The Upstairs Room | Part 2

Absalom tried to apply himself to his work that day but made unsatisfactory progress. He made a call to the letting agent, thinking that his mind might be put at rest if the matter of the previous occupants’ departure was explained. The agent informed him that a forwarding address had indeed been left, in case of urgent communication or, as they put it, anything they had left behind should be sent on. However, it had so far not been able to speak to them in person.
The rest of the day was unproductive and Absalom was in a poor mood when he retired to bed that night. He slept fitfully for a couple of hours before once again being possessed by the same sensation of the previous night, namely that something else was moving about the house. It was only different in the respect thatthis thing was not in the next room, but was further along the corridor. In the next moment there came the soft but distinct sound of a door being tried, yet remaining resolutely shut. The noise produced a thrill of fear and he fancied that he could now hear footsteps approach, stop outside the next room, try the door and gain entry. There was a blessed respite of silence before the noises of the previous night came upon him again; the agitated pacing of thefloor, the sounds of furniture being explored, the inescapable impression of a desperate searchfor something.
The fear was acute and Absalom knew that he was in danger of being subdued completely if he did not muster some activity of his own. Gathering what remained of his sensibilities he urged himself to move from his bed and leave the room. Unlike the previous occasion, when the intruder had immediately sensedthe possibility of detection, the noises continued as Absalom approached the door of the nextroom. They possessed a strange quality - beyond the strangenessthat they should have been heard at all - in that although they were quite emphatic in their clarity, they seemed distant. It was not possible that they emanated from a different room, though, as the direction was easily identifiable. Oddly faint and remote though the sounds were, Absalom was sure they came from within the roombefore him. He seized the door handle and at once the house returned to a sepulchral silence.
The sudden change in circumstances lent him more courage, as though the matter were once more on his own terms. He pushed at the door and saw instantly, from the moonlight that pervaded the room, that all was quite undisturbed. Turning on the light confirmed this; the room was empty. Absalom’s fear was not quelled, though, only turned in another direction, for he gained the definite impression that whatever had until recently occupied this room had moved next door, to the very room in which he slept. The impossibilityof this did not dissuade him from the belief. Nothing had been seen to pass him, and therewas no other means of communication from one room to the other; nevertheless, Absalom was convinced of the truth of this. By opening the door to this room he had allowed his own to be occupied by something he knew to be grotesque. It was there now, as Absalom turned his head slowly, as he released the door handle and retraced his steps, as he stood outside the room and asked himself how such things could have been visited upon him.
He leaned forward, listened intently. All was quiet but still hewas convinced of the presence beyond the door. Rational thought was beyond him; not even his recent courage could now be found. Something had altered. The presence in the room, not seen, not heard, only felt, was repulsive to him. Absalom, ashamed, turned and made his way downstairs to the study. He made a play of saying to himself that he should make some progress with the work hehad so far been unable to do, but knew this to be false. Instead he lit a fire, sat in a comfortable leather chair, rested his head on its wing and stared unblinkingly at the door.
Not even the reassuring light of day was enough to calm his nerves. It seemed impossible forhim to assemble a series of logical thoughts. No sooner had he urged himself to concentrate on the job he had been trusted to do than the greater part of his mind became troubled. It was not even possible that morning to wash with any degree of confidence. As he passed the cold razor across his face, his eyes did not focus on his skin but instead wandered across the mirror to the reflection of the corridor behind him, and the closed door beyond. Having finished his toilet, Absalom returned to his room and found that he hesitated before entering. He was sure that nothing lay on the other side of the door, but his mind was now so discomposed that he visibly shook at the smallest task. At last summoning the nerve to enter the room, he dressed quickly, seized anything that he might need during the course of the day, and left without looking back. Closing the door behind him reminded of that sound: the trying of the locked door; an impossible sound in a house where no doors were locked. To satisfy himself of this, he travelled the length of the corridor, testing each door in turn. He came to the narrow staircase at the end and halted. There were two further doors above him; each of these, he knew, bore a keyhole but no lock. He impressed upon himself the futility of the exercise, though it futility of the exercise, though itwould have taken only a matter of seconds, and he backed away from the staircase, looking at it with an aspect of suspicion, and made his way downstairs to the rooms that offered protection.
This notion, that the ground level of the house was a kind of sanctuary, took hold of him during the day and it was with ameasure of relief that he realisedhe did not need to ascend the stairs at all if he did not wish to do so. The impression was such that it temporarily worked a beneficial effect upon him and he was able to make some headway in his work. The effectwas different as the hours passed, however; the drawing of the evening and the darkening of the sky only reminded Absalom that he had imposed a prison upon himself and that, in the interest of his own well-being, he would have to escape it. He shied away from the thought and worked late, telling himself that he was working well, although in truth his accomplishments were unremarkable; and eventually, when the day had passed and sleep pressed upon him, he argued that it made sense to puttogether a makeshift bed on the sofa, in case he felt a surge of creativity. It is true that the pattern of an artist’s energy is often unpredictable, but Absalom’s argument was meant only to deceive himself. He lay awake on the sofa, a blanket thrown across him, until he felt the welcome embrace of sleep; and an hour or two might have passed, or it might have only been a few moments, when he was rudely awoken by intrusive sounds, soft and persistent as whispers. There were footsteps above him: hurried, scampering, anxious, swift but so delicate they might have danced across the floor, and interspersed so often with the unmistakable rattling of a door in its frame.
Absalom was unable to sleep again that night. The sounds, which seemed strangely to comefrom a remote place and yet were identifiably in the same house, were intermittent until the day broke. There was a great distress in the behaviour; even during moments of apparent rest there would be sudden bursts of activity which, despite their abruptness, were all the more alarming for their unpredictability. The tautness ofthe atmosphere was such that Absalom could not bring himself to close his eyes even during lengthy periods of silence.
When he rose he washed in the small basin in the downstairs cloakroom. He dressed in the same clothes of the previous day. He told himself that he waskeen to work. It was true that Absalom was given to periods ofintense endeavour, some of which resulted in him looking the worse for wear, unkempt and unshaven. It was the memory of such occasions that allowed him now to excuse his behaviour, but it was another act of sophistry on his part. In the past his dishevelled appearance was a matter of choice; now there was no choiceto be had. Absalom could not take a shower or dress in different clothes because he hadnot the means to do so; for Absalom, though he had yet to admit it to himself, could not bring himself to climb the stairs. True, he did not test himself in this regard. At no point did he walk to the foot of the stairs, stand before them, will himself to take the first step, and so discover that he had lost his courage. He did not attempt to ascend the stairs because he foresaw precisely this outcome, and by refusing to do so he could at least argue that he remained there out of choice. But this was untrue; Absalom had no choice, and he was constrained by it.
It continued in the same manner for the next three days. There was no razor in the cloakroom, and rather than climb the stairs to the bathroom he instead decided to buy a new one from a local chemist. While he was there he bought soap, toothpaste and a brush, and the sales assistant remembered him as having bought the same only a few days earlier. The towels became damp and he went out to buy fresh ones. While he wasthere he bought bed linen even though he did not sleep in a bed. He bought shirts and trousers, socks and underwear, despite having a full and clean wardrobein the room above. None of this could he explain and so he turned his back on the question. Absalom emptied his mind of all thoughts, in order to avoid the danger of recognizing his own madness. An observer would have said that he brooded, but on what did he brood? His work, perhaps? It was unlikely, for his drawing board was bare, the sketches remained undeveloped; even the waste paper bin lay empty, which would have offered a positive sign had it overflowed with discarded ideas. No, Absalom only gave the impression of brooding. He did not dwell on the sounds of the night; he could not bear to think of them. He thought of nothing. He did nothing. Absalom only existed in the sense that one might havenoticed him to breathe, but nothing else. In nearly all other respects, Absalom ceased to be aman.
Why, then, did Absalom not leave the house? It is difficult tocomprehend, but he was a man who could embrace both logic and passion, things that are not always compatible. He possessed a quality that could cause admiration and resentment in equal measures, a quality that might have been described by some as resolve and others as pig-headedness. Absalom was a man of rich and complex texture, and somehow this last vestige of his diminishing character held firm; and though the outward husk ofthe man had become shrunken and shrivelled, the seed was alive within him.
A week he had endured. Seven nights of unnatural disruption, broken by empty, obdurate days. He sat at his desk, staring at a blank sheet of paper before him, and though he had no notion of doing any work and did not require an implement of any kind, he was suddenly possessed by a desire to retrievesomething from the drawer. He could not say what it was that he thought he wanted, or even how he knew it was there, for itwas precisely this drawer that he was compelled to open, not any other, as though he had received an instruction to do so without being given the reason for it.
Upon opening the drawer he saw immediately that there was nothing there that he did not expect to find, nor anything thathe particularly wanted at that moment. There was a sketch pad, some pencils and assorted stationery, all of it quite useless in his predicament. This expectation notwithstanding, hegrabbed at the contents of the drawer with a tremendous violence and threw them wilfullyon the floor around him. Still finding nothing of any great importance, he growled his displeasure and thrust his arm tothe back of the drawer, feeling for some unknown object, whenhe at last felt the cold metallic touch of something within his hand. His fingers closed around the small angular object and withdrew it. Holding the palm of his hand open before him, he saw upon it the key that he had chanced upon a few days earlier. The impossibility of the matter brought about a sudden change in Absalom’s temperament; the petulance he had inexplicably felt now left him, and in its placewas a sense of foreboding. Howcould the key have possibly beentransported to this room, when he had not even travelled upstairs, much less located and retrieved the object? Solid matter does not move in such a way, not without assistance from another agent.
The obvious conclusion was thatit was not the same key, but a similar one; and while Absalom disregarded the fact that no key of any sort had been held withinthe desk when he had first arrived, he brought the object close to his eye so that he might observe it better, and there, just as he had known he would, he found the strange group of circular scratches around its shaft.
The discovery of the key in his room represented a new level ofintrusion. While he had been made afraid of the presence thatseemingly stalked the corridors above, he had managed to assure himself that any threat was countered by the distance he maintained. The feeling was not enough to allow him to sleepwith any constancy; nevertheless each morning he awoke with the assurance that he had not been in any peril throughout the hours of darkness.
Now, though, a new danger presented itself. Curiously it wasmade all the more menacing by its silence. The preceding nights had all followed the same pattern, one whereby Absalom could lie awake in bed, listening to the growing commotion. On this occasion there was no sound at all. It might be assumed that Absalom could take some comfort from this, perhaps in the belief that the haunting was at an end; but the unexplained presence of the object in his room did not permitthis. Instead it suggested to himsomething altogether more sinister. Absalom was convincedthat the activity was to enter a new phase, and the lengthening silence, when there should have been disorder, only served to confirm this belief. Absalom waited in the dark. Absalom waited in the silence.
There was a groan from somewhere above. Faint but certain. A desolate noise that evoked misery. Absalom clenched the bed linen between his sweating fingers; and then, as soon as he released his own breath, there came from elsewhere another exhalation, but resonant and joyous, as though a great achievement wasabout to be made. Whatever had made this discovery and briefly exulted in the moment began to move at a great speed. Absalom, wretched and cowering in his bed, heard a succession of footsteps rattle across the wooden floorboards of the attic rooms, descend the narrow staircase, race along the landing and move at a supernatural pace down the last flight of stairs.