Danny Buckett and the Waiting Chamber - Chapter 1 excerpt

In Puckett House, Snukkett street, Danny Buckett lay restless in his bed: a boy considered by many around him to be so extraordinarily ordinary with his stark black, short-back-and-sides-and-messy-on-top haircut, his paler-than-white skin and his perfectly-proportionate nose, that something mildly sporadic or out of the blue happening to him was out of the question.

Except that is not true at all.

As with many things, there is a simple reason why the social workers at Puckett House, the orphanage in which Danny lived, insisted upon the fact that he was ‘as bland as a cauliflower’. It was because they were obliged to: an orphan child had clearly been through enough trauma in his or her lifetime to feel in any way special or different; any opportunity to reject this principal was strictly forbidden for the staff at Puckett House.

Danny was abnormally normal, according to those around him. This notion had been urged upon him, therefore making it so, since the age of six - the very same day his father passed in a car accident Danny knew shockingly little about. Subsequently, he found himself in Puckett House Orphanage, an architecturally mind-boggling construction overrun with spiders and dust mites in equal measure, a house sat atop a high hill with British countryside surrounding, countryside which would endure on three-hundred days of the year a downpour of rain.

The transition from his sizable, pleasant family home to the House had been far from seamless, although it was undeniable that the staff of the orphanage had tried their best to comfort him. They did not succeed, of course, but you can’t ask for everything.

As Danny lay in his bed, now at the age of fourteen, he recounted these events (he was long past the point of trying to get any sleep), and remembered the scale of pain he felt when his father passed. It was the type of pain that would leave a permanent scar. For the six short years they had together, Samuel and his son shared an inseparable bond; he and Danny would spend most, bordering on all, of their free time in each other’s company - partly due to the fact that there was just the two of them left (Danny’s mother passed giving birth to him), but more so down to the natural friendship they shared. Their inseparable bond was broken only when death interfered, and it hurt.

But that was not what was tampering with Danny’s sleep pattern tonight. Yes, his mind was racing, but no, it wasn’t down to mental images of his deceased parents, the countless spiderwebs looming above him, or the worryingly weak floorboards beneath - he was used to those things. However, there was one thing he could not get used to: the prospect of his birthday.

It was trivial, when he thought about it, to be this rattled by something so fatuous. Although Danny didn’t consider himself particularly superstitious, he couldn’t ignore a trend - every year, on his birthday, for as long as his mind would allow him to remember, some unusual incident had happened to him. Naturally, they weren’t outrageously odd, but curious nonetheless. He shuddered as he thought about last year, when he woke up in the middle of the town’s high street to be pointed at and muttered about by several passers by. He could’ve sworn a child even prodded him like a zoo animal as he lay there. On his seventh birthday, the roof caved in at the dinner table (luckily everybody walked away unscathed), at the age of nine he found himself halfway through climbing out of his window for no apparent reason. These were incidents which surely had valid explanations behind them, yet still, they were significant enough to cause concern.

Tomorrow, he would do what he did when he needed solitude, or a distraction: trek down to the nearby forest with his old notepad and sketch something of his choosing - he had a proclivity for art and the natural world enthralled him.

He turned and turned again so many times in his bumpy excuse for a bed that dizziness ensued, and was eventually able to find a position where his body was not crippled by springs digging into his back. Danny would have much preferred to sleep on the floor - it was probably comfier, but that wasn’t an option. The rusty nails used in the poor construction of the building would no doubt impale him - a prospect Danny didn’t really fancy, to say the least.

All this exercise will make me tired, he told himself resolutely - what he previously believed to be a comfortable position was no good as it cut off the circulation in his arm. All the shuffling had made him tired, he was right, as soon after this thought he managed to find a tolerable place in which he could drift off.

Feelings of tomorrow which had been lingering tauntingly at the back of his mind eventually grew tired and drifted away for the night, allowing Danny to welcome his slumber. 

He had reassured himself that nothing too dangerous would happen the next day - after all, if you tell yourself something enough times, you eventually believe it. This, after all, was the only way he’d be able to get any sleep - but what he didn’t yet realise was that, to this ordinary boy, something extraordinary would occur.

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