I once had to stay overnight in Aberdeen for work.
As an introduction to a spooky story, that’s as bold a first sentence as you can get. The shivers you feel creeping over you now are from the pre-emptive terror triggered by such a statement, or just first-hand experience of being in Aberdeen at night.
Working for an IT company based in Glasgow, I would often be sent to our offices in Aberdeen for meetings. Three hours away on the train, it meant I would occasionally stay over for late meetings, or early meetings the next morning. Only this time, I wasn’t able to secure my usual hotel. Lying in the north east of Scotland, the port town’s proximity to the sea meant it was an ideal location for offshore workers to return to the mainland, and it just so happened a lot of them had come ashore, and prices for rooms had hit unimaginable highs.
Naively, I assumed I’d be able to find a hotel on the night but, as anyone from Aberdeen will realise, that’s not a particularly viable option when the city is heaving with workers.
Despite being the third most populated city in Scotland, Aberdeen can be a very grey and dark place, especially in the rain. Jaunts up and down Union Street with a hood up as the chubby rain spat from the clouds could feel isolated and lonely, even with the abundance of folks surrounding me. Quick glances up above my wet glasses caught indistinguishable blurry smudges on the horizon that failed to separate the grey buildings, the grey pavements, and the grey clouds. But, in that respect, it was no different to Glasgow — another eternally overcast place, perennially living in the shadow of its unfortunate weather cycle.
Buckets were flowing on me that night as I left the office and the downpour was slicking up the pavements, rendering my ridiculous and hopeful excuse for a hood useless.
I ducked into a wee alcove for respite, and to jump on the internet to hopefully grab a last minute Airbnb. Raindrops from my soaking hood and the hair stuck fast to my forehead was waterfalling on to my phone, almost booking me a hotel in an entirely different country. But after a few drenched swipes from my sleeve, I was able to find a nearby room in Aberdeen quite quickly. I assumed it was a bit of luck, a wee crack in the gloomy ceiling groaning above me.
According to the instructions in the booking, to get access to the flat, I had to drop by a nearby shop and ask for Moira. The onus was then on Moira to contact her dad, who’d agree to meet me outside the shop, and escort me to the flat. It all seemed like a weirdly convoluted operation, because it was.
So, I swam along the wet, long, darkened pavements and located the shop. It was after 5pm, and the shutters were down on its doorway and windows. My phone’s screen was now a blotchy mess and I had to wipe and re-wipe it several times to make certain I was in the right place. But I was.
I gingerly rapped on the shutters, then realised doing so without making much noise rendered the whole point of it redundant. I knocked more firmly with my sodden hand, and the shutter pulled up with an elongated and creaking bang.
And there was Moira, standing in there in the dark, eyes squint.
“Oh god, I’m sorry,” I said, “Did I wake you?”
“No,” said Moira, “I’ve just been in the dark.”
After a tension-breaking laugh about the whole thing, Moira convinced me all of this was quite normal, and she picked up the phone to tell her dad to come to collect me.
“He doesn’t use the internet,” she laughed, “So we have to go through this whole rigmarole every time!”
Her dad didn’t take long. He was an old, arched fella who dressed in grey, with matching grey hair and skin, all of which camouflaged him against the streets and buildings. He had a kind of rasp coating his words, but he seemed relatively normal despite looking exactly like a living embodiment of a stick of charcoal.
I thanked Moira, and her dad led me round the corner to the flat.
As I followed his grey outline inside, he escorted me up the thin communal stairway, illuminated by a singular bulb hanging from the ceiling. At the top were two doors on either side of the stairwell, punctuated by an old brown bookcase against the wall between the rooms. Inside it was a weird, charity shop-style collection of disparate DVDs. Things like ‘Top Gun’ alongside ‘The Nightmare Before Christmas’, and ‘The Matrix Reloaded’. It seemed both peculiar and really normal.
“Oh, nice DVDs!” I said, feigning interest after his pointed finger demanded I, in some way, regarded them.
“You want to watch them?” he said, the words scraping out of his throat.
I did a wee laugh but a beat of silence passed and he hadn’t matched it with his own.
I stumbled over a couple of words and he interrupted with, “Just let me know if you want to watch them.”
And I wasn’t sure what he meant. Was he inviting me to borrow one, or did I need his permission to watch them? Or was there a DVD player in the flat I was welcome to use? Or worse… was he asking if I wanted to watch them with him?
So I just sort of laughed a laugh that existed in aural definition only, without the weight of humour, and shook my head. But he kept at them. He ran his stubby grey finger across their spines.
“Only Fools And Horses,” he said with a throaty comma after each word, “Lock Stock. Bridget Jones. They all work.”
“Nah, I’m alright, man!” I said, trying to keep it light in the stark interrogatory beams of the bulb above us, “I just want to get to sleep, to be honest!”
Another grim rasp fell from his throat, as if anatomically disappointed by my response. Then his finger moved from the DVDs to the door behind me, the entrance to the small flat in which I was going to stay the night.
As he opened it and handed me the key, I saw that inside it was actually quite modern and well maintained. Underneath the large flat-screen TV that hung on the wall like a moose’s head there was a DVD player, so it helped steady my nerves and I convinced myself that was what he’d meant all along.
It was a studio flat, with a kitchen and bathroom at one end, next to the singular window, and the bed was hard against the wall beside the entry door, which led into the lightbulb-lit hallway.
After I closed the door behind him, offering some rushed thank yous, I listened to his angled, wet body slump down each stair. Before he left the building, I heard a dull click as he turned off the solitary lightbulb, then he squelched back into the rainy night.
I settled in quite quickly, tucking into a packet of emergency crisps I had in my bag and spending longer than necessary trying to get the TV to access any channels whatsoever.
Despite being exhausted, I simply couldn’t sleep so, meekly and with an ounce of self-conscious fear, I opened the door to the dark hallway. I reached a hand out and grabbed the first DVD I could on the old shelving unit — turned out to be fucking ’50 First Dates’.
Lying in bed, I didn’t last long with it before I turned it off. But as I started drifting off to sleep, listening to the hard rain bounce off the window, I heard another, closer, more alien noise. Something loud pierced the darkness.
A sharp, raspy hiss. Like the noise from the throat of the old man.
I snapped my eyes open and peered into the dark abyss surrounding my bed, trying to tune my ears into every noise, to hear every creak in the room and determine what it was.
Nothing.
I convinced myself it was just one of those things that happens when you start to fall asleep, and think you hear a noise which startles you awake. So I settled back down, fluffing up the flat pillow, and pushing my head deep into it.
Just as sleep started to embrace me, it happened again.
A sudden, huge, raspy exhalation.
This time I was ready, I sprung up straight, pinpointing where it had come from.
And it had come from the door. Beside my bed.
The door to the communal hallway.
I groped in the darkness for my phone because I couldn’t remember where the light switches were. I pointed the screen in the direction of the door, half expecting to see that old man standing there holding a ‘Little Britain’ DVD.
Nothing. The door was closed. There was no light coming from the hallway behind it.
I waited, staring at it, the shadows from my phone light stretching over it in longer and eerier angles, but it remained shut.
I sat there, unmoving, for what felt like an age, waiting for the noise to repeat. I wanted to say ‘who’s there’, but had never seen a horror film where such a question hadn’t been answered in the most brutal of ways. After my heart returned to a regular pace, I slowly put my phone down and lowered my head back to the pillow.
But it happened again. HISSSSSSS!
I leapt out of bed, terrified I was about to be reverse Tell Tale Hearted, and slid my hand around the wall frantically, finding the hard comfort of the switch and engulfing the room in the safety of light.
I stood there in my boxers, staring at the closed door, waiting for this old cunt to burst in with a bloody axe or something, accusing me of watching ‘50 First Dates’ without his permission.
I edged closer to the door, my eyes fixed on the gap under it, thinking maybe I’d see the shadow of his creepy bent body moving around behind there. But no.
I slowly trembled my fingers around the door handle and figured this was exactly what someone in a horror film would do before being bludgeoned. I did it regardless, eking open the door.
Some light from the my room poured into the dark hallway, illuminating the DVD cabinet at the top of the stairs, and the closed door of the flat across the hall.
I peered at the spines of the DVDs, trying to figure out if any of them had moved, as if this was indicator the old grey DVD killer was on the prowl. It seemed ridiculous, they were all there. Except one. ‘Bridget Jones’ Diary’ was missing.
It had been right next to ‘Lock Stock’, but all that remained was a dark, telling gap.
And then suddenly, it happened again. HISSSSS!
Right next to me, right next to the cabinet.
I honestly screamed and leapt into the air. I remember the feel of the jaggy carpet under my bare feet as I landed back down and crumpled to my naked knees, ready to be sacrificed to the DVD gods by the old grey man of Aberdeen.
But as I collapsed melodramatically to the floor, accepting my fate, my flailing body spotted it.
Just above the DVD cabinet, right outside the door to my room, was one of those automatic air fresheners attached to the wall. Every so often it’d spray out a loud, gasping exhalation of lovely odours into the hallway. HISSSS!
As I lay there in embarrassed terror, my brain piercing together what had just happened, more light poured over me. The door across the hall swung open.
I let out a yelp, and the guest staying in the apartment next door spotted my screaming body, splayed in my boxers on the carpet, and met it with his own shriek. He jerked backwards in fear and a DVD case flew from his hands, hurtling and spinning into the air. As it passed by the air freshener, the fucking thing let out another piercing hiss, before ‘Bridget Jones’ smacked me on the face.
