‘Another note?’ said Sylvia.
‘Yes,’ said Bonnie. ‘Like the one I found under the door yesterday, except that this one was on the window.’
Sylvia frowned. She put her hand to Bonnie’s forehead. ‘You ought to rest,’ she said. ‘You’ve not been well.’
‘I would like to get some fresh air though,’ said Bonnie. ‘I’d really like to go down to the seafront.’
‘Soon,’ said Sylvia, ‘perhaps.’
Bonnie was feeling rather weak in the legs anyway. She ate her vanilla ice cream, and Sylvia said, ‘Where is this note?’
‘I’m sure I left the first note on the desk,’ said Bonnie. ‘But it’s gone now. I threw the second note in the wastepaper basket.’
Sylvia went over to the wastepaper basket. ‘The basket is empty,’ she said.
‘Yes,’ said Bonnie. ‘And there was a third one as well, stuck to the outside of the window,’ but they could both see, even as she was saying it, that there was nothing there now.
‘I think you’ve been dreaming,’ said Sylvia. ‘Or hallucinating.’
Sylvia herself did not look entirely well, thought Bonnie. She looked rather wide-eyed. Her complexion was shiny and her hair was quite wild. She still had on what might have been the same blue suit, and it looked a little dishevelled. Perhaps this sea air was not doing either of them any good.
‘You’re getting mixed up with what happens in your Seatown story,’ said Sylvia. ‘It’s not surprising, of course. Here you are, in Susan’s room, in Susan’s bed, almost in Susan’s skin. Now you can find your ending. You just have to think: what is she going to do?’
‘I don’t know,’ said Bonnie.
‘Well, as long as you’re in the right frame of mind, in your character’s mindset, it will come. You’re Susan — what happens next?’
Bonnie finished her ice cream and Sylvia took the bowl away, and Bonnie heard her lock the door.
Bonnie woke suddenly, from a dream in which she had dived into water, into the sea, and was looking around on the seabed for something that she had lost. She had been underwater for a very long time, and throughout she had been holding her breath.
She seemed to remember from reading Freud that a dream of diving into water was a ‘crossing a threshold’ symbol relating to the process of waking. It seemed topsy-turvy, because the sea was supposed to be the realm of dreams. In dreams, though, there was all this reversal.
And she had, just before waking, found what she had been looking for, which was a key, a car key. She had lifted it from where it was lying half-buried in the sand, like a gift from the sea.
She could feel something tickling her cheek, and she scratched and rubbed at her face.
She was on the edge of the mattress. She rolled back into the middle of the bed and looked at the window, the night sky. There was no moon — no circle, and no square either. She got out of bed and turned on the desk lamp. Squinting away from the light, she looked down at the headache-inducing carpet, which she could see now had not been properly laid, only cut to size; she could see the loose threads from the rough edges against the skirting boards.
Facing the window, she found that her reflection was missing, as if somehow she did not exist, but then she saw that the window was wide open; it must have been left ajar and caught by the wind. She shivered in the night air and thought that it was lucky that the glass in the flung-open window had not smashed. The draught coming in, blowing the split ends of her hair against her face, must have been what woke her up.
She could smell something damp in the room, something mouldering, a swampy smell.
And then she saw the word.
20
There was a word on the window. It looked etched into the glass itself, scratched with something sharp, like the point of a compass, and she remembered a boy at school using the point of a compass to scratch a message into his own arm. She did not remember what it was that he scored into his flesh, but it was something short, and perhaps left unfinished.
She went to the window and ran the tip of her forefinger along the length of the word: ‘JUMP’. The surface of the glass was smooth, though; she could see but not feel the engraving. It seemed to be inside the glass, like the warning that appeared like an advertisement within the window of an electric tram in an M. R. James story. What were the words that appeared there? It was, she thought, some lines from ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’, about someone who, having glanced over his shoulder, walks on,
And turns no more his head;
Because he knows a frightful fiend
Doth close behind him tread.
Or perhaps that appeared somewhere else in the story. She had a feeling that what was seen within the window of the tram was a message with a more specific hint of what was coming, but she could not quite remember what it was.
She wanted to touch the outside of the window to see if the writing had somehow been scratched on backwards from the outside. She thought that this message was not quite so far beyond her reach as the previous one had been.
She took her pack of cigarettes from the windowsill. The lighter was inside the packet, where it belonged. She lit up a cigarette and leaned out of the window to puff out the smoke. She could hear the harsh utterances of the gulls, and the sound of the sea toying with the pebbles at its edge, and she flicked her ash to the ground. In a vacuum, or on the moon, she would fall at the same speed as that ash, at the same speed as a feather. She was not in a vacuum though; she was not on the moon.
Light was leaking into the sky. The tide would be coming in.
It seemed to her that it mattered greatly whether the word had somehow appeared within the glass or whether it had been scratched into the glass from the far side. She reached around, trying to touch the outside of the window, but her arm was too short. She got herself up onto the windowsill and tried again, straining towards that hard-to-reach spot behind the word. Her fingertips, with their bitten nails, edged closer. ‘Come on,’ she murmured, ‘come on,’ and she leaned out just a little further.
Her cigarette landed last, and softly.
Keep passing the open windows.
— John Irving, The Hotel New Hampshire
21
She knew that was how it had to end. As soon as she had seen that word, which really did seem to be scratched into the pane of glass in the unfastened window, Bonnie had known suddenly and clearly what she had to do. Still in that place between sleeping and fully waking, she had turned away from the wide-open window and written the last part of her story out in longhand in the lamplight, without even sitting down at the desk, only leaning over the desktop to scribble onto the paper, giving herself a backache. She felt strongly, unequivocally, that it was the only possible conclusion, although she would want to check that reference to ‘Casting the Runes’, that Coleridge quotation.
So, she thought, as she put down her pen, her story was finished, although she still did not know why the messages had appeared in Susan’s room, or who had put them there. It was the landlady, she supposed; she had wanted to see what would happen. People did some very odd things. Or at least the landlady was responsible for the first message. Beyond that, perhaps it had just been Susan’s imagination. Or perhaps it was all in her imagination; perhaps she had dreamt the whole thing. Perhaps, at the end, she was sleepwalking.
Straightening up, Bonnie became aware that the door to her room was standing slightly open, creaking in the breeze. She stepped away from the desk and went towards the door. She looked outside, peering up and down the dark landing. ‘Sylvia?’ she said, but there was no reply. She stepped onto the landing.