In the room, they talked – just the two of them – in total darkness, harrowing through the losses, the hurts, the threats.

The room – thick, black walls, cement floor – came with the house. Its usage shifted over the years, from bomb shelter to darkroom to wine cellar. They left it empty when they first moved in. But one night, standing in the room, deciding how it could be used – maybe laundry, maybe storage – they began to speak in the dark – about memories and dreams, shards of images arising from within. She told him her nightmare of a horse on fire. He told her of a cockroach he’d once found on his pillow that crawled into his sleep, night after night. They spoke for hours. Over the days and weeks, the room became their refuge and they retreated to it often – whenever their fear overcame them and they couldn’t tolerate what was above.

They could have talked to each other anywhere in the house. The bedroom was spacious and full of light, the kitchen warm and cozy with a round breakfast table – the perfect place to sit and chat over coffee. They never did. He fixed his gaze on the news, she scrolled through Facebook and Twitter. The few words exchanged in daylight were the dull currency of praxis, the normal and the dead.

When they went down to the Night Room, they would shut the door, sit on the plain wooden chairs they’d placed in the middle of the room, and speak quietly to each other in the gentle siege of dark.

They spoke of shocks, of moments that had twisted their lives, affinities that were new and unfamiliar to them. She spoke of a wild yellow dog with black eyes, a terror that stalked her by day and by night. He told her of an ant he’d once burned with a magnifying glass – how the ant shriveled in the tiny sun he’d created, the singed legs curling up, the thread of smoke. His horror at what he’d done. They never spoke of the strangeness of the Night Room; they spun a world out of the dark. It became their home.

And if one of them was worried about the threat, they spoke of that too – as an old vengeful workman going round from house to house, smashing windows, or as a cloud of locusts. And they would speak to each other until their ragged feelings could be sewn up smooth, simply by listening. At times, they sat in purest silence and didn’t speak at all.

After weeks and months, they spent so much time in the Night Room, they no longer felt comfortable anywhere else in the house. They shuffled about in it and hardly spoke. Didn’t look where they were going and sometimes bumped into each other on the stairs. They were strangers to the house and barely spoke to each other, even when they needed to. She would pick up a cracked vase and put it back down on the mantle. He would stand and stare out the bedroom window and then draw the curtains.

They took to writing messages on the kitchen table with a Sharpie, the walls of the kitchen bristled with sticky notes. They stopped cleaning the house, stopped doing laundry.  Rarely went out, except to do shopping. The fridge broke down. They didn’t get it fixed. A leak from a bathroom pipe soaked through the kitchen ceiling, spreading into a wide stain and dripping onto the kitchen floor. He placed a plastic bucket under the drip, and they retreated to the Night Room and had a long rambling talk about furies and sirens, dark seas, wooden ships. The earth shedding its skin in volcanic ash. The river of Xanthus. The time it took a giraffe to swallow. Blood skies.

Their dreams crept with the living creatures of their long, fathomless talks. Myrmidons marched, horses with manes of fire ran fearless across open fields and dry river beds, bright ribboning sunsets scattered a rum light on calm seas and bathed their fears in long-reaching shadows. So that they would awake refreshed and ready to descend again to the basement.

They spent hours and hours in the Night Room, until eventually, most of their day and night was lived there. They brought down a mattress and a blanket and only went upstairs to use the washroom or eat. Once when they went upstairs, they found some chicken bones, a blue raincoat and a trilby hat on the kitchen floor. He put a padlock on the door of the Night Room, a deadbolt and a chain lock so no beast, no phantom could enter. They carried down packages of food. He drilled a small hole through the brick wall to the outside to let some air in close to the ceiling.

Sometimes, in the middle of the night, they could hear creaking noises as the wooden stairs warped. Once they heard a ripping sound as if someone was shredding paper. And always the drip-drip of water into the bucket in the kitchen above. One night the living room window smashed and the wind flew in and howled through the empty house above them. He boarded the window the next morning but didn’t have enough wood to cover it, so merely placed two planks in a big X across the empty space. He didn’t clear up the shattered glass. From that time on, they heard the steps of animals, the clicking of their nails on the linoleum floor of the kitchen.

On a morning that they didn’t know was morning, they ran out of food. They were sitting on the floor of the Night Room, their legs stretched out, their heads lolling. They dozed and exchanged single words or names, a wake of silence flowing behind each one. Then, after a long drowsing stillness that lasted days, they felt a weight pressing down from above, as if the ceiling were sinking, and the air in the room thickening. And then – a long slow groan of agony as if the floors and walls above them were bending and collapsing. For many hours they endured this pressure, this noise.

Finally, he unhooked the chain lock, slid the deadbolt across, and opened the door. He didn’t say if he would return. She heard his cautious steps on the basement stairs. Then, quiet. His slow steps returning. He came back into the room, locked the door, drew the deadbolt across, and sat beside her, holding her close.  

– Rosalind Goldsmith