There was something wrong with his forearm. It was swollen like a ham, but unevenly swollen, lumpy. I swung my head around and fixed my eyes on the empty space where his stack of television sets had been. I took my medicine and smoked steadily until it seemed the sofa was sliding towards the empty space, or the empty space was sliding towards the sofa. I shivered. My bowels had turned to ice. My stomach had sprouted teeth. I wanted to get up and leave but was scared my exit might antagonise Giz. You never knew what would trigger his rage, you never knew what would send him rampaging. So I sat there, quiet as a mouse, smiling probably, or trying to, demonstrating that I was good. I must have fallen asleep for a few seconds. I had been dreaming of ants.
‘Bleedin perished,’ Giz whispered.
‘Plug in the heater,’ I whispered back.
Where was the heater? It was missing, same as his television stack and collection of video nasties. All gone. His communion photo lay face down on the carpet beneath a chipped Toyota hubcap. Giz’s skin was so clammy, so pale by then, that his freckles looked black in comparison, as if they’d been spattered onto him by the wheel of a passing car. He slumped forward in his armchair and held the flame of his lighter to the leg of the table.
‘What the fuck are you doing?’
He sniffed. ‘Bleedin perishing in here.’ The varnish was flaring black.
‘But Giz, that’s—’ Dangerous, I was going to say, but it seemed a bit late for that. He was shivering too hard to keep the flame applied to the table leg anyway. His body seemed not to be shaking itself but shaken by another agency, such was the force of it. The lighter flew out of his hand, and he gave a little cry of protest.
The detritus on the table juddered as if there were a poltergeist in the room. My ashtray slid off the armrest, landing upside down on the floor. Blood was trickling down Giz’s chin. The scab on his cold sore had cracked. I sat there in confusion, taking it all in. Then — slowly, so as not to alarm him — I reached across the sofa to lay a steadying hand on his arm. My good hand closed around a rattling humerus, thin as the leg of the table he’d been trying to set alight. Giz recoiled violently from my touch.
‘Get off of me,’ he spat, though I hadn’t been on him. ‘Fucken puff,’ he added, a quiver of disgust contorting his bleeding mouth.
‘I’m not a puff.’
‘I seen ya lookin at me. Don’t try an deny it. I fucken seen ya.’
Oh Jesus, his forearm was rupturing. A septic fissure was splitting his skin. Something toxic was breaking through his flesh. It was red and yellow inside. I sat rooted to my seat. Giz had no sense of how wretched he had become. He did not grasp that if I were a bleedin puff, the last man I would touch was him.
His spasm abruptly subsided. He sank, head thrown back, limbs splayed, star-shaped on the armchair. Two crescents of white showed between his eyelids. I stared at him, my mouth as far agape as it would open. Was he dying? Was he dead? I couldn’t take my eyes off him, terrified at the same time that his eyeballs would roll into place and he’d lash out at me for gawping.
‘Giz?’ I asked hesitantly, still whispering, as if some third party were present in the room, some prison warden, some dungeon keeper, behind whose back I might manage — were I stealthy enough — to make covert contact with my old friend. I was throwing pebbles up at his window, trying to wake him without rousing the house. ‘You alright there, Giz?’
It seemed important to keep using his name, in case I had become as unfamiliar to him as he had become to me. ‘Giz,’ I whispered, louder now, ‘Wake up, it’s Declan. Deco. From upstairs.’
Repeating his name did nothing to summon him from the catatonic state. Giz woz ere, but not any more. Jesus, fucking answer, I wanted to scream before it was too late. Too late for what? I didn’t know. I didn’t know yet.
There was a whirring noise in the far corner, followed by a familiar mechanical clunk. The bedsit was plunged into darkness. The electricity meter had run out.
Giz did not react. I couldn’t hear him breathe. I held my breath to listen for his. Nothing. Just the sound of a poor old dog howling away the night, the groan of a bus labouring up the square.
‘Giz?’ I whispered yet again.
Silent as the grave.
I was pleading with him by then, begging him to become Giz again, and not this awful lifeless changeling. I tried to make out his star shape in the darkness. I blinked and strained my eyes at his armchair, or at the spot I reckoned contained his armchair, because I was entirely disorientated by then, had entirely lost my bearings, could barely tell up from down. The part of the room at which I stared remained the blackest. It was so black, in fact, that I got it into my head that it wasn’t Giz at all. That thing which had split open his arm had been unleashed by the darkness and was taking form. It was right there in the room beside me. I could have reached out and touched it.
I tried to stand up but was unable to move, whether from fright or intoxication, I cannot say. My limbs pegged me to the sofa like a tent. I heard myself whimper, the sound loud and glandular in my ears. My head was issuing dogmatic instructions. Don’t make any noise, it warned me. It’ll hear you, and then it’ll get you. It’ll get you, and then it’ll hear you. So don’t make any noise.
‘It’s the tab,’ I managed to say out loud, a eureka moment.
Hearing myself speak fulfilled some normalising function, and I propelled myself to my feet. From that elevation, a slit of white was visible under Giz’s door, welcoming as a landing strip. Beyond it was the sagging corridor, the old carpet, electric light. If I could just make it to the door.
I lunged toward the light and collided with his coffee table. An almighty clatter as his wares crashed to the floor. ‘Careful now,’ warned my head, ‘You’ll wake it.’
I listened, my head cocked to one side like a bird. Not a whisper of breath out of him. I was hardly breathing myself. I had no notion of where Giz was presently located. He could have been hanging from the ceiling, for all I knew. I took another tentative step toward that three-foot-long chink of light, worried it would startle and take flight at any sudden movements. The thing to do was creep up without it noticing. That was the thing to do.
Something split in two underfoot with a loud brittle crack; I braced, ready for a hand to snatch my ankle. There were objects scattered about the floor that hadn’t been there when the light was on. They scuttled around the room like rats. ‘It’s okay,’ I assured myself, ‘This isn’t happening.’ The one thing that I could be certain of was that Giz was seeing worse. If I was caught in the ninth level of Hell, he was trapped in the Inferno itself.
The floor lurched, and I lost my footing. The bar of light beneath the door started to ascend. Smoothly and evenly, it rose higher, as if we were descending in an old-fashioned elevator cage. ‘Aw Jesus no,’ I whispered. The bedsit was sinking into the basement.
A wild thrashing broke out behind me. I hurled myself at the bar of white and miraculously connected with the door. I did not expect it to open, but open it did, flooding a benediction of light over me. I was all but crying by then.
The arc of light from the corridor did not extend as far as Giz’s armchair, just to his runners, which were no longer glaringly white as of old. He was flipping about like a landed fish. At least he wasn’t dead. I pulled his door shut and, to my shame, held the lever of the handle in place with my good hand, just in case, God forbid, he tried to come after me.
*
When all fell quiet inside, as it quickly and ominously did, I crept upstairs to my room and got into the bed without undressing. A full day and a half without sleep, yet I was scared to close my eyes. I couldn’t lie facing the wall because ghouls seeped out of the corner as soon as my back was turned, and I couldn’t lie facing the corner because hands stretched out of the wall. I couldn’t go downstairs because Giz, what was left of him, was waiting, and I couldn’t stay in the bedroom because Giz, or whoever he was now, was on his way up to get me. I propped myself upright on pillows and sat facing the door.