right above her. There was a groaning. Then she felt the heat. And smelled the smoke. She opened her eyes and watched as the ceiling and wall behind, fell in on her. She scrambled to the end of the bed, screaming in shock. She watched as the wood and metal slowly fell on to the bed, the heat of fire following closely behind.

There was a pounding on the door, and then a person shouting from the other side. She dragged herself off the bed, the rest of the ceiling loosening itself and crashing in behind her. She staggered to the door, opening it and running into Jenny, who grabbed her hand and pulled her down the hallway. They ran down the stairs, people falling into step around them, all sprinting out on to the grass of the garden outside.

From there she watched as the crumpled metal of the plane ripped through the old wood of the pub, grinding and twisting through it, plunging down through the place her room once was, into the kitchens below. She felt an arm around her, and in the distance she heard thunder. The rain eventually fell, soaking her, putting out the fire in the room where she had once slept.