Baux Hill Village is a small rural community on the outskirts of London and like any small community Baux Hill has its fair share of secrets. Moving there from a young age Joshua finds himself tangled up in the web of deceit. Will he find his way ou...
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I MOVED TO BAUX HILL in the fall of 1995. It was a small village, barely hanging on to the outskirts of London. I was six then, and to a six-year-old me the change was incomprehensible; I felt as though I had moved to an entirely different planet rather than a village that was, more or less, a two hour drive from where I used to live. I wasn't opposed to it though. As a child I had no concept of such things.
Our house was of Georgian descent; thick green ivy crawled up the white pebble-dash exterior, large windows faced west-ward, averting their gaze from the mighty Baux Hills. It was raining so hard that day. Mum said that the booming was God banging His tremendous fists down on the sky. In anger, she said, at recent events that we were too young to understand. Golden rays shone where it gave way, drops of heaven, only visible for a second through my mortal eyes. I shuddered violently at the whip of the wind that accompanied it.
Everything cowered in the presence of the chaos. Birds desperately flapped their wings in an attempt to escape the battlefield that was, in better days, their home, trees swayed vigorously, groaning in agony as their splintered limbs fell to the floor in abundance.
"When you get out of this car," my mother spoke. "I want you to run into the house as quickly as you can, okay?"
My siblings and I nodded. It was a short ways to the house from the car, still, I found myself being led astray by my curiosity. Heaven's tears cascaded down my cheek, and the whipping of the wind hurt even more then. Airy hands pulled me towards the dark forest path by the side of the house, one of many that led up into the Baux Hill woods.
Knowing me full well, my mother swiftly grabbed my hand, and led me towards the house.
The slam of the front door echoed for what felt like hours, and we must have stood there, in that gloomy hallway, for much longer. Blindly, mum showed us to the living room, ordering us to remain there whilst she ran back to the car. The three of us sat down on the sofa-- brought to the house during the previous day. The material felt cold, and alien against my skin, even though I had sat on it many times prior. I curled up into my sister's side and she instantly wrapped her arms around me. Tentatively, my brother joined.
Despite the tumultuous mayhem transpiring outside the atmosphere within the house was perplexingly still. My eyes drooped and I forced them back open. Sleep was consuming me, but I didn't want to succumb to it. Unfortunately, my six-year-old brain was prone to tiredness, quite inescapable. I'd wanted to go exploring that day, familiarize myself with what would be my home for the next twelve years. The weather was hardly suitable for the type of venture I was interested in.
As I fell further away from consciousness the storm calmed, and the birds returned. My ears became hyper-sensitive to their call and I wondered what they looked like. If they were great, black, majestic birds with wingspans the length of me or tiny, multi-coloured ones that could fit comfortably in the palms of my tiny hands. Or perhaps they were an array of different types, all flocked together for some unusual gathering, unbeknownst to the scientists that studied them.
