The Room: A Tale of Murder in the Social Networking Age Read online



  The Room

  Gavin Bell

  Copyright 2012 by Gavin Bell

  Copyright © Gavin Bell 2012

  The right of Gavin Bell to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved.

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either a product of the author’s imagination, or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual people living or dead is entirely coincidental.

  Contents

  The Room

  Halfway to Hell (exclusive free sample)

  Also by this author

  The Room

  I STARED AT the screen for a while, listening to the pulse thudding in my head over the hypnotic hum of the hard disk. I was alone, but I wanted to get away from these people. No words had been spoken, yet what had been said echoed around my head like approaching thunder. I was perfectly safe in this room, but still I felt a primal urge to escape. Maybe this was what it felt like to be insane.

  Distance. That’s the thing about the internet: the distance renders all communication slightly off-kilter. In one sense, that distance allows you to open up more; the act of typing creates a chance to organise your thoughts more clearly. In a way, it frees you to truly be yourself. But you will always be inescapably less than yourself as well: thoughts without a voice, communication without contact.

  I read it again.

  It could have been a joke, of course, but I knew deep down that it wasn’t. For the first time, I found myself wishing that I had never discovered The Room.

  I never would have, had it not been for the accident a few weeks before, on Christmas Eve. My girlfriend Julie had been helping me move into a new flat in the west end. I was renting, of course. Who can afford to buy, these days? The flat was a two-bedroom on the top floor of one of those four-story Victorian tenements, which meant it was grand, spacious, and cold.

  The block was situated at the boundary with Hyndland, where property values start to get really out of hand. There was a great view from the big old-fashioned bay window in the living room. I could happily waste an hour staring out of that window at the lights of the city through the bare branches of the oaks across the street. The master bedroom needed a coat of paint and some minor repairs, nothing too drastic. The landlord said I’d have to wait until after the holidays, but he assured me I was welcome to do the work myself. There was a reason I could afford the rent all by myself. I took him up on the offer – unwisely, as it turned out.

  There were some loose wires dangling from an old light fitting in the bedroom ceiling. I decided to investigate; said investigations resulting in a minor electric shock, a fall from the ladder and a badly broken leg. The pain in my leg was excruciating. I can remember gritting my teeth in agony and tearing strips off the cardboard we’d laid on the floor to protect the carpet while painting. They say you can’t remember pain and frankly, I’m glad. I wouldn’t want to be able to describe that experience too accurately.

  When I got to the hospital, I had to wait over an hour for treatment because of a suicide attempt that, in the end, proved successful. A woman had decided to cash in her chips and taken a long walk off a short balcony, eight floors up. Against the odds, she hadn’t died right away, and had hung on long enough to keep the doctors busy for a while. In my own state of extreme pain, I had been inclined to believe that if someone wanted to die so badly, it was better to let them get on with it. Eventually I was examined, informed that I had broken my leg in two places and given a shot of morphine, which helped. A little.

  After an operation to reset the bones, I moved straight into the new place. Bad move, and not just because of the four flights of stairs. With nobody to talk to, cabin fever set in fast and hard. Julie tried to visit every day or so, but we had been going through a rough patch lately. We both knew it wasn’t working, but we’d been going out since high school: five years. I don’t think either of us wanted to let go of another piece of childhood so quickly. At any rate, when she came round we almost always argued. And that was worse than being alone.

  It was the cabin fever that led me to the internet. After days of moping around the flat on crutches watching daytime TV, rereading old Elmore Leonard paperbacks and even attempting some studying, I finally succumbed and tried surfing the net. Unlike most of my generation, I hadn’t had a lot of time for cyberspace before, but Julie had brought her dad’s old laptop over so she could update her Facebook page while she was here. I didn’t have Facebook. Just having an email address made me feel a little too… connected, I guess. Ironic, the way things turned out.

  I was surprised at how quickly I became addicted once I’d breached the levee of my resistance to the 21st century. At first I browsed aimlessly, looking for sites on TV shows and movies I liked. Then I discovered the message boards, where I could converse with people from all over the world who shared interests with me.

  One of the days when Julie was due over for dinner, I happened on a new kind of site. At first, it seemed like just another message board. After a second, I realized that wasn’t quite accurate. It was neither one thing nor another; a kind of bastard hybrid of a message board, an old-style chatroom, and a social networking site. The place was called A Problem Shared...

  Reasoning that I was more than eligible, with two problems – a broken leg and terminal boredom – I registered with my usual pseudonym: ‘Jack’. My favourite drink, and as good a name as any. My internet aversion might be a thing of the past, but that didn’t mean I was ready to fully connect with the world. The site prompted me for a profile pic, which was expected, and then refused to let me skip that step, which was not. That was odd. I sighed, annoyed at myself for being curious enough to proceed, and browsed for a picture from MyDocuments: a head-shot of Julie’s older brother, Glenn.

  Once I’d jumped through the hoops, what I found within was a kind of online self-help group; a menagerie of people talking out their problems, from the serious, like cancer-sufferers, to the mundane, like teenage girls missing their unfaithful boyfriends. It was a kind of Miscellaneous Anonymous: all problems, all the time. The thing that struck me most (perhaps in contrast to my own outlook) was the level of intimacy. People were prepared – no, happy – to share the most private details of their lives.

  Before long, I began to discern that this site was very different from the others I’d used. It wasn’t a social network at all, unless you think of Scientology or the Manson Family as social networks. The site community behaved just like that: a cult. For a start, the users universally referred to the site as simply ‘The Room’. The capitals made the place sound almost like a place of worship. A further anomaly was the lack of nicknames. On other discussion forums, participants had names like ‘Blue Harvest’ or ‘bob69’, but here everyone used an ordinary first name, just like me. I even got the impression that a lot of them were using their real names. Finally, there was a list of rules, or ‘The Code’ as it was labelled, on the entry page. The Code stated that all were welcome subject to certain rules; the most important of which was Rule 1:

 

  What is said in The Room stays in The Room.

  The po-faced sternness of the warning couldn’t help but make me smile. That smile would come back to haunt me.

  After an hour, I was hooked. Something about people unveiling the darkest recesses of their soul appealed to the voyeur in me. It was like reading the problem pages in Julie’s magazines, but a thousand times more potent. When Julie arrived to find the frozen lasagna still sitting in its box beside th
e oven, I apologized perfunctorily, then tried to interest her in my new discovery. She watched over my shoulder for a few minutes before declining, saying it was wrong to eavesdrop on other people’s pain.

  “What, you mean like that country music you always play in the car?” I’d cracked.

  “Not funny,” she’d replied, her face showing that she meant it.

  She was right, of course, and I did feel slightly seedy, but I reassured myself that it was a harmless vice. Besides, for all Julie’s protestations, I got the feeling that she was getting off on it a little too. Eventually, she went home, leaving me to it to avoid another argument. It took me twenty minutes to realise she’d gone.

  For the next few weeks, I found myself in The Room constantly... religiously, I laughed, thinking of the sacrosanct atmosphere that pervaded the site. I noticed that I was reading less, watching less TV. I was occasionally forgetting meals, and I was seeing less of Julie. That, I had to admit, could not be blamed entirely on The Room.

  I became familiar with other Room regulars, their words and their profile pictures combining to create a sense of their being until I could almost hear their voices in my head. People like Jill from Ontario, who was stuck in an unhappy relationship; Rob from London, who had lost a leg in a boating accident; and Bryan, a recovering alcoholic who had frequent lapses and lived right here in town. You could move from room to room and join in conversations, like guests at a party in a big old house. Or inmates in a big old asylum, perhaps.

  Some days there would be a large group online, other days only a handful, but it was always compelling. And gradually, to my surprise, I found that this was not the only thing bringing me back.

  After reading and participating in the conversations, I found I had more right to be there than I had thought. Nothing really serious, of course, but nevertheless... the problems I was having with Julie, worrying about life after university... Talking about it helped. Not only was I drawing comfort from talking about my problems, it felt good to give comfort to others, too.

  But the original voyeuristic buzz always remained, humming away in the background like the noise of the hard disk.

  The night things in The Room took a turn for the worse, it was around four in the morning and there was only a small group online: myself, Bryan, Jill, and Claire; a newbie from Pennsylvania whose profile picture showed a sullen brunette wearing black and too much mascara. Like Bryan, she was an alcoholic. Claire was crying on our virtual shoulders about her latest drunken indiscretion. Apparently, she had screwed her sister’s fiancé.

  CLAIRE: im a horrible horrible person

  I tried to reassure her, eschewing txtspk the way practically none of my Room-mates bothered to:

  JACK: we all do dumb things when we’re drunk

  CLAIRE: not like this

  JILL: claire - not ur fault - this sleazebag took advantage of u

  I sighed out loud. Jill always managed to use every conversation as an excuse to badmouth men. I had had run-ins with her on more than one occasion. I kept wondering why she didn’t just dump the jerk she was with. Then again, she was always very cagey about discussing him in detail, which led me to believe he probably wasn’t a particularly bad guy, if he even existed. Her profile picture pissed me off, too. It was so... artificial. So posed. It was a cropped headshot of her in a field somewhere: dark reddish hair windblown away from a determined and unsmiling face.

  After a pause, Claire typed a response.

  CLAIRE: no my fault - shouldnt have been drinking

  I couldn’t help but agree with this, but decided it would be more helpful to stay quiet. Perhaps Jill and Bryan did too, because there was another pause in dialogue. I found myself marveling that it was possible to have uncomfortable silences in cyberspace. Eventually, the silence was broken.

  CLAIRE: im a bad person

  BRYAN: ur not. there are much worse things - take it from me

  BRYAN had broken his silence, and he’d got me curious:

  JACK: anything you want to talk about?

  I later came to fervently wish that I had never typed those six words. Because it turned out that Bryan did want to talk about it.

  He told us how he had been drinking again, and how the only times he could stay sober had been while he was in The Room. I found myself thinking about cults again, and addictions.

  Bryan went on to tell us how his wife resented the time he spent in The Room, how she had threatened to kill herself, and how he had come to think things might be better if she did. He told us about their final argument, over Christmas presents for their son. Finally, he told us how he had pushed his wife over the balcony of their eighth floor flat.

  It wasn’t what he had said that shocked me so badly, though God knows it was shocking enough. It was what I already knew. I had gathered from previous conversations that Bryan lived in the city. More importantly, I knew that, on the night he claimed to have murdered his wife, I had been lying on a hospital trolley with a broken leg while the doctors worked in vain to save the life of a suicide: a woman who had supposedly jumped to her death from eight floors up.

  That was how I knew it wasn’t a joke.

  I stared at the screen for a while. Alone in the silence, deafened by a voiceless confession.

  I slammed the lid of the laptop shut, as though by doing so I could lock the problem inside. I stared out of the old-fashioned bay window at that great view as my head spun. There was a light rain, and it created a haze that made the lights of the city seem slightly unreal, like a matte painting in an old Technicolor movie. I turned away and found myself staring at an unpacked box of CDs, the pile of plastic holding my focus for a long moment for no reason I could discern.

  I shook myself out of the daze and opened the laptop again. I searched the websites of local newspapers. Eventually, with a sense of satisfaction I despised, I found the morbid tabloid headline I was looking for:

  TRAGIC LIZ (33) IN 80FT XMAS DEATH PLUNGE

  Elizabeth Young, died in the early hours of Christmas morning after falling eight floors from her flat in Sighthill. Police are treating the death as a suicide, and it is believed that Mrs. Young had been depressed for some time. She leaves behind husband Bryan, 37, and son Paul, 6.

  I got up and hobbled towards the phone.

  The next newspaper I read was an old-fashioned paper one. It was four days later and this time the headline was SUICIDE HUSBAND CHARGED, the sort of garbled header that practically forces you to read the article to see if it makes any more sense.

  I felt guilty about turning Bryan in, but I would have felt a hell of a lot guiltier about allowing a murderer to remain in custody of a six-year-old. Julie hadn’t answered any of my calls for a week, although in truth I hadn’t been trying too hard since the Bryan revelations. I tried again now, got her machine and left a message asking her to call me. I replaced the receiver and tapped a pen on my message pad, thinking.

  I looked over at the laptop, which had lain as dormant as my phone for the last few days. Suddenly, and not without trepidation, I was a little curious to see how the guys in The Room were taking the news. As I went through the over-familiar routine of turning on the computer and accessing the internet, I realised the extent to which I had lost my taste for eavesdropping. I decided this would be my last visit.

  In the event, The Room agreed with me. A pop-up message stated matter-of-factly that my login was not recognised. I typed again: same result. I gave up and checked my email, immediately wishing that I hadn’t. Dozens of unread emails, all from members of The Room. I sampled a selection. Some were disappointed, some angry. I even had a couple of death threats. The one constant was an accusation:

  You broke The Code, you betrayed one of us.

  Any lingering doubts I had vanished. I switched the computer off for good. I went to the kitchen, where I poured myself a good slug of Jack Daniel’s and made my mind up never to go near a computer again. A Problem Shared was right. It had now been five weeks since my
fall, and my leg was healing up nicely. I could actually hobble around on the cast without my crutches, and I decided I was taking my life back. I drank to that thought and started back towards the living room. I almost fell off my crutches when I saw the plain white envelope that was tucked under the front door.

  Two things about it jumped out: one, it had no stamp, two, there was no address, just the word JACK, scrawled in thick black marker. I had been an idiot. If I had located Bryan from things he said, then of course others could do the same to me. But my address? My fucking home address? How the hell did they get that?

  I opened it with only slightly unsteady hands. Inside was a simple note that made my blood run cold:

  You broke The Code. You betrayed Bryan. You’re nothing but a rat. What would your lovely girlfriend think?

  Jill

  Jesus, I had talked about Julie in the Room... hadn’t even disguised her name. If that crazy bitch Jill could find me, she could certainly find her. I called Julie’s number again, forcing my fingers to go slow and hit the right buttons. All of a sudden, I had all kinds of worries about what the week of silence from Julie meant. I waited through the distorted voice on her machine that seemed to take forever to complete its simple instruction, and left a message telling Julie to get in touch with me as soon as she got it. I turned my head a little and just happened to glance straight at the CD on the top of the pile I’d stared at stupidly a couple of days before.

  I blinked once, and realized that it hadn’t just been a daze brought on by shock. Something about that pile of CDs – about that one CD in particular – had caught my attention. I picked it up, held the jewel case up to the light. It was a Patty Griffin album, one of Julie’s. The cover was a mid-shot, not cropped, but it still showed a familiar woman standing in a field somewhere: dark reddish hair windblown away from a determined and unsmiling face.

  I started when I heard a coldly familiar voice from behind me:

  “Hi honey.”

  I closed my eyes and breathed a sigh of relief, “Julie, thank God, I thought...”

  “Julie?” a tone of mock surprise. “That’s not what you’ve been calling me lately, is it... Jack?”

  I turned around to see Julie standing in the kitchen doorway. She was toying with a carving knife, testing the point with her index finger. I recognized the knife: it was the good one we’d bought from the homeware department of John Lewis, back when the world was sane. My mind overloaded for a second. Then something clicked into place, and the truth washed over me like an icewater tide.

  “Jill. Jack and Jill. Cute.”

  “You betrayed Bryan,” she said. “You betrayed all of us, Jack.”

  “Us?” I repeated, confused. It didn’t make sense. “I showed you that fucking site.”

  “Wrong way round, newbie.”

  I blinked, seeing a flash of the laptop screen all those weeks ago. I hadn’t just happened on The Room. It must have been in the internet browser history. Somehow I hadn’t realized that was how I’d found it.

  “You were one of them all along.”

  “I thought it might help you. Help us.” She smiled briefly and I could see hate in those eyes. She was obviously as far gone as the rest of the zombies in The Room. As far gone as I had felt myself getting, I remembered, thinking of all the hours I’d spent there, feeding an unhealthy addiction.

  She lunged for me.

  I sidestepped the knife, losing my balance and stumbling. I winced as I felt a twinge in my fragile leg and stumbled towards the living room, not thinking where I was going, just trying to go somewhere. Julie followed, slashing the knife across my back, cutting through my shirt and into the flesh beneath. I yelled in pain as Julie pushed me to the ground. She stamped on my leg hard, cracking the plaster open like an Easter egg. I screamed as I felt the partially-healed bones snap again. The pain was incredible. The first time was a day at the beach compared to this. Mixed up in the pain, though, was pure rage, boiling up inside. And that was what saved me.

  All the frustrating weeks spent cooped up, the problems with Julie, the indignation at being exiled from The Room, it all came to a head with the unbearable pain. I found myself pushing off my good leg, charging at Julie, pushing her backwards... right through the big bay window with the great view.

  She didn’t scream. There was a terrible silence followed by a horrible, leaden thump as she hit the street fifty feet below. I lay on my side, wanting to feel horror at what I had just done, able to feel nothing but the waves of stabbing pain from my leg. More than I’d wanted anything in my life, I wanted to pass out, but I didn’t. So I just lay there until I heard the approaching sirens.

  I wondered if the police would believe it was suicide.

  If you enjoyed The Room, why not write a review on Amazon or Goodreads, and recommend it to other readers? You can get in touch with the author at [email protected]

  Also by Gavin Bell:

  Short Story Collections

  The Misfortune Teller

  A Living

  One Shot

  Second City Tales (collects the above)

  Read on for an exclusive free sample of Gavin Bell’s full-length novel:

  Halfway to Hell

  Johnny Park is a hundred miles from Phoenix... and

  Halfway to Hell