Free Infinite Rooms: a gripping psychological thriller that follows one man's descent into madness by David John Griffin Page A

Clement was bewildered; he turned one hundred and eighty degrees. The other passengers had boarded the train that stood on the opposite side of the platform, save one. She ran past the guard. ‘Quickly,’ he urged.
    The girl was wearing brown leather shoes and black diamond-patterned tights (or stockings, Clement considered in an instant) with an elaborately embroidered cape about herand a salmon pink dress. Her hair was held up with a tortoiseshell hair clip. Fine wisps and a white neck below her bunned hair as she stepped up. Her profile was to him. Unplucked eyebrow, the high cheekbone and pouting mouth: he saw these in a handful of seconds. Clement ran to the same train carriage she had entered, brushing past the guard as he went, his sight never leaving the young woman.
    It was Bernadette.

11
    F ive other people occupied the carriage compartment though Clement’s attention was for Bernadette only.
    So she did exist again outside him. He wanted to hug her close, smell her scent.
    By impulse, he looked to her feet. The shoes there were not brown leather. The legs and the tights were as he had seen them though the calves seemed plumper than remembered. The salmon pink dress was neither pink nor a dress, but a mustard-coloured pleated skirt. She was undoing her cape which, Clement noticed, was secured by buttons.
    This person was not Bernadette after all. A similarity in facial structure maybe but inspecting her annoyed face with its different nose, smaller eyes and thinner top lip, this woman was a mere caricature. Clement resolved to smother his sight, suddenly swamped with fatigue.
    He inexplicably found an erotic scene flashed into his inner view: a woman seductively draped in silken ribbons, laying on her back upon a Persian carpet. This sculptured carpet wasmade with the finest of dyed silks, the pile cut to different heights, intriguing symbols in pastel shades within it. The woman’s head lay as smooth and featureless as an egg, propped up with large pillows. These pillows glinted and caught light; they refracted luminosity, splitting it into prism colours which altered the shades of the carpet in streaks and spots as though a reacting chemical had been spilt there. She was surrounded by lakes of poppies and bright daisies. Some of the mustard and red flowers, being flattened by the carpet, lay poking out from around its perimeter, their petals limp and stems snapped, or bent and oozing a resinous sap. About her, a summer brightness. Beyond this incandescent bubble was a night sky peppered with stars. Her breathing was deep. She felt her shoulders before moving both hands down, caressingly, to the cleft between her ample breasts which rose and fell with each breathe. Rhythmic sighs left her as gentle as the susurration of autumn leaves, the scintillating pillows beneath her letting out clouds of white points like sparks flying from a bonfire. The exotic carpet undulated and rippled, the brightness waxed and waned. Her sighs became the wind and it blew in bursts, making the luminous fields of flowers bow and quiver. And there, leaving a furrow behind him, a black-moustached figure walking closer. He wore a striped jacket. The faceless woman breathed faster as though she sensed the nearness of him.
    Arrest the man’s advance: manipulate sparks from the pillows to form walls, instruct these to surround the woman,to hide and protect her from the advancing man. Let pale green stars grow until they overlap, becoming a ceiling above.
    This mindroom I know; it has been developed and tailored to perfection. Bernadette is laying on the bed next to me. With her elbow buried in the pillow and her upturned palm forming a plinth for the side of her head, she’s flicking through a magazine. The evening sun seems loathe to rest, still feeling as hot as the afternoon.
    ‘My skin’s glowing, look. Do you think I’ve tanned?’
    The walls shimmer; the eiderdown has become perfumed satin sheets as large as the largest of rooms,