The Seventh Pan Book of Horror Stories

THE LITTLE ROOM By William Sansom

The Nun Margherita was escorted with ceremony to the threshold of her new little room without windows; but there the Mother Superior and her sisters excused themselves and left Margherita alone with the five appointed artisans, who then immediately proceeded with their duties.

While three of these women artisans busied themselves with lengths of plastic boarding — these looked almost like boards of asbestos into which hairs and husk had been mixed — the other two artisans erected a firm brass guard over the manometer already cemented into one of the inner walls. Thus the three women occupied with the boarding acted as an impromptu guard over the threshold, while those within were able at any moment to glance up from their work and observe at close range any dilatory move on Margherita's part.

But Margherita had removed herself quietly to the side of the bed and seemed simply content to sit there and view at her leisure the equipment of her new room, which, of course, she had never seen before.

However, it differed little from all the other rooms in the convent. The walls were distempered a pale green, the polished linoleum reflected the same colour. There was little furniture; only her bed, a simple affair of polished walnut with a green silk coverlet, a small prie-dieu upholstered in similar materials, and a table; a miniature electric fire stood in one corner; but otherwise the room was bare, appearing thus with its shining surfaces immaculately clean, orderly, but unvisited. There hung about it an air of melancholy, the same that breeds in the deadly clean gleam of all those small suburban parlours, touched but unvisited, that day after day wait, dying of the afternoon light, for the good rustle of dust, or for a book to be thrown across their immaculate monotony. But of course no such afternoon light ever penetrated into Margherita's room, for there were no windows through which it might enter. Only in this way did the room differ from all other rooms; but that is enough, for the character of a room is conditioned as much by the angles of light diffused upon it as by any other decoration. Margherita's new room had no windows, then — but it was illuminated by concealed bars of bluish white electric light that cast upon the room what approximated an afternoon light, colourless, and originating from no definite source, perhaps thus even the more monotonous, for its very essence was artificial. This light illuminated with unwavering severity a bowl of large white daisies that the Mother Superior had placed by the prie-dieu as a gesture of her personal impartiality.

Up to this time Margherita had comported herself with com-mendably calm reserve. Such very placid behaviour might have been mistaken for complacency — but Margherita was in no way indifferent, she knew her position, and now she regarded the busy movements of the artisans with interest. Perhaps it was the very presence of these other women that enabled her to maintain a tranquil attitude towards such fatal proceedings.

Margherita was in process of being walled up. In a very few minutes the final boards would be nailed into place, and she would then be abandoned for ever to herself and her little airless cell. Then there would be many hours in which she could repent her sin. She had been sentenced for 'the usual' — of which in fact she had been guilty on more than one occasion — and now it only remained for her to undergo the 'prescribed treatment'. For the moment, though, these artisans supplied her with feelings of company, it was difficult indeed to imagine life without people when these artisans were working around. Otherwise Margherita accepted as inevitable the process of her sentence — it was traditional and usual, she would never have dreamed of criticising so venerable and deeply rooted a custom. If unpleasant things are expected, they are easier to accept — the more so if they are not to be accepted in the very next instant.

The three women on the threshold had almost completed the fourth wall. They handled the light partitioning material with fluent ease, wielding their hammers and needles without effort, with the careless surety of workers skilled with their tools. They hammered the partitions together, sealing each socket with a nail, while along the floor they stitched deep into the carpet and on the ceiling deep into the tapestried frieze to ensure absolutely the exclusion from the room of all air. And at last, when only a narrow slit remained, they paused leaning against the new partition and chatting, for it was impossible to affix the final board until the other artisans inside had finished work on the manometer.

This instrument, of which only the dial showed, was already inset firmly into the wall. But since its function was to register the decline of oxygen in the atmosphere and since thus its slow needle would demonstrate to Margherita the speed of the approach of her suffocation, tempting her at some critical moment to injure the instrument in the belief, perhaps, that it was the agent of death rather than its mentor — for such reasons it was the custom to affix over the dial an outer trellice of brass wire as a shield against interfering hands. At all costs the manometer must be preserved — it was a refinement that was traditionally indispensable. How otherwise could the confined person be assured of a proper appreciation of the truth of her death? How could she grasp the full significances of her declining hours? For instance, without the exact message of the manometer, she might swoon prematurely, thus dying unnaturally early; or an optimism inherent in her character might decry the possibility of death, postponing in the strength of that belief even physical atrophies and thus protracting death artificially. In either case the dying would have been robbed of its natural proportion, and this was opposed to the convent philosophy. At all costs matters must take their allotted course. There must be no artificial stimulation, no short cuts, no illusions whatsoever — real experience according to the laws of nature afforded the prime base upon which all matters, including the suffocation-confinement, must be ordered.

Of course, it had been argued that illusions were illusions according to natural laws — after all as themselves the illusions they occurred within the machinery of natural minds, they did not occur anywhere else — but nevertheless the highest intendants clung to the conception of an arbitrary norm which they styled as the real experience of a majority. Yet — came the constant complaint — how could any majority be proved more real than its minority? People on the sliding scale between the flesh and the spirit were difficult units with which to deal — there might be more of one sort but was it the right sort? What was the evaluation of a 'real' person. There might, for instance, be a majority of units far too fleshy — but this majority though convincingly numerous might also be convincingly sub-real? In a ceaselessly changing world among ceaselessly changing inhabitants, who was real, at what stage, now? Glib answerers maintained easily that there was no change, that the old world was the same and that human nature never, never changed. And that was the kind of answer given by the intendants, who, at this stage of their doctrine, smiled with pitying distaste at their interlocuters, raised their white eyebrows and sucked at their hollowed cheeks, invoking then such ready panaceas as 'common sense' or even — could this veil a conspiratorial return to the flesh? — 'horse' sense.

However, such problems did not concern Margherita as she watched the artisans finally stand away from, their task and then survey the fitment with satisfaction. They turned to Margherita with smiles, as though wishing to be congratulated on their skill, and for her part Margherita thanked them, nodding her approval and smiling into their faces. For some minutes the three of them chatted about the manometer; then the artisans began to wander about the room, fingering the bed and the walls awkwardly, now quite plainly worried as to how they might take their leave. Margherita, too, found their company increasingly irksome — there was an emptiness now in their relations with her, almost as though they had left her already. No longer had the three of them a mutual interest. The only subject of meaning to all of them, the manometer, had been exhausted. The atmosphere became really embarrassing, so that Margherita felt almost glad when the three artisans in the corridor began to yawn very loudly, and finally to summon the two inside, complaining that there were many other duties to perform, that valuable working hours were being lost.

The two inside leapt at this chance, they jostled each other in their haste to bid Margherita farewell. In a few seconds they had disappeared through the remaining slit in the wall. Margherita was relieved to see them go. Only when the final board was being nailed into place did she raise one hand towards them in a slight gesture of restraint. Then she wanted the two artisans back. But then it was too late. She was alone.

For some minutes she stood in the centre of the room, slowly tasting the new silence, the breathless silence, and the first sensations of being quite alone. The four walls, the floor, the ceiling — in fact six walls and their eight immaculate corners. Her eyes slowly roved these surfaces, one by one, and then suddenly she realised their similarity — there was no opening whatsoever, no familiar shut door, no window frame, only the plain unrelieved walls. It seemed impossible, no place could be like this. Perhaps there was a door behind her. Her senses told her there must be a door. She spun round — to face a wall. The door was eluding her, it contrived to exist behind her all the time! But spin as she might the door was too clever — it disappeared every time, just in time! Once she thought she had caught it in the corner of her eye, a misted rectangle just fading, like a shadow left on the eyes by a strong light. Several times she pretended to turn one way, then suddenly spun round in exactly the opposite direction. She tried even to disguise her thoughts, as if the ominiscient door could read her mind. But every tactic proved useless — the door was too clever by half!

Then she looked up at the concealed channels from which the light came — it seemed to her that the fanning of this light might be heard. She strained her ears. Yes — a buzzing, a slight continuous whirring! For a moment her striving senses brought this companionable sound, but as her hearing relaxed so the noise faded, there had been no noise after all, nothing there but silence, a silent light, motionless, painted.

She shrugged her shoulders. The room was impassive. Nothing moved, it projected no character whatsoever. It was bare, yet compact. It gave no sign of warmth, but was not cold. It echoed no sounds, nor did it consume sound. Whatever happened in that room happened by itself without the aid of the room, against a neutral background that neither projected nor absorbed. Margherita walked over to the bed and sat down. Her footsteps clattered on the linoleum an exact sound, un-echoed, unmuffled. She rested her head on her hands and stared at the floor. What was there to do?

Yet the room without character seemed nevertheless to be alive, to contain invisible and inaudible motions, as if its function were to hide things going on just outside its walls. It radiated the impassive energy of a surgeon's waiting-room with its connecting door shut and watchful; it was like the interior of a large refrigerator, where there was no actual movement but the sensation, almost perceptible, of ice forming somewhere behind the walls, perhaps within the walls themselves. Of course, there lay also about this room a strong foretaste of doom — that was only natural, and Margherita felt it herself, though as yet she had not been moved by any deep apprehensions, remaining so far resigned beneath the weight of inevitable traditions. For all their massive ponderance, traditions such as these impose themselves gracefully, their approach is foreseen, they come slowly, with no sudden shock, with the footless tread of encroaching lava.

She rose from the bed and went over to the manometer. Through its brass screen the dial could be seen distinctly, its needle steadily pointing to a number, never quavering, encircled steadily by imperturbable spikes of enumeration that, of course, never moved. This girdle of numbers, some red, some black, lay engraved and meaningless. The units rose in hundreds, their many 'O's' and the enormous aggregate signified nothing to an imagination accustomed to count in simple threes and fours. These figures were vacuous, inestimable. If they expressed anything to Margherita, they expressed only an infinite plenty — thousands of 'O's' to go before anything could happen, thousands of pounds of oxygen to eat, hundreds of cubic hours to pass. Margherita turned away from this impossible instrument, walked over to the electric fire, switched it on, careless that the ravenous little filament would squander her oxygen, careless with her wealth of hours.

Many years had passed since Margherita's novitiate, she was quite accustomed to solitary confinement. The idea of loneliness held no terrors for her. She went to the prie-dieu and on her knees addressed a prayer to the organization in which she believed. Presently she rose and went again to the bed. There she sat in contemplation. The glowing filament burnt at her air, a quiet and hungry bar of vermilion silently murdering her. But Margherita hardly thought of this acceleration; really she had not yet appreciated that she was about to die. She had often considered death, but never her own. She could never imagine her own death, in fact she had never tried — the idea was inconceivable. Even now there was no startling evidence to direct her thoughts. She was whole, healthy, fed, warm, breathing. Her hands were still hands, they told her beads, each finger was as sensitive as ever; her body filled the inside of her, she felt the usual pains in her left shoulder and a cramping discomfort down on the left of her back; her mouth felt pleasantly fresh, her eyes a little tired; this was her body as she had known and felt it inside her every day. The idea of its disintegration simply could not occur to her. Despite the disciplines of humility, an animal self-confidence assured her of life; her entity lived; and since its function was to live it could not consider itself dead, nor would it be capable of beginning to think in so negative a direction. Certainly these present surroundings implied death to her thinking brain. But here also she was deluded, for the tradition and its ceremonial had outpaced its truth, so that now only the idea was true.

Nevertheless after some hours Margherita became restless. She had meditated but had not been able to lose herself in meditation. This was ordinarily a difficult exercise, but today the power eluded her altogether. Something distracted her. Perhaps something in the room? But why, she thought, should this pleasant little room prove so distracting — it was like all the other little rooms in the building? Yet unlike the others this room disturbed her. Then she realised — it was of course the absence of windows. She thought: 'Alone in my ordinary cell, however absorbed I become in my meditations, I am always accompanied in some measure by the presence of the window. A little square of sky, a little square of the infinite.' (But there was more to it than that. There were the small shadows, for instance, that surround all windows — the shadow just above the top frame, where in all the room the shade seems deepest, and again beneath the sill where it is really deeper, for the floor reflects no light. Windows and doors are deeply impressed in the child's first consciousness; they are the exits to mysterious regions, the entrances through which the first shapes of terror may approach, the first images of love. They are more than doors and windows, they are rectangles of infinite drama, mystery, and hope. They remain forever a mental comfort; one should never move far away from these facts perceived in the first moments.)

Margherita stared with greater curiosity at the green distemper surrounding her. She saw this closed expanse for the first time windowless. The first feelings of uneasiness disturbed her, so that still seated in an attitude of meditation her eyes glanced quickly from one side to the other, urgently revealing their whites, her eyes moved but her head remained still. Deprived of meditation, the full vacuum of these enclosed hours revealed itself to her. This artifice for solace had crumbled, she did not know how else to occupy herself, she had no further means. Loneliness descended and, thrown open against herself, she looked down at her monotonous empty hands and at her feet without direction. She could see, as if they were plainly laid out in layers, the hours that remained for her in the little room — an endless staircase of hours, not descending, as in reality they must, but instead ascending. She could see the stretch of these hours but never the limit. Because they had really to be experienced now, minute by minute, they appeared endless; outside the room, thinking of another in her position, she would plainly have seen the limit, she could have contracted the period into a reasonable perspective for criticism. But now she was the subject, the hours had no clear ending, indeed life itself seemed monotonously long.

Then, strangely, this very idea that life was endless provided it with an ending. By 'endless' she had really meant 'of immeasurable length'. But by virtue of not being able to measure the tedium, and thus endowing it with a proportion, though of a length unendurable, she had really now envisaged an absolute length — and a length must have an end. So for the first time she saw the possibility of an end to life. Perhaps, appalled by the great staircase of hours, she began to hope for an end, and her wish enabled her to feel it quite clearly — so clearly that, if those misted hours had really formed a staircase, she might have seen the fringe of the topmost carpet, the brass rods, the level space of the landing. But the hours were not of carpet; they were a misted succession of grey apprehensions formed sometimes into the letters of the word 'hours', sometimes with no form but only weight, and so the final hour could never be seen but only perhaps felt; she was still defeated by the appearance of the final hour, death was still inconceivable.

Yet… she had felt the idea of death, if not of her own death. She could think of death on the one hand and of herself on the other, and know that these two ideas were related, although perhaps she could see no form to the link. And so, sitting on the green bed, her hands still clasped, in the lonely room where nothing moved, not even the heat, not even the light, where everything was quite still, where she alone could be heard to move and the rustle of her gown sounded deadly exact and solitary — there Margherita began to pity herself. She could say to herself: 'I am to die.' And now, in a remote way, to feel this, to regret it as the first unshed tears began to swell below her throat. She felt suddenly small, neglected, abandoned by those she had known and the environment that had nourished her. She had been left alone! Not one of her sisters cared, perhaps they had even ceased to think of her. She crossed the linoleum to the prie-dieu and tried again to pray. But 'I am to die', she thought.

All through her prayers she felt the weight of death. 'This person, this "me" that I am, this familiarity of hands and memories and close wishes and dry disgusts, this well-shaped shadow lying about my inner thoughts — all this is going to die. It will cease to be. There will be nothing more of it.' Then she thought through the words and the half removal of herself in prayer: It cannot be?' And then: 'But what of God?' 'Where will God be if this "me" ceased to pray beneath him? I feel Him in my prayer, it is in my thoughts that He takes a shape. If, then, there is no me to feel Him…?'

Many hours later she crossed herself and rose. Her mind had grown drowsy, the air before her eyes had become confused and thick. Perhaps a glass of water? She went to the bed and looked for the jug. There was bread laid out — but where.? They had forgotten to leave her a jug. That was too bad! To think that they had forgotten such a vital detail of ceremony! Such casual behaviour belittled the ceremony. Could the ceremony have been as important as she had imagined? Perhaps they had not thought it worth while to devote their energies to the ceremony, perhaps they were impatient for other things. It might be that even now one of them — perhaps the Mother Superior herself — had remembered the jug and had personally questioned one of the artisans; yet even if the artisan had answered truthfully, which was to be doubted under the circumstances, then it was probable that the Mother Superior had nevertheless dismissed the question of the jug from her mind at the first opportunity. It was plain that her old companions had no further interest in her, their thoughts had skipped easily away to other matters. She, Margherita, was finished with. They had even hurried the ceremony of finishing her, so that an important detail had been neglected, and this showed that Margherita had been forgotten even before they had gone. How thoughtless these people were, how treacherous their affections!

Margherita felt this neglect deeply. Now that the ceremony had been exposed as unimportant, it seemed equally unimportant that she should die. It seemed now to be a mistake, and without point. All her efforts were to be of no purpose, she would die unseen, unheard, unfelt for, even unremembered. Hopelessly she took up the bowlful of daisies and drank the bitter yellow water from among the stalks, several of which fell untidily across her face as she drank.

She replaced the bowl and her eyes remembered the manometer. She hurried quickly clicking over the linoleum and peered through the brass shield.

She gasped — with surprise, with shock, with fear, and then for the first time for breath itself. The manometer needle had advanced to within only ten units of the blue-starred danger mark! Soundlessly, with no show, no hesitant jerk, slowly it had revolved on its inexorable sweep, sweeping down the units with its remorseless steel stick. If it would quiver!' Margherita thought. 'But it's steady, steady as the hand on one of those electric clocks. You can't see it move,' she whispered, the words chasing themselves fearfully, 'yet it moves; you can feel the time shortening; but from minute to minute you can't see how short it is; for as soon as you fix on a minute it has gone; the hand has already approached some seconds farther on.' She put her fingers to her face, scrambling at her features, as if she needed in some way the reassurance of their shape. 'And what happens? Does the speed increase? Still imperceptibly, but nevertheless increase? Does the pressure rise at the compound speed?'

Her hand on her face came away wet, as streaming wet as if she had stroked a rain-spotted windowpane. She gasped for breath. Then, trying to concentrate, she took carefully exercised long breaths and paused in between these with her lungs empty. She seemed to be breathing not air but weight. It was so heavy to breathe, it took a pull — she perspired with lack of breath. Then, suddenly agile, like a cat wide-awakedly springing from half-sleep, she whisked her arms at the cord of the electric fire — the plug snapped out and rolled on the linoleum with an empty clatter. To have left on that bar biting through the precious minutes of her oxygen! She stared down at the plug, panting, her hands with their white scrubbed knuckles clenching and unclenching.

Why had she attacked the cord so savagely? Because the air in the little room had grown hot, uncomfortably hot? Because the needle's advance had thrust her suddenly far up her staircase of hours, so that this sudden proximity with the end had flooded her with an equally abrupt desire to live? She had not felt this desire before. In the endless hours death had seemed remote, inevitable, but remote. Now it was dangerously close. She looked in all directions, moving her head slowly in the heat, but with thoughts that raced, to find at all costs a way of spinning longer the hours she had wished to compress. But these hours were now remorselessly compressed about her ear, they weighed above her eyes in the blanketing air, air that was thinning yet thus grew thicker, and her eyes finally returned to the needle, which even in that short time had encroached upon two further units.

Desiring life, her regrets took form. She no longer pitied herself as one neglected. She strove now strongly to recapture what might have been. Her regret now consumed the past: 'What I could have done — in that long time!' The sensation of growing physically smaller which had distinguished her mood of self-pity now reversed itself in these positive regrets; she felt herself grow larger with the striving of thought, her mind attacked, she summoned at each possible resource, she seemed to grow large with the strength to attack. The time that had been wasted, the opportunities missed, the effort unpractised! Now in the shortening moments she thought back upon her past as a compartment of time whose every minute should have been utilized with faultless efficiency. She imagined only an inexhaustible energy that had been voluntarily let to waste; slj* forgot the necessities of rest, of disorder, of lethargy, of me'an-choly, of digression — all the negative inclinations through which incomplementary struggle the positive energies exist. No, in Margherita's sweating, panting, leadening brain there thrummed only the one-faced regret that the minutes should have been more used. She could have done this, she could have done that; she could have planted this avenue of limes, she could have blessed that maritime charity; she could have proceeded with her journal, she could have seen to the re-equipping of the dairy; she could, standing on a hill once at dawn, have appreciated more fully the message of the iridescent skies, she should then have exerted her senses so that forever after she could have re-created that dawn; she should have multiplied her lover by many lovers; or she should have disdained him, incarcerating herself within a shell of virtue shaped by tireless impeccable effort. Whatever it was, she had left it undone. However much she might have done, she could have done more. However much she had seen, she had not felt deeply enough. However much she had felt, she had not stored those feelings deeply enough.

As again she rose the bed groaned — the sockets of its wooden frame seemed to complain beneath an invisible pressure. She dragged over the short linoleum journey to the manometer. Her feet lifted heavily, every such effort was made beneath a great weight. Her head nodded. She had made the journey from bed to manometer many times. Each time, even as her steps grew slower, as the needle swept closer, even within an ever-increasing desire to lie down and sleep — her desire for life mounted. As she looked through the engineer's brass at the dial she saw the needle encroaching, as steadily as the sun's shadow, upon the second unit beneath the blue stars.

Gasping, with slack shoulders, she dragged the prie-dieu from its place and set it by the manometer. She knelt beneath this dial and stared, not for a moment longer daring to leave it. Who knew whether the needle might not suddenly spring forward? If she stared, she could superintend its motion and know intimately the speed of her decline.

As the oxygen thinned and the pressure weighed more heavily, as the time shortened and the blue stars approached, as the units increased their pace and her grasp for life fought at their speed to slow it — sorrow for the past changed to a more virile regret for the future. The vague images of matters in which she was not ordinarily interested suddenly enthused her — the building of the new wing at the southerly aspect of the old convent fortress; how appalling that she would never, never see this! The installation of an electric laundry — this would occur, many other changes would occur, but she, dead Margherita, would never, never see them. Gripping the sides of the prie-dieu and staring through the brass shield she thought then of the problems of doctrine, of behaviour, of prayer that would now never be solved. She thought with growing envy of the great goodness of life, the browning bloom of autumn fruit, the ice-slush on the February roads, the draughts of winter, the huge dusty leaves shading their green midsummer trees — and above all the skies that went with the seasons, the skies to which she had looked for consolation… a thousand good things she would never feel nor see again. She would never see them. There was no hope left. Yet — it was still inconceivable that there should be no hope! Hope was bred in her living veins. But a new weight of reason was cruelly forcing at her senses, crushing out hope. With her pale scrubbed nails she began picking at the little brass wires of the shield. One fingernail weaved like a worm through the square and thrust itself straight at the needle, smelling at it, but yet inches away. Her mouth began to mumble, sagging, letting water.

How many hours had she endured in that room? A hundred? Days perhaps? There had been no measurement. The last hour of all dropped its lead on her nodding neck, she slipped from the prie-dieu on to the floor. Her finger pointed still at the manometer, but weakly. Her veil fell aside, revealing the nunnish pate bald as an ant's egg. An intolerable weight of sleep pulled her down, pulled at her eyelids, her puffed breathless lips, the muscles in her blueing cheeks. She forgot about the future.

Her eyes craved only for some taste of the present, the sight of birdflight, the colour of a flower, the pressure of her man's arms, the lick of fruit. How strong these could have tested! Her lips opened and her tongue came swelling out, eve. fattening, gently to lick the air.

The vision of the taste of fruit faded, as in their order the wish for the future had faded, the regret for the past, her first incapacity to believe in death; and now lastly as a swimmer out of her depth she began to struggle, her fore-brain gone, only now like an animal, thoughtless but to move, the instincts alone in charge. The naked head lurched from side to side, her arms weaved slow frog movements, weakening at each thrust. Before long they stopped moving altogether.