Magnus wasn’t sure when it was he finally got back to sleep, but it must have happened at some point, because before he knew it he was opening his eyes and immediately squinting at the bright sunlight coming in through the bedroom window.
He groaned, rolled over, wiped his mouth — apparently he had drooled in his sleep, which he added to his increasingly long mental checklist of things that disgusted him about himself — and blinked a few times, trying to get used to the light.
As the room came back into focus, he glanced at the clock-radio. It was just before 9 in the morning. He’d woken up at a normal time for once.
He groaned again, sat up, stretched and unsteadily got out of bed. As he turned to look at the wall that had been emblazoned with the strange, dark letters last night — or had that been a dream, too? — he paused, looking it over as if willing the letters to appear again. Unsurprisingly, nothing happened. The fear he had felt last night was all but gone: now, the strange happenings were nothing more than the fading memories of a confused subconscious, and he attributed them to the fact that he quite literally wasn’t feeling in his right mind at the moment.
He retrieved his phone from on top of the chest of drawers, where it had been charging all night, and pressed the power button. The screen sprang to life, the large numbers of the clock informing him once again that yes, he really had managed to get up at a normal person’s time today. Not only that, but it was Saturday; a day where he always felt significantly less guilty about not working or, he felt, contributing to society in any meaningful way.
He tapped the “Messages” icon, then on the recent conversation he’d had with his friend Dora. He hadn’t spoken with her in a few days, and he felt like he needed to talk. He knew that she worked, though, and didn’t like disturbing her in the week, even though he couldn’t remember the last time she had turned him down for an invitation to do something together, even if it was just hanging out watching a movie.
“Hey,” he typed clumsily, fumbling for a moment over the auto-correct function. “Are you up to anything today?”
The message sent, and his phone informed him that it had been delivered, but not read. It was entirely possible, he figured, that Dora was still asleep; it was quite early in the morning on a Saturday, after all, and he certainly didn’t begrudge her a lie-in after a week of juggling working and taking care of her family.
He’d thought off and on that he might be in love with Dora. He’d even considered confessing it to her at some point, before the rational part of his brain took over and told the irrational part — which held an increasingly large dominion over his overall consciousness these days — that he was being silly, that he didn’t really love her, that all he was trying to do was replace that which he had lost, and that, given she was happily married with children, she almost certainly didn’t feel the same way. The rational brain won that particular argument, but the irrational side often felt to him like it was biding its time to flare up again at the most inconvenient moment.
His phone buzzed, interrupting his wandering thoughts.
“Nothing much,” came the reply. “Want to come over?”
“Actually,” he wrote back quickly. “Would you mind coming over here? I need to ask you…” he paused, and deleted the last sentence. “I need your help with something.”
He waited. Dora always took several minutes to reply, whereas he was inclined to treat text messages like online instant messaging conversations, feeling guilty if he didn’t respond immediately. It frustrated him at times, but he was also conscious that not everyone out there had quite as much time on their hands as he did. He sighed dejectedly as he once again found himself contemplating his life situation; today was an upbeat day by his own standards, but there was still that background noise of hopelessness, that feeling that things were never going to just neatly work out like he hoped they might.
“All right,” came the reply eventually. “I’ll be over in an hour or so. That ok?”
* * * * *
Dora Miller was a pretty woman, blessed with a youthful face and shapely figure that had not yet begun to succumb to the ravages of time despite the fact that she was just the wrong side of thirty years old. She always made an effort with her appearance; her straight, golden-blonde hair falling around her face and down her back without a single strand out of place, her light touch of makeup complementing her natural attractiveness without seeming artificial.
Magnus always felt inferior when he was next to her, like they were polar opposites in almost every way. He was the scruffy, unkempt, no-hope male loser that, he feared, no-one would ever find attractive ever again; she was, he felt, radiant. He didn’t know why she hung out with him or why she allowed him to call her “friend”, but he appreciated it nonetheless.
He handed her a cup of coffee and sat down next to her on the sofa. He didn’t look her in the eye; he’d always found eye contact difficult, but even more so since the events of the last couple of months.
“So,” she said taking a sip of the coffee. “Ow, that’s as hot as the sun, let me put that down a minute.” She put it down and smacked her lips before speaking again. “What did you want to talk to me about?”
He thought for a moment. He wasn’t quite sure how to put it.
“I, uh,” he began, trying to think how he could express the things he was thinking about. “I’ve been feeling a bit weird.”
Her eyes softened. “Well, we both know that,” she said. “Is this something different? What do you mean?”
Her questions weren’t helping. He still wasn’t sure how to put it across.
He stood up, and looked down at his hands. While he was waiting for her to arrive, he’d noticed that his hands looked a little different to how he was used to them looking — at least he believed so, anyway. He couldn’t quite pin down what it was that was wrong, but they certainly didn’t quite seem right.
“I need you to have a look at something,” he said seriously.
“Oh, God,” she said, chuckling, obviously trying to lighten the somewhat heavy mood that appeared to be falling over the room. “You’re not going to make me look at your balls, are you? I mean, if you’re really, genuinely worried, I will, but,”
He laughed despite himself; a weak laugh that even he found unconvincing. “No,” he said softly. He held out his hand to her. “Does anything look… strange about my hand to you?”
She gave him a quizzical look, complete with exaggerated raised eyebrow as if to emphasise how strange his question was, but she looked down at his outstretched hand nonetheless.
“No,” she said after a moment. “Looks like… well, a hand. Your hand.”
He blinked and looked down. They looked, as she said, like his own hands, just as they always did. Had he been imagining what he saw earlier? A trick of the dim light inside the flat, perhaps?
He sat down again, and began to tell her the tale of his strange experiences the previous night. Once he started, he found that he could not stop. Dora’s eyes widened as he explained in great detail — the specificity of which surprised even Magnus — the sensations he had felt, the things he had seen, what he had been thinking. For a dream, he thought, it felt decidedly real; eerily so.
The feeling of dread he’d experienced the previous night started to creep up his spine again, but he tried his best to banish it from his thoughts. He finished his story.
“Wow,” said Dora. “That’s… quite a dream. What did that word on the wall say? ‘Welcome’? Welcome to what?”
“I don’t know,” Magnus said with a shrug. “Probably nothing.”
There was a momentary silence between the two of them. Then Magnus spoke again.
“I’m sorry to bring you out here for some bullshit dream,” he said. “I feel a bit stupid now.”
“It’s all right,” said Dora, smiling that warm smile she smiled when he knew she was being genuine rather than jokey. “I’m guessing you were feeling a bit lonely and could do with someone to talk to anyway, huh.”
“Yeah,” he said. “I’m sorry to keep bugging you like this.”
“It’s fine,” she said. “What are friends for?”
* * * * *
Magnus and Dora spent a couple of hours together, heading to a local coffee shop for a change of scenery, before Dora had to head home and back to her family. As Magnus walked back in the direction of his flat, the grey clouds that had been gathering overhead as the morning had progressed finally started to spill their load of rainwater: gently at first, but quickly progressing to a strong shower that didn’t take long to soak right through his clothes.
“Shit.” It didn’t help his mood, and much of the good that Dora’s visit had done him was undone by the weather; it wasn’t long before he was feeling bleak again, and by the time he reached his front door he wasn’t sure he actually wanted to go inside. Although this place was still home, it also housed all manner of memories, many of which he didn’t feel like he could particularly deal with.
As he reached out for the door, he noticed his hands again and paused. Something seemed “off” once again; was it really a trick of the light, or had they actually changed colour? Perhaps it was the cold of the rain; his soaking clothes were making him feel somewhat chilly, after all, so it’s possible that it was just his body responding to the low temperatures.
Banishing thoughts of the memories floating around inside the flat, he decided that he wanted nothing more than to get inside and into the warm, perhaps even back into bed. As he reached out for the door, there was a soft “click” as it unlocked, and he pushed it open, reaching around the frame to find the hallway light switch as he did so and clicking the lights on so he didn’t have to walk in to thick darkness.
It wasn’t until the door slammed shut behind him that the fact he had never taken his keys out of his pocket registered to him. And yet here he was.
He glanced around the hallway, confused. Everything looked normal. Nothing seemed out of place.
That is, until he turned around to face the other end of the hallway, and there it was. Another word, scrawled in large, dark letters on the wall, plain to see.
“GOOD.” it said.
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I loved this imagery: “the grey clouds that had been gathering overhead as the morning had progressed finally started to spill their load of rainwater: gently at first, but quickly progressing to a strong shower that didn’t take long to soak right through his clothes” – so well-worded – I could say devised, written, portrayed, but I DO really mean worded. Especially ‘to spill their LOAD of rainwater’ – clever use of plain language. Your work is so easy to read, Pete – it flows as you say from your mind uncensored yet so well-formed. The odd typo of course, as you must be typing so quickly, but that’s to be expected.
Always so enthralling to read, and, as I’ve said about your previous works, addictive, compulsive reading. 😀