Under a Watchful Eye

by Adam Nevill

  Ewan rolled onto his side to clasp the glass of water on the bedside table.

  Seb tried to conceal his sarcasm but knew he’d failed as soon as he began to speak. ‘It doesn’t appear that this enlightenment of which you speak so highly, and this ability to transcend space and time, have done you much good. To be honest, Ewan, I’d be inclined to feel a little short-changed by your epiphanies if this is how you end up, at your age. I mean, wouldn’t it have been better to have stayed in this other place, wherever it is that you go?’

  ‘Doesn’t work like that. We’re not supposed to be there.’

  ‘Evidently. But when I . . . when I have seen you out and about, you hardly look your best either. If I am going to be honest, you look like you’re stuck in hell. You also always return to your body, the prison, and that’s not much better, is it?’

  The jibe caused Ewan pain. If it was possible he went even paler. He now looked harried too, if not haunted, as if being forced to remember something not only unpleasant but frightening. ‘Hell’ may have been the trigger.

  When Ewan resettled himself, his eyes had developed an expression that seemed to reach beyond the room, like an intense focus on something in the past. ‘It wasn’t always like this. It’s not all darkness. There’s light, a light that you cannot imagine. Like nothing you’ve ever seen. That’s why we travel. Once you’ve seen it . . . Nothing is the same again. Nothing.’

  Seb was convinced those had been the first truthful words he’d heard Ewan say since arrival. ‘Light?’

  Ewan’s face appeared younger, the eyes alive with something other than scorn, spite or deviousness. It looked like genuine wonder. ‘It’s not the same as the light here. It’s so bright and yet so soft. It defines everything more vividly. You can see the beauty of everything. What you see becomes new, changed. There are no shadows. The light casts no shadows. No glare.

  ‘Paradise. Summerland. The Third Sphere. It’s been called all kinds of things by people who have been ignored. But these people have been there. And it is the only place where we can be free and happy. Completely free and intensely happy, always. Even if it is dark where you find yourself, you take that light with you. Your presence is the light in the unlit places. Your soul is the light . . . trying to return.’ Ewan continued to stare at nothing in the room as tears filmed his eyes.

  Seb sat on the floor, resting his back against the chest of drawers. Trying to appear as if he were not humouring Ewan, though he still found it difficult to suppress his scorn, he said, ‘How do you do it? How do you get there?’

  Ewan didn’t seem to hear him. His lips moved, though he wasn’t speaking to anyone but himself. Eventually, he smiled. ‘You don’t, unless by accident, or during an accident. A near-death experience will do it. Or while upon an operating table. Or unless you are born with a loose . . . it’s known as the vehicle of vitality. And if you are in possession of one that is improperly moored, it allows you to drift. It was only the determination of some people, who’d travelled accidentally, to relive the experience that made it possible for this to ever be controlled. As much as it can be, but never fully.’

  ‘There are techniques?’

  ‘They have to be practised for years, in the right environment, and under the supervision and control of mentors before it’s feasible. It’s not easy, what I do, oh no. For most it’s impossible and always will be, no matter how hard they try. But not for all. And I have been preparing and learning a great secret for years.’

  Seb barely managed to repress the derogatory snort that had gathered behind his face like a sneeze.

  ‘But the first time was an accident. You see, I nearly died. Massive fit. Maybe from bad gear. I’d separated my consciousness before, using LSD, and other things. Loads of times. I’d known about this experience years earlier, before I first met you. As difficult as the books were to get hold of, I’d even read everything that Hazzard ever wrote. Both of his books before I was twenty-one.’

  ‘Hazzard? M. L. Hazzard, the writer?’

  Nodding his head, Ewan narrowed his eyes knowingly.

  Seb knew of M. L. Hazzard. Aficionados of the weird would probably be aware of him too. Years before, Seb had read a couple of Hazzard short stories in long out-of-print horror anthologies, but he’d never forgotten one of them. ‘Many Communications Must Remain in Doubt’, it had been called. A simple but affecting story of a man who continually haunted a beautiful young woman by travelling in spirit-form to her home each night, to watch her undress, before lingering by the bed to inhabit her space and scent. Eventually the woman wakes and the narrator reveals himself, but wearing a goatish mask, the horns extending into the air. The man had wanted the woman to believe that he was Pan, and that she had been chosen for special instructions, but she dies of fright. She had a heart murmur that the stalker never knew about. The story ends with a description of a paranoid man in a house that he hasn’t left in two months, on the other side of town, as he hides a goat mask in the loft, between a box of Christmas decorations and some board games from his childhood. He makes a cup of tea, but his hands are shaking and he can’t speak.

  The anthology in which Seb had first read the story had actually been one of Ewan’s books: Night’s Longest Hours. Derleth may even have been the editor. It had been published by Consul, Seb thought, someone like that, and Ewan’s copy had been bound in sticky tape.

  ‘I tried all kinds of things to achieve what the Master did.’

  ‘Master? Who, Hazzard?’ But before Seb said any more, he began to feel cold. The goat mask? Could a hood or sack be put to the same use in the interest of striking terror into a man? That black form in the trees of Marriage Wood that he and Becky had seen, and crawling across the golf course in the dream, what had that been? Ewan must have used a costume to make his point more dramatically.

  Seb thought about the rucksack in the living room and wondered what he might find inside it. He shifted about on the floor and rattled the chest of drawers. ‘Please, continue. You were saying, the first time, it was an accident.’

  ‘Yes. I nearly died, or even died. They weren’t sure afterwards. But I felt myself die. And it was the most peaceful thing that I have ever experienced. I was aware of it. All of it. Dying. Actually dying. Totally aware of it, as if death was magnified inside my mind. My toes went first, then my feet, then my legs. They just became absent. My abdomen, my chest and then my neck just shut off. But the focus of my consciousness in that room was intense, everything was so clearly defined around me. I was shutting down, but I was more aware of the world than I had ever been.’

  Ewan paused to swallow and moisten his lips. ‘But then I was looking at myself. Standing upright and looking down at myself. Like in Hazzard’s stories, I was looking at myself from nothing. I was in two places. I could see myself on the floorboards in a room in that terrible house. My eyes were open but totally vacant . . . I wasn’t there any more. And I remember thinking how thin I looked. And how long my body was, as if I’d never realized what I actually looked like. It wasn’t the same as looking in the mirror. I looked . . . strange.

  ‘That didn’t matter, that body on the floor. I felt nothing for it. But I still knew that it was me. I knew that I had split. I didn’t care that I had separated. I felt euphoric. I was euphoria.’

  Ewan lay back and briefly closed his eyes in bliss from recall alone. ‘The experience was so gentle and beautiful. I was in love and loved more than I had ever been . . . It was more powerful, more transporting than the effect of any drug that I’d ever taken. Here was true joy. I was free. It was all over, the struggle. I was completely free of myself. And yet, I understood everything too. Or I was about to understand and . . . about to know everything, instinctively and all at once. It was like I was on the edge . . . of that.

  ‘I watched one of the two people that I was with, and he touched me. I could see the back of his head. I watched him shake me really hard. And I suddenly fell forwards. It was like stumbling in a dream, like stepping
off a kerb that you haven’t seen, or a step that suddenly appears under your foot. There was this sickening jolt and I woke up on the floor, back inside that body that I had just been looking at. My body. And the experience was over. Completely.

  ‘I cried because I had come back. For the first time in my life, I really wanted to die. I wished that I had died. That was the first time it happened and it changed my life. It changed everything.’

  Seb realized that, if his experiences in the last two weeks had never happened, Ewan had said nothing that couldn’t be explained as the result of drug use, mental illness or a combination of the two. ‘The first time?’

  ‘I was taken to hospital and kept inside for a few days. They ran tests. I was in pretty bad shape and I was diagnosed with epilepsy. I’d had a couple of fits before, but nothing like that one. I thought it was because of what I’d been taking, impure stuff, for years, living rough, you know? But it happened again, in the hospital, on the ward. Maybe I had another fit, but a milder one. I don’t know.

  ‘I found myself standing beside the bed, looking down at myself. That time it didn’t last long. As soon as I became aware of what I was doing, I fell back, into myself, and I was awake again in a hospital bed, inside this long, dark room. The ward. But it hadn’t been dark when I was standing beside the bed. The room had been filled with light. Beautiful, soft light. I had seen everything inside the room. I only realized later that I had been the light.

  ‘I knew something special was happening to me. It didn’t make me afraid. Not at all. I couldn’t think about anything else afterwards. It was like that had been a sign. A message. I’d been guided and this was my new purpose, to understand and control a gift. This was something unique that I could do. This was the thing that I had always been looking for. It’s like it found me. There was nothing that I would ever do in my life again that could compare to that experience. I had travelled, truly. My soul had detached from my body.’

  ‘When did this happen?’

  ‘2010. Though there were plenty of signs before then that I was right for it. Compatible. I thought poetry was the route for my awakening, music, drugs, a lifestyle, a way of living, of being. Subconsciously I had always been searching for it, without being sure of what “it” was. But nothing compares to this, no other human experience.’

  ‘You learned to . . . what, harness it?’

  Ewan shrugged. ‘Not really. Not for a long time. Not until . . .’ He didn’t finish the sentence and reached for the glass to drain the last drops of water. Seb suspected it was a deliberate evasion.

  ‘I tried. God, did I try. You have no idea how hard. But you gotta let it take you. You don’t decide. You just put yourself by the door and hope that it opens, like Hazzard said. Took me a long time to realize that. And sometimes it would happen when I was sitting down, drifting off, day-dreaming. But mostly when I was lying down, before I fell asleep. It can’t be forced. The fit shook something loose, though, a latent, innate gift.’

  ‘What about the fits? Don’t you need medication? To see a doctor? I mean, it’s pretty bloody serious. Don’t you care about your health?’

  Ewan glanced at Seb as if the question was stupid. But within the look was the answer: of course Ewan didn’t care. Why would he care, when he thought he’d found something greater than life itself? Something that he believed would transform his own dull and painful existence.

  ‘It started to happen without the fits. They weren’t always involved, thank God. I had inhibitors, medicine for my condition. But sometimes, quite randomly, when I was resting, and really tired, I just seemed to step outside of my body. Sometimes as I was going under, falling asleep, I’d feel myself rise up and out. I would open my eyes and be wide awake, fully conscious, but looking down at myself, from the ceiling. I would be floating. I could also wake in the early hours of the morning after a dream and I would sit up, but my body would still be lying down.

  ‘Around that time, it even happened in a cinema. I was standing beside my seat, about three feet away, in the aisle, and looking at myself sitting down. I had no recollection of even leaving my body. I was just there.

  ‘I had to go home for a while, after the first fit, after my diagnosis, and I remember my mother came into my room one morning. She had a cup of tea and my medication to make sure that I took it. I remember watching her enter the room and approach the bed. My body was inside that bed. But I was standing in the corner of the room, watching her.

  ‘As soon as I became aware that it was happening, I would always return to my body, with this jolt. A sickening kind of click or crack and I’d be back inside my body, and feeling weak and tired and disappointed again.

  ‘I knew I had to be relaxed. Extremely relaxed. Especially my muscles. So I took relaxants when I could get them. My mother had medication for anxiety attacks, and those tablets helped. In combination with medication I used yoga and meditation. I studied those for the years when I was at my mother’s. I had to get everything right, the body, the mind, the environment, the situation, otherwise it was hopeless. The room had to be warm too. And I would begin my breathing exercises. I would put my whole body to sleep, one part at a time.’

  Seb writhed at the idea of the selfish prick taking his old mum’s medication, but Ewan remained enraptured by his own recall. ‘I would begin the process with the little toe of my right foot. Have you any idea how long it can take to make one toe go to sleep? I mastered it. Eventually I could turn my body into a dead weight and that mass would then dissolve. The facial muscles were the hardest parts to get right. But I would become so deeply relaxed, my body so limp, that I wasn’t awake or asleep. I was between. That’s crucial, to get between states of consciousness. I learned that, once I had reached my eyes, the final part of myself, I needed to imagine a void, a hole, a great emptiness between my eyes.

  ‘Eventually, in my mother’s house, in the room I kept there, this blank, white room, where nothing could distract me, I found myself near the ceiling, looking down upon myself again. And forty-three times thereafter across two years. I kept a journal. I made it happen forty-three times. Imagine it!’

  Ewan slumped back and released an exasperated sigh. ‘Our minds are the key, or what is held inside our minds is the key. But our minds are also the jailors. Anxiety, or surprise, or shock, or any conscious activity can disrupt the experience. I could not linger, as so many others had done before me, in that state. There was instinctive panic. A primal anxiety, the dread of not being able to return. The survival instinct, it’s in the body. And nothing that I could do about it. Unless I stopped taking my medication. Then, I would leave my body so dramatically during a fit, and the experience would last for longer, and more intensely, while my body was in shock. Only while my body was close to death could the soul-body better escape.’

  ‘You’re not taking the meds now, are you?’

  ‘I don’t have any,’ Ewan said in a voice as piteous as Seb had heard yet.

  So that he could terrorize Seb, Ewan had put his health in the gravest danger. ‘Jesus Christ.’

  ‘There was no way it was all a daydream, or a hallucination, a delusion. Where I ended up is hyper-real. My acuity was incredible. I could even see dust motes. Every colour was beautiful. I put a print in my room, a Van Gogh, and I saw what he had seen, but barely managed to transcribe into a great painting.

  ‘Everything around me was living, emitting, transporting. Twice, when I was drawn upwards and suspended, I even managed to touch the ceiling. Where the paint was rough, the sensation in my fingertips was so exaggerated that I could have been touching broken glass. Where the paintwork was smooth, I could have been touching sandpaper. And I was willing myself to move. Don’t you see? I was moving on the ceiling of that room. You can’t imagine it.

  ‘So where else could I go? What else was possible? And the light! My God, the light. If you saw a glimpse of it right now, in here, you would weep. You would dream of it every day for the rest of your life. You would crave it. That
is how moonlight should be, enchanted. It was my spirit that was generating that light. Me. The inmost light.

  ‘Soon, I was beginning to notice myself too, as a form. My ability was evolving. It was adding limbs that weren’t really there. I even put a mirror in my room and angled it so that I would see myself if I separated. And I managed to see myself once, in the air while my body lay beneath me on the bed. I could see part of myself, just adrift, floating. I’d wanted to see myself, so I had focused on seeing myself, and I did. There were two of me in that room.

  ‘I could think too. And remember things more clearly than at any other time in my life. But it’s not like reasoning. Everything just came to me at once, in a flash. I could see, hear, feel everything more acutely. It’s not a dream. I was more conscious. I was more intelligent. I’d never been so wide awake and never experienced such a wonderful feeling. The weightlessness as you ascend . . . The vitality you feel. The delight in seeing the world so bright and alive in a way it never was before. There’s no pain, only joy.

  ‘And in that form, I could also see three hundred and sixty degrees without turning my head. I only had to want to see behind myself and I could. It was subtle. A nuance of the experience. So I knew that I could also look beyond a wall, or a ceiling, or anything solid if I so desired. Sometimes, I would be looking down at myself in the bed, with everything below me appearing small, while behind me was infinity, a vast blackness.

  ‘What if I could also move further away from where my physical self lay, and I could travel beyond the room? That was my thinking. I sensed that movement to other places could be instantaneous. And in time it was.’

  Ewan grinned his yellow grin. ‘As you can attest.’

  ‘Someone else taught you how to go further.’

  Ewan’s grin became a smile though it was less pleasant than the previous expression. ‘I’m tired. If you want to know more, you’ll have to read my book.’