My Grammy’s house had wall-to-wall white carpet that ran to every white wall. We weren’t allowed in certain rooms except on holidays, which didn’t make any sense to me, because the same blinding carpet in the dining room and the sitting room was everywhere else too. It was in the study where I slept on the floor with my brother during the year we lived with her. It was even in the bathrooms. Every time we trespassed, it would tell my Grammy with the footprints indented in its high pile. But its sterility called to me, and in the night I’d sneak to the sitting room where the same impressionability that would rat me out acted as a kind of drawing pad. Like a lost alien, I’d leave crop circles and my third grade spelling words, tracing my fingers in it like it was glowing frost on glass. Through the French doors, the moonlight reflected brightly, illuminating the tapestry that covered the wall, a tall rendition of The Lady and The Unicorn watched over me like protectors.
I was getting better at not getting caught, even Grammy didn’t come all the way into the sitting room, since she was capable of leaving footprints. She meant to keep it impeccable, but if I tip-toed close to the wall with as long a stride as I could manage, my steps were imperceptible to her. The maid would vacuum my tracks up when she visited weekly, so as long as my initial footprints didn’t warrant investigation, the sitting room was my private oasis.
The white silenced anything around it, so in those pale white nights under the moon, I experienced something rare in that house, peace. When I noticed that some of the carpet seemed bunched around the dark chestnut clawed feet of the sitting room chairs, I said nothing. I wouldn’t admit that the forbidden room was a place I went to for any reason. I could have found an army of kangaroo rats there and taken it to the grave.
But night after night, when my brother started snoring, I’d tiptoe into the sitting room and draw on the ground, make snow angels, and bask in the moonlight. It was eerie, but I craved the solitude and quiet too much not to return night after night. As the carpet crept further up the legs of the chairs and consumed the baseboards, I said nothing. I wouldn’t let them know I saw anything in a room I wasn’t supposed to be in.
It started creeping faster, fast enough that I could see it slowly swallowing up the chest of drawers. The woman and her unicorn looked down on me with chilling indifference as I realized my legs were being swallowed. I didn’t cry out as it took my hands. It crept over me like decay on a corpse. I wriggled back and forth to get free, rocking and thrashing as it crept further and further into me.
My whole face was wet with tears, but I couldn’t close my eyes. It was creeping into me now, I could feel it softening my bones, my blood and skin were being consumed by white. My whole lower half was sinking into it like tar, the pulsing matched each sob that wracked my body. I quietly cried out to my mum to come get me, but not too loudly. I knew what would happen to me if I got caught in here. It suffocated me from the inside out, when the carpet started pouring out of my mouth, I knew it would be over soon. I begged the unicorn and the lady to do something, but the carpet had begun digesting the bottom of their tapestry. The windows were covered, but it wasn’t darker. It was brighter, whiter, and piercing as I suffocated everything turned to white.
