I'll admit it, though: I hesitated just a fraction before opening that door. The screams sent an iciness through me that seemed to reach down and frost my testicles. I turned my shudder into action by twisting the handle.
With no barrier between us, the sounds were even more intense and scary.
A lamp was on in the round room, Kiwi kneeling on the floor beside it: she was staring horror-struck at a crouching figure on the far side of the room. That crouching figure was Bob, his face even more horror-struck, ugly and disfigured, like one of those stone gargoyles you find jutting from cathedral ramparts. What made his appearance all the more shocking was that he was white. I mean it—totally white. From his face down to his chest and stomach. Down to the waistband of his pyjama legs. Even his arms. Not just pale, or ashen, but white.
He was looking toward the open doorway leading to the stairs, and his eyes were wider than seemed possible. His jaw was dropped almost to his throat, his mouth a huge gaping hole, now his screams no more than dry scratchy sounds.
I ran to him, calling his name as if that might drag him back from the madness that was evident in his stare, skidding to my knees before him. His hands, like stiffened claws, were held up to his face as though to block out a nightmare vision; but still his eyes stared insanely from behind bent fingers. He was trembling, the movement jerky stiff, his body somehow brittle.
"Bob, what is it? Calm down and tell me what's wrong!"
He didn't seem to hear; he tried to push himself further into the curved wall, bare feet scuffing at the carpet. I pulled at his wrists and they were like juddering steel rods, impossible to move. Somewhere in the background I could hear loud sobbing, and I hoped Midge was tending to Bob's girlfriend—I had enough to cope with without offering any comfort there.
"Bob, for Chrissake take it easy!"
I shook his shoulders, although I was almost afraid to touch their milky whiteness, and he flinched violently. I persisted though, matching his strength with a roughness of my own. This time I grasped his hands and wrenched them down, moving my head close so that he was forced to look at my face.
Maybe I should have realized there and then what part of the problem was, because despite the room's soft light his pupils were small, contracted, as though affected by bright sunshine. And there was a glassiness to his stare that overlaid the horror expressed there; I'd observed that same faraway look over the years on the faces of several acquaintances who'd gone beyond cannabis.
But the atmosphere was too charged, too frighteningly potent, for me to take cognizance of that right away. I kept my voice soothing and controlled as I reasoned with him.
"There's nothing happening to you, Bob, everything's okay. You've had a bad dream, that's all. Or maybe you heard something that scared you. Was it the bats? We didn't tell you we had bats in our belfry, did we? They scare the hell out of me sometimes and I'm used to 'em. C'mon now, Bob, we're all here and nothing's gonna hurt you.
I felt slightly foolish coaxing him like this, but it really was as though I had a terrified child on my hands.
For a brief moment, his eyes managed to focus on mine, and that seemed to help a little. He stopped struggling against me and tried to speak, but still that rasping sound emerged. He was having difficulty in closing his mouth to form words.
I looked away for a second to see how the others were and wished I hadn't. The round room somehow wasn't the same. Oh, everything was in place, the furniture hadn't changed, the carpet wasn't a different color, nor were the drapes: but I was somewhere else. Everything was cold— without touching I knew that everything was tomb-cold— and everywhere there were shadows where they shouldn't have been. And the musty, damp smell was back. I thought I saw bubbling fungi on the curved walls, but the shadows were too deep, too obscuring, to be sure. And the room was growing smaller, the walls closing in so slowly that I couldn't be certain, even when I blinked my eyes and looked again, I couldn't be sure, couldn't measure it. The shrinkage had to be imaginary, had to be! The mustiness clogged my throat, making it difficult to breathe.
Kiwi was wailing, Midge kneeling beside her with an arm around the blonde's shoulders, doing her best to calm her and having about as much success as I was with Bob. Kiwi was trying to tell us something, but I could only understand a few choked phrases here and there:
". . . thirsty . . . he . . . went downstairs . . . oh my God, I heard him scream . . . he saw someone down . . . there . . ."
More than enough for me to catch the drift, and centipedes fresh from the freezer crawled up my spine. Somehow I guessed what had confronted Bob in the kitchen.
Fingernails raking my chest returned my attention to my buddy lying propped against the wall, and I grasped his wrist to stop the painful scratching. His head was shaking like a palsied man's and his other hand was pointing generally toward the open doorway—I say generally because his arm was moving wildly, barely able to maintain any sure direction.
But I followed his gaze rather than his pointing arm, mesmerized by the stark insanity in his eyes: it was like following the dotted line in a cartoon, from eyeball to object.
There was no light on in the hallway, but a pale glow came from the bend in the stairs; from the kitchen itself, in fact. BOD must have switched on the light down there.
The room, seen only in the periphery of my vision, was growing smaller and the shadows darker, as if both conspired to crush those within. My subconscious sent the message that it was only imagination, my own fear, that was creating the effect; that fleeting realization afforded little comfort. I still gripped Bob's wrist, and now I was shaking as much as he. My jaw locked open as I watched through the open doorway.
A shadow was rising from the stairway. A bulky shape, ill-defined, inky dark. Coming up from the kitchen.
Rising. Lit only dimly from the back. Now in almost complete darkness as it rose higher, came around the bend in the stairs.
Slowly emerging into the soft light of the round room.
BAD TRIP
I ALMOST COLLAPSED with relief when Midge's agent walked through the door.
" Jesus fucking Christ, Val, you nearly scared us shitless!" I thumped my fist on the floor in exasperation.
She was genuinely surprised. "Good Lord, why? I went down to investigate the cause of all the fuss our gibbering friend was making."
She reached for the switch by the door and turned on the overhead light. Walls immediately sprang back into place, shadows instantly evaporated. Val strode purposefully into the room, voluminous flannel nightgown, worn with total disregard to the season, billowing out behind her. Never had she looked so formidable. Nor so reassuring.
"There's nothing downstairs, Bob, nothing at all," she said, bearing down on us. "Now just what is all this nonsense about?"
I drew my robe around me, feeling somewhat under-dressed, and hauled myself to my feet. We looked at Bob together and I was happy to notice a glimmer of color returning to his flesh. He didn't look healthy, though, he didn't look healthy at all.
"Help me with him," I said to Val, and we both grasped his arms and pulled him up. There was no resistance left in Bob, and little life either, and we all but carried him over to the sofabed.
"He was crawling across the room when I got out here," Val explained as we gently lowered his body, "screaming blue murder and pointing at the stairs. I thought perhaps you'd had burglars, so I rushed down there immediately."