The Room

The stairway was doused in enough light to see the faded tan carpet, but also enough shadow to shroud the landing twenty steps above. Any detail on the wall to the right was lost in swathes of gloom. The light and shade of the hallway to the left gave a ghostly view of the white bannister and spindles.

Marcus hesitated.

Something upstairs was bad. It had a smell — impossible to define, but reminiscent of the elephant house at London Zoo mixed with something rotten. The bad thing also triggered a certain feeling: the ‘groping hands beneath the bed’, the ‘face at the window’ kind of feeling.

It wasn’t a thing you could see, though. Nothing would jump out at him, press its rank face close to his, or rake dirt-encrusted nails across his cheeks. But it could smother him. Crawl across him like cloying, moist fingers. Crawl into him so that its stink rose into his throat and settled on his tongue like a sewer rat.

Sense told him to back down the stairs, and through the door he sensed was behind him. He should seek out a lamplit street and crouch in the yellow glow until he woke up. But he knew that was not the way of dreams. Not this dream.

This was a dream where he had to confront the thing in the room — just as he’d had to nestle down with the stinking tramp in the filthy train carriage in the dream the previous night, and kiss the rotting mouth of the old woman the night before that.

He would have to walk into the room and allow himself to be engulfed by it. Feel it squirm inside him, corrupting his body like a disease. At least it would be over quickly. Not long before he woke, wrapped in a sweaty duvet, his heart seeming to pump inside the pillow.

This is one of those dreams where a house represents the soul, he thought, and the room where the bad thing is hiding is the part of me I don’t want to accept.

The rational, lucid part of his mind was a distant voice, led by the detached dreaming segment that now pulled him up the stairs towards the landing and the room where the bad thing lurked.

The door to the room was open just a crack, allowing the bad feeling to seep through, tendrils licking at his face and exposed hands. He pulled the sleeve of his jumper down so that his fingers were covered.

I don’t want to go in there, he thought.

But he had no choice.

He pushed the door open. It swung inwards soundlessly. It revealed a room sparsely furnished: a cot-like bed and a great dressing table festooned with dusty brushes, lipsticks and jewellery.

He glanced towards the dressing-table mirror, speckled with liver spots of rust.

His mother stared back at him.

His mother, as she had looked just before she died — grey face, lopsided mouth, terrified milky eyes.

No.

He tried to look away, but her frightened gaze held him, and the bad feeling crawled into his mouth and down his throat, filling him with its putrid essence. It crawled inside him, scratching at the fears buried there.

He woke to the sight of the red illuminated digits of his radio alarm: 4:45.

His heartbeat filled the room.

For a few seconds, he lay rigid, squeezing his eyes closed at intervals to clear the remnants of the dream, imagining that the buzzing in his head was a force that dispelled the bad thoughts.

Then he threw back the covers and climbed from the bed, ignoring the cold biting at his ankles as he stumbled to the kitchen. He got a glass of water, imagining the cold flood would cleanse the bad feeling from his system.

But her face was still there, lurking behind the rusting mirror, pleading for him to hold her hand, to be by her side as she died.

Some people can’t cope with death, he said.

He set the glass on the draining board and headed back to bed.

As he reached the landing, he felt it.

The bad feeling.

He stood staring at the door of his bedroom, which stood slightly open, the tendrils of guilt and fear sneaking through the gap, snaking across the landing towards him.

It’s followed me out of the dream, he thought.

The bad feeling is here.

And then it filled him — coating his insides, bubbling into his stomach, licking at his innards with a rough, filthy tongue.