I turned to the tiny alarm clock on the bedside cabinet and pressed the button that illuminated its face. 1.34am. No, they couldn’t still be out there, not at this hour. Even the most determined reporters would have gone away to rest before their resumed onslaught the following morning.
The raps came again, harsh, resolute, in quick succession. I groaned, wondering whether if I downed what was left in the bottle of Dalmore, I’d finally find the oblivion I sought. My head was pounding, my mouth was an ashtray, and every move I made seemed to arouse little harpies of pain inside every part of my body.
‘Oh God, please go away,’ I moaned to the torture and the knocking on the door. Neither one paid any heed.
A thought rushed into my head and suddenly I was throwing off the bedsheet and scrabbling for the bathrobe – for once I had gone to bed naked – lying across the end of the bed. It might be Constance out there.
I had tried to call her several more times throughout the afternoon, but the response had been exactly the same each time: ‘Ms Bell is unavailable.’ I’d even tried to speak to Dr Wisbeech, but wouldn’t you know? – he was also unavailable. It had left me frustrated and tense.
I stumbled along the hallway, my shoulder bumping the wall. It had to be her! Constance would never have ignored me all day, not after what had happened last night.
‘I’m coming.’ It wasn’t a shout to whoever was out there – please, please, let it be Constance – but more of a murmur to myself. Even though my attention was solely on the door at the end of the dark hallway, I was still conscious of the chill in the atmosphere, the robe offering little protection against it. It was as if winter had made a premature appearance.
‘Hold on, I’m coming!’ This time it was to whoever – Constance, yes, yes – was out there.
Although only a short hallway, it seemed to take me a long time to reach the door, which was now rattling in its frame.
‘Yes, yes!’ I yelled, as the rapping and the rattling became almost violent.
I was reaching for the catch when everything went silent.
I stood there, blinking in the gloom. The metal of the door-lock felt so frigid I feared my fingers might stick to it. Suddenly, I didn’t want to open that door.
Someone had murdered Henry last night, mutilating his body in the most horrendous way. What if this same sick bastard was outside on my doorstep?
‘Who’s out there?’ I yelled, managing to inflect a growl into my voice to imply fearlessness and even annoyance. ‘I’m not opening up unless you tell me.’
The blow that hit the door shook it in its frame.
I staggered backwards, sliding against the wall, so startled I thought my legs might buckle under me.
‘Who’s there? What d’you want?’
A stillness followed my demand to know and it was full of – it was drenched with – foreboding. As if something were just waiting there out of sight on the doorstep. There was no sound at all from beyond the wood.
It came from behind me instead.
A light tapping.
Fingernails against glass.
I slowly turned my head to look back down the corridor.
Tap, tap . . .
Hump brushing wallpaper, I retreated from the front door, slowly inching my way towards the source of this new sound.
. . . tap, tap . . .
I peeked around the open door to the sitting-room opposite. The sound wasn’t coming from there.
I moved on.
. . . tap, tap . . .
I swung round to face the kitchen. Listened. The sound wasn’t coming from there either.
. . . tap . . . tap . . . tap . . . More evenly spaced now, but still deliberate, still insistent.
Not from the bathroom.
No, it was from the bedroom. The tapping was coming from my bedroom. As if whoever had been at the front door had raced around the apartment block to the back. But that would have been impossible. All the yards were enclosed.
I moved on again, treading warily, my dread adding lead weights to each foot. Someone, or something, was in my bedroom.
There was a second hall light-switch outside the bedroom door, the first being at the other end, beside the flat’s entrance. I flicked it on and my eye was stung by the sudden brightness. I closed it briefly and still I heard the sound: it was even more ominous inside the darkness of my head.
. . . tap . . . tap . . . tap . . .
Someone was tapping on the bedroom window.
Then someone was banging on the front door.
My head swung this way and that, back towards the front door, back towards the open bedroom door.
The tapping on the window increased in volume, became a rapping that threatened to shatter the glass.
I rushed through the door, at least brave enough to confront whoever was out there – as long as they were out there. But all I saw was moonlight.
I hurried round the bed, making for the window, once there boldly throwing back the curtains even further so that the culprit would be exposed, the tormentor faced. But all I saw was my own small backyard and the buildings beyond, moonlight bleaching everything, while also creating shadows like deep black holes. Nobody was there. No one was looking back at me through the glass.
Yet still the tapping continued, softer once again, then building, returning to the rapping, becoming frantic so that the window rattled in its frame and even the curtains inside fluttered as if disturbed by a breeze or unseen hands.
And the sound from behind, from the front door down the hallway, was becoming even louder, the knocking on wood thunderous, the banging on glass deafening.
I clapped my hands to my ears and moaned, shaking my head from side to side.
Then it all ceased.
Abruptly. And it seemed, permanently.
It was the window I backed away from now, my footsteps light, as though I were afraid to rouse my tormentors again, and my eye watched the moonlight, waiting for the slightest shift in its shadows. I lowered my hands. The curtains settled.
I lingered in the doorway, the hall at my crooked back.
Something was impending. I could feel it in the very air itself, a rising tension so thick I could have wet my finger and felt its swell. Something was about to happen and I wanted to scream before it did. But my throat, my jaw, my voice, were paralysed. Almost mechanically, the movement so deliberately forced you might have heard cogs and wheels grinding, I looked over my shoulder.
Back towards the front door.
Which was bulging inwards, its wood beginning to creak, its metal lock and hinges beginning to squeal.
But it was the window that broke first, glass fragments exploding inwards and across the room like shrapnel from a cannon, tearing towards me to shower me with its glitter, stabbing me with its tiny shards.
It was fortunate that my face was turned towards the door at the end of the hallway, otherwise I might easily have been blinded in my single eye; and I think it was sheer gut-reaction that made me throw myself to the floor, thus avoiding the worst of the blast. The thick towelling of my bathrobe also served me well, for not too many of those glass daggers pierced its material, although even while falling I felt the sharp stings of those that did manage to penetrate. I curled into a tight ball when I hit the hallway floor, covering my head with my hands, too stunned even to cry out.
A loud crash and a fresh wind from the other end of the hallway. I looked up to see that the front door was open wide. Street litter and dust swept in with the storm, the air rushing at me with screaming force.
And with the wind there came the shapes, distortions, curling grotesques that might have blown from Hell itself. And I could hear their voices, although they made no sense, were incoherent murmurings and mutterings and screeches, the sound of chaos, the discord of bedlam.
The gale joined its sister from the shattered window, the gustings melding over my head, becoming a maelstrom around me, images swirling in the currents, strange, contorted limbs snatchi
ng at my hair, prodding my back, so that I was forced to move, forced to crawl along the floor towards the open doorway, the street beyond it seemed my only refuge. But even as I did so, the door at that far, far end of the short, brief hallway slammed shut once more.
Leaving me enclosed with these half-seen, half-realized hideosities.
A barely-formed face appeared before me, in place of its mouth a yawning gap, instead of its eyes two black pebbles with no expression, nothing beyond them. The cavern that was the mouth feebly opened and closed as though the formless creature were speaking, but no utterances came save for a high-pitched keening. It disassembled to be replaced by a thing so awful, so monstrous, I had to shield my eyes, the absent one too, against it.
Yet still I saw. With my eye closed and my hands across my face, I saw.
This thing was bloated and hairless, a pale blob whose veins seemed embossed beneath tightly-drawn skin. Its eyes were red, an albino’s eyes, and when they blinked the pupils could still be seen through the fine layer of flesh.
Something touched one of the hands covering my face, the cold, liquid feel of it causing me to flinch, to jerk my hand away and open my eye. The bloated thing had moved away to be replaced by yet another face, one that grinned at me, that grin too wide, reaching too far across the barely formed face; and something interrupted that grin, a growth that extended down from what must have been a forehead, a horn, a tusk, that divided the expansive but human mouth, a feature that rendered the countenance an obscenity. This too, swirled away from me, other unsightly images taking its place.
I collapsed against the wall, swatting at those floating impressions with frantic hands, yet still they came, swimming before me in blurred profusion, different shapes, different distortions, all voicing disordered warnings or appeals, I couldn’t tell which, their cries as varied as their forms, their agitation as frenzied as the silent breezes that swept around me.
A figure emerged from the darkness of the bedroom, forcing a cry from me.
As though in a mist, the figure came forward into the light of the hallway and I could just make out the golden, natural ringlets of her long hair, the clouded beauty of her face. Among this churning sea of grotesque perceptions, she came to me almost as a relief and in my desperation, I think I must have smiled, for tension left my jaw and I could feel my lips turn. She was the sanity amongst the lunacy. Or so I thought until I took in the rest of her.
Her image shimmered as if viewed through a heat haze rising from a hot road, her outline unclear, not quite in focus; and as she advanced and my eye took in the rest of her, I noticed that the legs were not beneath the torso, that they appeared almost to be walking below but alongside her upper body. It was as if she had been sliced in half, some magical process enabling both trunk and lower limbs to move independently yet as one.
Suddenly I didn’t like the apparent beauty of that ill-defined face, the allure behind those blurred lips that seemed to smile down at me. I scrabbled away, rolling on to my hands and knees once more, scrambling towards the opening at the end of the hall . . . stopping when my eye set on the thing that lay on the threshold.
It quivered and shook, a slug-like being, but too huge to be such. Stumps grew from it, placed like arms and legs but with no joints, no fingers, no toes, and at one end there was a protrusion, small, not in proportion to the rest of the body, that I realized was its head. The head turned towards me as if to see, but I observed that it had no eyes.
When something cold touched the hump of my back, iced fingers seeming to enter the material of the robe so that they felt my skin, slithered over the sac, I shrieked. I shrieked and clawed my way up the wall, rising to my feet and stumbling away, the shriek falling to a gibbering as I staggered through the nearest doorway and slammed the door behind me.
I fell to my knees and held my head in my hands, twisting my shoulders, shaking myself as if to break free from this . . . this . . . nightmare? It couldn’t be, it was too real, my mind was conscious. And dreams have that quality whereby you know, even if you do not acknowledge, that they are merely excursions in which you cannot be harmed. Tormented, maybe, but never physically harmed.
This was no dream. This was really happening to me. To convince myself I slammed my hand against the floor and felt the pain shoot up my arm. Oh yes, this was real enough. These things were surely out there.
I heard their tappings on the door, fingernails scratching wood, their muffled mumblings as though they were gathered in the hallway, entreating me to let them in. Haunting me.
I straightened and looked back at the door.
If these, then, were ghosts, perhaps there was one person who might rid me of them.
I lurched towards the telephone on the sideboard against the wall, one unsteady hand lifting the receiver, the other already rifling through the address book lying beside it. Louise Broomfield. She would know what to do, she would help me. The woman talked to ghosts, for Christ’s sake! She would tell me what to do, she would rush over to help me! Where was her number? I knew I’d written it down; I always noted the number of a new contact or acquaintance, you never knew when it would be useful. Not enough light! Not enough light coming through the basement window from the lamps around the crescent! Had to get the light-switch . . .
But the receiver was tight against my ear and there were voices already coming through, whispers, murmurings, growing louder, gradually becoming audible, becoming coherent.
‘Help us . . .’ they said. ‘Help us . . .’
The words were repeated over and over again so that they became a litany.
‘. . . help us . . .’
And as they spoke, the receiver grew cold in my hand.
I stared at it, heard the voices, more distant now that the instrument was away from my ear, felt the seeping coldness creep into my own flesh to travel up my arm.
Then the voices altered, became a moaning, and then a wailing. As I listened closer again, I thought I heard sniggers among the wailing, and cries among it all. And the instrument grew even colder. Becoming so cold that I dropped it on to the sideboard, afraid it would stick to my skin. Yet it was burning that I could smell. Burning plastic.
Even in the dimness of the room I could see steam or smoke rising from the receiver, then from the curled cord itself. And the plastic was beginning to bubble as though the receiver were red hot – red hot, even though I had felt it freezing! The stench became stronger and through the tiny gaps of the ear- and mouthpieces, I could see a glow, as if the inner circuitries were overloading, the wires glowing. The bubbling of the casing became more liquid as the plastic began to melt. And the wailing diminished, grew fainter . . .
But began again from behind the sitting-room’s closed door. And even then it began to grow fainter again, as if receding, moving down the hallway towards the front door, drifting off until there was silence save for the soft popping sound as the plastic bubbles exploded. Eventually, even that stopped and the telephone receiver was nothing more than a charred, misshapen mess. I squinted closer to the sideboard and although the light was poor, I could see that the wood beneath the receiver was unmarked.
I leaned heavily against the sideboard, hands clutching at its edge to prevent myself from sinking to the floor. I had to get out! I had to get away from there! They might come back, their haunting not complete!
I pushed myself away and hobbled to the door, afraid to open it and afraid not to. I listened and there were no sounds from outside. Had the sitting-room window not had bars to protect the flat from burglars, I would have climbed through and up to the street at ground level, not caring about my state of undress, only wanting to be far away from this place and the entities inside. But I had no choice other than to use the front door, and to do that, I had to go through the hallway.
Fresh adrenaline rushing through me, I yanked open the door and, without pause, ran into the hallway to charge towards the flat’s entrance. I had been afraid that the sluglike thing would still be lying across t
he threshold, my intention being to leap over it and out into the night beyond. But it was gone. The hallway was empty. And the front door was shut.
I almost barged into it, so desperate was I to flee, but my hands took the impact. I reached for the latch, twisted it, and pulled the door towards me. My fingers slipped from the metal as the door remained where it was. I tried again, this time using both hands, twisting and pulling, trying to wrench the door open. Again, nothing happened, the door refused to budge. Next time, I lifted the letterbox flap, slid one hand through the opening to grip the iron-lipped wood, twisted the latch and tugged with all my strength. Still nothing happened; the door would not open.
Now I staggered back, away from the front door itself. It was as if it had its own will, its own volition. As if it did not want to open!
I slid away, another thought in my mind. The bedroom window. It was broken, I could climb out. I could stand in the yard and shout for help, or I could climb over the dividing wall, bang on my neighbour’s back door. I didn’t care what anybody thought of me standing there half-naked in my bathrobe, screaming blue murder about dreams and ghosts and murder and melted yet frozen telephones. I didn’t care if they thought I was insane and men in white coats came to take me away. I didn’t care about any of that. I . . . just . . . wanted . . . out . . .
My foot dragged as I hobbled back down the corridor and my hands slapped at the walls on either side as I passed. I ran straight into the moonlit bedroom.
But it was a mistake. It was a huge mistake.
For the things had gathered there and their unnatural forms preened in the silvery light. It was as if they had been waiting for me, knowing I would come to them, sure that I could not escape. And I saw now that the window was not broken at all.
The shapes moved in the moon’s glare, but still shadows hid the worst of their malformations from me, although I caught glimpses, I saw partial deformities that seemed devised in Hell, for no true God would have inflicted them. Yet they appeared happy in their own monstrousness, for they revelled in themselves and each other, fondling and caressing their own and their neighbours’ distortions, performing lewd acts that brought nausea to my throat. All in the moonlight of my bedroom.