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Underground > Creation >

The Room

Mordant Carnival

15:23 / 05.08.01

Rooms have flavours: they have sweetness, bitterness, aroma. They have voices, too.

This one speaks now. It tells you: I have seen your kind before. I have nursed them on peeling paint and the breath of old plaster, I have borne them on the ragged backs of the floorboards under my cheap carpet. I have been witness to countless weeping nights, stolid days, slept-through mornings. I am the place you fetch up when you have nowhere else to go. And because you live in me I know you must be devoid of worth.

Who is being addressed? How do they reply to the room?

What happens next?

16:27 / 05.08.01

I have seen your kind before
me..in my room of an apartment, where no doubt the room has seen my kind before.
I do not know how to reply to the room that claims I am devoid of worth.

11:59 / 06.08.01

Who is being addressed?
The recently laid-off husband of a well-paid accountant. He worked in the computer industry and his start up didn't survive the bust. With the loss of fortune came a corresponding loss of potency.
They have just moved into a Victorian brownstone in a city far from Silicon Valley, living the life she always wanted because now it's her turn.

What happens next?
The room becomes a mother figure.
A jealous mother. The man stays at home as long as possible, only leaving donning an interview suit and heading for the local bar minutes before the wife is expected home. Even then, he feels like he has to get away, go back to the room.
He begins trying to fulfill the room's longingsby physically filling the room with accumulated objects. Used books, odd bits of rusted machinery, computer components. The room is vast and unsatisfied.

22:35 / 06.08.01

I live in you because of your worth to me.
The Room is not devoid of worth to me.

z3r0

17:42 / 09.08.01

The man cannot sleep. He won't let anyone get into his room. And he daydreams about slowly floating and touching the ceiling.

He gets a ladder, places it in the center of the Room, and carefully, one would say with respect, starts climbing up.
He reaches the pale green ceiling and it is like a god´s eye, its cold firmness and blank stare, all seeing, all knowing.

Suddendly the man becomes aware of the plaster decoration that goes along the walls, just where they make contact with the ceiling. It is a bas-relief, small and intricate; it is telling a story.

What story is it telling?

Whisky Priestess

10:12 / 10.08.01

It tells the story of the room-womb and its prisoner. It is a tiny replica, perfect in every detail, of the walls, the floor, the junk and kipple that he has accumulated to fill it and feed it, and in the very centre of the bas-relief is a minscule carving of the man himself, staring up at the ceiling. He begins to sweat, sensing that something about the carving is wrong, but he can't put his finger on it.

Until he realises with a sick lurch of horror that the relief of the room has no door . . .

No star here laces

11:25 / 10.08.01

He decides this is a pivotal hallucination and that he just needs to get out more. Enjoy himself. He climbs down off the ladder and finds a reasonably clean suit in the wardrobe and puts it on in front of a cracked mirror, sizing himself up. In the small segments of glass his size is small. In the big segments it is bigger. In none of the glass is he as big as he ought to be.

The suit is brown.

11:41 / 10.08.01

Welcome to the Jobcentre.

The Unemployed. The Commandant of the facility is addressing the "Jobseekers". Outside the searchlights sweep and the Leather Trenchcoats are sent out to inspect living quarters and their arrangements.

Most trudge in and out, fortnight after fortnight, signing papers and checking boards. Some come daily, desperately trawling through papers, databases and lists.

All must prove themselves worthy of the Holy Giro.

Whisky Priestess

21:40 / 13.08.01

A mad-haired man approaches a young neophyte who is trying to remember which examining boards his GCSEs were marked by.

"Are you a seeker after . . . JOB?" he asks huskily. Looking up into the man's cracked face, the young neophyte's eyes widen in fear.

We're The Great Old Ones Now

13:01 / 14.08.01

This room is slick with routine disappointment. Its walls are institutional green left over from the cancer ward, and the air under the striplights buzzes and twitches in the corner of your eye. The room has no voice, but rather a listless murmur of weary anticipation and rote rejection, the sussuration of despair by the numbers.

Defy the room. It is made in the image of your death.

00:29 / 20.08.01

The room addresses a person frozen, scared rigid into stillness by the fact that nothing is ever still, deafened by the sound of electrons spinning, shaken to the core by the invisible motion all around. There is no reply, just a desperate effort to lie that much more motionlessly, hoping that relief will come someday in the form of absolute zero and shut everything and everyone up.

05:23 / 20.08.01

The room is like a layer of dust that covers an old wooden cupboard or set of draws. Memories settling, congealing out of the air, falling, discarded. Like dead skin and hair, a sign that something lived. Something was. But all that remains are the signs, like cheap souvenirs of a holiday long forgotten.

How bitter the room is. No death to silence the emptiness. Nothing that hasn't been burned by the cold hand of neglect. Rancid and unwashed.

And there you stand. On the threshold. Returning like a lost lover, to the scorn of the shunned.

A yearning blossom of burning knives.

20:02 / 23.08.01

With Mr nobody from the nothing room,Nemo writes..'And at the end of all possible dreams they sleep on in lucid states where they chance to dream of waiting,and in the waiting dream there is the time for notions of breaking from obsessive dreams.To look up from reverie,into the face of the nothing room,and to have the time and wit to say...
...something to the gloom'.

06:15 / 24.08.01

The man lies on the floor in the centre of the room. intricately designed snakes structures grow like branches from beneath his head. They quickly multiply covering the floor and begin growing up the walls. Soon the entire room is covered in the most intricate woven celtic pattern imaginable.

Except for the man. As he lies shallow breathing the room seems alive too...

Mordant Carnival

20:22 / 06.09.01

I swore I wasn't ever going to do this, but:-Somebody write a new bit!
I was enjoying the subtle tang of your despair.

03:01 / 07.09.01

23:02 / 09.09.01

Small dark corridors winding. Flicker of the neon light, exposing momentarily images of neglect and putresence. Thick dirt on the floor, the smell of unwashed bodies. Sickly sweet. Insults written in excrement, smeared across the forgotten walls. Flickering testaments of the damned, unnoticed screams.

And in the distance, a light. Constant. Light from beneath a door. And a sound. Low, grinding, mechanical.

Closer now. Grim imaginings of ripe murder overflowing. In empty hearts repeating, endlessly. Loss and terror and emptiness. Grinding the fruit of pain into the chalise of blood. I will drink my own inards, feast on my own flesh, in unending revulsion of my own existence.

Now the door. Opens. The inverted revelations of a billion hells. Goodbye.

00:37 / 10.09.01

This room's a balloon, swollen with silvery expectation, party-bright, lighter than air. I'm young! it laughs, marvellous things will happen here! It is empty of all but giggly potential.

It hates to be reminded that it is no ingenue, that it has a past. Water under the bridge, it says breezily, look at me! I'm born again! The best is yet to come! There is something forced and taut in its pastel gaiety, its nervous exclamation.

Standing weightless in its dead centre, the air is tightly packed, molecules pressed inwards; the room's fresh-smelling skin ('Pistachio Haze') stretches tighter than tight.

This room denies its own fragility; it could burst at any moment - and then what?

Beware of nails.

We're The Great Old Ones Now

15:23 / 15.09.01

This room is inverted; it is defined by the presence of other rooms around it. It is not a room. It is a space between rooms. It is cousin to bridges, sister to partition walls, mother of trapdoors and priest-holes.

It has no walls of its own, it shares each one with a real room next door. This room is a parasite - drawing physicality from those around, definition from pre-conceived notions of space.

It speaks with your own voice. It uses your words. You cannot hear it, because the answers are pronounced in perfect synchrony with your questions.

This is a room you will never find again.

08:53 / 15.02.02

This room is rich with cinammon. It wears its curtains like desire, billowing velvet and cool, goose-pimple breezes on the skin. It is a summer room.

In winter, it is a room of damp despondency, mildew and fear.

This is a changeling room.

10:52 / 15.02.02

The Room is many things. One would spend his whole life writing down the things that the Room is. But I have the feeling that - doesn't matter who would write that list, or when, or why - the first thing he would write would be:
"The Room is empty".
It has always been empty, except for its one and only occupant, one occupant at a time.
From this point, towards the end of that list, we can only conjecture about the order of the entries:
"The Room is white" (of course) - and this is the substance of nightmares;
"The Room is knowing" - but we knew that already;
"The Room has no corners";
"The Room is jealous"...
And the list would go ad nauseam, but that would be pointless.
The most important thing to the battered, wrecked shadow of a soul that by this time wiil most certainly have lost his fingernails to the disciplined solidness of the Room's walls is this:
"The Room's womb is as full of beetles as is full of forgiveness"

20:14 / 16.02.02

The Room loves you, which is why it won't let you leave.
The Room loves you, so it ignores all pleas for mercy; it knows best.
The Room loves you, so it presents you with every demon, every quiet pain, of the past, so that you understand how much better it is than anywhere, anyone, anywhen else. It knows that what it tears out will grow back better.

The Room knows one day you'll understand, and then you'll thank it.

Less searchable M0rd4nt

15:44 / 27.02.02

*notices thread has sunk to the bottom of the page, and gives it a surruptitious bump*

01:09 / 28.02.02

Through the window shimers golden afternoon sunlight, like honey sweetly dripping.
Everything is caught in the warm glow of the fading day. Simple things are transfigured, made holy, divine. The chair where my mother sat and craddled me in her arms, the old persian rug, the simple music box and its delicate song that echoed through the memories of my youth.

I hear the grandfather clock, ticking quietly in the background. Unmoved, unchanged.

I can almost see days past flickering through the golden strands, like old worn movies, falling like autumn leaves.

We're The Great Old Ones Now

04:52 / 28.02.02

This room has no fashion sense. It is the room in purple trousers. It is the room without mercy on anything with fur. Other rooms gather in corners and snigger.

This room has big hair.

One day it will be famous.

We're The Great Old Ones Now

11:37 / 11.03.02

This room is clean. This room knows the value of order. It smells faintly of soap. Every surface wears its Sunday Best. This is the 'room most likely to'.

It will either be President or kill everyone in the office.

This room is nailclipper tidy, sockdrawer tidy, plucked eyebrows and cuticle knife tidy.

This room scares you.

We're The Great Old Ones Now

11:49 / 25.04.02

This room is lonely. I am the only person who loves it. It sleeps, but there are tears on the dry walls, the paper is shuddering. I coddle it, but it cannot but be afraid.

To be a room alone, is hell.

22:30 / 25.04.02

i know this room...
it made me sick to build it.

magic... and I strayed into creation.

bootstraps and brews... want out... did you know that the floor is the cieling? complete with carpet...
and planks.

23:30 / 12.06.02

...the room was remodeled a few years back...only the beat-up rocker speaks of the inhabitant that past. Yellowed ceiling tiles matched the nicotine stains along the wallpaper...now fading memories as borders and country themes try to compete with the sadness. The reception is still shakey with familiar smells emitting from the a.c. when it's on. No more PBR to fetch from the windowsill to cool...no more stories of the plateau on the water that sat between two wars. I visit this room every Christmas, to remember...

23:58 / 12.06.02

There is a room underneath a stairwell, in an abandoned house on the otherside of town. I never remember it in sunlight, only in greys under a heavy sky. It was a secret place. A safe place. Perched on the edge of the world, beyond the gaze of anyone searching in the darkness.

I used to bring treasures to it. Shower it with gifts. The discovered random treasure brought forth from the excrement of society, the washed up debris. In my eyes the room glowed. A temple to hidden god, worshipped only in silence.

The room seemed to welcome all this attention, and in turn it turned all other attention away. While many other houses in the street were brought and sold, this one remained empty. A sign of the secret mystery within, or so I thought.

It was my refuge from the world, that secret room. With its dust and damp. Its peeling wallpaper and rotted furniture.

Then, without warning, it was gone. Not just the room, but the entire house. Everything. Not even a hole remained. The secret transformed into pure mystery.

14:20 / 13.06.02

This room was meant to be temporary. Now, seven years later, it has become clear that it is here to stay, propped up on a dozen concrete legs. Children have run about in it, filling it's walls with laughter. Technicians have roomed here, and the air had the tang of ozone from the many machines with their guts open to the world. For a while, there was row upon row of narrow tables and uncomfortable chairs for nervous sould to sit at as if in prayer, scribbling frantically while clocks ticked away the seconds in the background. The room absorbed all of it. Every guggle, every muffled curse, every tick of the clock.

Two years have passed since anyone did anything of any value in the room. Dust settled, insects died, a fire control panel in the corner clicked every now and then. In one corner, a leak in the roof gave the room a means to cry, and an occasional tear would flow down the faded paint.

Now we have moved in. In a flurry of activity the doors were wrenched open. Gloriously mismatched chairs and desks, battered filing cabinets filched from dark corners, colourful posters and even more colourful language filled the room. The walls (and with them the tear stains) are covered with torn out magazine pages, declarations of passion scibbled on napkins and tattered posters, checklists and notes. Life has flowed back into the room, and in the evenings, when there are only one or two of us here, you can hear the satisfied creak in the rafters, for in us it recognises all those people that passed through before. We laugh and play like children, mutter and curse like the technicians and nervously scribble on papers and flip through books like those under scrutiny. Our machines even impart a slight whiff of ozone to the air, behind the cigarette smoke and incense.

I think the room is happy.
I think we will be happy here.