by Adam Nevill
By publishing his early stories, the small presses had encouraged Seb enough to stay the course, though he’d remained anxious about what might befall him if he didn’t make changes to his life. But what changes? A professional job? He’d been clueless about finding one of those. Write one more book and then we’ll see. That had been his mantra. And at least Seb had grafted at the writing. He’d always been a grafter, determined.
When Seb’s last parent went, his mother, he’d spent two years on antidepressants wearing a security guard’s uniform, and then he’d got lucky. Horror became the new black in publishing and he was noticed.
But why had his own past noticed him now?
Seb remained in bed with the blinds down. Sometime in mid-afternoon he drifted to sleep.
4
Broken Night
A dream of winter, of charcoal skies and grey light. And he walks amongst people he does not know. People who move on their hands and knees. They appear helpless, perhaps lost, or even blind.
‘Is the light over there?’ he is asked.
‘Have you seen my sister?’ he is asked.
‘I cannot get back,’ he is told.
He is on the contoured hillocks of a golf course. A place he often crosses to reach the pub at Churston Court. And up and down those manicured mounds of grass he walks, but more quickly now to remove himself from those drawn to him who are given to crawling like infants. He won’t look at them directly again. They’re too thin and near transparent in some of their parts. The only face he looked into reminded him of creased, wet newspaper.
A wide, hazy sea lies directly ahead of him. Sounds of a distant crowd carries from the opposite direction. Seb turns and sees a large white building, three storeys high, the front flat and white like a vast mausoleum. A building he has never seen before. The patio before the entrance is full of people, and his mother’s voice rises from the crowd. He wants to run for her. She has been gone for nine years, but he thinks he can see her, wearing a red coat.
Seb calls out, ‘What?’ and, in unison, the group points at the sky.
His mother’s voice breaks free from the chatter of the crowd. ‘Come back!’ or maybe she says, ‘Go back!’
He is a boy and has become a younger self in the way selves effortlessly switch within dreams. He remains on the golf course, but the grass is now sawdust, just like that of the butcher’s shop that he used to visit with his nan, where it was scattered over the lino of a cold floor. Sawdust with blood mixed into it. The blood was dark and he was always told not to touch the floor with his small, questing hands. He’d liked the cold sausage and iron smells of the shop.
Seb’s legs sink to the knee into the dust and wood chips, and he soon becomes breathless in an attempt to break free. Water flows fiercely somewhere nearby, as if from between the dunes. He cannot see it and fears the water will appear between the small slopes and cover his head and mouth.
Another enters the sawdust landscape, a thing with a covered head and a whitish body low to the ground. Seb can hear a wet snuffling and he is paralysed with his old terror of dogs.
Those others around him, who are crawling, scatter like crabs beneath upturned rocks. This new entrant moves eagerly to traverse the golf course as Seb flounders and twists and cries for his distant, unreachable mother.
That head, covered by a dirty sack, stiffens with an alertness that communicates an awareness of him, and an anticipation within its horrid form. When it turns to him, Seb cannot find the strength to scream. He stops struggling in the blood-mired sawdust and cries harder.
Into this dream he comes to be sitting in his childhood home, on a green and brown carpet with a pattern that once made him think of chameleons. He sees a silver Christmas tree, a dimpled glass door, a plywood service hatch opening into a kitchen, and the images remind him of what will soon be lost forever. From out of the kitchen comes the sound of wooden sticks being snapped in half while a large, unseen form turns round and round and rubs against the cupboard doors.
When Seb wakes and sees the darkened bedroom and the vertical band of daylight at the edge of the curtains, his relief is immense.
Tracks of dried tears split upon his cheekbones. He is damp and hot, his muscles heavy and his mind groggy from the heavy sleep that overcame him in the middle of the day. But within the early bewilderment of waking, he is aware of a disturbance outside. A noise that issues a dreadful continuity with his dream.
Lying upon his bed, his thoughts stumble and he can’t be certain if the sound is part of the worst nightmare he’s endured in years, or whether it is a sign of a long animal moving around the external walls of the house, looking for access.
Into his mind creeps a sense of a sinewy body with a covered head, pressed into the bricks, and moving like a dog.
5
Incertitude
‘There’s so much I don’t know about you,’ Becky said, once they had returned from the restaurant and settled in the living room. Before they left the house earlier they had set side-by-side on the sofa, but now looked at each other from different sides of the room. It was the evening of another day that hadn’t passed without trauma.
Seb’s frantic invitation to Becky had been accepted and she’d arrived at the weekend, alighting from an afternoon service at Paignton with a small leopard-print case in tow.
Her failure to disguise her shock at how he looked had been immediate. A face unused to smiling, and a mouth unaccustomed to talking, as a tired but frantic mind turned upon itself, could not be concealed by a pressed shirt, smooth cheeks and aftershave.
Seb had spirited her out of the station and into his car. Her visit fell eight days after his sighting of Ewan on the pier, and Seb no longer felt safe outdoors. Even though the weather had distinguished itself with warm sunshine and cloudless skies, he’d barely been outside in four days.
Seb had been reduced to darting to and from the nearest shop to fetch essentials, all the time certain that a predator watched him while planning its next strike. To prepare for Becky’s visit, he’d resorted to home deliveries from a supermarket chain.
‘God, I love your place . . . The view. Look at it! . . . How’ve you been? . . . I finished your book about the ship on the way down. It’s different . . . Are you sure you’re okay?’ She’d said this as soon as they arrived at his house, while throwing her coat down and reacquainting herself with his home.
Seb’s place was a modernized twenties townhouse, redesigned by the previous owners in a style that now resembled a picture in a Scandinavian design magazine: open-plan upstairs, light and airy, wood and right angles, bedrooms on the first floor and the living space on the second, all powered by solar energy. The ground floor had a garage for three cars and a reception area.
When Seb first saw the house, he’d liked the idea of going downstairs to sleep, but had never been able to account for the attraction beyond the novelty value.
‘Any news on the new film?’ Becky had asked, distractedly. ‘When’s it out? Can we open the doors? I want to go on the balcony.’
‘There’s a cold wind coming off the water.’
‘It’s nineteen degrees.’
Seb had maintained the stiff smile that made his face ache. His nerves constantly jumped and the most innocuous sounds made him flinch. Though it was the departure of sound that he dreaded most of all, the unnatural silence that accompanied the harrowing presence.
Becky opened the balcony doors. Eyes closed, she inhaled deeply, savouring the coastal atmospherics in the way he’d forgotten how to. After a few minutes outside, she came indoors to sit beside Seb on the sofa. Glass of wine in hand, she’d sat tight against him and slipped a hand over his restless paws. ‘You don’t look that pleased to see me.’
‘Don’t say that. I’ve been counting the days.’
‘Then what is it? You hiding a ring behind you?’
He blanched enough to make Becky shriek with laughter.
‘I’ve . . .’ He had been unable to finish the s
entence. He’d made the decision to tell her about Ewan and had rehearsed an explanation. But what he needed to unload had suddenly seemed preposterous and left him feeling awkward, a bit ridiculous too, and even craven.
Becky had stretched out one leg and raised an eyebrow, coquettishly. ‘I can’t believe you haven’t commented on these. I bought them for the weekend. You haven’t even looked at them yet.’ She was referring to the boots, spike-heeled and shining like eels to her knees. She’d worn them with a pencil skirt that had given her progress across the train platform a faint but enticing hobble. The susurration between her thighs would normally have electrified him. He should have been pleasantly uncomfortable with arousal, even greedy for her. After all, it had been a while, but now there was nothing normal about his existence and state of mind.
‘They’re great.’ He’d unintentionally sounded unimpressed, and caught a shade of dismay in Becky’s expression. It registered in a lowering of her satin eyelashes over the green eyes that had first attracted him to her.
‘And you should see what else I’ve got on.’ She’d stroked knees that appeared slippery with a sheen created by the afternoon sun that fell across the seat.
Seb had reached for her then and held her tightly. Not with desire but with affection and relief. He held her like the friend that he so desperately needed – this pretty girl whom he’d always kept at an arm’s length, and with whom he’d been unable to drop an act of indifference. He suspected she’d fallen for him during the six months in which they’d been lovers, without strings, and living in different places.
Becky found his ear. ‘I want to go for a walk and a paddle in the sea. And I want to get pissed. But I’m not going out dressed like this. So let’s get reacquainted properly in your room and then I’ll get changed.’ She’d reached between his legs and applied a gentle pressure. ‘I thought you’d be a rock by now. Am I losing my touch?’
She wasn’t and he’d wanted to say as much. She was as lively and cheeky, playful and sweet smelling, as kind and just as lovely as she had been, since the first time they’d met at a literary festival. Seb had wanted to tell her all of these things but he didn’t, and not because of his reticence about taking an intimate friendship one step further. He’d remained quiet because he was cornered and muted by wretchedness. He was a man who felt twice his age and had no mental capacity for the erotic. Because of him, Ewan, or whatever it was that he was seeing.
During the previous week, Ewan had come for him again, and then again. And he was getting closer with each ‘visit’.
Two days after the episode near the pier, and after the onset of a series of ghastly persecution nightmares, Seb had been compelled to leave the house. Needing to immerse himself within crowds during daylight hours, he’d driven to Plymouth. And while wandering the broad precincts of the town centre, he’d seen Ewan standing before St Andrew’s Cross, at the bottom of the Royal Parade.
His clutch of shock had been instant, followed by a sense of being swallowed by a vacuum, or strange absence, his thoughts unravelling and transported somewhere else. Traffic, gulls, the crowd’s chatter, a pushchair’s wheels on cement, a ship’s lonesome horn, and the clanking of a delivery van’s door, all withdrew as if his hearing had lost its power source. But the face and murky mouth confronting him were distinct enough to reveal a most unpleasant smile, one triumphant and sneering.
There had been something more threatening about Ewan’s appearance in Plymouth, too. He’d moved from out of the corner of Seb’s eyes and deliberately positioned himself in Seb’s line of sight, at the end of the street, and in the direction Seb walked, as if a meeting was inevitable.
Ewan had then passed away, without Seb being aware of the figure moving its feet. Two separate groups of people had crossed the monument from each side and Ewan had vanished.
Seb had seen more of Ewan that time. Streaks of white in the beard. What had looked like a dark raincoat was zippered to his neck and pulled in tight at his waist, covering the thin torso. Jeans too. Black jeans that were worn too tight for a man of his age, and were too short for the length of his legs. When they were students, Ewan’s jeans were always too short, an inch of sock always visible above his dirty trainers.
Seb had returned to his car, but at once disliked being inside the gloomy parking level where he’d left his Mercedes and was alone. Hurrying to be anywhere but inside the shadows and silence of a multi-storey, he’d tripped up and scuffed a shoe, his jog up a concrete stairwell poorly coordinated. But Ewan was long gone by then.
Hoping that a short voyage on water would place him beyond the range of the visions, or whatever they were, he’d then intended to drive to Dartmouth, to take a boat to Totnes. This was two days later, but Ewan had appeared again, and at the side of a road a few hundred metres from his home.
Seb had been driving in the direction of St Mary’s Bay and had turned into Ranscombe Road, only to then struggle to keep the car straight after seeing Ewan standing alone on the pavement. At full height too, without the shy man’s stoop that had also been strangely absent during his previous appearances. At that point, Seb still refused to call them manifestations, but this would change.
What he’d seen of Ewan’s face from the moving vehicle, and within the passing of a second, suggested an unappealing pallor embellished with a grimace. There was no smile. Just the bloodless features staring at him, with loathing.
A great discomfort, fuelled by fear and sharpened by shock, had impacted his senses and he’d veered towards the side of the road, at a parked vehicle. Forced to brake, a horn had then blared from behind. A tradesman’s van had passed his car with a roar of acceleration.
Classic FM, on the radio, returned to the car’s interior.
When Seb had looked up, Ewan had gone.
Seb had returned to the house, no more than half a mile away, and to a place that Ewan must have been telling Seb was now within his reach.
That same afternoon, Seb had intensified his frantic online search for any information on Ewan Alexander. As with the other investigations, he’d found no trace of his old roommate. But, as he’d worked with the door to his office open, three bath-sheets drying on the balcony had moved at the edge of his vision. He’d swivelled his chair towards them, struck by a conviction that the towels had raised their corners, like hands, to beckon him.
Solely the work of his imagination, transforming the raw material of the inexplicable into the animation of ordinary objects. But he’d rushed to the balcony . . . only to hesitate when the sun umbrella under the pergola next door became a tall figure, bowing a concealed head.
Another illusion. But his blinds had come down in every window of the house that afternoon, and had not been drawn until Becky arrived on Saturday.
Too nervous to feel shame at his desultory attempt at sex, Seb had continued to top up their glasses. Having lived alone for twenty years, he’d vowed never to uncap a bottle before four p.m. Any self-imposed abstinence was long dead by that weekend. Becky had showered in silence and then dressed-down.
They had gone out for an early dinner in Brixham harbour, saying little to each other during the walk down the hill. Nodding now and again to acknowledge Becky’s stilted observations about the loveliness of the quay, his focus had remained on the faces around them. Becky’s disappointment in him was palpable but the least of Seb’s worries, considering who might appear within the evening crowd at any time.
Guiltily, he’d also acknowledged that her corroboration was a motive for inviting her to stay. He’d wanted Ewan to appear so that Becky would see him. If she couldn’t see him, then only God knew what was wrong with his mind. Of course, if she did see him and Ewan was really there, it wasn’t great news either, but at least it would mean he wasn’t going mad.
In the restaurant, Seb had pushed his lobster round the plate, while anxiously sipping several pints of Bays Gold. At some point between the first course and dessert, Becky’s patience had reached fumes.
‘I’m
not going to ask you again, but something is wrong, Seb. You’re different. Are you upset with me?’
‘God, no.’
Her concern turned to irritation. ‘You’ve got something to tell me. Are you breaking up with me? Couldn’t you have done it on the bloody phone? I’d have thought an email would have been your chosen medium.’
‘No, no, no. Please. Don’t think that.’
‘Then what is it?’ She’d reached out and touched his hand, one that had barely released a glass since the mutually unsatisfactory tumble in bed that afternoon. And that’s when his confession had begun to seep out.
‘I’m worried about . . . something. My health. Mental health.’
‘What is it? Has it come back? The depression?’
‘I haven’t seen a doctor. Not yet, because I’m not sure a doctor can help.’ Seb shrugged. ‘I think something has come back into my life. Someone.’
‘A woman.’
‘I wish it was that simple. Then I could do something.’
‘Do something?’
‘Forget the woman. There is no woman. I’m talking about a man.’
She’d looked relieved, but remained uncomfortable.
‘And no, I am not coming out. You think that’s why . . . back there, at the house? This has nothing to do with sex.’ He’d paused to swallow a draught of beer. ‘Becky, have you ever . . . hallucinated?’
‘How much are you drinking, Seb? You haven’t stopped since I got here. You know, living on your own, and writing those books, having to think about horrible things all day and night, while drinking, how can that be good for you?’
At that point, Seb covered his face with his hands, prickling with shame at how close he was to tears. The sympathetic ear, the warm familiarity of a companion combined with the drink, and he couldn’t speak.
He’d gulped at his beer to rinse away the constriction in his throat. ‘No, it’s not that. It must look like that, but it’s not. There was someone. Many years ago. A friend even, who . . . who I keep seeing now. Everywhere. But he can’t be there. It’s crazy.’
