Under a Watchful Eye(54)

The floor of his room was covered with liquid. Black water that reflected no light. As soon as he became aware of the water he also heard the distant hush of a current.

The first figure to appear in the doorway of his room passed down the corridor outside without noticing him. At the sight of it, his heartbeat had occupied his mouth.

Exhausted, bent forwards, wading through the black water that made no sound about the figure’s knees and produced no ripples, a terribly thin woman had passed his room.

Black hair offered the only relief to her pallid form and had concealed most of her face. The lank hair was plastered to her scalp. A thin vapour, similar to what drifted from frozen food introduced to room temperature, wafted from her back and coiled behind her, then vanished. Her bloodless flesh exuded a faint grey light and the outline of her silhouette had perceptibly blurred as she staggered past, moving at an irregular speed, one much slowed, as if gravity worked against her meagre frame. She was there, in the doorway, and then she was gone.

A second figure passed the door moments later, but on all fours. It’s emaciation and unhealthy complexion were the same as the first figure, though this one’s hair was patchy. What wisps remained drooped like wet bootlaces from the back of a livid scalp. It had once been a man and the definition of the body had shifted in space, just like that of the first figure, before settling again and then blurring once its slow and painful passage continued out of sight. A stubby appendage had hung beneath that figure’s solar plexus. The protrusion was like a dead tongue extending from the middle of a body.

Other figures were soon drifting by, but Seb had no sense they followed those who had gone before them. All appeared isolated, their sufferings insular.

Eventually, one of them paused and fumbled about the doorframe before coming inside his bedroom. The visitor was an aged woman, more bone than flesh, her joints pressing out her whitish-blue skin.

Her nostrils and eyes were pitch black. She whimpered piteously and padded her palsied hands against the walls as if the room had been a sudden, strange and unexpected revelation. Seb retained the impression that she only sensed, rather than saw him, sitting in his bed and paralysed with fright. But she had wanted to find him.

At this point the room and even the building altered. The house was still familiar, though rendered almost as a photographic negative. New objects appeared. A cushioned easy chair of indeterminate colour and pattern came to exist in one corner. It was covered by an old blanket and several discarded newspapers. None of which belonged to him.

A second figure came inside the room. Its white arms were spidery on the dim walls that they traversed, scratching and near clawing for something that made the creature whinny with either excitement or desperation. At that point in the dream, Seb was choked with a terror that the apparition might turn and face him. And yet he never awoke.

This form also exuded the faint vapour and displayed the thick nub, or dead remnant of an appendage about the solar plexus. The silhouette blurred out during its quicker movements closer to the bed, before settling again when it came to be still.

An iron-framed hospital bed appeared alongside Seb’s bed. The bars were painted white, the bed linen was white, the legs ended in casters.

He experienced an unaccountable sense of his parents, as if they were close by, and he cried out for his mother and father. This was heard by the visitors. The elderly woman, who had come inside the room first, dropped to her knees in the black water, but without making a splash. She then clutched her long hands to her wasted face and emitted a groan, a sound filled with a misery so deep that Seb’s own anguish was reduced to that of a child merely suffering a bad dream.

Two other naked forms waded inside the room, hurrying as much as their wasted legs would allow. They had heard him too. And as the space filled, the walls of Seb’s room became increasingly vaporous, vaguer, dissolving away entirely where the blue-grey light had failed in the inkier corners. This very light, he finally came to realize, was emitted by his own form.

Soon he was looking at wet bricks around his bed and a curved ceiling above his head. The articles of his own furniture had disappeared, along with the hospital bed and the easy chair. The gushing of the water, as it funnelled through the dark bricks, became louder.

This was no longer a room in a house, but a tunnel.

The four figures about the bed groped closer.

Seb covered his face so as not to see their eyes.

A croaking, female voice made a sudden, desperate entreaty. ‘Which sphere is this? Can anyone tell me which sphere this is?’

‘I can’t get back,’ another voice called out.

Nothing touched him, but a third voice filled one of his ears. ‘Is this the second death? This is not my greater self. Where are the everlasting arms?’

The voices barked and echoed in the long, brick tunnel, an old sewer, and one cold and disturbed by a wind.

‘I can’t get back!’

‘Can you help me? I know you are close. Where is the light? Do you know?’

‘I can’t get back!’

A wind came from an aperture that never became visible in the distance to which they had all been struggling, barely upright or on all fours. The water flowed away, around their thin limbs, and continued into the darkness.

When they reached for Seb’s legs, he screamed and the light in his own form went out.

A final voice spoke from the void, and with a weary resignation. The words became fainter as if the speaker were moving away from him. ‘A time of darkness.’