Some Will Not Sleep: Selected Horrors

by Adam Nevill

  ‘With the majority of the oil lamps arranged about the room, and a fire roaring in the grate, I tried my best to relieve the oppressive gloom of the place. I’ll admit it, the place and its atmosphere unsettled me greatly; every window nailed shut and reinforced with oddments of wood, horseshoes hammered on the outside of every interior door, the wind crashing about in the trees outside, or buffeting the walls and whining under the room beams. And as night fell, the entire structure of the house was beset with all manner of groans, creaks, bangs and sly draughts. How Atterton could have even contemplated a year alone, out here, was beyond me. In itself, such a decision suggested the onset of mental illness, and it seemed his sanctuary had quickly become a prison – a theory confirmed by what I found amongst his papers.

  ‘Besides his jottings detailing his chores and repairs and intentions to begin a vegetable patch, I discovered some heavily scored maps; they indicated the paths he’d trekked, waters he’d fished, the circle of stones on the high ground to the east of the property, and a loose folio of charcoal sketches. Amongst his drawings, there were depictions of the house from various angles, trout he’d caught and the church I had seen; all of which I took to be his earlier work, before his obsession with the stones took precedence. You see, there were scores of rubbings from the runestones on the hill, and dozens of sketches of the circle from within and without its rough boundary. And as I flicked through the papers, I noticed how he’d begun to incorporate text with the pictures. One page in particular caught my eye. It was titled ‘From The Long Stone’ and featured a rubbing from a weathered granite dolmen. Below, he’d added definition and detail to the etching’s crude suggestiveness with a set of cutaways and expansion sketches. It was these convincing embellishments to which I took an instant aversion. So what am I to make of this? he’d written at the foot of the page.

  ‘What indeed? If Atterton’s sketch was to be believed, upon the stone was carved a silhouette of something both too tall and too thin to have been a man. A creature with long simian arms and clawed feet and hands, that appeared to stride across the face of the stone, while pulling behind itself a smaller figure, by the hair. The second character in the piece must have been a child, and it was being taken to what seemed to be a depository of bones chiselled on the far side of the stone; that is, if the pile of sticks were skulls, ribs and femurs and so forth.

  ‘My eyes didn’t dally upon the sketch, I can assure you, and I began to take a keener interest in the violence of the wind about the little house. The timbers were being harangued by these swooping blasts, from every direction, and I was at once reminded of how the noise of a strong wind in old timbers can produce the sounds of occupancy in empty rooms, particularly those above one’s head. I had another suspicion that the elements were building to something, or heralding an arrival. I could have sworn there was some kind of anticipation in that wind.

  ‘After perusing Atterton’s final sketch, I confess to getting out of my chair in order to move it away from the window behind my head.

  ‘You see, the last picture contained a rough impression, made by an unsteady hand, of the tracks Atterton claimed to have discovered outside the gate, at the rear of the garden and under the parlour windows. They were certainly the prints of a biped, not dissimilar to the human foot in shape, apart from the size and the length of the clawed toes, including a sixth on the heel; this was akin to that of the cat, used for disembowelling its prey. As a footnote, Atterton had added the date of composition too: four days prior to my arrival. He’d embellished that drawing with a comment: No longer deterred by horseshoes or fire, it meant to get in.

  ‘I tried to persuade myself that this was more concocted evidence produced by a deeply disturbed mind; one driven to extremes of fancy and conjecture, delusion and suspicion, by the windy rigours of this climate and the haunting aspects of the landscape.

  ‘I put down the sketches and took a firmer grip of the fire poker, longing for a more fitting distraction from the dark and the relentless wind than Atterton’s illustrations. I had a go at Great Expectations, but my concentration was repeatedly fractured by sudden squalls against the walls of the parlour that made the foundations shudder and the lamps flicker. But some time after midnight, I mercifully succumbed to a fatigue peculiar to travel, fresh air and new surroundings, and I nodded off in my chair. Neither the angry roar of the gale nor the thumpings about the roof could stay my eyelids any longer.

  ‘But a heavy crash, filled with the splintering of wood, brought me around soon enough and straight to my feet.

  ‘About me in the parlour, the fire was no more than red embers and two of the lamps had gone out.

  ‘The terrific noise had originated from the front of the house, and the most vulnerable spot, or so my senses cried out. Even with two metal latches in place, I had broken the main lock earlier, and it was the only access point not secured by six-inch nails and timber. I surmised that Atterton must have left that exit clear to make his final escape. Unable to spend another night trapped like a rabbit in a burrow, he must have made a dash for it, during his last morning.

  ‘With the lamp and the small axe, used for breaking up the kindling, I stumbled through the parlour, into the dark kitchen and towards the little reception room that housed the front door. And the thought came to me then: it could be Atterton trying to get inside. Who knows what hours he kept out there? He could have been half-lunatic by then. But when I saw the state of the door, I soon shook off the last swaddling of sleep. At once, I abandoned my theory about Atterton breaking in. And besides that, I never had the breath to call out his name.

  ‘Both hinges and latches had been ripped from the wall and now hung from a flattened door. It had been smashed inwards from the outside by considerable force. Did a man have such strength? Even a madman?

  ‘The freezing night air hit me with a whump that failed to dispel what I would call an intensification of the stench that I had smelled seeping from the trees around the garden earlier: the damp of an unlit forest floor tinged with a bestial pungency; the raw miasma that strikes one near the stained concrete of the zoo cage. And it filled the house.

  ‘I found it impossible to even step onto the porch and investigate. I dithered in the hall and suddenly comprehended Atterton’s belief in the necessity of barricades: someone, or something, was terrorising the property under the cover of moonless nights. An assailant of significant size and power.

  ‘I held the lamp up and tried to shed some light on the doorway and whatever lay beyond. Screwing up my eyes, all I could make out was the end of the porch and a murky impression of the grass below the steps.

  ‘The lamp flickered and was nearly doused by another gust of wind that whipped across the paddock from the treeline. “Who’s there?” I called out, and in a voice that broke like an adolescent’s.

  ‘I put the lamp on the floor beside my feet and went to raise the door when I heard the sound of a footfall. Behind me. In the kitchen. The dark kitchen that I had just come through, wide-eyed but drowsy.

  ‘Then another floorboard creaked. Followed by the sound of a snort; the kind a bullock might make.

  ‘Whatever had smashed down the door was inside the house with me. I stopped breathing and felt disoriented by an acute terror that I cannot begin to articulate. I whimpered like a child and I cringed as if anticipating a blow from behind. One more sound from the darkness and I was sure that my heart would stop beating. I could not bear to turn my head and see what now stood behind me.

  ‘Then I heard it again. The squeak of a floorboard beneath another step taken, closer. And there was something at the end of the sound, a scratching, that inserted the picture from Atterton’s sketches into my mind: a long foot, tipped with claws, but now moving across a wooden floor toward me.

  ‘I sprang about-face and knocked the lamp onto its side with a clatter that made me suck in my breath, and cry out, “Oh, God!” At that moment, I saw the intruder, bent over and tensing long limbs inside the kitchen.
<
br />   ‘I say I saw something. I mostly saw a silhouette for a moment before the lamp spluttered out. But in that crouching figure I am sure I detected a wet snout, yellow canines and blood-spoiled eyes in a black face. The head was close to the ceiling, against which it was stooped over, unable to stand upright, even with its spindly legs bent at the knee.

  ‘I ran out of the building and into the darkness, and in the direction of the car. Which I hit with my knees at the very same moment as the door to Atterton’s house was slammed hard against the floorboards by a heavy weight landing upon it. That noise, I assumed, was of the door being trampled, or run over, and it signalled that the trespasser was now outside with me.

  ‘From force of habit I’d locked the car and activated the alarm, which I set off after striking the vehicle at full pelt. It was the shrieking of the alarm, I believe in hindsight, that saved my life. It must have momentarily stunned my pursuer, and given me enough time to get the keys from my jacket pocket and get the car unlocked and my body eventually into the driver’s seat. Had those valuable few seconds not been purchased, I am sure that I would never have left Radalen. And leaving the place, I am convinced, is something that Atterton never managed to achieve.

  ‘I stalled the car three times. Once because I had left it in gear. The second time because the engine was cold. And the third time because, when I turned the lights on, I caught sight of something in the rear-view mirror, all lit up in red, that made me take both feet off the pedals in shock.

  ‘When I managed to get the car moving, across the paddock and onto the narrow entry road, driving faster than caution advised, it kept pace with me. Sometimes behind, loping along the track, a few feet back from the bumper, and sometimes alongside me in the trees at the side of the road. At least I think it was my pursuer that rubbed and scratched up against the car like that. And as I slowed down to take the bends in the road, something outside the vehicle tried to hold the car still. It meant to have me that night, and I believe it tracked me for over ten kilometres.

  ‘I drove through the night and into the welcome dawn, straight onto Kiruna, where I raised the alarm about Atterton. That was before paying over two thousand pounds for the damage sustained to the car’s paintwork and, in some places, to the actual steel of the door panels.’

  It was a much paler and strained figure who finished the story for me in the library of our club. The epilogue Henry only managed to deliver after another glass of brandy:

  ‘They never found him. A removal company sent a van the Friday before my arrival, but found the property much the same as I found it: deserted and crudely boarded up. Atterton never set foot on the plane. He never left the valley.

  ‘Just as the first snow began to fall, the forestry commission and army searched the area and found no definite trace of him either, and could shed no light on his disappearance. They even used a helicopter to search the valley, but found nothing unusual except an abandoned bicycle, about three kilometres from the Fritidshus. Though the ownership of the bike was never established, I think it must have been his.

  ‘In Sweden, poor Atterton is still listed as a missing person.’

  Mother’s Milk

  E xiled like a degenerate king on a cardboard throne, Saul sleeps down here in the gloom, same time every day. All seven feet of his bulk rest. Thick limbs splay amongst the boxes and acres of bubble-wrap. His big head is thrown back and making strangled sounds. There is a moon of a face above a neck tiered with fat, luminous from afar in the dusk of the warehouse.

  Left among empty factories on the edge of the city, just the two of us work here in this metal labyrinth, where aisles of skeletal shelves the colour of battleships go on for ever. Above us the buzzing fluorescent suns on the corrugated ceiling bleach our skin. Together, we are neglected by the managers in a distant office block and avoided by the drivers who come for our packages: square mountains of boxes that we pack, seal, stack and then stuff into the lorry that is parked inside the giant roller doors at the end of the day.

  As I watch Saul sleep until the afternoon period, when our shuffling under the weight of boxes begins again, I fancy I could run away. But he makes sounds like gas escaping whenever I stray far. Through those sticky lids, I think he can see me.

  Saul, I whisper. Saul, Saul, it’s time. My voice is quiet and I keep my distance from the alabaster mass as I try to rouse it. Rising without a sound from sleep or out of the shadowy aisles, he still frightens me.

  Before me, an eye opens: a blank, grey shark eye. Soon joined by the other eye to move inside the doughy curves of his eye sockets. There is a sound from dewy lips as if a billiard ball is passed from one cheek to another. Then Saul speaks. Oversized tongue speech that I have learned to understand. Milk. He wants milk. And then we work some more before the pickup.

  After lifting the metal flask from the little white table, I cradle the sloshing torpedo in my arms and deliver it to his moist paws. Big hands gently take it with a touch like cold cheese. Turning my face away I hear guzzling sounds but do not watch the feeding. It reminds me of her, the mother. Saul’s mother. My mother, she likes to think.

  Signalled by a grunt, I collect the flask when he’s finished. Watching my own hands tremble on the lid, screwed tightly down, my stomach flops over as I carry the flask back to the little white table. Hunger starts in me with a growl and I can feel Saul smiling behind me. In the past I would only take the milk in tea, but now there’s no resisting such delicious cream. At night I dream of milk.

  With the work done we go again to the place Saul calls home: a house on the top of a hill, protected by a fence and hidden by the trees and the dark. We are the last people to leave the bus and dismount by the big oaks at the bottom of the hill. Then the bus turns around, almost by itself because the driver never stops staring at us.

  Old iron bars, with spikes on top, run around the base of the hill, but Saul has a key for the heavy gate I can’t move. He opens the gate and we pass through. It slams shut behind us.

  Walking in silence, we go through the black gaps between tree trunks. Pine needle and weedy smells rise thickly from the ground. Above, the leafy canopy shuts out the light. Darkness presses against us and I feel peculiar as the odours of the forest pad my brain with a thick creamy drowsiness, flowing through me and over me and getting behind my eyes too. But with nowhere else to go, I follow Saul’s shambling up the path and into the restless woods where I imagine children running away from the dewy-faced thing in front of me; flitting like little ghosts like they did when I escaped and ran blind into the shopping centre full of Christmas lights. What a commotion I caused. Seeing my reflection in a shop window made me weep like a baby; a big, fat, white baby. That was a long time ago and I haven’t run away since.

  Carrying the can of milk, which is now empty and must be brought home every day, I whip my head from side to side. Birds the size of dogs are flapping out there. They crash about in the undergrowth and their wings make wet leather sounds. I can’t see them but Saul told me they’re what’s left of unfarmed game. Can’t picture pheasants. My mind tries to see greeny-blue birds pecking the ground nearby but my heart still gallops inside my mouth when I hear them. Same every night and there have been many journeys up through the trees.

  As we climb Saul makes a smell amongst the huge oaks and conifers. Something bubbles from his flabby body and smells of sulphur. I make the same smell now. It comes from the milk; gallons of frothing sweetness that we slurp down.

  After passing through acres of woody darkness we come to the houses that have been owned by Saul’s family for longer than they can remember. Looking up from the bottom of the hill, you can’t see the houses because they are smothered by the trees where the forest suddenly thickens around the two white buildings. Upper boughs and branches then curl over the pointy, red-tiled roofs to blot out the stars. And only when you’re in the centre of the garden can you see the sky through a small hole, up in the top of the trees, like you’re at the bottom of a huge bowl with
curved sides and a rim.

  After returning from my first escape, I spent ages trying to find the garden gate on my hands and knees, so frightened by the loud flapping in the woods around me. And in the end only my stomach was able to lead me back to the gate and the houses where the milk is kept.

  When we pass through the hidden gate and go through the corral of trees the first thing we see is a pale lawn. Milky green grass grows here. It’s short and soft, on dirt that is black if you dig down with a finger. The lawn is perfectly flat and smells sweet too. It’s amazing, in all these trees is this circle of grass like the top of the hill has been chopped off for the houses, and the dances that I dream of.

  This evening, soon as I’m in the garden the grass catches my eyes and holds my stare. It grows in my dreams. Sometimes in the middle of the night I imagine I’ve woken up face-down, and that I’m pushing my nose and mouth into the lawn’s soft pelt, sucking the sugary blades. Shining under the strongest moons, the lawn often looks like a big pond too. I like to watch it from my window to bring the dreams back. The good dreams; not the bad ones when things move across the bright surface.

  Silence and darkness inside the houses now. No lights on behind the windows in the square white walls that remind me of the sheds that farm animals live inside. There are no flowers or shrubs around the great solid building. It is divided into two houses by a thin inner wall. Each back door faces the milky pasture and leads into a kitchen. Like lonely sentinels the houses watch the sky and are lost to the world below.

  In the kitchen of our house, we light the lamps full of pink oil and wait. But never for very long. Over they come, rushing through the back door: the mother and the brother, Ethan. In the days before I drank the milk, I used to wonder what they were doing next door with the lights out. Soon as I started to drink, I stopped thinking about it.