The Boy Who Counted Backwards

• 4 minute read
• Ages 10-13
• Horror Stories for Kids

My younger brother Bilal started counting when he was six.

Not counting things. Just counting, out loud, quietly, to himself, while he was doing something else. Colouring, or eating, or walking beside me on the way to school.

He counted backwards. He would start somewhere in the hundreds and come down, one number at a time, and when he got to zero he would start again from somewhere else.

Our mother thought it was a habit and that he would grow out of it.

The number

It went on for about eight months and nobody worried about it.

Then one evening I noticed something and I sat down and worked it out on a piece of paper, and it took me about twenty minutes.

He was not starting from somewhere else each time.

He was continuing. Every time he reached zero and appeared to start again from a new number, that number was exactly where he would have been if he had never stopped, and had carried on counting silently through everything in between.

Through meals. Through sleep. Through the whole of school.

I checked it four times because I did not believe it. It was right every time.

What I did not do

I did not tell my mother.

I have thought about this for twenty years and I still do not have a good reason. I think I did not want to be the one who turned a small strange habit into a serious thing, and I think I was fourteen and did not want the house to change.

So I did what I told myself was the sensible thing, which was to watch it.

I wrote the numbers down for six weeks in a notebook.

What the notebook showed

It was going down.

Not fast. He had been in the high thousands when I started, and after six weeks he was in the low thousands, and the rate was steady enough that I could put a line on graph paper and read off where it met the bottom.

It met the bottom in about four months.

And I sat on my bed with a piece of graph paper and understood that I had spent six weeks measuring something instead of telling somebody about it.

Telling

I told my mother that night. All of it, including the six weeks, which was the hard part.

She did not shout at me.

She took Bilal to a doctor the following week, and then to another one, and there was a long period of appointments that I was not part of, and at some point in the middle of it he simply stopped counting.

He was seven. He does not remember any of it. He is twenty-seven now and he is completely fine and he thinks this story is funny, and I have never shown him the notebook.

The four months

Here is the thing I have never resolved.

Nobody ever told me what the doctors found, and I have asked, and my mother says there was nothing to find and that children do strange things.

Bilal stopped counting seven weeks after I told her.

Which is well inside four months.

So I do not know whether telling her is the reason nothing happened, or whether nothing was ever going to happen. I have gone round this my whole adult life and there is no way to find out, and that is the actual ending of this story.

But I know what I would do now, and it is not six weeks of graph paper.