Naomi's Room

by Jonathan Aycliffe

  I stopped in my tracks.

  ‘How . . . ?’

  ‘Oh, Charles, come on. I’ve pieced together things Laura let slip. I used a little intuition. It’s true, isn’t it? You’ve seen her.’

  I nodded.

  ‘I saw her once, and Laura another time. And we’ve heard her. In our bedroom one night – she was crying. And there are photographs.’

  ‘Photographs? I see.’ She paused. We were like lovers, walking arm in arm now, our inhibitions dropping away. I longed to leap into the river, to drag her down with me into its darknesses and its dank weeds.

  ‘I heard something last night,’ she went on. ‘Footsteps up above me, in the attic. Have you heard them?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said.

  They weren’t a child’s footsteps. Not Naomi’s.’

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘Not Naomi’s.’

  ‘I think you’d better tell me.’

  So I explained all I knew, leaving out only the details of what John Liddley had done to his family. When I reached the end, more than an hour had passed. We sat for a long time in silence, Carol and I, our eyes on the river, the soft silver grace of it, the forming of ripples, the coolness and the depth.

  ‘It’s a strange coincidence, isn’t it?’ she said. I knew what she meant.

  ‘You mean Mother?’ I asked.

  She nodded.

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘If it is a coincidence.’

  ‘You don’t think so?’

  ‘No,’ I said.

  The river curled past just beyond our feet. Our reflections danced on its surface like ghosts. I shivered.

  ‘Laura should never have encouraged you to come,’ I said. ‘She should never have let you bring Jessica. It isn’t over, you know. I think . . . I think this is only the beginning.’

  Carol said nothing immediately. She went on staring at the water, at our reflections distorted and trembling on its labile surface.

  ‘Last night,’ she began at last, ‘after I came to your room with Laura, I didn’t go straight back to my own room. Instead, I went to check on Jessica. She wasn’t sleeping. I found her sitting up in bed with her light on. She didn’t seem disturbed or anything. I asked her why she was sitting with the light on. Had anything woken her? I thought she might have heard you cry out.

  ‘She said she’d been playing. “What were you playing?” I asked. “Families,” she said. “All on your own?” She shook her head. “Oh no,” she answered, “I wasn’t alone. My cousin Naomi came to play with me.”’

  24

  We spent a quiet evening, speaking of anything but the topics we most wanted to discuss. Carol and I had agreed not to raise the subject of the hauntings with Laura. And we had decided that it might be best to ask for an exorcism after all. I remembered only too bitterly my broken promise to Lewis. As we collected our bicycles, I told Carol I would call on the priest tomorrow.

  About ten o’clock, Laura said she was feeling tired and wanted an early night. When she went upstairs to bed, Carol and I stayed down in order to talk. I showed her the photographs. Not all of them – not the worst ones, which I had locked away – but enough to convince her finally of the truth of what I had told her.

  ‘You have to leave,’ she said. ‘This house is evil. It will destroy you if you stay.’

  ‘Laura won’t go,’ I said. I told her about Naomi’s visitation, the appeal she had made for Laura’s return.

  ‘In spite of that,’ Carol replied. ‘Because of that. Even if she does see Naomi, it will only distress her more in the end. Let me speak to her, she may listen to me.’

  I nodded, but I knew she would be wasting her breath. It would take more than reason to make Laura leave again.

  We went up to bed just after midnight. Carol was nervous. I knew she was listening for sounds from the attic.

  ‘I don’t want to sleep on my own,’ she said.

  ‘You’ll be all right,’ I reassured her, feeling little reassurance myself. ‘We’re just across the corridor – you only have to shout out if you need me.’

  She gave me a nervous smile and opened her bedroom door, switching the light on at once.

  ‘Off you go,’ she said. ‘I’ll be all right. But I do wish it was morning. I’ll just look in on Jessica before I brush my teeth. Maybe I’ll bring her in to sleep with me.’

  She kissed my cheek and went off towards her daughter’s room. I opened the door of our bedroom and went inside. Laura had left a nightlight on. She stirred as I entered. I saw with relief that it was indeed Laura in the bed and not . . . Not someone else.

  Less than a minute must have passed when, without warning, the door was flung open and Carol came into the room in a state of extreme distress.

  ‘It’s Jessica!’ she cried. ‘She’s gone.’

  ‘What! Are you sure?’

  ‘Of course I’m sure! She’s not in her room, she’s not in my room.’

  Laura muttered indistinctly from the bed, ‘What’s going on? Is something wrong?’ She was struggling to get upright, still half asleep.

  ‘It’s nothing, dear,’ I told her. ‘Go back to sleep.’

  ‘Carol? Is that you?’ She was coming awake now. I could see the flicker of fear in her eyes.

  ‘Yes, Laura. Jessica’s gone missing.’

  I left them together and went off to look for my niece. She could not be far away, I reasoned. But my heart was thumping violently, and I could feel fear crawling in the pit of my stomach. Memories of those first awful moments in Hamleys came rushing back, those moments when I realized Naomi had really gone.

  Carol and Laura joined me, and together we went carefully through all the rooms on the top floor. My chief hope had been that she might have gone to Naomi’s room to play with her toys, but there was no one there and no sign that anything had recently been disturbed.

  We went through the rest of the house, room by room, calling her name loudly. No one answered. She was not to be found. I took a torch and went into the garden, cursing the darkness. Fifteen minutes later, cold and shivering, I came back in shaking my head wearily. There was no sign of Jessica anywhere.

  We sat down in the kitchen. Carol was the first to speak. She said what was going through all our minds.

  ‘There’s one place we haven’t tried yet.’

  We looked at one another. Even now, after so much, I still feel the grip of fear, the nausea of that moment.

  ‘I’ll go,’ I said.

  Carol shook her head.

  ‘I have to come with you. Jessica’s my daughter. She’s my responsibility.’

  ‘Very well,’ I said. I was not reluctant, I wanted her with me.

  ‘I’ll come too,’ said Laura.

  I shook my head.

  ‘One of us has to stay outside,’ I told her. ‘In case something goes wrong.’

  She hesitated, then nodded slowly.

  The attic door was unlocked. I tried to remember whether or not I had locked it after the last time, the time we had all gone up and Lewis and I had discovered the bricked-off room. But however hard I tried, my memory failed me.

  The moment I opened the door, I could feel the cold. It was not just a matter of temperature, that cold: it was as much inside me as in the air around me.

  I switched on the torch and swung it up the stairs. No sunlight lightened the gloom. Darkness held the attic fast. It was like a wall in front of me, high and black and without chinks. Like the cold, the darkness was more in me than outside me. It was my own darkness, my own night.

  I began to climb the stairs. The wooden treads creaked in protest beneath my feet. As I came level with the floor, the torch-beam vanished in the open space. Entering the darkness was like being turned inside out. And there was something else, something besides the darkness. I could make out a faint smell, one that had not been there before. It was an odour like chemicals or decay. It felt familiar, like an odour from my past, yet I was certain I had never smelled it before.

  Carol was close behind me on t
he stairs. I reached down and helped her up to the floor. She did not let go of my hand. I swung the torch back and forwards through the dark. Old tennis racquets with small heads, a toboggan, a chair. The attic was as it should have been, unshifted, in a time and place I could understand.

  The wall was still there, the floor at its centre strewn with dust and rubble. Through the opening I could make out the dingy glow of another light. I remembered the broken oil-lamp we had found in the other chamber.

  ‘Through there,’ I whispered. ‘Can you see it?’

  ‘Yes.’ Carol still held my hand. We had not held hands since we were very small. I didn’t like it. It felt . . . It felt sexual. I had an erection. This was my sister, and I had an erection. I felt dreadful. The smell was pressing on my lungs like gas. I could hardly breathe. A gross excitement threatened to overpower me. I wanted to touch Carol, to waken her, to drag her screaming and aroused into my naked dream. I breathed hard, fighting the compulsion, I closed my eyes tightly. Darkness, darkness.

  ‘Can you smell it?’ I asked.

  ‘Smell what? What do you smell?’

  ‘It doesn’t matter,’ I said. My breath was coming in short gasps. My hand shook as I shone the torch on the opposite wall. I opened my eyes again. She held my hand so tightly.

  We walked together to the opening in the wall. The light grew steadily stronger. Was it the darkness choking me? Or myself, my lust, my self-loathing?

  I looked through the opening. The lamp had been lit and placed on the floor near an armchair. In the armchair, Jessica was sitting, a doll on her lap, oblivious of me. Her hair hung over her eyes, she was rocking to and fro. Standing by the side of the chair was Naomi, dressed in the clothes I had put on her the morning of our trip to London, the clothes I had last seen in plastic bags in Scotland Yard. She looked at me and smiled.

  Carol let go of my hand. I stepped through the opening. I had such grief, such blinding grief. She was standing unblemished in the lamplight. There was nothing phantasmal, nothing insubstantial about her. My eyes could not see through her, I felt sure I could touch her if I dared, if I just stretched out my hand. Her hair was soft, her skin looked freshly washed, and I knew I was not dreaming. In a nightmare, but not dreaming.

  Carol stepped through the hole behind me. I could hear her breathing, tight and uneven and full of fear.

  ‘Hello Daddy.’ Naomi’s voice, not a voice in a dream. I felt tears scald my eyes, blinding me. I kept telling myself it wasn’t Naomi, that Naomi was dead.

  ‘Hello Auntie Carol. Are you looking for Jessica? Jessica came here to find me. We’re playing with her doll.’ She paused. ‘This is my room now. I’m allowed to play here any time I like.’

  ‘Oh sweet Jesus.’ Carol was beside me now, clinging tightly to my arm.

  Jessica looked up. She seemed oblivious of her surroundings. A few feet away from her lay the bundle of human remains Lewis and I had unwrapped. The other two still rested where we had left them. Two large spiders scuttled over them, black and malevolent. I shuddered at the quick movements of their long legs.

  ‘Hello Mummy,’ Jessica lisped. ‘I came up to Naomi’s room to play with her. Caroline and Victoria will be coming later.’

  ‘We’ve got to get her out of here,’ gasped Carol. Out of here? I thought. Out where? Where is there to go? The darkness stretches for ever.

  ‘Isn’t Mummy with you?’ Naomi asked. Her thin voice carried without effort through the darkness. She did not move. Her soft eyes seemed to beckon, to draw me towards her.

  I shook my head.

  ‘Mummy’s downstairs, darling,’ I said.

  Carol grabbed my arm.

  ‘For God’s sake, don’t speak to her. She isn’t real, she isn’t there. Help me get Jessica out of here.’

  At that moment, there was a sound from the back of the room, from the shadows just out of reach of the lamplight. A shuffling sound. I raised the beam of my torch and shone it in the direction from which the sound was coming. Dear God, why did I not just run?

  They were walking towards us slowly, little Caroline and little Victoria. They were not dressed in their pretty clothes, they were not pretty at all. I suppose this is how they must have looked after they had been dead for a little while, before Liddley finished the job of carving them up and wrapping the pieces in burlap.

  In my sudden revulsion, I dropped the torch. It hit the floor with a crash, smashing the glass and shattering the bulb. There was only the lamplight now. And behind us the darkness. The darkness and the sound of breathing.

  25

  He was almost invisible at first, coming to me as he did out of his familiar darkness, those soot-black clothes camouflaging him perfectly. It was his face I saw first, the preternatural whiteness of it, its pallor like no earthly pallor. He seemed drained: drained of blood, drained of hope, drained of volition. His eyes were full of pain. They spoke to me before he opened his mouth. I learned more from his eyes than from anything he ever told me or from anything I ever read in a letter or diary entry. He was holding a scalpel in one hand. A red scalpel with a bone handle. His hand was bright with blood.

  ‘Help me.’ His voice sounded thin, etiolated, remote, as though it came from a great distance, as though it had crossed fields of stars to arrive here finally, in this last and deepest of darknesses. ‘Help me.’ He was standing facing me like someone with nowhere to go. A lost soul? Not quite. John Liddley was not lost, but he had used up all his refuges, flown to his last bolt hole. I was his refuge, I was his hideaway. He needed me, he needed my will and my flesh. I felt flattered, felt for the first time in my life the stark necessity of my existence. I knew what he wanted, what I had to do.

  With a smile on my face, I turned round. I looked at Carol, trembling, cowering, cringing. She could not read his eyes, no, she could not understand. I felt such lust. Such lust and, in that same instant, such hurt, such anger.

  ‘Sleep with me,’ I said.

  She looked at me as though unable to believe what she had heard. Stupid, she seemed so stupid. ‘What?’ she said. A flat word, without inflection. ‘What?’

  ‘I want you to sleep with me.’

  ‘Charles, what the hell is going on? What are you talking about? Have you gone mad? We’ve got to get out of here. Now.’

  I hit her with the back of my hand hard across the face. The blow drew blood, a thin trickle through her teeth. She looked at me in shock and horror. I hit her a second time. She toppled and I hit her again, this time in the stomach, low down. Without a word, she crumpled and sank to the floor, groaning and clutching her abdomen.

  ‘Hit her again.’ Liddley was behind me. Naomi and the little girls had gone, leaving Jessica in the chair. I felt terribly alone. I bent down, pulled Carol upright, and hit her with my fist, full in the face. Her nose crumpled like paper, blood gushed everywhere. I let her fall to the floor.

  ‘Take her over there.’ Liddley pointed with his left hand at the wall. For a moment, I failed to understand, then I remembered the chains.

  ‘Will they hold?’ I asked.

  He nodded. For some reason I believed him. After all, he knew about these things, I was only a beginner.

  I dragged Carol’s limp body across the floor, holding her tightly by the ankles. Her head bumped on the floorboards. It was the dragging, bumping sound I had heard previously, coming from the attic.

  Jessica was sitting bolt upright in her chair, visibly disturbed now and frightened. Liddley stepped out of the darkness into the light. She saw him and froze, then uttered a terrible scream. I dropped Carol and looked round desperately. I had to stop Jessica screaming, her cries would bring Laura, and Laura would set about complicating this beautiful simplicity that Liddley and I were weaving together.

  Quietly, I went up to Jessica, kneeling on the ground beside her.

  ‘It’s all right, Jessica: there’s nothing to be frightened of. I’m here with you.’

  I reached out a tentative hand and stroked her head, but she p
ulled away from me, mortally terrified.

  I wanted to soothe her. I wanted to break her neck.

  When I looked up, I saw Liddley a few feet away. With the hand that held the scalpel, he gestured towards the little table. I crossed to it and my eye caught the box of surgical instruments. I understood at once what he meant. I opened the box and drew out a long, glistening blade, whose precise purpose I could not guess. It was almost perfect, untarnished, beautiful. Its edge cut a paper-thin line in the ball of my thumb. Jessica was still sobbing and screaming.

  My hand did not shake once. The long scalpel felt familiar, its weight, its balance. My fingers knew what to do. He watched me walk to my niece, watched me take her hair in my left hand and pull her head back, watched my hand swing back, watched me cut her throat with that smooth, scything motion his eyes had taught me. I needed no practice, I sidestepped the blood with ease. She jerked once, twice, three times, then fell to the floor. A convulsion of all her limbs threw her into her last stillness.

  I remember those moments with peculiar clarity, as though each had been made for me a particular focus for unquiet recollection. They haunt me now, and all those other vivid moments of my creation and his creation. I know that in one and the same moment I felt sick and wild with joy. Part of me was myself, aghast at what I had done, what I was about to do, part was whatever I was becoming under John Liddley’s invisible tutelage.

  Poor Jessica, all trust betrayed, all security wiped out in that one brilliant moment of execution. And yet how fortunate that she did not have to suffer the protracted agonies my Naomi endured. Just as I endure those same agonies vicariously now, all their agonies and my own doubled and redoubled.

  I must have been in a daze, bedazzled with blood, my first taste of that bewitchment. Liddley snatched me out of it with a cry of inarticulate alarm. I swung round like a sleepwalker awakened and saw Carol on her feet, swaying as she staggered towards me. I slashed at her thoughtlessly, cutting a thin line down her cheek. The pain threw her back, allowing me to move in, striking her again, pulling her to the wall, throwing her down.