FORTY-THREE

Stephanie awoke on the brittle carpet, shivering. Her discomfort was immediately overshadowed by the sound of a voice above her body.

She’d broken from another bad dream that left her with a vague memory of a discoloured face, whispering from inside a plastic covering, only to emerge into a space where another voice spoke. And the second speaker was either inside the room or situated near the ceiling.

Stephanie didn’t sit up, because that would have meant moving her head closer to where the voice originated, up there.

Still wrapped inside the aged candlewick bedspread, an item she had shaken vigorously and then turned around to keep herself as warm as possible on the floor, Stephanie tried to orientate herself inside a room as black as pitch.

She strove for a recognition of where the door to the room was in relation to her position on the floor, and also where the window was, the bed, the bedside cabinet.

She remained afraid, though identified more resolve in herself than she’d experienced before at night in the building. She was becoming accustomed to these visitations, or manifestations, or whatever they were, though it was a familiarity that brought no real comfort.

Those that actually lived at 82 Edgehill Road, she was reminded with a cruel irony, were now far worse than the muttering but unseen mouths of the building’s dingy cavities. She’d still take this situation over being in a room with the McGuires. But as she stared into the freezing darkness, endeavouring to pinpoint the source of the sound, Stephanie still bit into a hand to stop the whimpering that wanted to struggle out of her mouth.

The voice she could hear was brittle with age. And it spoke English. The speaker was a woman, an older woman, and an angry woman. That was apparent, as was Stephanie’s belief that it was the worst voice she had yet heard at night inside the building.

As if the speaker had swiftly moved into the distance, the voice became faint within an atmosphere of absolute silence that allowed the words to travel, but not carry far enough for Stephanie to really understand all of what was being said. She caught bursts of speech thrown at her in desperation, fragments repeatedly cut off as if by swipes of a headwind, while the room remained unnaturally still and cold.

‘Avoid foolish questions and . . . contentions . . . strivings about . . . they are unprofitable . . . vain . . .’

The voice then muffled as if spoken at the ground, or into a hand held across a mouth, or as if a radio signal had momentarily lost its strength.

When the voice surged back into the room, it moved across where the ceiling should be, and in a manner that made Stephanie cringe into near paralysis.

‘A man that is an heretic . . . first and . . . admonition . . . reject . . .’

Struck by the notion that the speaker was crawling across the ceiling and through the darkness above her head, Stephanie cast off her dusty coverings and moved to her hands and knees. Crawled to where she hoped the door would be.

The voice then circled, or perhaps hugged the corners of the ceiling as it moved around Stephanie in an anticlockwise fashion that gradually increased in speed. ‘Knowing that he . . . subverted . . . sinneth . . . being condemned of himself . . .’

Stephanie groped along one side of the bed, the carpet so dry and rough the fabric could have been snow crunching beneath her tender palms and fingertips.

She turned and sat down and then shuffled across the bottom of the bedframe to the wall. When she found the door with the back of her head and shoulders, she made to stand up with the intention of fumbling for the light switch. But at that moment the voice spoke again. And no more than an inch from her face.

‘Be diligent to come unto me!’

Stephanie screamed until not a solitary molecule of air remained inside her lungs. She screamed to expel the notion that the invisible speaker now hung upside down from the ceiling so that its mouth was level with her eyes.

When her scream tailed into a gasp, so icy was the room that the skin of her face burned. She had not been dismissed by whatever had gathered about her.

Silence thickened around her like a cold sea blackened by night.

A small voice, and one full of tears, ended the calm by whispering into both of her ears at the same time, ‘For I have determined there to winter.’

She could not understand why her heart did not stop at that moment. Had it done she would have considered cardiac arrest the only mercy she had been shown by the house during her short time beneath its roof. But she managed to stand up on legs she could hardly feel, and to find the switch and return light to the horrible room.

There was nothing on the ceiling and no one inside with her. But the room’s dimensions now appeared dirtier and even more forlorn than they had before she fell asleep.