A motionless man stands alone in the hall, the foundations of his thick legs sunk into dusty boots. Bleak electric light illumines a galaxy of emulsion, pebble-dashing the grey overalls that are stretched taut over the barrel of his middle. His fingers, stained as if by a baker’s flour, droop from the weight of the tools they barely hold. A hammer within the unclenching left fist. Suspended from the idle digits of the right hand, a small axe.
Below eyes stricken wide with terror, a tear of cream paint dries upon a cheekbone. Enlarged to voids, his pupils absorb the sight of what hangs from the ceiling of the hall.
A noose.
Beneath the newly painted ceiling, below the rope’s end, his own collapsible aluminium steps have also been repositioned to create a scaffold for the condemned. Folded white dust-sheets fashion a path from the kitchen door to the ladder.
DIY gallows.
Tools and the scattered detritus of plaster dust, timber offcuts and tongues of dirty wallpaper litter floorboards blackened by age. One half of the hallway is pristine and issues the sheen of fresh paint. The other half hasn’t heard the whisk of a paintbrush, or felt the slop of a paper-hanger’s paste, in decades. A house of halves. The present and past huddled together.
The loop and knot of the noose are fashioned from the white electrician’s cable of the light fitting – his cable that he threaded yesterday . But this man did not tie the end of this wire into a noose. Nor does he know when it was fashioned. He lives alone. But other hands made certain that the cable intended to bring light into this reception area now serves to usher a terrible darkness into the space. And in the house he’d hoped to call home, before the threshold he’s secured with crossed planks of wood, the slack loop of wire beckons him to bow for a fitting.
An urge to blink the sight away, or close his eyes, is overcome by the same compulsion that bid him leave the kitchen, walk in here and behold this . One foot simply followed the other before caution and restraint fired the first warning shots.
With growing difficulty, the man’s lips move to ask a question of himself, or the house, or the gods. ‘Inside? How…’ And then, as if to his invisible executioners, a simple, piteous entreaty dies inches from his tongue. ‘Please.’
A brief struggle commences within his frantic thoughts before his body jolts rigid. And like a man who finds himself upon ice, spider-webbing beneath his heels, he stumbles forward.
One grubby hand twitches, drops the hammer. Bang. From the second hand, the axe handle slips. Clump. And inexorably, against their own volition, his feet scuff the white path of linen and carry his heavy body onwards.
Towards the metal steps that climb to the noose, he goes unwillingly. Face bulging the purple of kidneys, he is a prisoner who strains desperately to free himself. His own will is bound by a knot of iced rope that ratchets yet tighter to tug him forward. To the noose.
Begrudgingly, he mounts the metal stairs. All three unto the summit.
Tinker-creak. Tinker-creak.
No louder than the sound of air squeezed from a valve in a rubber tube, his voice wheezes, ‘Not this… I’ll go… Promise.’
Under duress from his shifting weight, as he assumes the required position upon the platform, the gallows moan. And his hands, which might as well belong to another man, carefully collar his neck with the noose. They tuck the pebble of the knot under his jaw. Then tighten the cord about his bristly throat and nape.
As he powerlessly watches his first foot venture out and hover in thin air, the ladder’s protests subside as if the steps themselves are holding their breath.
With one foot on and one foot off the trapdoor, a whimper escapes the man’s thin lips. His first boot prods out further and plants its weight upon empty space, pulling the second boot into the very last stride these legs will ever take.
A vegetable sound of twisting fibres obliterates the silence of the hall. A trickle of plaster-dust sugar coats the scalp of the hanged man.
Screened upon the pale wall he painted expertly, his shadow kicks a jig. Steel toecaps rake the air, rubber soles run across nothing. A foot then sweeps in a half-circle and knocks the steps. And as he turns upon his throttling tether of sealed, waterproof cable, his engorged face drifts. Within what remains of his eyesight, now darkening from the pressure of the blood that cannot escape his skull, a pale smudge disinters itself from the wall near the kitchen door.
Within the shadows, inking the waters of the dangling man’s vision, most of the intruder’s form remains indistinct. But what can be seen steps birdlike and probing. Then stops. A thing girlishly thin and chalky in half-light. Only the head is dark. And tatty and showing too many teeth.
Standing upon one leg, the intruder points at the hanged man.
The momentum of his soundlessly stamping boots turns the hanged man about-face until he confronts the threshold once more, so recently barricaded to keep them out. His final kick disperses a shower of urine across the bare floor and jerks him around a second time. But this time, what’s left of his sight only glides over bare walls and an empty kitchen. There is no one there. Nothing at all to see before his own light goes out.