Figures of Fear

by Graham Masterton

  After the fourth or fifth groan, Martin glimpsed something out of the corner of his eye – a dark shadow that flickered across the open doorway, so quickly that he couldn’t be sure that he had seen it at all. He stared at the doorway intently, waiting for it to reappear, but even though the rustling and the tinkling and the groaning continued, it seemed as if one fleeting shadow was the only illusion that this record was going to evoke.

  He thought of playing the record over again, and he was just about to lift up the tone arm when he saw another shadow, halfway along the landing this time, as if it had just come up the stairs. It was very dim and indistinct, and it rippled like the shadow of somebody walking past a picket fence. But it was definitely the shadow of a person, and it was making its way toward the half-open bedroom door.

  ‘Hey!’ shouted Martin. ‘Hey, you! Stop!’

  He pushed back his chair and hurried along the landing. All the same, the shadow reached the bedroom door a split-second before he did, and stepped into it, without any hesitation at all. It was only a shadow, though. The door was still only half-ajar, and no human being could have walked through it without pushing it open wider.

  Martin burst into the bedroom. Serena had already switched on her bedside lamp and was sitting up, wide-eyed.

  ‘What?’ she said. ‘Who were you shouting at?’

  Martin looked around. There was nobody else in the room.

  ‘Martin,’ Serena repeated. ‘Who were you shouting at?’

  Martin circled around the room and even looked behind the drapes. All he could see was the sparkling lights of the neighbouring streets of Belmont and, less then a half-mile away, the red and white river of traffic on the Concord Turnpike.

  He opened the doors of the built-in closets but all he found in there were their clothes, hanging up, and their neatly folded sweaters and socks.

  ‘Martin, you’re scaring me now! What are you looking for?’

  ‘Nothing,’ he said. ‘It’s OK. It was just like an optical illusion, that’s all.’

  ‘What kind of optical illusion? Jesus, you haven’t been smoking any of that skunk again, have you?’

  ‘Of course not. I only tried that under laboratory conditions, for that neuropsychology program.’

  ‘Well, it made you all jumpy, like you are now.’

  ‘I haven’t been smoking skunk, Serena, OK? Even if I wanted to, I don’t have any. It was a visual aberration, that’s all. Like a mirage.’

  ‘A mirage? This isn’t the Sahara, Martin, in the middle of the day. This is nine o’clock at night. Indoors. In Massachusetts.’

  ‘I’m fine. I’m OK. I promise you.’

  ‘Well, come to bed. You’re freaking me out. Next thing I know, I’m going to start having contractions.’

  Martin set aside the ‘Moving Shadows’ record for now, but over the next few days he tried out several of the others, such as ‘Apples’, ‘Snow’, ‘Cold Fingers’, ‘Lightning’ and ‘Faces’.

  Some sounds stimulated his other senses much more than others. ‘Apples’, for instance, gave him a strong taste of Tremlett’s Bitter apples in his mouth, and he could even smell apples, too. With ‘Snow’, however, he could feel only the faintest of chills, as if he were standing in front of an open fridge, and he could see nothing more than a pale reflected light in the window of his study. When he looked outside, there was no snow in the yard, although the grass appeared whitish, as if an early frost had settled on it.

  ‘Lightning’ was more spectacular, especially when he played it in the evening. The record was a mixture of creaking and crackling, and after about thirty seconds Martin began to see static electricity crawling across his desk and around the window-frame like sparkling centipedes. Outside, over Little Pond, he could see branches of lightning flickering behind the trees, although he could hear no thunder, and the evening was completely calm.

  ‘Cold Fingers’ was the first record that actually made him jump. It started with a light scampering sound, like a small rodent running, and then the scampering was accompanied by the shrill, sharp ringing of a bell. Immediately, Martin felt somebody drawing their chilly fingertips lightly across his cheek, even though there was nobody there. As the record continued, he felt it again and again. He stood up, knocking his chair over, and stumbled back across the room, holding up both hands to shield his face, but the chilly fingertips kept stroking him, faster and faster – not only his cheeks but his forehead and his ears and the back of his neck, even his lips. It was like being fondled by a dead but urgent lover.

  He crossed over to his desk, still with one hand held up in front of his face, and pushed the record player so that the stylus scratched sideways across the record and stopped it.

  ‘Martin?’ called Serena, from the hallway. ‘What’s all that banging?’

  ‘Sorry!’ he called back. ‘I’m rearranging my study, that’s all!’

  He slid the ‘Cold Fingers’ record back into its sleeve. He felt guilty that he hadn’t told Serena what he was really doing. After all, he had first met her when she was a student in the department of cognitive neuroscience, and she was quite capable of understanding Vincent Grayling’s research into synaesthesia. For several reasons, though, he wanted to find out more about the true psychological effects of these records before he shared them with anybody, especially Serena. They were exciting, but he was concerned by the way in which they manipulated his senses so easily, making him see shadows where there were no shadows, and lightning where there was no lightning, and feel as if he were being intimately touched by somebody when he was alone. Serena was just about to give birth, and the last thing he wanted to do was mess with her mind.

  He put on ‘Faces’. The sound of this record was quite different from the others. It was a jumble of hundreds of human voices, talking so quickly and indistinctly that it was impossible to make out what they were saying. He sat hunched at his desk, listening to them intently, but for over two minutes he didn’t see anything, or smell anything, or feel that there was anybody else in the room. Maybe this was one record that wouldn’t stimulate any of his other senses, and it would be interesting to know why.

  He stood up and walked around the room, still listening. The voices made him feel as if he were surrounded by a huge crowd, still babbling away to each other, but a crowd which was completely ignoring him. Maybe that was the point of the record: to make him feel isolated, as if nobody cared about him.

  It was only when he turned back toward his desk that he realized how wrong he was. ‘Faces’ meant exactly that – faces. On the left-hand closet door, where he had found the records, he saw two faces, both of them in bas-relief, as if they had been carved out of the wooden door itself.

  Martin stopped where he was and stared at them. One face was on about the same level as his own, a man’s face, and even though it was fashioned out of wide-grained oak, he recognized it immediately as Vincent Grayling. Those near-together eyes, that heavy jaw, that suspicious, pugnacious pout.

  Below Vincent Grayling’s face, and slightly to his right, as if she were standing next to him, was the face of a young girl. She was quite plain, with a long nose and thin lips, but then she looked as if she were still too young for her features to have developed.

  Martin thought: Vincent Grayling and Vera. That’s who these faces belong to. I can see them. I can actually see them, the way they must have appeared when they were alive. Not ghosts, not supernatural apparitions, but images created by stimulating my sense of hearing, and through my sense of hearing, my sight.

  He raised his hand toward Vincent Grayling’s face, wondering if he ought to touch it – or, if he did, if he would actually feel anything. As he did so, however, a voice blurted out from all of the other voices. It was distorted, and some words were muffled and incomprehensible, but he could understand most of what it was saying.

  ‘Can you hear me? I said, can you hear me? I have to bring her back. It was my fault. I was –’ [incoherent] – ‘and I should have k
nown better. I can bring her back. I can. It’s only a question of –’ [incoherent] – ‘if I should fail, what future do I have? I will have lost everything. Joan, Vera. Everything.’

  Martin stared at Vincent Grayling’s face on the closet door. Although he assumed that it was Vincent Grayling’s voice that he could hear above the hubbub of other voices, the lips on the wooden face stayed motionless, and the eyes showed no sign of movement. Martin reached out again to touch him, but as he did so the record came to an end, and the tone arm lifted, and the face immediately melted away, leaving nothing but the flat closet door. The little girl’s face disappeared, too.

  ‘I should have known better.’ What had Vincent Grayling meant by that? Martin would have to listen to the record again, more carefully, to find out exactly what he had said. Maybe he had blamed himself for his daughter’s death. Maybe he had been driving under the influence of drink or drugs or even the mind-distorting influence of his own research.

  It sounded to Martin as if he had been attempting to use synaesthesia to bring Vera back to life. Not physically, that was impossible, but by stimulating his own senses so that he could see her and feel her and talk to her. Maybe the photograph of ‘Vera, 01/16/55’ showed that synaesthesia could evoke an image that could not only be perceived by people’s neural pathways but by light-sensitive film. After all, if invisible voices could be recorded, why not invisible people?

  He went downstairs. Serena was sitting in the living room, watching a repeat of Party Line with The Hearty Boys. He sat down next to her, put his arm around her and kissed her.

  ‘Thinking of opening your own restaurant?’ he asked her, nodding toward the TV.

  ‘I think I’ll have enough on my plate once Sylvia’s born. I just want some ideas for when your parents come round.’

  They sat in silence for a while, watching Dan and Steve make a three-cheese spaghetti. Then Serena said, ‘There’s something on your mind, Martin. I can tell.’

  ‘It’s nothing. Well, it’s not nothing, but it’s nothing for you to worry about. It’s only that I’ve been listening to Vincent Grayling’s records, and he really was on to something. It works, sweetheart. Synaesthesia actually works. Before I hand over any of his research to MIT, I want to find out how far he actually went with it. I may even be able to take it further, who knows?’

  ‘If it worked, why didn’t he win a Nobel Prize for Neuroscience? Or a Hartmann Prize, or whatever they had in those days? Not even his own department took him seriously. Come on, Martin, he was the archetypal mad professor, and you know it.’

  Martin was about to come back at her, and tell her about the taste of apples, and the flashes of lightning, and the wooden faces on the closet door. Maybe if she hadn’t been so close to giving birth he would have done, but he didn’t want to argue with her, and he didn’t want to upset her. Right now she needed him to be very normal and very dependable. The most important thing in their lives was Sylvia Martina, whose feet were churning under Serena’s smock as relentlessly as the paddles of an old-fashioned washing-machine.

  Martin reached across and stroked Serena’s hair, which was shining in the afternoon sunlight. He wished he could think of words that meant I love you, but a thousand times more than anybody else ever could.

  Sylvia Martina was born a day late at the Bain Birthing Centre at Mount Auburn Hospital. She weighed seven pounds two ounces and she was blue-eyed and fair-haired and when she was born showers of red and yellow leaves flew upward past the fifth-floor window of the maternity unit and rattled against the glass as if to welcome her.

  On the third day they took her home to Oliver Road, and placed her in the crib in their bedroom. She would soon have a room of her own, but at the moment it was brown-wallpapered and bare and it would have to be decorated first.

  Sylvia was a good baby, docile as well as pretty, and she hardly ever cried. A week after she was born, Martin came quietly into the bedroom at seven o’clock in the evening to find both Sylvia and Serena asleep. For the first time in his life, he knew what it was to feel blessed.

  He went across and kissed Serena’s cheek, and then he switched off her bedside lamp and left the bedroom, although he left the door a few inches open so that it wouldn’t be totally dark.

  He went into his study and poured himself a glass of Jack Daniel’s. He hadn’t listened to any of Vincent Grayling’s records since Sylvia had been born, except for ‘Lavender’, which he had played again while Sylvia was asleep and Serena was taking a bath, just to make sure that he couldn’t detect any hint of blood. He had inhaled deeply while it was playing, and all he had smelled was lavender, lavandula angustifolia.

  This time he put on ‘Child’, and at the same time he leafed through Vincent Grayling’s notebooks until he found a heading for ‘Child’, handwritten in capital letters followed by several pages of Grayling’s scrawling purple script. The handwriting on these pages was even more untidy than he had used for previous notes, with wild loops and fierce downstrokes, as if he had been angry or upset when he wrote it.

  Martin lowered the tone arm on to ‘Child’ and the first thing he heard was breathing. It was quick, and panicky, like the breathing of a small child fighting for air. It went on and on for more than three minutes before it was eventually joined by a very low grumbling sound, so deep that it was almost below the range of Martin’s hearing – more like an earth tremor than a noise. His whiskey glass started to rattle against the side of the Jack Daniel’s bottle, and all the pencils and ballpens that he kept in a white china mug on his desk began to jump up and down as if they were trying to escape.

  The grumbling continued, drowning out the breathing altogether, although Martin couldn’t be sure that the breathing hadn’t stopped. Then, suddenly, there was a scalp-prickling howl. It was a man, no question about it, but a man howling in such agony that he could have been mistaken for a dog crushed under a truck.

  On the opposite side of the study, next to the bookshelves, a shadowy figure materialized – the figure of a man, dressed in grey. His features were indistinct, but Martin could see that his mouth was stretched open wide, as if it were he who was howling. He was making his way toward the door, in a flickering motion, one image of him after another, a succession of grey shadowy men like a very early motion picture.

  He reached the door. Although it was open already, Martin felt that it wouldn’t have mattered if it had been closed; he still would have gone through it. He went out on to the landing, and as he did so the howling twisted itself into a cry of ‘Vera! Vera! My dear little Vera!’

  Martin got up from his chair and went after him. He was just in time to see him enter the master bedroom, without opening the door any wider than it was already.

  ‘Vera! Oh, God, Vera! You’ve come back to me! My little Vera!’

  Martin pushed open the bedroom door and switched on the overhead light. Serena was already sitting up in bed, looking bewildered.

  ‘Martin, what’s … Martin! Who’s that? Martin, what is that! Martin, get it away from Sylvia!’

  This time, the figure hadn’t vanished when it had entered the bedroom, but was standing by the side of Sylvia’s crib, looking down at her. He was half-transparent. His face and hands were dark grey and his eyes were white, like a photographic negative, but at the same time Martin could clearly see that it was Vincent Grayling.

  ‘Vera,’ he said. ‘My wonderful little Vera.’

  Martin could hear his voice quite distinctly, even though it wasn’t coming out of his mouth, but playing on the record in his study.

  ‘We thought you were gone, my darling one, but here you are again, alive and well.’

  ‘Martin, get him away!’ screamed Serena, pushing back the covers and climbing out of bed. ‘Don’t let him touch her!’

  Martin seized Vincent Grayling by the shoulders and tried to twist him away from the crib, but he was jolted by an electrical shock that threw him back against the wall, jarring his spine. He lurched forward, snatchi
ng at Vincent Grayling’s sleeve, but another electrical shock froze all of the feeling in his leg muscles, and he dropped on to his knees on the floor.

  Vincent Grayling reached out for Sylvia. ‘Come to daddy, my darling. I never thought to see you again.’

  But he wasn’t quick enough. Serena bounded across the bedroom floor and snatched Sylvia out of the crib before he even had the chance to pull back her blankets. Then she ran for the door, gasping, ‘Martin! Help me! Stop him!’

  As Vincent Grayling flickered past him, one still image after another, Martin pitched himself sideways and tried to trip him up by grasping his ankle, but again he was stunned by a thrilling electrical shock.

  Serena ran out on to the landing with Sylvia clutched tightly in her arms. The animated images of Vincent Grayling pursued her, only three or four feet behind, and as he did so the record in the study produced an eerie whining noise, as if Vincent Grayling were deliberately trying to panic her.

  Martin reached the bedroom door just as Serena was starting to hurry down the staircase. Vincent Grayling was almost close enough to catch at her nightdress.

  ‘Serena!’ Martin shouted. ‘Watch out for the stairs!’

  He didn’t know if she had heard him or not, but she continued to run down the stairs as fast as she could. A third of the way down, they collapsed under her feet, cracking and groaning and then noisily crashing as the risers broke and the treads were ripped in sequence away from the wall.

  Serena dropped into the space below the stairs, still holding Sylvia close. She didn’t scream. She didn’t utter a sound. In her nightdress she looked like an angel falling, until she was impaled by a capped-off gas pipe that ran vertically up through the floor from the basement. She was stopped with a jolt, her arms and legs flapping upward, and blood spurted out of her lips. She dropped Sylvia somewhere into the darkness and Sylvia didn’t make a sound, either, not that Martin could hear.