The room upstairs

A short story in two parts.

I am at the top of a stairway. I shiver with cold. And fear. A door behind has just closed. I cannot help myself and I look back along the corridor to the room I have just escaped. I cannot see it �" the grey light quickly turns to a shadowless black. There is no pursuit from which I must escape, there is no screaming against which I must shield my ears. Just silence and blackness, pregnant with evil, reaching for me. I search my memory but there are only dark silhouetted forms that menace my soul.

The staircase is bleak and narrow. My awkward descent takes me, little by little, away from the foreboding behind. My body is full of hurt and despite my desire for haste my movements are laboured �" pain and terror vie to dominate. The peeling wallpaper feels damp to my scratching fingers and loose floorboards worry my feet. I pause and glance up and the terror is still there �" confined �" but diminishing with each step.

At the bottom of the stairs, away from immediate danger, I am able to reflect on my existence and the nature of the house. I am a man but my name is lost. I am not old but my body has the stiffness of age. I know this house but the limit of my memory is the top of the stairs. Beyond that I am haunted by the wraith-like shapes of fear and pain. Shapes that sometimes begin to form images in my mind but which make me afraid and I push them back. The present, although meaningless without a past, is preferable to that.

But where to go? There is a passage and, left or right, I can choose.

The passage to the left is illuminated by a window, so, anxious to know more of my whereabouts, I approach it. The wall of the house is thick and the wooden-framed window is grubby. Old cobwebs further obscure the view outside but I can make out a weary path leading from the house to a small picket gate that hangs uneasily on its hinges. The house seems to be surrounded by a curious mixture of trees: some in leaf and full of life and others long dead. The garden is unkempt with weeds and wild flowers interspersed with tufts of green-brown grass. It is still outside �" the elements are subdued and the sky leaden �" and I feel no great relief, nor do I better understand my predicament. Turning, I continue my progress to the end of the corridor and I am aware of a growing warmth of familiarity. My fear is gone �" I know this house and there are parts of it that will comfort me.

The door creaks a little as it swings open. A black cat, sitting in the shadows, stops licking itself and deigns to look up. Two windows pour light into the room �" a kitchen. The wooden table is busy with pots, plates, and potatoes �" two piles, peeled and unpeeled. There are six chairs surrounding it and in the background a black, warming stove. On one of the chairs at the end of the table and with her back to the stove sits a young woman and she looks up. She is not shocked to see a man enter her kitchen and she smiles. There is a mellowness in her young features, revealing experience and understanding that have grown out of pain and love. I have been here before. I think.

I don’t know what to say and wonder if I should wait for her to say something. Surely, she will greet me. But she doesn’t. The smile never fades but she looks down at the potatoes that wait to be peeled.

I want to talk to her to find out who she is but before I can invent something to say she looks up. The smile fades but her face is still welcoming and she gestures to the chair closest to her. A gesture I have seen before. The wicker seat is very worn and is stretched to the shape of a thousand behinds. As I sit down I look into her face and I can see that she loves me. Her eyes tell it. And it strikes me as a wonderful thing that this woman can fill me with such joy when five minutes before there was so much wrong. It is a joy that I once knew but now is lost. The recapturing of it overwhelms me and tears well up into my eyes. She puts her hand on my knee to show she understands that loss.

‘There’s something in the room upstairs that frightens me,’ I stammer. ‘But here …’

‘You used to come down and sit in that chair if you’d had a nightmare. It made me happy that I could comfort you. And when you felt better you’d talk about your day’s adventures in the garden. The goals you’d scored and how you and little Daru were going to play for Dinamo. And once, you talked about a girl you’d met at school and how she made you feel funny inside.’

Her words mean nothing to me but they are true. There are no images in my mind of the events she describes but they did take place. I look at her as she speaks and, momentarily, she seems to change. One moment young and confident, then older, with a wisdom tinged by sadness.

‘I’m sorry I was not always with you.’ Her confidence is replaced with doubt, as if she is still trying to resolve something of her past. The loss.

‘Do you remember how, after we had talked a while and laughed a bit, you always went back upstairs. When you decided you were brave enough, you got out of that chair; I would get up, too, hold your hand and walk you to the door and say goodnight and kiss you on the nose.’ She stands up and holds her hand out to me. ‘It’s time to go back upstairs.’

‘I cannot.’ Half-formed memories churn my stomach and my eyes plead with her.

‘You must. It is time. Everything is changing. Go now, while you can.’

She leads me to the door and opens it. I turn to her in desperation and she kisses my nose.

‘Goodnight, my beautiful boy,’ she says.

Before I understand anything the door is closed behind me and I am walking towards the bottom of the staircase. She has given me strength but I am still dismayed by the unknown dread of that room. One step at a time �" all light seems to extinguish as I get to the top. She is right, there is a different quality to the worry that resides in the darkness. The evil is there, but it is broken now, less strong. Weakened, perhaps, but still there. As I reach the top my terror returns and I want to go back to the kitchen �" to the table and the warming stove. But she has kissed me on the nose and told me to return. I feel my way along the corridor to the door of the room.

I turn the handle and push the door open.

***

The bitter cold was beginning to affect him now. Luca Petrescu was more exhausted than he knew and it was only now, some 18 hours after they had all met up outside the home of Father László Tökés, that he was beginning to be aware of it. The confrontation with the local police, just a handful of days before Christmas, had escalated to full-on skirmishes with the Securitate, body and mind bristling with terrible excitement. Around him, his comrades had fought with slogans, stones, petrol bombs, and captured guns. Some, to his left and to his right, had fallen and Luca was now fighting to avenge them as much as to topple Ceausescu. The weariness and sadness were unbearable but there was an inner strength that drove them all. Luca knew he was playing his part in something great: what was happening here in Timisoara, was happening all over Romania. His country would be free. He knew it.

And the struggle was going their way. At first the odds had seemed overwhelming and the government forces with their tanks and heavy fire-power had seemed able to break up the disorganised groups of resistance at will, leaving in their wake rubble and bodies. But gradually, the onslaughts of the police and soldiers became less deadly and bands of citizens were able to advance through the town, mopping up enclaves of resistance.

But in the freezing, subterranean passages of Building 149 �" the headquarters of the Securitate �" they had found something very different. Luca had always dismissed the rumours that surrounded this place. Yes, he knew that people had been taken here �" spirited away in the middle of the night, some of them �" but surely Romanian could not do this to Romanian.

The network of empty corridors seemed endless and behind every door they were greeted by broken bodies and wide-eyed panic. Fearful rescuers finger-tipped their way into dark spaces to find new horrors:. gaping wounds and twisted limbs of the alive, putrefaction of the murdered �" every cell its own tragic world. Luca did what he could: ‘It’s over, it’s over.’ He tried to reassure but grey faces, wracked with pain, blinked uncomprehendingly.

At the end of the corridor a door smaller than the others opened awkwardly, but was not locked. There were concrete steps curving downward. ‘A torch! Bring light.’ Swinging shadows announced the torch-bearer and a large lamp was thrust into his hand. They descended in single file, barely able to squeeze between the stone walls. The panic of confinement gripped Luca’s chest and cold rushed at him. His fingers scratched the brick-work, water dripped and dread echoed. About twelve steps down and the flashlight caught black water and the shape of a human body, chest-deep in filth. Luca traced the shape with the beam of light: it hung from a rusty hook; arms grotesquely strung up behind the back; head forced down, half submerged in the odorous water. He lowered himself in beside the body, freezing water forcing sharp intakes of breath as it poured through his clothes. Taking the weight of the body in his arms, a comrade was able to unhook the hands, stiff with cold and pain. The face �" a man’s, thin and bloodied �" slumped onto his shoulders.

‘Is he dead?’ A voice from above.

‘I don’t know. Help me get him out.’

Without warning the body arched its back and legs kicked out. The whites of terrified eyes illuminated a gaunt face.

‘Hold him!’

‘It’s over. It’s over,’ was all Luca could think to say.

A voice could just be heard, through cracked, swollen lips that hardly moved: ‘Please. No more.’

‘It’s over,’ Luca repeated. He tried to be calm, to hide his own distress.

Terrified eyes became distrustful eyes became tearful eyes. And they stared into Luca’s.

‘Downstairs,’ the voice pleaded. ‘Mama. Find her.’

Author's Note

My wife tells me the two parts don't connect very well and the story is not obvious enough!