FIFTY-FOUR

When Bennet grunted Stephanie screamed.

She ran across the pink room to the doorway. Her hands bumped around the door handle. She was carrying too many things: knife, candle, screwdriver. She could not get purchase on the round door handle.

She dropped the screwdriver, put the knife between her teeth, turned the handle, opened the door. Glanced over her shoulder at the noise of bed springs, but instantly wished she had not. The figure on the bed swung thin legs over one side of the mattress and hissed with excitement.

Stephanie slammed the bedroom door behind herself. The speed of her exit put out the candle.

Turning about, in the absolute darkness of the black room, she felt her body shake, and not just from the sudden freeze and stagnant odour of corruption she had plunged herself back into; terror that threatened to become a seizure had taken hold of her limbs.

With near useless hands she retrieved the box of matches from the front pocket of her hooded top. Slid the box open, withdrew one match. Others dropped and scattered across the floor at her feet. She shut the box.

Against the other side of the door the dead thing in the windbreaker turned the handle and pushed.

‘God, God, God,’ she muttered at the darkness.

He ain’t in here no more.

Stephanie struck the match she held. It flared alight.

She whimpered when she saw all four chairs drawn back from the black table in anticipation of guests.

Nothing was sitting in them, yet. But whatever was inside the little wooden box upon the long sideboard, hidden behind the purple curtain, began to beat out a muffled rhythm. And into her mind flashed an image of small black hands banging a leather-skinned drum.

Old hair . . . black horse’s tail . . . wiry hair, doll hair . . . leather skin . . . little black hands beating a drum with a stick.

She dropped the match when it burned her fingers. Back into darkness she sank with the sound of a drum thumping inside her ears.

Using the tatters of her concentration she fished another match out of the box; there were not many left.

The door handle stopped swivelling in the small of her back, and Bennet stopped pushing at the door. But he had not gone because she could still hear the sound of his odious breathing: fast breathing that comes from arousal, from delight. But why had he stopped trying to get out?

As if summoned by the drum, there was a shuffling sound upon the floor of the black room which tore her attention away from Bennet.

Something not wrapped in polythene, something heavy and yet soft, was moving through the darkness that engulfed her. Whatever produced the susurration, this sliding, was concealed by the broad drapery of the black tablecloth. A small mercy and one she was sure would be short lived.

Stephanie suffered the sensation that the darkness about her was filling and expanding with motion. She flinched back tighter to the door, afraid something might be closing in on her face, and struck a match against the box.

No spark, just the sensation of crumbling close to her fingertips.

The next match she tried flared and briefly spat, then sputtered extinct. She dropped it and pulled out what she realized was the second to last match.

This match ignited. Before the flare retracted, she saw movement on the far side of the room, near the head of the table. There was definitely motion, but she could not see what was responsible for stirring the darkness.

Stephanie glanced at the wooden box on the sideboard; the purple curtain was still drawn while the muffled beat thumped inside.

She dipped the candle wick inside the match’s flame. Waited for the trembling light to struggle and to grow and to reveal what new and, perhaps, final horror awaited what was left of her mind.

Once the wick caught, Stephanie looked to the door that led into the kitchen as if it offered some hope of salvation.

Gas yourself. Start a fire.

At the furthest reach of the candle’s flickering flame, she detected the vague outline of a shape against the far wall, one almost as dark as the paintwork. A silhouette rising from the floor in a gliding motion. From a spasm of renewed terror her head shook, her mouth twitched, her breath condensed about her face. ‘Dad. Daddy. Dad,’ she muttered, as if he were able to come into the room when called upon to save her.

Up and off the floor the thing moved, as though the lower half were serpentine and the ceiling its intended destination. Stephanie screamed and threw the candle at the movement. It missed and hit the far wall. But as the flame arced across the room she glimpsed what might have been a tatty black head, close to the ceiling, and a pair of shrivelled arms beneath.

Maggie. Black Maggie. Maggie. Black Maggie.

She heard the voices inside her head. Not her own voice, but other voices. Lots of other voices. Voices that now travelled over the ceiling as she fled beneath them and across the room towards her memory of where the kitchen door had been.

Round and round and round the voices went.

Up and up and up the black thing slid to be among the voices calling out its name upon the ceiling.

The drum beat grew louder.

Stephanie batted her hands across the wall, whimpering in her blindness and in her frustration that she could not find the wood of the door, because her hands were now sliding across wet bricks.

The blackness was inside her lungs; she had inhaled too much of it, drawn the darkness inside her chest and through the chambers of her heart like dirty smoke. A taste of water rank with ashes and burned bone filled her mouth.

She turned around and fumbled the match box out of her pocket and then scraped the last match out of the box. With fingers she could barely feel she struck the match against the wrong side of the box. Then turned the match box over and tried again.

The match flared.

In the air, near the ceiling, a pair of small white eyes, inside a face she was glad she could not see, closed. But when the head slowly moved down and towards her, as if to investigate her presence, it shook what might have been hair with an emotion that resembled joy.

She turned her own face away from the thing above her, glimpsed the kitchen door behind her shoulder. Reached for the door handle. Stepped out of the black room and slammed the kitchen door shut.