Psychological horror · 4 min read ·
The Snoring That Is Not Mine
A lodger times a second sleeper in his room against the stops of the yard bell, and the bell is loud enough to be believed.
- perspective: first
I lodge at the top of 14 Rider Street, one room, over the cartway of the old bonded yard. The yard still works some tonnage, tar and barrels, and it keeps its bell. The bell hangs on a gallows-beam by the gates, and the foreman tells me it has been rung by clockwork since before the war and that it is the loudest thing in the street. He says it the way a man says a wall is load-bearing, meaning you may lean on it. I have leaned. That is the trouble.
The bell rings at two, and again at three, and on nights when a ship is worked late there is a third ring at 03:33 that the yardmen call the late lady. When the bell rings you cannot hear anything else in my room. I have tried — radio, tap, kettle — nothing gets over it. The bell is a fact. It is the stopping I have had to learn to sit through.
Whenever the bell stops — and it does not fade, it stops, like a cutting — there is a snoring in my room. Not mine. Mine is thin, with a whistle in the top of it, and I have that on the best authority, which is an aunt who raised me and did not spare me. The other is deep and slow, down at the far side of the room from my bed, low, at the height a man's head would be if there were a man, and every eighth breath it hitches, a small catch, like a drawer that rides.
I have counted. I am not a fanciful man and counting is not fancy. The two o'clock bell rang, by my watch, fifty-two seconds. In the quiet after it, the snoring ran fifty-two seconds, breath for breath, and stopped as neatly as the bell had. The three o'clock bell rang sixty-one. The snoring after it ran sixty-one. I have watched this eleven times now and the arithmetic has not once mistaken itself. It is as if the snoring had been there under the bell the whole span, going on regardless, and could only be heard when the bell came off the top of it.
There is nobody else on my books. One bed, one chair, one coat over the chair. Mrs Tapper, who keeps the house, sleeps at the front of the ground floor and swears she would hear a stranger's breathing through two ceilings long before I would through one floor, and she hears nothing. I asked at the yard for its book. The book lists the men and their bells. No man on that list breathes with a hitch, and I have been down the list twice.
I have taken to saying two words under my breath in the dark, level, the way you talk a dog down: not mine. Not mine. I say them through the whole fifty-two seconds, which is long enough if you keep them level, and the snoring does not stop for being told. It stops when its time is up, punctual, like anything kept on the bell, and then the room is mine again till the next ring.
In the hard week of February the yard took the bell down to be cleaned and greased, five nights running, and there was nothing. No bell, no snoring, and I slept badly, which I put down to the quiet being raw. The night the bell went back up it rang out its span and the snoring came in after, as always, and I will set down plainly what I noticed, because noticing is all I have: it came in mid-breath, at the place in the eighth hitch where it had left off, as if the five silent nights had been entered in a book somewhere and allowed for.
The foreman says the bell is rung so the yard knows itself. My room is not the yard. But a snore has to have a beginning, and I have never heard this one begin; it is always already under way when the quiet lets it show, and the quiet only lets it show on the bell's own time. So the question I carry down Rider Street every morning, level as the man himself: if it began while the bell still rang, and I cannot hear a beginning, and the yard book lists no man with that hitch — who is keeping the other fifty-two seconds, and what are they being kept for the bell to finish?