I heard 1a shuffling around for the rest of the night. Their muffled scrapes and knocks, the constant fiddling, pattering, shifting, came through the wall, the hoodie, the fingers in my ears until finally exhaustion took me and I slipped into sleep.
My mind swept through the hills and roads I’d covered on my travel north. Trees flashed green in my peripheral vision and the grey stream of tarmac felt unending before me. In my rear-view mirror a darkness followed. Not a cloud or a storm or a monster of any kind. Just darkness. And anything that fell within it vanished. If I could just get to the cottage, I knew I could escape it. But the road kept going and the darkness kept coming and frustration rose in me until I wanted to tear the steering wheel straight out of the car.
Then, miraculously, I arrived.
This time only one door greeted me. Just one house, all to myself. What a relief! Everything else that came before must have been a stress dream. I’d always been plagued by them. Dreams of my hands turning to lead right as an exam starts. Dreams of my university getting washed away before I was due to arrive. Dreams of my father unpackaging me from a parcel, the look of excited anticipation falling from his face as he set his eyes on me.
But not now, for here was the house, whole, as promised, as hoped.
I ran inside to get away from the gathering darkness, shutting the door just in time for it to fill the windows with an unending void. I turned and the inside of the house had become my old office, complete with glass dividing walls, funky furniture and vases of orange lilies. My reflection mirrored me as I traversed the glass corridors. My suitcase had become a rucksack. I hugged it close to me. Hadn’t I just left this place or was that a stress dream too?
Knock-knock
I turned to the sound.
Someone was knocking on the other side of a wall. A wall close to my head. But there was nothing but a bank of desks. Only now every desk was a black standing desk: those cheaper weighted ones folk put on top of their normal desk, wobbling under the weight of computer monitors and books and mugs, their hinges and springs straining.
The darkness from outside started to leak in through the windows.
My old colleagues bustled around me under the fluorescent lights. They tutted and rolled their eyes at my disorientation. I went looking for my desk, but in its place was a meeting room. Oh, I must not work here yet.
Knock-knock
The noise was louder. Urgent. It came from inside the meeting room. I must be late. I straightened my purse strap across my chest—my rucksack was now a purse—and stepped inside.
The room was barely more than a cupboard. The interview table filled it save for space for one chair on my side and one chair on the other.
The director of my company sat on the other side of the table, her hair perfectly coiffed, eyeliner impeccably winged, fingers with their hot pink nails steepled in front of her face.
My heart immediately began to pound.
She regarded me with a cool glance. I sat in my chair. Perhaps it hadn’t happened, I thought with relief. Maybe it had all been a bad dream.
“What do you consider to be your greatest weakness?” she asked.
Her eyes scanned me up and down as I recited my weaknesses.
Knock-knock-knock!
The knocking was now a constant banging on all the walls around me, which were now made of glass and perfectly black. The darkness from outside had eaten up the rest of the office and all I could see was my own haunted face reflected back at me. I held my hands over my ears to block out the sound.
“What’s the biggest mistake you’ve ever made?” asked the director.
I gestured at the gathering dark.
“Something’s wrong.”
Without blinking or moving her eyes from me, she un-steepled her long elegant fingers and pinched her left pinkie between the thumb and forefinger of her right hand.
“Do you think you’re a good person?” she asked.
Then with a flick she snapped her little finger in two.
CHAPTER 4
I jumped awake, choking on a gasp that stuck in my dry throat. I pulled the hoodie off my head, coughed, rolled onto my side, leaned up on my elbow and tried to work up some spit in my cheeks.
It took me a moment to remember where I was.
