In a Room

He sat wrapped in a black sheet. The chair was his mother's, it cracked and splintered and creaked with the slightest movement. A sickly yellow firelight came from the lantern beside him, dangerously atop a pile of books with indiscernible spines. He had finished a painting on his wall underneath the stripping wall paper. Only half of it could be seen now that the wall paper had floated back to a comfortable position, and a wavering shadow was fast by the flame over top the remaining image of the painting. He squinted, feeling his face tug like leather, and relaxed his jaw letting it dangle. Drool escaped out of a corner and then quickly turned to a steady stream. Somewhere, in the guts of his house, a grandfather clock chimed and ticked and crunched it's old gears. Two chimes, three chimes, four. Hours he had been staring at the color on the wall. The chair screeched as he leaned closer and squinted to make out more of the painting. It was a red smear, piled with texture, but there lay a hand gripping a knife somewhere in the highlights of it. 

“1975 red car. Next to the porn store.” 

He looked around the room. The voice in the walls. Unconsciously, he began to twirl a wispy thread of his remaining hair. He rose slowly out of the chair, his knees buckling for a moment, the old arm rests taking the little of his weight. The black sheet piled at his ankles and dropped around his shoulders making him look like a priest in shadow. He snatched up a pack of cigarettes from a crevice in the bookshelf, his hand flapping around like an electric shock had been sent through him, but it was just a symptom of his degeneration.

With a cigarette in mouth he murmured, “Hmm 1975…” And he put the lighter to the cigarette. “I saw the car down the road…I did.” He said. Creeping closer to the painting, he kept one arm under the sheet and used the other to gently hold up the peeling wall paper. “I knew it was you. Mhm I knew it was.” He said with smoke puffing under each word.

“It was you!” 

He looked around the room again. That bastard in the walls was back. It always came back after a new painting, or was it before?

He bit down, ripping the cigarette in half and filling his mouth with tobacco. “No, no! It was you, you rotten bastard! Come out here! COME OUT HERE!” He said.

A terrible sound like bone and skin rupturing came from the walls and with it came a face and six hands that waved all out of sync. The number “372” was carved into the face's forehead. “IT WAS YOU!” The face said. 

The man rushed over to the wall and got so close to the face they were breathing into each other's mouths. With an accusatory finger he said, “You be careful this time and don't knock over the lantern!” He shot a glance at a black pillar burned into the room’s red doorway. “I want you to understand how you have hurt me! This time! THIS TIME I WILL MAKE YOU UNDERSTAND!”

The face's fingers all rolled like a centipede's legs. “The defendant would like to bring out their witness!” The door knob began to rattle.

“Don’t you dare! Don't you dare!” The man said, and clamped down on the door knob. He placed his weight into the door to hold it shut and layed there long after the door knob stopped rattling. “This is between us! Us, and those filthy hands of yours! 

“Another one!” The face said with a smile! Suddenly it's eyes rolled to the back of it's head then began to spiral like a slot machine. The sound of a knife carving wood scratched it's way into the air as the number on its forehead changed from 372 to 373. “Keep feeding me and I will grow more limbs! Remember when I was just a face in the back of your mind? Or before that when I was just a voice in your gut that made-”

“That made me sick. Yes, I am very aware of how you have made me feel. Always a reminder.” The man said, sitting back in his chair. He began to kick at random piles of books and trinkets. Porcelain shattered on the ground, a book that had been turned into an ashtray spilled it's contents, and some container of weeks old food let out a rotten smell. It all joined the rest in the manigery of disillusion.

The face in the wall rubbed it's hands together as if it was waiting to collect a reward. “Pretty soon I will come out of this wall and devour you whole.” 

“Yes,” The man put another cigarette in his mouth, “I've wondered long if I have been in your belly, Cronos.”

“Since then?”

“Yes, since that night. It's funny how your intuition warns you again and again where your decisions are leading you. Every night I went to that store…that filthy store, and I looked at the man behind the counter and I thought…I thought…I didn't want to be like him. I didn't want to be the way I was anymore. Perhaps, what I did to him was the only way I could recreate myself. Maybe my intuition was telling me to continue. I don't know.” 

The face rubbed it's temples as if to ease a headache. “Close,” it whispered, “You are very close. How old are you now? 67? Still you don't know? With all this art, all these books, all this studying and expression, and you are still stuck. You know it doesn't end here, right? This room, you will stay here, but just a layer deeper. It will be harder and harder to get out.”

The walls hummed and vibrated and danced with a wild wobble and for a moment the man forgot entirely what walls were, what a room was, and the difference between here and there. The wall paper, the bit that dangled over the painting, curled upwards shyly. The flame in the lantern roared as if gasoline was tossed on top of it, densely illuminating the whole room; and the painting was now clear as a mirror. The man shielded his eyes. 

“Just look.” Said the face in the wall.

Through the slits of his fingers, the old man peered at his creation.

It was a red beauty. A freeing honesty. A weightlessness in his legs. A motivation to his hands. A distance from the darkness. A place without shame. It was a man dead under a knife. 

The door knob rattled - it opened. The face laughed and breathed out a red mist. The number on its head read: “0”. The grandfather clock chimed five times. A silhouette hunched under the doorframe. It held a shimmering silver scythe in its hands. The man stood from his chair and tossed down the black sheet that kept him warm. His cold skin shriveled and he held his arms in front of him, hands fat sides up. The silhouette extended its weapon, its arms seemingly growing out of the darkness, and let the scythe slip from its hands. The man caught it, he expected it to be heavy, but it was light as snow. The silhouette closed the door gently and was gone. The man sat naked in his chair, scythe in hand.

The grandfather clock chimed twelve times. 

The face in the wall looked neutral, with perhaps a hidden envy, and it's hands drooped freely. 

Rubbing his palm across the scythe’s smooth surface, the man said: “Would you like to come out of the wall now?”

The face smiled something fowl, and it used its hands to tear at the wallpaper that was it's skin. Once it was naked, it fell to the ground, a centipede with a human face. It walked on its hands, closer and closer to the man in the chair. The man stood proud and began to swing the scythe wildly. He swiped and swiped and the light pulled with him against the metal of the weapon and he closed his eyes and laughed, but something was wrong. There was no feeling in the blade, no resistance, it did not feel like the first time. He opened his eyes and the centipede stood before him without a single cut. The man clenched his scythe tightly and cowered. Slowly, the face opened its mouth and swallowed the man whole. 

In the stomach he was warm. There was nothing to see, and he never heard the clock again. There were no walls to paint, and his hands could only feel the scythe. 

The centipede stayed in the room, and the room in the house, and the house waited to be found.