By three in the afternoon I had decided to pause my search for work in this city, and looked for board instead, eventually finding a five-floor tenement with no lift by the river.
The manager was a leaden old woman, seventy or so, with suspicious purple eyes, hair in a bronzed bun, who led me up to the third floor. The place was uncarpeted, one main room with a tiny kitchenette in the corner; a single table and chair; a dirty meshed window; a slim closet with a toilet inside; and an alleged bedroom, a single bed barely fitting in, that was really just part of the main room, sectioned off with a plywood partition that would collapse if you kicked it, entered by a doorless doorway. The bath and shower room was down the hall and smelt like a mortuary at the height of summer.
The most abnormal thing however was that the wall opposite the supposed bedroom, kitchenette, and water-closet was totally and perfectly painted black. No markings or scratches or anything else—just pure, smooth blackness.
I asked the old woman what it was or what it meant, but she only shrugged and said that the man who had previously occupied the crevice was a loner who had left without notice a week earlier with two month’s rent still on his account.
The whole situation was grim, but I had not come across any other options, and it would soon be getting dark. I did not want to spend yet another night outside in the park with a forecast of rain.
I took the room and forked over almost all of my remaining money on the deposit.
I was not hungry, but went across the street to a café for a cup of tea, after which I came back and unpacked the measly artefacts from my suitcase.
By then it was after nine and I decided to lie on the naked mattress, planning to get up early to resume to my unpromising hunt for work.
Fully clothed, I soon drifted off, despite a prowling chill.
§
It was sometime before two in the morning when it began.
The experience was of me opening my eyes and turning my head to the right where, through the way, I could see the black wall, absolute and ominous. The room faintly lit through the window by the streetlights, I stared at it, long and deep, and as I gazed, it shimmered.
It felt as if I had been looking for hours, frozen in a sweltering bond, until the shimmer gave way towards the bare boards of the floor to a shape, moving out of the wall. It was a hand, followed by an arm, and then naturally came the rest, a crawling man, garbed in some kind of withered bluish robe, streaked with mildew. His hair was long and tangled, his face turned down. He scraped across the boards slowly and with difficulty, as though he was in pain or somehow not used to the gravity.
As I realised what was happening I struggled with my own body, not able to move. I started to groan, trying to vocalise with a paralysed larynx. Unable to shut my eyes, I managed to turn my head up to the ceiling to avoid the sight of that terrible thing, and at last was able to sit up, crying out.
I swung my feet around and stood uneasily.
There was nothing there. It was just me and the room and the wall.
§
I could not sleep for the rest of the night, even though I needed it desperately. After seven in the morning I went out and resumed my job search. I returned emptyhanded in the mid-evening, my stomach satiated only for the help of a charitable canteen for transients.
I had ultimately decided that my experience that night had been but a particularly bad dream—the shock of moving into a new place with unusual features.
Before bed I rummaged through the cupboards of the kitchenette to see if I had missed any foodstuffs or other resources. They were totally empty, but there was a curious thing about the back of a lower door: some phrases etched into the grimy wood. They were in the Latin alphabet, but the language was unknown to me. Since then, thanks to the research of a sympathetic chaplain, I have surmised they were most likely written in Chaldean, or some other closely related language.
Dejected, I lay down on the mattress, again fully clothed, and slept.
It must have been around the same time: I opened my eyes and turned my head. The black wall was shimmering. I struggled, but I felt even weaker than in the night before. My eyes once more refused to shut.
The wall bulged. The hand came through, and then the rest of him.
This is just a dream, I told myself as I watched it inch along, his robe dragging after him, his back hunched.
Just a dream…you’ll wake up soon enough.
Then, in the middle of the floor beside the table and chair, he stopped.
His head rose up and his eyes finally met mine.
I smashed through sleep and screamed. I flew off the bed, but believing the thing still there I was sure I could not get around him. In a mindless panic I launched myself through the window, the rusted mesh exploding away, and I plunged down to the pavement.
§
That thing, you see, was not hideous, or deformed, or anything like that.
It, he, was me. My face. My body.
A parallel form, brought into this world by the unfathomable and unspeakable rites of an antediluvian evil, aroused unwisely by the preceding occupant of the room, and this form now wanting me, needing me…
Being permanently trapped in this hospital bed after my fall, there are spells when the far wall in here can get uncomfortably dark.
Harris Coverley has had more than one hundred short stories published in Penumbra, Hypnos, JOURN-E, and The Black Beacon Book of Horror (Black Beacon Books), amongst many others. A former Rhysling nominee, he has also had over two hundred poems published in journals around the world. He lives in Manchester, England.
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