Nineteenth

It was always going to be the nineteenth.

As a teenager, he expected that he would die in his nineteenth year. Not when he was nineteen. That would be past the time that had been allotted to him.

Never would he admit to another soul, his disappointment at living beyond his nineteenth birthday. He knew he should be thankful for the reprieve and the extra life it afforded him, but he didn't know why the plan had changed. 

He didn’t know what it was that he had done wrong, this made him feel smaller. He no longer measured up. He’d failed to do what it was that he was supposed to do in his first nineteen years and to compound the misery of his continued existence, he did not know what it was that he must do to complete the circle of a life that continually fell short.

Not once did he consider ending it all. That wasn’t to say that he didn’t consider his end. He willed his end and fancied that the occasional twinges he felt in his middle were the coming of that end. That something was eating him up from the inside. He vowed to let it do its worst, to suffer in silence until there was nothing to be done other than die.

Had he made a mistake?

From time to time he would throw nineteen around and see where it stuck. Nineteen was an odd number in all respects. This was a number that didn’t fit. Few were the places he could shoehorn nineteen into. 

On a registration plate seemed contrived. Not when there were thousands upon thousands of cars with nineteen on their plate. Similarly, a house with nineteen on the door was all very well, but this may mean that he was destined to live to a hundred, dying peacefully in his sleep.

As with a great many of the important things in life, things began occurring after he had given up and ceased his speculation as to how nineteen would end his days. He was thirty seven years old and nineteen seemed so very far away. 

3am.

The darkly magical time in the hours of slumber. The witching hour. He was dismayed to be awake at such a time. Then his dismay sank away to be replaced by a growing unease and consternation. His heart rate sped up and yet it seemed like his heart had stopped and it was his ears that beat like a war drum. That relentless beat took him back to a time when the world had been such a terrible place, when the sun took its leave and the monsters washed in on the tide of darkness.

He was small, so small and the monsters were huge and filled with a dark, poisonous strength.

He’d been ill as a small child. He couldn’t remember when it was. How old he’d been. But now he remembered the dreams. Dreams so real he could have sworn that he was awake. Laying there sobbing silently. Fingers digging into the duvet, desperately wanting to pull the covers over his head so he could hide from the presence in the room. The presence knew and somehow it communicated to him with no words.

Pull those covers up and I will slip under them and eat you where you lay!

He stifled a sob. He had to be silent. If anyone heard and tried to help him, then that thing would kill them. He knew that with a certainty.

He also knew that he had to keep his eyes open and on the creature lurking in the shadows beyond the end of his bed. It would not come any closer as long as he kept watch and held it at bay. He did not know what power it was that he held, but it only worked if he stayed awake and kept his eyes on the shadow world that the creature wanted to emerge from. 

Night after night, the creature would come for him, but it could not come forth if he kept watch. Its entrance into this world could not be seen. But once it was in the world…

…well, that would be a different matter entirely.

Later that morning he awoke and drifted back into the wakeful world in the same way he always had. He followed a routine and the routine centred and grounded him. Attending to the tasks that prepared him to leave his home and face the world was a spell that allowed him to take on the dreary forces of capitalism and play his part as the smallest of cogs. 

As he washed buttered toast down with strong coffee, he stared out of his kitchen window at the world that lay in wait for him. He made his customary sigh and questioned the futility of his drab existence.

Then everything changed. 

He experienced a flashback and as he did so, his face paled and then creased. The initial wave of flashback was from such a long time ago that it should have worn garments of nostalgia and warmed him, bringing forth a smile. This did not happen. This was not a visitor from a time so long ago that it could no longer hurt him. This was a visitor who was all too real. A visitor who had come a-calling in the early, dark hours of this very day. 

His flashback was a flashback of a flashback. Dread mirrors staring in on themselves and multiplying his fear. All of a sudden he was that small boy again. He was alone and frightened and he wanted it all to go away. Hewanted to go away. He wanted the finality of death to save him from an entity that was intent on taking him to a place of darkness and consuming him over an eternity in a way that would make his previous experiences of pain seem like a wonderful afternoon tea.

It was back.

He wanted to refute this. He wanted to remind himself that he was a grown up now. He needed to scoff at the stupid and cowardly little boy he’d once been.

He tried.

But instead his dark reverie of terror was broken by a short syncopated scream that sounded backwards and wrong and so filled with anguish it would crush anyone that heard it, and then there was the crash of the half full coffee mug as it hit the tiled floor of the kitchen and the spell was broken.

Trembling, he staggered out of the house. He had to get away. Seeking the refuge of his workplace, he drove away from his home. He cried all the way to work and spent a full ten minutes composing himself before he could walk into the office.

The working day slipped by and afforded him little in the way of sanctuary. Frightened of what awaited him back home, he found a pub to drink in. This was a place that he’d seldom been to. He wanted to be alone and to drink.

Drinking did not help him. He did not experience the insulation that he sought, and so reluctantly, he went home. He poured a full glass of whisky directly after shrugging his coat off. The glass was empty as he slipped from consciousness on his sofa. 

He left the 7^th March, drunk, disoriented and disconsolate.

3am.

The creature was there. 

Of course it was.

The creature was always there, but he could never tell. If he ever told, there would be consequences. Telling someone was an invitation for the creature to enter the world of mortals and it would feast upon whoever he had told.

“No!” 

This was the first word he uttered on the morning of 8^th March.

He scrabbled around the bedsheets with his hands as though they would provide him with a unicorn answer that would make perfect and painless sense of his predicament.

“How?” he gasped. His eyes were watery and his vision blurred, but he was looking in the exact place he had seen the creature in the wee hours of that morning.

He’d seen it!

He had never seen it before. The creature always lurked beyond sight. It was awful enough to know that it was there. As a little boy, he had thought that the invisible quality of his dark nemesis made it all the more horrifying.

How wrong he had been.

He broke his gaze form the place the creature had lurked. In front of the bedroom door so there was no escape. His eyes sped around his bed and its surroundings. 

How had he got here?

He looked down at himself and removed the covers from his body. Boxers and t-shirt. Just the same as he always wore when he slept alone at home. 

His final recollection of the previous day was the sofa and the whisky and he knew he had fallen asleep there. What he did not know was how he came to be here.

With an effort of will he pushed himself from the bed and raced around the room so he could exit it. There was no coffee or toast this morning. He would drink the instant coffee at work. That would do. He was not hungry.

The next day he had the same flashback. Only it was subtly different. The creature remained cloaked in darkness, but he could make out more of it. It was making itself known to him and that could only mean one thing.

He was truly terrified now. There was no respite from that state. He could not think straight. Yet he thought about taking holiday from work, or sick leave if they would not accommodate him, but he knew it wouldn’t help him.  

Three days later, despite his beleaguered brain making thought increasingly difficult, he had an idea.

“Yes!” he cried.

Blushing, he realised that he’d just shouted out loud at work. He nodded an apology and shrank away from his annoyed audience. Then he booked a hotel room nearby. 

For the first time in the best part of a week he was happy. He ate a meal of steak and chips and treated himself to a bottle of red wine despite the hotel mark up making him squirm. Before he headed to his room he treated himself to a brandy to round off the night. He’d done it. He was going to be OK. He wondered why he hadn’t thought to do this before as he drifted off into a beautifully relaxed sleep.

He awoke to screaming.

As his consciousness tuned into the reality of another day his terror also ramped up as he understood where the screaming was coming from.

He was screaming.

And no wonder.

He was in his own bed, back home where he belonged.

In a state of panicked confusion, he got out of that place as quickly as he could. He did not go directly to work, instead he drove to the hotel. 

“Can I have a spare key card for room 319, please?” he asked the receptionist, a different one from the night before, but that was usual. They were on shifts.

She gave him a strange look, “when you say spare?”

He kept his growing frustration and anger in check, “I stayed in that room last night and I’ve lost my key card. I’ve left a bag in there,” he added this white lie. He didn’t know for sure that he’d left anything in the room, he wanted to check this though. He wanted to see the room. He needed this because it felt like he was losing his mind.

“There was no one in room 319 last night,” the receptionist told him matter-of-factly. 

“There was because I was there,” he told her.

“You couldn’t have been,” she countered.

“Is there a problem?” asked an older woman.

“I just want a spare key card for room 319,” he told her. Glad there was someone else who would help him on this simple quest.

“I’m afraid I will have to ask you to leave,” she said to him icily.

“But I…” he began.

“I don’t care whether you’re a journalist or you have a twisted interest in what happened in that room, you are not going to see it, OK?” there was a cold anger in her voice now.

“I…” he was shaking his head, this wasn’t him. He wasn’t like that, “I was here yesterday.”

“Name?” the manager asked him.

He gave it. The receptionist tapped on the keys of her keyboard and the manager shook her head. 

Feverishly, he grabbed his phone and opened his emails. The confirmation of the booking would be…

“No…” he gasped, and his shoulders slumped as his energy was drained from him, “what happened in room 319?”

The manager seemed to see something in his eyes, she told him, “sadly, someone took their life.”

He nodded. That made sense. He thanked her. It was strange to do so, but he had nothing else.

Nothing.

He went home. Couldn’t face calling in sick, so he texted a colleague. 

Death in the family.

In a way, that was true. Only it hadn’t happened yet.

Sitting on his sofa before noon, he drank whisky. He kept the bottle on the table before him. 

The next flashback made him wretch, but he prevented himself from being sick.

He saw its face.

Only a glimpse. But that was enough.

That was more than enough.

It was coming for him. 

He sat back on the sofa and threw his head back, realising that he was staring at the ceiling beyond which his bedroom lay. He sat like that for a long time.

Then he laughed. He laughed and he laughed.

Nineteenth!

Only there was another number there too.

This was what it had all meant.

The creature had come back to him on the seventh, and it would all be over on the nineteenth. That was thirteen days in all. 

Unlucky for some.

There was something liberating about being right, and now he knew. 

The subsequent nightly visitations were transformed by his knowing. He’d heard of how people made their peace and accepted their fate and he supposed this was something akin to that. 

Only, why was it that he wasn’t present in the moment of the visitation?

He mulled this over as he stared out of the window after the next flashback. He did this in preference to attending to the creature’s face. There was a familiarity to that face even in the hideously alien aspect of its features. It was a distorted caricature and yet he felt sad at the lack of originality.

The pale white face that was so unnatural it looked painted on. The vividly red lips that spoke of hunger in every aspect of that lustful urge. Lips that hid a vicious maw that would tear and bite and inflict the worst pain imaginable. The markings around the eyes that drew the gaze into dark, hypnotic pools.

He’d seen the creature.

It had been at the foot of the bed.

So why was it that he only recollected it now. 

Why did the creature dwell elsewhere, and not in the moment it came to him?

The next morning he awoke to discomfort and shame. He had wet himself. He changed the bed and showered, but it was only when he was downstairs that he was given a glimpse of what it was that had caused his bladder to go. 

He had seen the creature in all its glory.

“Trevor…”

It had said one word in a voice that was not a voice. 

His name.

Naming him made it all the more real, Trevor knew it was going to happen now and there was no escaping it. His legs gave way and he slid down the kitchen cupboard and sat on the cold tiled floor, crying until he could cry no more. He knew it was self-pity. But he needed this and he deserved it. Who else would cry for him when he was gone?

The house was his prison now. There was nowhere else. His life was coming to an end and the petals of his world were closing up for a final time as the darkness descended.

On the penultimate night his flashback was simple and brief but it undid him all the better for it. He had felt the creature’s fetid breath upon his cheek as it leaned in towards him. Worse still, he’d smelt what that breath contained, the stench of the creature’s breath was death. Death was coming and with it something far, far worse.

On the morning of the nineteenth of March, Janice came back home. She had flown over to see her sick mother. When she arrived, the old woman had rallied and didn’t seem so sick at all. Janice liked to think this was due to her visit, but in her heart she knew this was not so.

She had not heard anything from her husband during her trip, but this was no surprise to her. He was a quiet, withdrawn man and only seemed to engage with what was before him. Besides, they needed the break. Their relationship had become cold and stale.

Upon her return, Janice found Trevor laying in their marital bed. He had died in his sleep, but his end had been far from peaceful, the rictus grin and contorted features of his face spoke of pain and terror. 

Janice would tell the attending doctor about the strange dark mark on her husband’s neck. A mark that looked like the shadow of a hand. But there was no sign of this when he attended the body to issue the death certificate. There was no mark on the body. Just another heart attack in the early hours of the morning.

3am.

Janice had a flashback of a nightmare…

Was that Trevor standing at the end of the bed?