by Glen Johnson
I decided the house was obviously empty, after no one came down to see why the front door had banged loudly, or at the noise I was now making, as I started to undress and lay my clothes over a metalwork fire grill. Steam instantly started to rise from my soaked tracksuit and colourful underwear that looked comical spread out to dry, with Marvin the Martian’s angry face staring at the ceiling. My clothes stunk of smoke.
One of the light bulbs in the three-bulb centerpiece above me popped and went out. I continued to undress, pulling off my wet socks. I then pulled an old blanket from the back of the chair. I shook it, sending a storm of dust motes everywhere. After my coughing fit I snuggled up into the seat and wrapped the blanket tightly around myself. Even though it was dusty I welcomed its dryness and warmth.
The blanket smelt like Marks & Spenser, an expensive clothes and food store. When you walked in the store it stunk; a smell you associate with old people, a musty, sweaty smell. Every M&S I had ever been in smelt the same, as if they sprayed it around the store at night, like some sort of pheromone to attract old people.
I sat curled up, staring into the hypnotic flames of the fire. The images of the hotel fire started to fill my mind again. My head nodded forward from lack of rest. Before I knew what hit me I was fast asleep.
The dull light from the pulled curtains woke me. Looking at the old mahogany clock on the mantelpiece, I realized it was past eight o’clock in the morning, if the clock was working?
I looked again at the window, with dull light spilling in. What with the heavy rain clouds above and how narrow the lane was, I realized this small dwelling probably never got direct sunlight into its front room.
I went to uncurl. My muscles screamed at me, having been tucked up in an unnatural position all throughout the night. I felt like I had run the London Marathon.
The fire burned steadily in the grate and I knew I wouldn’t need to put anything on it; it would burn for as long as I decided to stay here. And knowing this place was obviously safe, because he had guided me here; I decided to stay the day and another night. Recover and put my mind in order.
Also, I would see if the old television, which was resting on the wobbly legs, actually worked. I would catch up with the latest news.
I found that after being sat in front of the open fire all night my clothes were like dry cardboard. I climbed into them. Hot and comforting, but slightly musty smelling. Or was that the house? Old and unused it seemed to have a familiar smell that I couldn’t quite place. Not the M&S smell, but something ominous.
I wandered into the small kitchen, which only filled one wall. A small two burner stove with a cooker beneath, a box-fridge and a collection of mismatched cupboards. The whole kitchen was covered with a film of greasy yellow dust. The small dirty window was full of dead flies and dried larvae cases, and a patchwork of dusty cobwebs.
I started opening a few cupboards. I found a handful of Tesco baked beans tins, the value twenty-nine pence variety, with the blue and white stripes down the side. A couple tins of value spaghetti and other cheap cupboard fillers. Whoever had lived here was on a budget. I realized I wasn’t really hungry, just going through the motions. I ignored the tins and looked for something to drink instead.
The fridge was still running, but everything inside it had taken on a life of its own. Some sort of cheese – in its former life – now filled almost the entire top shelf in a green-grey type of spider’s web, reaching out from the dried mummified remains of the original lump. Milk cartons were bloated from chemical decomposition; they looked like they could explode under the pressure at any moment. Apart from the lower glass draw being full of an organic looking brown soup – that was possibly once a collection of vegetables – nothing else was inside.
I ran the tap for a few minutes, waiting for the brown water to run clear. Water pipes banged loudly from somewhere in the house. First I washed the smudged lipstick off the cup, and then filled it. I returned to the small front room.
I slowly – to make sure it didn’t collapse – moved the cabinet with the old television on, closer, so I could sit in the seat and see what the news had to say. It was a Murphy TV, which had a 19 inch rounded screen. After getting use to a 50 inch flat plasma screen, I needed it closer just to see it.
After fiddling with the aerial for a couple of minutes I eventually achieved a picture that was a fuzzy haze. The old colour television had a large round knob on the front for changing channels. I hadn’t seen a television this old since I was a child, and was surprised it wasn’t black and white.
I now sat curled up in the chair, with the chipped cup resting in my hands, watching a tacky breakfast time TV show, waiting for the news to start.
The rain had picked up intensity again; I could hear it splattering against the dirty window, the howling wind rattling the old wooden frame around like a dry skeleton. I had to turn the sound up just so I could hear it.
I had to get up from the chair to do so, realizing just how much I had taken remote controls for granted.
The breakfast show was bright and tacky, with the presenters giving false laughs and over exaggerating their hand movements. Countless people wandered around in the background, also laughing and going about whatever it was they were suppose to be doing. A couple of times the camera strayed away from the two young presenters, to gauge the reaction from the hyperactive audience.
The presenters were a man with blue-dyed hair and bright clothes, who tried to smile and talk at the same time, making half of what he said just incoherent babble. The woman had unnaturally blonde hair and fake breasts, which she kept trying to squeeze back into her skimpy top, while letting her hands run all over the young man next to her, as if flirting. What was it with silicone implants, why were so many woman unhappy with their looks? Each held a clipboard holding the schedule; each board was decorated in tacky stickers or fluffy material. In all it looked like an amateur children show, with wannerbe porn stars.
I groaned a sigh of relief when it went to a commercial.
I needed the baño.
I wandered back to the kitchen to see if there was another door leading to a toilet. Nothing. Upstairs it was then. I climbed the uneven carpeted stairs to the first floor, trying not to touch the banister rail that was once painted white, and was now a grimy brown colour from dirty hands clinging to it. The stairs felt like my weight would make them collapse. It was a death trap.
Upstairs was a small landing that held just two doors. With my luck the first I tried was the only bedroom. Cobwebs stretched and snapped as I pushed open the door. The door seemed stiff and ungiving. Staring in I noticed the bed was unmade; all crumpled, looking like it had never been made before. The sheets were almost black from being unwashed. Small mouldy blobs covered the sheets, looking similar to the festering cheese sat in the fridge.
On one side numerous books perched one on top of the other – a vast collection taking up precious space. The books looked all yellowed and brittle. A small wardrobe nestled in one corner with a chest of draws next to it. The draws all slightly open with dusty items pushed into them, spilling out over the edges.
Then the smell hit me, the smell I couldn’t quite place, but now I could – decay and death.
Then I noticed something on the floor beside my foot, a hand and part of an arm – decayed, old tatty moth eating clothes stretching across the gaps the skin no longer covered. Silver rings hung on white bones, now too large and all hanging unevenly. The hand all mummified, having curled into a fist when the muscles had dried.
I didn’t want to look at the rest of the body behind the door, so I shut the door back tight.
I sat on the toilet, which I had to wipe clean with toilet paper. Strangely the toilet paper seemed unaffected by time and decay. The rest of the toilet faired no better than the rest of the house. The bath was still full of something, which I didn’t want to examine too closely. It seemed like someone covered in mud had had a bath and not cleaned it out after. Now it was a kind of primev
al soup. I expected a new species to crawl out of it at any moment. I thought houses like this only existed inside writer’s heads when describing a derelict dwelling.
I know it sounds strange, staying in the same house with a dead body only a couple of foot away, but I had become accustomed to death. After everything I had witnessed over the last almost two weeks, nothing could now repulse me. I needed somewhere to stay, to hold up, and check the news. This seemed like a safe place. And I was thankful the body next door wasn’t sat on the edge of the bath, trying to strike up a conversation.
The person, an old woman on account of her rings and clothing, had died for some reason or other in the next room. She had been like it for some time, considering the mummification of her hand and the dust covered state of the rest of the house. If no one had come to check on her in all that time, then the likelihood of someone coming now was doubtful.
You hear stories in the news about people dieing in their homes and not being discovered for months.
One story I recall was an old man; he had fallen and broken his hip, then died. He lived in an apartment block. The only reason he was discovered was not because of some concerned relative or neighbour, but because the neighbour in the apartment beneath him had complained to the landlord about a stain that was coming through the plaster on her apartment ceiling. The neighbour thought the old man was spilling something or had a leaky pipe. Once the landlord tried several times to get in contact with the old man, and failed, he used his master key to enter the property. The old man had been dead, lying on the floor for so long he had almost completely decomposed. The stain was his body’s juices and decomposing matter slowly dissolving through the floorboards and down through the woman’s ceiling. It was so bad the whole ceiling had to be removed and rebuilt.
I thought about the lady in the adjoining room, and how come she had no one checking up on her. I also knew that things happened quicker than you would believe. Her body could become like that after only a couple of weeks in the right conditions. The rest of the house must have already been like it, because the lady was either too old, or disabled from illness, to cope with the cleaning. Being too proud, or worried about being forced into an old people’s home, to mention it to anybody.
I finished up and wandered back down to the front room, blocking the images from upstairs out of my mind.
I was glad to see the childish program was just finishing, the credits riding up the screen way too fast for anyone to possibly attempt reading them.
I settled back down in the chair just as the news was starting.
The leading story was still about the serial killing writer – me. It went into more detail about the bodies that had been found so far. The identities of the missing persons having been identified as those taking from my garden.
The reporter also talked a little about the way in which they had been killed, which didn’t really interest me, considering they were all dead before they even got to my house.
I was waiting for them to give more details about the other bodies they had uncovered, but apart from announcing that they had found those they were expecting to, no other names were forthcoming.
One thing that did shock me was the information that almost all the bodies having been excavated had been mutilated, bitten, and gnawed repeatedly, with some of their body parts and organs missing. Most having been located in a freezer in the farmhouse kitchen.
I recoiled in horror. My dreams seem to have spilled out into reality.
Could I have done this? Could I have in someway mutilated the bodies? My stomach fluttered, I swallowed bile that was rising in my throat. My vision started to blur, the picture from the television started to swim, everything lost its edges, washing together. I sat bolt upright, blinking my eyes and then closing them tight to stop the room from spinning. My head was thumping. White noise filling my ears likes thunder. My mind replayed the last meal I could remember eating in my house. That big chunk of juicy meat.
I shook myself all over. I had fainted. But not for long. Another story was now being shown on the screen. The fire at the hotel.
I ignored the doubts screaming in my head. Had I not become hardened to everything? I pushed all my feelings and confusion to the little place I locked everything away in, and concentrated on the reporter, who was standing under a huge green fishing umbrella, trying to hold off the worse of the heavy rain.
“…The scene is devastating. So far nineteen bodies have been pulled from the cooling building, which was only brought under control a matter of hours ago, the fire fighters having fought the fire right throughout the long hours of the night and early morning.
“So far sixty-four people are still unaccounted for.”
The cameraman panned around. The car park was a flood with brackish water, with debris scattered everywhere; flotsam bobbing on the stagnant oily pools. Behind the reporter, looking through the pouring rain was the burnt-out shell of the remains of the hotel. Blackened walls leant dangerously. Charcoaled remains of ceiling rafters and floorboards hung from the twisted walls. Everything still steaming, even with the rain washing relentlessly over it.
Even with the condition of the building, firemen were searching through the destruction. Their yellow uniforms making a stark contrast to all the blackness around them.
“…The fire alarm was raised around two A.M. this morning, while most lay fast asleep.
“Some of the survivors have to live with the knowledge that they have lost loved ones.
“A hotline has been set up for relatives who think family members or friends might have been staying at this hotel.” He continued by giving the hotels address and hotline number.
It was now a Birdseye view looking down from a helicopter. The writing below stating the time in one corner and BBC in the other. I even wondered if it was the same helicopter that had looked down on the train crash from the day before.
The hotel had been much larger than I realized. From above you could see that very little of the structure had survived the fire. Black burnt-out remains of walls had toppled onto cars, which in turn had either burnt-out or exploded under the heat. Shrapnel and twisted black wreckage of empty shelled cars lay scattered around. Some looking like the powerful explosions had tossed them high into the air, finally coming to rest upon others. The heavy rain gave a kind of surreal feeling to the scene.
The helicopter was circling around the towering grey column of smoke that rose from some sections of the burnt-out building. It looked like a war zone, the helicopter a Black-Hawk, circling during a military campaign. You half expected the long barrel of an M-60 Delta machinegun to be jutting from the edge of the picture frame.
“…The cause of the fire has yet to be determined. The spokesman from the fire department said, and I quote.” He looked down and read from a scrap of paper, that had became sodden the moment he removed it from his coat pocket, even under the cover of the umbrella. He read: “‘We believe the fire originated in a store cupboard at the end of the first floor.’” That was it? He couldn’t even remember a sentence without reading it from a sheet of paper.
This defiantly wasn’t CNN or Fox.
He looked back into the camera. “A body has also been recovered from the same area. As of yet no identity, or reason for him for being there in the first place, has been established.”
The camera view changed. Ambulances could be seen scattered about one area. Perched between the back open doors – under another green umbrella – was the young woman who had booked me in. I felt a little relieved that at least she had survived. She was a crap receptionist, but not so bad I would wish her dead.
She looked bedraggled. Hair a mess, clothes covered in soot, eyes all red and bloodshot from the pungent smoke, with two clean lines running down her cheeks made by tears. Another reporter, from the same station, was interviewing her. Nothing interesting was being said, just filling space. I felt sorry for her. She was almost falling asleep while talking; the adrenaline that had kept he
r going throughout the night was wearing off.
The screen returned to the studio. Also nothing interesting. Only the coverage you would expect from a tragic fire that had claimed so many lives.
They mentioned that it had been a devastating few days, what with the train crash only a few miles down the road.
Nothing was mentioned about one of last nights leading stories, referring to officer Kemp. It might have been talked about while I had fainted. Or there was simply no time left on the morning slot. Or one man paled into insignificance when compared to a train crash and hotel fire.
The news finished, stating they would be back at their normal time. No mention of the time, presuming everyone knew what there normal time was.
I sat staring at the television while adverts filled the screen. Adverts that were so random and bizarre that it wasn’t until the actual product was named, or shown at the end that you even realized what they were talking about.