The Sound of Bangles

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

My aunt's village had one rule about the road past the fields, and it was not about the dark.

It was about the sound.

"If you hear bangles behind you on that road," she said, "do not turn round. Keep walking. Walk at the same speed you were already walking."

"What if it is a person?"

"A person will speak to you," said my aunt. "That is the whole test. A person says your name."

The road

I was fifteen and I did not take it seriously.

I did not disbelieve it either, exactly. It sat in the part of my mind where things sit when you have not decided about them, and I walked that road twice a week all summer without ever thinking about it.

Then one evening in August I stayed too long at the shop and came back after the light had gone.

The road runs between two sugarcane fields and there is nothing on either side for about a kilometre.

And somewhere in the middle of it, behind me, I heard glass bangles.

Walking

It was not close. It was maybe twenty steps back, and it was the ordinary sound of somebody walking with bangles on both wrists, the small irregular clinking that goes with a person's stride.

The most likely thing in the world was that it was a woman from the village walking home behind me.

I kept walking at the same speed. That was the only part of my aunt's rule I could remember properly and I held on to it.

The bangles stayed twenty steps back.

They did not get closer and they did not get further away, and after a while I realised they were matching my pace exactly, which is not something you notice a person doing, because people do not.

I did not turn round.

The gate

It took eleven or twelve minutes to reach the edge of the village and it was the longest walk of my life.

When I got to the first houses and the light from a doorway fell across the road, the sound stopped.

Not faded. Stopped, between one step and the next.

I stood in that doorway light and then I did turn round, because I was in the village now and there were people, and the road behind me was completely empty for as far as I could see.

My aunt

I told her that night, and she listened to the whole thing without interrupting.

Then she asked one question, which was not the question I expected.

"Did you speak?"

"No."

"Not at all? You did not call out to ask who it was?"

"No."

She sat back and let out a breath she had been holding the whole time.

"Then it never knew your name," she said. "That is the rule. Not turning round is not the rule. Not turning round is only how you stop yourself from doing the thing that matters."