By Carly Sheil

The silence was broken by the intolerable sound of bells at all three of the nearby churches going off at the same time – apparently it was morning again, at least according to these cretins. With a sigh he rolled over, a pillow over his ears, trying to ignore the morning wake-up call he really couldn’t give a damn about after a full night of study.

Minutes past and the bells were still ringing, few minutes became ten, ten became twenty – by this point he was a shaking wreck. The final desperation of earphones and loud music weren’t doing anything; the bells just wouldn’t stop and couldn’t be drowned out.

He crawled out of bed, to the window – nobody was in the street and there didn’t seem to be any event causing the abhorrent chiming, ringing – it now sounded no kinder than screaming – of the bells. Venturing down the stairs, he pushed open the wooden door to the street to see if he could find meaning behind the endless ringing. He was outside a coffee shop now, thirty minutes in now and it wasn’t stopping.

Nobody was inside. Nobody was outside.

He looked towards the nearest cathedral, emitting the endless chorus of ear-melting pain, and ventured towards it. The aged wooden door creaked open, he slipped inside. It was empty and cold – where the fuck was the bell in this massive place? A touch to his shoulder, nerves already on edge from the half-hour of noise he spun around.

A nun. Cold, empty eyes looking up at him, cold, gnarled hands reaching up to him.

Hands. Wrinkled hands all around him. Pulling him down below the stones as he suffocated in aged flesh and dirt. Fingers crawling down his throat, pulling at his mouth.

She was gone and he was lying on the cold stone floor of the cathedral – naked – whilst finely dressed citizens shuffled past, all of them staring.

He saw her – another nun – smirking from the distant entry to the cathedral crypt, beckoning him near. There was nowhere else to run; the cathedral door was filled with an endless stream of formally dressed churchgoers, faces filled with looks of horror.

Horror. Darkness. Bells. Cold-sweat. He awoke.

The bells had stopped. He was back in bed – the smell of croissants in the air.

Naked. Wrinkled. Covered in dirt.

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By Carly Sheil

The winter air within the hostel feels cool on her skin, fresh from her heated room. She sits on a worn wooden bench, one of many along the corridors of the building, and contemplates the past week of her trip overseas. The hostel isn’t at all like the dark and dirty buildings within the movies she is so fond of watching – instead it is almost too clean, with beige walls and a burgundy floor.

But then the voices start. Innocent conversations and laughter growing louder as they ascend the staircase.

Her heart quickens and her mind snaps shut, she flees up the nearby stone stairway and the voices follow her – louder, louder, and louder. She scurries down a corridor past beige, burgundy and photographs of the town.

The door! It is unlocked!

She dashes inside. Bolts the door. The voices fade and she is safe from children again.

But the walls don’t look the same; they are twisting away from her, melting to the floor. Behind those walls of beige are walls of sterile white – glaring, burning white. It’s so empty, so void of life; less life than beige, less life than cream, less life than all of the pastels of rooms the world over.

It’s a blank canvas threatening to swallow her, a world of painful bright closing in on her – screaming to be covered, to be painted, and to be anything but blank. Who could be so cruel as to paint rooms of a colour so plain, so dead, and so unnerving?

She falls to the floor, sinks into her mind, she paints on the walls in her head and tries to forget they are so cold and so plain. Dreams of the eyes on her walls back home, the paintings, the photographs and the life. Past her dreams she can still feel the white leaking down the walls, across the burgundy floor towards the corner in which she crouches. White. Crawling up her limbs – pushing past her eyelids and into her veins.

The cool air from the corridor, flowing to her from beneath the door rouses her from hysteria. Child-like footsteps and laughter fades, she uncurls herself and is calm once again to contemplate the past, slinking out again to the safe corridor of burgundy and beige.

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