KNOCK KNOCK

The man was desperate, so he took the room. The lodging was cheap - strangely cheap - and the building right in the centre of town. Yet the landlady said that he’d been the only person to answer the advert.

‘Modern folk are lazy. Probably can’t deal with all the stairs’. He’d nodded. And then he said he’d take it.

The room was so very, very quiet. The bustle of the street seemed not to carry up to the top floor.

And a gloom clung to it all, like a gossamer shroud.

Only one shaft of sunlight broke through the top window - a shrewd rectangle cut into the high cobwebbed timbers - though it did little to warm the dusty dark bricks and warping wood.

And bricks and wood was all there was; creature comforts stretched to a simple bed, wash basin, a rail for his clothes. A boarded-up fireplace lurked in one corner. Above it hung a large mirror, pockmarked with the blemishes of age.

‘There’s only the one loo, down in the yard,’ the landlady had said, as she made to leave. ‘Best to get in early, beat the rush.’

And then the door was closed.

Yes. This was a room to be lonely in. But now it was his.

Or so he’d thought.

The trouble began three nights in. The day’s work had made him weary; he felt stretched thin and could only dream longingly of bed as he ascended the ancient stairs up and up and up to the top floor.

He fell out of his clothes, and into the blankets. Sleep came quickly, as he’d hoped.

But it did not last long.

Was it a minute or an hour that had passed? Unclear. Unknowable. What had roused him first was the chill. The room had chilled, as if every window in the place thrown open to let the winter in.

Apart from it wasn’t winter. It was August, and the only window anyway was rusted shut high high above his head.

He bunched the blanket about him - trap the heat, invite the sleep back in. Before too long his lids grew heavy once more, things began to fog, blissful slumber embracing him again - -

That’s when he heard the knocking.

Knock. Knock. Knock.

Three knocks.

He lay there, unsure if he’d imagined them, for who would come knocking up here on his door at this time of the night -

Knock. Knock. Knock.

There they came again. Although this time he realised that the knocking wasn’t coming from the door. Or through the wall. Or at the window.

The knocking was coming from the mirror.

Knock. Knock. Knock.

He craned to see. The room was black, save for a thin bone of moonlight splitting the dark. The blue-white glow shone upon the mirror-glass. And he could see that the mirror-glass was empty.

Knock. Knock. Knock.

The glass shuddered and the frame bucked against the wall. He dove under the covers, panic gripping him, and pulled it all tight about him - a cocoon.

But the knocking continued.

‘Stop!’ He cried out. His words scattered like coin into the cold void, buying nothing back. In front of him his hurried breath had become mist.

Knock. Knock. Knock.

‘Stop it please,’ he whispered.

Knock. Knock. Knock.

He could stand it no more. Mustering all his courage he leapt from the bed, arms outstretched, the blanket taut between them - a shield - and charged toward the mirror.

With a swoop he threw the blanket over the glass and -

The knocking stopped. As suddenly as it had begun. Silence returned.

Returned, that is, for only a second. A blast of cold air bellowed forward from every gap - each nook and cranny - of the boarded-up chimney breast. It caught him in the gut and sent him onto his back.

The blanket began to pulse, slowly and rhythmically. Like it was breathing. Or rather, behind it - just behind it- it was being breathed through.

But by what? He could not bear to imagine.

He stood, as quickly as his quaking legs could manage. Before he realised, his hand was outstretched, and he was stepping toward the fireplace, fingers twitching [eagerly, desperately] to grip the cloth. Something far away, beyond the beyond, whispered dark encouragement into the innermost recesses of himself over which he governed no control.

He reached and reached.

A shape was forming behind the blanket now - curved, defined. A head. The cloth sank into the hollow sockets, the sharp relief of a nose, the space where behind a mouth opened quick and wide and hungry and - -

He snatched back his own arm and dug his heels fast.

The knocking resumed - faster and more frenzied than before. The whole room shuddered, the floorboards rattled up and down, above him slates splintering to rain sharp obsidian shards down like a hellish hail.

KnockKnockKnockKnOcKKNoCkkNoCKknOCkKnOcK

Not just from the mirror. But the walls. The sky. The darkness. Inside his very skull.

He rushed to the fireplace in a surge of terror and fury, hands clawing and teeth clenched. He gripped the mirror and tore it from the wall. He flung it to the floor - an almighty crack, like a pistol-shot - and jumped upon it. His feet worked a feverish dance; each stamp and stomp and crunch of his heel met with the sound of breaking-shattering-decimated glass.

He kicked the blanket aside, and began to destroy whatever remained. He broke down the broken. He ground it into sand. He twisted the frame and threw it out of sight.

And the knocking stopped.

And the silence came back.

Through the sweat and his shakes he sighed. Whatever it was, it was gone.

And then he felt the hand on his shoulder and heard the whisper in his ear.

‘You didn't cast me out,’ it said.

‘You set me free.’

Inspired by classic English ghost stories like those penned by M R James or Henry James, I wrote this short chiller to introduce a special paranormal evening at the Old Red Lion Theatre in 2019 which culminated in a live séance.

It then opened 'Last Orders: The Haunting of the Old Red Lion' - a docu-play by The Knock Knock Club [of which I am a member + co-founder] which explored the spooky history of the building - told by candlelight, in the pitch black.

It's a bona fide recipe: a cold night, a dark room, and a disturbing sound that just won't stop.

Dare to peek over the covers..?

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