|
Room
1408
Mike looked
around the bedroom with wide, frightened eyes.
There was no
plum on the end table to the left of the bed, no plate either. The table
was bare.
He turned,
started for the door leading back to the living room and stopped.
There was a
picture on the wall. He couldn't be absolutely sure, in his present
state he couldn't be absolutely sure of his own name, but he was fairly sure
that there had been no picture there when he first come in. It was a still-life.
A single plum sat on a tin plate in the middle of an old plank table.
The light falling across the plum and the plate was a feverous
yellow-orange.
"Tango
light," he thought. The kind of light that makes the dead get up
out of their graves and tango. The kind of light...
"I have
to get out here," he whispered and blundered back into the living
room.
He became
aware that his shoes had begun to make odd smooching sounds, as if the
floor beneath them were growing soft. The pictures on the living room
walls were crooked again, and there were other changes as well. The lady
on the stairs had pulled down the top of her gown bearing her breasts.
She held one in each hand, a drop of blood hung from each nipple. She
was staring directly into Mike's eyes and grinning ferociously. Her
teeth were filed to cannibal points.
At the rail
of the sailing ship, the tars had been replaced by a line of pallid men
and women. The man on the far left, nearest the ship's bow wore a brown
wool suit and held a derby hat in one hand. His hair was slicked to his
brow and parted in the middle. His face was shocked an vacant.
Mike knew
his name...Kevin O'Malley, this room's first occupant, a sewing machine
salesman who had jumped in October of 1910. To O'Malley's left were the
others that had died here, all with that same vacant shocked expression.
It made them look related, all members of the same inbred and cataclysmically
retarded family.
In the
picture where the fruit had been, there was now a severed human head.
Yellow-orange light swam off the sunken cheeks, the sagging lips, the
upturned glazing eyes, the cigarette parked behind the right ear.
|
