“Turn around.”
“I can’t.”
“You won’t.”
“I won’t.”
There was a dripping sound. Soft and rhythmic. He couldn’t quite fathom from where it came.
“If you do I can show you what it is you lack.” The voice wasn’t one he knew nor felt he should recognise. Yet at once he had heard it before. It was from somewhere deep. Somewhere wet and dark. Somewhere where the green flourished.
“I don’t need to see what I lack.”
“You do.”
“I’m not turning around.”
“Not even for me?”
“I don’t know who you are.”
He turned around as the door swung shut, leaving him alone on the landing once more. Before it did so, fragments of what lay beyond were etched into his eyes. All he had to do was shut them and he could see it again. The hand, fingers twitching with the spasmodic current that jolted through the nerves, contracting the muscles tight. Dirty finger nails dragged over old wood.
Walking forward he stopped when the sun caressed his naked skin, sending the hairs on end like they were
before
before.
Hands around iron. Cold to the touch. He gripped tightly and held it until the familiar took hold, wrapping itself around his flesh and bones as he wrapped his flesh and bones around the railing. He propelled himself upwards slightly on his tiptoes, enjoying the feeling and knowing he would forget it once he woke. He had the awareness to be struck by the lucidity of the dream, yet he could not revel in the ludicrousness of it, for it was at that moment that he was living it. This was not his world.
He was merely passing through.
An interloper.
He wondered if she would welcome him as a hostess would welcome a visitor out of the storm, such as one that he felt.
After all light has gone.
No. Here she was now.
He looked down, the staircase continued down until the night.
The stars remain undone.
These thoughts were also him. An interloper. Each one. Were they from his awoken self, or from deeper within his subconscious?
There. In the gloom. A fingernail of light illuminating a blackened visage. Extended over the balcony, peering up towards him. Out, seen. In, gone.
No more.
Now the cacophony of her footsteps. Her outrage. Somewhere below an elevator sprang into life. Spurred on by hidden machinery, in turn powered by unknown means. Continuing to peer into the gloom, he made out the briefest snatch of skin, a hand over a balcony, a face, closer. He heard her feet on the iron. The whole staircase shook. The ivy twitched and shivered in sympathy as she rose to meet him.
Should he stay and wait? He thought that’s what he was supposed to do. The ivy held him and wouldn’t let him go. He nodded to himself. Much as she had nodded to him in an other life. The other she. The one who
she’s nothing to do with you
I HEARD YOU SCREAM
was written in to drive a narrative that he couldn’t forsee the result of. It wasn’t his, nor was she anything to do with him. She had fled a conflict that he had little interest in. That she had lost children he could only commiserate. They weren’t his. Her war, wasn’t his.
He had his own conflict.
Sunlight beyond algae coated glass, with even the clear sections fogged and occluded. Looking up towards the ancient skylight - framed by wrought iron rusted to an umber skeleton - he could see nothing of the sky beyond, and only presumed that it was there. Only presumed that the warmth he felt was from the sun, when it could be from anything else. A furnace for example, or perhaps he and this place were formed as miniature, and it was the flame from a candle held too close by a curious child. Or worse, he conjured images of terrible things - even more terrible than what flew up those tired stairs towards him. The light of an angler fish, so massive that it would blot out the sight of the horizon from him.
No sooner had the thought entered his head than he heard - nay, felt - sharp and sudden movement from beyond the glass. From somewhere deep within that burning light, a leviathan strayed close to the glass, a large fish-like eye peering in to observe him and all that played out upon and within the staircase. He shifted weight on his feet and wished to be gone from there. He knew that the world was not real, and yet it made little difference to his control of it. He should by rights be able to force himself awake, and yet was powerless. He should be able to leave, to regain consciousness in his bed, his body covered in his own perspiration.
Yet he could not.
The light shifted across the far side of the skylight until the stairwell was shrouded in darkness. He watched the shadows grow long, the intricate damask patterns formed by the light through the ornate balustrades and ivy was losing all definition, becoming a gaussian blur mimicry of itself before giving way to the tide of shadow that followed it’s dying path.
An outraged scream from below. Not far. Two, perhaps three floors at most.
She was close. For the first time, he began to feel that this time things would be different. He had always woken up, either at the insistence of the contents of the room behind him or the ivy as it took more purchase of his body inch by inch. Doubt now took root in his head, as ivy across the inside of his skull, until it threatened to
Leaning forward, he could just now barely make out the fleeting paleness of her as she hurried round and around the stairwell, eager for
him?
something. Perhaps merely the top, the room behind. The contents of which was still a mystery to him, save for whatever or whomever it was that waited within. Dead but not dead. Undead.
The telephone rang, a shrill cry in the gloom. It screamed for him yet his hands were fast bound and there was no freeing him even if he wanted to answer it, and he wasn’t sure that he did. He tried to turn at least, even to see where it was, sure the it hadn’t been there before yet also not sure, as he couldn’t recall looking.
Tendrils across his body. Tight. Constricting him. He was held in place and couldn’t turn, yet the telephone still rang.
“Answer it,” that choked and gargled voice said from somewhere below. Far below. It drifted up to him amidst the trilling and the anger and the fury that surged upwards. Somehow it was quieter than all these things and yet it was louder, but not as loud as the brittle creaking and cracking. All around him. The sound of old limbs.
Brittle bones.
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