Literary Remains

by R. B. Russell

  ‘It doesn’t make any sense,’ she admitted, letting go of his hand and sitting on the edge of the bed.

  Robert walked to the window and tried the shutters, but they appeared to be fastened securely.

  ‘It is rather worrying.’

  ‘I know. The cottage is detached, isn’t it? We haven’t inadvertently gone into a house next door?’

  ‘No,’ he shook his head, frowning, not believing that when they arrived at the explanation that it could be anything obvious. Perhaps they would laugh at how, in the middle of the night, tired, when it was so dark, they had been so obtuse as not to realise where they were? Somehow he doubted it.

  Georgina patted the heavy damask bedspread beside her and he padded over the carpet and sat down.

  ‘Let’s just make the most of this,’ she said and they kissed. The room was not warm and so after some minutes it seemed natural for them to get into the bed. By the soft lamplight they continued where they had left off the previous night, but now they felt no inhibition and they made love properly, fully, for the first time. In the secret room they had discovered, in the large comfortable bed, it seemed quite natural and they did not feel any nervousness with one another. Neither felt any guilt, for both Terrance and Wendy seemed so far away at that moment.

  Afterwards they snuggled against one another with the blankets tucked up around them and for a while thought and spoke of nothing but their love for one another.

  ‘I will leave Wendy,’ he said. ‘Will you leave Terrance?’

  ‘Yes,’ she said, slowly, ‘Tomorrow we’ll work out how we’re going to tell them.’

  He agreed, and they smiled at each other and kissed, and after a while they closed their eyes. Robert awoke first and his heart leapt when he realised they had been sleeping. It was impossible to tell the time, so he woke Georgina gently and suggested they had to go back to their rooms.

  ‘In a minute,’ she replied sleepily. ‘You go first.’

  ‘I’ll wait for you,’ he said and after a few moments got out of bed and looked around at the room once more. It was Victorian, he decided, not the same age as the rest of the house, and the dimensions were rather larger than elsewhere in the building. He looked over to where Georgina lay and felt an enormous tenderness for her. Why, he wondered, had they allowed themselves to take so long before they had come together like this? He noticed that she had fallen asleep again and he walked over and woke her once more. She sat up this time, tired, rubbing the sleep from her eyes. Then she shivered.

  ‘You go now,’ she said. ‘I’ll follow in a minute, just in case anyone sees us together.’

  ‘Does it really matter if we’re seen?’

  ‘I don’t want to discuss our relationship with anyone now, in the middle of the night,’ she said. ‘Go on, you go.’

  He kissed her and went to the door, looking back at her as she sat up in the bed, happy and slightly dishevelled. As he walked back through the small room to his door he did not see her lie down at an angle onto the pillow where he had just been lying. He opened the door and found his way back onto the cold side of the bed next to his wife, and listened out for Georgina returning to her room. Perhaps he fell asleep sooner than he thought, or perhaps she left it a very prudent length of time before she returned, but he didn’t hear any movement from her bedroom before he fell asleep.

  The next morning Robert awoke and immediately his heart crashed in his chest and his stomach clenched. Now was the time to tell his wife that he was leaving her. He didn’t know how he could do it, and hurt her, but he was certain that it had to happen. She kissed his forehead and said she would go down to the kitchen to put the kettle on.

  He got up immediately and dressed. He would have to make sure that Georgina was in agreement that the time was right, and when he heard the door to the neighbouring room open he went out onto the landing. It was Terrance, who always looked a mess when he first got up on account of his thick growth of beard.

  ‘Sleep well?’ he asked.

  ‘Thank you, yes,’ Robert replied awkwardly, but Terrance did not seem to notice anything out of the ordinary. ‘Wendy has gone down to put the kettle on.’

  ‘Too late,’ he said. ‘I think Georgina’s down there already.’

  Robert walked down after him, wondering whether he and Georgina would have to exchange a nod of agreement before they gave their news. He had not felt quite as nervous as before. He alternated between wanting to forget the whole idea and needing to get the news out as quickly as possible. If Georgina suggested leaving it until later he was not sure he could stand the anticipation.

  ‘I’ve put the kettle on,’ Wendy said as the two men entered the kitchen.

  ‘Where’s Georgina?’ Terrance asked.

  ‘I don’t know,’ Wendy said. ‘Is she up already?’

  ‘I suppose so,’ he said, sitting down, unconcerned.

  Wendy walked to the door and found it was still locked. The keys were in the door. Robert wasn’t really thinking it was odd that they didn’t know where she was. He had suddenly been struck that they ought perhaps to tell their partners their news separately. He started to panic, hoping he could make the suggestion before Georgina said anything.

  ‘She’s not gone out.’ Wendy said.

  ‘Oh,’ Terrance replied and got up, going first through to the lounge and then checking the dining room. He then wandered back upstairs.

  Wendy was unconcerned, but turned to Robert and sensed he was troubled; ‘You okay?’ she asked, walking over and putting her hand to his forehead.

  ‘I didn’t sleep that well,’ he excused himself.

  ‘You were asleep when I got up, but I must have woken you. Why not go back to bed for an hour? I’ll bring your tea up to you.’

  He thanked her and went back out to the hall. Terrance was coming down the stairs looking concerned.

  ‘She isn’t upstairs either,’ he said.

  ‘Who isn’t?’ asked Donna from the door to her bedroom.

  ‘Georgina. She isn’t in the house,’ he explained. ‘And the doors are locked.’

  ‘She must have gone into the garden, or for a walk,’ Donna suggested, and Terrance looked back towards the door. ‘But her boots are still here, and her coat. And the keys are inside the locked back door.’

  He turned and looked back up the stairs.

  ‘Georgina!’ he shouted. ‘Where are you.’

  There was no reply, but Brendan appeared at his bedroom door now and Wendy came into the hall from the kitchen.

  ‘There’s a rational explanation for it,’ she said.

  ‘Georgina!’ he called again, loudly.

  ‘You’ve checked your room, and the bathroom?’ Donna asked.

  ‘Of course I have,’ replied Terrance, annoyed at her.

  Robert pushed past him on the stairs and walked towards their room.

  ‘I’ve told you, she’s not there,’ Terrance insisted.

  In the bedroom it was obvious there was nowhere to hide, and he could see through the door to the en suite bathroom that she wasn’t in there. Nevertheless he walked over and looked in, and it was then that he heard somebody stumble and fall behind him. He looked around and there was Georgina, on the floor in her nightie, looking distraught.

  He ran to her and held her.

  ‘I thought I’d never get out,’ she said through a sob.

  ‘You were in those rooms?’ he whispered urgently, while putting his finger to his lips to encourage her to be quiet. He could hear talking down in the hall, discussion, and he hoped that he had to calm her down. He took her hands and her knuckles were grazed and sore.

  ‘Come into the bathroom and we’ll wash your hands,’ he said. He could hear the others going out the front door and calling for her.

  ‘I fell asleep. When I woke up I thought that I could hear you all and I tried to leave, but the door was gone. It wasn’t there.’

  ‘How did you get back?’

  ‘I don’t know. I was banging at the
wall, pushing hard against it, crying, with my eyes closed, and suddenly I was back in here, on the floor.’

  ‘They’ve been looking for you. You’d disappeared.’

  ‘I know!’ she said, raising her voice, and then calmed herself. ‘I was stuck in those rooms.’

  ‘I don’t know what to tell the others.’

  ‘Don’t tell them anything,’ she pleaded. ‘Not yet. Not now. Maybe not ever. I don’t want to go back there.’

  He ran some warm water and she put her hands into the bowl. The raw red patches on her knuckles stung her.

  ‘We need to explain where you’d disappeared to,’ he said calmly.

  There were now two or three distinct voices calling out to her from the garden. It sounded like the searchers were on the edge of the woods.

  ‘I’ve got to tell them you’re here, and okay,’ he said, standing up and going to the window.

  ‘And what are we going to say.’

  ‘Perhaps we could say you’d fallen out of bed, you know, between the bed and the wall. You could say you’d somehow slept through everything.’

  ‘We could try,’ she agreed, uncertainly.

  Robert opened the window and could see Donna out on the edge of the lawn in her dressing gown.

  ‘It’s okay!’ he called. ‘Tell Terrance I’ve found her.’

  ‘We’re not going to tell them about us today,’ Georgina asked.

  ‘No,’ he agreed. ‘We’ll leave it for now. Let’s discuss it later. Perhaps tonight?’

  ‘Not in those rooms!’

  ‘No. We’ll find some other way to talk.’

  The story they told was that Robert had checked down between the bed and the wall and had found Georgina lying there on the floor, sound asleep, muffled in her blankets. How she had hurt her hands she didn’t know. Everyone said that it was incredible, and very strange that Terrance hadn’t found her there, but it wasn’t an unreasonable explanation. There were a number of jokes made at Georgina’s expense by Donna, Brendan and Wendy about her strange sleeping habits, but more at Terrance’s for loosing his wife in their own bedroom. It took some time before either of them admitted that there was a funny side to the occurrence.

  They spent the day in Usk as a group, principally because Brendan had a friend there who had promised to show them over the grounds of the Castle. They travelled in two cars and although Robert and Georgina contrived to sit together in the back of Terrance’s, while he drove, they were unable to talk. They looked over the Castle and had lunch, and that afternoon walked along the river. Once again Robert and Georgina managed to walk together and Terrance walked ahead with Brendan and Donna, but Wendy held his arm the whole way. They had given up hope of talking alone when it was decided that evening to order a takeaway from Coleford. Robert offered to drive and collect it and he asked who wanted to go with him and keep him company. Nobody offered, which allowed Georgina to say that she would.

  Finally they had the opportunity to talk, but as they drove through the fine evening neither knew quite what to say. Finally, Robert asked bluntly:

  ‘Are we going to tell them, then?’

  She took her time before saying that she didn’t know.

  ‘After this morning…’ she said, but trailed off.

  After a half minute she said:

  ‘I’m not going back into those rooms.’

  He took a breath and then said that he understood.

  ‘It is, though,’ he pointed out, ‘a place where we can meet.’

  ‘But even if there was no danger of getting trapped in there, like I was trapped, where the hell is it?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘I mean, is it real? Did we just dream it?’

  ‘You’re suggesting that we both had the same dream?’

  ‘Is it any more unlikely as an explanation?’

  ‘Okay, well, in my dream we were in a small, carpeted room at first with a couple of chairs and a chest by a window. And there was a small table with a lamp on it. The second time we were there we went through a third door to a larger room with a large bed…’

  ‘I’m sure it was the same for both of us,’ she said.

  ‘So it couldn’t have just been a dream. You weren’t in the house this morning. Physically, you were in those rooms. You weren’t just asleep, dreaming.’

  ‘Maybe I had just fallen down the side of the bed.’

  Annoyed, he pulled the car over to the side of the road and stopped. Another car behind them sounded its horn in displeasure as it passed them.

  ‘Look, I made up that story to account for your disappearance.’

  ‘Did you?’

  ‘Are you denying that we met twice, at night, in those rooms? Are you saying that we never made love?’

  She looked down at her hands in her lap and started to cry. When he put his hand on her shoulder she shrugged him off and leant down and gave in to her sobs.

  He said, quietly:

  ‘You don’t have to go into those rooms again, not if you don’t want to.’

  ‘You don’t understand,’ she said, and then wiped her eyes with the back of her hands. Not looking at him but out of the side window she considered her reply. ‘I would rather be in those rooms, forever, even trapped in them, but you have to be there with me.’

  ‘Then let us go there again tonight. But I’ll go in first. Open the door, but don’t close it. Stand inside the open door until I come in.’

  She nodded, then sniffed, then gave him a weak smile.

  And so, that night, they both went into the rooms that could not possibly be there. Robert entered first and left his shoe in his doorway to stop it from closing. When Georgina came in he whispered for her to do the same, and stopped her from turning on the light. They fumbled their way over to the third door and into the far bedroom which was dark and felt cold. It smelt heavily of damp this time. Closing the door behind them he left her standing there while he made his way over to the side of the bed and felt for the lamp. It seemed to have been overturned so he righted it and flicked on the switch.

  The room was in chaos. He didn’t know how he had managed to navigate his way over from the door. The ceiling had partially collapsed on the far side of the room, in front of the window, and the floor sagged dangerously in that part of the room and some floorboards had actually rotted through. The bed listed dangerously to one side.

  ‘What on earth’s happened?’ she asked.

  ‘I don’t know,’ he replied, confused, walking carefully over to where she remained standing. The whole of the wall behind her was black with mould in the places where the plaster remained clinging to very rough, old brickwork.

  At her side he looked back into the room and noticed that all of the material on the bed was rotten.

  ‘I want to leave,’ she said, scared.

  ‘So do I,’ he agreed. He tried to open the door, but it was stuck. By the dim light it looked as if it were jammed. The woodwork seemed to have warped.

  ‘I’m scared,’ she said, though quite evenly. Turning back to the room he looked at the holes in the floor and ceiling:

  ‘I wonder if there’s any way down there?’

  ‘You’re joking? This place is horrible enough as it is without going any further into it.’

  He turned his attention again to the door. He could see that although there was a gap between the door and frame at the bottom, they were tight against each other at the top. He tried the handle again, but this time put all of his effort into pulling. It moved a little with a disproportionately sickening shriek from the wood. He pulled again and with another screech it was open. They both hurried through the ante-room and could see a light through the door that lead back into Robert’s bedroom. In Georgina’s doorway there was movement and Terrance appeared.

  ‘What’s happening?’ he demanded.

  With a sudden inspiration Robert said ‘We both went down for a drink of water and didn’t realise the other was there. We frightened the hell out of each other.
’ And he bundled Georgina through her door before going back into his own. He faced Wendy who was sitting up in bed, looking worried.

  ‘Was that Georgina screaming?’ she asked, frightened. ‘It sounded horrible.’

  ‘I’ve just frightened the hell out of her, bumping into her in the dark,’ he said, shaking all over. ‘And frightened the hell out of myself. It’s stupid.’

  ‘Are you alright?’ she asked, concerned.

  He was becoming calmer now. The story came easy, convincingly:

  ‘I will be. Her scream scared me more than anything else,’ he explained. ‘I’ll go through and check on her.’

  Turning he could now see only one door. He went through it, and then knocked on Georgina and Terrance’s door. In a moment Terrance opened it.

  ‘What the hell happened?’ he asked again.

  ‘We bumped into each other in the dark,’ he explained. ‘In the kitchen…’

  ‘She said it was on the stairs?’

  ‘Well, I was coming out of the kitchen, and she was at the bottom of the stairs,’ he lied as a compromise.

  Terrance turned back to Georgina: ‘Is this true?’

  She was only able to nod.

  ‘I don’t think either of us knew the other was there until we bumped into each other. We terrified each other.’

  Terrance turned and stepped back to where his wife was sitting on the bed, shaking. He sat next to her and hugged her.

  ‘My poor darling. I think I understand,’ he said. ‘It’s being in a different house. I was completely disorientated when I heard the scream. I wasn’t even sure it was a scream. And it didn’t seem to come from downstairs, or down the hallway. I don’t know…’

  ‘Is she alright,’ Wendy enquired, making Robert jump. He hadn’t realised she had followed him out of the room and was standing behind him. ‘It woke me up and I couldn’t work out where the noise came from. As we’re all up and awake and jittery, why don’t we all go downstairs, throw all the lights on, and have some hot milk before trying to get back to sleep again?’