THE ALPS
Jack’s eyes popped open. It was country black. He couldn’t remember where he was. He couldn’t see the ceiling or his hand in front of his face. Then he remembered: he remembered Gaston’s light-hearted threat of murder and that the reason he had woken was because he had heard a noise in his sleep.
There were no street lamps for miles. He strained to enlarge his pupils, to draw in any ebbs of natural light there were, but his entire field of vision was pure blind black. The drapes were so heavy they were blocking out even the scant mountain starlight.
He kept still, straining to recapture the sound he had heard. Perhaps it had been nothing more than the moo of a cow; this was a farmhouse. There was sure to be any number of strange noises in the span of night; except this hadn’t sounded like a moo. Even asleep he could remember enough to know it wasn’t a natural animal sound. It had been more like a clunk; and nearby; in the house; maybe even in the room.
It was natural to hear things at night. There was no crime in getting up to visit the toilet. It didn’t mean that Gaston was stalking through the gloom, coming to kill him.
There wasn’t a recurrence of the noise: no distant cars down in the village, no birds or cows or sheep. Then a creak came, loud and close, breaking the silence completely; not just in the house; in the same room as him: a floorboard creak no more than five paces away.
Jack lifted his head off the pillow. His eyes hadn’t become any more accustomed. He still couldn’t see the slightest contour to any objects in the room. “Hello?”
Like the creak, his voice sounded loud against the back-cloth of nothingness. It went out to meet the opposite walls of the little attic room then came back to him unanswered.
“Is someone there?”
The creak came again, a deeper, longer sound like the croak of a dying toad, and this time it wasn’t five paces away. It was on the floor right beside the bed.
Jack tried to get up but he couldn’t move. Sudden absolute childhood terror had taken the strength from his torso. This close now he could sense the mass of the intruder even though he couldn’t see him, parting the air with his body, rustling it with his dry silent breath. Jack tried to speak, to create a sense of normalcy if nothing else – somehow if someone were speaking then this night-time terror might vanish – but his vocal chords only quivered and gave out a moan.
Then the mattress shifted, creasing as the intruder sat down beside him on the bed. There was absolutely no doubt now. If he’d been able to move he could have touched the intruder or pushed him away but he couldn’t. The intruder was sitting on the covers at Jack’s waist, pinning his arms underneath them. The distributed pressure of the trapped covers pressed him down into the bed like belt straps in a loony bin.
He tried to speak, tried to move, but he couldn’t.
The intruder shifted his weight toward Jack’s head, tilting. He wasn’t even a silhouette against the sloped ceiling. Jack’s entire sight was a bland boneless sheet of black. He could feel the intruder’s breath against his eyes, light and subdued, not laboured in the least. Then words, in the inevitable whispered French accent of Gaston: “I warned you about sleeping in the house of a man obsessed with killing.”
Jack couldn’t move. He couldn’t speak.
An edge, a taut edge, came down against his throat. It pressed harder and started to hurt: a blade. Gaston pushed it against his skin.
The skin started to break.
Then Jack woke up.
For real this time, covered in sweat, the bedclothes pushed into an ugly misshapen fan at the bottom of the bed. There was no Gaston; no blade at his throat; no impenetrable darkness. It had been nothing but a nightmare, but even so Jack could feel exactly the same sensations: the pressure, the cut of the blade, the breath on his eyes, the sound of Gaston’s voice. He could feel them as clearly as if they had really just happened. It didn’t seem possible that it was only a dream. But dream or no, it was built inside a cage of anxious danger, the reality of his current life.
It was irrational. Gaston wasn’t a killer. He had only been joking.
But Jack still couldn’t escape the feeling of impending danger nevertheless.
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