Infinite Rooms: a gripping psychological thriller that follows one man's descent into madness (4 page)

4

C
lement stood in a daze in front of the ticket office window at a train station. ‘Pardon?’ he replied at last.

‘Hurry up or clear off.’ The clerk was sullen and put his ear closer to the grille.

‘I see.’ Clement turned to view the faulty ticket machines then to the vertical boarding of the hall blemished by graffiti scrawls. A digital clock changed its numbers to the next hour. His attention was held there until an urgent barking cough distracted him. A queue had formed behind.

It seemed to him that the members of the queue were complicated clockwork machines full of cogs and gears, stuffed with levers and rods, each run down at the same moment. He had the urge to ruffle through their hair like a twitching marmoset would and was sure he would find coin slots underneath, or check their backs for large keys projecting from shoulder blades like cast-iron wings.

‘Get a move on,’ said the man who had coughed. He let out a shuddering groan of frustration. ‘I’ve got a train to catch,
haven’t you?’

The others twittered together, exchanging glances and ill-tempered stares, annoyance promoting them to curses and threats.

A businessman left his place in the queue. ‘You ought to be put down,’ he bawled, accenting his words with a thumb prodding Clement’s sternum. ‘I’ve got an extremely important meeting.’ He held up a leather briefcase as if in proof. ‘Now get out of my way.’ His pronouncement seemed to activate the others. They wriggled and nodded in agreement or shuffled on the spot. Clement was certain the ticket hall was sharper with grinding and whirring sounds.

Clement had ignored the businessman’s tirade. More concerned with the jabs to his person, a sudden lucidity came over him:

How dare you poke me. I’m not a helpless animal in the animal zoo. I’m human animal unlike you with that stupid toupee, starched collar, arrogant briefcase. Lighten up, construction; accept the truth. Let it cross your electronic grey matter – you build on a sieve. Your months and years become as anonymous as flickering stars, finally snuffed out as easily as a candle. Yet I’m able to manipulate time, slow it down, get it right, repair. Then I’ll replay. My required dream becomes real. Are you getting this?

A train announcement had ended and the clockwork queue
had run down, each member standing glassy-eyed and furrow-browed. The clerk in the ticket office was tapping the dividing window glass with a coin: ‘…otherwise I’ll get the stationmaster to sort you out.’

Clement quickly stated his destination and after paying for a ticket he went through the barrier, heading for the platform.

‘About time,’ someone said.

He wandered between the awaiting passengers. A woman stood up from one of the benches. Clement sat on the vacated seat, squeezing in between a man with large sideburns and a schoolboy who fiddled with the clips on his homework bag. As the boy took out an electronic device, Clement became concerned. He stood and walked further along the platform.

The majority of those waiting were silent, gloved hands, creating breath clouds from their rigid mouths. The start to another week on a cold, unfriendly morning.

Three teenagers broke the quietness. And as they swaggered along the platform clutching mobile phones they threw aside mocking glances. They nudged at each other while passing Clement, staring at his tights moulded to his skinny calves. Their laughter became high-pitched giggles, more at home in young girls’ throats than their own. To Clement the hilarity came from two starlings skillfully chasing each other through the chill air. After spiralling and diving, the birds flew over the tracks, then under the walkway bridging the platforms. The laughter went with them. The town’s traffic hummed.

A crane’s boom, lofty from a building site next to the station,
began to scrape through the sky. Hanging at the end were steel cables which, from Clement’s distance from them, could have been silk threads; the clank of metal.

That noise, probably made by a dumper truck, altered in volume, the distance making it quieter, sounding like a product of a metallic muzzle. The mind can deceive itself, I have to be careful. Like spitting of bacon fat heard as rain or thunder as a growling leopard in a cave. Squeal of a car’s brake pads the call of a wood pigeon. Or was it a partridge? Difficult to tell. I’m not good at analyzing birdsong. I almost believe the woods do belong to King Smythe; it holds a magical quality.

I must call out to Bernadette. ‘Catch up.’

‘Remember my legs aren’t as long as yours.’

King Smythe must have sent an advance party to shine the leaves and spray them a fresh green. He ordered the rain away. No jangling resonances or renegade frequencies within this forest. The sun has to push its way through the canopy of top branches and spots the tracks with silvery puddles of light.

Between bushes and trees, a tangle of ferns and sticks litter the ground. This track is spongy with layers of decaying leaves mulching into the earth.

Bernadette has caught up.

Turning my attention to the hamper. ‘Want a go carrying it?’

‘Charming, very chivalrous. Look, I wonder who had the nerve?’ A smallish crater with flints and tubers poking from its
sides. Are you really trying to see, doctor? You seem unresponsive sometimes. Within the crater is a gnarled tree, blackened by fire and smoke. Branches are twisted into grotesque shapes, like knobbly arms reaching out with fingers rigid in palsy, as though the tree had writhed in agony when the flames were upon it. I’ll make it writhe again like a blackened exotic dancer.

This track is beginning an incline. Roots exposed on the hill provide us with natural steps. A stream chattering over there. A dappled birch ahead of us marks the summit of the climb.

No longer a definite track. We’ll hike on in silence, both of us with reverence to this cathedral of nature. Untidy angles of tree trunks about us. A constant cracking of twigs as we tread, and the whispering leaves. The breeze gentle in this secret, sacred place.

Tang of earth, with a faint odour of cabbages – from fields to the east, I suspect. I’ve disturbed a gathering of toadstools by accidentally kicking off their caps. I’ll pull a fern from the ground to wave away a cloud of midges.

A fallen tree in our path with its foliage dried and shrivelled. I’m going to sit upon the mossed trunk to rest. Bernadette is tramping past.

‘Where you going so fast? Hang on, wait.’

I’ll have to adjust the strap of the hamper; when it’s balanced on my back again, I’ll be able to catch up.

Hear her calling back. ‘No time for resting. Shift yourself, lazy.’

She is singing. You’re trying to listen, I know. The voice crystalline, though not possessing exact pitch or intonation, taking on a melancholic feel.

This woman I make love to – the only one I adore and cherish – is lively and inquisitive, as vital as the rain we have left behind. She keeps appearing, spotted with flecks of light then hidden by tree pillars. The further away into the woods she walks the less she appears. I’m captivated: those hips gyrate as she steps over obstacles or bends to avoid low hanging tree limbs, the hem of her salmon pink dress swinging. The dress is resonating in a quite stunning way in comparison to the greens and browns. Could be neon.

She’s phantom, ethereal, eternal. She has become painted over. I must break from this dreaminess, I have to pursue her. This is her game, for me to fight branches which slap or trip. Hack aside brambles and lakes of nettles, step over logs and horse droppings. She might have become a story or an invention though I’m certain that can’t happen here. It’s simply because she’s chosen a better course through the woods.

Watching her go, she was the essence of femininity – graceful and precise – while my progress is slow and clumsy.

‘Bernadette, where’ve you got to?’ No use asking you, doctor.

Have to stop. What a noisy banging and crashing I’ve been making. A hush descending with an ominous quality about it. Movements still play high up in the topmost branches.

‘Binny – hello…’ No answer. She should answer.

A bank of earth ahead, with shafts of light pushed into this subdued underworld.

Run to it and scramble up. Doctor, are you watching? I’ll need to clutch at those stems to aid my ascent. This trouble I’m having – it’s not very steep but the hamper is hampering me.

What a splendid surprise. I wish you could see this. All is washed with an exquisite brightness. Abundant bottle-green ferns, growing each side of a wide track covered in a lush moss. Fewer trees but each seem a flawless specimen, huge rugged boles which two adults couldn’t encircle. Long dipped boughs are an invitation to be climbed if I were younger. The ferns are neighbours with fields of ox-eye daisies and vibrant red poppies.

As lovely as this is I’m feeling uneasy at losing her. She’s here in the mindroom somewhere. Maybe I just need to reconstruct her in a proper fashion; perhaps I need to call her name again.

Push my way through the ferns. Another surprise. A circle of grass surrounding a mammoth oak is in superb condition as if tended by a gardener. A magpie has flown to a bough.

‘Bernadette!’ Has she got lost?

Throw the hamper onto the grass. I’m certain she’s nearby. Make my way back to the shady territory.

As I’m battling through bushes, scraping past black and green thickets, a sense of foreboding is taking hold. This
twilight is muffling the outer world. My one spot of woodland is an island, a crafty hall of mirrors reflecting only a few clumps of trees and the same tangles of plants bedded into their layer of decaying vegetation. And if I were to scrape away at my feet I would discover concrete. In fact, when I look down, it is concrete. When I find Bernadette I’ll see other Bernadettes running. First there’ll be a laugh of delight, hanging high with the birds’ nests, solidifying and proclaiming delighted attention, as though suspended on an invisible wire. Then this’ll fragment like a comet breaking up; I wouldn’t know whether a duplication or the real Bernadette produced it, the wonderful, gentle creature whom I love so much. And she loves me.

Now it’s a Bernadette wandering through a dismal place, no doubt with tears welling, desperate to erase false memories of bony fingers shuffling Tarot cards, stealers who can make their skins the texture of bark, chameleon-like. She might be calling from the depths but the scheming trees would be stifling her or sending her in the wrong direction.

Being fooled by these mirrors and I’m going round in circles. I’ve been hacking aside cables and metal lattices for over ten minutes. Concrete trees and steel bushes decide where I should go; pushing me one way, barring my advance another. Scratched and whipped, rendered tired and impatient, hungry and worried. Must regard my watches. One second needs to kickstart the other.

Try to push away nasty notions. There are some odd
characters about. What if Bernadette has been discovered by someone, this pretty young woman wearing a pretty dress? Perhaps ancient fathers have found her. No, erase that.

As it happens, there’s an odd character inspecting me in a quite annoying manner. He appears to be standing on a train station platform. Why would you inspect me in such an aggressive way, Dr Leibkov? I see, it can’t be you, the stupid apparition’s walked away.

There’s the bank I’ll climb again. Call out her name once more. I have to. The only reply is that stuttering bird’s cry and a flurry of wings.

5

F
ound the carpet of moss again. Veering off, flattening another channel through the ferns. Walking further until I see the poppies and daisies over to the right and glimmers of sea through the clusters of trees lining the cliff edge.

The pool of pastoral grass; thick roots of the oak tree like embracing knuckles. The hamper open and a picnic laid out: bowl of strawberries and plate of sandwiches, tomatoes, pâté and sticks of celery, on a chequered cloth. And my Bernadette there on the grass, sitting with bare legs curled to the side, holding a glass of wine.

‘Binny, where the heck have you been? Was so worried.’

Getting to me, it really has. I was beginning to believe you’d ceased to exist. This mindroom was in danger, was becoming compromised.

‘Brush those bits out of your hair. Look peahead, you’ve ripped your jacket; you’ll put blood on it.’

‘Blood?’

‘You’re bleeding, there, the wrist.’ Just above our slingshot
band of love and perfect understanding. ‘What a state you’re in. I doubled back, was following. I was going to jump out, give you a surprise,’ she’s brushing my wig, ‘but you ran off again. I’ve eaten most of the sandwiches, it’s your own fault.’

Dabbing smears from my face with a handkerchief.

‘No, leave it.’ She doesn’t understand homage makeup.

‘I was only joking.’

‘About what?’

‘Eating the sandwiches. I’ve only eaten my half.’

I must throw myself at her as a wave of pure joy cleanses me. I plant kisses on her forehead and cheeks. ‘Oh Binny, I lost you.’ I must cling to my wife, my friend, my meaning of existence. Have to hold tight, make sure I never let go again.

‘Silly.’ She’s pushing me away to take a sip of wine.

Two cabbage whites flitter and twirl. We will create garlands of buttercups to cup the light.

‘I love you; love, love, love you.’ Distinct laughter, not certain why.

Yes, I see, how can three simple words hold total meaning? They’re only syllables strung together. They can’t contain the passions and yearnings, the wanting, more than bodily – the blending of minds, a meeting of spirits. Every ounce of me needs to enfold her for always. A shuddering elation is swelling in my throat.

Gently pull her to me, like this, my hands meeting around her. I have her, she has me forever. The joy of knowing her is incomparable. A light breeze is rippling the poppies, making
them dance.

‘Do you love me?’ I had to ask. Damnation, why did I say it? She’s pulled away and appears hurt as she bites her lip. ‘Sorry.’ I’m no better than a beggar cringing in a shop doorway rattling a tin can. I’m not sorry to you though, doctor, in case you were somehow responsible for promoting that question.

Still not clicking despite you seeming an intelligent man, is it? Let me explain another way then. If I get this precise – really accurate – here in the mindrooms, it’ll inevitably happen in the real future dream. Perhaps not exactly but the same ambiences and love colours will occur again. I’m working through such an elegant solution.

Excuse me please while I correct the mistake for the next dream time.

There we are. She appears to have brightened.

We’ll eat in silence awhile, let our skin tingle in the warmth within the tranquillity of our abundant surroundings.

‘Didn’t mean to ask, you know. It was an aberration in the mindroom.’

‘Don’t start.’

‘Trying to say, can never live without you.’

Have I said too much again with no mystery or wonder left? What’s your opinion, doctor? You can’t speak, can you? I haven’t heard you speak for months. But then you don’t have to. Bernadette is engaging enough. No matter what she says there’s deepness and affection, subtle attraction.

‘Eat your sandwiches and be quiet. Stop being serious.’

I should leap to my feet, carve a symbol of union into a guardian tree, let Bernadette watch the happening as if I were a performance artist. Though no need. Already she’s watching with fondness given in sultry pulses. My Binny, with your lustrous hair, your delicious kissable neck.

We settle, enclosed by wild angelica, tiers of poppies and daisies, canopy of foliage above. Lay kissing, caressing, embracing. Feeling warmth on the back of my neck, insistent burning weight which has stilled blossoms, held trunks tight. Murmur of leaves; distant sea folding and bending, moving as frothed white curtains to the beach. Affirming life-song, high flying dove, far-away breathy, clacking beat of a train.

She must speak softly, quietly: ‘This is our place and our secret.’

‘Our place and secret, yes – just the three of us.’

‘Three?’

‘You, me and King Smythe.’ That’s all.

Rhythm like tribal drums, beating louder, a solid pulse. Shrieking brakes; grinding and banging as though a train has left its track and is plunging from a plume of unreality through the forest, roaring into the trees, barging them aside as skittles and sending frightened birds flocking. The roll of drums is louder still, becoming frenzied as the Goliath machine charges headlong out of control through the woods, sending high trunks creaking and crashing to the ground, letting new light into hushed habitat for the first time in centuries.

This beat is becoming deafening. The engine pulling its carriages, mashing those poppies to pulp. Thundering past, tearing more trees apart. Bernadette, tumble down the bank to safety. The drums are slowing until the train has come to rest at a platform. I seem to be standing on a platform.

Clicking like castanets as train door buttons are pressed, doors sliding open, shuffling commuters boarding, sorting themselves to single files; a guard with his flag raised and a whistle clamped between his teeth; the doors finally shutting. A shrill peep then an electronic bell sounded. The train moved off.

Clement sat by a window on the train. He watched without much interest as the station began sliding away.

He became anxious all at once with his breathing irregular. He was certain he had forgotten something. Of course, he realised quickly, it wasn’t something, it was someone. And the solution was elementary. Create Dr Leibkov in a mindroom aligned with the outside.

But there was no need. The doctor stepped out of a wardrobe and was strolling across the walkway above the train, seen as if without a single worry, not one care in the world.

Not a care in the world. You’re well. Bernadette’s well. I’m well. Doctor, I might speak to you later though I’m sure there won’t be any need.