The Damask Room
Unpublished
Short Story
For forty years, Sybil Harwood kept the truth of what happened in the Damask Room locked away. Now, as her mind begins to fracture, the room she sealed unlocks what she cannot remember.
The Damask Room is an 8,000-word literary short story told entirely from inside a single room, in the unreliable first-person voice of a woman whose dementia is dissolving the line between past and present.
About the Book
It is 1948, and Sybil Harwood drifts through her days under a measured dose of bromide. The nurse who administers it is kind, and her face is one Sybil sometimes cannot quite assemble. The room is wrong. Objects she knows sit beside ones she does not. A hand-knitted bear she cannot recall. A stain on the carpet she has scrubbed for years without knowing why. A photograph that is, depending on the day, her daughter, herself, or someone she does not recognise.
Expand Full Synopsis
Then the visions begin. A pregnant girl crying in her armchair. A doctor shouting from somewhere in the room. Blood on her hands that will not wash away. Sybil cannot tell whether the room is haunted, her mind is failing, or something far worse has been true for forty years.
In 1908, in this room, her fifteen-year-old daughter became pregnant, and Sybil did what a respectable widow was expected to do. There was a doctor. There was no nurse. Sybil held the girl down. The procedure took the child, and most of her daughter with it. The Harwood name was preserved.
Now Sybil’s mind is breaking. Each day she remembers less, recognises less, holds less. The reader sees only what she sees, but with one thing Sybil no longer has: the ability to remember. In that gap, the truth becomes visible. A broken mind, a room that resets, and a daughter who returns to where her mother destroyed her — arranging the room and its reminders to break her again and again.
The reader is left with the revelation that she is caring for her mother, and she is also torturing her. The story closes on the moral ground between those two facts, and asks the reader to stand on it.
“I do not belong in this room.
—Sybil Harwood
Yet I have existed here long enough to pretend otherwise.”
The Damask Room
Manuscript Details
| Status: | Complete |
| Format: | Told entirely from inside a single room, via an unreliable first-person voice |
| Genre: | Upmarket, Psychological Literary Horror |
| Length: | ~8,000 |
| Comps: | Format: Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s The Yellow Wallpaper, for the confined, deteriorating first-person perspective. Theme: Emma Healey’s Elizabeth Is Missing, for the unreliable, dementia-driven mystery. Tone: Shirley Jackson’s short fiction, for the clinically grounded domestic horror. |
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