Under a Watchful Eye

by Adam Nevill

  As he tried to make sense of the man’s relocation to the pier, he could not suppress a competing suspicion that the figure had known where Seb was running to. To wait for you. And again, his reason was overrun by the notion that the man had arrived at the pier by other means, and by a method and design that Seb couldn’t even guess at.

  But if this was to be a reunion, his memory began to reopen some of its darkest rooms in anticipation. Rooms with doors long closed and double-locked.

  On the beach below Seb a frisbee was thrown badly. A mother, with broad tattoos on her lower legs, roared at her young. An elderly lady spoke to her spouse and said, ‘But I don’t want you to feel any pressure . . .’ Gulls cried above the rinsing action of the waves upon the sand. And all of these sounds retreated to a distance found only in daydreams, or in echoes from the past.

  Bewilderment and the swoop of vertigo made Seb press his body against the railings to remain upright. An atmosphere of thinner air seemed to come into existence all around his body. He even feared that gravity was disappearing.

  To the pier he looked beseechingly, his face pleading for a release and for that figure to make it all stop.

  The man had vanished. He’d either sidestepped behind one of the little cabins at the side of the pier or had concealed himself within the crowd, or even . . .

  Seb had no idea.

  From an even shorter distance than before, he heard the sound of his name. Sebastian.

  Again, the word might have appeared within the confines of his mind. It may also have issued from a range somewhere behind and slightly above his head. The only amelioration of his shock was provided by Seb’s recognition of the voice. The speaker’s face even appeared to him before quickly fading.

  Could it be?

  Seb turned about, and felt his vision drawn over the parked cars and to the man in black. He was now standing on the far side of the green within the shadow of the fir trees and behind a waist-high wall of breccia stone before the Hotel Connair.

  He’d been on the pier mere seconds before. Impossible.

  Seb could now make out the presence of lank hair and a baseball cap. A jaw covered by a black beard. The surrounding flesh issued an unhealthy pallor reminiscent of cream cheese, near-noisome at a glance.

  The figure raised a long arm. The hand and wrist were as blanched as the face.

  Seb moved hesitantly across the beach road. The world looked as it usually did, though his vision twitched from shock. But the world was not the same. Where had sound gone? He might have been sleepwalking.

  A car braked hard and Seb saw suppressed fury in an elderly face behind the windscreen that he’d nearly rolled across. He waved an apology to the driver and stumbled back to the bench where he’d left his bag.

  The temporary suspension of the world ended. A universe of raw sound rushed like the sea into a cave and filled his ears.

  A mournful chorus from the gulls upon their lamp-post perches.

  The gritty bounce of a rubber ball on tarmac.

  A car door slammed.

  The grunt of a motorbike on the Esplanade Road . . .

  The end of the episode left him shaken and as cold as a bather emerging into a crosswind.

  The watcher behind the wall had vanished.

  3

  A Sack with a Narrow Opening

  Breathless and barely recalling the journey home, Seb fell into the house.

  Without the presence of mind to remove his coat and shoes, he ran upstairs and took to pacing the living room. He only paused to sweep up a brandy bottle from the drinks’ cabinet. He chugged the brandy over a glass before resuming his anxious laps of the room.

  By natural law it was impossible for a man to appear and disappear and then reappear.

  A brain tumour?

  There had been no headaches, no dizziness prior to these sightings. Nothing physically wrong with him for a long time and never seriously. Paranoia about his health ensured that he paid for regular check-ups and even annual, full-body screenings.

  Dementia? At fifty? It was possible. He’d have to pursue some kind of test, and no doubt a search on ‘Doctor Google’ would fan his fear into hysteria.

  Schizophrenia had been rife in his father’s side of the family. Several relatives had seen terrible things and believed in them. One of them, a cousin he’d not seen since he was a child, had taken his own life. Two more had managed their condition with drugs. They’d told him at his grandfather’s funeral over twenty years before. That was the most likely scenario, the past returning in the form of a family taint.

  He imagined selling the house and liquidating his investments to pay for a long-term residency in a care home. He saw powerful psychotropic drugs sedating the ghastly visions of his near future. All alone in a white room, he imagined being unable to identify himself until his mind eventually winked out.

  Seb scrabbled for the phone to make an appointment at the local surgery. Then put the phone down.

  The memory of it on the pier, the sight of it in the shallows, reintroduced a hideous suspicion about the figure’s identity.

  Ewan?

  Ewan Alexander? Why would he now be seeing Ewan Alexander, of all people, so near his home? A man he’d all but suppressed in his memory. Ewan was the kind of person you wanted either to forget, or to stare aghast at from a safe distance. It was the improbability of seeing him here, not just the nature of his appearance, that had shaken Seb.

  Ewan had always been a tragic case, never physically threatening. He’d only turned nasty when Seb met a girl and escaped Ewan’s influence. God, remember Julie? But Ewan had been as excluded and powerless as a man could be in life. A lost soul. Socially inept. A misfit. A chronic alcoholic. An eater of acid.

  Brandy flowed. Seb’s feet shuffled through the rooms of his sanctuary.

  It wasn’t him. Can’t be.

  Seb had not seen him in . . . let me think . . . twelve years. Not since the last brief intrusion. That had been in London and Ewan had knocked on the front door and not just appeared out of nothing. He’d also called on the telephone the following year and left a garbled message intended for someone else. But that was all another lifetime away.

  Seb opened the balcony doors and sucked the cool sea air into his chest. They had no mutual acquaintances. Ewan had no business being down here. But if he was here, then how had he done that?

  Dear God. What if he was dead? That would have been his ghost.

  Unable to appreciate the view, because of what might appear outside and look up, Seb retreated from the balcony.

  Over at the kitchen counter he visualized the lone figure, watching amongst wind-beaten trees. He scratched through the ruin of his logic and attempted to convince himself that he was safe and sane, that Ewan Alexander had not been glimpsed in four different places in as many days.

  The scaffolding of wishful thinking, that he was mistaken, or confused, or unwell, collapsed. His mind insisted on marrying an unhappy year, buried deep in his past, to that sickly face, crammed beneath a baseball cap.

  He had seen Ewan that morning. And he had seen and heard him while feeling agitated, unwell, and even deranged.

  So how did he cause that? Why had sound changed? How had the textures of the world dispersed, or been swapped with another place? Was ‘place’ even the right word? Environment? Sphere?

  Ewan Alexander.

  God, no. Not possible.

  A lot had happened in the intervening decade since he’d last seen his ‘old friend’. For one thing, Seb had moved on. It had taken a long time, but he’d made a success of his literary aspirations. A goal that he and Ewan had once shared as students.

  So had Ewan come to . . . haunt him?

  Seb didn’t want any reminders of that time coming back. Not now, not when he had everything just about right, give or take a book that he was struggling to finish.

  The last time they’d met, in London, Seb had been convinced that Ewan was not long for this world. When was that, 2003?
Surely no one could drink so much and avoid a premature grave. And the drugs? He’d watched Ewan neck neat MDMA from a brown bottle as if it was a shot of whiskey. Just one of his many assurances that Ewan’s demise had been imminent a decade gone.

  Ewan had been committed to self-destruction when they’d first met, in the late eighties. That was thirty years ago, in a Student Union bar, and even then Ewan had been too drunk to focus his eyes. He’d rambled and spat about music: Mercyful Fate, Venom, Bathory, stuff like that. Ewan’s life had formed into the immediate shape of a slow, proxy suicide.

  They’d only shared a house for one year. Much of which Seb had spent listening to Ewan through the walls, when the man was out of his mind.

  So how could he still be alive?

  But if he isn’t, then . . . Even briefly entertaining the ludicrous idea made Seb breathless.

  Another cascade of brandy splashed into his crystal tumbler. He slumped onto his favourite sofa in the living room.

  A panorama of sea stretched round the rear of the house, visible through floor-to-ceiling windows. But the bay’s wild beauty failed to offer its customary balm. Nor did the awards, pictures, ornaments and furniture provide their usual reassurance. In fact, Seb’s advantages had developed a horrible feeling of impermanence. Wasn’t that similar to how Ewan had always made him feel, even when he’d had so little to lose?

  Seb didn’t know what to do, so he remained seated, bewildered and sagging with the self-pity that follows misfortune and finds succour in inebriation. Eventually he moved downstairs and drew the blinds in his bedroom, then lay upon his bed. He needed to calm down and think things through.

  Going to the doctors was still on the agenda and he’d try the following morning. Can’t go now, can’t go pissed.

  But how do you explain something like this? He feared being sectioned.

  In the gloom and silence, his memories of Ewan insolently pushed through his thoughts and trampled the happier times standing guard at the outer walls of his mind, the barriers against back then.

  1988. Ewan was his first lesson of who to avoid in life.

  Back then was horribly vivid as his mind hosted a carousel of dim, brownish rooms with thin curtains that were always closed, and spaces echoing with a drunk’s rampages. Seb had written about that time in his first two books, and he’d succeeded in leaving Ewan out of those stories as a character. Even then, in the processing of memory through his writing, he’d been concerned that a fictional consideration of Ewan ran the risk of bringing him back from the past.

  Those who live alone often speak to themselves, as Seb did in his bedroom. ‘I was young. Inexperienced . . . and lonely.’

  He’d been captivated by Ewan too, an older man. Shyness and courtesy had made him the victim of a misfit.

  Their old house on Wylding Lane laid new foundations inside his thoughts. If every house had a face, then that one had suffered greatly, for a long time, and been forgotten behind barbed wire.

  A concrete terrace, tide-marked by green mildew. A building slipping backwards down a muddy bank of a front yard with a broken gate. Sash windows clouded with condensation, or brittle with ice that resembled mucus, depending on the season. Every inch of kerb on both sides of the narrow road cramped by parked cars. Vehicles passing through all day long, and into the night, initiating noisy stand-offs.

  Three bedrooms and communal areas untouched by improvements since the sixties. And within those narrow spaces, his old mate had never risen before four in the afternoon. Seb saw Ewan again, grey with a hangover, his eyes reddened, his breath gluey, a washed-out Reign in Blood shirt hanging from his bony shoulders, the cotton smelling of something you might walk downwind of in a zoo.

  Ewan had been ten years Seb’s senior, a mature student without maturity, his studies on the rocks. He’d been retaking a year of university. Only Ewan had failed the foolproof first year. What is he even doing here? How did he get in? That’s what people had asked. Ewan’s parents had paid for the course, and many other courses after it. Maybe to keep him away from them. But Ewan’s parental contributions had been transmuted into strong cider and cannabis smoke, which is why he’d been co-dependent on Seb for food and money, in a matter of weeks after he’d moved into the house on Wylding Lane.

  That was Seb’s second year and spent out of halls. Cut out of every other potential house-share going, he’d drifted too far away from the college, and that was when it really went wrong. Marooned inside a house with no central heating on the outskirts of town, with Ewan, his sole option. Two miles from campus in a neighbourhood for the abandoned, the jobless, the neglected seniors, vast but poor families: the uncared-for in the community. An area part-derelict, ashamed of itself, but curiously industrialized. A bottled-sauce factory had covered the area with the smell of molasses and diesel.

  The mentally ill Indian girl who looked out of the window of a front room, across the road, all day, every day. She’d worn colourful saris that were like vivid colours in a black-and-white film made by an auteur.

  Air so cold in Seb’s bedroom it had bruised his skin blue that winter. Sleeping in his clothes and leather jacket under two duvets. The permanent odours of moist timber, the powdery rot of dew spots in the plaster beneath age-clouded wallpaper, and the kind he’d only seen before in crime dramas set in New York tenements. A hint of gas blended through raw sewage. The must of ancient dust under floorboards, mingled with what dirty shoes had left on carpets, where they existed. Cat piss despite there being no cat. A fridge that never worked. Food poisoning from belly pork. Chest infections. No toilet paper. Hunger. Cold. Stomach bugs. Grim.

  They had both smelled. It had been too cold to take a bath in that house, though Seb had tried, once a week, in an inch of tepid water, and engaged in a feeble upward splashing of a cupped paw, like a monkey in a stream. He’d never managed to get a full sink out of the old immersion heater. But Ewan’s odours had made his eyes water. An animal odour: cattle and ethanol, with a hint of shellfish left in the sun.

  In one entire year Ewan had never laundered his few articles of clothing. Seb’s own gaminess had eventually become a comfort, his bed a compost of sheets with the Turin Shroud on top, concealing a well-used mattress that he’d never dared examine. Fifteen quid a week.

  Six lectures a week: Shakespeare’s tragedies, the Romantic poets, the Victorian novelists. Seb had associated with the paupers, the derided, the murdered in every text. Ewan had cast himself as the dark, moody hero in every scenario, the prophet poet, the adventurer, the sage and mystic.

  It was all coming back, a landslide in a landfill.

  The open bin bag in the kitchen with no bin around it. The lino stained as if the rubbish sack was a giant tea bag. Oddments of crockery and cheap, dull saucepans piled across the counters. All debris from Ewan’s odd mealtimes and hapless, hungover attempts at preparing food. Ashtrays heaped like mounds in crematoria. Living out of cans. A fiver a week on food. A diet of sausage sandwiches and soup.

  Seb’s inevitable retreat into his room, away from the tides of Ewan’s squalor and noise that nothing could turn back. Smoking roll-ups and playing vinyl records. Handwritten essays. He’d thought himself a Dostoyevsky sketching notes from an underground, or a Hamsun enlightened by hunger, a Fante who asked the dust. But he was a nobody. Ewan had thought he was William Burroughs experimenting with acid, or a Bukowski drinking himself unconscious before the four-bar heater in the living room, twice each week, six cans of cider empty beside his long, curling form on the filthy rug, whenever Seb discovered him in the morning as he went out for classes, or food.

  Ewan’s own mountain of pain one long silence, caged behind those heavy-lidded eyes and never shared. Not even in rare moments of sobriety when he talked at length about Arthur Machen’s The Hill of Dreams, or Algernon Blackwood’s depiction of the numinous, Wakefield’s ghosts or Blake’s visions, and so many other diversionary things, from Shakespeare to Black Sabbath, from Shelley to Slayer.

  That was the
stuff that had drawn Seb in, his awe at a true outsider who might tutor his own sensitivity to the dark things that confirmed a belief in his own outcast status. Seb had read King, Herbert, Barker, Straub and Lovecraft before university, and he’d watched Romero, Cronenberg, Carpenter, Argento and Friedkin. But Ewan had shared M. R. James with him, M. P. Shiel, Aickman, Campbell, W. B. Yeats, Hughes, Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Bosch, Bruegel, Bacon, Spare, Resnais, Bergman, Kneale, and Lynch. Tipped him over with a wallop into another way of thinking it all through, another way of saying things, or not saying them at all and just letting them come out and be there.

  He started you off . . .

  But Ewan had never wanted to let Seb go, and by the end of that year, Seb had been unsure whether Ewan had cared about anything other than getting drunk or high, while using Seb like a carer, valet, apprentice, housekeeper, and admirer.

  Seb had grafted at university and then grafted even harder afterwards. He owed Ewan nothing.

  Had Ewan not always encouraged him to turn his back on the material world, on family, friends? Poverty and the avoidance of responsibility and attachments being the only way to become a true artist, according to Ewan. And once Seb had flirted with that set of ideas, and set that course for himself, he’d felt unable to meet the world in any other way. Or had that been inevitable anyway? Was that the reason he’d been so attracted to Ewan in the first place? Had he seen his own destiny in Ewan? Or at least an inevitability in himself to become overwhelmed by his own compulsions? Seb didn’t know, but their association should have ended in Wylding Lane in ’88.

  That year was merely the beginning. Ewan broke him in, and his mentor’s legacy had continued through fifteen years of under-employment, often uniformed, often temporary, its only permanence low pay, augmented by occupations of sublets in the corners of cities inhabited by poor migrants and those who’d slipped off the edges. Those others had no choice, but he’d wanted to be an old-school writer and had been unable to resist Ewan’s narrative. Perhaps Ewan’s ghost had now returned to check on Seb’s progress and to correct it, or regress it.