by Adam Nevill
‘Now, darling! Now, now, sugar plum! Shush, shush, darling!’ Helma shouted at Mrs Van den Bergh to calm the outbursts.
My eyes then moved to the enormous oil painting hanging between the balcony doors and the dining table. It was a full-length portrait of Mrs Van den Bergh in her prime. An intolerably beautiful, regal face stared down, unimpressed with the detritus and disgrace inflicted upon her final years. Ice-blonde hair was pulled back beneath a diamond tiara; the forehead was porcelain-smooth; the nose perfect beneath the thin arches of haughty brows; full red lips smiled, faintly; white satin gloves shone to the elbows; a glittering necklace pulled my stare to the princess’s neck; below the jewellery, a long white dress hugged her embraceable lines and curves. But it was the astonishing arctic eyes that really enchanted and also withered me. It hurt to look into those eyes, but it was impossible not to. They possessed an expression of piercing curiosity, and they revealed the fevered thoughts of the inspired, and the vulnerability of the passionate.
But the sense of impending doom in the painting, the tragedy of these qualities that were soon to flounder into madness, stopped my breath. It was as if the painter had been commissioned, just in time, to capture the last of the subject’s allure, before she became something else entirely.
A lump formed in my throat. She had been an angel, I remember thinking. An angel. As close as anyone would ever come to being an angel.
Mrs Van den Bergh and Helma fell silent too, and they had turned to stare at me. From her chair, Mrs Van den Bergh smiled as she acknowledged her admirer.
And then the spell was broken. The moment had upstaged Helma. On her clattering pink heels, she muscled across the stage to obscure the great beauty once more. ‘She gets so disturbed! It’s the new medication! The doctors are useless! Four hundred euros for a call-out and they’re useless!’ Now she was talking about money, and reasserting herself as a dreadful painted parody of her mistress’s beauty that she might have long despised. Helma vulgarised the very space in which that picture hung.
I felt sick and longed to get back downstairs to my chair. Especially as Helma was now eyeing me with a combination of suspicion and bemusement, a look peculiar in my experience to those who were fond of underestimating me. Helma then brushed passed me on her way to the front door, and slid one hand across my chest, provocatively. ‘Goodbye, darling!’ She called out to Mrs Van den Bergh.
‘Florine! Florine! Florine!’ the ancient creature cried out from the wheelchair.
‘But . . . but what do I do?’ I implored Helma, following her.
‘Just watch her.’
‘But what if she needs something? The toilet?’
‘You don’t need to worry about that. She’ll just watch her programmes.’
‘She could fall.’
‘How? She hasn’t walked in twenty years. You took the money easily enough, and I’m not asking you for much. You can keep your eyes open, can’t you? Vaarwel, my love!’ She closed the front door on her way out and was gone.
Alone with Mrs Van den Bergh, I hid myself inside the kitchen, directly across the hall from the living room. Surrounded by soiled dishes and cutlery, old newspapers and plastic carrier bags that were filled with yellowing catalogues and rubbish, I decided to wait out my sentence. If there were any sounds of distress, I could look in on Mrs Van den Bergh. Otherwise I would stay outside her line of sight, because the moment she caught a glimpse of me – and she was always looking for me from her chair – she would begin that dreadful shrieking for Florine.
In the dim brownish pall of the apartment, I then suffered the unhealthiest thoughts about age and ageing. These black impressions and notions extended to my own life and to all of humanity. I felt that despair and immobility were the only natural outcomes of the miserable struggle that is life. At one point I even buried my face in my hands. I desperately wanted to weep, but somehow held that back, though I don’t think it did me any good.
In the distance I could hear the chatter of the television, a whooshing sound of what could have been fireworks, and the clang of bells. It was some appalling quiz show that she had been sitting before. A programme that produced whitish flashes that briefly illumined the living room.
It seemed my dream-life of seclusion and contemplation was coming to an end. Even here, at night, while the world slept, there were still parts of it, these obscure quarters, that would give me no peace. Places that would seek me out and torment me in the same insidious manner that caused my former misery working for a corporation, where I was overrun by the will-to-power of baboons with silver tongues.
Was it so much to ask for? To be just left alone?
I thought the world mad. Desperate and cruel and stupid, endlessly repeating the same mistakes with terrible consequences. The world’s refusal to leave me out of its activities made me consider its destruction. Bring on the wave. Please, the asteroid. Anything. Just take it away. And then Mrs Van den Bergh stood up. And she ran from the living room on those long brownish bones that served her for legs.
She appeared at the corner of my sight, impossibly tall and thin with that little dry skull grinning above her narrow shoulders. I turned, at once shocked out of my morbid stupor. And I watched her flee, bandy-legged, with both chicken-bone arms thrown upwards at the ceiling. Her hands had looked strangely masculine, atop wrists as thin as woodwind instruments. Her long feet had slapped down the hallway toward the front door.
‘No,’ I said. Or I whispered it. Perhaps it was just a thought that never made it out of my mind. But I moved into the hallway, unsteadily, where the amber lights were caged within such dirty glass that they gave me the impression that I was trapped inside an old photograph. But I could still make out the figure of Mrs Van den Bergh scrabbling at the latch of the door, and a keening sound issued from her mottled head. The noise transformed into a growl, before it broke into a bellow. ‘Florine! Florine! Dear God, let them out! Florine! I can hear them!’
I approached her, but I made it no further than the threadbare mat in the hall before she had the front door open and was out. Outside. Suddenly. On the landing, under brighter lights, naked, and racing across the landing at speed and on limbs so spindly the sight of them striding like that made me want to crouch in a dark corner and never move again. And as she skittered at the top of the stairs before making her rickety descent, my eyes locked onto something even more dreadful. Folded flat against her prominent scapulae were two brown flaps. Like wings, but hairless, and shrivelled in the manner of dried fish.
What could I do but follow? Below me in the building, I heard Mrs Van den Bergh shouting as she fled from floor to floor, ‘Florine! I can hear them! Florine! Florine!’ Though whether she was crying out with elation or with grief, it was impossible for me to decide.
I leaped three stairs at a time. My tie flapped about my face. My hand clutched at the brass railings as I pursued the sounds of her flight.
Somewhere below, a door opened quickly. Followed by another, and another.
The other residents must have been disturbed. What would they think, coming to their doors in nightwear, only to see the emaciated form of Mrs Van den Bergh racing past, shrieking for Florine? Had she not looked such a fright, I might have been tempted to add my own hysterical laughter to the commotion. The entire episode was as absurd as it was disturbing. And my reason tried desperately to assert itself, telling me that all of this was not possible: the woman was over a hundred years of age and had not walked in twenty, allegedly. But then maybe Helma was behind this. Helma must have known this would happen. She had deliberately left her ward unsecured in that chair and I had been set up. And now it was my task to catch an infirm and half-crazed resident. Oh, how they would all laugh: Mrs Goldstein, those mute Husseins, little Manuel and half-smiling Olive. I would be reported. I would be fired.
But so be it; I wasn’t being paid enough for this. Any of it. It was not in my job description either to enter flat 17, flat 15 or flat 14. I was not to enter any of the a
partments unaccompanied by the owners. But the doors to these apartments were now gaping. Wide open.
I saw the open doorways as soon as I staggered off the stairs on the relevant floors. So why were they open, as if they had so recently released occupants into the communal areas? Had I been misinformed? Was the information in the desk ledger not up to date? I then thought of the desperate winds and the bangs from inside these dark and empty spaces, and for a few seconds I wondered if this was now my last chance to flee the building and to never return.
I called out for Mrs Van den Bergh, my voice disappearing into the darkness of every open flat I passed. But I received no answer.
Flat 12 on the fifth floor, where I came to a stop, was also supposed to be a sealed and empty property. The other flats with open doors were unlit and they issued an air of vacancy, but not flat 12. That one was different.
Hovering on the threshold, biting my bottom lip until it bled, my chest rising and falling too quickly, I could hear them inside. Them? Mrs Van den Bergh perhaps. And others. I heard a muffled voice, or voices, over the sound of weeping, coming out of the dark hallway, and from somewhere deep inside the apartment. Yes, there was a thin light seeping under a door at the end of the hallway. The master bedroom, if this floor plan followed the graphic in the desk ledger of how these apartments were arranged on this side of the building. But why then were the remainder of the lights out in the apartment?
I dithered. I vacillated. I did not want to see, or to know, where I was being led. It was as if my involvement in this madness had somehow been assumed. But out of some deluded sense of duty I went down to that bruised orange light, faintly washing from under the door at the far end of the hall. And as I went down, I turned on the ancient lights in the hallway by flicking down the heavy porcelain switches in fixtures the size of butter dishes. It was like walking through a museum, with its telephone table, coat-rack made from antlers, and the dusty oil paintings of peasants and beggars engaged in what appeared to be odd and unpleasant gatherings. I glanced into the kitchen and saw enamelled appliances and yellow lino that could not have been changed since the Second World War, and wooden cupboards painted buttercup yellow with little glass doors that protected thin china sets. The dining room was mostly draped in white sheets tarnished with dust, but the chandelier, above a table fit for a boardroom, glittered in what little light seeped inside from the hallway. This place had not been lived in for decades; I knew that at once. Though part of it was occupied that night.
I listened outside the far door. Heard the low murmur of voices again, and something else. Something rhythmic. Like clapping. Gently clapping hands. There were several people inside the room. People who were also cooing in the way that adults make noises around infants. I cleared my throat. I knocked.
No one answered. Was I trespassing? About to intrude on some strange but private gathering that had nothing to do with my search for Mrs Van den Bergh? I feared I was, and experienced far more anxiety than curiosity about what was on the other side of the door.
I turned around and began to creep back down the hallway in a way that made my every footstep resemble the absurd mime of a man trying to withdraw quietly.
‘Florine! Florine! Florine!’
After that, there was no mistaking the presence of Mrs Van den Bergh within that room of dirty light and soft clapping and the incongruous cooing. And her utterances suggested that she was in a state of excitement not yet matched in my experience of her. I was instantly tempted to believe that Florine herself had made an appearance within that room.
‘Enough of this,’ I said. It could not go on. I had to remove the resident from this place and take her back to her chair and strap her in. Without another thought, I acted. I opened the door.
Round and round they went in the large bedroom. In the slow up and down dance, one foot after the other, the residents staggered in their ungainly circle.
I did not know where to look at first, and saw everything in a jittering panorama because my eyes would not allow themselves to settle for long on any single detail. Not on the diminutive Hussein sisters, naked as cadavers and shrivelled as figs; or the worm-white Mrs Goldstein prancing with those sticks, her hair extending wildly from her scalp as if she had been hit by a gale, and her empty paps with black nipples flapping; or the long and dry Mrs Van den Bergh, with her eyes rolled back white, and the gurgling from her stringy throat and the big hands thrown up to the ceiling. I didn’t look long at the others either, whom I had never seen before, but immediately understood them to be the bedridden residents who had somehow made it down here for this occasion. Some thing with skin like a plucked bird went up and down, up and down, from heel to toe, heel to toe, and shook its wisps of hair about in delirium. Others tottered like undraped wooden puppets with their strings cut, or the fossils of birds suddenly reanimated out of stone, and they must have been even older than the figures that I recognised. But all did their very best to hop and teeter in that circle. And all of them carried the shrunken flaps behind their shoulders with the skin that looked like the salted cod, rolled into sheets, that I had once seen in Norway. Flightless birds, I thought. Not extinct, but nearly.
And it was an elegant drinks trolley that the bony procession was moving about in this grotesque whirlpool of brittle limbs and gargles and skin like the parchment of dusty scrolls. And upon the top tier of the old and highly polished silver trolley was arranged a set of pickling jars, made from thick glass, with heavy wooden plugs rammed into the necks to keep the occupants safe from exposure to the air. The small figures inside the jars were adrift in a thick but semi-transparent fluid. Their limbs were as pale and delicate as cartilage, but their heads were enlarged and bulbous, thin as eggshell, with tiny faces at rest. On the back of one small body I saw appendages no bigger than thumbs, or unformed wings.
A second sedentary circle had formed around the skipping residents. It was the nurses and carers, and they were responsible for the clapping and the cooing sounds. They wore little crowns of golden paper on their heads and had all dressed in their finest clothes for the occasion. And they encouraged their wards to hop and stagger like that, round and round and round.
No one even looked at me, agape in that doorway. Though I thought at one point that Mrs Goldstein hissed at me from the side of her mouth, as she skittered past.
The first one to break ranks was Helma. Shaking with excitement, she ran to the head of the room, and then padded her hands along the wall until she reached the middle. It was not a wall, but a wooden screen. I had seen the same arrangement in a studio flat, and also in a hotel; an attempt to give one room the potential of becoming two, for privacy. Something I thought odd on every occasion, including this one.
I was sure, with every molecule in my being, that I did not want to see what was on the other side of the screen. But before I could wrench myself away, Helma had the screen opening along its ancient brass runners, the wooden panels folding flat like a concertina.
In my strengthless delirium of disgust and fear and shock, I then stared across the bobbing of the stained skulls and the thin arms of the prancing circle, and I caught a glimpse of the father of this extended family. Bedridden, mercifully, but still keen enough to raise his great horned head from the enormous bed, in order to smile on what must have been his wives, their staff and the bottled offspring who would bear him no heirs.
The Ancestors
I t never stops raining at the new house. When you are upstairs it sounds like hundreds of pebbles thrown by as many little hands onto the pointy roof. We can’t go outside to play so we stay indoors and amuse ourselves with the toys. They belong to Maho, but she is happy to share them with me. My parents never knew about Maho, but she is my best friend and she lives in the house too. Maho has been here a long time.
When Mama used to come upstairs to put clean clothes in my drawers, or Papa knocked on the door to tell me that dinner was ready, Maho would hide and wait in my room until I could play with the toys again.
Maho sleeps in my bed too, every night. I wish I had hair like her. Maho’s hair is long and silky. When she puts her arms around me and hugs me, I am covered by her hair. Tucking itself under my arms and winding around my neck, her hair is so warm that I never need the blankets on my bed. I think her hair feels like black fur too, and like big curtains she pulls her hair across her face so all that I can see is her little square teeth. ‘How can you see through your hair, Maho?’ I once asked her. ‘It looks so funny.’ She just giggled. And with their teeny fingers the toys like to touch her hair too. They stand and sway on the bed and stroke it.
In the daytimes the toys never do much, but we still go looking for them in the empty rooms and in the secret places that Mama and Papa never knew about. When we find a toy sitting upright in a corner, or standing still after stopping dancing on those tiny fast feet, we talk to them. The toys just listen. They can hear everything you say. Sometimes they smile.
But at night the toys do most of the playing. They always have things to show us. New tricks and dances all around the bed. I’ll be fast asleep but their little hard fingers will touch my face. Cold breath will brush my ears as they say, ‘Hello. Hello,’ until I wake up. At first I was scared of the tiny figures on the bed, all climbing and tugging at the sheets, and I would run and get into bed with Mama and Papa. But Maho told me that the toys just want to be my friends and play. Maho says you don’t need a mama and papa when you have so many friends and I guess she is right. Parents don’t understand. Most of the time they think about other things. That’s why they weren’t needed for the playing.
Maho told me that when the other children who lived here grew up and left the house all of their toys stayed behind. And it’s an old house so there are lots of toys. Maho never left either. She never left her friends. Like I did when we moved out here. I told Maho my parents made me move. ‘See,’ she said. ‘Parents don’t understand about friends. About how much we love our friends, and how special secret places are to us. You can’t just leave them because papas get new jobs or are sick. It’s not fair. Who says things have to change and you have to go to new places when you’re happy where you are?’
