Shadows and Silence

A struggling writer´s existence is plunged into turmoil with the arrival of two mystery lodgers, one who may have come from the supernatural.

Shadows and Silence

At the time, I was living in a three bedroom house sandwiched between a disused warehouse and a recycling plant in the middle of a dilapidated road on the east side of New York - the city that can’t sleep. The space I occupied was on equal terms with the rest of the run down surroundings; a kitchen doubled up as a lounge, all three rooms were small and smelly and none of the windows seemed to fit. However, it was the first place I’d stayed after living at home for the first twenty years of my life, and, despite the cold nights, to actually have a place I could call my own filled me with a sense of naïve achievement. I was working on a novel I have yet to finish and I wrote for most of the morning and for a couple of hours in the evening. It was an exciting time for me and looking back, the fact that the novel never reached completion let alone publication fades away when I remember the pride I experienced in telling people that I was a full-time writer with my own place. To pay for the house, I rented out the other two rooms for slightly dearer prices then they should have been but this, coupled with my shrinking savings, was the only way I could devote myself entirely to myself and not have to work nights in some grotty bar downtown.

The guy who took the first room was called Jerry. He was at least twice my age, and even that was being generous to the bald, solemn man from Detroit who worked for a pest control company and spent the evenings reading the adverts for sex numbers in the back of porno mags without ever phoning. To be fair to the man, he was pleasant enough and did me the favour of reading various drafts of my unfinished manuscript without complaint. His rent was always wired from his mother’s account in Pittsburgh dead on time which was all I really needed. The other guy was called Maurice, a young Scot who worked in a science museum selling magnetic pencils and who drank too much. His room was filled with newspapers he bought but never threw away, as if they were all some kind of collector’s items. He was a nice guy Maurice, had a soft Scottish accent that rolled with each smooth word and I can remember several hilarious nights when, drunk and drunker, we repeatedly attempted to write ‘slaphead’ on top of Jerry’s sleeping and shiny crown. However, one hot July day, Maurice had gone to a local park and helped himself to a lunch consisting of a six-pack of strong European lager and very little else. He returned to work late and when his boss questioned him on his tardiness, Maurice, in his gentle, slurred voice told the man that he could take the job and shove it up his grandma’s arse. No money, no rent, and despite swapped telephone numbers and smiles, that was the last I ever heard of Maurice.

The next day I found myself wondering around a run down area of the city which backed on to Chinatown. I remembered that it was nearing the end of the month and I was still short for rent, so I scribbled an advert onto the back of a receipt I found in my barren wallet and posted it up in the window of a newsagents run by a worryingly large oriental man. I shouldn’t have been, but when Chie arrived, I was surprised that an old Japanese woman would first answer the advert and second, after seeing the place, and Jerry, ask to live here. I had no objection and can recall thinking that a woman’s touch might be just what the place needed. With a sprinkle of enthusiasm, Jerry and I cleaned out Maurice’s papers and beer cans, aired the room, and dusted the shelves, doing our best to raise the place’s slipping standards of hygiene.

She returned the next day with a small, square suitcase and a wooden box the size of a brick. She seemed happy enough; I had no idea why she had turned up in my life, what she was running from or when she would leave, but we seemed to get on from the start and well, she smelt better than Maurice. I took her bags from her as she followed me into her room and proceeded to place the bags on her cleaned single bed. I pointed out the desk, the mirror tucked away on the inside of the wardrobe door, both of which had been hidden by Maurice debris, showed her the knack to closing the window by lifting the lever up and then hard down, all of which she accepted with a series of neat bows of the head. I thought that she would like some time to settle in by herself so I left the room and returned to my novel. I was deep into the sixteenth chapter when I heard the scream.

I rushed into the room expecting to see either a masked thief or a horny Jerry and, on the way to the room, I instinctively picked up an old umbrella that stood in the corner of the hall. Opening the door, Chie’s breathless screaming became louder and for some reason I remember thinking it was about time to clean my ears out. On first glance I could detect no intruder in the room. Chie was crouched in fear on the edge of the bed, eyes fixed on the desk, her trembling hands pointing at some invisible monster. She didn’t even see me. When I put my arm on her shoulder to comfort her she jumped and it took her a bundle of estranged seconds for her to realize who I was and that I presented no threat. She pointed to the desk with her bulging eyes. Various objects stood still; a light, some linen, a small stack of books with what I presumed to be mandarin titles and a wooden box I later learned contained chess pieces. I smiled, presumed that the old lady was merely afraid of the dark and desperate for some attention so I played along, my hands dissecting the contents of the desk, picking things up, putting them down as if trying to amuse a bad tempered child. It was then that I touched it.

It. To this day I can still recall the overwhelming numbness of that touch, the harrowing cold that swept through my hand. But even that description does not come close to the otherworldly sensation that my hand felt. It was as if �" and as I begin this second attempt, the feeling falls out of my memory and seizes my spine �" as if my hand was lost in the messy void of a signal-less television. I jumped back as if stung, almost falling over Chie and the bed. I then saw, just for a slither of time, that on top of the wooden box there was a small crease in the texture of reality, as if someone had taken a knife and cut a slice out of the world, a see-through shadow. That slice moved, danced on the desk, and my fear swapped clothes with anger as I hurtled towards it, smashing the desk with the umbrella, knocking the wooden box and all its carved pieces to the floor whilst shouting some kind of absurd war cry. A second later Jerry entered the room, restraining me with both arms and when I looked back it had vanished.

I was dumb, used. Jerry’s futile questioning only fuelled my starry silence and he went to bed early muttering something about gooks and their freaky voodoo s**t. The Japanese woman spent the night in my bed whilst �" and you can put that eyebrow down reader �" I slept on the sofa. The next morning, after I had suffered a night of frozen thoughts, Chie appeared at the front door with her bags packed. She seemed better, grateful for a night spent under a roof if nothing else. She tried to give me a slim slice of money but I refused with a smile. I let her go.

The house felt strange and aloof the next few days. I kept to myself under the mask of inspiration; in truth, I was encased in fear. Each little movement �" the sway of a curtain, the splash of cloth from a fallen jacket �" filled me with dread and every evening I expected to see it again. At the end of the week, Jerry informed me that his mother had died and that he was going to return to the family home to be with his bereaved father. He left me with some encouragement, saying he really liked what I wrote and that he’d keep a look out in bookshops for my name. Dead or alive, his mother paid his rent at the end of the month.

I had been unable to return to my work since the incident and left alone with my solitude I could feel madness follow me around the room. All the talk of parents made me think of my own, and the next month I had left the shadows and silence of the house and returned to the customized chaos of the maternal home, half-heartedly embracing the never ending persuasion for me to get a real job. Time passes and the memory of my stay sat locked in some secret draw of my mind until last night, when I was searching for an old friend’s phone number I found, in the bottom of my suitcase, a strangely cold wooden chess piece.