To begin with he liked the odd layout, and it was the main attribute that led Peter to renting the apartment. He liked the counter that completely separated the living area from the kitchen, it reminded him of the kind of counter you’d see in a coffee shop or a cafe and one of the first things he’s purchased for the apartment were three high stools that were placed against on the living room side of this counter.
He would think that it would be a nice way to entertain guests and he imagined himself on the kitchen side of the counter mixing drinks or preparing food for a gaggle of laughing people.
This was before he realised he would never have guests of course; it was a time when the city was new to him, and he hadn’t realised how impersonal a big city could be.
Still, he still liked the counter and would sometimes sit at it a good part of the day reading newspapers and drinking instant coffee while listening to a radio turned down low.
Peter would also write at the counter too, using a tiny netbook computer that was way too old to use for anything other than the most basic functions. Another attraction to the apartment was its poor internet and barely working phone line, to most this would be a negative and the landlord was surprised at Peters enthusiasm until he explained that he was a writer and would welcome the lack of distractions.
It did mean that when it came to submitting his articles, he would have to resort to visiting a coffee shop, a real one, just to use their connection; but this got him out of the apartment so was probably a good thing. It also made the apartment a little cheaper; to which Peter had no complaints, it was only later that it occurred to him there may be other reasons for the price; but by then everything had changed.
Writing was an isolating endeavour, and to begin with he thought that perhaps he had gone a little strange since he had buried himself in his work. When a man starts hearing things it’s probably time to get out and meet people, but that wasn’t as easy as he had hoped; nine million people in the city, nine million strangers who seemed to have no interest in becoming his friend.
That was then, of course, and as much as some things had changed that particular thing had managed to remain constant.
His usual seat at the counter showed more use than the other two, the red leather covering it already faded to pink in some places and cracking in others. He knew he should use one of the others but, for some reason he couldn’t put his finger on, this one was his favourite; so, he sat.
He plugged in the netbook, the battery wouldn’t sustain it for more than ten or fifteen minutes anymore, opened up the article he was working on and began to write. He didn’t think much about what he was typing; he just wrote a stream of consciousness that formed the basis of a warm-up before he started work. It was a way of limbering up the fingers and releasing the mind and he found that ten minutes or so of free writing would make the day run far smoother.
Peter wrote until lunch, which he took at twelve-thirty exactly and would take him no more than twenty minutes, leaving him ten to make fresh coffee and settle in for his afternoon.
His routine was unalterable, two days of writing followed by a day for edits and fact checking and potentially two days for re-writes before he uploaded and waited for the next assignment. Within a few days he’d receive an email containing an outline and the cycle would repeat.
To begin with he would look at his article online and re-read it, but this was a practice he eventually stopped when he realised how much his work was edited down. He had complained, politely, but was told rather firmly that anything than ran over the allotted length would be trimmed, and if he couldn’t keep to it he was lucky the editors just didn’t drop him and go to those who could; so he stopped reading and kept his head down, preferring the pay to the artistic integrity.
It’s just a job, he would tell himself, just something to tide my over until I finish the novel.
The novel he knew he would never finish.
The novel about The Room.
What came first: the whispers or the written word? Peter could no longer tell, and he could barely believe in a time before The Room. He remembered a time that belonged to another Peter, a man something like himself but not himself, someone who had rigid views of the world, a man before The Room.
Peter didn’t know what came first, the whisper or the word, but he did know that they were indivisible and once the one died the other would soon follow.
He completed his work for the day and shut down the tiny computer. He never used the computer for his own work, the written word wasn’t enough for the whispers, the whispers demanded more and seemed to despise anything connected to a keyboard; besides, few things could beat the versatility of pencil and paper.
He pulled a fresh pad from the plastic sealed pack of twelve and sharpened a dozen 2H pencils then ate a little before steeling himself for the evening ahead.
A short corridor ran alongside the kitchen area that ended in the door to the small bathroom, on the left was a tiny closet in which could be found the old water heater that ticked like a clock when it cooled and its twenty-year-old thermostat, and on the right was the door to the apartments only bedroom.
The bedroom was never used, Peter favouring the large couch he had purchased from a charity shop, and the door was the only one in the apartment that sported both a lock and a security chain; the front door only had a lock. The tiny gap between the door and the surround was sealed with wide red electrical tape that always felt moist to the touch.
Peter tore the tape free and immediately heard a murmur just under the threshold of his understanding, then he turned the key in the door and twisted the handle. He didn’t push the door open, he didn’t need to, the door was wrenched inward, and the security chain pulled tight, a large hoop of steel crashing against the horseshoe of thick metal stopping the door from slamming against the wall inside The Room.
When Peter had moved in, he had slept in that room, and the thought made the hairs on his arms stand on end. He had seen the plaster torn where the door handle had struck the wall, but he had thought little of it until the whispering began, and the bed shifted, and the door slammed; and he ran out screaming in the dead of night.
The remainder of that night he had spent in the park, sat wide awake with only the stars for company, and the next morning he had returned to a silent and deceptively normal apartment.
The next night the same happened and the night after it got worse; the murmurings and whispers began to make sense to him and he began to hear the tales that only the dead would tell and as any writer would do, as only they can do, he began to write, within days it become a morbid routine of cataloguing the dead and their tales.
Peter sat and listened, scribbling notes, and drawing diagrams with a hand that was only barely his own. The whispers fought amongst themselves as to who would speak, the weaker ones fading into the background as the stronger ones played him like an instrument, one tale moving into the next, a narrative without end.
By two in the morning Peter was spent. The notebook was full of his small tight script when he pulled the door closed, the spirits, if that’s what they were, fought him then unwilling to let their audience leave; but Peter was persistent and twenty minutes later the door was closed and locked.
He slept and rose, wrote, and listened, his own tale no more likely to find an end than the tale of the dead.
The woman who lived in the apartment opposite was small and hunched and appeared far older than her actual years. She always wore a hat of some kind, some days something from the 1920’s and other days nothing fancier than a baseball cap, and her coat was grey and drab and a little too large for her. Her name was Christina McAdam and on occasion Peter would see her during one of his rare visits to the outside.
Christina and Peter never spoke, and Peter wondered which of them would scamper away in fear first if either of them conjured up the courage.
He wanted to conjure up the courage, he thought the loneliness he saw in her would complement his own. They say that misery loves company and in Peter’s experience that was true, but only because everything loved company, even loneliness.
He had been living in the apartment for six months and writing The Room for five months, three weeks and five days when he had the first knock on his door, the very first from anyone. His post was deposited in a little metal locker on the ground floor and his only experience with the landlord was on the day he took the keys. In the six months he had lived in the city he had still not made a single friend; so, at first the knock was something he didn’t recognise, and his first instinct was to stand by the door to The Room and listen. It took almost a minute for him to realise his mistake and when he finally reached his front door and looked through the tiny viewing hole drilled through it, she had turned to walk away but she stopped when he pulled open the door.
“Err, hello?”
His own voice sounded small, and he realised he had not heard it in some time. For a moment he wondered when he had been out of his apartment the last time, but then she turned to face him, and his mind went blank. She was wearing a frayed red beret and for the first time he saw her without her oversized coat.
She looked at him with eyes that pierced him, they were unfriendly eyes but not aggressive; they were the eyes of someone used to watching things unfold around her of which she had no control but little concern. She was colder than he imagined, and he found himself strangely afraid of her.
She jutted her bottom jaw forward slightly and bit her lower lip before speaking as if biting back words, she knew she shouldn’t say. She was ageless like a Victorian doll, a nineteen-year-old who had seen a hundred winters.
“Look,” she began, the word an order, “I don’t know or care what you get up to, but I think my bedroom and yours share a wall and…” She paused, shook her head, and wrinkled her nose. “And I know you don’t work but I do; I need my sleep. I’d appreciate it if whoever you share your bed with would shut up and go to sleep at a decent hour.”
He blinked in response, a flurry of eyelid flutters in replace of words.
She waited; her chin set defiantly, practically daring him to argue.
Peter couldn’t argue, he could barely speak through the implications and revelations of her speech. She was not the mouse he had believed her to be, she was a lioness who could actually hear the voices and thought he was some Don Juan; while in reality it was he who wanted to run away from their encounter and so he did something that would haunt him each waking moment from that point on; he closed the door in her face.
The moment he did he was stunned at his own foolishness and for a moment he intended to open the door and apologise but then he heard her foot kick the door and a scream of anger issue from her that might have been an insult but may have been just an animal outpouring of rage.
He heard her feet stomp across the hallway and her door slam closed and for the first time he thought he could hear the spirits of The Room mumble and whisper at his distress; unsure whether the sound denoted concern or joy.
Peter did not write for the rest of the week; he didn’t work on any articles, and he didn’t record the whispers from The Room; instead, his days were filled with reality TV and local radio.
Neither did his disposition any good.
The living rooms single window was coincidentally the furthest point from both the front door and The Room, and it was here that Peter had begun to sit. He had turned the TV to face the window and the radio sat on the windowsill. Over the top of the television, he could see the front door and the darkened hallway leading to the whispering Room to its left.
Occasionally he would raise his gaze and glare at both accusingly, feeling like a parent scolding his children; but knowing it was closer to the other way around. By the end of the week, he had run out of food, all his clothes were dirty, and he thought he didn’t smell all that good. He could hear the whispers clearly now; he could not make out words, but they sounded abrasive, perhaps even angry at him now and he knew that this was the real reason for the TV and radio was always on.
He was trying to drown out the noise.
Christina McAdam thought that her apartment was the mirror of her neighbour and though she didn’t know this as a fact she would feel comfortable if asked to state it as such.
The assumption made sense, and Christina liked things to make sense.
The largest wall of her apartment was a single wall to wall, floor to ceiling bookcase that had been built even before she had purchased a sofa to go in the room. On it were books carefully arranged in sections as one would see in a small library. In fact, this was what Christina’s friends, the few friends she had, would call her apartment, The Library.
At first Christina took this as a subtle insult but gradually she begun to think of it as a sly compliment instead. It was Christina whom each would come to if there was a fact they needed or advice they sought, so she believed they respected her knowledge, though perhaps they resented it a little as well.
She was comfortable regardless, very little phased Christina McAdam.
Except that was for the noises.
The noises were beginning to phase Christina McAdam quite a lot.
She sat on the pink chair in her pink shorts with one leg draped over the arm and a book rested on it. The stereo played a nondescript jazz that nicely filled the dead air and, in the kitchen, separated from the living area by a worktop, her supper cooked, filling the room with the comfort and pleasant anticipation.
She finished a chapter and slid a slim silver bookmark between the pages but didn’t immediately rise to check on the food, instead she sat and let her eyes move over the room.
The jazz was just the right tempo and timbre to cover the noises, its improvisational approach breaking up any reoccurring sounds into something more random and less intrusive. For the moment, at least, making any further contact between her and her neighbour unnecessary.
Christina rose and tended to the food she was cooking, estimated another five or so minutes of cooking time and then took the corridor that led to the bedroom. Inside the noises were slightly more noticeable and she knew that as evening wore on and the sun outside slipped over the horizon the noises would become more obtrusive.
She opened the wardrobe that half covered the offending wall and dug out her work clothes for the following day and the iron she’d need to make them halfway presentable. Beside the wardrobe was the ironing board, still unfolded and ready for use, she draped the clothes over it and plugged in the iron to heat then returned to the kitchen.
She plated up the food and set it aside to cooling a little and went back into the bedroom to iron her uniform, taking the usual care around the Buster Burger logo that would peel from the blouse with very little provocation. She hung the clothes and returned to the kitchen.
Her dinner was spaghetti and meatballs, her favourite food, and she settled down to enjoy it when she heard the thump from her bedroom. She grumbled to herself, rose, and made her way back into the room to find the ironing board collapsed and the iron, still hot, burning a hole in the carpet.
This was, she decided, going to be one of those days.
A few hours later, smelling of cooking oil and sweat, she carried trays of processed meat and smiled her fake smile.
She was a good fake, people couldn’t tell, she had practice letting the smile reach her eyes in the way poor fakes never manage. She was so good in fact that sometimes she thought it was all real and she had begun to wonder how many people in the world wondered around as accomplished fakes. She would watch for them, and sometimes she would share a glance with someone and wonder if they thought the same thing that she was thinking; “I’ll pretend not to have rumbled you if you promise to do the same.”
When she wrapped herself in her oversized coat and made her way home, burgers in a bag suspended under her arm, she wondered how many wore these masks, and whether her kind was a dying breed or a growing one.
For a moment she thought of the man who lived opposite her and wondered whether he was an accomplished fake or a poor one. He must have been good, there were too many different voices from his bedroom for him to be a bad fake, but she hadn’t seen any of it in his eyes when she confronted him about the disturbances.
She considered another confrontation, it had been almost two weeks since she had spoken to him and the noises had gotten worse rather than better, but as she reached her apartment block, she reconsidered; tonight, she had better things to do.
She punched in the four-digit door code that let her in the main entrance and checked her post. There was a parcel from a mail-order book club and a handful of bills, she pushed these into one of her huge pockets and rooted in another pocket for her door keys and it was then that she heard the scream.
It was a short one, lasting only seconds but growing in intensity as the man’s body slammed into the ground outside the door; landing in the exact spot in which she was stood only seconds before.
The square of concrete cracked as the body hit and something burst in an arc of red. Christina turned away but the fan of red, some of it splattering on the glass door, was burned into her memory anyway. In her mind’s eye she saw an eye thrust from the skull by the blunt force and teeth flung from the body and chipping the glass. She didn’t know if in that moment her eyes had somehow recorded more detail than she could have consciously been aware; or whether it was the curse of her ever active and creative mind; either way, she knew she wasn’t sleeping well that night.
At first things were disjointed and moments of his life were interspersed with blinding light or unfathomable darkness. The light undulated with translucent veils of shifting membranes like lace caught in a brides’ happy sigh, it floated in a warm place that drifted ever forward; a gentle pull into something inexplicable but welcome. The darkness was all that light was not, it was not merely the lack of light, it was the thing that moved in under the cover of lights absence. Things moved here too, but they were things that an observer was glad could not be seen. The sense of their existence shook him far more than he could have believed; the sight of such things would break him and leave him a creature that knew only fear.
Between these moments of light and dark was his life and the pathetic importance he placed upon its mundane meanderings. In his three decades of existence, he had only one moment where his life may have grown to have had meaning; and he had closed the door on it.
Peter opened his eyes and saw the jagged glass that ran along the bottom of the window like hungry teeth, gagged by the sheet of wood that covered the frame from wall to wall. He could not see the world outside and the light could not penetrate the rooms gloom; regardless of this he saw every detail as if the light from that other place lit his way.
He turned and moved towards The Room. He didn’t feet his legs move, or his feet brush the carpet, nor did he feel the clothes on his back or the heat, or lack of, in the apartment; he felt the need to open the door and look into The Room to see what only now would be visible to him.
He turned the key, undid the chain that restrained the door, and the room welcomed him.
The tumbling red and blue of the lights brought her back and it was only then that she realised she had gone away. She was wrapped in a silver blanket no thicker than a sheet of tinfoil and a woman dressed in unflattering blues had an arm around her. For a moment she didn’t recognise the world around her, the low wall and the partially dead foliage looked alien, and the high block of impersonal concrete and glass looked menacing. It was dark and the lights danced over the brick and glass like a lazy carousel.
She could see people in groups peering around, some looking over to the buildings entrance and a few looking at her. She lowered her head and the woman beside her barked something to another person dressed in blue.
The onlookers were moved further away, their faces caught in the grumpy grimace of a child told “no.”
Christina felt something warm clutched between her palms and looked down to see a plastic cup filled with something that might have been tea or thin soup. She raised it to her lips and sipped, still none the wiser but glad of the warmth.
One moment did not lead to the next and she seemed to jump from moment to moment in a random chain. For a moment she was climbing stair, then another she was sat on a sofa in what appeared to be a library, and in another still she was leaning against a counter in what might have been a coffee shop. She half recognised these places as being something she should have recognised but she didn’t have the energy.
She heard someone say, “Christina?” and she looked up into a familiar face and she felt her own face split into a smile. A real one, she thought but didn’t understand the reference even as it fled through her mind.
It may have been an hour later, or it may have been a day, but when she awoke it was as if from a dream.
Sat in the chair by the window was a woman half obscured by the light of the sun low on the horizon. The woman was doused in red light and her hair looked like a mane of fire was tumbling from her skull and she was wearing a t-shirt and jeans that wouldn’t have looked out of place in a commune from the 60’s. For a moment Christina couldn’t place her but she felt comfortable and safe in her presence.
The woman looked over and smiled but didn’t speak.
Christina pushed herself to a sitting position and felt her toes brush the carpet. She felt so very small, almost childlike and for a fleeting moment she thought she was going to cry but she didn’t understand why.
“You okay?” The woman said and Christina felt each word glow with warmth, so she nodded, unsure of whether that was the right reaction or not. She thought about it for a moment and then decided it probably was. It was just the shock, she thought, I’ll be fine.
A fan of red clawed its way into her thoughts, and she shut her eyes and a moment later she dreamt, gratefully finding that the dream was not an unpleasant one.
She dreamed of a library where tiers of books stretched up to a vaulted ceiling high above. The carpet was a deep burgundy, and the room was lit with what appeared to be gaslights. The table in front of her had been stained an ebony and she followed the grain with a fingertip; the smooth but uneven wood under her fingertip felt like the skin of secret things.
“I’m sorry.” He said and when she looked up, she saw her neighbour stood in the flickering light of an open fireplace. She didn’t remember seeing the fireplace before; but that was the way of dreams, wasn’t it?
In his hands he held a thick old book, the edges of its pages were uneven, and its cover chipped and threadbare.
“They still speak, and I still record their stories,” he said as if she would understand; she didn’t and yet she did, and nothing of this seemed out of place.
“All they need now is someone to read.”
He held it out to her, and she took it; and she read.