by Adam Nevill
Without looking at her, as if he was too ashamed to meet her eye, Tom Shafer opened his front door and then hobbled away into the darkened hallway. He paused after a few unsteady steps and turned his head to the side. ‘You coming in or what?’
Dabbing at her nose, Apryl walked behind him. But now she was inside she wasn’t even sure she wanted to hear what he had to say.
‘Keep your voice down,’ he whispered. ‘If you disturb my wife you’ll have to leave.’
She nodded, but wondered whether he’d said this out of protectiveness for his wife or out of fear of her.
She followed him between the bare and stained walls of the hallway and into a large living room. It appeared the couple only used the one little corner of this space, the part with the television and the two worn armchairs huddled together about a little table on wheels, covered with small Evian bottles, tissues, sweets, a half-eaten bunch of purple grapes and scattered packets of medication. The rest of the room was empty save for an ancient sideboard and a dinner table piled high with cardboard boxes, faded towels and wrinkled bed linen. It was another poorly lit and miserable little pocket of Barrington House. With all their money they lived like bums in one corner of a penthouse. The carpeted floor was covered with crumbs and bits of paper. There were no pictures on the walls. No mirrors. Only the outlines of frames that once hung there, the paper bleached around the dark rectangles and squares.
The Financial Times was spread over one of the two chairs. ‘Take a seat. I can’t offer you a drink. It’d take me an hour to get to the kitchen and back. And we don’t have that much time.’
‘Please, don’t apologize. I’m sorry to disturb you. I really am. I know I came here uninvited. I don’t want anything but a few words. An explanation. It’s just—’ She swallowed the tightness in her throat. ‘—I’ve found out so many things since I’ve been here. Things I now wish I didn’t know. But I can’t go home without knowing the rest of my great-aunt Lillian’s story.’
After falling into the chair and panting to get his breath back, Tom Shafer peered up at her. His aged face was calm now, his stare unfaltering, resigned, with no time for social discomfort despite the squalor of his surroundings. ‘You really do look like Lilly,’ he said, and finally smiled. ‘She was a very beautiful lady.’
Apryl’s face suddenly suffused with warmth at what he’d just said. Not because he thought her attractive, but because he’d confirmed the connection between her and Lillian. ‘Thank you. She really was, wasn’t she? I’ve seen the pictures of her and Reginald.’
Tom Shafer kept on smiling. ‘Sometimes it hurt just to look at them. They were something else.’ He looked away, at nothing in particular. Just out there into the scruffy room he occupied every day. ‘But things change. Enjoy what you have when it’s there. Don’t go looking for trouble.’ It sounded like a warning. He looked back at her. ‘I hear you’re going to sell that place of Lilly’s. Well I’m going to ask you to do it, right away, and to get out. Don’t waste any more of your life here than you have to.’
‘What makes you say that?’
‘I thought you knew.’
She avoided his eyes and looked instead at her hands clasped in her lap. ‘I know some things. But not everything. I can’t put all the pieces together.’
‘And you think I can?’
‘But you were there. Back then.’
He shook his head. ‘But who can say what happened? I’m not sure I can. Betty sure couldn’t. Nor Lilly. And the others aren’t with us any more. It was not something in the normal course of a person’s experience. Not something we were prepared for, or could deal with. It should never have happened. We just got caught up in it because we were too proud and too damn stupid to get out when we had a chance.’
‘But caught up in what?’
He let out a long sigh. ‘I don’t suppose it makes a goddamn bit of difference who knows now. I can’t believe Betty told you anything. I really can’t. But who would believe a damn one of us old fools? And I have no idea what the hell Lilly was writing. She wasn’t herself. Not for a long time. It all beats the hell out of me, but something happened for sure. By God, we’ve paid our dues for it. We all have.’
Apryl looked down at her lap again, feeling herself fill up with a familiar frustration and despair. ‘But you can tell me how Reginald died. Lillian couldn’t bear to write it down.’
Tom Shafer looked up at her. ‘You ever heard the expression that two people can love each other too much? Well that was Lilly and Reggie. We never thought she’d survive Reggie’s passing, and I guess we were right in some ways about that.’
‘But how did he die?’
His stare hardened. ‘He killed himself. Jumped from the living-room window of their apartment.’ He spoke without a pause, blink or stutter.
‘Where the roses were,’ Apryl said. ‘Where she put the roses. It was a memorial.’ She looked deep into Tom Shafer’s eyes. ‘Because of Hessen. Because of the way he tormented them and drove them crazy. But how did he do it?’
Tom Shafer shook his head. ‘I don’t know.’
‘You must. My great-uncle was a war hero who flew missions over Europe. I have his medals. He survived and came back here to the love of his life. And then killed himself over a dispute with a neighbour? And in the process broke his wife’s heart so badly she went crazy from it. I can’t accept that no one knows the reason why he would do that. You were close to him once.’
Tom Shafer shook his head. ‘Now you are getting ready to understand why we don’t speak of it and never have done. Beside your aunt, who never let it go. Maybe she had more cause than the rest of us. But how can I explain it? You can’t understand unless you were there. Reggie wasn’t the only person to take his life. Mrs Melbourne did too. She was the first. Went right off the roof and hit the damn fence. They had to cut her from the railings. And then there was Arthur. Betty’s husband.’
‘No.’
He nodded. ‘Oh they covered it up with some damn bullshit about heart failure, but he took an overdose.’
‘But why did none of you leave? Why can’t you leave? Lillian died trying. I don’t get it.’
Tom Shafer’s voice rose in anger. ‘Don’t you think we damn well tried? But we can’t! And that’s all there is to it. Can’t go further than a damn block in any direction and we don’t know why.’
‘The paintings. The Hessen paintings. It’s about the paintings. My great-aunt said it was all connected.’
Tom Shafer’s little body seemed to shrink further into the large chair. Now he looked like he was just bone and skin inside a plaid shirt and sweatpants. His gnarled hands trembled on the armrests. He closed his eyes and soon his entire body was shivering. Apryl felt an urge to go to him, like she had done with Betty Roth, and to hold him. To go to this tired and broken-down old man and to comfort him as no one had comforted Lillian. ‘I don’t want to remember them if I can help it,’ he murmured.
‘Lillian dreamed of whatever was inside those paintings. Then she started to see it. Around her.’
‘We all did. Somehow it never stayed inside those damn paintings.’
‘It’s why Reginald took his own life. And the others.’
Tom Shafer nodded. ‘Maybe they were the lucky ones who had the guts to get out of this. But we suffered too you know. We never had any children because of it. She miscarried every time.’
‘I’m sorry.’
A silence thickened around them in that dusty little corner of nowhere. Tom Shafer broke it and spoke as if to himself. ‘My wife still thinks she can protect us in here. She doesn’t know any better. I can’t afford for her to be upset. Not in here. So you’ll have to go soon.’
‘You burned them.’
Tom Shafer never said a word or even nodded.
‘And killed Hessen. Together. I know you did. You and Arthur Roth and Reggie. I don’t want to make trouble with this. I just need to know why Lillian couldn’t come home to us. It’s what she wanted. She said
so in her journals. But something was done here that drove her husband to kill himself. The same thing that kept her here until she died. I want to know how Felix Hessen could make all this happen after his death. Can you tell me?’
Tom Shafer shook his head in despair. ‘You have no idea what he was. I don’t know what Betty told you, but he brought things here. We didn’t know what. Or how he did it. I still don’t. None of us ever did. Lilly had some crazy ideas, but we weren’t buying it. But whatever it was, it was more than us. All of us together or individually. We soon found that out. And it was the end of Reggie and some other good people too. Including your aunt and now Betty. I’m pretty damn sure. That woman had a strong heart. I don’t believe it failed. Me and my wife are all that’s left.’ He stopped talking and swallowed. Perspiration had begun to make his forehead shiny and he began to look grey in the thin light as if he was seriously ill.
‘Are you OK, sir?’ She reached for his arm.
‘Don’t believe a damn thing they’re saying downstairs’ he said, his voice a whisper. ‘Something’s not right down there. Just get yourself out of here, girl. Like we should have done.’
Tom Shafer then shook his head and sighed as if reluctantly accepting bad news. It was the weariest sound she’d ever heard come out of a person’s mouth. ‘The whole damn building used to shake. It came out of his apartment. About a year after he moved in here. Make no mistake, he was a crazy bastard before all this started. Never left the building. Not once, I’m sure of it. You’d bump in to him on a staircase, or down where the staff used to live, making his weird signs in the air like he was drawing. Messing around with the pictures on the walls. Talking to himself, and not in English or any goddamn language I ever heard. The porters used to catch him all the time. They kept an eye on him. They never liked him.
‘And at night he was doing things in his apartment that could dim the lights on the other side of the building. Used to fill the air in Betty’s apartment with something you couldn’t see, but could tell was there all the same. And if you listened real hard you could hear voices. Not like you and I are speaking, but a hundred voices. All going round and round down there with him.
‘We all heard it for the first time in Betty’s place. We were having dinner and we heard it coming up out of the apartment below. In Hessen’s place. And once you heard it you never stopped hearing it.
‘Whatever he had in that damn place came out. It came out of there and got into everything else. Came through the building. Got behind the walls and inside mirrors and pictures. You saw things in them that weren’t there before. Even if you were the only damn human being in a room you suddenly knew you weren’t alone when you looked into a mirror. Sometimes it was one of them things, sometimes more than one. But you saw them. Moving. And then they came into our dreams. They got inside our sleep.
‘I don’t know how he did it. I made a hundred million on Wall Street. I’m good with what I can see and explain. But not with this. We had no defence against it. Neither did he.’
‘What makes you say that?’
‘He lost his own goddamn face down there. He lost his whole face and his whole goddamn mind in whatever he had moving around down there. Something he couldn’t control once he got it started.’
Apryl swallowed. ‘What happened to his face?’
Tom Shafer kept his eyes lowered. He thought for a while and then swallowed. ‘Arthur called Reggie and Reggie called me. Betty and Arthur had heard screams. Hessen screaming. So we went down with the head porter and let ourselves in. And found him in the living room. All on his own with all the rugs pulled back to the wall. But you could see how messed up his face was. Like frostbite, Reggie said. Black and burnt-looking, with the flesh gone down to the bone and eyes. But there was no fire. No chemicals. No blood. And he sure as shit hadn’t been to the North Pole, though we may have wished it on him. We had no idea what caused those injuries.
‘An ambulance took him away. And we thought that was the end of it. But he survived and when he came back, he just started it up all over again. All them noises, circling. Like a whirlpool. All down in his place.’ Tom Shafer broke his train of thought and looked at her. ‘How did Betty die?’
‘In her sleep, Stephen said.’
He shook his head. ‘That’s a damn lie.’
‘Betty said he’s come back. Do you think he could really come back?’ Apryl prompted him, terrified he’d stop talking, like Betty Roth had done.
‘Back? He never damn left. He’s kept us here and he’s been waiting for something to start it all over again. He’s still here for us. Which makes me as crazy as Lilly for just saying such a thing. He’s been biding his time. Until now, he couldn’t do much else beside scare the shit out of us if we went near a picture or mirror. Or make us sick as a dog if we tried to leave the neighbourhood. But things have changed again. Now it’s different. Like he’s got some help.’
Apryl struggled to control her voice. ‘And Reginald . . . You all killed Hessen.’
Tom Shafer shook his head. His voice was barely audible. ‘It wasn’t a case of killing a man. Reggie just put him in there with it. We did nothing to stop it. And that crazy bastard never came back out again.’
‘Put him in with what?’
‘I don’t know. None of us did. But it sounded the same as whatever was in them paintings on his walls, or filling that room that must have been the size of a football field.’
‘I don’t understand . . .’
Tom Shafer swallowed, noisily. ‘Second time we went down there, we took the keys from the head porter’s safe ourselves. Reggie took a pistol too. We let ourselves in and Hessen was waiting for us in the hall. So damn thin he looked like he could barely stand on his own two feet. Just wearing his dressing gown with this mask over his face. Made from something red that went over his head like a hood and tucked into his collar. But you could still see through it. See that fool’s messed-up face.
‘Reggie demanded to know what he was doing. What he had in that room, making all that noise. The living room. And Hessen just laughed at us. Like we were nothing. Like we were pointless. That’s how he made you feel.
‘And Reggie lost his temper. Got him by the collar and mixed it up with him. Knocked him down over a chair that busted right from under him. We tried to hold your uncle back while all the time trying not to look into those pictures on the walls. But your uncle was a strong man and he just shrugged us off and dragged Hessen by an arm across the hall floor. Right up to that room he dragged him, and opened the door.’
Tom Shafer stopped talking and began shaking. He reached for a bottle of water, which Apryl quickly uncapped for him.
‘Well, Hessen really started struggling then. And carrying on like he did the time he lost his face. Screaming like a lunatic. But Reggie tossed him into that dark space. With all the cold coming out of it. And those noises. All them voices speaking at once and crying out for help. A room where you couldn’t see much beside the bit of the damn floor with all them markings on it. Voodoo shit or something, right behind the door. But it was a place you knew went on forever. And Reggie threw Hessen in there. Like he was a doll. Just picked him up and threw him through the damn door.
‘And we all held that door shut on him.
‘We heard him carrying on for a while. Screaming and banging and begging for us to open the door. And then just bumping against it, like he had no strength left. Until he stopped that too. Until it all stopped.
‘It was like he faded away, with all them other voices in the wind and cold. Don’t ask me what it was. None of us had a goddamn clue. But we all felt about twenty years older the day after.’
Apryl gulped. Her voice was only a whisper when she spoke. ‘Hessen was dead?’
Tom Shafer shrugged. ‘When we opened the door, the room was empty. Not a soul in there. Just them four mirrors and the candles that were still burning in the middle of all the marks on the floor. I swear to God almighty that’s what we all saw. But he wasn’t
there. He’d vanished. Hadn’t gone out the window either. They were all locked, and anyway, no one would walk away from a fall from the eighth floor.’
‘The paintings . . . You . . .’
‘Every damn one of them. Took them down from the walls in the hallway and in all the bedrooms. Burned them to ash. Bust them out of the frames and burnt that crap he’d done and all the strange markings under them. Put them all in the furnace they used to have here to burn coal.’
From the hallway outside the lounge door, a shrill voice suddenly destroyed their whispered sharing. ‘Is there someone in here? I can hear ya’ll talking through that damn wall! It’s driving me crazy.’ The voice was breaking down into tears and hysteria.
Tom Shafer suddenly broke out of the miserable trance he’d fallen into while recounting the story. His face was now stricken with panic. The door handle turned. He struggled to his feet. Apryl stood up quickly too and turned to face the doorway, her own discomfort turning to fear. In this place it was contagious. The door opened.
A huge bulk of a body filled the gap between the lounge and the hallway outside. The moon of Mrs Shafer’s face was terribly old, but the skin had a curious sheen to it, as if she were wearing a thin plastic membrane over her features. It must have been some kind of face cream. Coils of black hair were piled under a blue headscarf that was sloppily pinned in place. It was squashed flat on one side where she must have been lying against a pillow. The small black eyes were ferocious.
Mrs Shafer clasped each side of the doorway as if to support herself from the shock of seeing this stranger in her home. Immediately her lips began to tremble, whether from rage or grief it was hard to say. ‘What is going on in here?’
Tom Shafer raised two thin arms that wavered out in front of his little doll body. ‘Now don’t go getting all upset.’
‘I . . . I . . . I . . .’ She stared at her husband in astonishment, as if the greatest betrayal of their entire time together had suddenly been revealed. ‘She’s got to go! I’m telling you. I want her out of here! I don’t believe my eyes! I mean, what were you thinking? God damn you for bringing trash into my home!’
