FIFTY-TWO

The impact of the second room’s strangeness was worsened by her sense of familiarity inside it. She had seen the place before, what seemed like a long time ago, though her dreams of the room could not have been more than a week old. Time and space, the dimensions and certainties of reality, seemed to command a position as contemptible and forsaken as her own status inside the building.

The walls were painted black and adorned with nothing. The ceiling was black. The floorboards were painted black. Had there ever been a light fitting inside the room, it was long gone. She found it hard to determine where the walls met the ceiling and the floor.

The large round table in the centre of the room was covered in a dusty black cloth with hems that lapped the floor. She would have preferred to have been able to see beneath the table.

Four plain wooden chairs were pushed under the table so the backrests touched the rim of the table top. The only other item of furniture inside the room was a long, black sideboard. Upon the sideboard were two old wooden candlesticks. They gave off an ecclesiastical feel without any of the comfort a residue of Christianity might offer.

The suggestion of a ritual having been conducted inside the room made her experience a shrinking sensation inside her skin. A repulsion further embellished by the sight of a wooden box with a purple curtain drawn across its front. The container on the sideboard was no bigger than a small doll’s house, though the idea of the tiny curtain suddenly being drawn from the inside made her head tremble upon her shoulders.

The room smelled of dust and damp fabric, it reeked of emptiness and age. But its odours were secondary to its atmosphere. She had never experienced anything akin to that, and wasn’t aware that a physical space could even command such a character. Because this space was desolate, and somehow fouled with a corruption she could only guess at. And yet the room was alive too, vibrating with a black energy that pressed her thoughts to a diamond of terror.

This was a tomb, a mausoleum with brick walls painted black, a chamber that both existed in a terrible past and also now. Her assumptions of its nature were instinctive.

A door. An entrance. A way in.

The purpose behind the room’s design suggested the obscene, the unholy, the inhumane. Nothing would ever be able to cleanse the space or its blackened walls. So many terrible things had been absorbed into the room, and it could become alive with them at any time. The room was charred by an evil she could not even recognize as human. It had been fashioned by someone, perhaps with the help of something from somewhere else.

The flickering of the candle’s light inside the sombre room only increased her abhorrence of the place. She didn’t want to look at the room, but needed to walk across it, and slowly enough to keep the candle alight too. Stephanie cupped the hand holding the knife around the fragile flame. When the flame goes out your mind goes out.

At the far side of the room she noticed a second door, one at first disguised by the absence of variety in the wall’s colour scheme. She immediately moved towards it.

Fergal listens. What does he listen for? Bennet?

You heard noises and furniture being scraped inside this room, so who the fuck was in here? Bennet?

A door slammed. You heard a door slam.

This door? So whatever was moving inside here might now be inside the next room you need to go into.

Don’t open the door.

You have no choice.

Windows. You have to get to a window. And break it.

As Stephanie made her way to the door, her thoughts chasing each other through her mind like frightened cats, she began to shiver and was forced to pull her arms closer to her torso and to withdraw her head into her body. When the temperature of the room dropped even lower, she froze with panic in anticipation of what intense cold always preceded inside the house.

A noise, accompanying an unseen movement, commenced behind Stephanie’s back. Her first notion was of a breeze rifling through loose polythene that covered a solid object; an object close to the door she had just come in through.

The realization that there was no wind, not so much as a draught, and that the room had been empty only a moment ago, brought her to a stop.

The continuing sounds of crinkling plastic now put into her mind the image of something rising from the floor. And a sudden stench of decomposition suggested that something no longer living now shared the space with her.

Stephanie turned around, her mouth and her eyes wide open.

She had come to a standstill between the two doors and beside the table. The light from the solitary candle she held in her shaking hand struggled to illuminate much of the walls and very little of the room’s corners, but it did catch features of the room’s newest, or perhaps oldest, occupant.

The light was reflected in the parts of the aged polythene not stained or fogged by the inhabitant within the long, plastic sheet. Through the clearer patches in the covering, what she could see of the shape inside appeared dark, like the lustreless brown of aged leather, but mottled black like the skin on the hands of the very old.

The figure shrouded in plastic stood upright but struggled to remain on its feet. Stephanie was unable to look at it for long, but through a brief, appalled gaping she realized the figure had once been female; attested to by what looked like shrunken drinking gourds, tipped with black nipples and pressed into the polythene.

The body was thin, if not shrivelled. A feeble posture suggested it was bow-legged too, though all she could see of one leg was near skeletal. And when it opened what must have been a mouth within a hairless head, she heard a parched voice whisper a single word. She thought it said, ‘Time.’

When the second door clicked open, swung wide and banged against the black wall behind her, Stephanie screamed. And turned to face whatever had just entered the room on the other side. Her vision flickered like the candle’s light, and then seemed to judder as if she were drunk.

She struggled to breathe through lungs frozen inside her chest. Gulped at the black air. Staggered backwards until her buttocks struck the table. She’d forgotten she held a knife in her hand, and when she remembered it was there her desire to move her arm and point the knife at the thing on the floor never became action. Because she was too frightened to do anything but whimper out the air she’d managed to swallow.

What entered the room came in on its front. It used bony elbows like hands to pull itself across the floor. The sound of the elbows upon the black floor made a knocking sound like wood upon wood. What she assumed was the head was entirely and tightly bound in brown parcel tape, glinting where the candle light struck it. She recognized the slurps and wet wheezes immediately, and now understood how such an awful noise was created. From where a mouth would have been on an uncovered face, there was a small hole, with a tiny plastic pipe extending through the puncture, through which the thing on the floor tried to breathe.

Once the shape was entirely inside the room, it paused as the blind and blank face moved about, searching for something, groping without sight or hearing. Behind the wrapped-up ball of the head its thin shoulders were draped in a cape of polythene that encased the body in the places where it was still taped down, but had come loose from other parts of its slim, black torso as if from past struggles within the unventilated confines.

Stephanie turned and climbed upon the table so the thing upon the floor could not reach her feet. Even using nothing but two sharp elbows, its movements were uncomfortably quick upon the ground.

At some point, as she drew her second leg up and onto the black table cloth, the candle went out and total darkness returned to the cold and stinking room.

Stephanie screamed again, this time so hard she wondered if her vocal cords would snap like old rubber bands and just flap about inside her throat. Her scream filled her head with flashes of lightning.

The darkness filled with the sound of rustling polythene as the two visitors shuffled and crawled towards the table she knelt upon, as if drawn to her.

When something bumped the table she twisted about and onto her bottom in a defensive flinch.

A dry panting erupted close to one side of her head. At the same time she sensed, as much as heard, a faint woody rapping amidst the rustles of polythene. She could only surmise that a pair of wasted hands were now feeling about the table top near her body. When something as thin and hard as a pencil touched one of her thighs she choked more than screamed.

Beyond her feet she heard the wet exertions of the thing with the taped head, pulling itself up the back of a chair to join her on the table. Both of the visitors were blind but intent on finding her. They were investigating her.

Stephanie shuffled sideways and moved further along the table top. Between each movement she swiped the kitchen knife in the black air about her. The blade touched nothing.

When she found the head of the table closest to the second door, she fell more than clambered off the table and ran at where she thought the door leading out of this room must be.

And hit a wall, first with a knee and then with her forehead.

Over by the table, her new position immediately registered with her pursuers, who rustled anew inside their coverings in what suggested a haste to follow her.

Palming herself through the darkness and along the wall, Stephanie found the open doorway. She fell into the next room and pulled the door shut.