by Adam Nevill
Dragging her fingers down her cheeks she tried again to recall the terrible dreams of which only vestiges had ever remained in her mind. She had seen a horrible bloodless female face, had been a little girl trapped between brick walls, had been on the ceiling, there had been a dark room with candles, some kind of chest or box, curtains … most of the rest was a murk that still refused to reanimate into something informative. And yet she now had no doubt that the house, or whatever was inside the building, had been communicating with her through sleep, and using its own idiom: nightmares.
Stephanie took a deep breath, closed her eyes, forcibly cleared her mind of anything but the most immediate practicalities.
In the kitchen drawers she found a stained cloth and wrapped it about her hand now that the hot wax was running down the shaft of the candle. The idea of dropping her main source of light, and of the candle dousing again, was dead-level with her fear of what she might find in the rooms beyond the kitchen. But she surmised it was always better, at least, to see your assailant.
She went back and pressed her body against the only door that would take her out of the kitchen; screwed up her eyes and pushed her hearing into the room beyond, forced it out as far as it would extend.
She heard nothing.
Stephanie sniffed then wiped her nose and eyes on her sleeve.
Just get to a window. Candle. Knife. Screwdriver.
There would be other windows down here and they would be barred and they would be boarded over too. But she needed to get access to a window when the rooms were quiet and not freezing; unblock a window and smash the pane of glass. And then she would need to scream and shout like never before. And whatever tried to stop her must feel the knife.
Don’t think. Don’t think. Don’t think. Do.
She put the knife between her teeth, turned the handle, and opened the kitchen door.
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.
FIFTY-THREE
Panting, her back and head flat against the door, Stephanie focused her efforts into stopping the spinning inside her skull; a maelstrom of panic and fear had become her entire consciousness.
They were still in the other room. She could hear one of them staggering like an invalid suddenly released from a wheelchair, scuffling on feet that were mostly bone, while the second one wheezed and scratched at the base of the door she held shut.
The room she had fled into was lightless. The windows would almost certainly be boarded shut, like those of the kitchen. And the boards would be fixed to the wall too, screwed flush with the casement, to prevent even a sliver of daylight from intruding into the hell that was the ground floor of 82 Edgehill Road.
Stephanie raised the shaking hand that clutched the unlit candle. Patting the front of her hooded top she located the pocket and the tiny rattle of the matchbox; not many left. She would have to be careful with each match that could still be ignited.
Only when her heavy exhalations subsided into shallower, tauter breaths, did she become aware of the scent of the room. The place smelled of death.
The space was warm and musty with age, but still acrid with what must have recently been an unbreathable stench of corruption in an unventilated, lightless room. A room she had just shut herself inside.
She coughed to clear her nose, mouth and throat of the smell. Crouched down and slipped the candle between her teeth and removed the box of matches from her pocket. If she could even find a match that was firm and intact enough to light the candle, she knew she would not want to catch so much as a glimpse of whatever was inside here, issuing the miasma of decay. But she could not bear to be in the dark either.
She got lucky, or unlucky; she wasn’t sure. The first match she struck against the box fizzed alight. It took her several seconds to hold the candle steadily enough to dip the wick into the flame that left a sunspot in the middle of both eyes. When the candle flame grew large enough to cast a vague, flickering luminance across the room, her initial shock was caused by the sight of the room’s walls.
They were pink. The wallpaper was pink striped with mauve, the dry carpet was cherry-pink, the curtains featured a pink cabbage rose pattern, the dressing table was a dark red wood, or lacquered in imitation. It was hideous, but awful in a manner so different to the black room she had just escaped.
Tasteless, aged, another preserved capsule that must have remained intact for decades. How could something so grotesquely feminine and vulgar share a wall with a room so appallingly evil? Because that is what the black room had been: evil.
Only after the sounds from the neighbouring room ceased did she rise from a crouch and move the candle through the air. The flame’s misty yellow glow revealed white fitted wardrobe doors and a second open doorway leading to an ensuite bathroom. And only when she was standing did Stephanie take more notice of the bed: a vast article of furniture covered with a quilted pink eiderdown. And she nearly opened the door and ran back into the darkness when she realized that the bed was occupied. Though whatever lay on top of the coverings did not rouse at the sound of her shock in the stifling darkness.
As immobile as the subject of her appalled scrutiny, Stephanie watched the body without blinking and clenched her fist around the knife handle until it hurt her hand. There was nowhere else to run inside the ground floor flat. If the thing on the bed moved she would have to … have to use the knife on it.
But if it’s not alive, what use is a knife?
The dark figure remained inert upon the bed. From what she could see from the door, it wore black trousers, inside of which the legs looked short and unappealingly thin. The ankles had collapsed inside patterned socks. A windbreaker was zipped up right under the figure’s chin, the head covered by a plastic hood.
Moving around the foot of the bed, close to the wall and the dressing table, Stephanie moved the candle higher to better see the occupant.
A brownish face had sunken into the hood of the anorak. A pair of large spectacles with tortoise-shell frames were still in place upon the mottled skin. What was left of the wide open eyes was magnified through the lenses of the glasses, as was their discolouration and collapse into the eye sockets to now resemble the dried-out bodies of dead snails inside their shells. Long brown teeth, that reminded her of a donkey’s mouth, grinned at the ceiling as if the corpse was pleased with itself.
Bennet.
The face on Fergal’s phone. The rapist. The man who had been put inside the flat before her lay dead on what looked like a grandmother’s bed from the 1980s.
Stephanie moved to the curtains. Death had been caught amongst the fetid folds and floral patterns of the drapes and she coughed to clear her
airways of the scents of stale decomposition. She clawed them aside to find pine boards screwed into the walls.
Growling with frustration she hammered the side of one fist against the wood, which returned a hollow sound while the board did not even rattle in its secure moorings.
She tied one curtain back to the wall, using the ostentatious gold and tasselled tie that hung from a brass wall hook. When she looked to see how many screws she would have to get out of the sheet of wood to reach the window pane, she noticed the marks in one corner of the board. Someone had tried to get out before her, using what looked like their teeth. Vague black stains surrounded a patch of wood that had been gnawed, and by a person positioned on their knees.
Stephanie stepped away from the windows and closed her eyes for a moment. She wondered why Bennet had been put inside here; how badly he’d offended Fergal to deserve such a fate.
Had they killed him? Those things out there?
Stephanie looked at the bedroom door she had come through and couldn’t recall her legs and arms ever feeling as weak as they did now. Did they need doors? Or can they just rise?
As if her thoughts were contagious, she heard a rustle of what sounded like nylon.
Heart thumping the roof of her mouth, she turned quickly. When the candle flame settled, she raised the candle higher above the foot of the bed. The desiccated thing in the anorak still grinned with dirty teeth, and the sightless and collapsed eyes were still fixed upon the ceiling. But had one arm moved? The right arm, the one closest to the window? She couldn’t remember whether the withered brownish hand had been in that position before, held so close to the body. The hand was also missing a little finger and the removal had not been neat.
She had imagined the rustling noise. That is all, that is all, that is all, that is all.
Stephanie turned to the window, repeatedly glancing at the corpse as she exchanged the knife for the screwdriver. She slipped the screwdriver head into the first screw and used what felt like all of her remaining energy to get the screw to budge. And it did, or she thought it did, about one millimetre. There were at least a dozen screws to be loosened. How would she reach those at the top?