That's The Way To Do It!

Colin’s father had bought the damned thing forty-five years ago when he had taken a motorcycle tour of East Anglia in the days before he had met Colin’s mother. There had been a faded photograph of his dad with outrageously long hair standing proudly next to his bike, with the flat landscape of the Norfolk Broads stretching out behind him, tucked into the frame of one of the old family portraits on the side table as long as Colin could remember. But now, it was in a cardboard box destined for the back of his car along with all the other photos.

But this thing was here in his hand, and he had to make a decision. He hated it. It scared him when he was a child, and its sneering, crooked face still sent shivers down his spine.

But it was his dad’s only trinket. While his mum was alive, the house was filled with ornaments, plastic flowers, pictures, and embroideries. However, over the past decade, they had gradually disappeared as his dad cut down on his dusting load. Mr. Punch had stayed; in fact, he was promoted from the back of the dining room dresser to the mantelpiece. His cloth legs dangled down, and his red wooden feet twisted in opposite directions. He sat hunched over, peering over his huge hooked nose with a sickening smirk that seemed to have a sinister knowledge of something unpleasant yet to come.

When Colin was very young, he was convinced it moved; his younger brother Christopher even more so. Christopher had once claimed he heard it laughing, but that was before the accident. Nobody had said they heard a laugh since. In fact, there had been no laughter in the house after Christopher’s accident. The family had tried to get themselves back into some form of normality, but his mother never recovered; her spirit withered, and it reflected in the degeneration of her body. When she was found at the foot of the stairs, there was almost a sense of relief that her pain was over. Colin and his father had soldiered on, barely talking about their losses, and as soon as the opportunity had arisen, he had left to find his own way through three years at University in Cambridge and then a year in Canada before settling back in London, 200 miles but in reality a whole world away from his reclusive father.

The home clearance company was going to arrive in an hour, and he had completed his last sweep to see if there was anything he really wanted to save. There was very little. He took one more look at Mr. Punch and put him down; he wasn’t coming home. He could take his chances with the inevitable bric-a-brac shop he would find himself in. Colin took one last stroll around his childhood home; it held few happy memories, Christmases and Birthdays of going through the motions. It felt like another empty chapter of his life was coming to an end, but maybe one that could see the start of some sort of liberation from his past. He picked up the box of photographs and walked to his car, shutting the door and not looking back. He placed the box on the back seat and climbed in the front. He heaved a deep breath and turned the ignition; the car growled, and he pulled away down the road and on his way home.

As he mindlessly plowed down the motorway through the increasingly heavy rain, his thoughts wandered to his brother. That day, more than two decades ago, he had locked it away, but he could feel the key turning. His brother was an energetic toddler and had become his shadow. That day, the one he deliberately forgot, Christopher was sitting in the dining room crying. He was complaining that the nasty man laughed at him and said “bad things.” Nobody had really paid any attention to it and brought him back into the living room where they got on with their own things. Nobody noticed that Christopher had gone, nobody knew he had made his way into the garden, and out to the park, and into the river. His mother’s screams had gouged out his heart that day; for a moment, he felt the emptiness again.

Then his mother shuffled into his head, her broken body and fractured mind existing between cups of tea and brief moments of clarity. The day she passed, she had been surprisingly lucid but rambling and vague. She had reminisced about her wedding and Colin’s first day at school amongst stories about people his father said were not real. She had gone to her room to find her crossword book when from the living room they could hear a cry and a despairing call of “You, leave me alone.” Before the telltale thuds as his mother fell to the foot of the stairs. There had been nobody there.

Colin jogged his attention back to the road. The rain was beginning to really hammer down, making it difficult to see the road ahead. He indicated, moved into the inside lane, and slowed. A motorcyclist passed him at speed, and he smirked, imagining his youthful father tearing around on his motorbike. He had never owned a bike in all the time Colin had been alive. He thought about him sitting in that chair in front of the fire alone as the heart attack crept up on him. It was a neighbour who found him two days later, staring ahead at the fireplace with the lonely fear of death in his eyes.

For a moment, he looked over his shoulder at the box of photographs in the back of his car, all he had left of them now. His eyes locked on the back seat, there in the middle sat Mr. Punch, his round red cheeks below his menacing eyes glaring at him. His head slightly dipped, and his smile as sinister as ever. How did he get in there? With a jolt, he realized he needed to look at the road again. He whipped his head around as the red brake lights of the lorry that had slowed to a stop began to fill the front of the car. The screeching of the car brakes mixed with what sounded like a nasal laughter, then a sickening crunch, then nothing.