Footsteps in the gallery

Text 1: Goodnight to the Bear, by Ivor Castellane

An original short story extract.

Every night at two o’clock Gideon walked the long gallery, and every night it was the same. The cases glowed faintly under their safety lights. The stuffed animals watched him go past with their glass eyes: the wolf, the lynx, the great brown bear standing on its hind legs by the stairs with its paws raised, as if it had been caught in the middle of telling a joke. He always said goodnight to the bear.

Tonight he was halfway down the gallery when he heard footsteps.

He stopped. The footsteps stopped.

He told himself it was the echo. The gallery was eighty yards long and floored with old oak, and every sound he made came back to him a fraction late, like a slow child copying. He took three steps. Three steps answered. He took one more, very carefully, rolling his foot from heel to toe. Nothing.

Then, from somewhere behind the Egyptian room, a single footstep that was not his.

His torch beam shook as he swung it round. It slid over glass and brass and polished wood and the pale, bandaged shape of the mummy in its case, and showed him nothing but his own reflection, a white face and a dark uniform, staring back at him from every cabinet at once like a crowd of frightened men.

Gideon had worked here for nineteen years. He knew every creak of the building, every pipe that knocked, every window that rattled when the buses went past. He did not know this.

He made himself walk towards the Egyptian room. His thumb was on the radio button, and he did not press it, because what would he say? The air seemed to thicken as he went. His own breathing was enormous. At the doorway he stopped and lifted the torch.

A small boy in a school jumper was sitting on the floor beneath the sarcophagus, his knees pulled up to his chin, his cheeks streaked with dried tears. He blinked into the light.

“I got lost,” he said, in a very small voice. “On the school trip. I hid, and then everyone went.”

Gideon let out a breath he seemed to have been holding for nineteen years. He crouched down slowly, the way you would for a frightened animal, and switched the torch away from the boy’s face.

“Well,” he said. “You’d better come and meet the bear.”

Explore how Ivor Castellane uses language and structure to build and then release tension as Gideon investigates the footsteps.

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