No One Gets Out Alive by Nevill Adam

Author:Nevill, Adam [Nevill, Adam]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780230772144
Publisher: Pan Macmillan UK

FIFTY-TWO

The impact of the second room’s strangeness was worsened by her sense of familiarity inside it. She had seen the place before, what seemed like a long time ago, though her dreams of the room could not have been more than a week old. Time and space, the dimensions and certainties of reality, seemed to command a position as contemptible and forsaken as her own status inside the building.

The walls were painted black and adorned with nothing. The ceiling was black. The floorboards were painted black. Had there ever been a light fitting inside the room, it was long gone. She found it hard to determine where the walls met the ceiling and the floor.

The large round table in the centre of the room was covered in a dusty black cloth with hems that lapped the floor. She would have preferred to have been able to see beneath the table.

Four plain wooden chairs were pushed under the table so the backrests touched the rim of the table top. The only other item of furniture inside the room was a long, black sideboard. Upon the sideboard were two old wooden candlesticks. They gave off an ecclesiastical feel without any of the comfort a residue of Christianity might offer.

The suggestion of a ritual having been conducted inside the room made her experience a shrinking sensation inside her skin. A repulsion further embellished by the sight of a wooden box with a purple curtain drawn across its front. The container on the sideboard was no bigger than a small doll’s house, though the idea of the tiny curtain suddenly being drawn from the inside made her head tremble upon her shoulders.

The room smelled of dust and damp fabric, it reeked of emptiness and age. But its odours were secondary to its atmosphere. She had never experienced anything akin to that, and wasn’t aware that a physical space could even command such a character. Because this space was desolate, and somehow fouled with a corruption she could only guess at. And yet the room was alive too, vibrating with a black energy that pressed her thoughts to a diamond of terror.

This was a tomb, a mausoleum with brick walls painted black, a chamber that both existed in a terrible past and also now. Her assumptions of its nature were instinctive.

A door. An entrance. A way in.

The purpose behind the room’s design suggested the obscene, the unholy, the inhumane. Nothing would ever be able to cleanse the space or its blackened walls. So many terrible things had been absorbed into the room, and it could become alive with them at any time. The room was charred by an evil she could not even recognize as human. It had been fashioned by someone, perhaps with the help of something from somewhere else.

The flickering of the candle’s light inside the sombre room only increased her abhorrence of the place. She didn’t want to look at the room, but needed to walk across it, and slowly enough to keep the candle alight too.

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