 
The Black Room, Part One: In the Black Room

By Luke Smitherd

Copyright 2013 Luke Smitherd

Smashwords Edition

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior written permission of the author, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the purchaser.

Adapted cover image of "A stamp printed in Monaco shows Study for Woman's Head by Leonardo da Vinci, circa 1969" Used under licence from DepositPhotos.com.

All characters in this publication are purely fictitious, and any

resemblance to real people, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
Books By Luke Smitherd:

Full-Length Novels:

The Physics of the Dead

The Stone Man

Serial Novellas

The Black Room, Part One: In The Black Room

The Black Room, Part Two: The Woman In The Night

The Black Room, Part Three: The Other Places

The Black Room, Part Four: The End

Novellas

The Man On Table Ten

For an up-to-date list of Luke Smitherd's other books, his blog, YouTube clips and more, visit www.lukesmitherd.com
The Black Room
Part One: In the Black Room

By Luke Smitherd
Contents

Acknowledgements

Chapter One: An Unexpected Point of View, Proof That You Can Never Go Home Again, and The Importance of the Work/Life Balance

Chapter Two: Minnie Leaves a Calling Card, If You Don't Want To Know the Result Look Away Now, and Charlie Sits Alone In the Black Room

Dedicated to all the strangers that backed my two other novels. There wouldn't have been a third one if you hadn't let me know that you were out there.

Acknowledgements

At the time of writing, the following people wrote a nice Amazon.com or co.uk review of _The_ _Stone Man_ , or sent a kind e-mail. It means an immense deal, not only practically—reviews mean people are far, FAR more likely to buy a book—but personally, as disappointments are abundant in the writing game, so any encouragement is amazing to receive, especially from strangers. I'm using here either the name you put in your Amazon review, or a shortened version if you sent me an e-mail. I don't want to ruin any witness protection programmes that might be in progress.

Thanks to:

R C Mansfield (I remembered this time) Ms Natasha Moore, K Murphy, Mr Timothy W Dawson, David A Willson, Andy, Boney D, seemore, A. C. Clarke "Hal 9000", karlos the jackel, Chezisme, scrooby1, adamb1980, Guy Beauchamp, T, Daisy, VB, D. Macauley "Don", Katyia, Mr De Graff, Carl Law, M Hands, katrina, Andrew, renee, and to everyone on the 'Luke Smitherd Book Stuff' Facebook page that took the time to share the link and help promote the book. And of course, as always, to Angela, for constant encouragement and unfailing belief, and to Pete Robinson for proofreading. If you notice any typos or grammatical errors in this thing, it's because he failed to spot them...
Chapter One: An Unexpected Point of View, Proof That You Can Never Go Home Again, and The Importance of the Work/Life Balance

*****

Charlie opened his eyes and was immediately confused. A quick reassessment of the view, however, confirmed that he was right; he suddenly had breasts. Not very noticeable ones, perhaps, but when he'd spent over thirty years without them, even the appearance of a couple of A-cups was a real attention grabber. As he continued to look down, the very next thing to come to his attention was the material covering them; a purple, stretchy cotton fabric, something he had never worn, nor had he ever harboured any plans to do so. As he watched his hands adjust the top, he came to the most alarming realisation of all; those weren't his hands doing the adjusting. The giveaway wasn't in the slenderness of the fingers, or the medium-length (if a little ragged) fingernails upon their tips, or even in the complete lack of any physical sensation as he watched the digits tug and pull the purple top into position. It was the fact that, whilst they were clearly stuck to the end of arms that were attached to his shoulders (or at least, the painfully skinny shoulders that he could see either side of his head's peripheral vision; his shoulders were bigger than that, surely?) they were moving entirely of their own accord.

He was so stunned that he almost felt calm. The bizarreness of the situation had already passed straight through _this is crazy_ and out the other side into the utterly incomprehensible. Charlie stared dumbly for several seconds as his mind got caught in a feeble loop, trying and failing to get its bearings ( _What ... sorry, what ... sorry, WHAT ..._ ) Whilst, in that moment, he never really came any closer to coming to terms with the situation, his mind did at least manage to reach the next inevitable conclusion: this wasn't his body.

The loop got louder as these unthinkable, too-big-for-conscious-process thoughts instantly doubled in size, but got nowhere ( _WHAT ... WHAT ... WHAT THE FUCK_ ). All Charlie was capable of doing was staring at the view in front of him as it moved from a downward angle, swinging upwards to reveal a door being opened onto a narrow hallway. A second doorway was then passed through, and now Charlie found himself in a bathroom. He wanted to look down again, to see the feet that were carrying him forward, to help understand that he wasn't doing the walking, to aid him in _any_ kind of conscious comprehension of his situation ... but he quickly realised that he couldn't affect the line of sight in any way. The viewing angle was completely out of his control. Instinctively, he tried to commandeer the limbs that were attached to him, to move the arms like he would have done on any other minute of any other day since his birth, but there was no response. There was only the _illusion_ of control; the moment when one of the hands reached for the door handle at the same time that he would have intended them to, as he reflexively thought of performing the motion simultaneously. What the fuck was going on? _What the fuck was going on?_

The crazy, unthinkable answer came again, despite his crashed mind, even in a moment of sheer madness—what other conclusion was there to reach?—as he saw the feminine hands reach for a toothbrush on the sink: he was in someone else's body—a woman's body—and he was not in control.

Incapable of speech, Charlie watched as the view swung up from the sink to look into the plastic-framed bathroom mirror, and whilst he began to notice the detail in his surroundings properly—tiny bathroom, cheap fittings, slightly grubby tiles, and candles, candles everywhere—the main focus of his concern was the face looking back at him.

The eyes he was looking through belonged to a woman of hard-to-place age; she looked to be in her mid- to late-twenties, but even to Charlie's goggling, shell-shocked point of view, there was clearly darkness both under and inside her green eyes (physically and metaphorically speaking) that made her look older. Her skin was pale, and the tight, bouncy, but frazzled curls of her shoulder-length black hair all added to the haunted manner that the woman possessed.

All of which Charlie didn't give a flying shit about, of course; thoughts were beginning to come together, and his mind was already rallying and coming back online. Whilst Charlie would never describe himself as a practical man, having spent most of his life more concerned with where the next laugh was coming from rather than the next paycheque, he had always been resourceful, capable of taking an objective step backwards in a tight spot and saying _Okay, let's have a look at this._ Whilst he was beyond that now—had he been in his own body, that body would have been hyperventilating—he was now aware enough to at least think more clearly. As the woman continued to brush her teeth, Charlie watched, and thought the one thing to himself that instantly made everything else easier:

This is probably a dream. This is fucking mental, so it's got to be a dream. So there's nothing to worry about, is there?

Whilst he didn't fully believe that—the view was too real, the surroundings too complete and detailed, the grit and grime too fleshed out and realised—it enabled him to take the necessary mental step back, and put his foot on the brake of his runaway mind a little.

Okay. Think. Think. This can't actually be happening. It can't. It's a lucid dream, that's what it is. Calm down. Calm down. That means you can decide what happens, right? You're supposed to be able to control a lucid dream, aren't you? So let's make ... the wall turn purple. That'll do. Wall. Turn purple ... now.

The wall remained exactly the same, and the view shifted downward briefly to reveal an emerging spray of water and foaming toothpaste. The woman had just spat.

_Right._ _Maybe it's not quite one of_ those _dreams then, maybe it's just a very, very realistic one. Don't panic. You can prove this. Think back. Think back through your day, think what you'd been doing, and you'll remember going to bed. What were you last doing?_

He'd met the boys, gone for a drink—excited about the prospect of one turning into many—the first night out for a little while. Clint's mate Jack had been over from London too, which was both a good excuse and good news for the quality of the night. They had ended up on a heavy pub crawl, and somebody had said something about going back to their place ... Neil. That guy Neil had said it. And they'd gone to Neil's, and then ...

Nothing. Nothing from there on in. And now he was here. As he felt hysteria start to rise, escalating from the panic that he already felt, Charlie frantically tried to put a lid on it before it got badly out of control.

You passed out. You had some more to drink and you passed out. That's why you can't remember what happened at Neil's, and this is the resultant booze-induced crazy dream. So wake up. Wake your ass up. Slap yourself in the face and wake the fuck up.

Charlie did so, his hand slamming into the side of his head with the force of fear behind it, and as the ringing sting rocked him, he became aware that he suddenly had a physical presence of his own. If he had a hand to swing and a head to hit, then he now had a body of his own. A body inside this woman's body? Where the hell had that come from?

There'd been nothing before, no response from anything when he'd tried to move the woman's arms earlier. He'd been a disembodied mind, a ghost inside this woman's head, but now when he looked down he saw his own torso, naked and standing in a space consisting of nothing but blackness. Looking around himself to confirm it, seeing the darkness stretching away around him in all directions and now having a body to respond to his emotion, Charlie collapsed onto an unseen floor and lay gasping and whooping in lungfuls of nonexistent air, his body trembling.

His wide, terrified eyes stared straight ahead, the view that had previously seemed to be his own vision now appearing suspended in the air, a vast image the size of a cinema screen with edges that faded away into the inky-black space around him. Its glow was ethereal, like nothing he'd ever seen before. How had he thought that had been his own-eye view? It had clearly been there all along, hanging there in the darkness. Had he just been standing too close? Had something changed? Either way, there was no mistake now; there was just him, the enormous screen showing the woman's point of view, and the black room in which he lay.

Charlie pulled his knees up into a ball and watched the screen as he lay there whimpering. That slap had hurt badly, and instead of waking him, it had added another frightening new dimension to the situation. He was terrified; he lay for a moment in mental and physical shock, and for now, at least, everything was beyond him. The words that he feebly tried to repeat to himself fell on deaf ears— _it's a dream it's a dream it's a dream_ —and so he lay there for a while, doing nothing but watch and tremble as the woman made a sandwich, checked her e-mails on her phone, and moved to sit in front of her TV. She flicked through channels, thumbed through her Facebook feed. As this time passed—and Charlie still watched, incapable of anything else for the time being—he came back to himself a little more. He noticed that, whilst he was naked, he wasn't cold. He wasn't warm either, however; in fact, the concept of either sensation seemed hard to comprehend, like trying to understand what the colour red sounded like. Thoughts crept in again.

You can't actually be in her head. You can't actually be INSIDE her head. People don't have screens behind their eyes or huge holes where their brain should be. You know that. You haven't been shrunk and stuffed in here, as that's not possible. So this ... HAS ... to be a dream. Right? You have a voice, don't you? You can speak, can't you? Can you get your breath long enough to speak?

Charlie opened his mouth, and found that speech was almost outside of his capabilities. A strange, strangled squeak came out of his throat, barely audible, and he felt no breath come from his lungs. He tried several more times, shaping his mouth around the sound in an attempt to form words, but got nowhere.

_Focus, you fucking arsehole._ Focus _._

Eventually, he managed to squeak out a word that sounded a bit like _hey_ and, encouraged by that success, he tried to repeat it. He managed to say it again on the third try, then kept going, the word getting slightly louder each time until something gave way and the bass came into his voice.

"Hey ..."

With that, the ability to speak dropped into place, even if getting the hang of it again took a real physical effort. He at least knew _how_ to do it now, his mind remembering the logistics of speech like a dancer going through a long-abandoned but previously well-rehearsed routine. He looked out through the screen with sudden purpose, determined to find out if she could hear him.

"Hey ... _hey_ ..." he gasped, his lips feeling loose and clumsy, as if they were new to his face. Charlie sat up, hoping to get more volume behind it, more projection. He thought he had to at least be as loud as the TV for her to hear him, if she was capable of doing so at all.

" _HEY_ ," he managed, but there was no external response. Charlie's heart sank, and he almost abandoned the whole attempt. After all, it was easier and more reassuring to resign himself to the only real hope that he had; that this truly _was_ a dream, and thus something he could hopefully wait out until his alarm clock broke the spell and returned him to blessed normality. Things might have turned out very differently if he had, but instead Charlie found the strength to kneel upright and produce something approaching a scream.

" _HEY!!_ " he squawked, and fell back onto his behind, exhausted. Staring at the glowing screen before him, dejected, Charlie then saw a hand come up into view, holding the remote control. A finger hit the mute button.

Charlie froze.

The image on the screen swung upwards, showing the white ceiling with its faint yellowing patches marking it here and there, and hung in that direction for a second or two. It then travelled back to the TV screen, and as the hand holding the remote came up again, Charlie realised what was happening and felt a fresh jolt of panic. Without thinking, he blurted out a noise, desperately needing to cause any kind of sound in an attempt to be heard, like a fallen and undiscovered climber hearing the rescue party beginning to move on.

" _BAARGH!_ _BA BA BAAA!"_ Charlie screeched, falling forwards as he almost dove towards the screen in his clumsy response to the images upon it. The hand hesitated, and then the view was getting up and travelling across the living room and down the hallway. It looked like the woman was going to look through the spyhole in her front door, and as she did so, the fish-eye effect of the glass on the huge screen made Charlie's stomach lurch. He still saw the fairly dirty-looking stairwell outside, however, and realised that the woman was inside some sort of apartment block.

Charlie stared, trying desperately to pull himself together, and assessed the situation. She could hear him then; but she certainly didn't seem to be aware that he was there. So she could be as unwilling in all of this as he was?

It'sadreamitdoesn'tmatteranywayit'salladreamsowhocares—

He didn't believe that though. He just couldn't. There had to be some sort of explanation, and he couldn't be physically _in_ her head, so this was ... an out of body experience? Some sort of psychic link?

Charlie surprised himself with his own thoughts. Where the hell had all of that come from, all of those sudden, rational thoughts? True, he'd been confronted with something so impossible that he didn't really have much choice but to look at the available options, but ... was he suddenly adjusting again? When this all started, he didn't even have a body, but one quickly appeared. Was his mind following suit? He was still trembling, his shoulders still rising and falling dramatically with each rapid, shallow in-breath of nothing, but his mind was at work now; the shock had seemingly been absorbed and moved past far more quickly than it should have been, he was sure. Would he be this rational already if he were in his own body? Whatever was going on, being here was ... different. He felt his mental equilibrium returning, his awareness and presence of mind growing. He was scared, and he was confused, but he was getting enough of a grip to at least function.

You have her attention. Don't lose it.

He opened his mouth again, got nowhere, reset himself, then tried again.

"Lady?"

The view jerked round, then everything in sight became slightly farther away, very quickly; she'd spun around, and fallen backwards against the apartment's front door. The view then swung sharply left and right to either side of the hallway, looking to the bathroom doorway and then to the doorway of another, unspecified room. Charlie assumed it was a bedroom. He tried again.

"Can ... can you hear me?"

The view jerked violently. She'd clearly just jumped out of her skin, her fresh adrenaline putting all of her physical flight reflexes on full alert. It was a dumb question to ask—she obviously could—but even with his growing sense of control, Charlie's mind was still racing, his incredulity at the situation now combining with the excitement of finding that he could communicate with his unsuspecting host.

It was clear that she was terrified, and Charlie realised that he couldn't blame her. She was hearing a voice within the safety of her home when she'd thought that she was by herself, and Charlie could only guess what it sounded like to this woman. Did his voice sound as if he were right behind her, or was she hearing it actually coming from the inside of her head? Charlie couldn't decide which would be worse.

Get a grip, man. Of course she's going to shit herself when you start talking to her. Just ... try and think, okay? Think straight. You have to get out of this. You need her to talk to you; you need her if you're ever going to get this sorted out. Get a grip, get control, and think smart.

"Please, it's—" He didn't get any further as the jump came again, this time with a little scream; it was a brief squeal, clipped short as if she were trying to avoid drawing attention to herself. Charlie jumped with her this time, startled a little himself, but pressed on. "Please, _please_ don't be scared. I'm shitting myself here too. Please. Please calm down—" The second half of this sentence was lost, however, disappearing under a fresh scream from the woman. This time it was a hysterical, lengthy one that travelled with her as she ran the length of the hallway into the living room, slamming the door behind her. Charlie heard her crying and panting, and watched her thin hands grab one end of the small sofa and begin to drag it in front of the door. The scream trailed off as she did so, and once the job was done, the view backed away from the door, bobbing slightly in time with the woman's whimpering tears and gasping breath.

Charlie was hesitant to speak again; he knew that he simply had to, but what could he actually say without sending her off into fresh hysterics? The answer was immediate; nothing. There was no way to do it easily. She would have to realise that she was _physically_ alone at least—and safe with it—and the only way to help her do that was to keep talking until she accepted that there was no intruder in her home.

Not on the outside, anyway.

"I need your help," he tried, wincing as the view leapt almost a foot upwards and then spun on the spot, accompanied by fresh wails. "Please, lady, you're safe—" The cries increased in volume, to the point where he had to raise his voice to be heard. In doing so, Charlie realised that he now had his voice under complete control. And wasn't the blackness around him a fraction less dark now, too? "Look, just calm down, all right? If you just listen for two seconds, you'll find that—"

" _Fuck ooofffff!!_ " she screamed, the volume of it at a deafening level from Charlie's perspective. He clapped his hands to the side of his head, wincing and crouching from the sheer force of it. It was like being in the centre of a sonic hurricane. _"Get out of my flat! Get out of my flaaaaaaat!!!"_

"Please!! Please don't do that!" Charlie shouted, trying to be heard over the woman's yelling. "Look, just shut up for a second, I don't _want_ to be here, I just want to—"

" _Get out! Where are you? Get out!! Get oooouuuuuttt!!"_ she yelled, ignoring him, and as the view dropped to the floor and shot backwards—the living room walls now framing either side of the screen—Charlie realised that she'd dropped onto her ass and scooted backwards into the corner, backing into the space where the sofa had previously been. Frustrated, terrified, in pain and pushed to his limit (it had been one hell of an intense five minutes, after all) Charlie let fly with a scream of his own, hands balled into fists over his throbbing ears.

" _JUST SHUT THE FUCK UP FOR A SECOND!!"_ he screamed, and whether it was from using some volume of his own, or because her own screams were already about to descend into hysterical, terrified and silent tears, the only sound after Charlie's shout was that of the woman's whimpers. The view still darted around the room though, trying to find the source of the sound, a source well beyond her sight.

Charlie seized his moment. At the very least he could be heard, and _that_ hopefully meant he could start talking her down. She was more terrified than him—of course she was, at least he'd had time to get used to the situation whereas she'd just discovered an apparently invisible intruder in her home—but he had to get through to her whilst she was at least quiet enough to hear him. Hysterical or not, she had ears, even if he appeared to be currently stood somewhere in between them.

"Look, I'm sorry for shouting like that, I just need you to listen for a second, okay? Just listen," Charlie said, as soothingly as his own panicking mind would allow. "I'm not going to hurt you, okay? Okay? It's fine, you're, uh... you're not in any danger, all right?"

"Where... where are you? _Where are you?_ " the woman's voice sobbed breathlessly, small and scared. Her thinking was clear from the confusion in her voice; she was finally realising that she should be able to see the person talking to her, that there was nowhere in the room that they could be hiding. Charlie thought quickly, and decided that it was best to leave that one for a minute. He'd only just got her onside, and didn't want to push her over the edge.

"I'll tell you in a second. I'm, uh ... I'm not actually in the room, you see. You're alone in the flat, and you're safe. You're fine. Okay?" She didn't reply at first. The sobs continued helplessly, but Charlie thought that they might have been slightly lessened, if only due to confusion.

"Wha... what?" she stammered, the view swinging wildly around the room now. "Your voice... what the fuck... _what the fuck is going onnnnnn...._ " And then she was off again, the hysterical screaming coming back at fever pitch. Charlie stood in front of the strange, glowing screen, his hands at his ears again whilst she bawled, blinking rapidly as his mind worked. After a moment or two, his shoulders slumped and he sat down. There was nothing he could do but wait, and let her adjust. His own breathing was beginning to slow further, and he was finding acceptance of his situation to still be an easier task than he thought; whilst it was no less mind boggling, his panic was dropping fast, and unusually so.

_It's being in here that's doing it._ _It has to be._

Either way, he let her have a minute or two to calm down. Eventually, he stood and began to pace back and forth in the darkness—illuminated dimly by the unusual light of the screen—whilst he decided what to say next. His frantic mind kept trying to wander, to seize and wrestle all the aspects of the situation into submission, and failed every time.

You don't like the dark. You don't like the dark! Don't think about it, don't think about it... think about ... wait... there's no breeze in here, no echo. It really is a room of sorts then, a space with walls on all sides?

He looked out into the darkness, looking for walls, and saw none; there was only seemingly endless blackness. Charlie thought it would be best not to go exploring _just_ yet. Instead, he tried to control his breathing, and quickly ran through a mental list, double checking his actions and decisions of the previous few days before his night out:

_Went to work._ _Did the late shift._ _Argued about sci-fi films with Clint._ _Helped Steve throw the drunk arsehole out that had started slapping his girlfriend._ _Went home, stayed up and watched a film because I had the Wednesday off. Met Chris in town—_

And so it went on. By the time he'd finished a few minutes later—whilst he was no clearer about what had led him to be inside this woman's head—he told himself that he really _did_ feel more capable of beginning to deal with things, and less frightened; in the absolute worst case, even though he didn't believe this to be the _actual_ case, this situation was real, and had to be resolved. If he'd got in, then he could get out, and if this was the _best—_ and more likely—scenario, where this was all just a dream, then he would wake up and all would be well.

Yeah. And if I had wheels, I'd be a wagon.

Charlie took a deep breath, and decided to speak again.

"Are you okay?" he said. The view jumped again, along with a fresh scream.

For fuck's sake.

"Look, we're not going to get anywhere if you keep doing that," Charlie said, not being able to keep the frustration out of his voice. "I'm sure you're a smart person really, so just knock the screaming and shit on the head and we can work together to sort this all out, right? For crying out loud, if I'm not _there,_ I can't exactly do anything to you, can I? I know you're scared, and I know this must have been a hell of a shock, but I'm not exactly a million dollars myself right this minute. So, please... come on. Just... have a minute, sort yourself out, and then we'll... then we'll carry on," he finished, shrugging his shoulders in annoyed impotence. He knew that he was perhaps being a little harsh, but he couldn't help thinking that he had a bit of a flake on his hands here. Being scared was one thing, but a complete collapse like this was another.

_Don't be a dick, Charlie,_ he reprimanded himself. _You don't know what she's been through before now. You might be squatting in her head, but you don't know anything about her._

It was a fair point. She seemed to respond better to his last outburst though, and the sobbing was now drying up into skipping little breaths. She wasn't responding to his annoyance, Charlie thought, but it might have been the honest approach that got through. Sometimes people just appreciated it.

"Your voice..." she said, and her own was steadier, but uncertain. "Where—" She hesitated, seeming to try and find a different question to ask, something else to say that would stop her from repeating herself. She gave up. "Where are you? Where... where _are_ you?"

She's not going to drop that one. Would you, in her shoes?

Again, a fair point, and Charlie decided that the honest approach had seemed to work before.

"Look... okay, I'll tell you," he said, trying to find words to describe the impossible, "and I don't understand it in the slightest myself, but it's... it's pretty heavy shit, okay? I mean, well, I don't mean heavy as in serious, as I've no idea what _it_ really is, but I mean heavy as in... hard to get your head around. It's... _weird_. And we can't be having any of the freaking out stuff you were doing earlier, okay? I need you to work with me. Okay?"

Silence.

"Okay?"

Another pause, and then the view nodded quickly; a rapid, brief up and down motion that would have been barely noticeable to an outside observer, but seemed to Charlie as if her flat had been caught in an earthquake.

"Okay," she replied quietly, her voice breathy and small.

"Right..." said Charlie, speaking slowly and trying to prepare each word carefully. "I don't know how this has happened, or why, but the last thing I remember is being on a night out with my mates, we were out in... wait ... hang on, where is this? Where do you live?"

"Huh?"

"Which city? Which city are you in right now?"

"Coventry."

"Jesus! That's where I live!"

"... okay."

In the brief pause that followed whilst she waited for him to continue, his mind grabbed the thought and filed it away for later. It might be relevant. Maybe they'd been somewhere in the city, been _through_ something, something that caused a connection...

It's a dream, remember? This is down to cheese and too many pints, or a bad kebab.

He dragged his wandering thoughts back on track, and continued.

"Anyway, _anyway_ , we were out in Cov, and then we went back to someone's house, and then, I don't know, I must have fallen asleep or drank too much or whatever, but somehow... _some_ how..."

He stumbled, tripping at the vital hurdle.

"What?" she asked, the view still scanning around the room, as if hoping to find the answers there.

"Ah... ah _fuck_ it, look, I, I, I woke up or whatever and here I am, in your fucking head. I don't know how I got here, and hell, I might be gone in the next five minutes for all I know, but I'm here, I'm in your head, here I am. That's it."

Silence again. Then:

"You're... you're what?"

"I'm in your head. I'm stood here, in front of this, this..." He waved his hands in front of the immense, ethereal screen before him, taking it in as yet another rapid flicker shivered across it. These had been happening constantly; later he would realise that this effect was due to her blinking. "This screen thing, okay, and everywhere else in here it's just black, and I'm stood here, completely..." he trailed off, looking down at his genitals and deciding that it would probably be best not to mention the nakedness to a scared woman who is stuck in a flat on her own, "... completely without any idea as to what's going on."

Silence again. Then:

"A screen... there's a screen in my head?" she asked. "What... what screen, what the hell are you talking about?"

Charlie rubbed at his face, angry now, both with himself and her. Of course she didn't get it, it was un-gettable, but she wasn't even coming _close_ to understanding and he was doing a lousy job of explaining it. He needed to get the important facts across if they were ever going to move on, and spare her the more intricate details. He needed a different approach.

"Look, don't worry about that, forget it, forget it. Listen. Right, okay, I'll start again. My name is Charlie. Charlie Wilkes. What's yours?"

There was a long, uncertain silence.

"Minnie," she replied, her voice shaking again. She was about to go any second, he could tell.

Talk her down.

"Are you scared to talk to me?" asked Charlie, as tenderly as he could manage. "You don't have to be. Talk to me. What's your surname? You might as well get used to talking to me, you know, as we need to talk to sort this all out, yeah? Come on. What's your surname?"

"I don't... I don't like to..." the tears were coming again, and Charlie knew he needed to stop this fast before she lost it.

"It's okay, have a second—" he began, but she cut him off, her voice rising.

"If I talk to you... it'll get worse... I think it's finally happening, I think it's finally happened and you're not real and I'm going cra-ha-ha- _haaaAAAAAAA_ —" and then she was gone, wailing again... but this time it was different. This time the screen went black and the sobs became muffled, turning into the low, mournful cries of someone who has given up. She'd dropped her head into her hands or onto her forearms, with her eyes squeezed shut as she cried, cutting off Charlie's view of the outside world. He realised in that moment why her earlier reaction had been so severe; this was someone not entirely comfortable in their own mind, someone already scared of finding voices in their head or visions of things that aren't there. He didn't have time to dwell on that, however, as he realised that Minnie's eyes being shut meant that he was now swallowed by total darkness. Terror came rushing in, threatening to take him and ruin the small amount of progress that he'd just made.

"Minnie, trust me, you're not going crazy," Charlie said, raising his voice almost to a shout to be heard over her noise. "I know it _sounds_ crazy, this whole situation is crazy, but I promise you I'm the real deal! Okay? My name is Charlie Wilkes, I work in a pub—Barrington's, you know Barrington's?—I support the Sky Blues even though I never go to the Ricoh, I grew up in Oxford, I moved here, what, ten years ago? I like, ah, I like movies and books, uh, I like, I like music... _shit,_ who doesn't, okay, I like cheese, and I hate getting up early! The last film I saw was _The English Patient_ on Blu-Ray, the, uh, the last thing I bought from the shop was a Pepperami and a can of Sprite! My favourite place to eat in Cov is the Ocean Restaurant, and I didn't vote last election day because I forgot to get to the polling station in time... okay? Is any of this getting through to you?"

"... _you're not real..."_

"I _am!_ I promise I am! Look, if I wasn't real, right, and you were genuinely going crazy, don't the voices in crazy people's heads tell them to go and kill people, shit like that? Tell them that the government is run by lizards, and that they're Jesus come to, to, I dunno, stick forks in their asses? Well I'm not saying any of those things!"

Ease off, for God's sake. Don't start attacking her again.

"Look. All _I'm_ asking you to do is listen to me. That's it. That's it. You know what, absolute worst case, you've gone nuts and you have a voice in your head. But it's not a nonstop voice, look, I can be quiet if you want, listen." Charlie stopped talking for a good thirty seconds before speaking again. "See? And I'm not nagging at you to do bad things. So it's not that _bad_ of a bad thing, worst case. And best case... I'm telling the truth, and you and I can figure this out together. Okay? So just, you know, chill out for a moment, take a nice deep breath, and let's talk."

He took a few deep breaths himself, trying to keep a grip—it was hard enough for him to keep it together, let alone having to try and do it for two people—and waited for her response. He closed his eyes, trying to pretend that the now-complete blackness that he saw all around him was of his own choosing, and that he could bring the light back any time he wanted. Her reply eventually came, so quiet that he could barely hear it even inside her head.

"Sorry?" he said, feeling suddenly hopeful. "What did you say? I didn't catch that sweetheart, I—" He jumped back as the screen blazed into life, her eyes opening as her head came up. He didn't have time to revel in the sudden return of the light, as her anger was already being directed at him.

" _Don't_ fucking call me sweetheart," she snapped, her voice immediately strong. "I'm not your sweetheart, and I have a name. It's Minnie. I told you. Okay?"

_Jesus,_ thought Charlie, kicking himself. He'd meant it as a term of endearment, trying to get her onside, and hadn't meant to patronise or insult. However, it seemed to have given her more of a kick up the arse than anything else he'd said so far, shunting her frightened mind back online.

"Okay, okay, fair point, I'm sorry," he said quickly, taking it back. "I just didn't catch what you said, that's all I meant." She hesitated to respond again, however, making a small noise in her throat that Charlie couldn't discern. Was she mollified by his apology or... embarrassed by her aggression? Whatever it was, the sudden fire in her seemed to have died down as quickly as it arrived, as if she'd forgot, then remembered, the situation that she was in.

"I said my surname," she said quietly. She _was_ embarrassed, Charlie could tell.

"Okay, sw—Minnie," Charlie said, correcting himself. "What is it?"

There was a heavy outlet of breath, and then something surprising; laughter, if a little snuffly in its execution. The light from the screen flashed off and on as she wiped her eyes.

"I don't like to tell people really, but I don't know why I'm embarrassed to tell you because obviously I've finally gone loony and you're not even real," Minnie said, laughing again and sniffing some more as she cleared the last of her tears. It was sad-sounding laughter, but there was also release in it, speaking to Charlie of an inner strength pushed beyond its emotional limits. There was another story here, Charlie knew, one that would have to wait. He decided that it was best to play along.

"That's right, you've gone crackers and I'm the result. Talk about adding insult to injury, eh?" he offered, smiling despite himself, and was rewarded with a small bark of continued laughter, sniffling and nervous, the view shaking back and forth as she shook her head resignedly.

"Yep, that's right... Charlie, was it?" she said, looking up at the ceiling. "Sounds like a name I'd give to my lunacy-powered imaginary head-buddy. Jesus..." She let out a sigh that ended in a final sniff. "Okay, _Charlie_ , stand by to yuck your socks off like everyone else has my entire life, then ask the questions. Ready?"

Charlie wondered what the hell she was talking about, but didn't want to interrupt her flow.

"Yes. Ready."

"My full name... is Minnie Cooper."

Charlie stared at the screen, suddenly lost for words. This had to be a dream, then.

"Are you... are you ser—"

" _Yes_ , I'm serious, my dad thought it would be funny, _yes_ , my brother is really called Tommy, even though he insists on being called Tom, _no_ , I don't like it, _no_ , I won't change my name as it'd really upset my dad, _yes_ , people find it funny, and _no_ , I've never owned one. I think that's all of the usual questions. Got any others though?" she finished, sighing and chuckling in the quiet manner of someone who doesn't actually find anything in a sickening situation funny.

"No, I think that's all of them," Charlie said, sitting down and realising that they were finally having a conversation. "Well, I'd say it's a pleasure to meet you, but given the circumstances, I think that'd be a lie."

"Uh-huh," said Minnie with a sigh, the view leaning back and looking at the ceiling. "Keep talking, this really is something else. A real first, I have to say. Just ... great. Fucking _great_."

"It's for real, Minnie, I promise you. You have to take me seriously. Please."

"Don't worry, Chuck, I'm all ears. Go for your life."

Charlie winced.

"Do me a favour, will you?" he asked, scowling slightly.

"For you? Anything. Just name it."

Ignoring the sarcasm, Charlie responded.

"Don't call me that. It winds me up, and I'm stressed out enough as it is."

" _You're_ stressed? Ah wait, of course you are. You're stuck in my head. You just don't know what to do with yourself, you little tumour you. I always thought that when my brain eventually went, it'd be a sudden haemorrhage, but I guess I'm going the slow way. Marvellous. Perfect way to leave a legacy, ending up wandering down the high street in my knickers, makeup smeared all over my face and babbling to invisible Chuck."

Ignoring the deliberate jibe, Charlie took in the room in front of him whilst he thought of his next move. It was as shabby as the bathroom, with a threadbare carpet and faded paint on the walls. A small table with two chairs stood in the opposite corner, and a bookcase—a full to capacity bookcase—was placed in front of the eastern wall. A fairly old TV stood in the corner to their left, with a knotted rug placed in front of it. She had done her best to make it homely, though; the candles were again in abundance, and there were many small picture frames all over the walls, each one with a candid photo of people she presumably knew. They were all quite faded, however, suggesting they hadn't been updated in some time.

Charlie realised that he was going to get nowhere unless he convinced her that he was for real, and so he turned his attention to finding a practical method for this. Almost immediately, he thought of one. He hesitated before asking the question, being forced to go somewhere he never really liked to. It had been a while...

"Can you drive?" he said, trying to keep the tremor out of his voice and quietly hoping the answer would actually be no. She sniffed in response, and drew in a breath.

"I clearly shouldn't be allowed, but yes..." she replied, her voice quiet and croaky like she was trying to hold back more tears. Charlie's heart sank a notch. _Dammit..._ he'd been hoping they'd have to take the bus. He _always_ avoided being in cars.

"Where do you want to go?" Minnie continued. "I'm assuming this is the start of the bloody ... killing spree, right? Drive the fucking ... Fiesta through Tesco's shop window?" Her hand dragged across the bottom of the screen as she wiped her nose. Again, Charlie found himself wondering where he physically was; how could he be stood behind her eyes? He couldn't be. The screen would have to be, again, just a strange representation of them then?

_First things first, Charlie. Plus, it's a dream, don't forget that,_ the voice in his head said ... but it sounded less confident than ever. Then Charlie realised that he was listening to a voice in his _own_ head, and quickly pushed that thought away before his mind blew.

"My house. We'll go to my house," he said, firmly, pleased with his own idea and finding it infallible. "I'll tell you where the spare key is, and you can go in, hell, I'll tell you the password to my PC, you can go in there too ... all stuff that you couldn't possibly know. Right? And then you'll have to believe me. Okay? And then we can decide if this is, I dunno, a psychic link or an out of body experience or whatever, and then decide what we do about it. Tell me what's wrong with that, eh?"

Silence again, followed by another sigh and a headshake. Charlie was about to do some shouting of his own, when the view began to rise from the floor.

"Okay, whatever you say, Chuck, it's not like I had any other pla—sorry, Charlie, Charlie—let's go for a road trip. At least I'll have some company."

"You're up for that? That's great. Do you... do you have a car of your own?"

"Only just, but yes. Hopefully it'll get us around Coventry and back."

_Great. An_ _old banger as well._ _This just gets better_ , thought Charlie, trying to smother his usual anxieties.

"Where the hell are we going, anyway?" Minnie asked.

"Radford," said Charlie, relieved at least that they were making progress and pushing thoughts of the dreaded passenger seat out of his head. A thought struck him. "Where are we at the moment, anyway?"

"Canley," she said, moving to pick up a black woollen coat from the living room table. "Costa Del Canley. Not too far ..." she caught herself, and gave a hollow laugh. "So it shouldn't inconvenience you too much." Then, quietly to herself: _"What the fuck are you doing, you crazy bitch ..."_

They moved into the hallway and the mirror came into Charlie's view, showing Minnie's face again. It was now red-eyed, with blotchy pink patches on her skin.

"Jesus, look at the state of me," she said, sarcastically, running her hands through her tight curls. "I'm in no state to be seen out and about with my very own man-in-the-head. Girl-about-town, man-in-the-head. Not every day I get to do this sort of thing, right?" Her face crumpled slightly for a second, about to go again, but she swallowed it back. She stared into the mirror for a moment, and as Charlie watched he was suddenly struck by an uncanny sensation.

It was only brief, but for a second Charlie had the utter conviction that he recognised her; that he knew her face like that of an old, long-forgotten friend, reduced to a hazy memory by a distance of years. Then just as quickly, the moment was gone, and Minnie was yet again just a stranger whose life he'd been thrown into.

"Charlie?" Minnie said, in a small, suddenly scared voice. _Or maybe not suddenly,_ Charlie thought. He wondered if maybe the annoying sarcasm was her defence mechanism against the world, protecting the real Minnie when she felt as terrified as she did now.

"I'm here. I wish I wasn't—no offence—but I'm here."

"When we've been to your house ... if it's there or not ... will you leave me alone after that?" she asked. It was almost a plea. Charlie didn't know what to say.

"I'll try. I promise I'll try."

She carried on staring into the mirror, and then he heard her keys jangle in her hand. Minnie—and Charlie with her—was turning and walking out of the front door.

*

In all the years Charlie had lived in Coventry, he'd never quite got his head around knowing exactly where each area of the city ended and where the next began; knowing the quickest way between them was even more of a challenge. Riding inside Minnie's head—the pair of them inside her barely roadworthy Ford Fiesta—it became immediately clear that she didn't suffer from the same problem. He thought it best to be silent as they drove, even though he had questions; was she born here, what was her job, what the hell was her general problem anyway, other than having a strange man in her head (although he thought that if he did ask that, he'd phrase the question slightly more pleasantly). All of which he kept to himself, both out of politeness—Charlie was all too aware that he was effectively trespassing on her life—and the fact that if questions were asked about _his_ life in Coventry, he'd never really be able to answer them all, as he knew that he couldn't really explain why he was still there.

He'd moved there for a girl, after all, and quickly realised that she wasn't The One (a lack of desire to do anything other than watch TV became rapidly apparent in their new domestic situation) and after moving out, he'd kept the same stop-gap bar job that he'd taken upon arrival in the city. He'd started off telling himself that he'd only work there whilst looking into doing something else—he had a degree in English, after all, and had thought about becoming a copywriter—but the same internal conversation had carried on for ten years, even when he was made manager of the venue.

These days, he didn't really even bother convincing himself that he intended to do anything else; life was good, the hours suited him, the work was mainly a sociable laugh, and he was lucky enough to have what he considered to be a good group of friends. If the city wasn't his first choice, and the pay wasn't spectacular, he supposed he didn't really class those issues as being enough reason to upset the status quo. Bottom line, he guessed that he spent a lot of time having fun, and that was what he loved best in life. Starting a family wasn't on his radar, held no appeal, but that wasn't because he was shallow; he just prized his freedom very highly.

And yet here he was, sitting trapped in a black room, with no knowledge of how he got there in the first place.

Even worse, he was trapped in a black room that was itself trapped inside a moving car, one of his least favourite places on earth to be. Visions of the past flashed before his eyes; the roll and flip of the light, the smack of weight on water...

Charlie closed his eyes and breathed deeply, taking it away as best he could. Eventually, it was Minnie who broke the silence.

"You there, Charlie?" she asked, sounding businesslike. Minnie had seemed to relax once they were in the car; she had a job to do now, something to occupy her frightened mind.

"Yeah," he replied, sitting up and feeling keen to talk. As time had passed, he'd felt more and more guilty about his presence in her head, despite his previous annoyance at her hysterics. She'd been scared out of her wits, after all, and had done nothing, as far as he knew, to deserve any of this. Anything he could now do to be 'nice', he would do so, for her sake. "I'm here, just, you know, trying to respect your personal space. Well... as far as possible, anyway." He chuckled slightly, trying to make a joke, but she didn't acknowledge it.

"Sat nav says we're nearly here," she said, referring to the phone software that was directing her. The modern hardware looked out of place where it was sitting, clipped in its plastic holder against the aging air vents of the decrepit vehicle. She hadn't recognised the name of the street when he'd said it, but Charlie hadn't even bothered to try and use it as proof of him being who he said he was. She'd only claim the same explanation that she'd used earlier, that of her own subconscious storage of something she'd heard, or seen once in passing, that was then forgotten by her conscious mind.

Charlie looked to the right of the view, clocking a shop he recognised as it went past.

"Yep, nearly here," he confirmed. He'd actually known that they'd been drawing near for the last few minutes, seeing the same old landmarks that he knew very well. _Thank God,_ he thought. _Get out me out of this bloody thing._ He meant the car, and realised that he could have meant the black room as well. "Couple more streets down, on the left."

The day was bright, being morning and early autumn, and as Charlie dimly acknowledged this, a switch flicked in his head and a jarring thought occurred. _Was_ it autumn? He'd just realised he had absolutely no idea what the date was, assuming all along that it was the next day after his night out, a Saturday, meaning today would be a Sunday. What if _wasn't_ Sunday? Then what the fuck would he do?

He tried to steady his shaking hands in front of the screen's bright glow, and took a deep breath, wondering whether to ask Minnie.

_One thing at a time._ _Last thing you need to do is give her another crazy concept to worry about. Let's do the bloody home visit first, confirm you're the real deal, then see what's up... you get Sunday mornings off, at least. Good thing you're not supposed to be in work right now._

He opened his mouth to tell Minnie that it was the next turn, but the sat nav app got there first; she flicked the indicator without a word, and the Fiesta turned into Fynford Road. As Charlie laid eyes on his home street, he felt a sudden pang of longing; here was normality, here was his life, represented by the terraced street he called home. It wasn't the most glamorous street in the city by any stretch, but the rent was cheap, the building was sound, and he knew enough of his neighbours to say hello to that he felt there was a greater safety here. He wasn't friends with any of them, as such—they didn't make any more effort than a smile and a greeting, and neither did he—but they were acquaintances, good people as far as he knew.

Take a trip in their heads, buddy, double check. You don't bother asking permission, right?

Minnie pulled over in the first available space, and drew the keys out of the ignition. She sighed again, a heavy, resigned, I-can't-believe-I'm-doing this release, and the view swung up to the ceiling of the car. Charlie noticed that she seemed to have a habit of looking up when she spoke to him.

"Right. We're here. Which number am I looking for?"

"Seventeen. The one with the high hedge," Charlie said, as calmly as possible. He was excited now, the prospect of getting her fully onside filling him with anticipation. This would be the start of the process that got him the fuck out of there, and Charlie decided in that moment that if she helped him fix this, he'd give her some money towards a new car. Patronising again, perhaps, but he thought it was the least he could do.

"Of course it is. Doesn't hurt that it's also the one I've just parked near, right?"

She was persistent, he had to give her that.

"The hedge hides the door number from here. How could you know that one was number 17?"

She didn't reply, and simply unbuckled her seat belt.

"Let's just get this over with," she said, quietly, and opened the door. Charlie felt his shoulders drop, his back relaxing the instant she stepped out of the metal cage.

The view moved across the fairly empty street as she walked—at that time of day, as usual, most of the cars were gone—and approached the house, which was obscured, as Charlie had pointed out, by the high hedge sticking up over the small fence that ran around the edge of the miniscule, gravelled front garden. Her hand came into view, pushing open the low gate that was made from a different wood to the rest of the fence. Minnie's steps seemed to grow lighter once she was walking on the short, concrete path, as if she were worried about being caught trespassing. The scuffing sound of her trainers on the dull grey surface ceased, as she picked her feet up properly and put them down again with care.

"It's okay, no one's in," said Charlie, noticing the change and trying to reassure her. "Eric'll be out at work—sorry, Eric's my housemate—so there's no one to worry about." Minnie didn't respond to this, and instead the view began to cast about the front doorstep, looking for something.

"Where's this spare key hidden then?" she asked, her voice very low and discreet. "There's nowhere for it to be hidden under."

"You have to crouch down," said Charlie, whispering himself on reflex—not wanting the hiding place to be overheard—then realising that doing so was idiotic. He raised his voice again. "At the back of the step, on the right-hand side, the concrete's crumbled away slightly and left a gap. We stash it in there."

Without a word, the view lowered and then angled up, showing the upstairs windows as Minnie craned her head back, leaning in with her shoulder. A few seconds passed.

What... did the curtain just move upstairs?

"There's nothing here," said Minnie, softly. "There's a gap, but no key."

"Of course there is," said Charlie, annoyed at what he took to be a half-assed effort on her part. "Check again."

"Charlie, I felt all round it. It's only a small gap, barely enough room for a key as it is, and there isn't one there. This is, as I suspected, bullshit." She didn't sound victorious, or even angry. She sounded scared, the word _bullshit_ coming out almost as a squeak.

Eric. He's forgot to put the bloody key out.

"Eric's obviously forgotten to leave it out," Charlie said, frustrated now. This was typical; Eric, always so reliable, except on the one day that it was really required of him. "This means nothing. And hey, how would you have known the gap was even there in the first place?"

Minnie sighed, and the view moved to the floor in silence for a moment, showing one of her trainers pawing in aimless arcs on the path. Charlie's heart sank; despite the important point about the gap in the step actually being there, she didn't buy it, and was instead fearing the worst.

"Look, Minnie, I promise you—"

Both of them jumped as the front door opened. The view leaped a foot back from the step, and Charlie actually fell onto his backside in surprise. The floor in his darkened room was solid, and yet didn't hurt; it wasn't hard or soft, it was just something for him to stand on, it seemed. But there was no time to consider that.

The person responsible for the door opening was a short, elderly woman, looking like she was at least in her eighties. She was wearing a green jumper and jogging bottoms with an apron covering the whole ensemble, and her feet were covered with nothing but a pair of brown socks. Her white hair was scraped back into a high ponytail, though some of it had escaped in thin strands that stuck out in all directions. She wore glasses, and the expression on her aged face was a mix of confusion, suspicion and indignation.

"What are you doing?" she asked, looking Minnie up and down and putting a foot out of the door and onto the step, holding on to the doorframe with one hand. Minnie didn't answer, and the view continued to show the scene before her. Had he been of normal mind, Charlie would have realised that she was frozen, waiting for him to explain or give her a clue as to what to say; this wasn't the situation that she'd been told to expect, whether she believed him or not, and she couldn't exactly ask questions of her invisible companion to get the answers she needed without looking insane.

At that moment, however, Charlie simply wasn't capable of providing assistance. His blood had run cold upon seeing the old woman, and his world had been rocked even harder against its already battered and strained foundations.

He had never seen the old woman in his entire life.

His mind raced; Eric's mother?

No, you've seen pictures of his mother!

Had Mr Bansal, the landlord, hired her as a cleaner?

He's never done that in ten years, and he knows I'd hit the roof if he sent someone round without telling us first!

Had Eric invited her round?

What the hell for?

Everything drew a blank, and Charlie just stood there and gaped in shock. The mutual silence went on long enough to draw another enquiry from the old woman. Her free hand went up, palm out, and her head began to shake back and forth in slow defiance.

"I'm not interested, whatever it is. I don't want it. The sign says that we don't buy from salesmen, so we _don't_ buy from salesmen. _Or saleswomen_ ," she added, gesturing her hand up and down Minnie's frame. The view scanned around dumbly, as Minnie looked for the aforementioned sign. The old woman caught the look.

" _Here,_ " she said, annoyed, and reached out and around the doorframe. She pointed to the front room window from the outside. "In the corner. You've seen it, I know you've seen it."

Minnie looked, as did Charlie, and his sense of shock dropped into straight-up terror. He felt like ice had just travelled around his entire body, and his mouth gaped at the sight before them. In the bottom left-hand corner of the window was a large, faded yellow sticker with black writing. It read:

NO DOORSTEP TRADERS, NO SURVEYS

The sticker had obviously been there for a very long time, peeling slightly at the edges, its surface bleaching after many years of catching the sun. Charlie didn't know how they'd missed it on the way in, due to its size, but it was clear as day to them now; to Charlie it was like a rubber stamp that declared his reality void. He'd lived in that house for ten years, looked out through that window every day.

There had never, ever been a sticker on the window.

As Charlie goggled uselessly, he heard Minnie's halting voice start up, coming to their rescue after realising she wasn't getting any help.

"Sorry...madam... but I'm..."

"Pardon?" said the old woman, cutting Minnie off and speaking louder than she had before. She seemed to realise that Minnie was on the back foot, and looked like she felt she could take control of the conversation. "I can't hear you, I'm afraid, you have to speak loudly, speak up."

Charlie heard Minnie take a deep breath, and tried to come back to himself, to help, but got nowhere, seeing the gluey remnants of the sticker's previous, fully stuck edges, now left as ghosts of their former glory where the corners had peeled back.

Where the fuck did that sticker come from?? Who the fuck is this woman??

" _Sorry,_ madam," he heard Minnie say, as if from far away. "I'm sorry to trouble you, but I'm not selling anything. I think I might have the wrong house, if I'm honest."

The old woman eyed her suspiciously, whilst her body seemed to relax slightly... but not completely. Minnie's words—or the surprisingly confident tone she injected into her voice from nowhere—had had an effect.

"Wrong house... who are you after then? What number are you after? This is seventeen," the old woman said, leaning out again and tapping the numbers stuck to the outside of the house. " _Seventeen,"_ she repeated, as if Minnie hadn't heard

"Yes, this is the number I was given, but I might have been told wrong," said Minnie, sounding businesslike but not stern, not forceful. She was coming across like a softly spoken schoolteacher. The transformation was surprising and impressive. "I was looking for a Charlie Wilkes, is this his house? He might have lived here before, and moved?" The old woman scoffed in response.

"You've been told wrong, love, there's no Charlie Wilkes here," she said, almost looking satisfied by giving the negative news. "No one on this _street_ even, and I know them all, apart from the Punjabi lot up the road," she added with a dismissive wave of her hand. "Who told you he lived here?"

"But he could have moved, maybe?" Minnie repeated, ignoring the question. "Did he live here before you?" Another scoffing noise came in response, the old woman leaning against the door frame and crossing her arms in front of her chest. She was no longer defensive or alert, but that didn't mean that her outward personality had softened in any noticeable way.

"Unless he lived here sixty years ago, but then I doubt he'd be anyone you'd know if he did," she said with an unpleasant chuckle. "My husband and I bought this house in 1954 and we've been here _ever since_." She said this last part with great relish, enjoying her final pronouncement on Minnie's enquiry being incorrect.

Her words were a slap, and they catapulted Charlie into action.

" _That's bullshit!"_ he yelled, thrusting an accusatory finger at the screen, veins standing out on his forehead. "That's fucking _bullshit,_ she's lying! I've lived in this house for ten years _, ten years!_ Tell her she's talking bullshit, Minnie, _I'm telling you, this is bullshit!"_ His shouts grew into hysteria of his own, confusion fuelled by terror and a crazy, cold sensation all over his body. _They've done something to my house, someone's done something to my house and put me in here, this is bullshit!_

The only sound now was his heavy breathing, and the brief noise of a passing car on the road behind them. Charlie saw the old woman's face grow confused. He realised that Minnie hadn't responded to her—she'd been listening to Charlie's rant instead—and now the old woman was wondering what was going on again.

"So. Not here," the old woman added, waving a hand to emphasise Charlie's absence and waiting for a response from Minnie. Charlie looked past her into her kitchen— _his_ kitchen—and saw souvenir magnets that he'd never owned pinning grandchildren's crayon drawings to a fridge he didn't recognise.

Wallpaper as faded and peeling as the sticker. Bran cereals on top of the cupboards, a half-eaten bowl of cat food.

This was real. This wasn't his house, and never had been.

"Minnie... Minnie, I don't know what's—"

"I'm really sorry to have bothered you, madam," Minnie said, speaking suddenly and loudly, her desire to cut him off causing Charlie to panic and try and talk over her words.

"Minnie, listen—"

"I think somebody must have been—"

"Minnie, I'm _telling_ you, listen to me—"

"—having a good laugh at my expense—"

" _Please, Minnie!"_

"—really sorry to have interrupted your day."

" _Minnie, I'm here, l'm HERE!"_

Minnie's last words to the old woman were choked back as her voice threatened to give way, and she turned before the confrontational hag could see her face collapse. The view hurried quickly back up the driveway, through the gate, and by the time Minnie had got halfway to the car her footsteps had quickened. They reached the Fiesta at a run. The door was flung open, and she dropped heavily into the driver's seat.

Charlie bit his own words back, not even noticing his surroundings this time, and let her get it all out. He was busy trying to control his breathing and get some perspective, to plan his next move. After a minute or two, he gave up. He didn't even know where to start. This was _insane._

"I swear to God, Minnie, I have no idea what's going on," he said, clenching his fists and speaking with a trembling, low voice. "I know you're scared, but I'm, I'm, I'm..." he trailed off. Minnie's hand struck the dashboard, hard.

"Dave, you _bastard_ , you _bastard_ , you _bastard_ ," she cried, her hand punctuating the word against the plastic surface. "All your fucking _fault,_ you _bastard_ , I _told_ you—"

_Dave?_ thought Charlie, his attention caught. _Who the hell is Dave, now?_

He decided to be quiet, and hoped that she would explain further by ranting to herself, but no further information was coming. A few minutes more passed, during which the occasional car drove by, and Charlie found himself wishing that she would look back at the house so he could check the upstairs curtains again, to see if the old woman was watching.

He was about to gently ask her the question when Minnie addressed him first.

"Charlie? _Charlie._ "

"I'm here, I'm here," he said eagerly, speaking as soothingly as he could manage.

"Just checking. Just checking I'm still _nuts,_ " she said again with deep bitterness, slapping her hands together, hard. "Just checking I'm still a goddamn _statistic._ "

There was a pause, and Charlie took that as his cue.

"Who's Dave, Minnie?"

" _Dave,_ " Minnie responded quickly, "is the reason I'm in this mess, that I'm sat in a car talking to myself after dealing with some old bitch that I managed to wake up on a Sunday afternoon, after driving halfway across town because my crackers fucking junkie brain finally blew a fucking _gasket._ Turns out all those old government warning ads were _right._ " The view rocked sideways with this last word; she'd slapped herself hard across the head, and Charlie saw a few small droplets of saltwater fly away from her face.

Ah. There it is.

"Did Dave... did Dave give you the..."

" _No,_ Dave didn't give me anything," snapped Minnie, sniffing. "Dave doesn't even use. Never has done. It was _Dave_ that decided I needed persuading, dragging out of the flat for... _socialising,_ as he so charmingly put it. Thanks an effing bunch, mate," she spat, the view jerking backwards as she jammed her skull into the headrest of the seat. There was silence again, except for the sound of Minnie's heavy breathing. Charlie could see this was a very sore point indeed for Minnie, whatever had happened, and didn't want to upset her further despite his own panic. He was responsible for adding more weight onto already distressed shoulders, and he suddenly felt an impotent urge to hold her hand for a moment, to tell her it was okay to need help. He opened his mouth to do the same verbally, but the words didn't come, his brain too rattled and swirling to put instinct into conscious words.

"Let's just say," Minnie said finally, "that it... didn't go well. All right? And I don't think it's any coincidence that the next day, up pops a little voice in my head calling itself Charlie and asking me to go and visit old women, claiming they live in their houses." There was a pause, and the view swung back to the house; Charlie took his opportunity to look at the upstairs windows. The curtains were now still. "Bitch," muttered Minnie. "There was no need to be like that. I know I looked dodgy, but it was obvious I just had the wrong house. No need for that..."

"Minnie," said Charlie, taking her calmer demeanour as an opportunity to try again, desperation forcing him to push his luck. "Something's going on here. I don't know, maybe I'm just... remembering it wrong, maybe my memory's been screwed, I mean, to me, that's my home, and I know I work at..." An idea struck him.

We could check that right now, we wouldn't even need to go anywhere!

It was a thrilling thought, but terrifying at the same time.

What if the result is the same as this one...

"Minnie, grab your phone there for a sec? It's important. You're not crazy, and I think I can help prove it _right now_. Or at least, prove to me that _I'm_ not crazy. I need you to do me a favour." She didn't respond, and continued to look out at the house. "Minnie? Can you hear me?" Charlie said.

"I can hear you, Charlie," she said quietly, the dry, protective sarcasm coming back into her voice but not quite making it. This time, it couldn't beat the fear. Her voice still had a crack in it. "Loud and clear."

"Facebook," Charlie said, excitedly. "Look me up on Facebook. I have an account, it'll say I live in Coventry, I'm all there. Easy." There was silence for a moment as she pondered this.

"Nope. Won't work, Chuck," she said, sighing and shaking her head as she deliberately used that name again. Charlie gritted his teeth and tried to keep a lid on his anger. "I could have seen your name on a mutual friend's profile, or even just seen your name in the paper, anything, and my subconscious has picked you at random and given you a little voice in my head. Seeing a name on a Facebook page, what would that prove?"

"I could... I could tell you what my last few status updates were about, and then you could check them and see if I was right. How would you know that?"

"Well, apart from the fact that I couldn't look at your statuses as we're not Facebook friends, Chuck. Unless your profile is Public?"

"I told you, stop calling me—"

" _Chuck! Chuckchuckchuuuuck!!_ " Minnie suddenly screamed, and the jaded bravado dropped away completely as silent tears began. Charlie bit his lip, and waited a moment for the sobs to fade.

"Don't cry, come on. Listen, grab your phone and bring up Facebook a second. I know, I know, but just do it anyway. I'll tell you my password, you can log into my account, and I can tell you before you even see them what my last couple of status updates were." It was a great idea, one he was amazed he hadn't thought of before, but he was only getting silence again in return. It was maddening. However, without saying a word, she picked her phone up off the dashboard clip where she'd left it ( _not the best idea round here_ , Charlie thought) and held it in front of her.

"Yep, okay. Got it," she said. "Can you see that?" She paused for a second, thinking. "You can see what I see, right?"

"Yes," said Charlie enthusiastically. She wasn't totally sure, then, and that was good. "And I can see that just fine. Listen, go onto Facebook and log in as me. The e-mail address is cwilkes27@hotmail.com, and the password is Xanadu, that's Xanadu with an X."

He watched as she did so, his heart racing again like a small, buzzing engine. This would be proof. This would be _proof._

It didn't work.

A familiar thumbnail image of his profile photo came up; a JPEG of the ELO spaceship. This image would have made Charlie almost weep with relief, as this was exactly as he'd always had it... but sitting where it was, next to the reappeared e-mail and password entry screen accompanied with the words 'Incorrect Email/Password Combination' brought him no comfort at all. Quite the opposite, in fact.

"What a surprise," said Minnie, "no joy."

"You've done it wrong!" snapped Charlie, and immediately tried to rein himself in. His fear would make him lose control if he let it, and he _had_ to keep her onside. All thoughts of concern for Minnie had temporarily disappeared. This was his _life._ He couldn't take another hit. This was something, _something_ to grip onto with desperate hands, and he couldn't take this being proved false too.

She tried again without speaking. He watched the letters as she pressed them, watched them with laser intensity. She did it right. It still didn't work.

"Nope," she said. The practiced, cynical tone didn't hide her fear. Charlie rubbed at his face with trembling hands.

They've gotten to your account. Changed the details. If whoever has done this can put you in someone's head, they sure as shit can change your fucking Facebook password. Right?

Right. That _was_ right. He tried to feel better, and he did, a bit... but far from completely.

Does the account even exist?

"Can you search for my name?"

"What would be the point?"

Good question.

He wouldn't even be able to see himself, as she wasn't his Facebook Friend and had almost zero access to his profile; all she would be able to see was the ELO spaceship preview photo.

Some of your Facebook information will be visible though, won't it, even if she's not on your Friends list?

That was right.

"I'll tell you the point," he said quickly. "You won't be able to go through my profile, obviously, but the basic details will be visible."

"You think this address will be on here? It won't show the bloody house number anyway."

"No, no, that's not what I'm after. Can you just do it please?"

"Fine," she said, tapping at the screen. "Wilkes with a K-E-S, yeah?"

"That's the one." Minnie typed in _Charlie Wilkes, Coventry_ into the search bar, and Charlie held his breath. The very first step was at least confirming that he was on there at all. His hands trembled, and he was unaware that his mouth was wide open.

The small ELO spaceship reappeared on the screen, then again as Minnie clicked on the preview and brought up the limited access version of his profile.

"I already said, Charlie, this doesn't really prove anything—" said Minnie, sadly, but Charlie interrupted her.

"No, no, I know, but look, look at the 'Works at' bit there," he said, a warm glow shooting through him as relief hit, blessed confirmation right there in undeniable black and blue on the screen:

Works At: Barrington's, Coventry

"See? That's where I said."

"When?"

"What? I told you earlier, I work at Barrington's." A pause.

"No, you didn't."

"I did! I bloody did!"

Another pause.

"Doesn't matter anyway," she said. "Same thing. Friend of a friend... subconsciously tucked away. Whatever." The knuckles of her right hand came up to the bottom of the view, resting against her lip as her elbow was placed on the windowsill of the car door.

"Oh come on, remembering a name, but remembering where I work as well—"

"There are _autistic_ people who can draw an entire city skyline from memory, and accurately too, because they can access parts of the brains that normal people can't," snapped Minnie, still looking at the house. "You've seen _Rain Man_ , right? All the matches on the floor, counted straight away, the exact right number? The brain can do, and store, amazing things, if you can somehow access those talents. So don't tell me it's impossible. Why the hell am I even arguing with you, anyway? Just shut up and leave me alone. I need to think what the hell I'm going to do."

Charlie thought frantically, found something, snapped his fingers.

"It's Sunday today, right?"

"Yep."

That was important. He hadn't lost any time then, no period in between passing out and waking up here.

"Two p.m. My shift is supposed to start at two. And what time is it now, about eleven thirty? Okay. Go to Barrington's—"

"I don't... I don't really go into pubs at the moment..."

"Doesn't matter, just get a coffee or something, it'll just be families having a Sunday lunch right now anyway. Look, just do this for me and if it doesn't work then... then... well then I'm fucked because I won't have a clue what's going on. Just go there, have a coffee, and wait. Once it gets past 2:00 p.m., I should be there, and you can ask for me. They'll _tell_ you I _should_ be in, but I won't be, and they won't know why. See?"

"I don't get you."

"Think about it. You think you just happen to have somehow stored my name—and where I work—in your memory, and have gone nuts so you're dragging it out of your subconscious to create me, right?"

"Got it in one, Charles."

Despite the sad, bitter tone in her voice, Charlie winced again. He didn't like _Charles_ any more than _Chuck_. He let it go.

"Well, there is no fucking way that A: you know my shift pattern, and even if _somehow_ you did, then B: you couldn't know that I wasn't coming today, right? Well, I'm telling you both of those things. So when it turns out that I _should_ be in, just like I'm telling you, and I'm _not_ in, you have to know that I'm real, right? The reason I'm not in work is because I'm in your head!" Charlie stopped talking, and held his breath. It had been an effort not to sound as desperate as he felt. Minnie's fingers drummed along the bottom of the screen, tapping across her mouth. The view then shook from left to right, accompanied by a resigned sigh.

"It's a good one, I have to admit, Charlie," she said, her keys coming up and slotting into the ignition. "And at the very least I won't feel like an idiot again, as you are at least _supposed_ to be there." She sighed heavily, preparing for the short journey ahead, and turned the keys.

Charlie flinched as the engine rumbled into life; another car ride to get through first.

"Only problem is," Minnie continued, "what the hell are you going to say when we get there and it turns out you're _not_ supposed to be in today? Or that you've phoned in sick? Or simply haven't updated your Facebook profile and you work somewhere else now? Hmm?"

Charlie didn't have an answer, couldn't begin to think of one.

"The house was wrong," Minnie added, with false, bitter breeziness. "Just because Facebook says Charlie Wilkes worked there at some point doesn't mean he still does, or that Charlie Wilkes's shift pattern matches what I've imagined it does. "

"Don't do that," snapped Charlie, his voice quiet but powerful now. "Don't say it like that. _I'm_ Charlie Wilkes. I'm the guy."

Minnie drew in a breath to say something else, perhaps to carry on the argument, but then thought better of it. She flipped the indicator, and Charlie saw her hazel eyes as they looked into the mirror, catching her own reflection for a minute and looking at herself, looking through him.

"Okay, Charlie," she said, sadly. "Let's go to Barrington's." She turned the wheel, and the car pulled away from the kerb. This time, as they drove, Charlie didn't even feel the desire to talk, utterly lost in his own thoughts. He was more scared now than he'd been during all of this crazy morning, presented with the possibility—the unthinkable, impossible possibility—that Minnie might be right.

I'm Charlie Wilkes. I'm Charlie Wilkes. I'm Charlie Wilkes.

But he was also inside another person's head.

*

... _the car flips, and he has time to hear her draw a sharp breath, realising that it's too late to stop it, handed over to fate and the twin forces of gravity and momentum..._

*

Charlie barely noticed the journey over to the city centre. Fear had turned to anger, and he began to think like a petulant child, thinking of ways to catch Minnie out, but they were all pointless, all able to be explained away with the same 'Subconscious Memory' excuse. He didn't think he could take hearing her say that again.

Somewhere inside, Charlie knew he was essentially being selfish, thoughtless, and tried to remind himself that he was the trespasser here. He was the one that had come to her, not the other way around. But like a cornered animal—and wasn't he exactly that, trapped and cornered?—his defences were up, instinct putting him into an aggressive stance. He tried to grasp his normal self, to find the man that would handle this situation best; friendly, helpful, the sort of person that would go out of his way to help a stranger if they needed it, ready with a smile and a kind word. But that man wasn't available just then. His every thought had turned towards proving he existed, and Minnie was not only the person who seemed determined to stop him, but the one who'd put the doubt into his head in the first place.

And so, once Minnie had parked the car near the cathedral, being lucky enough to grab one of the spaces on the small cobbled street nearby, he began to spit questions at her as she made the short walk along the street to Barrington's. They'd previously been sat in silence all the way there, but free of the vehicle and drawing nearer to the pub, a growing sense of dread prompted Charlie to begin his interrogation.

"Where are _you_ from, Minnie? What's _your_ story?"

"What?"

"You have my situation, you've heard me tell you all about it. I know nothing about _you_. What did you do yesterday? Where did you go, for example? Do you even remember?"

The view stopped walking down the cobbled path, the Barrington's sign visible over the other side of the main road that crossed their path about a hundred feet away. A few people walked past the front of the pub, quietly going about their Sunday business. Charlie saw Minnie's hand come up holding her phone, moving to the left-hand side of her head.

"Listen to me, Charlie. This is really important."

Charlie realised what she was doing; using her phone to stop any onlookers thinking that she was having a conversation by herself.

"That isn't up for debate," she said, quietly and firmly, but with a slight tremor in her voice. "You aren't here to question me. You're in _my_ head. Right? You're lucky I'm even bothering to come here, rather than being out getting myself sectioned. I will _not_ have you doing that. It's the absolute last thing I need. Got it?"

Charlie bristled, not liking her tone; he liked being given no choice even less. The words _It's_ _the last fucking thing_ I _need being here in the first place too_ came to his lips, but he bit them back. He knew could probably drive her legitimately crazy if he wanted to—stopping her sleeping, always talking, never giving her a moment's rest—and he knew that she didn't have the position of power here... but hadn't he been thinking less than an hour ago that he didn't want to make it hard for her? And he did want to get inside Barrington's, after all. Arguing the point would only delay that, and there were other ways of checking who she was, subtler ways. It could wait.

"Right, got it," he said, but still saying it as if she were being unreasonable. It was petulant, but he felt like he had to salvage something from the exchange.

"Don't mess with my head, Charlie. I think it's already messed up enough as it is."

The phone went away, and the journey resumed again. Charlie strained to make out the interior of the pub from where they were, but as they drew closer, he thought he could see... was it?

Yes! There's Claire, glass collecting!

A face he knew, someone he'd worked with for several years, and Charlie nearly wept with relief at the sight.

"Claire. That girl there. Her name is Claire, Claire Phelps, and you can ask her when you go in," he said, sharply. "Yeah, yeah, subconscious memory, fine, but the odds of doing it with _two_ separate people, people who barely have any mutual friends outside of this pub? Bit of a stretch, don't you think?"

Minnie didn't answer; there was only the view, casting left and right in response. They'd reached the end of the cobbled path, and Minnie was stood on one side of the more modern main road now, watching for traffic. Being a Sunday, there was hardly any about, apart from a solitary bus coming from the right.

As Minnie waited for the bus to pass, Charlie looked through the pub window again, still just visible on the edge of the screen. What he saw there made his heart stop, made his lungs spasm and cause his body to instantly try and gasp for air like a cartoon character presented with a hot babe.

With awful timing, the bus slowly drew past, blocking his view for a few moments and giving him a tiny span of time to convince himself that he'd seen it wrong. He hadn't, of course, but it gave him enough brief, momentary hope that when the bus moved out of the way, and he saw through the pub window for a second time—the second sighting convincing him, and placing hope completely out of his reach—the impact was even worse.

A man had come up to Claire Phelps on her side of the glass, wearing the same matching uniform and saying something that made her turn and laugh, slapping his arm and nodding as she did so. Their relationship looked exactly as Charlie knew it to be; two colleagues that had worked with each other for years, as at ease in each other's company as two workmates can be.

The man on the other side of the glass was Charlie Wilkes.

*
Chapter Two: Minnie Leaves a Calling Card, If You Don't Want To Know the Result Look Away Now, and Charlie Sits Alone In the Black Room

*

Charlie's knees buckled, and he fell to the solid yet somehow impact-free floor again, one hand shooting out to break his fall without him consciously noticing. Minnie, unaware, was already beginning to cross the street, taking Charlie closer to the sight that had caused his world to be turned upside down for the second time inside two hours. All he could do was watch, a faint moaning sound coming from his mouth.

And that was what he did; watched as this other Charlie talked to Claire, wagging a finger at her as if scolding a child, watched as Claire slapped his finger away, sticking her chin out and extending the knuckles of a fist towards his face, shaking it at him. Watched as this other Charlie held his hands up in mock remorse, one of them holding a tea towel that was then suddenly thrown into Claire's face. Watched as this other Charlie sprinted out of view, laughing, as Claire snatched the towel away, also laughing, her face now red with embarrassment.

It was a typical incident between the two of them... except it wasn't him. It was _another_ him, one who looked and acted _exactly_ the same as he did. One who was in his place of work—and several hours early at that, on a Sunday!—and living his life. Charlie was dimly aware of an intense anger somewhere, boiling like hot mud deep inside him, but he was too shocked to experience it. He just continued to watch; Minnie's hand reached out and grasped the brass handle on the wooden door, pulling it open and entering Charlie's place of work.

_Both_ Charlies' place of work.

The pub was the same as it had always been, a place that had never quite decided if it wanted to be a traditional boozer or a trendy city bar. As a result, it didn't really seem to cater to anybody's specific tastes, and became a place that people just ended up at somehow. Charlie had talked about changing the décor for years, but the owners never listened. It made money, and was the best performing of the five places they owned; by no means a runaway success, but never trouble, whilst the others seemed to haemorrhage money at an alarming rate. The owners had other concerns, therefore, and Barrington's was definitely subject to the 'if it ain't broke, don't fix it' rule.

So in both the main, large bar area—where Minnie stood now—and the lounge room with its small wooden dance floor area, the oak effect wooden fixtures were still everywhere, from the tables to the chairs to the bar itself, jarring with the cream walls and modern downlighters attached to them. The music was trad jazz, massively at odds with the small number of families and people in groups of three or four eating Sunday lunches. The pictures on the walls were prints of famous works of art, creating a weird effect that just didn't seem to add up, along with large potted plants dotted here and there. The whole thing would have worked a bit better had they looked after it; as it was, signs of wear and tear were in abundance, from smudges and scratch marks on the previously polished metal of the light fittings, to cracks and gouges in the floor tiles. Nobody cared or even noticed at night—it was too busy and too dark—but in the brightness of the daytime, the place just looked shabby.

Charlie didn't see any of this though, nor did he wonder if Minnie had ever been in there before. He was already picking himself out near the far end of the bar—the man that Charlie had already decided he would refer to as Chuck, let _him_ have that name—chatting and smiling with two seated couples as he cleared their plates. Despite himself, Charlie marvelled at the experience; he'd seen himself in a mirror countless times throughout his life, and also in camera footage that had been filmed whilst he was unaware of it at social occasions, so he knew how he looked from afar when moving and functioning. Seeing himself just a few feet away through the _screen_ , however, was the most unusual thing Charlie had ever experienced (other than waking up inside a strange woman's head). The effect was the same as _being_ there; the image quality was both unlike and superior to anything he'd ever seen on a man-made screen. Besides, wasn't he already seeing the screen as if it were his own eyes, already accustomed to looking through it... and again, wasn't the blackness around not him not quite as dense as it seemed when he first arrived? Still unwelcoming and impenetrable, but... less so? Things became familiar quickly in the black room, that was for sure.

Charlie watched mannerisms and expressions that were his own, and recognised them in a way that he would never have achieved when watching mere footage of himself in motion. Without a trace of vanity or arrogance, Charlie could have watched himself all day.

And there he was; taller than most at 6'2", but slim enough to take any sense of intimidation out of his height, reducing his visual impact. His smile was broad, as was his forehead, with slightly thinning blonde hair that still covered enough for him to get away with barely styling it, leaving it messy and free. In his white work shirt and black trousers, he managed the illusion of being smartly presented, even though outside of work he was never even close to it. Not that he didn't care about his appearance—far from it—but the look he preferred had always been one of carefree scruffiness. He felt it reflected his outlook on life; easy going, and looking for whatever experiences life threw at him.

When was the last time you actually had a real experience though, Charlie? Sure, you've got one right now, an absolute humdinger, but before this? What have you done? Look at your face. Look at that smile. Can't you see how false it is, now that you're seeing it from the outside?

Charlie snapped back to himself. Where the hell had those thoughts come from? It wasn't the time or the place; right here, right now, someone was living his fucking _life_ , and here _he_ was deciding that it was a good time for a bit of navel-gazing.

For some reason, Minnie was heading away from Chuck and approaching the opposite end of the bar. Confused, Charlie frantically tried to keep sight of his doppelganger, but soon he was off-screen as Minnie faced the mirror behind the optics full of cheap spirits.

"Go on then. Who's best to speak to here?" she muttered, the view dropping to look into the wood of the bar as she addressed him surreptitiously. Charlie goggled at the question; was she fucking nuts? Who was best to speak to?? How about the guy masquerading as him on the other side of the room, did she not think that might be a start?

Just as quickly, the realisation came; she had no idea what he looked like. She'd only seen his stupid ELO spaceship profile photo. Of course. She had no inkling that—in terms of convincing her that he was real—the absolute worst-case scenario had just happened. And compounding things further was the fact that he had no time to explain the situation either, as Chuck was now heading into view from the left-hand side of the screen. He'd obviously seen her waiting, and with his table-clearing task now complete, and no one currently behind the bar, he had gone back there to serve her.

Charlie's heart pounded with brutal force in his chest as he saw the other Charlie approach ( _Chuck, he's Chuck, I'M CHARLIE_ ) leaving him unable to make a sound. He tried fruitlessly to warn Minnie, to tell her not to talk to this _fake_ Charlie, this _Chuck_ , but he couldn't. Upon seeing himself approaching, the sight had ceased to be fascinating. It was the most horrible thing he'd ever seen.

The smile was genuine this time though, he could tell, and that made it even worse. Chuck had seen that Minnie was alone, and he was clearly pleased and trying to turn on the charm. The thought made Charlie's head spin even more.

"Hi," said Minnie, as Chuck stopped directly in front of her sightline and framed himself in the middle of the view like some kind of awful, damning self-portrait. "Sorry to bother you, but I wonder if you can help me?" Her tone was confident, assured, and whilst Charlie knew that it was false, there was an unmistakable and genuine warmth underneath it, a tone he hadn't heard from her so far.

What the fuck is that?

When Chuck spoke in response, the words made Charlie rock slightly on his heels, as he already knew what they would be.

"Well, I'll certainly do my best to try, as long as you're not after money," Chuck grinned, raising his eyebrows as he made the little joke. It wasn't a chat up line, it wasn't even a stock line as such ... but it was not only the kind of the thing that Charlie knew _he_ would say when something pleased him, but the _exact words_ that had sprung into Charlie's head, unbidden, when he heard Minnie ask Chuck to help her. He felt so disorientated for a moment that he thought he was going to throw up, and wondered crazily if he could even do that when inside the black room.

You can't do that here, not in this place, this black room. That's what it is; the Black Room. This place is only for watching helplessly as your life disappears, whilst you lose yourself as others make jokes. This is where—

Charlie's spiralling consciousness jerked upright when he heard a new sound; Minnie laughing. It wasn't a big laugh—only a little chuckle—but she sounded as surprised as he was.

"No... heh, no... I just needed to ask you—"

Charlie suddenly heard another voice interrupt, a gasping, wheezing voice, and realised it was his own. Not Chuck's. His.

"That's me," Charlie gasped, straightening up off the floor and sitting up on his knees. "That guy. That's me. That's Charlie Wilkes."

Minnie's voice stopped dead, and Charlie saw mild confusion flash across Chuck's face.

"Ask me ...?" he smiled. Charlie knew that smile too, had felt it on his face before; it was his pleased, slightly smug smile, his smile that said _Hang on, is this girl interested?_ It was a smile that said it was nice to know that someone might find him attractive, and he felt briefly embarrassed for Chuck, knowing the real reason for Minnie's stumbling hesitation. He wondered if Minnie had recognised the same thing. She still hadn't spoken, regardless. She was clearly frozen. Charlie froze too, trying and failing to think of a course of action.

"Are you ... is your name Charlie?" said Minnie, her voice almost a whisper, but Chuck didn't notice the tone, clearly delighted by the question. It looked like, as far as Chuck was concerned, she'd just confirmed what he'd clearly been hoping. Charlie supposed he couldn't blame himself ( _Chuck, not me, I'M CHARLIE_ ) as he guessed Minnie was attractive, after all; he'd only seen her seemingly fresh out of bed, or red eyed, so he hadn't thought about it. To be fair, even if she'd been dressed and glammed up to the nines, he hadn't really been in a state of mind to be assessing the looks of the woman whose head he was stuck inside.

"Yes, yes I am!" said Chuck, a little too enthusiastically. Charlie winced internally, realising that not only would that have been _his_ reaction, but seeing just how much of a goose he would have made himself out to be. "Sorry, have we met ...?" Again, Minnie froze in response, but only briefly; already she was fishing in her pocket for something, the phone then appearing in her hand.

"Sorry, I'm vibrating," she said, showing him the phone by way of explanation and then holding up one finger to Chuck as she turned away to take the 'call'. "Hello? Yes, this is her," she said, moving away from the bar. Charlie was impressed. She'd bailed, true, but she'd been put on the spot and had quickly remembered a good get-out when caught in the moment. Once she was out of earshot, she lowered her voice.

"What the fuck d'you mean?" she hissed. "I nearly just looked like a right idiot."

"I don't know!" Charlie hissed back, matching her secretive tone, then realising again that he didn't need to. "You'll have to excuse me, I've just found somebody else _living my fucking life!_ "

"Well that was your last shot," said Minnie, through gritted teeth. "You're here, not in my head—and that's the big one—plus you don't live at that house, your shift time was wrong, all of it's _wrong_. You're not real, you're fake, and I'm ... I'm ..." she trailed off, breathing hard, and Charlie had a sudden idea.

"Ask him something," Charlie said. "Ask him something that there's no way you could possibly know."

"What the hell would that prove?" she asked, her hand covering the top part of the screen as she held it to her forehead. "Charlie Wilkes is there. There, behind the bar, not in my head."

"I don't know what it'd prove, but ..." said Charlie, searching to find what he was actually trying to get at, but realising he was onto something important, "... but it proves something, right? It proves that, at the very least, I'm real, surely? That something crazy is going on, but it's not you?"

Minnie hesitated for a long time. Then she said:

"Well ... what?"

"What?"

"What should I ask?"

"Okay ... uh ..." Charlie searched around, trying to think of something quickly, but Minnie helped him out.

"It's got to sound believable though. Like, why am I asking for him by name and then asking him some kind of personal question? He's just gonna freak out. Are you an expert in anything?" Charlie pondered this, and came to the conclusion that he wasn't.

"Uh ... no. I have an English degree?"

"That's not really gonna work. Wait, what about lost property?"

"I don't follow ..."

"Can I say I've been told you're the guy to speak to about lost property?"

"Yeah, I suppose, but how does that prove anything?"

"Well, when did you last work here?"

"Friday night."

"Do you remember anything being handed in?" Charlie saw where she was going with it. It wasn't exactly what he'd had in mind, but it was at least something Minnie couldn't know subconsciously. How could she know what had been handed in most recently? There was no way. If he could remember, and tell her, it would be undeniable proof of him being real.

He racked his brain trying to remember if anything had come in on Friday night ... there was something, wasn't there? A purse? A credit card? Wait ... a phone. A cracked Samsung. He remembered because he'd tried to check for an address book in it, so he could text someone who could then tell the owner where their phone was, but the battery had been dead. He hadn't even been working in the bar that night either; they'd come in here on their night out! He'd found it in the toilet on top of the cistern!

"Yeah. A phone, a Samsung. Big crack right down the middle of the screen. Ask if anyone handed in a phone _last_ night."

"Why last night, if you weren't working?"

"I came in with some mates. Found it myself and handed it in."

"Right. That's what we'll go with. But this is the last one, Charlie. You have to shut up after this. All right? If this is more garbage... you have to go away. Okay?"

Charlie said nothing. What could he say, even though he didn't have a choice about staying or leaving. The Black Room had him.

"Whatever you say."

Minnie put her phone away and turned back to the bar. Charlie immediately watched Chuck as Minnie approached, watched him pretending to be busy moving glasses around; exactly as Charlie had known he would be.

"Sorry, you were saying?" asked Chuck, apologising for no reason and using unnecessary politeness. It was something Charlie always did, and something he regularly told himself off for doing. He said sorry when people bumped into _him_ ; not because he was a coward, but out of a very English social reflex. Still, he saw it in himself and didn't like it.

_Come on, Chuck_. _Show me something to like._

"Yeah," said Minnie brightly, turning on the false front, and Charlie noticed again how easily and convincingly she managed this. It would have been more impressive if it didn't speak of regular practice, of being something that she did on a regular basis to keep the world at bay. He wouldn't have even known this to be the case if he hadn't already seen her other side. "Apparently you're the guy to speak to about lost property stuff?"

Chuck looked slightly confused for a second, as Charlie had known he would; he wasn't the lost property guy—nobody was, specifically—but he quickly shrugged off the slightly unusual question and answered her.

"Well, I don't know why someone suggested me specifically, but I can certainly have a look for you. Missing something, are you?"

"Yes, my phone, it's a Samsung, black. Has it been handed in?"

"Hold on a sec," said Chuck, moving away to the other end of the bar and rooting around underneath. "I haven't seen one myself, but I'll have a double check for you."

Charlie froze. He hadn't found it. He was wrong about the phone as well. He was wrong about everyth—

"Oh, no, hold on, is this it?" Chuck said, straightening up and holding out a black Samsung phone with a badly cracked screen.

Charlie's heart leapt. It was the exact same phone! But Chuck hadn't seen it? Hadn't Chuck found it, the same way that Charlie had found it? It didn't make sense.

"Minnie, that's it, that's the one! That's the one I found! Ask if he found it."

"Oh great!" exclaimed Minnie, not missing a beat. She was doing well. "Was it you that found it?"

"No, no," said Chuck, bringing it over to her. "I don't know when this came in, to be honest, I wasn't working last night. Someone must have given it to another member of bar staff. Here you go," he said, holding it out with a smile. This one was definitely genuine, as Charlie knew. He was always losing things, so reuniting people with their missing items felt good. As he watched Minnie's hand go out to take it, he looked at the small black device with its unmistakably thick, single crack snaking its way across the phone's screen—beautiful, if aesthetically reduced proof of his existence—and he realised something.

"You've got to leave it though. Someone'll be looking for it."

He watched as Minnie's hand took the phone anyway, and felt a flash of anger; that was someone else's stuff!

"Minnie?" he said.

"Ah, no," said Minnie out loud, with a sigh, "This isn't mine. Mine's a Galaxy II, this is the older one." She sounded convincingly disappointed as she said it, handing the phone back to Chuck, who shrugged with an apologetic look on his face.

"Ah, sorry to hear it," he said, taking the phone but not moving away. "Never mind. Listen, do you want to leave your contact details in case it turns up?" Again, it was exactly what Charlie would have said, wanting to help return the right phone to this girl... but Charlie thought Chuck sounded a bit too eager.

Am I... am I trying to get her number?

"Oh, that'd be great," he heard Minnie saying, and saw her hand reaching into her bag for her purse. "I'll give you a card. I knew these'd come in handy for something one day." She pulled it out and handed it over quickly; too quickly for Charlie to read it. What the hell was she doing giving him a card? She didn't have a lost phone to be contacted over!

Chuck took the card and inspected it.

"Minnie Cooper?" he said, and Charlie saw him look up with a grin, one that almost immediately disappeared when he saw the expression that must have been written on Minnie's face. Charlie wasn't daft, and neither was Chuck, clearly; he knew when to abandon a line of approach with women when it wasn't going well. Despite himself, Charlie approved of Chuck's mental about-face. He watched Chuck glimpse at the card again. "Web design, eh? Tough work to make a living from, you must be good?"

Nice save.

"Apparently not," chuckled Minnie, and Charlie knew it was real, caught briefly by the question and somehow charmed slightly into giving a genuine response. "Gave it up a while back and started working on something else. Had the cards printed and just needed an excuse to use them up. But I still do it, if you know someone who needs any."

Chuck held up the card and flicked it.

"Not at the moment. But if I find anyone, I'll let you know quicker than greased-up lightning."

Charlie winced, hard, and saw that Chuck's smiled had faltered slightly too.

Quicker than greased up lightning? Oh, Christ.

That was one that Charlie hadn't known was coming, as Chuck was flustered and trying to be funny. But Chuck had failed, and he knew it.

"Uh..." Chuck said, lost for a second. Minnie, to her credit, didn't let on. Or was her chuckling response real?

"That's one way of putting it," she said with a smile. "But listen, thanks anyway."

"No problem," said Charlie, holding up a hand as Minnie turned to leave. As Minnie walked towards the door, Charlie could have looked at the reflection of the bar in the glass, but he didn't. He couldn't bring himself to look at what he knew he would see; Chuck would be watching her go, smiling to himself and nodding, then looking at the card and grinning, delighted with the perk that just had been put slap bang into the middle of an ordinary day.

Lucky bastard.

*

"I wasn't going to take the fucking phone," snapped Minnie, as she walked back towards the car. "I had to at least hold it to have a proper look at it, make the whole act look real. What do you take me for?"

"Well I didn't know, did I?" Charlie snapped back, but he wasn't really paying attention; he was too busy trying to get a handle on what had just happened.

So there's another Charlie Wilkes... or that's me, yet I'm here... and he wasn't working last night either, just like me... yet he's in this morning? So he's got a different shift pattern, or he's had to cover for someone? Either way, you've been replaced. Someone's gone to great lengths to get you out of the way, and erase the real you.

Charlie felt his chest tighten again, the panic dog scratching at the door.

_No. Don't get frightened. Get angry, but don't get frightened. If someone_ put _you here, then someone_ knows _. Someone knows the answers, and that means you can find them and find out. You lose it in here, and you find nothing._

The thought was both sobering and strangely refreshing at the same time, probably because for once his self-nagging had actually had the desired effect. Personal pep-talks rarely had an effect on Charlie, so this was a strangely pleasant surprise. Whenever he tried to talk himself into a lifestyle change, he tended to end up falling back into old habits quite quickly, and being generally happy to do so. He was not a man who ventured far out of his comfort zone, and knew it. It was another thing that he didn't like about himself, yet was too comfortable to change it. Quite the vicious circle.

"Minnie," said Charlie, suddenly remembering his host, "look ... sorry. I didn't mean to kick off over the phone. You have to remember, you could be a kleptomaniac for all I know. But hey, that's got to make you feel better, right? You couldn't have known that the phone was there, so you know you're not going nuts, at least. So that's one problem taken care of."

There was no reply, and the view revealed nothing; the street still passed hurriedly by as Minnie continued to walk at a high pace back to the car.

"Minnie?"

"Just give me a minute, Charlie," Minnie muttered under her breath, clearly not wanting to look insane to anyone who might be watching. "I need ... look, I'm asking nicely here. Just ... don't say anything until I get back to the flat. All right? Can you do that?" She _had_ said it nicely, too; her tone was soft, gentle, and calm in a way that he hadn't heard during any of this crazy, confusing day. She wasn't trying to manipulate. She was just asking him to let her think, and was trying to keep herself under control.

"Okay. Okay, no problem," said Charlie, in a quiet voice of his own. "Let me know when you want to talk. Just ... don't leave it too long though, yeah? I think I might go nuts myself if I had to keep quiet in here for hours."

"I won't," Minnie replied as she opened the car door and got in, sighing heavily as she settled into the seat, into her safe place. As the engine started, Charlie sat down on the floor, leaning back and propping himself up on his hands, giving a little sigh of his own.

You're real. You're real. Don't forget that. You've just proved it.

After a few minutes of the drive, and tired of chasing his own thoughts round and round, Charlie began to lean his head back on his shoulders, rolling it left and right ( _not your real shoulders, of course, your body hasn't been shrunk and placed inside her brain. Brains don't have screens inside them, remember? This is your mind, it's your mind that's been moved, and your mind is remembering your body)_ as a new idea occurred to him. Getting to his feet, he looked into the darkness again. When he'd first arrived, it was so thick and impenetrably dark that the idea of going farther into that space had been terrifying, and still was; he'd known, however, that if every other option was exhausted then he would have no choice but to plunge inside, looking for an exit or whatever might lie in the blackness, if there was anything at all. The thought had been smothered nonetheless, so terrifying and inconceivable that he couldn't even consider it unless he had no choice.

But he'd wondered earlier if it hadn't got a bit lighter, and when he looked now he was convinced that he'd been right. It _had_ been lighter then, and possibly even more so now ... in fact, that wasn't the only thing that had progressed since he'd been here, was it? He'd gotten his head around the situation surprisingly quickly. And now that the room was lighter, and seemed to be more so than the last time he'd really regarded it, then that would seem to suggest that he was possibly becoming used to the lack of light in the situation visually too. Or the place itself was changing.

Can I affect it, then? Can I settle into the actual space more, as well?

With nothing else to do but be silent, Charlie decided it was worth a try. Turning his back fully on the screen—an unnerving task, being faced with nothing but that which seemed endless—Charlie peered into the darkness, surrounded by it whilst sitting naked, and listened to the sounds of the car as it drove along, his fear of the metal cage temporarily replaced by his curiosity towards the black one.

After a few minutes, Charlie had had enough, but with no other options, he forced himself to continue. Even when he heard the sound of speeding tyres on tarmac turn into the soft rolling of tyres pulling into a parking space, he kept his gaze on the blackness. He couldn't be sure—like the hands of a watch, any progress would be difficult to see happening, but unlike a watch there was nothing to gauge any potential difference by—and just when he began to wonder if it _was_ in fact brighter now, Minnie's voice interrupted him.

"Charlie?"

And just before he turned back to the screen to respond, something caught Charlie's eye; the faintest detection of a shape in the darkness.

Something that _moved_.

Charlie leapt up, letting out a scream, and tripped over his own feet, tumbling backwards into the screen itself. Surrounded by an explosion of light for a millisecond, he had a moment to realise he'd fallen through it before landing painlessly on the floor on the other side. The image on the screen on this side was exactly the same, and so was the darkness that stretched away here; it would seem that the screen was the centre of this place. Jumping back up in terror, Charlie leapt through the screen once more and crouched impotently, trying to see whilst shield his naked body from whatever was shifting in the black space before him.

And it _was_ shifting; now he'd seen it, the shape appearing as if it were a Magic Eye picture, it was almost impossible to un-see. There was faint movement in the darkness about fifteen feet away, and now he saw with dread that it wasn't just in the one spot either; it was here, and there, and then he knew that it was all around him. With a shriek, he jumped back through the screen to check the other side; yes, here too he was surrounded by a wall of barely visible and shifting _something_ that had come for him out of the gloom. Charlie began to scream, his pressurised mind finally giving way and abandoning its tired attempts to stay calm during the most terrifying day of his life. He held his hands out in a pathetic effort to withstand whatever immensity had come for him.

"Charlie?! Charlie, what the fuck?!" Minnie was shouting, and Charlie's eyes darted to the screen, saw her hallway again, saw the keys go onto a small wooden hook on the faded wall. The normalcy of the sight was nightmarish, so close yet so far from the horror that Charlie was experiencing. He only just managed to find the clarity to speak, his mind blitzed by fear.

"There's something, there's something, something in, something IN HEEEERRREE—" he gibbered, and Minnie's response was even more panicked, even more blurted.

"Wha, something, wha ... _Charlie_?!"

And as she spoke again, Charlie saw something that stopped his screams; partly out of confusion, but partly out of the realisation of possible salvation. With Minnie's voice—exactly in time with each syllable—the movement had increased over on the left-hand side. This movement, in the same moment, had also had the simultaneous effect of clarifying the positions of the barely visible shifting all around him; specifically, that whilst it was everywhere, it was only moving _on_ _the spot._

Nothing was coming for him, at least. All that had been revealed was something that had been there all along.

"Charlie!" Minnie shouted again, panic in her voice, and again, the movement quickened on the left, pulsed faster and kept in time with her speech. The shape of it all was still only barely visible in the darkness, but the _change itself_ was clear.

"Hold on," squeaked Charlie, starting to breathe again, and sitting up slowly, feeling more than a bit foolish as he did so. He'd screamed, after all. As he'd continued to watch the moving darkness around him, as he saw where it turned and undulated on the spot, a theory had come to him. Was the moving thing not just ... a wall? Albeit a pulsing, twitching one?

"Charlie, what the hell are you playing at?" yelled Minnie, but it wasn't in anger; it was still fear, fear for him.

"I got ... I got a fright but ... I think it's okay. Give me a second, give me a second," he said, standing up and, after a moment's hesitation, taking a step away from the light of the screen, towards the black.

"Bloody hell," said Minnie, breathing out in relief, and _now_ there was anger there ... and the simultaneous pulses with her voice in the dark were now in a different place too, moving more towards what Charlie saw as the centre. Emboldened, Charlie took another two steps closer.

_About fifteen feet?_ _Have the walls of the Black Room been this close all along, just hidden by the darkness? Did it just_ look _like this place went on forever?_

Two more steps, and now Charlie could make out the movement more clearly. It was as if the darkness was alive, churning slowly and gently... but in slightly curved surfaces that went straight up; _walls_ was as good a word for them as any, but it didn't seem to quite fit. It would do for now. As his gaze made its way up the wall, he realised that it seemed to arch right over and above his head, coming down on the opposite side.

"Are you seeing something? You've got to tell me what you're _doing_ in there," asked Minnie, her voice a mix now of annoyance and concern. The darkness that was the wall pulsed directly ahead of him in perfect synchronicity with her voice.

"I think it's okay," Charlie said again, stepping closer still, inspecting it and not looking at the screen. "I can see better in here now. I'm just... I'm seeing stuff. It's still really dark but... I think I can see walls, but they're not like... I don't know..." It was hard to describe; a surface that seemed to be made of _nothing_ , yet moved like it was alive.

"What's in there, anyway? You said something about a screen? What do you see?" Minnie asked. That was something, Charlie noted. She hadn't wanted to hear any of it before. Had she decided it was _all_ real on the way over here? He seized the opportunity anyway, trying to explain it.

"It was all black before, but... well, it still is... but I can see better now. There's the big screen in the middle that shows me what you see, but the area around me seems... smaller than I thought. It looked like it went on forever before. But the walls... they're...." he'd moved even closer now, only a few feet away, and he thought he could make out actual shapes. He struggled to find the words to explain what he was seeing.

When Charlie was a kid, he'd helped his dad wash the new family car one day in the summer. They'd been halfway through the first stage, which was soaping every surface on the vehicle up (the boring bit before the fun part, as far as young Charlie had been concerned: blasting the suds off with the trigger hose) when he'd moved onto the right-hand side of the car to do the driver's window, the side where the mid-afternoon sun was striking the hardest. He'd pulled his thick, water-heavy sponge out of the bucket and slopped a good load of foam onto the glass, then moved down to the rear passenger window, when a movement to his right idly caught his eye. Without really caring—he already knew what it was, the movement of the suds as they slid down the glass—he'd glanced over at the driver's window again, and was quietly entranced for a moment.

The bright sun had caught the oily texture in the cleaning fluid, lighting up its myriad colours as they danced and swirled upon the water that carried them. They looked incredible in that bright, hot sun, spreading over the glass and looking like a peacock's feather that had been turned into electrified liquid. It seemed alive, with a million different shapes and blobs pressing together, forming and turning, creating new shapes that were almost immediately lost inside the next batch as they appeared. It was beautiful. And then his dad had shot him with the ice-cold hose, having snuck up behind him, and claiming over Charlie's shocked squeals and outraged laughter that he'd been " _aiming for the window_." Charlie had been very young. Of course, all that had been before—

Enough of that. Don't think about that.

This was almost the same visual effect, if only in terms of the movement; there were no colours here. As he moved within touching distance, Charlie could see the similar churn of shapes on the dark surface, liquid and solid at the same time, a dark oily thickness that rippled and rose, pulsed and ebbed. It was like watching tumbling muscle fibres that somehow moved so smoothly that they had the appearance of a fluid.

"The walls are what?" asked Minnie, and Charlie jumped back a foot in alarm as the surface in front of him came alive with each syllable.

"They move. They're black and they move," said Charlie quickly, as he tried to get his breath back. His words had failed to do the sight in front of him any justice whatsoever. "When you talk, parts of them move in time."

There was no immediate response. Then:

"Does the floor do it too?"

A good question. He'd been sat on the floor, and hadn't felt any movement, nor had he noticed any. He looked down; the floor, whilst black, reflected the screen's light slightly. The walls were either too far away for it to reach, or they absorbed the light in a way that Charlie didn't understand; but over by the screen, now a good thirteen feet away, he could see that the floor area around it was smooth, and was indeed illuminated slightly by the light. The floor was made of something different, then.

He found himself looking at the screen, and realised that _screen_ didn't do it justice either. The way it petered away to nothing at the edges, the way it was intangible—he'd fallen through it, after all—the way it hung in the air, the way the images on it reached his eyes in a way that he knew was more than just seeing them in front of himself. It felt, in fact, as if they were in _his_ head, _his_ mind, and yet somehow presented before him at the same time; after all, when he'd first arrived, there had been no screen and no room at all, had there? He'd been seeing Minnie's view as if it had been his own. Then something had changed. His view had changed, stepped back, and now there was the screen and the Black Room and his own naked body.

So what had changed? Something physical? Or just his perception of the situation?

"Charlie?"

"Sorry. No... no, the floor doesn't move."

"Charlie, it's really weird when I ask you something and you don't reply. It's bad enough having someone in your head without having to keep thinking that they've disappeared."

Charlie rolled his eyes.

_Ten minutes ago you wanted me to shut up completely. Make your mind up_.

He checked himself, and mentally wound his neck in; he could see her point.

"Sorry, it's just really distracting in here. When you talk, the place... it changes. It's disconcerting."

"I've been talking to you all day though. Why didn't you see it before?" She wasn't trying to catch him out. She was trying to work with him, to talk it through.

"It's changed in here, or I've gotten used to it... or a bit of both," said Charlie, watching the nearest part of the wall and waving a hand at it for no one's benefit. "I think it's been slowly changing since I got here, or maybe I have. I can see better, anyway."

Perception again...

He turned back to the screen again, and realised that he hadn't needed to squint either time that he'd looked from the black walls to the light screen in order to shield his eyes from the change from light to dark. Again, _screen_ didn't do it justice. It was a _vision_ , an _insight_... but those words weren't right either.

The view before him was that of Minnie's living room, from a low and crooked angle; she'd moved whilst he wasn't watching, and was now seated. Her head, Charlie could tell, was leaning to one side, perhaps resting on the arm of the sofa. Charlie walked back towards the image before him, running a hand through his hair as he wondered what his next move should be. A thought occurred to him.

"Are you okay?" he asked. It was genuine. He watched with slight amusement as Minnie sighed quietly, and then her hand and forearm came into view and up and over as she ran through her own hair, too.

"This is fucking nuts, Charlie. It's _nuts._ " The hand and arm fell back past the screen as they flopped downwards and into her lap. "But... you were right about the phone. Dead right. And no matter what I try to say to myself, there's no way around that one. Cracked, just in the way you said, and the exact same type of phone. And I can _hear_ you, Charlie, and you sound perfectly normal to me, and you have the name of a real guy I've never met, at least not before today and not that I remember, at least ... and there's all the talk of subconscious process bullshit that yes, _could_ explain it away, but then you put it next to the phone thing and it _just doesn't have any weight anymore_... so it's all nuts." The view swung upwards again, the drab ceiling being displayed once more as her head rolled back on the sofa.

Charlie understood. What the hell would he think in the same situation? But most importantly—even if she hadn't specifically said as much—she sounded like she finally believed him. She'd just had physical proof, after all. He closed his eyes for a moment, and breathed deeply, not admitting to himself how close he'd come to disbelieving his own reality too.

Wouldn't a dream person think that they were real, too?

"Look, first things first," Minnie said, her head not moving, and Charlie noticed the wall pulsing on a fresh side now as she spoke. "You're stood in, in like a room, right? I mean, you are a body stood in a room, that's how you see yourself right now?"

Charlie briefly considered mentioning the lack-of-clothes thing again, and decided against it once more; doing so might well derail recent progress.

"Yep, that's right," he said, nodding to no one.

"So you can close your eyes, yeah? Put your hands over your ears?"

"Well, yeah, of course, but ..." replied Charlie, confused for a minute, then slowly began to get a dim realisation of what she was talking about, like seeing a bus in the distance but being unable to read its number. She didn't mean _that_ , did she? But then, it had been a few hours ..."Oh. Do you, uh, do you need to ..."

"Yeah," she said, curtly. "Yeah, I do, I really do. Just don't look for a minute. Well, you won't see anything anyway, but oh _God_ , that doesn't matter, I shouldn't have said that ... just ... listen, most importantly, put your fingers in your ears and hum or something. I'll shout you when I'm done. You'll be able to hear me?" As she spoke, the walls turned in many places, alive and feverish.

"Yes, yes, no problem," said Charlie hurriedly, almost as embarrassed as she was, closing his eyes as the view swung down from the ceiling and rose up. Minnie stood, and walked to the bathroom.

Charlie stuffed his fingers in his ears until it hurt and hummed like a lunatic for what seemed like an eternity, until he heard Minnie calling his name, just audible over his own noise.

"Done?" he asked, quietly. She didn't acknowledge the question, responding instead in a tone that was overly brisk and breezy.

"Does this help?" she asked, as the view crossed the living room and stopped in front of a mirror Charlie hadn't known was there. Her face was framed perfectly, more settled and awake now. She looked more alive, having had time to wake up, and her hair—whilst her curls would never be tamed—looked less like that of a lunatic. The dark rings were still under her eyes.

_But those are actually some beautiful eyes_.

For a moment, Charlie could see why Chuck had happily taken her card.

"I mean, seeing my face, does it help? I thought it might feel more like a normal conversation for you." Her eyes stared back into his, an air of nervousness about them, wondering if she'd done something stupid.

Charlie was taken aback; not only because here was more confirmation of her new belief, but because this was a step further. This was a gesture, a thoughtful, subtle, but unnecessary kindness. And, he realised, it was something he would have done in the same situation, wanting to put her more at ease.

"Yeah, that's much better actually. Good idea," he said, smiling. "So I guess this means that you're on board then? With me being ... you know, real?" He regretted the question as soon as it had left his mouth; it was too blatant, too blunt. But she didn't react badly. Instead, she merely looked away and shrugged slowly.

"Probably. I think so. The phone thing ... and sod it, you know, what else can I do? If you're real, the quickest way to fix this is to try and figure out what's going on. And if you're not ... well ... there's not a lot I can do about that, is there? Who knows, maybe working on it and trying to figure out what's going on is a good way of getting you out of my head, real or not."

It was good enough for Charlie.

"Okay. Well, good. That's good." He sat down on the floor, getting comfortable. How long had they both been awake, anyway? About two hours? Shouldn't he be hungry by now, or at least thirsty, or needing a piss himself?

Further proof that you don't have a true, physical form in here.

"So ... what now?" he asked, letting Minnie take the lead.

"Well ... I actually had an idea, on the way over here," said Minnie rubbing at the back of her neck gently, eyes moving away again, showing Charlie the floor. "It's pretty stupid sounding, but what the hell isn't going to in this situation?"

"No, no, please," said Charlie, intrigued.

"You know like ... _Back to the Future_?" she asked, eyes seeming to take great interest in her own skirting board.

"Of course," said Charlie. He was a child of the eighties, after all.

"You know in _Back to the Future II_?"

"Which bit?"

"When they go back to Hill Valley and it's all different. Where, you know. Where they changed stuff. Changed time."

Charlie understood where she was going. Marty and Doc's actions in the past created an alternate timeline in the future, where their town was changed beyond recognition. And here was Charlie's world, where he didn't live at that house anymore, and worked a different shift pattern. It was possibly the same thing, on a smaller scale. But it didn't fit; here he was, stuck in someone else's head. Where does that fit into time travel? And why would everything else be the same except him? And fucking _time_ _travel_? Not only was that a step too far, but it was the same bloody time.

"I don't think time travel is a part of this, Minnie. Not wanting to be a dick, but I think even with all of this craziness, time travel is a bit much."

"No, I don't mean time travel," snapped Minnie, embarrassed further now that the idea she didn't even want to put forward was being called into question. "I just mean that there were two places in that film, weren't there? The Hill Valley they knew, and the Hill Valley they created when they changed the past."

"Okay, go on."

"Well ... what if this is just that? A different place?"

"But nobody's time travelled," said Charlie, confused. "No one's gone anywhere to change anyth—"

" _No_ , forget about the bloody time travel," snapped Minnie, and Charlie could see her pale skin reddening, her embarrassment rising. "I just mean that this could be another place, somewhere that turned out differently to where you're from, that's all."

"But why would I remember my life? And more importantly, why is it only things about me that seem to have changed?" said Charlie, catching her drift and already beginning to poke it, to turn it in his head. He felt like she was onto something, and his questions weren't designed to find flaws, but to work at it, to work _with_ her just as she was now trying to work with him.

"Where are you getting that idea from?"

"What idea?"

"That everything is the same apart from you? All you know is the date's the same and that you live somewhere else. You know nothing about what might or might not be different."

"Okay ... fair point," Charlie admitted. It was true, after all. He had no reason _not_ to think he was the only thing that had changed, but he certainly hadn't explored any other possibilities. "Who's the president?"

"Obama."

"Prime Minister?"

"Cameron."

"9/11 happened?"

"Yep."

"Who won the league last season?"

"Manchester City, I think."

"Uh ... biggest film of last year?"

" _The_ _Avengers_ , probably. Or the new Batman one."

They both fell quiet, trying to think of new questions but also trying to avoid the obvious. Minnie said it first, eventually.

"It could be anything, couldn't it. We could go on all day and get nowhere."

"Unless we already _know_ the only thing that's different," Charlie countered, shrugging to the darkness all around him.

"Maybe," Minnie replied, chewing her lip and thinking. Charlie turned back and watched the wall, finding the movement easier to make out; partly due to knowing what he was looking for now, and partly because, well ... wasn't it just easier to see now, full stop?

And were the walls churning faster?

"Minnie?" asked Charlie, not turning back to the screen as an idea occurred to him. "Do me a favour?"

"What's that?" asked Minnie, with a hint of suspicion in her voice.

"Can you remember ... Christmas. Christmases as a kid. Can you remember those?"

"Of course," she said, sounding confused. "I _loved_ Christmas. Still do, I suppose, but it's not the same since we lost Mum. Dad just isn't as into the whole thing anymore, but I think he likes having me and my brother back. Why?"

Spurts of movement in different places, memories sparking in different spots.

"Can you remember the best Christmas? Was there a really happy one?" he asked, almost literally watching the cogs turn.

"Oh, yes ... but what's that got to—"

"I don't want to say just yet, it might spoil it. Just tell me about it?"

"Okay," she said, sounding unsure, but going with it, trusting him. "I got a Girl's World that year. You know them, the big heads with the hair that you can actually style? I wanted it _so_ badly. Massively sexist and gender stereotyping and all that, totally, but I didn't give a shit about that back then. I just really wanted one. And Tommy got Megatron, and he was just going _nuts_ , he was that happy—he hadn't expected it—and we just spent the afternoon playing with those whilst Mum and Dad joined in now and then. Dad even let me show him how to do plaits, and his were so lousy ... everyone was just laughing all day, and there wasn't even the traditional Christmas argument ... is that enough?"

Charlie didn't reply. He was too busy watching the explosion of thought all around him, the walls' pulses turning through fresh planes of movement in the dark. Strong memories, strong thought, new movements in other places. But the inside of a brain didn't look like this, didn't turn and pulse in this way, and besides, he couldn't be physically inside one and still be able to breathe. So what was this place?

If it wasn't physical—and it couldn't be—then it had to be mental, or simply his psychic energy or whatever placed inside hers ... but what about the room, and the screen? That was all very specific, very precise, too much to simply be some strange force of nature.

Unless ...

Charlie's own cogs turned, as he was dimly aware of Minnie asking for a response. A lifetime of comics and bad science-fiction TV was being referenced inside his head without him even being aware of it, dim thoughts making connections with long-forgotten memories that he didn't even know he had, questing for possible solutions. Had he been in a lighter place, he would have remembered his favourite line from Calvin and Hobbes: _I'm not dumb. I just have a command of thoroughly useless information._

So this place could be ... a representation of her mind, then? Maybe it was simply how _his_ mind made sense of the situation, how his own consciousness presented the meeting of their energies to him in a way that he could understand. It made sense to him; if he had to imagine being inside someone's head and seeing the world through their eyes, this would be the way that he pictured it looking.

_Unless it's not actually in her head at all, Charlie._ _You have a body here. You can see it, you can feel it. It's right there, attached to your head. The Black Room could be—_

"Charlie! For fuck's sake, _Charlie_!"

"Sorry, sorry, I was just—"

"I told you, don't _do_ that! It's bad enough having a voice in your head without it suddenly going silent. Can you imagine what that's like?" She sounded really upset, and Charlie kicked himself. She'd only just started to believe he was real; his sudden silence would only tell her that he might somehow be a figment of her imagination after all.

"I'm sorry, Minnie, I just really had a whole roll of thoughts, I needed to finish them," said Charlie, turning back to the screen.

"Well you could have told me!"

"You're right, you're right. I just got an idea about this ... this room I'm in."

"Okay, tell me," she said, breathing out hard as she did so, calming down, embarrassed again. "Wait a second, I need to sit down. Do you mind?"

"No, no, please, sit. Take the weight off." As the view swung around and headed back to the sofa, Charlie regretted his last choice of words. Weight? She was painfully thin, after all. Weight could be an issue. Anorexia perhaps, or at the very least a lack of appetite that pointed to other things.

Or she could just be skinny.

The view dropped rapidly as Minnie slumped onto the sofa with a sigh.

"Okay, go for it," she said.

"Things happen in here, Minnie. In the walls. They change when you think, I mean when _you_ think, or when you have an emotional response to something," said Charlie, sitting as well, cross-legged and naked in the dark. He was getting used to it, but still felt as strangely uncomfortable as he always had done when fully naked. Even here, in the Black Room, he felt like eyes were upon him. "I know I'm obviously in your head, but I think... I think what I see around me, the walls... I think it's a _representation_ of your _mind_ , Minnie. I think I can see your thoughts."

"That's pretty trippy," she replied, surprisingly calmly. "So... what do they do? They light up?"

"No, they just move, but in different ways and in different places. I couldn't really see them before, but I can now. I think I'm growing into this place, to be honest."

"Well don't get too bloody comfortable," said Minnie, a wry edge in her voice. "I'll be honest, I've had a bugger of a headache since you turned up."

"Must be my voice banging away in here all day. I'll try and talk a bit more quietly."

"Thanks," she said, sounding like she meant it. "It doesn't hurt more when you talk or anything though; I think my head, or my mind or whatever, just isn't used to having you in there. So when it all moves, doesn't it knock you about a bit? I mean, it must make it hard to stand up."

"No, it's not like that. The walls just kind of turn, and the floor..." he put out a hand and caressed the oddly smooth and unyielding, yet soft and comfortable floor beneath him. It was a complete contradiction, yet that was the only way he could describe it. He'd never felt anything like it. "The floor's different," he finished, not knowing how to say it. "It never moves. I don't know what the deal is with that."

"But of course, you realise that there's nothing like that actually inside my head," said Minnie, stating the somewhat obvious.

"I know, I know. Which leads me to one of two conclusions. They're both a bit Saturday matinee sci-fi sounding though, okay? So bear with me."

"Shoot."

"Right. One—and I think this is the more likely—my mind, for whatever reason, has been separated from my body and has been put inside yours by persons unknown. All of this, all of the stuff I'm seeing in here, is simply MY mind's way of processing the experience in a way I can understand."

"Well... that does make the most sense in a loony situation, I guess," said Minnie, mulling it over.

"And the second one—which I think is more unlikely, but still one that we have to consider—is that the Black Room is man-made."

There was silence for a second.

"The what?" Minnie asked.

"Sorry, the room I'm in, I just think of it as the Black Room. Because—"

"—because it's black," Minnie finished, sounding like she was smiling. "Didn't really need that one explaining."

"No, I suppose not," said Charlie, smiling himself. For the first time on that crazy, frightening day, he felt like he was genuinely starting to relax a little. "But anyway, as I say... could be man-made."

"You mean like... some sort of... projection room or something?" she asked. Charlie brightened. That was almost exactly what he'd meant.

"Yeah, pretty much. Like, I'm in here, and they're beaming me into you for whatever reason. This whole room could be one big organic machine, and this could all be some kind of test. It's loony as hell, and I have no idea how the hell they'd do it, but it's no loonier than what's been going on today."

"Mmm..." murmured Minnie, thinking. Charlie heard fabric creak as she shifted on the sofa. "But what about the old woman, and your house, and, well... you, at work?"

"Yeah, well... I'd have to work on that one. But if they can do this, what else could they do?" Charlie offered. "Surely it's not outside of the realms of possibility to put an actress in my home, and remove my housemate? And if they can stick me in here, who's to say they can't stick someone else in my body's head, someone who can control it?"

"But your _body_ would be in there with you. If you were in a man-made chamber thing," Minnie corrected, politely.

"Oh yeah. Got ahead of myself," Charlie muttered, shaking his head. "Well, like I say, I don't know about all that. But anyway, here's the thing; if they put me in here, there must be a door. Right?"

"I suppose so."

"So if it's okay with you, I want to poke at the walls a little bit. See if I can't find anything different, something that might suggest an entrance of some sort." Charlie gently bit his lip and waited for an answer, not knowing what to expect. If Minnie was someone who had reason to be concerned _before_ all this about her state of mind, then he doubted very much that she'd be up for letting him prod her in the consciousness.

"Will you be careful?" she asked. She said it so gently that he was taken aback, feeling something soften inside of him. There was trust here already.

"Of course. I'll talk you through what I'm doing every step of the way, and if it sounds like I'm doing something that you don't like, just tell me and I'll stop instantly," said Charlie, genuinely wanting to reassure her; not just because he wanted her cooperation for the task ahead, but because he wanted to.

"All right then. Just go easy, okay?"

"I will. I'm heading over now," Charlie said, as he stood and made his way over to the nearest swirling wall. "Are you ready?" he called to the screen, once he was within touching distance of the wall.

"You don't have to raise your voice," Minnie said. "I can hear just fine." Charlie noted this; he'd had to raise his voice to be heard at all when he'd first arrived.

"All right," said Charlie, more quietly now, and cautiously beginning to raise his hand. "I'm going to touch it now." He was hesitant, and nervous. Up close, the black wall churned just like before, intimidating now with the speed at which it moved.

She's nervous too, then.

As Charlie watched the wall move, he was reminded of the image of cake mixture being whisked by a machine; folds and refolds and swirls, all turning on the spot. _So that's what it reminds me of,_ he thought, _finally,_ and with that he gently pressed his hand to the wall's tumbling surface.

To his surprise, he couldn't feel the folding texture he'd expected; his eyes said his hand should be bouncing around on the wall's shifting surface, but all he actually felt was a similar substance to the floor. Soft, yet unyielding... but here, there was something extra, too. A vibrating sensation, thrumming away under his palm.

"Is that okay?" he asked Minnie.

"Are you touching it?" she said, sounding confused.

"Yeah," he said. "You don't feel anything?"

"Nothing at all," she said, sounding almost disappointed, "just this bloody headache, still."

"I'm going to push a little harder then, okay?" Charlie asked. After a brief pause, Minnie replied.

"Go for it," she said, sounding determined. As Charlie pushed, the vibrating sensation increased under his hand, almost like it was trying to push back.

"Still okay?" he asked.

"Uh huh," she said. He couldn't tell what she was thinking. _Ironic,_ he thought. He pushed harder still. The vibration didn't increase further now, but it did seem to spread out across his hand, almost like it was _feeling_ against his fingers, caressing their shape, tickling him almost. He realised that his heart was pounding against his chest.

"Still okay?" he asked again.

"Yes. I'm fine. Are you pushing harder?"

"Ah. Ah. Ah. _Ah_."

" _Charlie?!"_ shrieked Minnie, suddenly terrified at his gibberish response, but Charlie was, for the moment, incapable of clarifying the situation for her as the vibration had now shot up the length of his entire arm and slammed into his head, piercing his brain and bombarding his mind with images.

It wasn't painful; it was _stunning,_ however, concussive with the force and strength of it all. The visuals were too fast to make any real sense of them—and on one level he could still see the churning wall and his hand pressing against it—but he found himself recognising people and events that he knew he had never known.

Uncle Paul. Sam McGinty. Sarah Westmuller. Results day. Kevin's dog Misty, an ALSATIAN. The man with the cats in a box. Harry the manager. The boxing match at the social. Turning up to work with ladders in my tights—

He was right. This was her mind. He was seeing the layers of her mind.

— _not being able to breathe and panicking, Jenny bringing me some Lemsip and grapes, Claire the Bitch's eighteenth, dancing in a nightclub whilst two years underage—_

" _Charlie, don't fucking do this_ —"

"I'm... I'm..." Charlie heard her, tried to find his voice, and nearly couldn't. "I'm okay... I can see... this is your mind, I'm seeing... your _life_..."

"On the screen, on the screen thing, you mean?" Minnie said, energised too now, speaking in almost a whisper.

"No, in my... in my head... I'm... I'm going to push harder... okay?" Charlie gasped.

"Does it hurt? Does it hurt you?"

"No, just... intense... _ah..._ but I'm okay... ready?"

"Yes... yes, all right," she said, breathing hard herself.

Charlie didn't respond, and instead pushed again, harder, the images still tumbling into and out of his head _(three hundred quid for fillings, left it too long, Euro 96 and being bored but watching anyway, James Pearson, my first pill in Ministry Of Sound_ ) but not changing in speed or pattern. He focused on the image before his eyes, not the ones in his head, and gritted his teeth as he got his body weight behind it.

Nothing changed. Then suddenly, the wall gave way beneath his hand.

Lots of things happened at once. The images stopped like someone had cut the ribbon of film in a projector, and Charlie found himself falling forward very fast, travelling with the force of his own pushing bodyweight. His arm disappeared into the wall up to the elbow, and his body fell against the surface surrounding the hole, his face and free hand slapping onto the wall. The images recommenced.

Charlie Brown Christmas special, Russ Abbott Christmas special, Who Wants To Be A Millionaire—

Charlie pulled his body and face back, and the images abruptly ceased again. He took a second to recover from his shock and get his bearings, and a second later he became aware of two things. One was that he _could_ now feel the folds and turns of the wall, all around his forearm; they felt rough, like a dog's tongue, and warm, and exerted a tight pressure against him that made him feel, with fresh panic, that he might be stuck. The other thing was the fact that Minnie was screaming.

Charlie whipped around to face the screen and saw its light flickering on and off, as Minnie repeatedly screwed up and then opened her eyes, yelling. It was hysterical, agonised shrieking, and it was clear what the cause was. Turning back to the wall, Charlie pulled, and was horrified when his suspicions were confirmed; he _was_ stuck. Frantically, he twisted and turned his arm, trying to get loose, but the tumbling folds of the wall seemed to almost have a vacuum effect, worse now that Minnie was in pain; they were moving at three times their previous speed. With desperation, Charlie got his feet up against the wall to push, then thought better of it; what if his feet went through as well? Straining, he planted his feet firmly on the floor instead and _leaned_ away from the wall with all his might, blood thrumming in his temples as his shoulder felt like it was going to separate.

Minnie's screams hit a pitch that could shatter glass.

Something shifted in the right way inside the wall, and the vacuum popped. Charlie tumbled backward, his arm coming free, and as he dropped onto the floor with a heavy thud that yielded no pain, he was dimly aware that his arm was dry. He'd half-expected it to be wet.

Minnie's screams hit a crescendo and then turned into moans of relief and pain, the light in the Black Room dimming as her fingers covered her eyes. Charlie propped himself up on one elbow, quickly, and turned to the screen, feeling the awful quicksand-like pull of rapidly increasing guilt.

"Minnie, I'm sorry ... it just gave way—"

"What happened?" came the muffled reply, lost between her palms and her gentle, breathless sobs. "What did you do?"

"The wall, it just buckled under my hand," pleaded Charlie, turning back to the wall and being amazed to see a clearly darker spot where his arm had been. Already, however, it was closing. The wall healed before his eyes but with a shuddering, staggering action, as if it required a great deal of effort to do so. As he watched, the spot sealed over, and all that was left was the turning wall of Minnie's thoughts. "My arm got stuck inside ... I couldn't get it out," Charlie continued, turning back to the screen. "I saw things, Minnie—" He cut himself off, the intense guilt he now felt reminding him that the other parts could wait. "Are you all right? Did it hurt?"

The light from the screen suddenly tripled in brightness, her fingers coming away and revealing her living room ceiling once more. There was silence for a moment as she got her breathing under control.

"I'm okay," she said, bravely, sniffing. "But that ... bloody hell, Charlie. It was like you'd stuck a knife in my head. No, worse than that; like you'd twisted ... _me_. The whole world seemed to shift." Nothing but her breathing again. Then, incredibly, she added: "I'm sorry if I scared you. That just hurt so much."

Charlie gaped in the darkness. She was apologising to _him?_

"No ... look, I'm fine, I'm worried about _you._ Your vision's okay, no blurriness? No headaches?" he asked.

"Just the one I had before. I think I'm gonna need to stay lying down for a bit, though. I feel shaky."

"No problem. That's a good idea." He thought about telling her about the visions, her memories, but he decided better of it. He'd shaken her enough today, caused her enough anguish and upset, without telling her that he had access to her mental rolodex too.

"So ... no door, then?" she asked, breathing out as she settled. Her eyes narrowed; the screen dimmed.

"Not where I pushed, no. I know how much pressure I can put on it, at least."

"You can check again, you know. Other places. Just touch though. Don't push."

Charlie smiled, despite his breathless guilt. This girl was brave.

"Not today, I think. Not for a good few hours anyway."

"Okay. Christ, this headache ... you certainly didn't help."

"I'm _so_ sorry—"

"It's all right. Really. You had to try, and I wasn't going to stop you. Look, I'm going to just put the TV on quietly for a bit. Do you mind?"

"No, not if it'll help you relax." Her hand swung past the screen, then travelled back the other way holding a remote. He heard the TV come on in the background, heard the volume dropping on it as she adjusted it to suit her aching head. A thought occurred to Charlie. "Minnie? Why did you give ... Chuck your card?"

There was just the sound of the TV for a moment.

"I don't know," she said eventually. "It just seemed to make it more believable, really. If I'd lost my phone, why wouldn't I?" She didn't sound right saying it—awkward, almost childlike—but then, Charlie had heard Minnie lie before, and it had been seamless. He had to assume she was telling the truth.

"Okay. I just wondered," he said, letting the matter drop. "I'll shut up for a bit."

"No," she said, sounding sleepy. "Talk to me. I don't like it when you go quiet. It's like you're lurking if you're there and not saying anything. Just talk quietly."

"No problem," said Charlie, smiling, finding himself feeling glad to have a break from the madness for a while. "What do you want me to talk about?"

"Tell me about your life," she said, sighing slightly as the screen turned to the left, facing the TV. "Talk about that. I want to know who my tenant is." Charlie wondered if she'd actually be paying attention if she was watching the TV at the same time, but he felt like he owed her; if that's what she wanted him to do to help, then that was what he would do.

"All right," said Charlie, rolling over onto his back and looking at the churning black ceiling. It turned above him like a boiling black sky. "Where should I start?"

"School... what were you like at school?" Minnie said drowsily. She sounded like she was about to fall asleep, which wasn't something Charlie was looking forward to. Her eyes would close completely, and the Black Room would descend into total darkness. He didn't like the idea of that at all, but pushed the thought away. It had to happen eventually; he'd better just get on with things until that happened.

"Apart from being terrible at sports, a distraction in class, and obsessed with comics, I was a fairly average kid," Charlie began, putting his hands behind his head, resting them against that strange, smooth black floor. "By the way, you go next, you know. I like to know things too, especially when it comes to the women whose heads I'm stuck inside."

"Uh-huh, yes. Carry on," she muttered, and Charlie did.

As he talked, and time passed, the screen dimmed several times, and Charlie was certain she was about to pass out on him. His heart leapt nervously as he thought of being alone in the dark ... but every time it happened she would make a noise to indicate that she was still listening, or she would ask a question about what he'd just said, and he knew that she was still awake, just relaxed. Whenever he tried to bounce the conversation back onto her, however, she would brush him off, or say that it was still his turn. Charlie went with it. He was relaxing too; they needed a break, after all, on what was probably the most stressful day of both of their lives.

In a strange way, he felt that he liked Minnie, too; he'd already been impressed with both her bravery and her ability to bullshit on the spot. She'd been through the wringer—that much was clear already, both by her outburst in the car and her reluctance to come forth with details about her own life—but he felt like he would learn about her if he ended up being there long enough ( _let's bloody hope not_ his own voice said). Plus, it seemed like she already trusted him. There was a lot to be said for that, in Charlie's book. Trust was very big deal to him. And he found Minnie easy to talk to.

"... although I never really expected myself to still be in the bar trade by now," Charlie finished eventually, by now lying on his stomach. "I like it though, and the people I work with are a good laugh. You just think sometimes, though ... different paths you could have taken, and all that." He decided to give it another try. "So what did you end up doing?"

"Wugginonnatull," mumbled Minnie, and that's when Charlie realised that the screen was almost completely black and staying that way. The images on it were already squashed to a thin strip in the middle, blurred by her eyelashes, and this line of light was getting slowly smaller.

Charlie shot upright, opening his mouth to shout and wake her up, but something stopped him. It had to happen eventually, as he already knew—as he'd decided to accept—but it wasn't acceptance that prevented him from waking her up. It was that he _wanted_ her to sleep, to have a rest from it despite his own terror of total darkness.

Madly, he found himself noticing the images on the TV screen in front of him, still just visible between Minnie's closing eyelids. The BBC were closing the news with a summary on the third round of the FA Cup so far, including the recent run of David vs Goliath upsets. Desperately yearning for the light from the TV—the _outside world's_ light—Charlie even half-raised a hand towards the screen, reaching for it. Catching himself, knowing this line of thinking would help nothing, he closed his eyes as the Black Room grew darker and darker, forcing himself to breathe slowly and to at least have a chance of staying calm. He thought that if he _started_ right, he had a better chance of not freaking out when the darkness smothered him completely. The sounds of the TV were still audible over Minnie's slow, deep breathing.

" _... and of course Coventry against Manchester United in a 3–1 upset at the Ricoh, after the controversial sending-off of Phil Jones just fifteen minutes into the match led to both a Clarke equaliser from the penalty spot and, seven minutes later, a screaming effort from Elliott that left David de Gea napping. United rallied magnificently, but Coventry were relentless, poaching a third before halftime, courtesy of—"_

Charlie's eyes flew open. He took a second whilst he frantically checked and double-checked it in his mind, the madness of the moment making him doubt his own memories, but he _knew_ he was right.

He'd _been_ at that game. FA Cup, third round, Coventry City Vs Man United. Clint's mate—he of the corporate connections—had a spare ticket going; Charlie hadn't believed his luck when he' been asked. Everyone in Coventry had wanted one.

But Jones had got a _yellow_ card, not a red. He'd never been sent off. United had won 3–0.

Then Minnie's eyes closed, and the Black Room became a tomb.

Panic immediately closed a fist around Charlie's heart as he was plunged into a blackness of which he had never known the like. It was worse than he'd imagined, worse than he'd prepared for, and a weak cry escaped his lips before he could bite it back.

You can't wake her up. Calm down. Let her sleep. There's nothing in here but you. Breathe. Breathe.

Trembling, yet embarrassed at his own childlike panic, Charlie opened and clenched his hands repeatedly as he drew in air through his nose, tried to push fear out through his mouth. It almost began to work, but then the humming began, coming from all around him.

This time, Charlie didn't even try and stop the yell as fear slicked over his skin like a cold shower; he whirled around on the spot, crying out faintly. It wasn't a mechanical hum, nor a human-sounding one; to Charlie, the word that came to mind, the only image that he could think of, was _Monster_.

The sound was too low, too guttural to be made by any animal that he could think of. He listened more intensely, his head switching from side to side in the dark as he tried to catch any change in sound that might mean that the terrible source of the noise was advancing. Charlie slowly realised that it seemed to fade and increase, turn and waver... it seemed to pulse.

Could it be ...

Taking a deep breath again—but holding it this time—Charlie put out a trembling hand and moved slowly forward, his fingers nervously splayed and twitching, as if the digits themselves were frightened of coming up against something in the dark. As he walked, the sound increased, dropped, raised behind him, coming alive in some places and dying in others.

You saw better in here after a while; all the time, you're getting better at being in the Black Room. You can see. You can see in the dark.

He opened his eyes, and the blackness was as impenetrable as ever.

Fuck.

One thing that was different, though, was the sound; even as it rose and fell, it got louder as he walked forward, as he approached the nearest wall. Charlie began to relax slightly. He thought he might be right.

_When you touched the wall_ , he thought, _you saw things. You saw her memories. Her thoughts are in the walls ..._

As the humming reached its loudest volume yet, Charlie's fingers found the nearest wall in the dark, and the images came once more. This time, however, they weren't the tumbling kaleidoscope of clear pictures he'd gotten before, pictures arriving with the stated knowledge of what each one was; now it was purely a single moving image, with no other information than the visual before him.

Seen from Minnie's eye-view, Charlie saw people walking all around her, laughing, waving, talking, some arguing, some walking dogs, all of them under a cloudless blue sky. The horizon stretched along forever, and the sun shone warmly.

All of the people were walking upon the surface of the sea.

... _and now the walls are showing you her dreams. That sound is Minnie's mind, dreaming._

Charlie began to laugh in the Black Room, relieved by the discovery and warmed in his mind as if the sun in Minnie's dream was shining upon him too. He watched as Minnie dove face first through the ocean's surface, seeing a town lying on the ocean floor, so far below that it gave him the impression that he was now flying. People were all around Minnie here, too, some swimming up from the citadel to the surface, others travelling inside clear, bubble-like capsules clearly designed to carry several lazier sea-people who didn't want to swim.

Whilst the views and the adventure being presented to him were entertaining, there was no emotional connection this time either, in the way that there had been with the memories. This was more like watching a movie behind his eyes. Even so, it beat being stuck in the dark, and for the time being, lost in his relief, Charlie was content to watch Minnie's dreams. Eventually, the scene changed to a grocery shop, albeit one done up like a high-end boutique where the milk cartons replaced coats on coat hangers, where mannequins stood holding packets of sausages. After a while, Charlie decided to get comfortable, and sat himself on the floor, still making contact with the wall.

As many minutes passed—Minnie now having an argument with someone (who appeared to be an image of a real-life friend, perhaps) over who got to take the horse to school—Charlie began to wonder what had happened to the memories in the walls once the dreams began. Did they turn _into_ the dreams? Or did the dreams just come to the fore as Minnie drifted deeper into sleep?

_Hell_ , _do_ you _get to sleep? Don't people go crazy if they never get to sleep?_

The dream-images themselves became more vivid, sharp, and colourful as more time passed, suggesting that Minnie was drifting into a different stage of sleep now, but the actual story being presented became more abstract. Things began to make less and less sense as time went on, and Charlie actually began to feel bored... but not so much that he wanted to stop watching. Anything was better than only seeing the pitch blackness.

That was when he _felt_ the wall move under his hand.

Charlie jerked his hand away, confused for a moment and convinced that he'd imagined it, but when the wall moved for a second time in the dark—moved forward so much that it already met his hand again without him even putting it back—Charlie knew that his first instinct had been right. The low humming sound all around him had grown louder, and the wall he'd been touching was now pushing against his body. It was actually moving him backwards, his feet finding no purchase on the smooth floor beneath him.

Oh no—

As the sound continued to grow in all directions, he realised that the walls were closing in on all sides.

Even in his terror, Charlie half-thought about the fragility of the wall, how he'd damaged it before and hurt Minnie, but it was different now, more solid; as if the surface of the wall had toughened as the weight of whatever lay beyond it pressed inwards.

There was no time to think, no time to plan. Terrified, Charlie pushed harder against the wall, trying to brace it, but he was still being pushed inexorably backwards. The humming grew and grew, sounding like a chorus of damnation, as the comprehension that he was about to be crushed to death exploded in Charlie's head. In a blind panic, he tried to punch through the wall again, hoping that the pain would wake Minnie and save his life, that she could stop this, but his fist bounced off harmlessly with no damage to the wall or his knuckles. It had clearly changed form now that it had begun this contracting process, had become solid and hardened enough to crush his bones to powder as her mind dropped into a deeper level of unconsciousness. The Black Room was being closed for the night. He could feel its density, and he felt frail and doomed against it.

" _Minnie! Minnie! MINNIIEEEEEEE!!_ " Charlie screamed, not knowing what he expected her to do and not caring. It was the only thing he had, his only desperate option. There was no response from Minnie; she was too far under now to hear his voice, her mind removed and elsewhere. This was happening so suddenly, so quickly, that Charlie hadn't even realised that his mind wasn't receiving the images anymore. His feet scrabbled and slipped on the floor as he struggled against the wall, knowing the effort was pointless but having no other option but to respond with the helpless, desperate actions of a trapped animal. He couldn't see, he couldn't stop it, and there was nothing he could do. The humming became deafening in the darkness, devoid of any humanity or mercy, as it signalled the end of Charlie Wilkes's life.

*

TO BE CONTINUED IN 'THE BLACK ROOM PART TWO: THE WOMAN IN THE NIGHT' OUT NOW ON AMAZON KINDLE STORE. IF YOU ENJOYED THIS FIRST PART, PLEASE LEAVE A STAR RATING ON AMAZON—VITALLY IMPORTANT AS THEY HELP SALES WHICH MEAN THE STORIES KEEP COMING—BUT PLEASE DO SO VIA THE AMAZON WEBSITE, AND NOT VIA THE 'RATE THIS BOOK' FEATURE ON YOUR KINDLE; THOSE RATINGS DON'T CONNECT TO THE WEBSITE HALF THE TIME! YOU CAN ALSO FIND OUT ABOUT MY OTHER AVAILABLE BOOKS WHILE YOU'RE THERE. FOLLOW LUKE SMITHERD ON TWITTER @travellingluke OR GO TO FACEBOOK UNDER 'LUKE SMITHERD BOOK STUFF'. MOST IMPORTANTLY, VISIT LUKESMITHERD.COM TO SIGN UP FOR THE SPAM-FREE BOOK RELEASE NEWSLETTER, WHICH NOT ONLY INFORMS YOU WHEN NEW BOOKS ARE OUT (AND _ONLY_ DOES THAT) BUT ALSO MEANS YOU GET NEW SHORT STORIES FOR **FREE!** YOU CAN ALSO READ MY BLOG WHILST YOU'RE THERE!

_Author's Afterword To Part One:_

(Note: at the time of writing, any comments made in this afterword about the number of other available books written by me are all true, and The Black Room series is now complete and available in full. However, since writing this, many more books might be out! The best way to find out is to search Amazon for Luke Smitherd or visit www.lukesmitherd.com ... _)_

Hello there. If you're coming to this story without reading any of my other books (all two of them) well, hello there. I hope you enjoyed this first part, and hey! While you're waiting for Part Two, why the hell not check out _The Stone Man_ and _The Physics of the Dead_? (Start with _The Stone Man_ , would be my recommendation.) If you DIDN'T enjoy this, then I'm sorry about that; I did my best. On the plus side, it only cost you under a quid (or under two dollars in the US) so it's not the end of the world ... right? (Right?)

But if you've read my other stuff, hello again! You may be wondering two things then, I think:

1. Why is this book absolutely nothing to do with the books I said I was going to work on next?

2. Why is this book being released in sections, when my other two were complete novels?

Well, the answer to the first question will be in the afterword of the final part, but for the second, there's a simple answer, and quite frankly it's obvious: sales.

Wait! Before you judge me cynically, let me explain my thinking.

You see, if you read the afterword to _The Stone Man_ , you'll know that I was very intrigued as to what would happen with sales of that book after the free listing success of the previous book, TPOTD (an acronym, I'm glad to say, that is catching on against all odds) as I'd shifted about 3,000 free copies of it ... 3,000 free copies that may or may not have been bought by pirate-website spambots (meaning there wouldn't be a resulting 3,000 people waiting to buy the next book if so). Plus, the additional (and mind-boggling) problem that Amazon still doesn't have an 'Alert me when this author releases a new book' button; so if there WERE 3,000 people waiting, would they even know that a new book was out? So I had no idea what would happen with _The Stone Man_ when it was released.

Well, the answer is both good and bad, but mainly good. Here's the numbers:

When TPOTD first came out, I was literally selling two or three copies of that book a month. After I ran my first free listing (Amazon lets you list a book as free for five days out of every three months) and had a huge amount of downloads (see: spambots) the reviews started coming in, and I was delighted to see that they were all favourable. The sales then went up to about ten books a month, pretty much unaffected by me raising and dropping the price to see what worked best.

Then I released _The Stone Man_ three months ago, at the start of December 2013, and the first funny thing happened.

Thanks to the efforts of TPOTD readers that had got in touch (and whom, therefore, I was able to tell that a new book was out) a good amount of initial reviews went up almost straightaway, which meant the book started selling immediately, which was great (I cannot stress the importance of reader reviews/star ratings enough on Amazon. Hint, hint.) You'd think, therefore, that overall I'd be selling maybe twenty books a month then; roughly ten copies of each book.

But instead, in December, January and February since _The_ _Stone Man_ 's release, I started selling an overall average of sixty copies a month, which was obviously great news and a really nice surprise. Certainly not a money maker (at 77p/99c a book, I make about 20p/30c off each sale ... speaks for itself) but I consider this stage of my attempts to make a career out of writing to be the 'just get it all out there by whatever means possible, including naked sandwich board-wearing if necessary' stage. The sales were split about evenly between TSM (thank you, reviewer 'Andy') and TPOTD, with TPOTD selling a bit more (due to having more reviews. HINT, HINT.)

Then, at the end of February, I had to use that quarter's free listing days on _The Stone Man_ before they reset for the _next_ quarter, and when I did, the book went to the top of the Amazon free best-seller horror chart, and to number 14 on the overall free chart. Fantastic!

And then it went back to the paid chart, and started to shift.

At the time of writing, TSM has sold 315 copies in the last six days since the free listing ended. TPOTD has sold over 100, presumably off the back of _The Stone Man_. Obviously, I'm extremely excited, as in 2012 I didn't sell more than 200 copies in an entire YEAR. To sell double that in eight days is, quite frankly, what is known in literary circles as a 'Big Cock Day.' Pretty much all of these sales have been on Amazon UK, however, and almost none in the US (Only three reviews on the US site, you see. HHHIIIIIIIINNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNTTTTTTTTTTTT) I need more Americans to get on board! _The Stone Man_ is currently at number 7 on the overall Amazon UK horror chart (books AND Kindle books, that is).

But the immediate problem I was confronted with was ... how the hell do I capitalise on this? The answer was immediately clear.

There are a couple of books in the top 100 on Amazon that are divided up into parts, creating a nicely serialised novel effect (hey, if it's good enough for Stephen King and _The Green Mile_ , then it's bloody well good enough for me) that keeps your work getting out in a steady, reasonably constant stream that means people will keep coming back to see what you're doing. And, as luck would have it, on the week my work is at the most visible it's ever been (which still isn't a huge amount, but it's at least three or four jumps from where I started out back in 2011 with the release of TPOTD. Well, for my money it is, anyway) I already had over a third of the new book written. I also had the rest of the novel fully plotted. So why not redraft what I already had, release it as Part One, and hopefully capitalise on the current 'success' of my work?

I'll be honest, I'm not entirely happy about doing it that way; I'm very nervous that I'm going to set something in stone in Part One that I might want to go back and change in parts Two and Three, and once Part One is out there, there's no going back ... but I think I'd be a fool to let this opportunity slip by. I'd prefer to have three complete novels rather than two complete books and one three-parter, but I hope you see why I'm doing it. If I'm ever going to get out of the literary gutter and into something resembling the shallow, sycophantic, materialistic and of course desperately appealing lifestyle that Andy Pointer enjoys in New York (see 'bestselling' novel _The Stone Man_ ...) then I need to pull out all the stops (I admit it. I heart 2 party).

So, it meant that this week I stopped working on the third draft of _The Stone Man_ and got busy redrafting this first part that you've just read. And here's another bit of news; the reason TSM was getting a third draft was in preparation for using Amazon's print-on-demand feature. Yes, this means that later this year, hard copies of _The Physics of the Dead_ and _The Stone Man_ will be available on Amazon! And I'll make ... ah shit, another lousy 20p from each one, even though they're full price (justgettheworkoutherejustgettheworkouttherejustgettheworkoutthere ... phew, that's better.) That's a very exciting experiment, because if those hard copies sell, then I'll be looking at producing a short print-run of my own to hopefully shift and thus make some proper money. Stranger things have happened.

As people have asked—and donated—I'll say it again here: if you'd like to donate to the cause, my paypal address is lukesmitherd@hotmail.co.uk. But! MOST importantly, PLEASE leave a star rating for this part on Amazon ... or there won't BE a Part Two! (*August 2nd 2013 additional note: all FOUR parts of The Black Room series are now available on Amazon, and the series is complete. Go get 'em! Luke)

AND, don't forget to check Amazon on (*DATE REMOVED, IT'S OUT NOW! :)) for the next instalment; if everyone buys it on the same day, that helps it shoot up the chart and helps other people to see it, which helps me buy cans of bee ... I mean, nappies for my non-existent children. Dog food. It helps me buy dog food.

If you'd like to stay updated on book news, add me on Facebook under Luke Smitherd Book Stuff, or add me on Twitter @travellingluke and I'll do my best to keep you amused. The website will be up in the next few months too, hopefully to coincide with the release of the final part of this book. It's all going on at the moment, folks, and whether you're a newcomer or one of the Smithereens that have been with me from the start (yes, that is your name now) I sincerely thank you from the bottom of my heart for giving this latest offering a try. You have no idea how many times a day I check for new reviews. It's pathetic.

Help me out here, folks, and you can say you were there on the ground level when Luke Smitherd was still a schmuck with a dream in his heart and tomato sauce around his mouth. Wait ... is that my sales slowing down? Am I dropping out of the top ten? Shiiiiiiiittttt ... this is where you guys save the day. I'm counting on you.

Stay Hungry.

Luke Smitherd,

Earlsdon,

Coventry

March 11, 2013

### Also By Luke Smitherd:

## The Physics of the Dead

What do the dead do when they can't leave ... and don't know why?

The afterlife doesn't come with a manual. In fact, Hart and Bowler (two ordinary, but dead men) have had to work out the rules of their new existence for themselves. It's that fact—along with being unable to leave the boundaries of their city centre, unable to communicate with the other lost souls, unable to rest in case The Beast should catch up to them, unable to even sleep—that makes getting out of their situation a priority.

But Hart and Bowler don't know why they're there in the first place, and if they ever want to leave, they will have to find all the answers in order to understand the physics of the dead: What are the strange, glowing objects that pass across the sky? Who are the living people surrounded by a blue glow? What are their physical limitations in that place, and have they fully explored the possibilities of what they can do?

Time is running out; their afterlife was never supposed to be this way, and if they don't make it out soon, they're destined to end up like the others.

Insane, and alone forever ...

Available now on the Amazon Kindle Store

### Also By Luke Smitherd:

## The Stone Man

### The #1 Amazon Horror Bestseller

Two-bit reporter Andy Pointer had always been unsuccessful (and antisocial) until he got the scoop of his career; the day a man made of stone appeared in the middle of his city.

This is his account of everything that came afterwards and what it all cost him, along with the rest of his country.

The destruction, the visions ... the dying.

Available now on the Amazon Kindle Store, and soon in paperback

### Also By Luke Smitherd:

An Unusual Novella for the Kindle

## The Man On Table Ten

It's a story that he hasn't told anyone for fifty years; a secret that he's kept ever since he grew tired of the disbelieving faces and doctors' reports advising medication But then, he hasn't touched a single drop of booze in all of that time either, and alcohol loosens bar room lips at the best of times; so on this fateful day, his decision to have three drinks will change the life of bright young waitress Lisa Willoughby forever... because now, the The Man On Table Ten wants to share his incredible tale.

It's afterwards when she has to worry; afterwards, when she knows the unbelievable burden that The Man On Table Ten has had to carry throughout the years. When she knows the truth, and is left powerless to do anything except watch for the signs ...

An unusual short story for the Kindle, The Man On Table Ten is the latest novella from Luke Smitherd, the author of the Amazon UK number one horror bestseller _The Stone Man_. Original and compelling, _The Man On Table Ten_ will leave you breathless and listening carefully, wondering if that sound you can hear might just be _pouring sand that grows louder with every second ..._

Available now on the Amazon Kindle Store
