Pure cunt, the room said. That’s all you are. Can’t even find your way out of a little maze like this. Better just lie down and take what’s coming to you, the way good cunts should.
Did she sense a note of desperation in this fresh assault?
Despair? said the room. I thrive on it. Cunt.
She had reached a corner of the room. Now she turned along the next wall.
No you don’t, said the room.
Yes I do, she thought.
I wouldn’t go that way. Oh, no. Really I wouldn’t. The Razor-Eater’s up here with you. Can’t you hear him? He’s just a few inches ahead of you. No, don’t! Oh, please don’t! I hate the smell of blood.
Pure histrionics; that was all it could muster. The more the room panicked, the more her spirits rose.
Stop! For your own sake! Stop!
Even as it shouted in her head her hands found the window. This was what it was so frightened she’d discover.
CUNT! it shrieked. You’ll be sorry. I promise you. Oh, yes.
There were no curtains or shutters; the window had been entirely boarded up so that nothing could spoil this perfect nullity. Her fingers scrabbled for purchase on one of the planks: it was time she let some outside world in. The wood had been very firmly nailed in place, however. Though she tugged, there was little or no give.
“Shift, damn you!”
The plank creaked, splinters sprang off it. “Yes,” she coaxed, “here we are.” Light, a fractured, all-too-uncertain thread of it, filtered between the planks. “Come on,” she cajoled, pulling harder. The top joints of her fingers were bent back in her effort to wrest the wood from its place, but the thread of light had now widened to a beam. It fell on her, and through a veil of dirty air she began to make out the shape of her own hands.
It wasn’t daylight that spilled between the planks. Just the glimmer of streetlamps and car headlights, of starlight perhaps, of televisions blazing in a dozen houses along Caliban Street. It was sufficient, though. With every inch the gap increased, more certainty invaded the room; edge and substance.
Elsewhere in the room, Marty too felt the light. It irritated him, like someone throwing open spring-morning curtains on a dying man. He crabbed his way across the floor, trying to bury himself in the fog before it dispersed, seeking out the reassuring voice that would tell him nothing was essential. But it had gone. He was deserted, and the light was falling in broader and yet broader strokes. He could see a woman outlined against the window. She had wrenched off one plank and thrown it down. Now she was pulling at a second. “Come to Mama,” she was saying, and the light came, defining her within ever more nauseating detail. He wanted none of it; it was a burden, this being business. He exhaled a little whistle of pain and exasperation.
She turned to him. “There you are,” she said, crossing to him and pulling him to his feet. “We’ve got to be quick.”
Marty was staring at the room, which was now revealed in all its banality. A mattress on the floor; an upturned porcelain cup; beside it, a water jug.
“Wake up,” Carys said, shaking him.
No need to go, he thought; nothing to lose if I stay here and the gray comes again.
“For Christ’s sake, Marty!” she yelled at him. From below came the sound of wood shrieking. He’s coming, ready or not, she thought.
“Marty,” she shouted at him. “Can you hear? It’s Breer.”
The name awoke horrors. A cold girl, sitting at her table laid with her own meat. His terrible, unspeakable joke. The image slapped the fog from Marty’s head. The thing that had performed that horror was downstairs; he remembered now, all too well. He looked at Carys with clear, if tearful, eyes.
“What happened?”
“No time,” she said.
He limped after her toward the door. She was still carrying one of the planks she’d pulled from the window, its nails still in place. The noise from below mounted still, the din of unhinged door and mind.