Childhood Memory

L

I was eight years old and lying in my bed. My screaming skin had turned into glue and my hair stuck to my forehead. The hour had come where I was too tired to escape my own nightmares and my mind was aware. It made my body parts constantly change in size, going from tiny to enormous. My poor flesh slipped into a vicious walk cycle deprived of any sort of anatomical correctness. It felt like a quiet descent into hell or like catching nails with your own limbs after being stuffed.

Slowly things changed, not that I noticed, but the way flesh hugged bones started to feel normal. Stonewalls was crawling up around me like determinedly growing weeds. It formed a funny house and it was kind of mine. Actually a castle. I was the king and strolling down one of the long corridors discussing business matters with an aged queen, who had more in common with a ruin than I would admit to her face.

 She took me to a dusty room with faded red colors. The dull bricks in the walls were naked and crammed series of tall windows dressed in soft, red velvet curtains, which had been worn out by the sun. The thick curtains were effectively shutting all sunlight out with exception of one window. From a crack in its heavy curtain leaked a small beam of light in which heaps of fortunate grains of dust floated past, blinking at me like eyes. However, the light only managed to highlight the darkness, and I knew that this housed the strange logic of night. Some time passed before my eyes got used to the darkness. The first thing I noticed was a couple of chairs in the middle of the room. Dark, static piles was sitting on them. Some more time had to pass before my sight could penetrate the darkness deep enough to find the silhouettes of humans. There was no sign of life but they were not dead. In all this time, we had not stopped talking for one moment. It carried on like snow on a tv-screen. And worked as a filter that separated me slightly from my body and dizzied my head. It was impossible to see if the silhouettes could hear us.

I didn’t want to, but we approached them, still talking to booth them and each other. It felt like I was the only one knowing that everything was sick and wrong. As we approached, the darkness started to reveal their pale faces. They grew out of the blur and showed variated sizes and shapes of heads, but empty eyes that looked without looking, and made shivers run down spines, was what they all had in common. Also they wore the smile of Mona Lisa. A smile to hang on the wall, and that was exactly what they were. Part of the inventory. I would go as far as to say; part of this room. They didn’t respond to the queens words. They just sat as an extension of the chairs, and looked with their bottomless eyes that radiated passively and provided the room with a membrane of ghostlike character. As if we existed inside the belly of a big ghost. It didn’t bother the queen, she just kept on talking like it was a normal situation. Suddenly I managed to stop my waterfall of words and walked away to leave the room.

The way we came from had been replaced with a casual wall standing and looking like it had done that for generations. It made my neck go hot and it became difficult to move it. Like rusty hinges on an old door. I was trapped with the ghostlike people and their white smiles. The queen had gone but the feeling of her filter-like talk still hung in the air. I was panicking and leaving my skin. For a moment, I separated from my body and floated above the room to view the floor plan seeking an escape. The floor plan had a shape like the letter L. A couple of meters beside the 90 degree angle, there was a kitchen. It was separated from the L shaped room with a thin wall. I returned to my body, and knew the thin wall was my only way out. Plenty of more empty eyed people found their way into the room. I couldn’t figure out where they were coming from. Maybe they were produced by the room itself.
I ran, soaked in fear, to the thin wall, passed the white smiles and eyes. I tried to destroy the wall with everything my body could manage. The staff on the other side heard my frustrations and began drilling holes in the wall. Half an hour would pass in the unpleasant company of the hollow eyed. They seemed almost willing-less drifting around in the cold darkness like empty-eyed sharks. They didn’t hurt me physically. They were feeding on something inside me like infections feast in bodies. I grew more and more desperate to get away. Finally, the holes were done and the staff began pumping salty water through them. They had learned that if you want something out of a stomach you have to drink salty water to help emptying it.
Soft, cold, black water rose to the ceiling. My hair danced along with the slow, hypnotic curls in the water. White smiling faces were floating. They stretched and trembled as if they were contained in chloroform.

“Now I am drowning,” I thought.
A low roar started to arrange the molecules of the water. Distant first like the sound of a slowly starting machine. Steadily it rose to a high pitch. Everything in the room was screaming and shaking. Even the people who had shown no emotions up until now were powerless like worms and twisting their white disgusting limbs in pain.

The possessed room had swallowed me. Thanks to the staff in the kitchen, I was saved from being digested. I don’t know if the room died, or if it can still manifest itself in other rooms. But I survived.