The Ninth Nightmare

the bathtub.

‘Who’s there?’ he shouted. ‘What the hell are you doing?’

He took hold of the doorknob again and twisted it, but the door was either locked or jammed. He heard more squeaking and more knocking, and then, suddenly, a woman moaning. Her moan started off quite shivery and low, ohhhhhhhhhh, as if she were calling out in dread; but then it grew increasingly shrill and panicky, and then she started screaming at the top of her voice, and begging ‘No! No! Please don’t do that! No! Please don’t do that!’

Lincoln rattled the doorknob and beat on the door panel with his fist.

‘Who’s in there? Open up! What the hell are you doing? If you don’t open up I’m going to call for security!’

The woman’s screaming went on for four or five more seconds, accompanied by what sounded like bare heels drumming against an empty bathtub. Then, just as suddenly as the noise had begun, it stopped, and there was silence.

Lincoln waited, his ear close to the door. He tried the doorknob again, and this time the door unlatched, and opened. Inside the bathroom it was completely dark.

‘Who’s in there?’ he repeated.

There was no reply, so he pushed the door open a little further. He could make out the edge of the bathtub now, but it wasn’t the shiny white-tiled bathtub that he had been expecting to see. It was an old-fashioned high- sided tub, on four lion’s-claw feet, with two large old-fashioned faucets, both of them dripping. By the light that was shining into the bathroom from the bedroom, he saw that the tub was filthy. The sides were streaked with runnels of black and gray dirt, and the enamel inside was decorated with dark brown spatters and diagonal runs and dozens of handprints, as well as a thick greasy tidemark.

There was nobody lying in the tub, however. He must have imagined all that screaming and thumping. Nobody could have jumped out of the tub that quick — and where would they have hidden themselves, even if they had?

In the far corner of the bathroom, high up on the wall, there was a small grimy window, but even though the window was so dirty Lincoln could see that it was daylight outside, even though it was almost quarter of eight in the evening. He could hear a very faint pattering, too, which sounded like rain. He frowned. It had been very windy when he went outside to try and talk to Grace, but it had been totally dry.

He pushed the door open all the way. It met with some resistance; there was a sodden stained bath-towel lying twisted on the floor, as if somebody had been unsuccessfully trying to clean the tiles with it. The tiles themselves were mottled green, with brown splashes across them, and a complicated pattern of bare footprints, pointing every which way, as if somebody had been dancing around the bathroom without their shoes on. They were small and narrow, like a woman’s feet, or maybe a child’s.

Lincoln took a cautious step forward, and as he did so he saw that there was a shower stall on the opposite side of the room — a shower stall whose glass door was so filthy and fogged up that it was impossible to tell if there was anybody in there. He strained his eyes in the gloom, however, and he thought he could make out a dark hunched shape inside it, but he guessed it was probably nothing but a shadow. There was a toilet beside it, with its mahogany seat raised.

The smell in the bathroom was sickening — like drains clogged up with slimy gray human hair and unflushed urine that had turned dark amber, and something else, too — a horrible thick sweetness that filled up his nose and his throat and made him feel like gagging. It reminded him of the bathroom in his boyhood home in the Brightmoor ghetto — the bathroom in which his older brother Nelson had died on the toilet of a heroin overdose.

The question was: how had his pristine white-tiled hotel bathroom turned into this? There was only one door to the bathroom, so he couldn’t have chosen the wrong door by mistake. And even if he had, he couldn’t imagine the Griffin House Hotel leaving any bathroom in such a disgusting condition.

He pulled the light-switch cord. As he did so, and the fluorescent lights popped on, he saw that he must have been suffering from some kind of an optical illusion. The bathroom was pristine. The bathtub was shiny and white, with gold-plated faucets. The hand basin was sunk into black streaky marble, and next to it there was a guest amenity tray with complimentary bottles of shampoo and body lotion and aftershave. The shower stall was sparkling clean, with an engraving of seagulls on its frosted glass door. There were towels, but they were all fluffy and dark green and neatly arranged on a heated towel-rail.

Lincoln stared at himself in the mirror. He was surprised by his own lack of expression. He placed his left hand on the marble surround of the hand basin and it was cool and polished and indisputably real. With his right hand he turned on one of the faucets, and that was real, too. The filthy, old-fashioned bathroom had completely disappeared — if it had ever existed at all. This bathroom even smelled good, like green tea bath oil.

‘You’re losing it, Linc,’ he told himself. He went over to the toilet, lifted the seat and relieved himself. He kept on staring at himself as he washed his hands. ‘You’re really losing it. You’re working too hard, that’s what’s wrong with you. You’re always living on the edge. You got to chill, bro.’

He left the bathroom and closed the door behind him, although he didn’t turn the light off. He stood for a while at the end of his bed, his head bowed, trying to untangle his thoughts. Then he went over to the phone and pressed nine again. It could be that when he had tried to get an outside line before, he had been suffering from the same delusion that had made him believe that his bathroom was so slummy.

This time, he managed to get a dial tone. He punched out his home number and waited while it rang. It rang and it rang and he had almost given up hope that Grace was going to answer when the phone was picked up.

He said, ‘Grace honey, it’s me! Sorry I took so long to call you back.’

There was a long silence, and then he heard the same man’s voice that he had heard before. ‘What did I tell you, Lincoln? What did I specifically tell you? Were you not listening to me, or what? ’

‘Who the hell are you?’ Lincoln demanded. ‘What the hell are you doing in my house? Where’s my wife?’

‘I’m not in your house, Lincoln. I’m much closer than that. But I specifically told you not to go back to your room, didn’t I?’

‘You listen to me, if you think you can bump my dome you got yourself another think coming. I’m going to track you down, dog, and I’m going to come looking for you and believe me you’re going to wish you never got on to my phone line ever.’

There was another sharp hiss of white noise, and then the line returned to its monotonous crackling. Lincoln said, ‘Damn,’ and then, ‘damn,’ and hung up. He thought maybe he should try his cellphone just once more. If he couldn’t manage to talk to Grace then at least he should be able to send her a text message.

He looked around the room. Where the hell had he left his cell? Then he remembered. He had put it down beside the hand basin in the bathroom, and forgotten to pick it up.

He went back to the bathroom and opened the door. He had opened it only two or three inches, however, before he stopped himself. He had made a point of leaving the light on, but now the bathroom was dark again. Not only that, he could smell that appalling stench of blocked drains and ageing urine and whatever that terrible sweetness was.

He hesitated for a very long time. Then he reached his hand inside the door and groped around for the light cord. He found it and tugged it but it didn’t work. The fluorescent tube must have burned out.

Come on, Linc. Just go in and pick up your cell. You’ve seen for yourself that there’s nobody in there.

He opened the door wider and stepped inside. But there was no cellphone lying beside the hand basin because there was no hand basin, only that old-fashioned bathtub with all of its splashes and drips and its dozens of handprints. He hunkered down to see if his cell might have dropped on the floor, but there was no sign of it. It must be here in this bathroom in some reality, he thought, but it sure isn’t here in this reality.

He stood up. He didn’t have any choice now. He would have go to the reception desk, not only to see if he could get through to Grace, but to ask them if he could change rooms. There was no way he was going to sleep next to this bathroom, not in a million years. It was not only filthy, it was scary, too. How could it be daylight in here when it was dark outside? How could it be raining when he knew for sure that it