Under a Watchful Eye

by Adam Nevill

  Even after what he’d just listened to, Seb found it difficult to want to know that much. ‘So what happens now?’

  ‘That’s entirely up to you.’

  ‘You can’t stay here.’

  ‘Only until you’ve worked on my book. This is a great opportunity for you.’

  ‘I’ll be the judge of that. And I don’t believe you, or trust anything that you say. That’s my main problem. There is also a massive collection of fragments in my living room, scattered inside two bin bags. I don’t have the time to work on that. So I’m happy with a synopsis of the remainder of your story. The part that takes you from your mother’s spare bedroom to here.’

  ‘That’s far too complicated. You wouldn’t understand, or believe it for that matter. I’m afraid that would be a bit too much for you. Better to read it. The manuscript is a bit more considered.’

  ‘It’s the bit more that concerns me. And you clearly have no intention of going anywhere, and neither do I, so spill.’

  Ewan immediately became uncomfortable and adopted a more serious tone. ‘I don’t feel comfortable talking about it. Not right now. I don’t feel well. For fuck’s sake, I’ve had a massive bloody fit and you’re interrogating me.’

  ‘That’s not why you won’t talk.’ Seb wanted to be more than a little astonished by the story he’d just heard, but he found that he couldn’t get past the situation, nor past what use Ewan’s great ‘gift’ had ultimately been put to. He also knew that he had heard an incomplete version of events. An embellished version probably existed inside the bin bags too. Ewan was not an honest man and he was playing for time.

  ‘Let me guess, Ewan: the next chapter ended badly for you. Just like everything else in your life. Yet no lessons were learned. So here’s an interpretation of my own: you are attempting some desperate last resort at my expense, because you’ve nowhere else to go. This is the end of your line. Right here.’

  Ewan had closed his eyes before Seb finished.

  Seb woke. Sat up quickly. Fought his way free of the duvet and clambered off the mattress as if that could remove him from where he had just been while asleep.

  He had not registered seeing any walls in the large, partially lit space that he’d just dreamed of. Behind the figures surrounding him, the borders had dissolved to black. Those others had been suspended in the air.

  Seb couldn’t recall a single face now, only suggestions of the naked and grey condition of the bodies bumping together, up there.

  From each navel, including his own, a snaking silvery cord had disappeared into the darkness of the floor. The stems had appeared as flexible and rubbery as flesh, while shining like liquid mercury.

  Awake, he now thought of those cords as strange metallic weeds. He also thought of fungal growths in caves, mushrooming from out of rock.

  All of the people in the dream had been agitated. They had talked in hurried whispers while moving their arms in small circular movements as if they were underwater. Beneath them, where a floor should have been, water had flowed. Black water without a trace of foam or a reflection. An underground stream in some kind of cavern and the people had been anchored to its bottom by the silvered cords extending from their abdomens. The water had rushed across the bottom of the room and travelled into a darkness without definition or relief.

  He’d scraped his fingers at the ceiling and slapped it with his hands. The surface had issued a hollow sound but been too hard to break. He’d known that he would never escape the tunnel.

  The only illumination in the space had come from a dim, metallic light issuing from the figures themselves and from their silver cords, as they all drifted. And either the surface above them was lowering or the water was rising. An elderly man beside Seb had wept, as if knowing they would soon submerge in the fast current and be swept away into nothingness.

  Nearby, out of his view, a woman had said, ‘Sink. Heavy, heavy. Sink deep.’ She’d seemed excited by the prospect of doing so.

  Others had begun to repeat that phrase as if it were a command or prayer. As his anxiety had also turned to a dreadful joy, Seb had felt a compulsion to contribute to the chorus.

  The water rose and his cord shrivelled like a disused umbilicus. Where it grew out of his abdomen the flesh had turned black. The stem then issued a far weaker light.

  He’d woken.

  What had Ewan said earlier about it being time he was involved in something more ambitious? Involved in something dangerous; had that been the inference?

  Seb looked about the bed. His room was dark but the silhouettes of the furniture were visible. Light didn’t so much shine beneath the door from the passage outside, as seep inside. A soft, grey light tinged a glacial blue.

  When he opened his bedroom door he realized that the lights in the corridor were switched off. Despite that, he was seeing too much of the passage without the aid of electric light. This dull glow in his home suggested an overspill, one steady and unflickering, but from where did it shine?

  Streetlights above the front drive were too distant to penetrate the building. Without interior light the house remained dark at night. The source confounded him.

  The television upstairs? Was Ewan in the living room again?

  As he tried to fathom out the luminosity in the corridor, his awareness of a peculiar discomfort grew. This was nothing physical, like being hot or cold. What he tried to dismiss as an after-effect of the nightmare persisted as apprehension. He suspected he was about to meet someone unpleasant. The very atmosphere of the building had altered and now swelled with the anticipation of a presence, or the arrival of something.

  Taking shorter breaths, if he took them at all, Seb was reminded of how he’d felt when Ewan appeared to him outdoors. A static prickle passed through the fine hairs on the nape of his neck and needled his scalp.

  Ewan. Ewan must have been projecting again.

  Whether by shaking or punching the man awake, Seb would stop whatever was being initiated. But before he took a single step towards Ewan’s room, Seb turned in the direction of the staircase because of what he could now hear.

  The sound was coming from above him. Though the noise was muted through the walls and ceiling, someone was in distress and weeping upstairs in the living area.

  Ewan?

  As quietly as he could manage, Seb walked barefoot to the stairs and went up. He’d only taken a few steps when the weeping ceased and was replaced by a voice, or voices, that stayed low and whispered together sibilantly.

  The light on the staircase had now changed, and he would have been surprised if a television could transmit an illumination capable of making the walls and stairs appear so drab, if not neglected.

  Seb continued up.

  Within the strange light his own home now appeared much older. He peered about the landing and was made to think of shuttered and locked-away places, where dust and dross gathered behind boarded windows, and flat surfaces turned grey and powdery. Unrestored and lacking in human habitation for decades.

  Before Seb made the landing, the distant murmur of voices was accompanied by the noise of dry paper shifting about the wooden floorboards. It could have been the riffling of a book’s pages by a breeze.

  From where he stood, he could see that the doors of the study and utility rooms were closed. The television was mounted on a wall and was out of sight, but the set emitted no light. It wasn’t switched on, so the light wasn’t coming from there.

  Just out of his sight, on the far side of the living room, the paper was soon being strewn about as if loose leaves were being subjected to a hurried investigation.

  What he could see of the living area, which reached to the windows and balcony beyond, might have become a basement. One in which his furniture had been stored for years. The light was faint and grainy, with a hint of tarnished silver, as if it were passing through gaps in the walls. Picture frames were black holes. Bookcases were inky rectangles. The corners of the room and balcony doors were lost entirely to darkness.
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  The unnatural light aged whatever it fell upon. He suspected he’d re-entered his most recent dream and become engulfed by the ghastly illumination of the watery tunnel.

  Where was the source?

  The voices?

  ‘Ewan?’ he called out, but too quietly. ‘Ewan! God’s sake, what are you doing?’

  His voice startled a fresh activity within the living room, and he was relieved that he could not see what had cast its shadow onto the far wall.

  Those lengths of what might have been the impossible shadows of wavering tree branches soon took shape as peculiarly long arms held out before a wasted body, topped by a large head.

  The murky suggestion of shadow then rose up higher and felt about, as if blind and unsteady when upright.

  A heavy object struck the living-room floor and Seb’s heart may have stopped for several seconds. He assumed that a sighting of whatever was inside the room would be foolish. ‘Who’s there?’ he cried out, the force of his voice compelled by panic.

  A soft thump.

  Scratching.

  The shadow on the living room wall grew within his sight.

  Taking three steps at a time, Seb fled down the stairs. As he descended, his last glimpse of the shadow repeated maddeningly inside his mind. That sense of a figure dropping to the floor, then rising to all fours. It groped about as if more capable, and in possession of a much longer reach, when positioned low to the ground like a stalking animal. As the shape had moved fluently about the room there had been a swishing sound, reminiscent of a heavy cloth sweeping floorboards.

  The muttering that followed him down the stairs was human-like, though much reduced, before it degraded into something canine.

  Seb reached the foot of the stairs and turned for the ground floor. He would have kept going had the last flight of steps not looked so impenetrably dark. He was also certain that the darkness down there swelled and bustled with a curious energy of its own.

  As he hesitated, the back of his neck tingled afresh, in anticipation of both an attack from below and a blow from behind. One glance over his shoulder was sufficient for him to notice movement on the staircase wall. What could have been human limbs commanding an unnatural extension, struck out and snatched at the air, and in a manner uncomfortably similar to that of a magnified insect. And if those were the shadows of hands, then the nails extending from the digits were long enough to qualify as claws.

  The scream that followed was reminiscent of the distant shrieks of the apes in Paignton Zoo, which could be heard miles away on a still day, as faraway territorial disputes were conducted on the contoured cement of their enclosures.

  Seb pounded down the passage and threw himself inside his bedroom. Using what felt like a superhuman strength, he raised one end of his antique chest of drawers and hauled it across the floorboards, scraping the skirting-board paintwork. He dropped the heavy article part-way across the door.

  At the windows he tore open the curtains.

  His shaking fingers began a futile clawing at the window locks. He turned the steel security key backwards and forwards, momentarily forgetting that the key required a simultaneous press and turn to release the window. By the time he remembered this, he’d become paralysed with terror at the sound of what moved through the passage beyond his bedroom.

  A shriek outside was followed by a heartfelt sobbing and a string of muffled words intoned in some kind of entreaty for mercy or succour. The piteous whimpering of a grown man had recommenced, and directly outside his door. A sound that passed inside his room to inhabit his nerves.

  When the crying ceased, a nasal whine shook Seb enough for him to make another attempt to unfasten the window lock, while knowing that the drop from the first floor was too great. Two broken ankles. He was trapped.

  The whine passed away in the direction of the stairs.

  Not breathing, Seb listened and received an impression that the intruder was conducting a search, albeit blindly.

  It entered the empty bedroom on the other side of the wall. A grumble whined into a bestial snarl. With horrible clarity, Seb imagined an old mouth that opened too widely. One filled with yellowing teeth.

  Shouts of distress issued from Ewan’s room, further down the passage. Such was the strength of Ewan’s bellow his cries passed through several walls.

  Seb crouched under the window and hugged his body into a ball.

  Ewan flung wide the door of his own room and shouted, ‘No! No! Get away! Get away! No! No! I’m trying to help. I’m only trying to help!’ This was swiftly followed by the sound of Ewan’s feet slapping towards Seb’s bedroom.

  Seb watched the door handle being snapped up and down from outside. Ewan was trying to get in, and desperately enough to employ his feet, knees and hands to bang at the door, shaking it in the frame.

  ‘Let me in,’ Ewan whimpered, his words near breathless.

  ‘No!’

  Ewan made a narrow gap through which one of his arms, whisking in an anorak sleeve, came through to swipe about inside as if he was trying to push Seb away from the other side of the door. When Ewan’s hand found the obstacle, the chest of drawers, he slammed his shoulder against the door, lower down and closer to the door handle. The barricade rocked back and forth.

  Around Seb, the air swelled with an unbearable anticipation.

  Ewan spoke again, though not to Seb. He seemed to be talking to someone else, out there, in the corridor. It was hard to understand all of what he was saying, but the childlike tone of his voice surprised Seb. ‘No. You can’t . . . Don’t.’ Ewan was pleading. ‘I’m doing what he wanted. Get away!’

  Ewan resumed hurling the full weight of his body against the wood until the barrier jolted forwards. Soon after, he was inside the bedroom. He slammed the door and turned round, his ungainly body wedged behind the chest of drawers. ‘Here,’ he said, panting, but as if to a room full of people.

  Seb had never seen Ewan so witless, so blanched and jittery, his eyes so wide and the yellow teeth bared horribly as his fear chattered out. ‘They know. They followed. They know. They know.’ Ewan’s muttering then became inaudible.

  He had no idea who Ewan was speaking about, but Seb got to his feet and began clumsily tugging on a pair of jeans with shaky hands. Socks and a hooded top followed. His shoes were downstairs. ‘What . . .’ Seb said, but was too shocked to finish the sentence. He finally managed, ‘Has it gone?’

  Ewan seemed to notice Seb for the first time. Strands of greying hair were stuck to his bearded cheeks. He raised a hand to bid Seb be silent. ‘We have to get out,’ he whispered, and rolled his eyes to look up at the ceiling. ‘It will come inside.’

  Seb suffered a sensation of his body dropping through thin air. When he regained his bearings, he felt weak and sickened with a fear that would not relent. Memories of the animal shrieks returned to his memory and resounded inside his skull. He went for the bedside lamp and clicked it on.

  ‘No,’ Ewan said, in a desperate whisper.

  Seb ignored him and made for the main lights.

  ‘Idiot! If it gets in you’ll see it . . . properly.’ He shook his head. ‘You don’t want to do that.’

  The receipt of this detail had Seb reaching for the chest of drawers to steady himself. His legs wanted to go out from under him. Ewan’s body odour served to revive him.

  Trying to make as little noise as possible, he returned to the bedside table and turned off the lamp. When halfway across the room on his way back to the door, Ewan said, ‘In here. There . . .’

  Ewan clawed his way around the door and disappeared, shutting the door behind himself, sealing Seb inside with the room’s most recent arrival.

  Reluctantly and fearfully, Seb turned to see what had startled Ewan. And even though no electric light brightened the room, the air was now lighter than it should have been, or had been only moments before. Like the living area had been, the room was drained of any colour but that of a dull mercury, and the visible furniture was aged with the i
nstantaneous affliction of antiquity.

  The air billowed with an otherwise invisible presence. Though it didn’t remain concealed for long. In a far corner beside the bed an indistinct shape appeared close to the floor. Motion became manifest too, as each taut second passed to reveal the form, moving about on the floor in a series of jerks.

  Before the paralysis snapped from Seb’s limbs, the shape rose and its sickly luminance cast a shadow. Impossibly, a silhouette appeared on the wall and the ceiling above the bed, and upon the other side of the room too.

  The form expanded and contracted quickly at the edge of Seb’s vision, though whether this was from the weird atmospherics or from pure shock he did not know.

  Seb yanked the door open.

  A desperate sob became audible within the room that he departed. It was louder than before and filled with more distress than he’d known any living thing capable.

  He closed the door behind himself, but as he’d turned he’d glimpsed movement in the mirror of the wardrobe, and received an impression of something sticklike but agile and too tall to be human. If that had been a head topping the form, the head had been covered. Seb suffered a notion that eyeholes had been cut out of whatever concealed the face. The suggestion of its arms extended and grasped at where he had just been standing.

  As the noise of the apparition’s grief transformed into something doglike, Seb fled, barely keeping his footing on the stairs to the ground floor.

  When he reached the hallway, Ewan was still fumbling with the front door keys in an attempt to get out.

  10

  Hinderers in the Passage

  Bent double, and gripping knees that shook from the exertion of bolting from the house and running to a stagger, Seb stared at Ewan with all of the murderous loathing that his mind could summon.

  Ewan lay on the grass beside him, facing the sky, insensible with exhaustion. His eyes were closed.

  They’d stopped running a mile clear of the house. If Ewan was running then he should be too; that had been his thinking and had brought them here. The ragged jog had ended after Ewan collapsed upon the dewy grass, at the top of a path that led deeper inside the Berry Head Nature Reserve.