Figures of Fear

by Graham Masterton

  ‘Do I really have to wait that long? I won’t be able to dress up like Scarlett O’Hara when I’m eighty-five years old.’

  He gave her a playful slap on the bottom. ‘Oh ye of little faith. Now, just take a look at this – the master bedroom!’

  He opened the door. The master bedroom was enormous, domin-ated by a huge four-poster bed with carved oak pillars and dusty orange drapes. In the centre of the opposite wall there was a pair of French windows, covered by shutters, so that the afternoon sunlight shone on to the floor in narrow parallel bars. Martin crossed over to the windows, pulled back the bolts which secured them, and then forced open the shutters.

  Outside, a balcony overlooked the yard, which was crowded with blossoming cherry trees. Beyond the cherry trees they could see Little Pond, blue and sparkling, with two rowboats tied together in the middle of it, and children swimming.

  Serena came out on to the balcony and stood there for a while, with her eyes half-closed. The warm wind blew a few stray blonde hairs across her forehead.

  ‘Well?’ asked Martin.

  ‘You’ve convinced me,’ she smiled.

  They looked into all four of the other bedrooms. Three of them were quite small, and empty, without even a bed in them, but the fourth was almost as large as the master bedroom, and it had obviously been used as a study. The walls were lined with bookshelves, although there were no books on them now, apart from a dog-eared telephone directory and a residents’ association newsletter. In the worn beige carpet there were two rectangular indentations with a dark scuffed patch in between them, where a desk had once stood. A dusty black telephone with a rotary dial had been left on the window sill.

  At the far end of the study there was a red-brick fireplace, and in the alcoves on either side of the chimney breast, oak-fronted closets had been built. Martin went over and tried to open them, but they were both locked, and neither of them had keys.

  ‘This would make a fantastic den for you,’ said Serena. She peered through the shutters to see what was outside. ‘There’s a girl next door, washing her car. She has thick glasses and a very large ass. I think I can trust you in here.’

  ‘Does that mean you want us to buy it?’

  Serena reached up and put her arms around his neck and gave him a kiss. ‘I think you’ve persuaded me, yes. Let’s go talk to the realtors, shall we?’

  It was seven more weeks before the paperwork was completed and they were able to move in. By now the air was feeling sharper every morning and the trees all around Little Pond were beginning to turn rusty-coloured.

  Because their baby was expected in less than two weeks, Serena’s sister Emma came to help them move, although Serena was blooming. Her hair was shiny and her skin glowed and Martin had never seen her so happy. They were going to have a girl, and they had chosen the name Sylvia Martina.

  ‘Just because we’re naming her after you, Martin, that doesn’t mean I want her to be a neuroscientist,’ Serena had told him. ‘I want her to be a singing star.’

  ‘What we want her to be is irrelevant,’ Martin had replied. ‘My mom wanted me to go into the grocery business, like my dad. Can you imagine me in an apron, slicing salami?’

  ‘Actually, I just want little Sylvia to be healthy,’ Serena had said, resting her head against his shoulder. ‘I don’t care what she does, so long as nobody ever hurts her.’

  On the third day, the sky was dark grey and it was raining hard, which made the trees rattle. Serena and Emma were cleaning the kitchen together, and Martin was waiting for a house-clearance company to take away the living-room furniture, which was out on the front veranda now, looking old and worn-out and sorry for itself.

  He stood on the veranda watching the rain for a while. The truckers were over an hour late now and he wondered if they were coming at all. He went back inside. Serena and Emma were singing some Rihanna song in the kitchen, out of key, and laughing together, so he decided to leave them to it. He climbed the stairs to the study. All his books were up there now, in eleven cardboard boxes, and he could make a start on unpacking them.

  His desk was there, too, although it looked distinctly out of place in a colonial room like this because it was made of chrome and smoked glass. He would have to see if he could find an antique one, with brass handles and an embossed leather top.

  He went across to the closets beside the fireplace. He had asked the realtors if anybody in the Grayling family had keys for them, but there had been no response. The Graylings had never taken an interest in the house, except as an investment, and they probably didn’t even know that these closets existed, let alone where their keys might be.

  He took out his Swiss army knife, opened out the longest blade, and slid it down the crack at the side of the left-hand door. He could feel the metal tongue of the lock, and he wiggled his knife from side to side to see if he could dislodge it from its keeper. It held firm, and so he gave up. He didn’t want to damage the colonial oak beading.

  In a last attempt to open the door, he opened out the corkscrew and inserted it into the keyhole. He jiggled it, and twisted it, but the door still remained firmly locked. He took out the corkscrew and gave the door a frustrated thump with his fist. As he turned away, the lock softly clicked and the door opened up, almost as if somebody had very gently pushed it from the inside.

  He stood and stared at it. No, he told himself, you’re a neuro-biologist; you’re an associate professor in Brain and Cognitive Sciences at MIT. You do not believe in ghosts, or any kind of paranormal activity. Ghosts aren’t supernatural; they’re synaptic. Like you told Serena, they’re all in the mind.

  Cautiously, he swung the door open wider. Inside, there were three shelves. The top shelf held half-a-dozen black hard-backed notebooks. On the centre shelf stood a portable record player from the late 1950s, cream and brown, an RCA Victor High-Fidelity autochange. On the bottom shelf there was a large cardboard box, with a lid, marked ‘S-Disks #5 – #31’.

  Martin tried to lift the box out of the closet but it was so heavy that he had to drag it. When he opened the lid he found that it was full of long-playing vinyl records, all in brown paper sleeves. He picked out the first one and slid it out of its sleeve. On the white paper label in the middle there was scrawly purple handwriting: ‘Lavender, recorded D Lab, 77 Massachusetts Avenue, 08/13/54.’

  Lavender? thought Martin. What the hell did that mean, lavender? How do you record lavender?

  He lifted out the next record. ‘Smoke, recorded D Lab, 77 Massachusetts Avenue, 08/21/54’. Then, ‘Lightning flash, 0.03 sec, recorded 76 Oliver Road, Belmont, 08/23/54.’

  Each successive record had a similar notation on its label. There were ‘Moving Shadows’, ‘Apples’, ‘Faces’, ‘Snow’, ‘Cold Fingers’ and ‘Child’.

  He stood up and took down the notebooks. On the front of each of them was a white label with the same scrawly handwriting. The first one read ‘Experiments in Synaesthesia, 1954–55. Vincent D. Grayling, PhD.’ When he opened it, and read Vincent Grayling’s handwritten introduction, he began to understand what he had found.

  ‘I am working toward the stimulation of one sense through the stimulation of another. My first experiments are with hearing. I have successfully used sound recordings to evoke smells, visions and various physical sensations, such as the feeling of being stroked, touched, prickled, and even burned.

  ‘I am firmly convinced that there is almost no limit to what the human mind can be persuaded to perceive through the manipulation of the various senses. We are already aware that music can dramatically sway our emotions. Sad songs can make us cry. Martial music can make us feel aggressive. But this is only scratching the surface. I believe that we can create an alternative “reality” through sensory stimulation – a “reality” so convincing that a subject will not be able to distinguish between “real” and actuality.

  ‘In the same way that a pilot can feel in a flight simulator that he is actually flying, we can allow people to experience “rea
l” events, such as walking through a scenic garden and smelling the flowers, or swimming in the ocean, or making love, or even meeting relatives or loved ones who have died.’

  Vincent Grayling’s explanation of how he had managed to conjure up ‘real’ sensations by the use of sound recordings went on for page after page. Martin sat at his desk, fascinated. It was hard to believe that nobody at MIT had made any effort to find out what had happened to Vincent Grayling’s notebooks and records after he had died. Martin had read that he had been a difficult man to get on with, and that his arrogance and overwhelming self-belief had antagonized many of his associate professors. Even today, though, his work on synaesthesia was cutting-edge, and had limitless potential for psychiatric therapy and who knew what other possibilities. Maybe troops could be trained by thinking that they were fighting in Afghanistan, when they were simply sitting in a laboratory with earphones on. Maybe surgeons could separate conjoined twins before they actually made an incision. Maybe widows could meet their dead husbands again, and talk to them as if they were still alive.

  He turned the next page and found a black-and-white photograph had been tucked into the margin. It showed a stocky man in a wide-shouldered grey suit, standing in the back yard, with the cherry trees behind him, although it must have been winter or early spring, because their branches were bare. He had black, slicked-back hair and a large, pale face, with near-together eyes and a heavy chin. Martin recognized him immediately as Vincent Grayling.

  When he looked at the photograph more closely, he saw that there was a blurry white figure between the trees. It looked as if a child had been running past, just as the shutter was opened. It was impossible to tell if it was a boy or a girl, but Vincent Grayling didn’t appear to be aware of it. He was staring straight at the camera as if he resented having his photograph taken at all.

  Martin turned the photograph over. On the back was written, ‘Vera, 01/16/55.’ Not ‘Vincent’ or ‘Me’ as he would have expected, but ‘Vera’. Maybe that blurry figure between the trees was Vera, whoever Vera might have been.

  Martin took the record player out of the closet and placed it on his desk. He plugged it in and turned the knob and it immediately came to life. Its auto-change arm dropped a non-existent record on to the turntable with a complicated clicking noise.

  ‘Martin!’ called Emma, from downstairs. ‘Your lunch is ready! Hot dogs!’

  ‘Thanks, Emma!’ he called back. ‘Just give me a couple of minutes, OK?’

  ‘Don’t be long! You don’t want cold dogs!’

  Martin took out the first record, ‘Lavender’, and laid it on the turntable. He carefully lowered the stylus on to it, and then turned up the volume. There were a few moments of hissing, and then he heard a very soft whispering sound, almost inaudible. The whispering went on and on, like somebody trying to say something confidentially in his ear, yet too close and too breathy for him to be able to make out what it was.

  After about twenty seconds, the whispering was punctuated by an intermittent buzzing, which reminded him of the noise that a faulty fluorescent light makes just before it flickers off for good. These two noises went on and on, with the whispering rising and falling from time to time, and the intervals between the buzzing noises varying in duration, but that was all.

  ‘Martin? Are you coming or not?’ called Emma.

  ‘OK, sure!’ said Martin, and reached across his desk to switch off the record player. As he did so, however, he was suddenly aware of a strong smell of lavender, as aromatic as if he had found himself standing right in the middle of a lavender field.

  He breathed out, and then breathed in again, deeply, just to make sure that he wasn’t mistaken, or that he was deluding himself. But there was no question about it – he could smell lavender. Not only that, everything in the study seemed to have a lavender-coloured tinge to it, as if he were wearing sunglasses with purple lenses.

  ‘Vincent,’ he said, under his breath. ‘I don’t know how you found out how to do this, but you were a genius.’

  He lifted the ‘Lavender’ record off the turntable and took out the next record, ‘Moving Shadows.’

  ‘Martin!’ shouted Serena. ‘If you don’t come down now I’m going to give your wieners to the cat!’

  He placed the record carefully on his desk and went downstairs, swinging himself on the banisters to avoid the rotten risers.

  ‘We don’t have a cat,’ he said, as he came into the kitchen. Serena and Emma were already sitting at the table, eating their hot dogs with coleslaw and curly fries.

  ‘I know. But we will one day, and I was going to freeze your wieners until we do.’

  ‘You women,’ he complained. ‘You’re such sadists.’ But before he sat down, he leaned over Serena and waved his hand under her nose. ‘Here,’ he said. ‘Can you smell anything?’

  She breathed in deeply. ‘I smell something, yes … but I’m not sure what.’ She breathed in again, and then she said, ‘It’s not your aftershave, is it? At least I hope not. Why? What have you been doing?’

  ‘I’ll tell you later,’ he told her. ‘I managed to open one of the closets in the study, and there was a whole lot of Vincent Grayling’s notebooks and records in it. I should take them all in to the department, I guess. Well, I probably will, but I want to go through them first.’

  Serena breathed in yet again, closing her eyes for a moment. Then she said, ‘That smell … I think I know what it is.’

  ‘Go on, then,’ said Martin. ‘Have a guess.’

  ‘It’s like when you first open a pack of ground beef from the supermarket.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘It’s like blood.’

  That night, after Emma had gone home to Watertown and Serena had retired to bed early, Martin went back to the study. He propped up the photograph of Vincent Grayling against the side of the record player, so that he could look at it while he opened his laptop and checked him out on Wikipedia.

  Vincent Grayling, born October 17, 1908; died December 12, 1957. Assistant professor at the Department of Brain and Cognitive Science at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 1934–1957.

  Grayling was a neuroscientist specializing in various forms of synaesthesia, a condition in which senses are linked together, so that the stimulation of one sensory or cognitive pathway automatic-ally stimulates a second or even a third pathway.

  He married Joan Bannerman, the youngest daughter of Professor Humphrey Bannerman, in 1928. They had one daughter, Vera Joan, born 1931, who was fatally injured in a traffic accident at the age of six, while Vincent Grayling was driving.

  Martin looked across at the photograph. Vincent Grayling had written ‘Vera, 01/16/55’ on the back of it, and yet the blurred image between the trees couldn’t be Vera – at least not the same Vera. If she had died when she was six, his daughter had been killed in 1937, which was eighteen years earlier.

  Martin read on: Joan Grayling died in 1952 of ovarian cancer. After her death, Professor Grayling became extremely reclusive, although he published several papers on synaesthesia, notably Cognitive and Perceptual Processes in Congenital And Adventitious Synaesthetes. None of these papers was very well received, because research into synaesthesia had been more or less abandoned by the scientific community, and after 1955 he submitted no more.

  He was found in his study, having bled to death from a fatal wound to his carotid artery. There was some bruising to his body, and one of his shirt sleeves was torn, but because the study was locked from the inside, with the key still in the door, the Middlesex county medical examiner decided that he had taken his own life.

  Martin closed his laptop and sat back. He wondered if he ought to try listening to the ‘Lavender’ record again. He couldn’t understand why Serena had said that he had smelled of blood after he had come downstairs, when he was quite sure that he had still been carrying the lingering scent of lavender. Maybe – with Sylvia’s birth so imminent – her sense of smell had been thrown out of whack by he
r raging hormones. He was much more keen to put on the second record, ‘Moving Shadows’, and find out what happened when he listened to that.

  He was just about to put the record on when he heard Serena calling him. He went along the landing to the master bedroom and opened the door.

  ‘Are you going to be long?’ she asked him.

  He crossed the bedroom and bent over to give her a kiss on the forehead. ‘Only a half-hour or so. I’d like to listen to one more record, that’s all.’

  ‘It’s just that I feel strange in this house.’

  ‘Strange – like how?’

  ‘I feel like we’re not alone. That there’s other people here.’

  ‘Of course there’s other people here. There’s Sylvia.’

  Serena slapped the pillow. ‘I don’t mean Sylvia, stupid. I feel like there’s other people walking around the house.’

  ‘Really? Have you seen them? Have you heard them? Have any of them left their dirty coffee mugs in the sink?’

  ‘No, of course not. It’s a feeling, that’s all. I’m probably letting my imagination run away with me. I’ve never lived in an old house like this before. I’ll get used to it.’

  ‘OK, darling,’ he told her, and kissed her again. ‘Why don’t you try to get some sleep? You’ve done a lot today, cleaning up the kitchen and everything. I don’t want you going into labour before you’re due.’

  ‘I don’t think there’s any chance of that, Martin. I feel like I’m going to be pregnant for ever.’

  Martin left the bedroom door ajar in case she wanted to call out to him again, and he left the study door open, too. He sat down at his desk, lowered the ‘Moving Shadows’ record on to the turntable, and started to play it.

  After the initial hiss of the stylus, he heard a rustling sound, like a breeze, blowing through trees. It went on and on for almost a minute before it was joined by some awkward, sporadic tinkling. It could have been a wind chime, or somebody stirring a glass of Russian tea. Then both rustling and tinkling were punctuated by deep, distant, reverberating groans. The groans didn’t necessarily sound human. They could have been caused by anything, like pit-props under tremendous strain, or dying animals calling out to each other across a swamp.