The Last Night (CW Competition)

She opened one eye. “What the hell was the time?”

She was fed up with not sleeping properly and waking up at some God-forsaken hour in the middle of the night. She switched on the lamp and looked for the clock. Then she remembered that she hadn’t brought the alarm down last night when she had decided that she could not bear to sleep upstairs again and had dragged the mattress off the spare single bed and rolled it down the stairs. She’d gone back up, grabbed the pillows, sheets and duvet off the brass four poster, hurled them on top of the mattress and had virtually flown down the stairs herself.

She felt that she wasn’t wanted up there, or indeed even in the house. “Over-vivid Imagination,” she’d thought “Probably brought about by one glass of wine too many”. But she wasn’t going up there again at night – nor would she sleep up there again. She only had three nights to endure before she moved. She could manage that.

Why on earth had she bought this house? It was everything she didn’t want. The front was a two-up and two-down brick cottage, jerry built in the 1840s, and only standing in the 1980s because it had been attached to an older stone construction, built who knows when?  The three cottages built at the same time in the 1840s had long since fallen down. The place was dilapidated, cold and incredibly uncomfortable to live in. The bathroom had been built in an open corridor between the ‘new’ and the ‘old’ ends of the house and the only toilet was on the ground floor at the far end of the house. A sixty foot run from the bedroom to the loo in the middle of a freezing winter’s night was not her idea of ‘all mod cons’.

Then there was that strange room on the top floor that was the only part of the building attached to the house next door. Long and narrow, built over an alleyway that separated the two buildings, it had a window at each end and a blocked in door-way that had, obviously at one time, given access to her right-hand neighbour’s main bedroom. They’d told her that they had never known the room to be used as ‘living space’. All previous owners had used it as a store-room. She’d tried to persuade one of her daughters to take the room as a bedroom – but both had refused, preferring  the smaller rooms in the ‘newer’ part of the house. “Too spooky, Mum”, they’d said and so it had, once again, become a ‘store room’.

She shut her eyes. Nice couple her neighbours, Jane and Ken, and very interested when she had researched the history of her house and the village. They were delighted when she found a document of 1666 that showed that her left hand neighbour, a supercilious idiot if ever there was one, was quite wrong in his assertion that his house had been “The Original Bull Inn” and that, in fact, it was their house that had been the Inn and the old bit of her house had been the stables. They weren’t quite so happy when she found that the Bull Inn had been the site of a number of murders. They both found it interesting that the village had a reputation for being involved in witchcraft – it wasn’t far from the home of the Woodvilles, a family accused of nefarious dealings in witchcraft in the 15th century, and an area still associated with Black Magic – there had been a few murders some years previously that seemed to have connections with the Black Arts. But Ken was a down-to-earth kind of guy – didn’t believe in all that ‘Nonsense’ – and she found that comforting, because she wasn’t sure that she did either.

There was a noise upstairs – a thud and the sound of someone moving around. She really should not think about these things in the middle of the night: “An Over-vivid Imagination”, she thought “Brought about by one glass of wine too many”. She determined to go back to sleep.

—–

She opened one eye. “What the hell was the time?”  She remembered that she hadn’t brought the alarm down last night when she had decided that she could not bear to sleep upstairs again.  There were noises upstairs. “Over-vivid Imagination,” she repeated to herself like a mantra. But, hang on. She hadn’t had a glass of wine too many during the days when the house seemed to close in on her,  and the darkness in the corners of the rooms seemed to be moving towards her. It was the fact that the house seemed alien, hostile and threatening that had encouraged her to open that second bottle of wine. She went to switch the lamp on, but it was already on. It did not give a warm, yellow glow – instead it cast a putrid green light, reminiscent of mould, putrefaction and pus. “Over-vivid Imagination,” she reiterated. “Over-vivid Imagination – Over-vivid Imagination.” But the sense of evil grew and grew… and the shadows at the edges of the light increased and increased and the light grew dimmer and dimmer …

She was dreaming, she knew she was dreaming. All she had to do was wake herself up. She shut her eyes – but that was worse. The noise from upstairs was more insistent,  and the sense of impending doom was unbearable. She was terrified.

It might be “Over-vivid Imagination” and ‘Nonsense’, but she’d read Dennis Wheatley and she knew what she had to do. “The Lord is my Shepherd, I Shall not want…. ” she intoned in her mind, over and over again.

—–

She opened one eye. “What the hell was the time?”  She was fed up with not sleeping properly and waking up at some God-forsaken hour in the middle of the night. She remembered that she hadn’t brought the alarm down last night when she had decided that she could not bear to sleep upstairs again.

“My God”, she thought, “That was one hell of a nightmare. I can do without that.”

Light was peeking through the curtains and the yellow glow showed her that the lamp was on. She was puzzled, she knew that she had switched it off before she had gone to sleep. She got up, made several coffees, had a few cigarettes, bathed in the corridor bathroom and rejoiced that she only had another two nights to spend in the house. She fervently prayed that she did not have a recurrence of the previous night’s dream.

—–

There was a knock on the front door. Ken was standing on the doorstep – a pale and a very uncertain Ken. She was amazed, her friendship was with Jane and he had never come to the door before. She invited him in for a cup of coffee. He stammered that he would not, under any circumstances, enter her house ever again. “Last night ” he said, “was one of the worst I have ever experienced. The noise from that adjoining room kept me awake the whole night. It sounded as if someone was trying to get through that blocked door-way. I could have coped, possibly, with that – but it was the sense of evil that  emanated from the room that so terrified me.” He gave a wry smile. “You know, Boadicea, that I really don’t believe in all that nonsense, but I absolutely insist that you spend the next two nights with us.”