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The original was posted on /r/nosleep by /u/Daniel_Eaves on 2023-06-27 03:58:54+00:00.
It disturbed me that Carly’s car was a Volkswagen Polo from the nineties. Sure I noted many differences from the car featured in my dream. The Polo was a small hatchback, whereas the dream car had the feel of an estate—quite possibly a Volvo. Carly’s ride was a dull maroon, but my car had been tomato red. And this time round Carly drove, while here I sat tense in the passenger seat. But how many Polos had survived from the nineties? It scarcely counted as a sturdy classic. It still felt spooky that we rode in a car out of the same era, while rolling over that familiar bleak landscape of our night terrors.
Carly interrupted my thoughts.
‘I hope you don’t mind me asking, but how did Malena die?’
I very much minded. Still, I understood her reasons—I too may have enquired if I was heading to the land of the dead with someone who meant to confront their dead spouse. I told her: ‘Malena had a rare blood illness. It was painful and protracted. The doctors gave her eight months. She got three-and-a-half years in the end. Before...’
No way I could finish that sentence.
‘It’s okay. You needn’t say more.’ She paused, before adding, ‘I’m convinced Beth’s dead, zero doubt in my heart, but I have no idea how she died. I’m not sure which is worse: knowing or not.’
I said, ‘neither’s worse. They’re just different,’ In truth, my situation was direr. I’d give anything for an inch of uncertainty over how Malena died. But how could Carly understand? She was hellbent on learning Beth’s fate and it would go badly for her when she did. The thing about not knowing, though, is there always exists the possibility, however tiny, that the person’s not gone. Such hope will drive you mad. And for this reason we root out the truth—to kill hope dead once and for all. Carly was too far along the path to her own destruction for me to make any difference now. And I found myself too far down my own path.
Carly pulled the car to a stop on the verge. ‘That’s the turn-off for the Coalhouse.’ She pointed to a patch of moor. If you strained you could just make out the double ruts, majorly overgrown, wending off over the hills. ‘It’s getting late,’ she said. ‘I booked us into a place for the evening and we can set out properly tomorrow. I hope you don’t mind, I got us a twin room. The only place for miles is pricey and I haven’t been in work for a good while.’
‘I’ll chip in.’
I imagined us both in the same hole when it came to finances.
Carly set off again. It was only when we hit the village and everything started to look familiar that it dawned on me. ‘Where did you say you’d booked us again?’
I glanced at her and she glanced at me. Then she got what I was driving at and her face dropped. ‘Oh no! I didn’t think. Is it going to be the same place?’
‘It is. Of course it is. Like you said, there’s nowhere else to stay in these parts.’
‘I’m so sorry.’
Two minutes later we pulled up at the retreat where Malena died.
‘It’s okay, we’re here now. It’s just a hotel.’
‘You’re sure?’
‘Let’s just get in.’
The receptionist processing our reservation gave me a double-take and started acting awkwardly with us.
‘What was that about?’ Carly asked me as we went towards the lift.
‘Oh you know. I reckon I’d treat someone like that if their wife had died in a room, then I’d jumped to the wild conclusion they were back at the same hotel for a romantic break with another woman.’
‘But don’t I look, obviously…?’
‘I’d say so. Never underestimate people’s blindness to detail though.’
Not long after, we lay in our separate single beds, both admittedly wearing more pyjamas than we were used to. I tried my damnedest to block out that familiar flowery pattern now wrapped around me in sheet form, and to avoid thoughts of a certain fateful room located somewhere on the floor above us.
‘Do we have a plan,’ I asked Carly before we turned the lamp off. ‘In case we encounter anything?’
She sighed. ‘I’d genuinely just regarded this as a doomed voyage of discovery. I suffer these phantoms in the daytime now anyway; I’ve never thought to overcome one. Also Beth was full of schemes and they don’t seem to have helped. She had this crazy idea about slaying the Bull God, even got some kind of sacrificial dagger from somewhere. You should have seen it—impressive thing, gold handle, curvaceous. How do you kill a god though? What?’
She’d seen my features change as she described the knife.
‘Oh. Well. I think I actually have seen that dagger. In my dreams.’
‘Alright. Tell me every detail.’
‘Remember I said I saw the words “Angwynne, left hand of the Bull God” written? That knife carved them. It was stabbed into the floor where it was carved.’
‘But you know what that means? Beth might be sending us a message!’ She sounded frayed but on the edge of excitement.
‘Wait. Hold it. There’s more. There was blood everywhere, Carly. All over the floor. The knife was smeared in it too.’
She took a moment, then the corners of her mouth started to spasm. Seconds later she was sobbing with her head in her hands.
‘It was just a dream,’ I managed.
‘None of them are just dreams,’ she replied, red face peering up through waterlogged eyes. True. It felt crazy we might take such nightmares as evidence of someone’s death; on the other hand I couldn’t deny there was some sense in Carly doing so, at least in this instance.
After that it took me a while to sleep. I witnessed Carly setting out on fitful unconsciousness beneath her duvet before eventually an aching type of weariness dragged me under.
I snapped to. The air was heavy and damp to breathe. It was cold. I struggled to remember where I was in the dark. Oh yes, the retreat… but hold on. The bed was hard underneath me, a block of wood with no cushion. My eiderdown had been swapped out for scratching sack-cloth. I could make out no features of the room; it was dread black.
‘Carly? Carly are you there?’
I turned on my side and came up against a wall where before there had been none.
‘Carly!’
I tipped myself off the other side of the bed and was astounded to pace only once and hit another wall.
Where the fuck was I?
I groped frantically along the perimeter of the poky cell until I came to a door. I yanked and rattled at the handle but it wouldn’t give.
‘Oi!’ came a cry from the far side. I froze. The door sprang open and a man confronted me, raising a paraffin lamp in one hand. ‘What’s this? Thought we’d have a little lie in, did we duchess? Give me good reason why I shouldn’t pummel you well.’
I considered explaining he had the wrong person. However, I clocked the snake whip he was busy kneading in his other hand, while flexing the muscles of his forearm, and the words failed me. He caught my expression looking down, and laughed. ‘The whip’s for the ponies, ye great jessie. It’s my fists for you. Get down the cellars before I give them exercise.’
I tried to slip past him into the corridor and obey without a clue where the cellars might be. He grabbed me by the shoulder. ‘Your lamp hey?’ He motioned to the foot of the bed where a lamp similar to his sat. ‘I should suppose you want me to light it for you as well?’ I nodded mutely and retrieved the thing, not having the faintest idea how to get it going. He tutted, took out a small length of rag and opened the window in his lamp to set it alight. Then he lit the wick in my lamp and twisted a brass knob on the side to set the flame’s brightness. ‘Get going.’ Again I went to comply but this time he grabbed me by the throat. He pushed me up against the doorframe and squeezed hard, a mean and triumphant look about him. ‘I’m docking a day. Don’t be late again.’ Then he scoffed and let me free. I stumbled away up the passage, clutching at my neck, hoping to whichever god would listen that I had gone the right way. I turned a corner and it was close to déjà vu. The long, rotted hallway with the tumbledown ceiling stretched out before me. I had been here before; at least this time the lamp hung in my hand rather than on a hook in the distance. I picked my way barefoot along the floorboards until at last I came to the stairs at the end, where I descended.
No Malena guarded the iron doors this time. They whined as I heaved them open. Inside was a shaft dominated by a rude wooden lift, with a hand-crank mechanism built into its wall for operation. The thing was the living example of rickety. But it would probably lead to the cellars, though I had forgotten why I wanted to go there. What was I doing?
It dawned on me I had temporarily lost my mind. That grotesque slave-driver character had filled me with such terror that I had slipped into a type of stupor, forgotten who I was. Had he been sent to scare me out of my wits, to make me comply? I searched for a handhold of lucidity and grabbed on once more.
I had been at the retreat, now I was here.
‘Carly,’ I whispered.
Perhaps the powers of this place were leading me by the nose to my own demise. It could well be they wanted me to go down. And why the hell not? What else had I come for?
I stepped onto the beams of the lift and cranked the wheel. With horrendous creaking and clacking the elevator dropped. My lantern swung wildly with the motion, casting a merry-go-round of shadows. I kept cranking. The air rising from below reeked with smoky coal dust. Inch-thick cracks in the floor slats revealed nothing beyond blackness b...
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