Hum
by Jesse Payne
Did you hear the humming noise?
I’m on a waiting list for subsidized housing. I’m a single woman. I’m housed. They won’t find a space for me. It’s long and heavy with names, and I’ve fallen so far to the bottom of it that I may as well be in the government’s basement. Slip-slid down the building and invisible, there I am. Wasting away like a child’s outgrown bicycle, like a long-dampened plastic Christmas tree, rust clogged between branches and spokes. There I am, in a suspicious brown puddle, waiting to rot down to the frame.
The landlord that showed me around my studio apartment is long gone. I just needed somewhere to stay for a little while, a temporary measure until I could get housed. John was nice. He smoked as we walked through the house. It made me wince when the ash dropped on the ground. How the gray mixed with the beige on the carpet, long worn into melted cheese pull gaps on the floor. A thin sprinkling of cancerous pepper.
“Wear and tear,” he said. “We’ll replace it soon.”
The wallpaper had the look of old china. Lace-like borders littered with flowers along the top, large roses dominating the ornate stripes across the middle. At one time it was almost certainly a glamorous, feminine choice, although I could not tell you when.
At the bottom, the wallpaper curled up at the base with yellow. The baseboard was thick with dust and had a greasy sheen. Most of the apartment did. The kitchen clung to the side wall by the front door and had no exhaust fan, no window. Grease-yellow hung from everything. You could scrape the fridge white with a fingernail, given the time.
I loved the place instantly. It was fully furnished, and I wouldn’t have to live with other people. The prospect of other people again was enough to make me sob and scream. I would be alone.
All it would cost me is one hundred and sixty hours. I do my math in hours, not money. Minimum wage never changes. Hours change. One hundred and sixty hours, and at the end of the month I’d still have eighty hours left to spend on bills, on buses, on food, on life.
And the hum. The unending hum.
The day I saw the apartment, I signed the contract. Did I read it? I don’t remember now. A letter came three months later. It said that the landlord had died. The apartment was being passed on. I’ve had eight letters since about my lease being passed around, passed on, passed between people, and then corporations. They had no first names, only surnames, and a cluster of them on each page. The last two letters addressed me as Tenant.
That’s when I knew. I knew that I had to keep my mouth shut, no matter what. My rent is under market rate. Impossible as it may seem, the world outside is worse than the world in here, and there aren’t enough hours in my month to pay for another place to live.
The first blackening on the wallpaper was almost a year in. To my eye, almost a burn from afar like the landlord had dropped his ash on the wall while inspecting in some silent stalk, slipping around the place as I worked, as I slept. Then, I remembered. How dull a place
this would be for him to haunt. See me rise and eat, and leave and return, and eat and sleep. Scroll. Little else is done between these four walls. I need to get a hobby. How does someone find a hobby?
I lost my train of thought. The cluster of darkness grew. The curling yellow edges of the wallpaper in the far corner by my bed furled up tight with black. Truth be told, I didn’t think much of it. Rot occurs. It will always occur. The end of the world will have two things: rot and dust. I’m just starting early.
On my knees, I peeled back the room’s skin to see the damage. Black, thin, slightly soft to the touch. Flesh-like, almost. A tensity I’d expect less in drywall and more in a well-done steak. I sponged it clean, but left the paper black. It was too delicate to scrub, and the mould too deep. I flapped it back across the scar and pressed it down. Redressed in a soiled bandage.
Months later, it had grown.
Whenever I walked up the stairs of the building, I would notice the smell as soon as I entered the room. An unmistakable dampness to the air, mixed up in my own smells. Yesterday’s bleach, today’s spilled shampoo, tomorrow’s soaking lentils. They don’t have a smell, but when I see them, I smell them cooking. I mix them in with beans and paprika. It’s surprisingly filling. With cheese on top, and over rice, the taste is almost pleasant.
It’s thinking about the hum, I think. Driving away the train, of thought, I mean, out into the fog. Turn on the lights, find the way back, stop distracting me. I didn’t know the disease was spread as broad as it was until it started seeping through the wallpaper so much higher, so much wider. Off-grey, speckled with dots like ink spots. Like hair dye, dripped across a towel.
I tried to mop it up again, but the dampened spot spread itself more. Darkened and dribbling, out of my reach. Too high then, even from my bed. No way to clean up after it. On
the floor, I tugged gently at the flapping paper, the bandage section, to see what was underneath. It came away from the wall with ease, a scab ready to be peeled. The second it came away, all I could think was that I had just cost myself at least half of my security deposit in repairs.
Underneath, the wall was much worse than I thought. Sweating with decay, canker black and blister blue. Scraping my fingernail down it, I carved through the wall, scarring it with ease. Perhaps it was a leaking pipe. I would never know.
To ask them for a repair is to remind them I exist. To remind them that I exist surely means my end. The end of the low rent, the end of my existence as I know it. I would have to keep my silence.
That night, there was a grumbling and rumbling in my walls. Pipes, probably, but as I lay awake I was sure it was my dead landlord, ashing his cigarette and yearning for his proper rent.
Weeks passed. Maybe months. The black circle grew. The wallpaper piece that flapped from the wall went gangrenous and shrivelled. Soon severed from the wall by a soggy strip, the pulp of it split while I slept. In the morning, I sat on the ground and folded it nicely. Hidden under my bed for safekeeping. It’s still there, I think.
My toilet stopped flushing. It has a high tank. I don’t know what you call them, but the chain pulls down from the tank by the ceiling. I didn’t have anything high enough to stand on, to check if everything was hooked on and in and working. It was most likely the rot, crawling up through the pipes and blooming in there. The day after it stopped flushing, there was a cigarette in the bowl.
A pan full of water. That seemed to do the job.
The circle of black kept growing. It had grown exponentially since I last saw it. There used to be paintwork under the wallpaper, but as it was flayed clean off the wall, the paint was infected too. Flaked off, like calloused flesh long-worked. The space underneath was stippled with inky dark dots and smelled like death.
Poking at it, the wall no longer had a hardness at all. My finger passed through it like stale pastry. The hole then truly a hole, and it breathed. Cold air seeping. No, puffing through it. Blowing through the hole like pursed lips. I poked it again to change the shape and only quickened the injury.
The kitchen faucet atrophied soon after. Cold water oozes out slowly, hot water doesn’t run at all. The shower still works, and I can fill up the pan from there. For the toilet, for the dishes, for the lentils.
The hole kept getting bigger. Gaping at me. My finger must have twitched over my phone to call somebody, anybody a dozen times or more. I never pressed it. Who would I even call? The property is several layers of death and debt deep. Was my owner a man or a company? If I tell them who I am, I remind them I am here. If I remind them I am here, I remind them there is money that they could be taking from me. More of it.
The hum. I spent fifteen hours on a dehumidifier. A band-aid over an amputation. I didn’t have wifi anymore, but I had a hum. It has been with me ever since.
I lost some hours. Vomit in the dry bowl. Pan of water beside me. Shower to toilet, just so I didn’t have to hold my head above the mess. Lentils and beans come back up the same. The window had crusted shut at some point over winter, sealed with a soiled layer. No fresh air, only the thin breath through the hole. Stink permeating.
More hours slipped away, slipped from my hands and vanished into nothing. Sent home, stayed home, not sure where I was supposed to be, but I know I was supposed to be somewhere. Stuck inside. At least if I didn’t take the stairs the air wouldn’t smell so foul.
The hole was still there, a gap in the black, but the wall was festering around it worse. Walls. I think there were more walls sloughing their skin by the time I started losing time. Have I said time too much?
I was dropped from my shifts, they told me. Was it by letter? A letter to Tenant. Soon after, the letters came addressed to Occupier. The letters were red-banded and shouting. I took superglue and sealed up the keyhole to my mailbox. Out of the tip of the tube it came out black, and I smiled. That was the last time I left my room. There were no hours to give, so I gave them instead to the apartment.
They turned off the electricity. I could still hear the humming. When I opened the dehumidifier, I saw that its innards had long decayed, corroded into wet-caked detritus. Pools of electric swamp in the base of it. There was still humming. It wasn’t from the dehumidifier. It was coming from the hole.
The hole, the hole, the hole. With no phone, no nothing, what else was there to do but to listen to the maddening hum? It became my hobby. It became my everything. Clean and redress the wounds, fill up the pan, sit and listen and wonder. Sleepless nights, saturated with humming. I dreamed of bees and heavy machinery. No escape from it, no relief.
One morning, I sat on my bed and faced the hole. Eye to eye. It had grown so big so slowly I hadn’t seen it happen. I slipped my hand inside it.
Silence. Blissful, immediate silence. It fit perfectly. A glove, made for me. I could stay on my bed, lean back, and hold the hum at bay. Use my time for this, for peace. That night, I slept for hours and hours and hours. I don’t know how many, I lost count. Isn’t that bliss? Not to count the hours as they’re being spent. To allow yourself to melt into time itself. Slacken your back and stretch against it.
The wall wasn’t softening with rot. It was softening to hold me against it. To prepare itself for me.
A bracelet of black spores. They flowered around me and crawled up my arm. My hand had long gone numb, and it felt better for it. Everything felt better for it. Time ceased to mean anything at all. Leaned against the wall, my shoulders sinking into it, skin to skin. I watched slowly curling tendrils wrap around my body and embrace me.
Part of me almost missed the hum.
Jesse Payne is a writer and TTRPG designer from Brighton, UK. Her tabletop work has been published by Lamprey Skink, and her esoteric symbols have been seen in your dreams. Find her on Instagram @ghostofjessepayne
Photo Credit: Ideal dye shop layout (1888) by Alexander Paul from the Public Domain Image Archive
Leave a Reply