H - Echoes Chapters Seven and Eight

Chapter Seven

FROM THE DIARY OF SUSAN MARSH MARCH 16TH 1993

God, James was really weird today. I was so looking forward to seeing
him at first. I'd spent most of the morning at Mr Porritt's waiting for
him to walk through the door. Every time I heard the customer bell ring
I thought it was him, and turned towards the door with a stupid idiotic
grin on my face. How have I got myself into this state? When he says
he's gonna ring and he doesn't (and that's happening more and more
often now) I sat by the phone and my heart practically jumps out of my
mouth when it rings. And then it's rarely him calling, anyway. And if
he doesn't ring of course stupid me rings him and then find I haven't
got anything to say to him. Still, it's difficult keeping up a
conversation when all you get back are monosyllabic answers.

Until today, when he couldn't stop talking - about the most bizarre
crap imaginable. He'd had a dream, and instead of laughing about it
like any normal person would, he went on and on about it as though it
was the most important thing in the world! I might as well have not
been there. And in the end I did walk off while he was still talking
about it, and I still don't think he noticed me.

Oh but I love him! I think about him all the time and I feel miserable
when I'm not with him. What do I do? It can't go on like this. I feel
guilty about walking away. What now?!

Susan finished writing, her desk lamp casting a liquid pool of light,
an island in the darkness of her bedroom. She heard faint sounds from
beyond the curtains, and moved over to the window, pulling them apart.
The glass was being pelted by another shower, and the sound sent a
delightful shiver down her spine. She opened the window, and held out
her hands as if in supplication, and the warm rain gathered in her
palms. She breathed in deeply, smelling the grass and the earth as
their scent was renewed by the rain, and for a moment, she forgot the
events of the day.

Lightning flickered briefly on the horizon, lighting up endless
curtains of rain sweeping away into the distance. Falling somewhere on
James' window. She left the window open and sank into bed and dreamed
of little beside a terrible black and white nothingness where she
floated endlessly.

Chapter Eight

James, strangely tired after an afternoon that had been spent
aimlessly moping around the house, sat on the edge of his bed. In his
pitch-black room the moon twisted and warped the contours of the walls,
creating darkened corners where he might once have imagined gibbering
monsters to lurk, who waited until silence had fallen before scampering
across the carpet and jumping onto their unsuspecting victim.

He still made sure that his wardrobe door was closed before he went to
sleep. His dreamy eyes always became attracted to that threatening
ribbon of blackness that was revealed and assumed so much terrifying
physical presence when the door was left ajar. If he turned away, or
buried his head in the comforting warmth of his pillow, it was still
there, a crack in the fabric of sanity, threatening to spill chaos and
nightmare into his rational world.

If it was still rational. The dream and the encounter with the tramp
had thrown everything into question. If growing up was a process of
rejecting the paranoid and irrational concerns of childhood, then he
had just undergone a substantial regression. Like the child that he was
ten years before, the darkness around him at once terrified and
enthralled him: enthralled him, because for the eight or so hours of
night-time, he was free from the confines of parents and family,
released from the regularity of a working day; terrified, because he
was afraid of what might be encouraged to come out from its hiding
places when the light had faded.

The wardrobe door was closed, and the curtains hung securely over the
windows, allowing only the soft, diffused light from street lamps to
penetrate.

"So you're coming for me," he said out loud to the silence. "Come on
then. I want to see you now, or maybe when I'm asleep. Surely this is
the time for you. Night."

A board creaked downstairs. A clock ticked somewhere else in the
house. He thought he could vaguely hear his father snoring, but that
was too material a sound to disturb this fantastic silence. A silence
of creation. The eternal silence before the Big Bang, or before light
was separated from darkness, and Lucifer fell screaming, trailing his
celestial glory behind him.

He dozed where he was, sitting on the edge of his bed, his head
lolling forward and then jerking back with puppet-like regularity. He
existed in a state which was half sleep, half wake, and the moon-washed
walls receded from him until he possessed an infinite space which he
owned and in which only his will could be done.

"I'm flying," he thought (or said, he wasn't sure which). He felt like
he'd felt as a child, when in dream after dream he'd been striding
across acres of rolling green grass. As he moved on, his strides became
longer and longer, until the grass was blurring beneath him and he was
covering miles with each step.

Elsewhere, behind one of four dark windows set in a gaunt, cube-shaped
house, a fist slammed into soft flesh and someone moaned. He felt it in
his half-waking, half-dreaming state; he saw, in slow motion, a thin,
naked shape crumple to the ground and lie still there.He heard the thud
as the body landed, and smelled blood and sweat. Then he blinked and
realised he was fully awake. The sensations, as vivid as the woman's
words in his dream of the previous night, were gone.

He gasped as he rose his head and looked across the room; somehow, the
wardrobe door was now open; a black void, darker even than the rest of
his room, gaped at him between the wall and the door. Outside the rain
began again, rising in volume from a gentle sighing to a steady roaring
that increased and increased in intensity until it became almost
unbearable.

"Are you there?" The moment was fraught with tension, and and felt his
voice trembling. He wasn't sure who he was talking to, but his heart
beat faster, surely rising towards a climax which could only result in
the arrival of....something.

For a moment, and in the sobering hours of bright morning he would
even be able to convince himself that he had dozed off again, the crack
that had opened between the wardrobe door and the wall became white, a
thin line of blazing energy which shone starkly on the wall behind him,
and cut viciously across his face, and an unintelligible voice
whispered and faded. The light flickered and died, and his room
relapsed into darkness. It was as if, for those few eternal seconds, he
had made contact with some force that was rooted in his childhood
imagination, but which also bore enormous importance for the
future.

He sank back on his bed, and his consciousness was lost among the
swirling shadows.