Rude Awakening

Another piece from an Electric Tomatoes session... Our prompt was Rude Awakening


He hears it below.

A key in the lock.

The handle turns. Hinges grind and squeal into the night. The door expressing its pain at this untimely assault.

A hiatus as whoever it is negotiates the coming in with whatever it is they're carrying.

Then slow steady steps. Feet on concrete stairs as whoever it is manoeuvres whatever it is, whatever heavy thing it is, from one step to the next.

He lies in his bed.

He listens, eyes wide. Listening to the dark echoes rising through the carcass of the building. Listening to large, sharp-edged noises magnified by cold, hard surfaces. Noises like things. Solid. Ungainly. Cracking the darkness, fracturing the thick silence of one in the morning.

It's cold.

He shudders. Pulls the quilt up over his shoulder and under his chin. Squeezes his eyes shut as if this will deaden the din. But the squeezing sets his blood to throb in his ears, it floods his head. It muffles the noise of the ascent into a sinister unknown. He cannot recognise the edges the sound – cannot define the lines that create it. It is darkly dangerous, unfathomable. He releases his eyelids again, softens his grip on the quilt, reaches out with his ears to know the sound he's hearing.

There's a cough of exertion.

Whoever it is is on his landing. Whatever it is is being dragged slowly past his door, towards the next flight. A rasping heaviness. Dragged. Breathing. Heavy, effortful. Each drag of whatever it is preceded by a hit of breath against vocal folds. Not an utterance, not a word, just an exhalation constricted by muscular contraction.

Whoever it is has reached the next flight. The rhythm shifts again. He lies in bed imagining the scene beyond the door. He pieces it together in his mind. A dark figure. Male, hooded, heavy. More than heavy – lumpen. Meat and bone. Gripping whatever it is with large strong hands and yet grappling with the awkwardness of it. Filling the space. Pushing aside the emptiness of the stairwell. Overfilling it. Whoever it is. Whatever it is. Air closing back into the space as whoever it is moves up, step by step, lifting whatever it is, step by step by step.

The sounds are softening – no – shrinking, as they ascend beyond him.

A sense of relief and yet, here, in this darkness the questions pull at his eyelids. Prise them apart. His eyes reaching out now into the darkness for answers, quickly now, before the sounds cease completely. For in the silence the detail will detach still further. The sounds will slip into memory, memory just slip into colour and slowly fade. The light from the window lifts itself out of the darkness, finds the edge of the frame. His mind cues in and settles the room's other features – pieces of furniture, the looming wardrobe, his own body – into place.

He projects his imaginings against the screen of the dark wall by the door. He sees through the building, up the stairs to the top landing. He sees the whoever and the whatever bound together in some deathly embrace as whoever searches his pocket for a key.

He must know now.

He must answer the questions. What is the whatever? Who is the whoever? Why is this deathly escalation being danced in this the depths of darkness? Secretly, secretively, anonymously paranoically. He pushes the quilt back down from his chest. Rolls onto his back. Feels for the edge of his bed with his right foot. Hooks his foot over the edge. Pulls himself to the diagonal and further. Reluctantly complies with the compulsion to get up, to leave the cocoon of his bed and face the mystery.

Feet to floor. Cold, rough, wooden floor. He searches for slippers blindly. Finds them.. It's not too late. He doesn't have to go. He does. He has to know. There's a panic now. The noises from the stairwell lost in the sounds of his own movement. Confused and confounded. He is desperate to cling to the vestiges of the strange ascent, but they are dying. Pining away. Questions. The questions. Demanding in his head. Boiling in his blood. Forcing him to move. He's standing. Groping through the darkened bedroom. No, don't turn the light on or it will all dissolve. Get to the front door. Key. Where's the key? There. Unlock it. Pull the door open. There. Now he's outside on the landing, counting the noise above him, measuring it in his head, feeling how it fits. He's estimating how much longer before it ceases. How can he know? Move, just move! Up the stairs. Straight up. Two at a time. Running up the stairs.

Distant sounds now blocked out by the sounds of his own feet on the staircase. His breathing. His pushing of air into air. Like thunder. Next landing. He stops to listen. Silence... No noise? Then a step and a thump as whatever it is is dropped heavily down. Has whoever it is arrived? Is that it? Is whoever it is there now?

He runs again. Up and up the stairs, not waiting now. Not stopping to check. Full flight. Up and up. Feeling the danger rising in his cheeks, surging up in his throat. The sickening taste of running into his own death. Is this it? Will this be the end of everything?

Another landing and as he looks up he sees above him light. Light cracking through a doorway then splashing, flooding over to the opposite wall. An opening and yet a final opportunity. He knows the opening will close in seconds. That the opportunity will die. That the questions will be unanswered.

But it holds, the light. It stays and still stays, while whoever it is lugs whatever it is over the threshold and into the room. He's on the final flight. Hard-hitting the steps to get to the top.

And then the voice...

• Who's there?

It's not his voice. It's a female voice. Elderly. Cracked. Tired.

• Who is it?

He stops. Shocked.

• I'm not alone! Who are you? What do you want?

She's calling out unseeing. He hears the terror in his voice. She cannot see him. She's just hitting out with words, hoping to strike one feeble stroke against the darkness. Craven in the night-time. Her voice is just thin paper skin, watery blood, brittle bone.

He steps up one more step. He can see her now. But she is still blinded by the light in which she stands,

She is small. A small dark figure. A coat. A hat. She is silhouetted against her doorway.

- Who is that?

She speaks again with perhaps a moment more confidence, grown in the fact that she is not yet dead, that whoever it is has not yet pounced. He has not yet struck her, cut her, collapsed her, cast her lifeless to the ground.

- I have no money. You won't find anything.

- She is stalwart, defiant now.

- It won't do you any good.

- I... I...

He tries to understand why, now, he is here, doing whatever it is he is doing. Pounding the night for answers to that which is no longer a question.

- I... I...

- What?

- I... I heard a noise. I...

- Yes... well.

She is irritated now.

- My case is heavy. I apologise if I disturbed you.

- It's... No... I... I just wondered if you needed help.

- No. No, thank you. No help required. Thank you very much. I have managed.

- Yes.

- Yes... Thank you for the thought but...

Her unfinished sentence packed the moment with a dismissal.

- Well, if you're all right, I'll...

- Yes, quite all right, thank you.

- Then I'll... I'll say goodnight.

- Indeed. Goodnight. Goodnight.

The door is closing. He turns to walk back down the stairs. He glances at the door. It is still not quite shut.

She is watching him. He can see where the light is obstructed by her form. He can feel her eye held up against the door cra