The Other Room

by James Everington

  I seem to have less and less words, he thought, I have less words. He patted the grey thing. Was this where he should be? Water coming from the sky, from the black. Was the water black too? He stooped to check.

  It whined and pressed close. It was grey. It was wet. It was black. It was wet. I have less.

  Big jumps or gaps. Do I need, did I have more? What more, where?

  It likes me. Grey. My friend? Keep us warm. Black, wet, above.

  Have less. Just my friend.

  Less too.

  All going black here, all going less, less, all jumps and gaps, my friend, I have, black, wet, all less, gaps, less, I less, here?

  less, I, less, I

  I...,

  I,…, …, …,

  Some Stories for Escapists #3: The Haunted House

  “The old men loved to scare the young boys by telling them the story of the black house that was the highest point on the skyline; but the young were never so scared as the old men expected.

  "The Son murdered The Father slowly, so the old men said, a thimble-full of poison a day. It was poured into The Father’s fifth glass of wine, by which time he would be too drunk to taste it. A thimble-full a day, but it soon added up, like pocket change put by. The Father went grey around the edges, his eyes yellowed over and lost their spark, his spine bent and his limbs trembled. He had to entrust the running of his business affairs to The Son who, educated more recently, understood the day’s markets better. Profits rose. This pained The Father terribly, for he knew when he recovered from his illness he would have lost much respect in the business world. To think that his own child could just take over like that and increase productivity! Admittedly to do so he’d laid off many workers, but at least the shareholders were happy. From his sick bed The Father could see the plumes of quiet smoke which drifted away from his factories. He tried to put it all from his mind, telling himself his health was of more importance. But he felt like he’d built those factories with his bare hands (even though he’d just inherited them) and now they seemed beyond his influence.

  "Eventually he died, and the share prices hit a new peak. Investors knew all about The Son and his reforms. The Son took charge of the business full time, and he moved into the house on the hill, the family’s ancestral home. Its vast spaces seemed too empty for him, and he quickly married and moved his new Wife in. She quarrelled with his Mother about trivial things, but eventually got her way. The Son installed bright lights and security cameras into every inch of the dark house. He kept expecting his Father’s spectre to appear, glowing and moaning inaudibly, but pointing his accusing finger at The Son. Certainly he saw such things in his dreams. He put more and more lights into the house, and lived in fewer and fewer of its rooms. Profits were stable but the shareholders were worried - they all knew The Son spent less time at work now, and delegated often. He seemed to have lost the flair he’d had around the time of his Father’s death. The shareholders were like ghosts to him, invisible people he’d never seen but who somehow exerted an influence on him. He had less energy now, and his back was troubling him.

  "For years people had been wondering why his wife had never fallen pregnant - was something wrong? But now she did. The Son regarded this new development with unease. He could no longer remember if he’d actually killed his Father, or just fantasised about it. Certainly he had dreamt of killing him, without really knowing why. That was probably where his vivid memories came from; but in reality a growing-old disease must surely have carried the old man off. So there was no reason to feel guilty or afraid. But he did. The family business was failing to move with the times now, and despite the cutting and cutting of workers, profits were down.

  "When his Son was born the new Father took one look at his smooth face and fled. Some of the old men said he saw his Father’s features there; others kept their mouths shut. This new Father raced to the top of the house in terror, into the unlit rooms he had sealed off. Here The Father threw himself out the window, dashing his frail body against the stones so many storeys below. After another brief dip, shares prices increased. The note he left was confused and disorientated, as if he thought he was someone else. Now he is said to wander, a ghost no one ever sees, around the dark house, with an aged look of confusion and terror on his face, because when he reaches out to touch things, his hand slides through.”

  Red Route

  Another of the signs went by outside, and Eliot tried to resist looking at the death count – but wasn’t that number one higher than last time?

  Annoyed with himself he looked back at the road ahead. Much safer - the signs themselves were a distraction, Eliot thought; more tax payer’s money wasted. The road was designated a ‘Red Route’, deemed especially dangerous, and regularly spaced signs showed monthly death figures, for this year and last. This year’s figure was higher, already.

  On average one person a day – Eliot could see why the road was considered dangerous, for those who didn’t know it as well as he: the route cut through the flat Lincolnshire countryside, but unlike the Roman-straight Fosse to the north, this road curled and snaked its way around the landscape – the signs lining its sides were written in a continuous language of zigzags, exclamation marks, and suicidal pedestrians, not to mention the ubiquitous casualty stats. And it was single carriageway all along, encouraging blind overtakings, and it ran east/west, so the sun was always in somebody’s eyes.

  Eliot was heading west, although through the bright fog of tiredness he was finding it hard to remember the route more than three junctions ahead. He didn’t know why he felt so fatigued, he was used to the driving, but he felt curiously light-headed, not able to concentrate, not quite present. Outside, the flat countryside stretched for miles, and despite how far the eye could see the land seemed empty too, devoid of anything for the eye to catch hold of except the stubby hedges, the arrangements of the fields, squat churches. It was summer and so sunset was slow, and Eliot found himself looking forward to the darkness that would smother the oddly desolate views around him. Only the road seemed alive, insistent, twisting itself into curious bends and curves.

  Eliot sighed for what felt like the thousandth time as he approached a car dawdling in front – tourists, no doubt, meandering back from the coast. Eliot didn’t slow down but sped up – after here there wasn’t another overtaking opportunity for miles. Best to go for it, to get it over quickly. He pulled out as he was thinking about whether to do it, and the white car he was overtaking seemed to speed up, as if chastened. Idiots, he thought as he passed, glancing left at them – two old dears, both looking half-dead, the old man gripping the wheel as if he daren’t let go, the old woman’s head slung back, asleep?

  When Eliot looked back at the road there was a car coming straight at him, lights on even in the dusk-light, blazing. Eliot screamed as it filled his vision - he flung his hands up in front of his face, and futilely shut his eyes.

  He opened them – nothing had happened to him, and the road ahead was clear. Shaken, he pulled back into his own lane, slowed to a speed less than that of the car he had overtaken. Was he so tired that he was hallucinating? He could picture the car coming towards him, how in that last second it has looked like it was made of light... Another of the Red Route signs went past and he felt angry – it was those ghoulish signs that had unnerved him! They didn’t make him feel more cautious, but more fatalistic – one a day and it was dumb luck whether it would be you, years of experience and knowledge of these roads notwithstanding.

  God, I can’t wait to get home, Eliot thought, with only a slight mental pause before the last word. Get me home. The comforts of his destination seemed hard to visualise, for he had been on the road all day. His limbs ached and there was a tight belt of pain across his chest. I just want to lie down in the dark, he thought, as outside the cat’s eyes lit up in his lights. It was that time of evening when the sun was so low that it seemed brighter than at midday. And there was nothing in the flat landscape to impede its glare – no wonder peop
le have accidents here, Eliot thought, your eye is drawn outwards, looking for some elevation, some landmark to let you know that you’re not somehow still where you were ten minutes ago.

  The white car behind him had switched on its headlights too now, shining in his rear-view – the old man who was the driver was nudging forward impatiently. Eliot refused to speed up for them. His near accident, or hallucination, or whatever in hell it had been, had left him even more tense. He went past a junction with a minor road, going god knew where in this countryside, and mentally ticked it off his list – past that left turning, then past a right turning a few miles later, also leading to Nowhere, then the crossroads... He couldn’t follow the route home any further than that without losing track. But he knew this road; he would remember when he got there.

  Feeling more confident again, Eliot sped up so as to lose the bag of bones driving behind him; but the white car behind kept pace. Someone has got a bit of blood in them after all, he thought, and he looked in his mirrors expecting to see the weak eyes of the other driver peering over his steering wheel. But all he could see was that damn light, sunlight and headlights both, glinting and reflecting across the whole of the vehicle, and his car too. At least dip them you old fool, Eliot thought.

  The sun was equally as blinding to the front, but he still saw the red numbers as he passed them – one a day, he thought, is it really so much as that, for a single stretch of road? Three hundred and sixty-five ghosts a year added to the tally; this road must be thick with them, if only you could see them. Maybe those lights, he thought, that you think are gnats and flies in the dusk, are really the pinpricks of all the souls that died here... – Eliot wasn’t normally given to such brooding, but it made sense. Weren’t ghosts supposed to be those who died suddenly, with deeds undone, their life’s tasks incomplete? And which deaths were more untimely than those that happened at seventy miles an hour: one second routine, hand drumming along to the stereo maybe; the next your body slammed to a stop with all the bloody energy you had thought you were in control of?

  What deeds have I left undone? Eliot thought. If it should be me today, then what... But there was a myriad of things, he thought, not the horror-tale hokum of a secret untold or a will unsigned, but the normal stuff of existence left undone at the tail-end of a tired day. But then everyone, he thought...

  He was distracted when the car being driven by the old man made a move to overtake him. They were about half a mile from the next right turning. What in hell is he doing? Eliot thought – he knew there were two tight bends before the junction. He slowed down, but when the white car pulled level it too slowed down to match, so that the two cars moved in parallel. Although they were side by side Eliot still felt dazzled by the lights of the white car; he still had to blink when he looked to his right to see what the hell...

  He met the eyes of the old lady in the passenger seat, and they were dead. Open, certainly; malevolent, maybe, but obviously dead, as was the slack-jawed hang of her denture-less mouth, the crazy twist of her neck. She both blazed with light and was translucent – through her he could see the old man, arms stretched for the wheel, rictus grin tight on the bloody oval of his face.

  Eliot slammed on the brake, and felt his body lunge forward sickeningly before the seat-belt bit. He didn’t slow to a full stop, but almost stalled, his hand automatically reaching to the gearstick to prevent this as his eyes followed the path of the bright car in front of him, still in the wrong lane and heading towards the tight corner. The light of the car was white, in contrast to the bloody glow of the low sun, squashing itself flat against the land. There was a screeching sound, whether of brakes real or remembered Eliot couldn’t be sure, and the car that he was watching jerked to a hideous and total stop, as if it had crashed into something, although nothing could be seen. It crumpled as if the impact was real too, and as it did so the light that lit it from within faded, and with it the vision of the car itself.

  He slammed his foot on the accelerator now, desperate to be away, to reach... home. He took the first bend at great speed but on the correct side of the road. At the point where the white car appeared to have hit something unseen, he could see nothing other than very faded skid marks. There, he thought, that’s where they died and what I saw was... The sharp turn of the next bend took all his concentration to manoeuvre around, and all he could think of was the crossroads ahead. A car passed in the opposite direction, a reassuringly normal looking estate with no ghost light to it, and the driver didn’t even seem to notice Eliot’s mad speed as he passed.

  Tiredness Kills! a sign hectored Eliot as he drove, and then the inevitable Red Route sign – despite his panic he still looked at the number of deaths as he passed. “Fuck,” he said quietly to himself, forcing himself to slow down to the speed limit. You’re just tired, he thought, taking his cue from the other sign. It was all just a hallucination. He just had to get to his destination, straight on at the crossroads that were coming up – straight on, he could remember that now, if nothing else. Straight on, and there was no point in stopping for those pissing little roads to the left and right that lead nowhere, and from which no one ever emerged. He knew this road. God my chest hurts, he thought; but then it had done all day.

  He passed the sign that announced the crossroads but he didn’t slow down. Someone had scrawled something on the sign, even all the way out here, but he couldn’t see what the graffiti said. The whole of the road now seemed lit up as if he was driving straight into the half-submerged sun; the red glow and the white of his own lights. He slowed very slightly as he approached the junction, but then accelerated again, for he could see in this flat and horrible countryside that nothing was approaching from either of the dead-end village turnoffs...

  But then something was, a blaze stronger than mere headlights coming for and engulfing him from the left, and all at once the answers to many things – why his chest had seemed to hurt all day even before the seatbelt had locked; why the last car he had passed had seemed not to see him; why he had been unable to remember anything beyond this junction – became clear to Eliot. But not the why, the unfinished deed, for in fact Eliot could remember very little about his life... He screamed as he remembered screaming, as the bright car hit him from the side and the world turned and toppled in the blood-red sunset. This is where, he had time to think; then that light too went out.

  ***

  Another of the Red Route signs went by outside, and Eliot tried to resist looking again at the death count – but wasn’t that number one higher than last time?

  Annoyed with himself, he looked back at the road ahead.

  When The Walls Bend

  The house was cheap, and available immediately; he thought there was little more to his decision than that.

  When he paid the deposit and first month’s rent he could scarcely remember the interior of the house – he had visions of a beige, ground floor flat, Seventies furniture, and a bathroom that stank, with murky stains around the U-bend and the sink. But even that could have been somewhere else – he had seen a dozen properties that day, in a desperate attempt to find somewhere before term time. And the details of all those flats and bed-sits had merged, creating one large yet cluttered house in his mind, with a myriad of small, shadowy rooms, outhouses and cellars, carpets and bare floorboards, rot, damp, and many windows and doors.

  He had half expected, in the back of his head, that finding a house would sort itself out, like everything else in his life had so far. He had lived all of his eighteen years in his parents’ home – large and secure and mortgage paid off. And that evening he headed back to this family home for one final night, back to the home whose every room he knew, in the small but prosperous town that was so small that he knew all of its spaces too, like they were just extra rooms.

  ***

  The next day he didn’t let his parents come with him – he had the idea that they would not be impressed by his choice of flat on the north side of his new home city. And wasn’t he supp
osed to be being independent? His parents hadn’t been pleased with his refusal, but they hadn’t helped him look for it had they? They (he reflected bitterly) hadn’t prompted him to write his application for university halls in time, and when that deadline had passed they hadn’t pushed him to find a place until the last minute. All they had done was sign… As he caught the taxi from the station an almost unacknowledged part of him felt quietly betrayed.

  His new home was on the ground floor of a Victorian house that sat uneasily at the foot of a sullen and disenfranchised terrace. There seemed little to distinguish it from the outside, its dull red bricks and peeling paintwork were on a par with the rest of the street. Except somehow, it seemed to sit funny, as if at a slight angle, as if it slouched or brooded - you couldn’t see from looking just where the fault might be. He didn’t think he had noticed that before. But, he reflected, he wasn’t going to be a tenant long enough for subsidence to become a problem.

  The first fright he had was from the burglar alarm. He had unlocked the main front door to the building, and in the entranceway was a door marked A (his flat) and a set of stairs leading up to B and C. He had moved inside, struggling with a rucksack of bedding and a carrier bag of CDs, and a cobweb had seemed to brush his face. Blinking, he’d stepped aside, and banged his hip against a rickety table that was there for the post… - and suddenly the alarm had gone off, causing him to drop his baggage in surprise. He had already been nervous, and the unexpected shrilling sound emptied his mind of anything else – including the code he had been given to turn the alarm off…