What Charlie Said

Standing before the entry point to the past, I knew Charlie was right. She always was. Staring at the plain white door at the end of the long doorway, there was a sense of eerie foreboding in the air, that I could taste like acridity on my tongue. It felt as I imagine it felt for Danny in The Shining when he sees blood flow down the corridor of the Overlook towards him. There was no blood. My overactive imagination was firmly kept in check.

The sad reality about reality is that there was nothing so cinematic as a tidal wave of blood. There was smaller, quieter and controlled moments that were every bit as gruesome though.

Charlie had been suggesting for a while that it may be time to open that plain white door. While I'd hardly call myself a coward, I had avoided it for so long and didn't see any point in changing my attitude that the door simply led to nowhere. In my mind, it was to nowhere. Nowhere good.

That was until Charlie's unexpected bout of sickness and death ruptured all calmness in my life and mind. She had been the one solid permanence of my existence, and I was marooned without her.

I felt a sense of duty to do this for her as much as my own reckoning with the past.

Clunkily, I tried to introduce the key to the lock, but my nerves were getting the better of me.

I stopped, composed myself and breathed deeply before the key slid into its long-lost home and the familiar clunk-click of the door being released from its bondage filled my ears with dread.

It had been so long that I barely remembered what the room looked like before its abandonment, let alone what ten years of sitting might do to it. Ten years of dust, ten years of mould, condensation, and dampness. Would there be the customary smell of death and the long-decayed food on plates and putrid liquid in coffee cups? Would the strong scent of a room unventilated for a decade where more cigarettes had been smoked than I cared to remember choke me?

Would I find long-lost relics of my past lying there frozen in the time capsule the room had formed when it was locked all those years ago?

There would only be one way to find out.

Pushing the handle down and pressing forward, I was struck with a silent uneasiness at what I found. My chest tightened.

It felt like the door hissed, and then silence followed. No true silence, but that silence when there's an absence of ambient noise. The floorboards of the hall creaked muffled by the carpeting.

A clean white room.

Characterless and unremarkable.

After a few moments standing in the doorway, my chest relaxed from the initial tension, only to tighten again.

This was... wrong.

Did I imagine...

No. The room must have been cleaned. I had no recollection of it, but that was the only reasonable explanation for what lay before me.

Stepping inside this room, the memory of which had lived rent-free in my mind uninvited since I had last exited it, I felt goosebumps and my mouth dried up.

"Shut the door. When you do eventually go back in, you need to shut the door, Brian. Trust me."

Charlie's instructions reverberated around my mind. As I closed my eyes for a moment, she was standing in front of me, hand on my shoulder, smile across her beautiful and earnest face.

I closed the door without thinking about what I was doing, and suddenly my chest cramped hard. I'd been cursed with a very sensitive heart, and the poor organ was beating at a tempo similar to something you might hear on a Slayer record.

In the five minutes, I'd closed my eyes to reconnect with my dearest Charlie — whom I missed — enough tension had built in me that I didn't want to open them again.

I knew I had to - to complete the process and get over my fears and face the past. That didn't make it any easier.

"Just open your eyes. You'll be alright."

Again, her soothing warmth was there for me - encouraging me to finally open my eyes.

It was still the plain white room.

It was still characterless and unremarkable.

"Brian."

A voice whispered from behind me.

It wasn't Charlie's voice. It was... it really couldn't be. Could it?

I turned around, feeling a sudden burst of bravery to find. Nothing.

The same plain white room around me, characterless and unremarkable.

I only really had Charlie's voice in my head, so the different tone, sinister in its flat and understated delivery.

My name had never sounded so terrifying as it did dull. The walls seemed to undulate towards me a little, though it may have been my red alert brain playing tricks on me.

In the daze of my attempts to be brave and turn to face the voice in my head, I was struck by the left corner opposite the door.

At first, it was still the same plain white, characterless, and unremarkable room.

Until a piercing sensation drilled through my temples and flashes of darker hues and sprays of crimson and pale flesh filled my eyes.

The flashes stopped as quickly as they started, and I found myself screaming and panting in the same white, characterless, and unremarkable room.

A brief brushing against the fabric of my t-shirt on my shoulder sent a shock of numbness down the right-hand side of my body as I turned instinctively to the hand.

Again, nothing but a white, characterless room.

Then another sharp pain, followed by the sound of a dentist's drill. Flashes of lust-red flesh and hellish screams seemed projected onto my eyes. Ingrained memories played out.

"Brian."

This time, the call came from both Charlie and the unknown voice.

I closed my eyes, hoping to see Charlie, but all that my eyes could see was the backs of my eyelids.

As I opened them again, the room was still white, still plain, still very characterless and unremarkable.

Then I remembered Charlie's other instructions.

"Remember, Brian. Remember."

That was the last thing I wanted to do. But her words replayed, and the air grew heavy — too heavy to breathe.

Then the white began to bleed at the edges.

*

Thanks for reading!

Author's Notes: This is for The Forgotten Room challenge. This story has caused me so many problems. There are two versions of it. I decided to publish this version rather than another version with a more pointed and realised ending.

Here are some other things.