Page 5

Only after we were both inside did I look around the room. There wasn’t really much to see; it was small, unfurnished, and the floor was wet with water, some of which had blown in through the window and the rest dripped off our raincoats. On the far wall a door stood open.

"You got a torch?" I asked. Somehow, I hadn’t thought to bring one, probably as a result of the hurry in which I’d packed that morning. "We’ll probably need a torch."

"Yes, I have one here." He fished a small blue torch out of his bag, which threw a wavering pencil of light. "Sorry, but that’s all I have."

"Can’t be helped," I said. "It’s better than nothing." We followed the torch beam through the far door and into a corridor, which ended in stairs leading up. With the slightest hesitation, for I hadn’t quite shaken off the curious feeling that had come on me at the sight of that open window, I started up the stairs, Bimohot following behind me. He was holding the torch, and its light wavered between my legs and threw strange shadows on the stairs. I felt like asking him to give it to me, but it was my blunder in not bringing my much larger and better flashlight, so I didn’t say anything.

I’d expected the stairs to end in another corridor, but instead it terminated in a landing with a single door, on the right. When I tried it, with a very slight squeak, it swung open.

It was a surprisingly large room, because the torch didn’t light up the far wall, but then it threw a weak little beam anyway. There was no furniture, and the floor was bare and made of something that looked faintly glossy, like black glass. Apart from a highlight here and there, it swallowed the torch beam completely.

"Must be some kind of marble," I hazarded, poking at it with the toe of my boot. It wasn’t as smooth as it looked – it wasn’t slippery and it felt like a concrete floor to my foot. But I also realised another strange thing. "There’s no dust on this," I added.

"What?" Bimohit’s voice sounded curiously muffled, though he was just behind me. "What did you say?"

"I said, it’s strange that there’s no dust." I glanced over my shoulder at him, and there was another odd thing, something so odd that I was at a loss to explain it. "Bimohit," I said, "just turn your torch back the way we came."

I had to repeat it before he understood, and turned the beam of the torch back. As I’d thought, we couldn’t see the door through which we’d come, or even the wall, though we certainly hadn’t walked so far into the room that they were beyond even the torch’s feeble glow. I frowned, wondering whether to try and retrace our footsteps. But there didn’t seem a point to it; going back would only put us back on the landing.

We continued across the black glassy floor, the torch striking little rainbow-hued highlights from it, until I began to wonder just how large the room was. Surely it couldn’t still be going on? Were we walking round and round in circles in the middle of the floor, disoriented in the darkness? I said something of the sort to Bimohit, but he didn’t reply.

Suddenly, I began to feel that there was something in the room with us, in the darkness overhead. I could almost see it in my mind’s eye, hanging from the ceiling somewhere above us, like a gigantic bat, watching us through a picture made of sound. I could almost hear the rustling of its gigantic leathery wings, as it shook itself and prepared to drop on us in a swoop. For a moment, I almost froze in panic.

But that panic lasted just a moment, because Bimohit’s torch just then illuminated a wall. The sight of that wall served to drive the fear out of my mind as if it had never been. I almost laughed aloud at the thought that I’d been so spooked by a mere fancy. I must have made some sound, because Bimohit asked me what I was sniggering about. That was when I also realised that I could hear him clearly again. The curious muffling effect had vanished.

Following the wall, we soon came to a door. It looked to me like the door through which we had entered the room, open as we’d left it. But there was a faint light coming through it, as of daylight filtered through clouds and filthy glass, so it couldn’t have been that door; and in any case I had no desire to cross that glassy black floor again. So, with scarcely a backward glance past Bimohit into the darkness, I stepped through the door.

[ Continue to page 6 ]