Aisha pushed open the door to Malik’s diner and made her way to the counter.
“You’re late today” Malik observed, wiping his hands on his apron. “Usual?”
“Yeah” Aisha grunted. “They changed my shift. Totally shit because it mucks everything else up you know?” Malik rang up her order; sausage and egg butty on a brown bap with brown sauce and a flat white.
She turned round, scanning for a table and spotting one free at the back. She walked past a table where a man was seated who she hadn’t seen before. She knew most of the regulars and tended to ignore anyone new, but this man was hard to ignore. He had an unkempt look. Scraggly white hair and beard that had grown into one another, darting black eyes behind a pair of round, thick-rimmed glasses, and shabby clothes covered in a layer of grime and what looked like ink stains.
He was wolfing down a plate of sausage, egg and chips while at the same time writing furiously on an A4 memo pad, muttering to himself occasionally and scratching a line out before starting again.
“Hey,” Aisha said quietly to Malik as he brought over her food.
“Uh?” he said, clanging the plate and mug down on the table, spilling coffee on the red formica. He mopped up the spill with a corner of his apron.
“What’s his deal?” she said, indicating the strange man. Malik followed her eyes and gave a shrug.
“I don’t know,” he said. “I don’t know his name. I just know that he comes in at eight o’clock every day and orders sausage, egg and chips.” Malik returned to the counter while she started on her butty. The egg was cooked just how she liked it, as usual she had to grab a napkin to catch the yolk dribbling down her chin. She didn’t take her eyes off the strange man while she ate. He did not stop writing the whole time. It looked as if he was under some sort of compulsion.
Her phone buzzed and she checked the screen. A message from Taylor, probably looking to grumble about work as usual. She kept half an eye on the man as she tapped out a response.
<Hey, what’s up?>
<Not much, dinner at Malik’s>
<Now? Don’t you have work?>
<They changed my shift.>
<Oh bum. Had this customer today, so rude she…>
There followed the predictably long rant about the painful condition known as working in customer relations. This one was about a man who tried to take back a coffee machine well after the return date because he had redecorated his kitchen and now it didn’t fit with the decor. The messages, mostly on Taylor’s end, got longer and longer. Aisha was never sure why they didn’t just call. For some reason Taylor always texted.
Out of the corner of her eye Aisha could see the man continue to write. He filled page after page after page in between bites of sausage and beans. But, by the time that she looked up again after reading a particularly long message, he had gone, his plate practically licked clean.
Over the next few weeks this same pattern repeated itself with unbroken regularity. Every week night at eight o’clock Aisha would come to Malik’s for her dinner, and each time the man would be there, writing. As she worked on her bap, he would hoover up his sausage, egg and beans, scoop up his pages and scurry out of the door.
One day, in his rush to pack up his things, she noticed that he had left a page behind. She went to his table and bent down to retrieve it from the floor where it had fallen. It appeared to be a page from a story. There was dialogue between several unidentified characters who seemed to be having a disagreement about some sort of business deal, followed by a description of a train journey.
Aisha looked up. The bell on the door still had some residual tinkle from his exit. She raced for the door, yanked it open and looked up and down the street, catching a glimpse of his shabby green mackintosh trailing around a corner to her right. She ran after him, turned the corner, and could see him making for the end of a row of Edwardian terraced houses. She had always thought that the house on the end of the street was abandoned. It had an unloved air, all overgrown garden and broken windows. But there he was, standing in front of it, fumbling in his pocket. She caught up to him just as he withdrew a large copper-coloured key, one of those old long ones that no one uses any more, and fitted it into the lock.
“Oy,” she said, only slightly out of breath. He glanced up but barely seemed to see her.
“Can’t stop, can’t stop, no thank you, no, no, no,” he said, opening the door and shuffling inside.
“No, wait!” she said, putting her foot in the doorway to stop him closing it. He looked at her now, but his eyes were all confusion and mild panic.
“No, no, no, can’t stop,” he said again, louder this time. Clearly ruffled by the intrusion.
“But look, here,” she said, brandishing the page in front of him. “You dropped this.” His eyes slowly focused on the page and widened ever so slightly.
“Page, page, my page, yes, yes, need that, need that, oh yes.” He snatched it from her hand and tried to shut the door, but Aisha’s foot was still in the way.
“No, no, no,” he said. “Lot’s to do, can’t stop, yes, yes, can’t stop. Please go now, yes go, go, go.” Aisha withdrew her foot and stepped back from the door. He slammed it in her face.
“You’re welcome,” she said to the peeling paint on the door.
The writer was in Malik’s every weekday through September and October. Aisha had even started coming in on the odd weekend to check, and yes come eight o’clock he was there. But then one day, in mid November, he didn’t show. Aisha ordered her bap and sat down, expecting him to show up any minute. But it reached 9pm and there was no sign of him
“Where’s the writer?” she asked Malik when she brought her empty plate up to the counter.
“Who?”
“The old man, you know, the one who’s always here at eight, writing.” Malik shrugged.
“No idea,” he said. And that seemed to be an end of it. She left the café, buttoning up her coat and pulling her scarf tight around her neck. Her breath clouded in front of her under the sickly street light. She turned left to go home but stopped, thinking for a moment, before turning in the other direction and making for the man’s house.
She passed along the row of terraced houses, all looking normal and well-kept, until she reached the one on the end. It really did look abandoned. The tiny patch of front garden was all weeds and overgrown bushes, so that it was hard to actually get to the front door. The walls were grimy brick with peeling blue paint around the door and windows. Two of the upstairs windows were broken and she could see no light from inside.
She stepped back for a moment. Was this the right house? But she knew it was. Slowly she picked her way up the cracked path to the front door and knocked. Predictably, there was no answer. She knocked again, louder. Still nothing. She should probably go, but she was half-way down the path to the road again before thinking better of it. What if he was sick, or injured? She returned to the door and tried the handle. The catch clicked and the heavy wooden door creaked open.
“Hello?” she called, stepping into the dusty hallway. The floor had at one time had an impressive black and white tiled pattern but was now hard to make out under all the dust and piles of unopened post and catalogues. “Hello?” she called again. There was a door at the end of the hall, which presumably led to a kitchen, and one more off to the right. The stairs were in front of her, and the only sign of life was a faint glow of light that was coming from one of the upstairs rooms at the back of the house. She called out again, gingerly mounting the stairs which looked distinctly rotten in patches.
Each step creaked as she went up. He must have heard her by now. She reached the landing where she could see four doors. Two were open and through them she could see what looked like a dingy bathroom and a room piled high with junk. Old chairs, tables, books and blankets, as if the contents of various other rooms had been swept up and thrown in it. One of the closed doors had a crack of yellowy light at the bottom, but now that she was up here that was not what held her attention. From the other closed door, off to her right, she could make out a low humming noise, and the odd crackle, as if from a giant fire. Definitely not a fire though, it was somehow colder up here than it was outside. As she stared at the door, she could see occasional flashes of purple light playing at its edges. There was something, some unseen sense, pulling her towards the door. She followed it, forgetting to call out now. She reached out a hand slowly to touch the door and could feel something in the air, like static electricity. But as she was just about to reach it, there was a hand on her shoulder and she spun round with a yelp. It was the writer. She put one hand to her chest, trying to stop her heart trying to pound its way out of her chest.
“No, no, no, no!” He said, pulling her by the arms away from the door. “No, no, no, come away, come away, mustn’t go in, no, no, no.” She let herself be led away through the other closed door, which was now standing open. She could see now that the yellow light had been coming from a table lamp with a broken shade that was perched on the end of a wooden table. The only other furniture in the room was a single chair and a rickety metal-framed bed in the corner, on which there was a stained mattress and sheets to match. The rest of the room was awash with piles of paper, all scribbled on in his scratchy handwriting, as well as a stack of new A4 memo pads in a corner.
He bustled past her into the room and it was only then that she noticed that he was limping. He made to close the door but she again stuck out her foot to stop him.
“Are you ok?” she asked. He looked up at her blankly, as if he hadn’t understood the question.
“No, no, no, too much to do, too much to do,” he said. Aisha decided to try a different tack.
“I’m Aisha,” she paused, “From Malik’s,” still nothing. “The café,” more nothing. “I saw that you hadn’t been in today and I was worried.” She looked down at his foot by way of explanation and could see that he had wrapped his foot up with a piece of dirty cloth. There was a yellow-green stain leaching through it. Probably infected, she thought. No wonder in this place. It felt like you could get tetanus just by breathing the air. He followed her gaze and seemed, finally, to understand.
“No, no, no, no problem, no problem, need to write, need to write, must finish,” and he made to try and close the door again.
“Are you hungry?” she tried. “I could bring you something.” Now he was looking at her foot.
“Yes, yes, food, yes, yes,” he said, clearly irritated by her presence. She withdrew her foot and he slammed the door. She could hear the chair scraping across the bare floorboards and she imagined him sitting back at the table, writing again. Once more, she found herself talking to a closed door that had been shut in her face.
“I’ll go and get you something,” she said. And with a last glance at the humming door, she left the house.
For the rest of the week Aisha picked up the writers dinner from Malik’s and took it round. He was clearly very reluctant to talk and did nothing but write. His foot wasn’t improving and obviously pained him. She tried to convince him to see a doctor, or to let her call him an ambulance, but at the suggestion he became so frantic that she promised not to mention it again. She didn’t try and get through the humming door again, but it was almost all she could think about each time she was there.
On the Saturday, Aisha’s day off, she decided to go round during the day and take him some lunch. She picked up his order and something for herself too and let herself in through the now familiar door, giving it a perfunctory knock out of politeness.
She mounted the stairs in a now practised route, avoiding the rotten patches, but as she reached the top she could see that his bedroom door was ajar and he was crawling across the landing floor. She quickly set down the food on the floor and went to him.
“Hey, are you ok? Is it your foot?” He looked pale and sweaty and frantic. He had a sheaf of written pages in his hand and was thrusting them in the direction of the humming door, which now sounded even louder. Somehow angry. There was more purple light too, crackling through the gap under the door.
“Can you hear me?” Aisha asked. He was wheezing, and she didn’t even want to look at his foot, which was dragging behind him. Suddenly he grabbed her arm, as if he had just realised that she was there.
“What, what?” she said.
“You…must, you…must,” he wheezed slowly, each word an effort.
“I must what?” He shoved the pages into her hands and then pointed at the door.
“You…must…feed…it.”
“Feed it? She sat back on her heels, hands starting to sweat against the pages. “Feed what?” She looked towards the door. “You want me to go in there?” He nodded. “What’s in there?”
“Please…please…please.” This seemed to take all of his energy, and he slumped against the floor. She slowly stood up to face the door. Inching forward she reached forward to grab the round, old-fashioned, door handle. But as soon as one of her fingers brushed its surface she got a violent bolt of static and yanked her hand back with a yell. She looked back at the man on the floor. His eyes were closed, but he seemed to be breathing regularly. Get a grip, she told herself before reaching for the handle again. No shock this time and she turned the handle and pushed the door into the room.
The door seemed to suck itself away from her hand and the humming intensified. The room wasn’t large, and if Aisha had been able to, she would have seen that around the edges were more boxes and junk. But all of her attention was instantly drawn to the middle of the room, where there was a huge back mass. Not a mass, an absence. It looked kind of like the illustrations of black holes she remembered from her physics text book at school. The middle was so dark that it seemed to suck the light from her eyes. A deeper black than she had ever seen before. Around it, more black of varying shades swirled around and occasional purple lightning was shooting out from the edges. The hairs on her arms leapt up as if trying to pull themselves out of her skin, though from the cold or from fear she wouldn’t have been able to tell. The room felt a good ten degrees colder than the rest of the house.
Aisha had no idea how long she had been standing there. Time as a concept seemed ungraspable in the presence of this swirling void. She finally remembered the old man and the pages in her hand, crumpled in a fist she did not remember making.
“Feed…it,” she heard him whisper behind her. He was almost drowned out by the humming of the black hole. Feed it, she thought. Feed it…feed it…feed it…the pages? She held them up and turned round to see him nodding and pointing at the hole. She took half a step back, preparing to flee, then flung the pages towards the black hole. For a moment they seemed suspended in the air, like Wile Coyote, defying gravity, before they were suddenly sucked into the void.
She didn’t breathe, but she could instantly hear that the humming had quietened a little. The purple lightning looked less angry and the hole itself seemed to be shrinking before her eyes. Or was she imagining it? Do black holes shrink? No, it was definitely smaller. Now she could see details of the room that had been hidden before. A full length mirror, cracked in three places, stood against the wall. Next to it was an old fireplace almost completely obscured by more piles of boxes spilling sheets and books onto the floor.
This was all impossible, Aisha thought as she stepped back out of the door towards the man on the floor. The black hole seemed to have stopped shrinking and was now the size of a beach ball, suspended in the middle of the room, swirling away. Compared to before, she would have described it as happy, but that was completely ridiculous.
The old man looked relieved, but only for a moment.
“Come, come,” he reached up to her and she carefully gripped his hands, helped him to his feet, and together they shuffled back into his bedroom. Eventually she got him to his bed and he lay there for a moment, wheezing in and out, like a clogged vacuum cleaner.
Slowly he regained himself and motioned for her to fetch the pen and paper on his desk. Aisha did so, then returned to the desk where a bunch of his written pages lay. She picked them up and started to read. It was another story, or part of one. This one seemed to be about a young man travelling on a rocky hillside path, trying to reach the top for some unknown reason, but terrified that he would fail. It was beautiful.
She looked up. There he was on the bed, pen moving ferociously, filling more and more pages. Enough was enough. She went to the bed and pulled the pad from his hand. He yelped as if she had bitten him.
“What is this?” she said, surprised to find that tears were pricking her eyes. This whole situation wasn’t just bonkers, it was sad. “What are you writing?” And what in the hell is that black thing in there?” She said, pointing to the landing. He reached for the pad but she held it further away and he slumped back onto the filthy bedsheets.
“Stories…stories,” he said, breathlessly. “Write…stories…It must…be…fed…must…be…fed.”
“But what is it?”
“Don’t…know…don’t…know…always…been…here.”
“Always?”
“Yes…yes…so…old…so…old.” Aisha paused for a moment.
“How long have you been doing this?” she asked. He looked confused at the question.
“Don’t…know…there…was…another…before…me…so…long…so…long...ago.”
“So you have no idea how long this thing has been there?” He shook his head.
“But...it…must…be…fed…must…be…fed.”
“With stories?” she said, brandishing the pad.
“Yes…yes.” He reached up again and she relented, giving him back the pad. She was at a loss. Suddenly she remembered the food she had brought and went to fetch it, though it was now pretty cold.
“Here,” she said, holding out the box for him. He pointed at the table but didn’t speak again. She put the food down, wondering for the umpteenth time whether she should just call an ambulance. She looked at him. His skin was grey and he was sweating.
“I’ll be back tomorrow,” she said. “And if you’re no better I am definitely calling you an ambulance.” He just waved her away, like you would a fly. A minor irritant. She left the house, questioning her decision over and over as she closed the front door behind her.
As she approached the house the next morning she could hear the humming. It was faint, but it was there. That didn’t bode well. She quickly opened the front door and mounted the stairs two at a time, cursing herself when she nearly went through one of the rotten treads that she had forgotten to look out for.
She reached the top of the stairs and looked to her right. The door was still open and the black hole seemed even larger than it had been yesterday. The purple lightning was reaching out into the landing and she could feel the static from where she was standing.
She put her head around the bedroom door and could tell immediately that the man was dead. Not that she had seen many dead bodies, but there comes a change with death under certain circumstances that is undeniable. His eyes were open but glazed over, and he still held his pen. He had died writing. She stood for a moment, paralysed, unsure what to do. As she stood there, the black hole kept growing.
The black hole was hungry. It had not been fed. It needed the man’s words. They were deep and soulful and nourishing. Though lately it had been thinking that the words were feeling older, thinner. It wanted younger words. It had been many years since it had fed on youthful feelings.
Aisha felt a stab of fire hit her hand as she held the door frame. She whipped round on the spot, lost her footing and fell backwards. The black hole was still expanding. It was now actually on the landing. In a panic she reached out and grabbed the written pages that had fallen from the bed onto the floor, the old man’s last words, and threw them at the black hole. She could almost hear a voice in the static humming now, talking to her.
More. More.
She frantically ran around the room and collected every last page with writing on it and threw them at the angry mass. Eventually it shrank back into the room and she was able to close the door.
But the voice did not stop. Now it was in her head. It had found another victim, and it would not let go.
More. More. Hungry. Hungry.
The voice buzzed in the middle of her head. Her thoughts became hard to control. It would not be ignored. Every thought spun faster and faster, but the only thing she knew she had to do was write.
She ran for the bedroom, grabbing the pen from the dead man’s fingers. She sat at the table, reached for some paper and started to write.
