DANIEL MILLS
Isaac’s Room
DANIEL MILLS IS the author of Revenants: A Dream of New England (Chômu Press, 2011) and the shortstory collection The Lord Came at Twilight (Dark Renaissance Books, 2014). Since 2009, his short fiction has appeared in numerous journals and anthologies, including Shadows & Tall Trees, Black Static, The Grimscribe’s Puppets and The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror Volume 23.
Recent work is forthcoming in The Children of Old Leech: A Tribute to the Carnivorous Cosmos of Laird Barron (Word Horde) and Mighty in Sorrow: A Tribute to David Tibet & Current 93 (Dunhams Manor Press). Dunhams Manor Press will also publish a novella entitled Children of Light as a limited edition chapbook.
The author lives in Vermont and is currently at work on his second novel.
“While much of my fiction derives its inspiration from New England’s social and religious history,” reveals Mills, “‘Isaac’s Room’ is one of only a few stories I’ve written that employs a contemporary setting. Of course, the story is in some sense a period piece, albeit of a more recent vintage, one in which the Iraq War looms large and AOL Instant Messenger is still a favoured means of communication among college students.
“Falmouth, Vermont, is entirely fictional, as is Falmouth College, though the latter bears some similarity to my own alma mater, the University of Vermont, where I was an undergraduate from 2003 to 2007. And if the story’s setting is autobiographical, then its tone is scarcely less so – the narrator’s resignation verging on ambivalence as he faces down his past and the ghost of mental illness: ‘the places we would haunt forever’.
“‘Isaac’s Room’ was written very quickly in the spring of 2013. Looking back on it now, I can see the influence of J-horror cinema (especially Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s films Kairo and Sakebi) as well as Robert Aickman’s ‘Your Tiny Hand is Frozen’ – though with Instant Messenger standing in for Aickman’s telephone.”
FALMOUTH, VERMONT. IN my memories, it is always dark there, always winter. The campus of Falmouth College, where I spent my freshman year, appears to me cloaked in the haze of snow and night, lit by sodium lamps and the flash of headlights on drifting powder. The cloud cover is unbroken, grey on black and veined with snowfall, as it was in 2004, when I used to stand on the river-bridge at dawn and watch the light seep into the east.
I was a virgin at eighteen, crippled by shyness and singularly unprepared for the Vermont winter: the chill of it, the isolation. In classes, or in the dining hall, I sat by myself and watched the other students laugh and flirt and make plans for the weekend. When night came, I bundled myself into a sweatshirt and parka and walked the campus with headphones strapped over my ears, filling my head with the roar of black metal: jagged guitars, pulsating beats.
Darkthrone. Burzum. Their howled vocals came to express for me all of the terror and rage I could not admit to anyone, not even myself, and I passed through nightly squalls of sleet and snow before returning to that empty room where I watched hours of amateur porn and punched the walls until my knuckles cracked and split.
My roommate Andrew was from D.C., an ex-sprinter turned full-time drinker. By the spring of 2004, he had lost his place on the track team and his scholarship along with it. Like me, he had no intention of returning to Falmouth for his sophomore year and so abandoned altogether the pretence of studying or attending classes.
His afternoons he spent watching movies or playing X-box, taking occasional breaks to pack a bowl and read The Lord of the Rings. At night he went to frat parties and stayed out past daybreak, later shuffling into the room with eyes red and voice hoarse and mumbling good morning. “Morning,” I replied, but beyond that, we rarely spoke, and it wasn’t long before he dozed off, sprawled sideways on the couch, waiting for night to fall before stirring from his hangover to check his voicemail, his Instant Messenger account.
That was how it started. It was around dinnertime, a Thursday in April. Andrew and I sat back to back at our respective desks, separated by our hand-me-down minifridge with the microwave and TV balanced on top. My headphones were silent. The CD had spun to a finish, and I heard the hum of the radiator behind me, the click of Andrew’s fingers on the touchpad. Other sounds too: crackling speakers, a faint patter like rain.
“What are you watching?” I asked without turning around.
No answer.
I asked him again, but he didn’t reply, so I stood and crossed the room and leaned in over his shoulder. His laptop screen was cluttered with various chat and browser windows. In one a Quicktime video had just finished playing. He closed the window.
“What was that?”
“Nothing,” he said, quickly, and rose from the chair.
He brushed past me, took his coat down from the door.
He wouldn’t look at me, but he was clearly unsettled, his features contorted by something like fear. He grabbed the lanyard with his keys and slipped from the room. I didn’t ask where he was going or when he would be back.
Alone now, I waited, but he didn’t return, and his laptop was open before me. I opened his IM account. Last night, at 3:31 a.m., Andrew had received a message from IM user IsaaC81. The screen name was unfamiliar to me, and he wasn’t listed among Andrew’s friends either.
Hey, IsaaC81 had written. U there?
Andrew was out. Out, his auto-reply read.
At 3:33 a.m., IsaaC81 forwarded a link to a Quicktime video file and subsequently logged off. He had not been online since.
I clicked the link. The movie buffered, opened.
It was a webcam video of some kind, shot by a low-res camera and badly pixillated. A desk lamp, angled away from the camera, provided the only illumination, but I was able to make out a small room jumbled with cheap furniture, concrete walls sheathed in white paint
A figure sat the desk. IsaaC81? No, I thought, looking closer. It was a woman.
She was shirtless, shadow-thin, the balls of her shoulders thrusting from snarls of ropy black hair. Her face was shadow ed and hidden but for her eyes, which caught the light somehow and shone. She whimpered. Her nostrils flared. Her breath came as a muted scratching.
She stood. The chair scraped on the tiles, and the shadows fell away to reveal her elongated arms, all elbows and joints, her right hand clenched over a glittering edge – a razor, maybe, a shard of broken glass. Her fingers dripped, arms criss-crossed with black lines where the edge had bitten, scraping on bone.
The speakers crackled.
With one swift motion she drove the glass into her belly. The wound blossomed, releasing a torrent of viscous black fluid, like old blood but darker. It poured from her, collecting in her knuckles and dribbling on the floor. A sound like the rain.
She lifted her head. Her eyes burned vividly, nearly white against her dark hair, but I couldn’t discern her features before the video ended and Andrew’s screen went black. I clicked the link again, but it was dead. Error 404. Page not found.
*
I couldn’t sleep. It was after midnight and Andrew hadn’t come back to the room. In my mind, a young woman, faceless, carved the flesh from her arms and ribcage. She winced, gasped, and bit her lip to stop from crying out, so that her mouth was smeared and dripping. I switched on the TV, hoping for distraction, but the news was full of footage from Iraq.
A bridge strung with corpses. A man shouting, openmouthed, his hands red and wet.
At 3:00 a.m., I wrapped myself in a hoodie and crossed the hallway to the men’s room. The air was moist, sticky, the mirrors misted over. I cupped my hands beneath the faucet and drank from the tap, gulping down water while the showers ran behind me, pouring out whorls of steam. Voices. A man and a woman, their rapid breathing. I shut off the taps.
I went outside. I didn’t bring my headphones or walk down to the river-bridge, as I often did, but circled the rainfogged campus in silence, pushing myself until my legs ached. The college was deserted at that hour, or nearly so, and I had turned back toward the dormitories when I spotted him outsi
de the arts building.
Andrew.
He slouched on a bench in the shadows with his hood pulled up over his head. His face was hidden, but I recognized him by his yellow windbreaker, the way he held his cigarette with the tip turned sideways. Thin trails of smoke rose from it, mingling with the steam of his breath, but I didn’t approach him and he didn’t seem to notice me.
I went back to the room. I crawled into bed and drifted off as our computers hummed, whirring. The morning skies sparked and faded and Andrew crept into the room. “Are you awake?” he whispered, but I said nothing, and I heard him close his laptop before collapsing on the couch.
The email came the next afternoon. A student had died on campus, a young woman named Annie. The message was evasive in tone, telegraphic in its lack of detail – a suicide, then, and I thought at once of “IsaaC81” and the video he had sent to Andrew. A woman’s bone-thin shoulders. A wound gushing black fluid. The email concluded with the date and time of a memorial service to be held later that month, followed by phone numbers for doctors, counsellors.
Andrew was asleep on the couch. His mouth was open, crusted with drool, and I didn’t want to wake him. At the library, I bought a cup of coffee from the café and descended two levels to the computer lab: a converted storeroom lit by harsh fluorescent tubes with high windows overlooking the green at ankle-height.
A lone work-study student was on duty. He ignored me as I sat down beneath the windows and logged on to one of the computers. Darkthrone buzzed in my ears, “Transilvanian Hunger”, the volume down as I opened up Google and searched for “IsaaC81”.
I had to scroll through pages of meaningless results before I found it. The website was called “Isaac’s Room”, and it appeared to be an online journal of some kind. The page had once belonged to a young man named “Isaac C”, who listed the IM screen name IsaaC81 among his contact details. In place of a profile picture, he had uploaded a sepia-tone image of a window in which the photographer was visible in reflection, a knife-thin silhouette – Isaac himself, presumably, though his outlines merged with the room behind him. I looked closer, noting the angled desk lamp, the cheap furniture, the concrete walls.
It was the same room from the video.
My pulse thudded in my throat. I turned off the music, plunging the room into near-silence. I heard the hum of computers in standby, the occasional rustle of paper as the work-study read from his chemistry textbook. I wiped my palms on my jeans and opened Isaac’s journal. I began to read.
Some entries described his interests in photography and music: Elliott Smith and Joy Division. In others he discussed his strained relationships with his parents, his longing for a girl named “S” whom he had once dated. I’m still here, he wrote. Alone in that room where we used to sit together. Was it just three months ago? I haven’t changed, S, even if you have, and I’m not sure I can believe that. I’m not sure I can believe in anything anymore.
The most recent post had been made over a year ago. It seemed to consist of a brief message of apology to his parents with references made to Nick Drake and Kafka. At the bottom of this final entry, he had inserted a link to a video file alongside the words for S.
I clicked it. The hourglass turned over and over.
Error 404.
I closed the browser, rubbed the sleep from my eyes. My coffee had gone cold while I read and a dozen or more students had entered the lab. Two girls sat together in the corner, whispering, and one of them was crying openly, unashamed.
Dusk. The room swam beneath the glaring tubes. I pressed the play button on my CD player and logged off from the computer. Standing, I donned my coat and hat and glanced up at my reflection on the window, shivering in places like the pieces of a dream: a lamp-lit space, a dripping shadow.
The next day was Saturday. Andrew and I slept in past noon and walked together to the dining hall. Chris was there. Like us, he was a freshman, the son of two New York psychiatrists. Midway through his freshman year, he had enrolled in the environmental programme and subsequently took to sporting tie-dye and twisting his hair into dreadlocks.
He lived down the hall from us in a triple room, where the windows were always open, even in wintertime, a boxfan whirring to vent the pot smoke, the stench of body odour and Nag Champa. Chris had planned a party for later that night and had invited the entire floor but needed Andrew to acquire alcohol for him. Andrew was likewise underage, but he “knew someone”, an upperclassman who lived off-campus, and owned a car besides.
Chris passed him an envelope of cash under the table. “Thanks, man,” he said, as Andrew took it. “Much appreciated.” He stood and made to leave but apparently changed his mind because he paused with his palms flat on the tabletop. “And remember,” he said. “Grey Goose or Skyy. None of that cheap shit like last time, okay?”
Andrew shrugged. “Whatever you say.”
“Good,” Chris said, smiling, showing teeth. “I think we all remember what happened the last time.” And with that he wandered off, eventually taking a seat at a table of barefoot girls and rich boys wearing Carhartts.
“Asshole,” muttered Andrew.
I thought I’d misheard him. “Sorry?”
“Never mind,” he said. “Let’s go.”
We drove downhill into town and collected Andrew’s hook-up from an apartment by the bridge. He was a senior, scarecrow-thin and clad entirely in baggy flannel. He climbed into the back of Andrew’s SUV and directed us across the river to a liquor store. We parked outside and waited, the engine running.
Andrew unrolled his window. He lit a cigarette and offered me the pack. I shook my head, and for a while, we were quiet. Andrew smoked thoughtfully, his eyes on the windshield. Cold rain spattered the glass, flattening itself into beads, rivulets.
“Did you know that girl?” he asked. “Annie. The one who died.”
The wipers thumped and squealed.
“No.”
“I did. Well, I met her once.”
“When was this?”
“Last month. It was at one of Chris’ parties. He knew her from class, I guess. They hooked up a few times, but she had gotten, well, ‘clingy’. That’s what he said. So he broke it off.”
“But she came to the party.”
“She did. She must have been desperate, though, because she drank too much and stayed on even after her friends had left and Chris had hooked up with another girl. In the end, we were the only ones left, the two of us, and his roommates kicked us out.”
“What did you do?”
“What do you think? I went home with her.”
His cigarette crumbled, shedding flakes of ash. He tapped it against the window and released a mouthful of smoke into the rain. The heat-vents rattled, sounding like the scratch of air over a microphone, the whistle of her breath, black fluid pouring from her veins.
“How did it happen?” I asked him.
He looked at me, features wreathed in smoke, rainwater glinting on his cheeks.
“How did she die, you mean?”
“Yeah.”
“Pills. Her roommate found her. It was in the showers. Annie had been there half the night, lying face down and naked with her skin all white and wrinkled.”
“Shit,” I said. “That’s terrible.”
“Yeah,” he said. “It is.”
He stubbed out his cigarette. “And that’s not even the worst of it.”
He didn’t explain. At that moment, our hook-up returned to the car, his arms folded over a soggy cardboard box. Inside were two bottles of Jagermeister, handles of cheap rum and vodka.
“But didn’t Chris say … ?”
Andrew rolled up his window, shifted the car into gear.
“Fuck Chris,” he said, and pulled out into traffic.
We were almost to the bridge when we heard the sirens behind us. State troopers. I watched Andrew’s eyes in the rear-view as the police approached and overtook us, making for the Interstate. Their blue lights dwindled in the dark, but he didn
’t blink, not once.
*
The party started without us. By eight o’clock, when we arrived in Chris’ room, a large group of our floor-mates had already assembled. They greeted our arrival with cheers and the rattle of empty Solo cups. Andrew opened the Jager, then the vodka. Chris packed a bowl and handed it around. I didn’t smoke, not usually, but tonight I fumbled for the pipe and lighter, thinking of Annie and Isaac’s Room, the video Andrew had received: her dark hair, dead eyes white with the light behind them. I breathed deeply, too deeply. I coughed and sputtered, nearly gagging, and closed my eyes as the music washed over me.
Others entered the room. Girls perched themselves on desks and dressers or the protruding arms of furniture and talked loudly to be heard above the music, practically shouting over me where I sat, slumped forward and swaying. The bubbler came round again and I took it, sucking down smoke, so that their voices merged and buzzed in the air above my head. The music was louder now, pulsating, echoed by the rhythm of the blood inside my skull.
Slowly, the room faded, falling from me to join with the dreaming, the darkness of empty rooms. In that place, the ghost of a thin girl hacked fat from muscle, sinew from bone. She whimpered, a beaten dog, and the sound rose like the smoke inside my chest. I tried to speak but I couldn’t. Her tongue was my tongue, and her breath was in my mouth.
Andrew’s voice.
The sound restored me to the stifling room, the couch with its stink of sweat and spilled beer. He was arguing with Chris, hissing through his teeth, though I couldn’t make out the words. The other students were quiet, or mostly so. The stoner girls looked at each other, unbelieving, as Andrew screamed and swore, spittle flying from his lips.
Chris snorted.
“Jesus Christ,” he said. “And she hooked up with you? No wonder she killed herself.”
Best New Horror, Volume 25 Page 14