I
Brass. Green with age where the weather had got it, numbers raised up off the surface.
"The address…the address plate…”
The window going in, not shattering but folding into itself, like ice. Something spreading across a carpet, taking its time.
“blood…theft…”
Then the man on his back with his mouth open and a knife standing straight up out of his chest like something planted there on purpose.
“cold-blooded murder…sad…so sad…”
And underneath all of it, every time, somebody humming.
…please help, HELP!"
Emma woke up with a start. Her heart was frantic in her chest. After a bit, she cooled down and approached the bedside table.
"Damned sleeping pills didn't work.
"
The hot weather made the shirt stick to her sweaty back. These windless, normal nights had been showing her the same nightmare over and over again. Emma had approached several psychiatrists, begging them to make a diagnosis. Every one of them had listened to her for eleven minutes and then explained, kindly, that it was a hallucination. That she was nineteen. That her age didn't support serious things.
She had stopped arguing about a year ago. There is no point arguing with someone who has already decided what you are.
The same thing over and over again. A movie she'd grown tired of watching. A house, an address, a murder. She looked at the bulletin board above her desk, a medicinal chart, and the crossed numbers of each doctor who prescribed her anti-depressants. Eleven of them crossed out one after another in different pens.
The twelfth was not crossed out. Three weeks old, written in her own hand, still waiting to disappoint her.
It felt like someone was behind these nightmares, someone had been trying to show her their story, an illusion, trying to drive her mad on purpose. And it was taking something out of her that she could not put back. She had stopped recognising her own wrists.
"If they won't fix me, I'll fix myself. It's nothing new, I've done this before.
"
Emma snatched up her blankets as concealed anger consumed her and tried to go back to sleep. Bits of the address flew in her mind.
II
Emma had walked these roads for nineteen years so she let her feet carry her. A dull ache penetrated her forehead for the lack of sleep last night. She had been thinking about the dream more than ever. She seemed to be forgetting some crucial parts, it kept rearranging itself most frustratingly, as though somebody were moving the furniture around in there while she slept.
A sad story really, the accidental murder of a man by a thief who only wanted to steal the antique through the broken window. No one inquired about the dead man. Yes, she had to find him, bury his dead body, and give him the peace he deserved.
Emma checked her phone. Twenty days since she'd fainted at a party. Eighteen days since the last text message from her friends. Seven days since–
"OWh! Oh gosh…
"
She fell face-first onto the path, wincing as a burning sensation flowed from her knees. With great difficulty, she stood up, supporting herself on a wooden fence. This was an unfamiliar alleyway, she'd never seen these houses before. All of them foreboding, with empty windows.
And the house in front of her, undoubtedly the one from her dreams.
The wooden monster worn with age seemed to be in some sort of meditation. She could almost hear its soft snores in sleep. Brown things blew into the air that at first seemed to be leaves but were really pieces of the plaster. A big front yard separated the house from the wooden fence. She told herself she was mistaken. Every old house looks like every other old house. She told herself this quite firmly, and then she looked at the gatepost.
The plate was brass and green with age. The numbers were raised.
She did not want to open the gate. She was simply on the other side of it, and the gate was swinging behind her with a scratching noise that made her skin crawl.
She hobbled to the front of the house and knocked politely. It seemed to her that it would be the proper thing to do. She had a pounding headache and only thought of her dream.
"Hello? Is someone there?
" she yelled, unsure of a reply. Grabbing the knob, she gave a hard push. A putrid smell of decay filled her nostrils as the door gave way. She could see light ahead. One door revealed a drawing room that was supposedly the scene of the crime. Just like in her dream, the big window was broken and the so-called antique was on the floor. The blood stains decorated the carpet like some pattern but…there was no dead body.
Emma felt uneasy. A humming voice was penetrating her ears, and she realised with a slow and sickening clarity that she had heard it before, every night, for a year, and had never once thought to wonder whose it was.
Scanning the corridor, she saw a room at the far end. She felt sure it was the bedroom. As the door swung open, her heart hammered in her chest as if her guts already knew what was inside. There was the dead man on the bed. He lay sprawled, his arms hanging over the bedsides, his blood staining the white bedsheets. The knife protruded from his chest.
It disturbed her, it disturbed the whole natural scene of death, the knife like some unnatural force that could rob a life. A delicious cool was settling inside her, but curiosity nagged at the back of her mind. She felt horrifyingly mesmerised by the man's milky white eyes.
Emma surveyed the room. There was little or no furniture, save for the bed, a chair, some rope, and a bookshelf. She stared at the large bookshelf on the wall, which through some abnormality seemed to be pushed forward on one side. The humming voice started again in her mind.
Feeling strange, she tried to move it.
A dark room was revealed. She felt around for switches. Catching something ovoid in her hand, she gave it a hard pull. The room lit up.
Directly in front of her was a rusted steel table. Beside it was a smaller table with surgical instruments laid out in a row, largest to smallest, the way a person lays things out when they intend to find them again in a hurry. The wall up front was lined with assortments of knives. She had seen instruments arranged like that somewhere. In daylight. On a tray. The thought arrived and left before she could stop it.
Her eyes fell to the left of the room, where the whole wall was a board.
Several pictures, pieces of paper, building plans, blueprints, and newspaper clippings were held up by threaded tacks, each thread running out to a person's face.
She looked closer, which was the mistake.
The first one she recognised was the girl from the petrol station posters, the one whose mother went on the news in a green cardigan. Emma had watched that broadcast. She had felt sorry for about four minutes and then gone to dinner.
The second was a boy from two districts over. There had been a search party. There had been a hashtag.
The third she did not recognise, and the fourth she did, and then she stopped counting, because the wall went on, and they were all facing her, and each one was still smiling in the photograph somebody's family had chosen.
Beside every picture, a small yellow sticky note. On every note, a smiley face, drawn carelessly, the way you doodle while you are on the phone.
Every victim?
Her eyes travelled along the wall and stopped.
Except…her own.
MY OWN?
Her photograph was near the end, slightly lower than the others, the paper gone soft at the corner from handling. She was wearing a blue top. She had worn the blue top to an appointment. She had worn it to an appointment and nowhere else, because it had a stain on the cuff and she had thrown it away afterwards, and she remembered throwing it away, and she remembered which bin.
The photograph had been taken from the side, and slightly above, as though whoever took it had been sitting across a desk from her.
There was a sticky note beside her picture too.
It was blank.
Something started to bother her very much. There were blood prints all over the floor. As if something had been dragged. It looked like rust on the bigger table. Upon closer inspection, it was dried blood and mucus.
Fear completely swallowed her, as did the distant humming voice. Fear immobilized her. She turned around to go back but her eyes slowly fell to the right wall. A small rectangular mirror, blurry with dust. She could see the fear in her face. But directly behind her was another face. A crooked smile with black teeth and bulging white eyes.
She gave a bloodcurdling scream as the apparition behind her raised a knife, the very one that was stuck in its chest, and a gaping hole replaced it. She swerved madly, making for the entrance of the secret slaughter room. And at the same time, the dead man struck.
She could feel the knife as it barely skinned her arm. The dead body of the man was no longer on the bed but she did not care and did not think. She forced herself out of the room, the humming voice at its peak, hitting her head on a loose plank in the doorway. For only a second, Emma could feel her life ebbing away.
Somehow, she made it to the door and pushed herself out. Trying to balance herself as much as she could, she walked, barely making it to the front yard. She clutched her head, trying to numb the pain.
Everything felt quiet now, with no humming voice, only the sunlight and the grass under her feet. She looked back one last time. There, staring straight at her through the broken window, was the dead man. His soiled nightclothes, the knife now in his chest again, the nightmarish smile, the white eyes looking straight at her.
No longer being able to hold herself together, she fainted.
III
A beep woke Emma from her deep slumber. At first, she understood and felt nothing. Slowly, everything came into focus. A white ceiling, something pushed into her nose, and a constant beeping.
Quite annoyed, she tried to move her arms.
They refused to oblige and lay dormant beside her, and she groaned at how heavy her body felt. She tried again. Her fingers answered, a little, far away, as though they belonged to somebody in the next room. Her arms did not.
Looking around, she realized she was in a hospital room. She was laid down on a bed, no longer in her clothes but basked in complete white, her blond hair enveloping her face. She blinked a few times in confusion.
A nurse came inside. Ecstatic to see her awake, she left again to fetch a doctor.
Emma wanted to tell somebody about the house. She had the whole thing ready. The board, the notes, the photograph in the blue top. She had been rehearsing it since before she opened her eyes, and she knew how it would go, because she had said true things to doctors before.
Eleven times. In eleven different rooms.
The door opened.
He wore a blue shirt and a white coat and a stethoscope around his neck, and he was humming.
Milky white eyes with black pupils piercing into hers. The same crooked smile she saw through the broken window.
Three weeks ago he had written her a prescription, and she had copied his number onto the board above her desk, in her own handwriting, and she had not crossed it out.
He closed the door behind him with his foot.
"Nobody believed you," he said. "I know.”
