“I am an interloper.”
I am an interloper.
“This is not my reality.”
This is not my reality.
“But it is my dream.”
But it is my reality.
“I do this not of my volition.”
I do this not of my own volition.
“But I do this for her.”
Who is she.
“For I know her name.”
Who is she.
“And where she waits.”
Who is she.
“Who is she?”
Turn around.
“I can’t.”
TURN AROUND
“It won’t let me.”
Do it for her.
“I do everything for her”
For who and what won’t let you.”
“Ivy.”
Walk.
He did as he was told, and found that he could do so. He rose from his sofa, feet on the sodden carpet. It stank of rot and felt foul under his skin. Somewhere a phone was ringing, but not in his apartment. Somewhere far off beyond his walls. He went gingerly to the door, navigating there as best he could in the half light. The living room was an almost bioluminescent green, with the bright light form outside filtered through a thick covering of some kind of green matter that coated the outside of the windows. It was a light not for the living. A hue for the deceased. Everything had a surreal hue in consequence, and objects in the room didn’t seem quite as they should.
They are casting the wrong shadow.
He looked towards his bedroom as something almost unseen slowly shut the door from the inside. He saw a pale hand, damp with water, skin mottled and grey green in the eerie dead light. He almost caught something behind in the dark. Something that grinned at him.
Yet this did not perturb him. Not here. He had been here before, and he could walk. There was always a degree of jubilance. He was himself once more. Complete. The circumstances didn’t matter. None of that mattered. Why he was there was irrelevant. How he was there… Well. He was sober enough to recognise that this was a dream once again. His regular haunt. How he had to come to have so much agency, he also didn’t know.
The phone ringing.
He should answer it.
He opened his front door and stepped out on to the landing. The familiar balustrade ahead, entwined with ivy. The sickly glow from above, only it didn’t filter down so far here. This wasn’t where he had begun on this particular journey. The phone was ringing up above somewhere, and he knew that was where he had to reach. The apartment up there, with the thing behind the door. The phone was inside. Or outside. He couldn’t recall yet thought that it didn’t matter if it was in or out. It would be where it was. It would keep ringing until he answered it.
He should answer it.
The bare floorboards here were damp, but not as sodden as the inside of his apartment. Nonetheless, they made a disconcerting noise when he walked to the base of the staircase. He ran his hand along the bannisters, over the ivy that had wrapped itself around the surface. It was long dead here. Dry and brittle, despite the moisture in the air. Despite the damp and the humidity.
He paused for a moment before ascending, taking time to look down. His eyes following the descending steps on the other side of the mezzanine, and down with them, into the dark. Down there he heard it again. The low growl of heavy and hidden machinery. It was too dark to see down there, amongst the iron and ivy.
You shouldn’t linger.
He nodded. She would announce her presence soon enough, and she would descend towards him from the bowls of the stairwell. She operated the hidden machinery. Of that he was sure. Ivy. She existed down below, but - he thought - only when he was here. It was only his presence that disturbed her. It was only him, the interloper, that called her away from the dark device. What function it had, he didn’t know and couldn’t guess, but he thought that there would come a time when he would know. That was not for now. For now. There was the telephone.
So he gripped the desiccated flora, and he ascended. His felt himself came alive as he did so, and he relished it. Every footstep upon every stair riser was an experience to be devoured by his senses. He never remembered when he woke up, and that devastated him. In his waking hours he had so long become used to the deprivation, to the ghost sensations, to the numbness and sporadic pain. He did not think he wished the alternative upon him. The what used to be. The before. That had been filed away, to be forgotten, along with all the other sensations he was apt never to experience again. Lust. Love. Longing. It was part of a dead sentence, never to be completed and never to be spoken about. Never to be recalled. That was for another Adam, one who had perhaps found a semblance of happiness with his new circumstances. One who could look to the future not as a great dark planet, larger in the sky with every morning, until gravity failed and the seas boiled. One who could look with hope, or at least the promise of hope.
Another Adam.
Possibly the Adam who had once stood at the top of this staircase, his hands wrapped around the railing as the ivy creepy over his skin, but he thought that might have just been him. He didn’t trust that memory. It could be any of his. It could be any of him.
An indignant howl from below. Far below.
She knew he was there.
Up above, the phone rang incessantly.
From the hidden bowels, the machine growled low and threatening, reverberating through the walls, the floor. He felt the vibrations through his legs, his arms. Up his spine until his teeth chattered.
If he looked down he would see her, and perhaps his will to ascend would fail. So he would climb, with what speed his former limbs could take him, should the memory of how to eke the best from them fill his movements.
One flight, then round and up another. The mezzanine above where he entered. The floor was drier here, his bare feet leaving indelible echoes of him behind him. They would soon dry and his memory would be lost.
The door of this floor opened as he passed and a dry wind nudged him, but it smelled wrong, of dev meadows and a summer filled with trauma.
He continued to climb, and he began to be aware of hurried footsteps below. A frenzy. The instigator of the noise moving at speed up the stairs. Hurrying to meet him. To greet him.
To stop you.
Answer the phone.
He gritted his teeth and climbed harder. Faster. The trill mechanical bell gradually getting louder, signalling him coming closer. It would be answered. Yet if by him he didn’t know. Because she was gaining, and fast. Despite himself he peered over the balustrades, and there, deep below, that pale oval, that terrible face, peering out into the centre. The indignant howl notifying him that she had seen him and continued her ascent anew. He also renewed his own ascent, fresh determination spurring him on. The phone louder. Louder still. One floor after another all began to blur, to lose cohesion. Doors opened as he passed, things that he would prefer not to recall beckoned him inside dark rooms. She followed him as he climbed, her rage racing ahead of her, biting his heels and spurring him onwards.
The top. He had reached it. He felt no breathlessness. He was not fatigued, his limbs not sore. That much of this dreamworld he could appreciate. There as one door, as there always was, in the bright yellow green light from the algae encrusted glass canopy above. A brief shaped as something swam beyond the obstruction, momentarily blocking the light.
The phone was there. An old style with a receiver and separate mouth piece. He could alsmot see it vibrating on it’s hook with every ring.
The door was closed, and he had no fear as he reached out for it. Lifting it off the cradle and putting the earpiece close to his ear.
He though he heard her behind him., yet his attention to the noise he heard form inside. It sounded like…
“Daddy?”
“Violet?”
“Is that you daddy? Is that really you?”
“Yes sweetheart.” Relief flooded over him. He would see her soon. She had called him and he would soon see her.
“Daddy I heard you!” She almost shouted, her voice ripe with joy. She giggled. There was something in the background, something tidal.
“I’ll bet you did,” he said, smiling, “I bet you do.”
“No. I heard you.”
“When? Just now? Are you okay sweetheart? Where are you, with mummy?”
“You’re the only one that could. I couldn’t because my head hurt daddy. My skull. It was smashed in. My brain was all torn up. Even now I can’t tell you where I cam because I can’t see. My eyes are gone. Everything tastes wet. But daddy, I heard you.”
“I don’t get it, what are you saying?”
That frenzy of footsteps behind. Mere feet away.
“I heard you scream. They all heard you scream.”
“Darling I…”
Turn around.
Something was behind him. She was behind him. In the ear piece, Violet was giggling away, repeating the last line again and again in a mellow sing-song voice.
A hand across his mouth, the smell making him gag. He was turned around to face her.
“I heard you -”
He screamed.
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