Then the light slid into new shapes and the surface liquefied and trembled. Reflections flicked about on the upper surface of the liquid becoming quick and brilliant. I was floating beneath the surface with a hissing in my ears, the kind of hollow sea sound which comes from the pale bone of a shell held close to the coil of your ear, covering all other sounds. I pushed my hands down to try to rise but it had no effect. The terror was beginning. Slowly, as if going through space, I felt myself being turned. The hissing stopped and there was silence, dead, total. A face came drifting into view, the face of a person dead under water. The eyes were open, the nostrils flared, the mouth gaping fishlike, the long tendrils of hair slowly moving like saliva in a tide of greenish water round a pale drowned face. I could not move. The sound came back in echoes of human voices, very distant. But I couldn’t reach them or speak for help.
I woke up, staring at the ceiling. It was not yet dark but the sun had set. Perhaps I had only been asleep a short while. The voices in the distance had woken me but they were not real, only part of the dream. I went to the window and stared out. The sky was turquoise and gold towards the sunset and a deep indigo overhead, into which the stars were beginning to glint. The universe was still there. The same.
Having had nothing to eat all day I now felt hungry. The sick feelings of panic and depression had gone, leaving a hollow. I decided not to venture back into town. I would stay here for the night. It wouldn’t be possible to cook anything but I had some fruit with me and the motel milk was still drinkable. Before the evening became completely dark I went down and looted the motel office and rooms, getting some packets of salted nuts and potato chips, a lump of cheese, two cans of orange juice, a tin of pineapple cubes and a transistor radio. Then, with the car safely locked, I took all this and the torch I had obtained from the shop earlier, and went up and locked myself in the motel room. I decided to barricade the door, and heaved the spare twin bed against it. With all the curtains and blinds closed I felt reasonably secure. It was now deathly dark and the silence was pressing in, but this was easier to deal with at night since it was usually quiet at night.
Yes. Usually quiet.
I ate by the torchlight, stopping every few minutes to freeze and listen intently for the faintest suspicion of a sound. Nothing, not even a breeze to rustle the trees at the back; in fact with the door and windows closed the humid evening was doubly oppressive. Should I drive up to the lookout and see if there are any lights in the distance? No, better not. I would not like to go out there.
It will not, I thought, be easy to sleep. The dreams are bad and I am afraid to go to sleep.
Perhaps even the dreams would have been better than what followed. I switched off the torch; the darkness was as complete as the silence. It was all very well to think that it was usually quiet at night but in my desire to stay awake for as long as I could, I found myself sitting listening to the silence, holding my breath, hearing even my own heartbeats, in the effort to hear something. I felt sure that I had heard some kind of noise from the direction of the car park below at the back of the motel. It was something moving, and when I listened intently it stopped as if conscious of being detected. For what seemed ages I strained to hear, but when there was nothing further I decided I had imagined it and relaxed, wiping the sweat off my face with a towel in the bathroom. Whilst I was doing this the noise briefly penetrated the room again, furtively. I stood petrified. The hairs on the back of my neck crawled like insects. There was something outside. There, again. This time it was a movement on the loose gravel of the parking area.
I cursed that I hadn’t picked up a gun or any weapons from the sporting goods shops in town. Creeping quietly back into the kitchen, slowly in the dark, feeling my way along the edges of objects, I gently withdrew the cutlery drawer and fumbled around until I touched the large breadknife. With this in one hand I stood by the back kitchen window steeling my nerves to the action of carefully, slowly, lifting the end of the blind away from the window by no more than a centimetre. From this angle I could see along the balcony by the dim starlight (there was no moon) but it was not possible to see down into the car park or to see the steps which led up to the first-floor units on my left, out of my angle of vision. The steps would be visible from the other end of the window but to lift the blind slightly there and look out through that narrow gap, I would have to climb on top of the electric cooker, and this would be precarious and might make too much noise.
Nothing happened, and I seemed to stand there for ages, aching in one position. The sweat made its way endlessly down my face. Whatever was outside must know I was here. And it must be evil. There was a furtive slyness about the sounds. I was sure that was not imagination. I could sense it.
The steps up to the balcony vibrated, as if someone, or something, had advanced onto the first step and paused. The vibration was detectable because the steel framework of the stairway was attached to the wall of the motel and the iron handrail acted like a tuning fork. But again, after the agony of waiting, nothing else happened, and I could feel numbness in my hands and feet as cramp began to set round the tensed muscles and veins. I realised that I had been exerting every cell in my brain towards the thought, directed at the steps, that no object of any kind should come one centimetre closer to me. The totality of this effort to repel and prevent seemed to have drained away all the resources which usually fed oxygen to nerve centres and muscles, so the slightest relaxation meant a lapse into instant weariness. At one point I must have been asleep, or unconscious, or hypnotised into a staring dream condition, for how long I couldn’t tell, perhaps only for microseconds, maybe for several minutes, until another slight sound brought me back to the full intensity of listening and concentrating again. And then I was not sure if there had been another sound or whether I had created the sound in the reflex of returning suddenly to total wakefulness in an instant. I had never before in my life passed through such a condition of terror, and to find this peculiar hyper-sleep or super-consciousness on the far side of fear was unbelievable.
After another huge void of starlight and dark and waiting, I moved very slowly from the window and slid down to sit on the kitchen floor with my back against the sink unit. The lino was cool. I held the knife in my left hand. The silence seemed to have taken on its former solidity, and instead of being threatening it now felt protective. But I wanted to avoid thinking that the noises outside had gone away or been defeated; I was afraid that any relaxation of that kind would somehow provoke a response from whatever was out there.
Sure enough, there was another sound: the crunch and rustle of loose stones again. The stairs had been abandoned, then, and it was back in the car park. I could hardly move, but I dragged myself up and gently lifted one slat of the venetian blind. It was not possible to see anything. After only a few minutes, the same sound of gravel, but further away and to the right, beyond my angle of vision. Was it going away, or trying another route? I strained to see, then carefully let the blind go and stood in the silence for a while. It could have been entirely my imagination, but I believed I could actually sense a lessening in the feeling of evil which had earlier been so oppressive it was almost touchable.