Infinite Rooms: a gripping psychological thriller that follows one man's descent into madness (13 page)

23

T
hey took the steps beside the lift with care, the lighting leading down to the basement barely adequate. Once in the cramped gully of the concrete flight, Clement was confronted with three doors. He was informed that the two doors either side were more cupboards as he followed the waddling man through the third.

The basement was cool, and smelled of oil and dampness. By the mustard light from the bare bulbs hanging from the ceiling the concrete floor was seen to be stained with brown patches. The lifeless walls – stretches of unplastered blockwork – seemed to take a step nearer as Clement tried to study them from the periphery of his vision.

A partition divided the basement into two areas. Within the unlit section were filing cabinets and degenerate computers moping in the shadow, and typewriters dumped on the floor. In the half-light they looked like an undiscovered species of beetle, massive but calcified.

A network of ducts ran along the walls and grew out from
the floor and ceiling of the main section. It was as if at one time the pipes had large polished leaves hanging; might have been the plump stems of a metallic vine.

Some of the pipes found their way to the huge copper boiler dominating the basement. Mr Klipps had tottered up to the device and was tapping the glass of one of the pressure dials. ‘System’s dead,’ he stated. ‘Central on every two weeks, keeps mould away. Cold up there, use electrical heater under the counter.’

After being told the redundant boiler still needed to be maintained in case of an emergency, Clement asked if he could go outside. He had come over feeling faint.

‘S’pose you’d better.’ Clement turned to leave but Mr Klipps took him by the arm. ‘Don’t make a habit of this, do you?’

Clement moaned weakly, ‘Boiler room; demanding; heavy.’

‘Bit costaphrobic, if you ask me. Off you go then. Good job you don’t have to stoke Bessy.’ He waved over the front of the formidable boiler. It held authority and Mr Klipps paused as though to acknowledge its presence with respect before saying, ‘Wouldn’t make a routine of nippin’ out. Agency check up every month.’ Clement tried to gulp air to lungs seeming to have become shrivelled. ‘Not at your post, sacked. Simple as that. Have to go out once awhile though. Expected, but always lock up.’ Clement was licking his dried lips as a mauve filter was put before him. The intensity of light halved. As though the guard had crawled inside the boiler, his words were dulled
and echoed as if by the thick layers of copper. ‘Least ways, I expect it. Agency don’t, tell you that much for nothin’. War starts, at your desk. You alright? Better go before you drop.’

The quick air in the street rejuvenated Clement. He marched back into the foyer. He rubbed his palms together and shuddered for it was still a wintry morning. Mr Klipps was coming out of the reception office.

‘Told you hours?’ he enquired. ‘Good.’ He glanced at his watch. ‘Right, me done; time I was off. Should have shown offices, but you can do it yourself, can’t you? Instructions written about what I’ve said. Have a rummage, you’ll find ‘em. Here’s the keys. Key map somewhere in reception. Anyway, Mr Clearmint.’ He enthusiastically pumped Clement’s arm with an energetic handshake and wished him well. Then, just before he was swallowed up by the revolving doors, he called back, ‘Remember, one good turn.’

Clement saw him spat out onto the street. He scuttled away on his stubby legs at an admirable speed.

After washing the mugs and tidying up, Clement looked in the drawers and cupboards under the counter. There were a few items of interest but still not enough to capture his attention. He sat and eventually closed his eyes.

Apart from deadened sounds of traffic and the anonymous ticks of the office clock, there was silence.

The confines of the office had become his enclave, a private
domain which nobody could encroach upon. The movements of the city belonged to another dimension, an alien and hostile environment. His was the only true, safe place despite hunger and thirst gnawing at his constitution.

He tried to empty his mind, to become physical self only. The task was a difficult one. No sooner had he got rid of the last scrap, another thought would come bustling in.

‘You there.’ He decided to make a final concerted effort. ‘Are you deaf?’

He fought to regain sense of surroundings and there, quickly, in sharp focus, someone stood looking through the pane of the reception office window. Clement went to meet him in the foyer.

‘Wondered if you might be asleep,’ said the man without humour.

‘Sleeping the sleep of sequence,’ Clement answered.

‘I’m trying to locate St Margaret’s Crescent. I’ve an appointment there very soon and do you think I can find it? Been round the block three times already.’

Clement’s stomach spoke with a gurgling, sounding like water draining from a sink. He went back into the office and pulled open a drawer to produce a map. He brought it back out and unfolded it carefully, laying it onto the carpet tiles of the foyer. Both men crouched down, resting on their haunches, to inspect the city’s intricate nervous system displayed in lines of red, black and blue.

The visitor jabbed a finger onto the map. ‘Here we are. This
is us here, right? So…’ He placed both palms flat down and leant forward as if about to perform a handstand. It seemed to Clement as though he had solidified there, on the foyer carpet, becoming a piece of sculpture for other visitors to admire. But no sooner had he thought this, the man pushed himself up to stand. ‘Around the corner, next right, next left; thanks.’ He went out quickly. The movement of the revolving door displaced a wedge of coldness into the foyer. Clement shuddered but remained crouching for a while, following the meandering course of a road on the map until it ran out to the west.

When he returned to the reception office he remembered the apples bought in the market. He retrieved one of the green fruit from the paper bag in his holdall and bit: it tasted of soap. Disappointment but he felt grateful, for at least the spell had been broken which had overtaken and anaesthetized him.

A pack of playing cards lay on a small table. Clement emptied the box of its contents and shuffled them before laying two face down, then putting the palm of his hand over one of them. If he relaxed and focused attention he was sure the front image of the card would declare itself.

The telephone rang. He blinked and stiffened. The ringing was rude and clamorous in his quiet capsule. He was indignant for the intrusion into his privacy. No need to answer, it would stop soon enough.

Like a solid which can become liquid then gas, all can transmute to sound, if not from without then originating from
within, he concluded.

Perhaps he was the generator. Sonorities, trembling resonances, setting up oscillations to reach a climax of unbearable plangency, bells clanging with a furor and with surging tones of such unparalleled power as to become firm again…

To solidify into a telephone, ringing insistently, never letting up until Clement leaned over and lifted the receiver to his ear.

24

‘
S
even of hearts,’ a female voice said quietly from the other end of the line. Clement brought the telephone to the table and turned over the playing card.

‘How did you know that?’ he asked with surprise. ‘How’d you possibly know? Unless, I suspect, you were born with the gift, a rare talent bestowed to the few. You’re able to take the phenomenon of cause and effect and reverse it, am I right? Would you teach me this? I’ve a serious use for such a discipline. But then, perhaps it’s trickery after all. Like your palm-reading friend. He’s not to be believed.’

‘Not so. Quite a few things he told me have come true.’

‘Like what? Tell me just one if you can.’

‘You wouldn’t be interested.’

‘Of course I would. Wouldn’t have asked otherwise.’

There was a pause from the other end before she said, ‘My job.’

Clement gripped the telephone receiver harder: any aspect concerning Bernadette’s new job angered him. He sucked in
his bottom lip and tried not to speak but words flowed under their own pressure. ‘I see; yes, I understand. He told you about the job; told you how you were going to deceive your husband.’

‘I didn’t—’

‘And that you were going to…’ he searched for the right expression, ‘harm our marriage.’

An interruption of laughter and so loud, Clement had to pull the receiver away from his ear.

‘Harm our marriage!’ she echoed. ‘I’ll tell you Donald, if our marriage has been harmed as you call it, it happened well before I got the job.’

‘What are you saying? What do you mean?’

‘Listen, I’m not prepared to argue anymore. I’ve got my job and that’s that. There’s no more to be discussed.’

‘OK,’ he said finally, ‘you can have your job and I won’t take it away.’

She laughed again but this time in mockery. ‘Won’t, you say? Can’t, more like.’

Clement spoke with a tremble. ‘Alright, can’t. But shouldn’t we be friends again? I do love you deeply, Binny. I sometimes think if there’s like on one side of love, there might be hatred on the other. No intermediate state. You don’t fall out of love and land up feeling neutral. Understanding me? Want us to love and like, before it’s too late. Don’t want us to leave love behind in our silly squabbles. Not that I could ever hate. Never could.’ There was silence at the other end of the telephone.

‘Never hate, always love you,’ he said loudly, the words catching in his throat.

‘Who is this?’ another voice demanded and the quality of it sounded different.

‘We’re pulling ourselves apart. Let us reunite.’

‘I’m sorry, I think I’ve got a wrong number.’ There was a click before the telephone line became a lifeless hum.

With annoyance, Clement dropped the receiver back onto its base.

Again, solemn introspection. He slumped in the chair and stared blindly into space. When the clock above the window whirred, he threw a hateful glance for being disturbed, and the machine was silenced. The blunt ticking became quieter, each fine tick, no larger than a grain of salt, falling and collecting as fragile transparent stalactites, hanging down from the counter to the vinyl-tiled floor.

He wanted to vandalize the delicate structures though he knew, with the insistent progression of time, it would not take long before they were built again.

The activity was beginning to annoy him. He did think to find a vacuum cleaner to suck the whole lot up but remembering the pencil and pad he had purchased; the thought was forgotten. He felt an urge to write, to clarify important topics.

He got the items from his overcoat pocket and pulled the chair closer to the table by the back wall.

No sooner had he held the pencil in readiness, ideas fled.
All that remained was potential, a compulsion to express himself only. The white rectangle of the pad with its feint blue lines mocked him. He nervously went to chew the pencil the wrong end. He tasted bitter graphite.

He dare not disgrace the dignity of the fresh page with any randomness. What is to be expressed must be essentially fundamental, he told himself. Perhaps he should write on a scrap of paper, to prepare and modify the script until perfection is achieved. Only then would it be fit for the pad, written with care in his best handwriting.

He had been scribbling jagged lines on the corner of the first page. He was despondent then; the purity had been desecrated, its virginity taken without ceremony. Should he rip this page from the spiral binding? He decided not to; he would use it to work out a piece of prose before committing it – exactly and succinctly formulated – to a fresh clean page.

A stream of inconsequential words flowed through his brain, the one insisting the formulation of a cousin: ‘Coin, cone, clown, crown, brown, bain, drain, train; rain, sane, seen, sown, sawn, lawn, pawn…’

He tapped the side of his tipped head as if the words would empty out from his ear. Then he plunged in, and wrote:

Dissolving of Veal the Tanner was gradual, gradual. Started on autumn night when skies were bruised – hard tracery of dead branches clawed against the real moon. Walking to cottage, in the past valley, twisted hunchback disturbing him by whistling tuneless
dirge. Reminiscent of a sailor who, many years long since departed, did whistle up a storm.

What is that tune?

Question best left unanswered. Turn of the heels hunchback crawls into orchard, apples shrivelled in the slugged grass.

Veal arriving home. Wife looks up from knitting. Perished rubber at marked changing of husband’s appearance.

Hunchback lope between mossy trunks. Rabbit scream while torn by owl talons.

Hesitant wife standing. Gently places hand upon Veal’s hand. Two hands. Veal the Tanner becoming so scarecrow scarecrow, expected rustle of straw.

Clement leaned back in the wooden chair to view the story. He read through the piece twice and crossed out a few of the adjectives. He was pleased with the result. He turned the page, being ready to write it again in a neater hand, but was dismayed to find he had been using too much pressure: there was his story in stencil. Maybe he shouldn’t worry; use the notebook for initial workings and purchase a new notebook to write it again precisely and neatly. He might buy a fountain pen and a bottle of blue-black ink to do the job properly.

He was feeling peculiar. Like the way Mr Klipps’ instructions had ceased to be understood, so the words upon the page lost meaning. Mere wriggling marks on paper, possibly an archaic set of symbols which might have meant something long ago. He turned his chair away from the pad
on the table, and the curved top rail hit the wall.

If only he were able to obtain a dreamless, empty state, block out inner and outer semblance. All he could do was stare, sunken in the chair with his peaked cap crooked and a peculiar smile haunting his features. Perhaps there was mirth to be found in his situation, only it had not revealed itself as yet. He was prepared to believe that. There was no other reason for smiling. Indeed, every reason not to.

Clement experienced a surge of stamina as if he had been slapped across the face. He felt more in touch with reality than at any other time during the morning. He needed to stretch his legs. He wanted to inspect the offices in the building.