Naomi's Room

by Jonathan Aycliffe

  ‘A flux in our emotions,’ I said. It was an attempt to distance myself from the enormity of what I had felt.

  ‘Yes,’ Lewis said. ‘Anger displacing . . . whatever had been there previously.’

  ‘Well, what’s the point of all this?’ Laura interjected impatiently. Lack of sleep had not improved her temper.

  ‘The point?’ It was Lewis’s turn to raise his eyebrows. ‘The point is this, Mrs Hillenbrand.’ I remember that he always preserved a polite formality with her. ‘If these changes become more . . . violent. If the . . . creatures that are haunting this house become more physical, you will not wish to be here. I do not exaggerate.

  ‘More than that, I am afraid for you, though I cannot explain why. I feel . . . Let me say that I have felt a terrible sense of menace here. Perhaps you have not, but I assure you, it is here.’

  ‘I don’t understand,’ said Laura, voicing my own doubt from before, ‘how it is possible for a camera to record images that are invisible to the naked eye. A camera is not – how shall I put this? – is not a spiritual instrument. It is not an item in the medium’s armamentarium.’ She was being deliberately affected. She could be, of course, it was in her nature. Affectation and disdain.

  Lewis set down the coffee-cup from which he had been drinking. I noticed that his hand had stopped shaking. He seemed very calm.

  ‘I have been giving that little matter a great deal of thought over the past few days. Great thought. It has been a source of infinite trouble to me. As you say, photographic film is sensitive to light, not spiritual emanations. It now seems to me, however, that we have been looking at the entire matter back to front, as it were.’

  He paused, less for effect, I think, than to gather thoughts that were only as yet half-formed. Laura was silent. Something in Lewis’s manner had taken hold of her.

  ‘The point is,’ he went on, ‘that, as you so rightly say, the camera is an instrument of limited dimensions. It can only be adjusted so’ – he made a gesture with his fingers, as though holding a camera – ‘or so. The focal length may be altered, or the shutter speed, or the angle of the lens. But it will, provided it has not been set badly out of focus or at entirely the wrong speed, make a fair enough record of anything you point it at.’

  He ran a hand over his hair, smoothing it.

  ‘Now,’ he continued, ‘that is not altogether true of the human eye. The eye itself is, perhaps, quite inflexible. We can’t make it infrared-sensitive or capable of acting like a microscope. A camera would be more flexible. But it is not the eye that does the real seeing, it is the brain. It is the brain that records impressions sent to it by the eye. Our brains are unreliable. Our perception varies from one of us to the next.’

  He paused again to drink and, I think, to steady his nerves.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he muttered. ‘I’m not explaining this well. Look, what I’m trying to say is this: I think that what my camera has seen, what it has photographed is . . . how things really are. Sometimes normal, as you might say, like this room at this moment. Sometimes the same room as it would have been in the past. And . . . sometimes the same room, still in the past, but changed. It’s as though the room is moving through time, and the camera is just photographing what it sees. I think . . . I think the people are actually there much of the time, and that they show up on film as a result. It’s just that we don’t see them, can’t see them, for whatever reasons. We are not . . . attuned. Do you see? The fault lies with us, with our perception, not with the camera.’

  I looked round the room and shivered. ‘How things really are . . .’ We were living in a state of unreality, in a dream of our own making. This room might be full of ghosts, might be packed with all the house’s dead, but we could not see them.

  ‘I think,’ the Welshman continued in a voice that had fallen to little more than a whisper, ‘I think that, bit by bit, their reality may be taking control here, that before long we will start to see them and hear them more and more often.’

  ‘You said two choices,’ Laura broke in. ‘What was the second?’

  He did not answer at once. Perhaps he realized that he had gone too far, that she might after all prefer the second option.

  ‘We go back up to the attic,’ he said finally. ‘That’s the heart of this thing, that’s where it resides. We find out what it is. And we put a stop to it.’

  14

  For a long time, nobody spoke. Lewis had shot his bolt, he was waiting for a sign that it had struck home. It was in the middle of that silence that the clock stopped ticking for the first time. It struck me then as queer, though I said nothing. I was thinking about what had happened the day before.

  Laura, surprisingly, was the first to speak.

  ‘I can’t conceive of leaving here,’ she said. ‘It’s my home. It was Naomi’s home.’ She hesitated. ‘Her only home. If she’s here, I can’t leave.’

  Lewis looked at her for at least half a minute before speaking.

  ‘You will come with me to the attic, then?’

  ‘I’m not afraid,’ she said.

  ‘You should be.’

  I cut in.

  ‘After what happened yesterday . . . Do you think it’s safe to go back there?’

  Lewis shrugged.

  ‘Safe?’ he asked. ‘How should I know? I’m not even sure if any of my theories are correct. But I think that, if we choose our moment, it’s possible to go up there and come out again without seeing or hearing or feeling anything. The problem is telling when it’s safe to do so. It would help if we knew whether there was some sort of periodicity. Perhaps there is, but it would take time to work out.’

  ‘What do you expect to find?’

  ‘If I knew, I wouldn’t have to go up. But I have a feeling there’s more to your attic than meets the eye.’

  He stood.

  ‘Let’s go outside first,’ he said. ‘I want to check something.’

  We followed him out. The first signs of spring had touched the garden. Its trees bore an air of determined normality. I could not imagine them slipping to reveal another reality. They were rooted, fast, secure, their only changes were inward and seasonal: the dropping of dried leaves and the brightening of buds.

  Lewis headed straight for the side of the house. He looked up, getting his bearings on the attic, then strode purposefully down the flank of the building, counting off the paces.

  ‘Fifty-three,’ he said, turning to face us. ‘Now, let’s see what we find upstairs.’

  We climbed the stairs, subdued and silent. I had already begun to suspect what Lewis was looking for. Laura was tense and still angry, as though the Welshman’s presence threatened her in some way. I found myself listening carefully, as though I expected some protest from the beings whose secrets we were trying to uncover. But the only sounds were those of our own footsteps and the occasional creaking of a stair.

  I unlocked the attic door. When I look back, I am astonished by my own courage – my stupidity, I now consider it – in turning the handle and pulling the door open. The photographs had prepared me for any horror; alone, I would never have plucked up the courage. But my torch picked out the staircase and nothing else. There was only darkness and a sense of expectation. In their old, fusty clothes and their tangled hair, they were there, unseen, waiting for us to ascend.

  I hesitated on the threshold. It was there, I could sense it, tugging at me like a spider pulling on the ragged edges of its web. I looked at Lewis.

  ‘Is there no way of knowing?’ I asked.

  He shook his head.

  ‘We have to chance it,’ he said.

  ‘Oh, for God’s sake!’ Laura snapped. ‘You’re both behaving like children.’

  Without warning, she snatched the torch from my hand and pushed past me through the doorway. Her feet sounded loudly on the bare wooden treads, then her voice came back to us, muffled, as though far away.

  ‘It seems perfectly all right to me.’

  ‘It isn’t how it seems, Mrs
Hillenbrand,’ Lewis called up. ‘It’s how it really is that matters. We’ll come up, but be ready to clear out if there’s the least sign of anything out of place.’

  He passed his torch to me and took another from his bag. I went up ahead of him, my heart racing wildly, a step at a time, watching, listening for the slightest change.

  Laura was waiting by the window. The attic seemed as it had always been. I could not relate the photographs Lewis had showed me to what lay around us. Daylight came through the unshuttered window, dulling the light of our torches. I switched mine off. Laura had already extinguished hers.

  Lewis went to the window, ignoring Laura, and did a quick turn, putting his back to it. Now he paced forward, as he had done outside, taking moderate, even steps, counting them out beneath his breath. He reached the far wall.

  ‘Thirty-seven,’ he said, quite without emotion.

  No one said anything. I think we all understood what it meant. My hands grew cold with sweat. I wanted to leave that room at once, leave it and never return. Laura stayed where she had been from the beginning, near the window.

  ‘What we’re looking for is behind this wall,’ Lewis said. He spoke calmly, without haste; but I could tell that his self-control was a means of protecting himself against the panic that might, if unchecked, destroy him.

  He struck the wall hard with his fist. It seemed solid enough, fashioned from brick. Perhaps we were mistaken after all.

  ‘We’ll need something heavy. A large hammer or an axe might do.’

  ‘You want to break it down?’ I knew it was a stupid question when I asked it.

  ‘I’d rather not,’ Lewis said. ‘But if we want to find out what’s causing all this . . .’

  ‘I’ll get something,’ I said. ‘Wait here.’

  When I returned five minutes later carrying an axe and a heavy spade from the garden shed, there was an uneasy tension in the room. Lewis looked up as I entered.

  ‘It’s been quiet,’ he said.

  Laura snorted.

  ‘He’s having you on, Charles. Don’t you see? He’s set this whole thing up in his fucking studio.’

  ‘Shut up, Laura.’ I had never spoken to her like that before. She fell silent as though I had slapped her. In a way, I had.

  Lewis took the spade, I used the axe. There were chips of wood on the blade, old wood from the autumn, when I had been cutting logs for the fire. It was an exhilaration, chasing away the silence and the fear with hard blows. The plaster came away in slabs, crashing dully to the floor, sending up clouds of dust. The brickwork was more stubborn. We worked together on a small area near the centre of the wall, banging and hammering with all our strength but without much success, until, suddenly, one brick cracked and fell out. We worked hard at the hole, enlarging it with sharp blows from the axe, then breaking it up in chunks with wild swings from the spade.

  ‘Hang on,’ said Lewis, putting up a hand. ‘It’s wide enough to see through now. Pass me that torch.’

  He had set his torch on a box to give us extra light while we worked. I passed it to him. Bending, he peered through the hole, holding the torch by his cheek, moving the beam slowly through a long arc. He must have spent a minute or more crouched at the opening. Not a word passed his lips. Finally, he drew back.

  ‘Here,’ he said. ‘Look for yourself.’ His voice was shaky. Even without the torch, I could see that his face was white.

  I bent to the hole, pointing the torch through, letting the long white beam play on the space beyond. At first, I could make out very little. Then, bit by bit, what I saw took shape. From a series of images caught in torchlight, I created a whole picture.

  A second room lay behind the one in which we stood. It must not have changed in well over one hundred years. With certain alterations, it was the room in Lewis’s photographs, the room whose walls had glistened with blood. Dark stains covered mouldy wallpaper. Cobwebs hung in banners on every available corner and projection. Thick with dust, two chairs and a little table stood by the rear wall. What looked like plates and a jug still rested on the table. A broken oil-lamp stood behind them. There was a pile of books, thick with decades of dust. A long, narrow table that seemed a little too low for dining. A heavy wooden box. And on the floor, wrapped in what looked like sacking, three narrow bundles tied with string.

  15

  I do not want to tell you what we found in that room. Nor would you believe me if I told you all. Isn’t it strange, after all this time, after so much else has happened, that I should be so reticent? But there was an intimacy about what we found, about what we saw, a privateness that even now hampers me. It was as though we had broken in on something intimate, like sex or a long death. We were interlopers in someone else’s darkness.

  Lewis and I enlarged the hole until it was wide enough to walk through without difficulty. Laura joined us. She was quiet now, subdued by the discovery. I lent her my torch and she swung it back and forth across the cobwebs and the squalid furnishings. Once, she shuddered as a mouse scampered away from the beam. She turned to me, handing back the torch.

  ‘I’ve seen this room before,’ she whispered, very quietly, next to my ear.

  ‘You can’t have . . .’ I began.

  ‘Oh, yes,’ she said. ‘In sleep. I’ve dreamed about it more than once.’

  ‘But when you saw the photographs . . .’

  She shook her head.

  ‘It wasn’t like that in my dreams. It was like this.’

  I wanted to ask her more, but she moved away. She seemed reluctant to enter the room, or to be near it. I wondered when she had had such dreams. And what had taken place in them.

  Lewis was the first to step through the opening. I followed him moments later, my feet slipping on a thick layer of dust. Something scuttled across the rafters above my head. I shone my light across the ceiling, but there was only darkness. There had once been a skylight, but someone had nailed boards across it long ago. Without light, it would have been dark in here, very dark indeed. It was at that moment, I think, that I first realized what should have been already obvious to me – that, once the wall had been closed, no one could have entered or left the little room.

  We left the bundles in the middle of the floor till last. I think we both had an idea what they might contain. I glanced through the pile of books. They were for the most part medical publications. On top were bound copies of old medical journals: the first volumes of The Lancet issued between 1830 and 1832, several years of The Medical Times and Gazette, and a much-decayed set of The British and Foreign Medical Review. I found several textbooks dating from the middle of the last century: Watson’s Lectures on the Principles and Practice of Physic, a late edition of Cullen’s Materia Medica, Good’s Study of Medicine, and Bichat’s Anatomie Générale.

  On one of the chairs, I found a long, shallow wooden box or case, almost buried beneath a thick layer of dust and cobwebs. Sweeping these away, I lifted the box and carried it to the table. There was a brass lock on one side, rusted hard. Lewis handed me a penknife. I slipped a blade under the lock and levered it upwards, snapping it. The lid lifted to reveal dark blue velvet padding into which was set a collection of surgical instruments with ivory handles: scalpels, a little saw, pincers, a drill, and other tools I could not name. Even after so many years, their polished surfaces shone in the light.

  I laid down the case and continued to search the room.

  We did not know what we were looking for, or if, indeed, there was anything in particular that we might find. A moment later, I heard Lewis call softly from my right. I crossed the room and joined him where he was kneeling by the wall.

  ‘Look at these,’ he said.

  On the floor lay several lengths of chain, each fastened to a thick staple that had been bolted to the wall. The ends of some of the chains were furnished with leather collars with buckles, others had metal cuffs. The collars were unfastened. I felt as though someone had injected me with ice water. I remembered the child in the photograph,
the one on all fours, with a collar round her neck.

  Near the chains stood the long table. Had it not been for the medical paraphernalia, I might not have guessed its purpose so quickly. But I wondered why it had been necessary, even in the days before anaesthetics, to furnish it with stout leather straps with brass buckles. It was not so difficult to surmise the purpose of the grooves that had been cut through the surface, leading to small apertures in the centre and at each corner.

  The large wooden box contained clothes, mainly dresses designed for a girl of about eight. Lewis lifted one item and let it hang in front of me. It was badly worn but still recognizable. It belonged to one of the little girls in the photographs.

  ‘I’m not easy,’ Lewis said. ‘We’ve been in here long enough. I don’t think we should push our luck.’

  ‘I think we should examine these first,’ I said, indicating the cobwebbed bundles on the floor. ‘We’ll only have to come back if we don’t.’

  He nodded, but I could sense his reluctance. He held his hand out and asked for the penknife. I passed it over without a word. I wanted him to be the one to open it. He went to the first bundle and knelt beside it. It was about three feet long and as thick as the body of a modern vacuum cleaner.

  The knife cut through the string without difficulty. The sacking was scarcely more robust. As Lewis hacked at it, the fabric crumbled, throwing up small clouds of dust and grime in his face. In a matter of moments, he had made a great incision lengthways along the bundle. Setting the knife aside, he pulled both sides of the opening away from one another. The sacking tore at both ends, falling away to reveal what lay beneath. I shone my torch on it.

  Lewis swore gently, drawing himself away with distaste. The torch picked out a jumble of partly-mummified human remains. The body had evidently been cut up and heaped together in no particular order. The dried skull still had hair on it, long tangled hair, hair the colour of old gold. On the finger of one mummified hand, a small ring glistened. One thing was immediately apparent: the remains were those of a child.