Bitterhall by Helen McClory (story books to read .txt) 📕

The hall extends away from you as you walk down it. Something crackles, shifts. Wall surfaces; ghosts. I went into the nook for coffee, stood for a moment staring into space, then pressed the options I wanted. A hearty old stream shot out of the machine, invigorating the air with fragrance. Behind me a long way

back down the corridor I could hear a slow, steady creaking. Sometimes your mood is a Dutch angle through which you can see the world and it’s only going to look bad, that tilted. I kept my head down, didn’t I? I didn’t invite it in. At no stage could anyone say I had let myself go completely. No, I got taken by the crazy. Or the weird reality, I don’t know. I don’t know! The creaking came nearer, I kept busy. Hand around the cup, so warm, the colours on the cup a solid choice, the logo resembling a major chain but not actionably close. I selected the options for Daniel, thinking he probably liked a standard cappuccino with a twist. For some reason, ‘smoky woods’ was a syrup flavour. My finger hovered over the button. A sound came from a few metres away, shuffling. Snuffling, like a horse tickering, the sounds of a bridle in a horse’s mouth. It kept coming closer. The machine beeped up closer still and the second coffee was ready. I sipped, I swallowed a hot mouthful. I turned around two cups in hand, face calm. Daniel had followed me – or, some other person with a job to do crawling in this empty hive.

Nothing. No one.

And then, walking in from my left side, a figure. There was a sick feeling all through me like death, like the system going into shutdown, greyish beats, no air.

The figure turned his head to me as he passed, then kept walking down the hall. My own head was facing forwards – I held myself upright, on duty, believe me, against any of this – so I saw little of it, only registering a horror and dirty coils of snail-brown hair, and only when he had gone by me, about twenty seconds afterwards I turned in the direction he’d left in. Nothing, no one. I stared. Still nothing re-materialised. I started breathing again in a gasp. A sick feeling – fuck me. I knew he had not gone into any of the other doors. The keypad noises would have alerted me to that. No. What had I seen, then?

I stood for a while composing a self against a world that had rotated its agreed-on boundaries. Come on I told myself, it’s just tiredness – here, breathe in the coffee – it’s just a moment you will find yourself thinking back on in pubs – disassociating with a group of mates talking about spooky things, but you – you won’t say, give them your moment – so weird you have to unhinge a part of your worldview like a snake unhinges its jaws just to accommodate the animal it’s eating. But I was used to getting through; I had good core strength, I could run a mile in four minutes. I could live through the childhood I had. Later I’d be able to – digest. And so I shook my head and pretended to scoff and became an approximation of fine and went back into the copy room to face other kinds of dangers, now seemingly less obscure and wreaking.

Still

Still the night had plans for me. Daniel wasn’t at the end of the room by his device. I found him in a kind of cupboard off to one side – the air here smelled like blackcurrant cordial, less sweet, more sawdust, the wine I’d drunk at the MacAshfalls’. It was from the inks. Daniel pulled out a container of liquid leather to show me – the stink of it – mammalian, dangerous. I took a deep breath in to show him I was not afraid. I pulled back spluttering.

‘Smells like an uncooked hamburger dropped down the back of a radiator.’

‘Yes, sordid isn’t it? There’s a bottle of gilding liquid up there. And dirt.’

‘A bottle of dirt?’ Daniel wanted to make the objects as close to real as possible, and real things stink, and are coated in their filth from being here – from existence. I admired it and I hated it, just how deep he was trying to go with authenticising things, but that was good – to be operating in a higher layer, above my weird, base confusion. ‘You’ll be able to convince everyone it’s real when it’s not.’

‘That’s not it at all’ Daniel said. ‘Well, now you’ve said it. Maybe. But it’s more – verisimilitude. And excessive pushing at the limit of what we can do, how far we can go.’

‘Dirt would really lend it credence. Get the right patina on it, and it’s like, why even have the real thing?’

‘You’re testing me, Tom.’

I picked up a bottle of ink from a nearby shelf, ‘Kells blue 0004. That Kells?’

‘That Kells,’ Daniel said. ‘You don’t really think this is all some kind of master forgery—’

‘No no. I think it’s pretty cool. Just, has to be in the right hands. Otherwise the world would be overrun with fakes, instead of your choice few.’

‘It’s still a pricey and difficult thing to do, and there’s a lot of paperwork around to prevent forging.’

‘Unlicensed forging.’ I looked at him, tilting my head. This was good. Pick at him, I thought, until he bleeds. But on thinking that – repulsed myself. It implied, if I thought about it, a skin stretched between us – skin stretched out on the air – or the skin of our bodies, interacting, pressing up against us, hairs raising in the scented squalid warmth –

‘I just want to keep the old things safe, Tom,’ he was saying, ‘that’s all I want to do. To keep the originals in perfect condition. And I get to do that here.’

‘I don’t think it can possibly do