by Adam Nevill
‘I am sorry, Mrs Roth,’ the woman said.
‘How many times must you be told. And cake. Bring in the cakes. I want the yellow one and the pink one.’
Mrs Roth glared at Imee until she’d left the room, then said, ‘Look over here. Here, dear. These are my daughter’s grandchildren. They are so beautiful. I took Clara to Claridge’s for lunch yesterday. And when the head waiter asked her what she wanted she said, ‘Fish and chips.’ What a darling she is. You’ve never seen such a beautiful child. Look. Here. I said look here.’ Irritated because Apryl hadn’t moved quickly enough to satisfy her most recent and impulsive demand, she began pointing in the general direction of the cabinet on her right side.
When Imee returned with the tea and cakes on a small silver trolley, Apryl looked at the floor. Squirming in her seat and powerless to act, she listened to Mrs Roth humiliate the nurse, going so far as to call her a ‘bloody fool’ for not positioning the tea things in the manner she had been told to ‘a hundred times’. Imee responded by saying, ‘I am nurse, Mrs Roth, not waitress,’ before scurrying from the room on the brink of tears.
‘Cake, dear. Have a slice of cake, dear. I like the pink one. My daughter bought it for me.’
It was so cheap and dry, Apryl struggled to swallow a mouthful of it.
‘You look like Lilly,’ Mrs Roth said, dabbing crumbs from the side of her mouth with one swollen knuckle.
‘I do?’
She nodded. ‘When she was young. Very pretty woman. Such a shame she went mad.’
And then, quite suddenly, Mrs Roth asked Apryl to turn the television on so she could watch some quiz show, during which she was forbidden to speak. But by the first commercial break, Mrs Roth had fallen asleep while the television boomed within the room.
Watching the sleeping figure, who made infrequent whistling sounds through her nose, Apryl sat still for a few minutes. Then she called out, ‘Umm, Mrs Roth. Mrs Roth,’ three times, but to no effect. The woman could not be woken. Perhaps she was dead. But when Apryl became desperate for the toilet and stood up, Mrs Roth’s eyes opened. Milky orbs drifted around her eye sockets, then locked on to Apryl. ‘Where are you going? Sit down at once.’
‘I was going to use the bathroom.’
‘Oh.’
‘You were asleep.’
‘What?’
‘You fell asleep. Maybe this is the wrong time.’
‘What? Nonsense! I did no such thing. Don’t make things up.’
‘No. Well, I was mistaken then. I’ll just be a moment.’
The bell was hoisted aloft and Mrs Roth began furiously ringing it again. Apryl and Imee passed in the doorway and exchanged tired, nervous but ultimately knowing glances. A look familiar to those beleaguered by the petty and the powerful.
When she returned from the bathroom, she tried to formulate a tactful way of bringing the conversation back to Felix Hessen, but Mrs Roth pre-empted her. It seemed she was now ready to speak of him without a prompt. It was as if until now she had been testing her guest’s fitness for disclosure. Playing a game, unwilling to give her what she wanted until she’d tormented her first. And mercifully, the television was silenced.
‘So you want to know about Felix. That’s why you’re here. I’m not fooled by you, dear. But it’ll do you no good. You won’t understand. No one does.’
‘Try me. Please.’
‘He drove Lilly mad. You know that much, don’t you?’
Apryl nodded. ‘Yes. Yes, I do. But I want to know how.’
Mrs Roth looked at her hands in silence. When Apryl began to wonder if the woman would ever speak again, she said, ‘I don’t like to think of him. I never wanted to remember him.’ Her voice was tired. Every vestige of her brittle, difficult, impossible character was now absent from her words. But she was unable to meet Apryl’s eye as she spoke. ‘When he was finally gone we all hoped that was the end of it. But we were naive to have thought so. Men like that don’t follow the same rules as the rest of us. Lilly knew that. She’d have told you the same. No one would believe us. But we knew.’
Apryl leant forward in her seat.
‘When he first came here . . . I don’t remember when . . . but after the war, when Arthur and I came back from Scotland, he was here.’ She paused to paw at the bedclothes with her knotted fingers. ‘He was the most handsome man I had ever seen. We all thought so. But he never smiled. Not once. And he never spoke to a soul. We thought it odd. It had never been a building for recluses. Quite the opposite. It was nothing like it is now. This was once a wonderful place where your neighbours were your friends. We all entertained each other. Only decent people here, dear. Not like today. It’s full of rubbish now. People with no manners. You should hear the noise they make. We have no idea who is living next to us any more. People move in and out all the time. It’s intolerable.’
Mrs Roth began to sniff. From under the sleeve of her nightdress she removed a white tissue and began to dab at her eyes. A long heavy tear that appeared incongruous on her face rolled down her cheek and splattered against her wrist.
Instinctively, Apryl went to her and sat on the side of the bed. Mrs Roth immediately offered Apryl her free hand. It was crooked with arthritis and very cold. Apryl warmed the fingers between her palms. The simple act made Mrs Roth cry harder, in the same way a child’s grief intensifies within the safety of a parent’s arms.
‘One would often come across him in a stairwell. He never used the lift. He would be standing alone and looking at the pictures. He would take them from the wall and study them. But he would turn on you if you disturbed him. I hated it. No one liked to look into his eyes, dear. He was a lunatic. Quite mad. No one in their right mind had eyes like that. No one was comfortable with him here. Many of us were Jewish and knew he’d been one of those Hitler people. What are they called?’
‘Fascists.’
‘Don’t interrupt me, dear. Nothing upsets me more than a woman with no manners.’
‘Sorry.’
‘But that was how it was for years. I never once had a single conversation with him. Nothing. No one did. The porters didn’t like him either. They were frightened of him. We all were, dear. He lived in the flat underneath us. Down there.’ She pointed at the floor. ‘And he was always making such a noise at night. Moving things. Waking us up. This bumping. And shouting. You could hear him talking in a loud voice. As if he was in another room of our home. And right up against his ceiling we heard the other voices. Under our feet. But we never saw any visitors coming or going. No one knows how he got them up here. We asked the porters and they swore no one had called on the gentleman in number sixteen. But he had company. It wasn’t a radio. Radios never sounded like that, dear.
‘Sometimes it seemed like his flat was full of people. As if he was having a party, but not a very nice one. His other neighbours said the same thing. We all heard it in the west wing. And it got worse. Before his accident. The noises and voices. People were leaving because of them.
‘And then one night – I’ll never forget it – we heard such a dreadful commotion. Screaming. It was awful. This screaming from below us. Like someone was in agony, dear. Like they were being tortured. We were so shaken. We couldn’t move. Arthur and I just sat together in bed and listened. Until the screaming stopped.
‘And then Arthur went down there. He called your uncle Reggie, and Tom Shafer, and they went down with him. They were all in their dressing gowns. Reggie came because he had been trying to get Hessen evicted from here. The head porter was called too, and the police. And when they opened it up, they found him in the living room . . .’
Mrs Roth covered as much of her face as possible with the handkerchief and sobbed. When she spoke again her voice was broken. ‘I went down with Lilly to help. He’d had a terrible accident . . . His face was all gone . . . Down to the bone.
‘They took him away. We thought he would die. No one could have survived those injuries. And no one knew what had happened to him. He must . . . he mu
st have done it to himself.
‘But he came back. Months later. With his whole head in bandages. And there was a nurse, who he dismissed a few days later. Some of us even sent flowers and cards to the wretched man. We knew he was in there, but he wouldn’t come to the door. Like before, he just wanted to be left alone. So we left him alone. At least until it began again. And the next time it was worse than before.
‘He was evil. I told you that. And now I have them again. The nightmares. They killed Reginald and Arthur. It was the dreams, dear. No one would believe me now, but we knew then. He killed them both.’
Apryl couldn’t remain silent any longer. ‘How, Mrs Roth? I thought he was just a painter.’
‘No. No. No,’ she shook her head, the rims of her eyes now inflamed. ‘I told you. He was all wrong. Evil. I never knew anyone could be so bad, dear. He should never have come here. I don’t remember why he did. But he ruined the building. Killed it.’
‘How, Mrs Roth? My great-aunt wrote the same things. What did he do?’
‘The shadows have come back to the stairs. We could never get rid of them then, and they’re back here now. They changed the lights but it never made any difference. People stopped coming here. People left. But some of us refused to let him ruin our home. It was such a wonderful place until he came here.’
‘Did you see . . . his paintings?’
Mrs Roth nodded. ‘Horrible things. You’ve no idea. He didn’t know what beauty was. He made us all dream of them. We thought the Colonel was going gaga. He used to live here, the Colonel. And Mrs Melbourne. They saw them first. At night, dear.
‘People took pills and went to doctors. Real doctors. Not like you have now, dear. They don’t know anything now. They’re bloody fools. But even our doctors could do nothing for anyone who had the dreams. Reginald had them next. And Lilly. Then me. I was only young.’ She began to weep again and to squeeze at Apryl’s hands.
‘What were they? I don’t understand. What were the dreams?’
‘I can’t say. I don’t know how to. But he made us see things. You think I’m mad, don’t you?’
‘No, I don’t.’
‘Yes you do. You think I’m a silly old woman. I’m not.’
‘No. No.’ Apryl rubbed Mrs Roth’s back, to which she responded with a surge of sobs.
She began to sniff and talk at the same time, in a tearful voice. ‘The voices came out of that flat and onto the stairs and into our rooms. Arthur and I used to sit together and hear them. There was never anyone there, but we could always hear them around us. Anywhere near his flat, you could hear the things he brought with him. They came out of there.’ Again, she pointed a twisted hand at the floor.
‘Oh, it was terrible.’ Mrs Roth began to speak in bursts between her sobs. Apryl moved her head closer as it was becoming difficult to make out exactly what she was saying. ‘And Mrs Melbourne jumped from the roof. I saw her down there in the garden. She hit the wall. She wasn’t the last to do it either.’ The last sentence she spoke softly and with a genuine remorse that shook her words, but she wouldn’t or couldn’t look at Apryl as she spoke.
‘Oh, Mrs Roth. I’m so sorry. They were your friends. It must have been terrible.’
‘You have no idea. It was his fault. He did it.’
‘With his paintings?’
Mrs Roth drew a deep breath and swallowed a sob. She nodded, once. ‘They confronted him. Reginald and Tom and Arthur. They went to see him, dear. They were so angry, you can’t imagine. We were all going mad with it. So the men went to his flat because he wouldn’t receive our telephone calls and wouldn’t answer letters from the management. The men took keys from the head porter and let themselves inside.
‘And . . . and he looked terrible. They said his head was all wrapped up in something. Over his face he wore this mask. It was red. Cloth. And through it they could see the terrible shape of his face, dear. It was so tight on his face. No one knew what to say. But Reginald tried to be calm. Asked him what it was he thought he was doing to our home.
‘He laughed at them. He just laughed. They were very reasonable. They were all good men. But he just laughed. His face in this . . . this red thing. They could only see his eyes.
‘And then the men saw them again. On the walls. What he’d been doing in there for so long. They were worse than before. All the terrible things from our dreams. The paintings . . .’
‘What were they like? Please tell me. Please.’
‘And then Reginald lost his temper. They . . .’
‘They?’
Mrs Roth sat up in her bed and released Apryl’s hand. The sobbing and sniffing stopped abruptly, and her face froze back into a grim facade. ‘I’m tired.’
‘But . . . I mean, you were telling me . . . about the paintings?’
‘I don’t want to talk about it. It’s not important.’
‘But you were so upset. I want to understand.’
‘It’s none of your business. I want Imee. Imee. Where’s my bell? It’s time for me to eat. You shouldn’t visit at mealtimes. It’s rude.’ The bell was ringing next to Apryl’s ear, the action deliberate, she felt.
She moved back to the chair to collect her things. Then turned to speak as Imee came through the door – but Apryl found herself too bewildered by Mrs Roth’s story to move her lips. And it was clear the woman was terrified and had told her far more than she ever intended to.
Apryl moved quickly from the bedside, only looking behind once she reached the safety of the doorway to see Imee beside the bed, bent by the force of the shrieked reprimands issuing from amongst the pillows. A cushion over that old face would not be unreasonable. Apryl felt shocked at the presence of such a thought that did not feel like one of her own.
She would let herself out. What kind of woman lets herself out, dear? Relief to be away from the dreadful woman pushed her down the aged hallway, and excitement at the revelations she would recount to Miles made her nimbler in her high-heeled boots. Until she opened the front door and passed through onto the landing.
With a breath-stealing suddenness, there was a quick flurry of whitish motion on her left side. Cringing, she sucked in air so fast she issued a tiny shriek. Then looked past the gloved hand she had raised to fend the thing off. In her peripheral vision she’d seen a flapping shape speeding towards her, with a smear of red above what could only have been bony shoulders.
And as she peered through her gloved fingers at the large polished mirror on the wall opposite the elevator, there was a brief billow of something white within the gilt frame. Which made her turn about swiftly to see the origin of the reflection on her right side.
Terrified she had flinched at a reflection and not the actual assailant, she staggered back two steps and braced herself for the impact.
But there was no one on the landing with her. She scoured the stairwells and elevator door for what had come rushing at her, but nothing moved, with the exception of the rapid ascent and descent of her own chest that struggled to take a breath.
TWENTY-FOUR
‘What are you doing?’
The sharp voice pierced him from behind. Seth didn’t even need to turn to identify who had caught him unlocking the door of apartment sixteen. It was a voice he’d heard on the house phone most nights for the last six months. But when he did turn to face Mrs Roth and saw her dressed in a pale blue housecoat and red slippers, the childlike vulnerability had gone, along with the frailty and confusion she exhibited last time they met, outside this very door. Now her hair was perfect; the bulb of thin silver covering the mottled skull hadn’t even touched the pillow. She’d sat up all night waiting for the sounds to begin.
Panicked at being caught trespassing – he could be sacked for entering this flat, and would be blamed for the noises coming out of it – Seth tried to speak. But failed, muted by his own fear. Mrs Roth would be sure to tell Stephen first thing at daybreak, if not before. She wasn’t just angry; she was furious at the sight of him before that door with keys
in hand. Her face was red, her bottom lip trembling with emotion, the small eyes sharpened by rage. She raised her arm, the elbow bent, the quilted sleeve of her housecoat slipping down an emaciated forearm, stained with blue veins and continents of liverish discolorations.
‘I asked you a question. What are you doing?’ Her voice rose as she spoke until she was shouting. It could carry. He wanted to shut her up, but was powerless to act, to placate her. She was too clever. Too aware of the weakness of others, of his lowly status, and of her instant advantage as a resident. Too eager to expose and torment.
Seth swallowed. ‘I heard something. I thought someone had broken in.’
‘Liar. You are a liar. It’s you. You! You make the noises in there. I knew it! You do it to frighten me because you know I am upstairs. You are a terrible man to frighten an old woman. I want Stephen now. Call Stephen. Now!’
He felt sick. Couldn’t dislodge that huge lump of fear clogged behind his breastbone. It was like being a kid again. She always flustered him.
Bitch.
The very sight of her filled him with a rage of such intensity he imagined smashing her dried-up stick body against a wall. That idiotically big head, the threadbare hair, the pointy, vicious face above that child-puppet body of old sticks and loose flesh: why couldn’t she die? Her own family despised her. She couldn’t keep a nurse for more than a month. Reduced them to tears every day. No one could work for her. Or stand her. She had even driven the taciturn Stephen grey with her impossible demands.
Seth felt himself go white with loathing from head to toe. An antipathy that frightened him; the kind that would astonish him once it passed. Something he regularly experienced now, but never grew accustomed to; he’d never before been able to hate with such intensity, or to create from it with such integrity. And didn’t she understand that he had no choice – that something far greater than him was calling him up here to study its genius?
