right-hand door to the cupboard slightly ajar and pushed it closed. I determined I would have to do something about the clothes in the tallboy and maybe even get rid of the wardrobe itself.
The following day I was able to relax. My research into the company was completed during the morning which meant I could spend the afternoon watching movies. I decided that the next day I would finalise my research and shave in preparation for the interview the following day.
Having watched several movies back-to-back, I decided to get an early night. I got into bed following my ablutions at around ten-thirty and watched a bit of comedy on television before switching everything off and bedding down for the night, just before eleven o’clock.
I had a fitful sleep. In one of my dreams I questioned the assistant from the charity shop.
“Who did the shoes belong to?”
She looked even younger and more attractive in my dream but she wouldn’t tell me. I’d become angry at her for keeping this information from me but still she wouldn’t disclose the owner of the shoes.
As the argument escalated, she screamed. I hadn’t touched her but she’d seen something behind me which had caused her to yell out. I spun around and in doing so physically turned over in the bed and opened my eyes to see the clock display. It was showing 02:15 again.
I sat up. In the dim light, I could see the tall boy stood across from where I sat in bed, both its doors wide open. I leapt out of bed and marched toward it quickly. The smell, which had emanated previously, was so strong I felt nauseous as I grabbed both doors and forced them shut.
As I turned to return to bed, I felt something sticky underfoot. I reached for the light and switched it on. Covering the floor in front of the tall-boy was a pool of the same sticky droplets I’d seen on the inner lining of the jacket in the wardrobe. They glistened brightly except for the area in which I’d trodden.
“Oh, shit!” I said aloud. Behind me, the wardrobe groaned and I turned my head towards it as it did so. The doors looked as if they were being pushed out from something inside.
“What the…” I said to myself as I turned fully to face it. Before I could utter the word “Fuck!” both doors flew open, causing me to jump backwards. I landed on the foot of the bed, staring in disbelief at the tall-boy.
The smell was so pungent now I started to feel disoriented. I stood up and reached towards the tall-boy again. I wanted to shut the doors but was terrified of some supernatural force preventing me from doing so. After a few seconds, I realised I was being ridiculous and I grabbed both doors once more, momentarily holding them to be sure nothing untoward was going to occur.
I pushed the left one shut first, reaching in to push the lock that sat on its inside into the slot in the top lip of the cupboard. I’d never had to use the lock before but figured that maybe my opening the tall-boy after such a long time had caused some strain on the doors and they’d subsequently moved and this was what had caused them to open so suddenly. I pushed the right hand door closed and was glad to hear the click as the ball-bearing set into the top of the door edge clicked home.
I entered the bathroom and wiped my feet with a towel. Taking the same towel, I returned to the bedroom and mopped up as much of the gooey fluid in front of the tall-boy as I could. I tossed the sodden and soiled towel into the shower. I’d sort it out later.
By the time I returned to bed, the clock showed 02:45.
The next day, I checked the time it would take me to get to the interview. Ordinarily, it would take an hour. I knew that the route could sometimes experience significant delays and wanted to give myself double the time to get there. I made an entry in my calendar to remind me to leave two hours before I was due to attend the company’s offices.
I retrieved the towel I’d used to wipe my feet and mop up the mess in front of the tall-boy from the shower and rinsed it thoroughly in a sink of hot water. As the hot water came into contact with the globules that had not burst and which still resembled perfect, transparent, shiny spheres, there was a high-pitched, shrill sound emitted from each before their external “shells” melted and the sticky substance inside was released. I delighted in the destruction of each of the “souls” that I imagined were contained within.
I hung the towel up to dry and grabbed a large empty polythene bag which I’d brought up from the kitchen earlier. I opened the tall-boy and removed the shirts therein and placed them in the bag. Following this, I set the bag on the floor, opening it as wide as possible, as I took the hanger holding the mouldy suit from the cupboard. I carefully placed the suit, along with the hanger, into the bag which I then pulled up and around the contents, sealing it by tying the bag into a knot at its opening. I used toilet roll to clean the remainder of the goo from the floor of the cupboard and then flushed the paper down the lavatory.
Having started something of a cleaning frenzy in the bedroom, I moved on to cleaning and vacuuming the entire house. By the time I’d finished, it was getting dark outside.
I gathered everything I’d need for my interview together in one place, ready to take with me the next day. I didn’t want to run the risk of running behind-time for my interview the next day so showered and shaved before getting another early night.
I lay in bed awake from ten until midnight, listening to BD’s Rock Show on Express FM, a local radio station broadcast which had two funny presenters, “BD” and “Thrashman” who chatted about all manner of things and who also played some rather excellent music.
When the show had finished, I switched off both the clock-radio and the light and lay on my side with my eyes closed, trying to get to sleep. The thought of waking up late had pervaded my mind and made me all the more anxious as I struggled to get to sleep. I kept looking at the clock from time to time. When I first looked, it showed the time as 00:25. The next time, 00:45 even though it felt like more than an hour had passed. The third time I rolled over and looked at it, it said 01:05.
The next time I looked at it was following my being woken by a voice. Slightly above a whisper, the voice seemed remarkably close to my ear. At first, I wasn’t sure if I’d not dreamt it.
But then it repeated.
“You can tell the mark of a man by his shoes.” The disembodied voice said.
I sat up, switching on the light urgently, seeing the clock displaying 02:15 as I looked around the room for the source of the voice.
There was nothing there. I sat, my breath coming in short, sharp gasps, as I tried to reconcile what had just happened.
“Fuck!” I panted.
Then, from inside the tall-boy, there came a noise. At first it was just a light scratching sound. As I leaned forward to listen more intently, there was suddenly a loud bang from within.
“Jesus Fucking Christ!” I said aloud. “Who the fuck is there?” I asked.
I saw the tall-boy shake. It visibly shook, as if something within it was moving left-to-right and back and forth to try and make the furniture item move. Then it came forward. Towards me. Towards the bed. I screamed. It stopped momentarily then, as if on inertia, toppled forward. As it did so, I saw the doors open as gravity overtook them. And, just for a moment, I could swear I saw a face inside!
The tall-boy landed with a thundering crash and the top splintered and cracked as it came into contact with the solid wood base of the edge of the bed. The doors swung loosely back and forth, their hinges creaking as the wardrobe groaned, its panels bending back into their original shape and position.
I waited. I tried to stifle the noise my breath was making by breathing shallower so I could hear for any movement. There was none that I could determine but I still felt unable to move.
After a few moments, I moved gingerly around the edge of the bed. When I drew alongside the cupboard, laying slanted with its top end supported by the edge of the bed, I kicked out at the side of it. It moved, enough to allow it to slide off the bed fully. As it did so, the doors were forced back into the closed position under it and it lay on the fl
oor motionless. I listened intently for any sounds of scratching or movement within. Only when my legs and back ached from being strained over and listening did I believe it was safe.
‘What the hell had caused it to fall like that?’ I wondered. I looked over the back of it.
A few scraps of old newspaper, discoloured and torn, clung to the edges of the rear panel where they had been placed previously. I presumed they had been wrapped around the tall-boy to protect the surface from scratches. Old advertisements, for vacuums with bags that would revolutionise cleaning and cigarettes first caught my eye mainly as these items weren’t advertised any longer. On one sliver of paper, there was the ominous title of the section I recalled my Mother always liked reading for some macabre reason. “Births, Deaths and” the torn piece of paper yielded, the “Marriages” portion having been long removed or lost.
“Hatches, Matches and Despatches.” I said, recalling what my Mother affectionately called the section that heralded new arrivals to the planet, recent couplings and those lost.
I looked down the column. There was just one birth.
“Tristan Hopton-Smyth.” I read aloud. What a ridiculous name I thought. “Born 10th February 1901.” Jesus, how old was this thing? Maybe the tall-boy itself wasn’t that old, I surmised, and it was just the newspaper that was aged.
The Ghost of Clothes Page 4