There’s a staricase that leads up to our flat – at the bottom of which is a door. Humble chipboard with a cheap veneer and frosted glass panels – a guardian portal to our little castle.
Astraman woke up early this morning, and has been hammering on our front door ever since. Bleary eyed and bleary brained – my first reaction was to let him in and help him. Anne stopped me as I was pulling the coffee table away from the door.
It’s odd that we grow up with these stereotyped zombies, but when they appear in front of us – we forget all the rules, all the cliches. He looked to me like a normal person, bloodied and wounded – but normal…. Anne pointed out that he wasn’t calling to us – just incessantly banging on the door. She called out to him, which ellicted little more response than a renewed vigor to his assualt on the door. Astraman it seems, is now Astrazombie – or Zombieman (the cause of some debate between Anne and myself).
The coffee table is firmly in place again – and short of cracking one of the panes of glass Astrazombie has had no joy whatsoever in breaking through. My bedside table now braces the whole arrangement against the stairs, so that sohrot of snapping the hinges themselves there is now way to force your way in.
That moment of realisation however illicited a second of pure, childlike fear. I’ve heard the expression ‘shitting a brick’, and can’t find it any less accurate. Having secured downstairs, I found myself suddenly in urgent need of voiding myself. What occured can only be described as ‘shitting a pint’.