Margaret rose to consciousness reluctantly, heavy with the weight of slumber. She blinked as her eyes slowly remembered how to see, the space around her reconciling into something familiar.
The room she was in was illuminated only by the blue-white light of the television screen, casting everything in an anaemic glow. She shivered. Her body felt heavy, and so, so cold as she struggled to right herself. Looking around, she realised with a dawning sense of horror where exactly she was.
Margaret had fallen asleep on the sofa.
Margaret never fell asleep on the sofa.
Spurred by a sense of embarrassment, as if someone could somehow have witnessed this transgression, she pushed away the fatigue in her body and rose to her feet.
There was a moment of being pulled down. As if the spill resistant poly-plastic wrapped cushions of her sofa were holding on to her, refusing to release her as she struggled upwards. But in an instant the feeling was gone. She rose somewhat unsteadily. She expected her hip to be stiff if she had slept sitting upright, and in this room. It was colder than comfortable to save on the cost of heating it. Yet, thankfully, her hip wasn’t paining her as she bustled to find the television remote to turn off the box.
The television was new. The salesman in the shop she had bought it from insisted it was the best of the range. That it met all her needs, despite her objections that she didn’t want anything new (or even old) fangled. Just one that connected to the news channels and got the soaps. He had talked about a lot of things she only half understood, and in the end she said yes simply because she didn’t really know what else to say. The thing was far more complicated than her old one, and not at all as easy to use as the man had claimed. She blamed this as she tried to turn the confounded thing off. Try as she might, the buttons did nothing. Even picking up the remote didn’t seem to be happening this morning. She pushed away the admission that she was getting foggier, her memory not what it used to be. Thoughts slowing as if each one had to rise through treacle to make it to the front of her mind. She gave up on turning the machine off, and focused instead on the lights. When these also refused to cooperate, she tutted and muttered in irritation, but left it. Another thing to bring down her bills, she told herself. Bills she couldn’t right afford to pay.
The next few hours passed quickly. Or, she felt they did. She kept looking at the clock, and the face didn’t make sense. Margaret kept finding herself in rooms unsure what she had gone in there to do, or even when she had entered them. The house wasn’t untidy, Margaret didn’t keep an untidy house, but there were bits and pieces out of place which she would normally have tidied away. Her cup from her tea still sat on the counter next to the sink, the tannin-stained interior crusted with a thin film of milk left to dry. When she went into the kitchen she saw it, felt the irritation at its presence, but then when she went to clean it away … it didn’t work. She didn’t know why. Each time she went back to the kitchen, there it was.
Her slippers were also in the living room. That was not where they were meant to be. Margaret balked at the thought of Dianne or Edith coming over and seeing that she had left her slippers out on display. Yet, every time she went to try to move them it just … didn’t happen. And there they were, each time she passed through the living room, mocking her.
She saw the thing on the sofa in the late afternoon. She didn’t know how she hadn’t seen it before. Maybe because it was dark, not even light from outside making its way into the room from the curtains. They were still drawn (why hadn’t she opened them?).
The thing was dark. Misshapen and lumpy. It was on the left side of the sofa, the spot she always like to sit, sunk into her cushions like it owned the place. The television cast a spotlight beam onto the thing on the sofa. The edges of the poly-plastic covers crinkled beneath its weight, and caught the light. Glassy eyes watched her. Its mouth hung open, a twisted, awful expression. Margaret couldn’t look at it. Something about it filled her with so much fear, so much revulsion, that she wanted to scream, to run from it in terror. She stumbled away, tried to find the door out of her house to get help, find one of her neighbours, but … she couldn’t find it. She was lost, in the corridors of her own home.
Each circuit she made brought her back to the living room. The thing on the sofa was still there. Still watching her.
She needed to go to the shops. Thursdays were her shop day, but she hadn’t been able to find her shopping bags. Then, once again, she hadn’t been able to find her way out of the house. She searched for it, searched for it, but no door seemed right. Her flat had always been small. she never needed much. Why were there so many doors? Why did she not know any of them?
She came to her senses in front of the thing on the sofa.
It was spreading, sticky liquid pooling from it onto her cushion protectors, staining them protein brown. The smell was horrible now. She hated the thought that it was coming from the thing on the sofa. She tried to cry. She didn’t feel any tears on her cheeks.
The telephone rang. She couldn’t find it to pick it up. It rang and rang and rang before it clicked. Whoever it was hanging up before it reached voicemail.
Letters had piled at the door, but each time she saw them, felt the need to move them and sort them and file them away, she found herself somewhere else, and the letters were still there. One was from the electricity company, still addressed to her Dennis, even though her husband had been dead for six years. The word Overdue was printed in red ink across the front of the envelope.
The stink in the house kept getting worse. The thing on the sofa was dripping onto her carpets now. It was no longer grinning at her. Its teeth had dropped out onto the front of a dress that had once been Margaret’s favourite shade of peony. Its face had slipped, sloughing off onto cushions turning putrid where the plastic had seeped up the rot.
Margaret couldn’t remember where she kept the carpet cleaner. She couldn’t find a sponge.
The thing on the sofa dripped, the only sound in the silence.
She tried to cry when the electricity was cut. She only knew because the television turned off. The only light in the house now taken from her. Silence and darkness.
And cold.
Hello Fionn,
I just wanted to tell you how much I enjoyed your short story “Nailbed”. Just listened to it through the Ominous Thrill: Her Horrorween podcast feed.
It was a terrific return to classic SK-style shorts; punchy, raw, and visceral. Just a character caught up in a real battle with horror which grew from a seemingly innocent incident of simple food contamination. Brilliant story. Thank you for sharing it.
Daniel