Under a Watchful Eye

by Adam Nevill

  ‘But, as I said, this was the night before Mr Alexander come back and passed away. It was ever so strange because this lady was really frightened. Really put the wind up her, as my old dad used to say, cos whoever she saw had his head inside something, like a sack or pillow case. That’s what she said. Never heard anything like that in my life, have you? She shut her door quick, like, and told Ray in the morning.’

  Seb felt that he should say, how odd, or how strange, but the constriction of his throat strangled a response.

  Now that she had a listener, Dot’s story became irrepressible. ‘But I says to her, like I’m telling you now, that Mr Alexander was not even here that night. Could not have been. No way, I says to her. Me husband wakes up when anyone comes through that door of a night. And we were nearly empty as it is. There was only the lady in two and a couple up on the next floor. Elderly like, and they’re always back in their room by nine. So it couldn’t have been a friend of Mr Alexander’s. How would he have got in here, for one thing?

  ‘We’d checked with the maid who does the rooms in the mornings and she said his bed hadn’t been slept in either of them nights that he wasn’t here, so he weren’t here. No way. But it gets stranger, really odd, like. Because the elderly couple up in five had said that on the day before Mr Alexander came back, that they had seen someone in here too, this room. With summat over their face, and looking out the window as they came in from the garden, and it give them quite a shock. They come in and says to Ray that the fella in number three needs his head seeing to, you know? That his jokes weren’t funny. If there’d been kids here, they said they might have been really frightened.’

  Seb had to concentrate on making himself speak loud enough to be heard. ‘They saw something . . . someone?’

  ‘Hard to say and I only heard this through me husband. And when I asked them the next day, the Gibsons, like, they didn’t want to talk about it. You know, it made them quite angry. But Mr Alexander wasn’t even here that day. Hadn’t been in his bed and, like I said, we would have seen him come through the front door.

  ‘It must have been the curtains and the light, you know, on the glass. That’s what I reckon, but they swore blind that they saw this fella in this room, at the window and looking down. Clearly like. They said he was wearing an old suit too. That’s right. It’s the details that make it so strange. I mean, an old black suit, with this big head, they said. Mrs Gibson said it was like a horse’s hood, you know. A horse with a white sack over this long head, but with eye holes cut in it. I mean, I don’t know what they were on themselves. Because they said he shrank too. Got smaller, you know. Then he wasn’t there at all.

  ‘But don’t you think it’s odd that the lady in number two says she saw something very similar in the hall, outside this room?’

  Dot pulled a face as if she’d bitten into something unpleasant while she let Seb imagine what she’d described for him. ‘I don’t like anything like that, you know. It does my head in. And no one has ever said nothing like that, not here, and we’ve had this place thirty years. But it made me think, you know, about this chap in number three. It was another reason to not want him staying here. I’m not being cruel, because we’re as open-minded as the next person, but it still seems odd that the other guests should start seeing things. I’d like to say that they was making it all up, but I’m not sure that I can.’

  After his tour of the place of death, Ray helped Seb carry the two big bin bags and Ewan’s rucksack to Seb’s car, parked at the kerb out front. Ray and Dot were visibly relieved to get ‘shot of them’. With the police reluctant to take them off their hands and Ewan’s mother not wanting it, Ray and Dot hadn’t known what to do with the three bags and had left them in their office.

  ‘We was gonna give it a few weeks and then put ’em out for the bin men,’ Ray had said, before Seb drove away. ‘They’re a bit whiffy, even with the windows open.’

  13

  Indeed, I Have Seen my Sister

  [Society of Psychophysical Research – SPR. Vol. 4. Case No. 37. 1963. ‘Mr B’]

  This place that we appear in, I know, is analogous to the world I left, and to its time and the natural laws that govern it. We can see the world we leave exactly as it was before we left it, though the light is very different. But we also stand at the gateway to immortality, to eternal life. Of this, I have no doubt now.

  I have actually taken my first step on the journey that begins after bodily death, and have renounced my will and been in the presence of something far greater, perhaps even God. But to also preserve my individuality, to be myself but changed and better as I venture deeper, is a miracle in itself, and the greatest journey that a man can embark upon. H was right and I have remained sceptical of my wife’s obsession for far too long.

  H commands my utmost respect, he has my faith. Like Christ, a comparison my wife so often made, he has remained steadfast in his beliefs, despite derision and persecution. He has been committed to his purpose, as we must be.

  Seb had returned home and placed Ewan’s bags on the floor of his office. And then circled them for hours. Several pots of coffee had succeeded in palpitating his heart and making his skin clammy.

  After the shock of Ewan’s death, he knew he was teetering on the brink of a new obsession. Despite the carousel of the past few weeks, sweeping him from terror to rage and back to terror, an awakening was underway within his imagination; a stirring of whatever had first compelled him to dedicate his life to writing fiction, over thirty years before. That unstable core of impressions and ideas was excavating itself from the rubble of the dulling process that had engulfed him across the previous two years.

  The unpleasant smell arising from the bags, however, proved inexhaustible and spread to fill the office. Seb opened every window on the top floor and cast wide the balcony doors in the living room to disperse the stale odour of Ewan and his dusty paper.

  For an inspection of the rucksack, he’d backed the car onto the drive and worn gardening gloves to examine the contents in the garage.

  He’d immediately shovelled the articles of clothing into a refuse sack, as well as a pair of shoes, the soles worn paper-thin from Ewan’s wanderings. An old Nokia phone he put to one side. The battery was dead and there was no charger. An antique Sony Walkman with a broken lid was unearthed, along with twenty compact discs of music, including Bathory, Emperor, Blood Frenzy, The 13th Floor Elevators and Coil. Seb tossed the music and the Walkman into the refuse bag.

  From what he could establish from Ewan’s effects, the value of his friend’s estate amounted to six pounds and thirty-seven pence. The money was stored in the toe of a venomous shoe.

  Seb had returned upstairs with the ancient mobile phone. Everything else in the rucksack he’d buried in the wheelie bin intended for household waste. A collection was due on Thursday.

  The bin bags that Ewan had been carrying contained fifty-four manila folders. They were old, a pale green in colour and instigated a memory of school stationery in the seventies. Each folder had been stamped ‘Society of Psychophysical Research (SPR) – CONFIDENTIAL’. This was followed by a title: ‘Case Studies’, a volume number, and then a date. At a glance, most of the folders originated in the sixties.

  The actual reports inside the folders were mottled and issued a fragrance of dried damp, but the text was visible. Each sheet of paper functioned as an official form, was identical in design and filled with black type. The headers of each document repeated the information on the front of the file, but the index classification on each report was followed by the name of the subject who’d given testimony. Some of the same names appeared across multiple reports in the first few folders.

  Randomly removing reports from the bin liners, Seb read haphazardly but compulsively. His reaction became fascination combined with horror.

  [SPR. Vol. 7. Case No. 28. 1963. Mrs K. Harlow]

  I found myself at a great height again. I looked down upon the world from a distance that I found terrible. So
much so that I came to quite shaken, and gripped by an impression that a vast expanse of black space had just surrounded me. The tiny white bed from which I had risen had been visible below. And yet, I knew, in some other form, that I had been inside that bed the whole time.

  [SPR. Vol. 10. Case No. 107. 1963.

  Mrs Ruby McDougal]

  H and Diane have congratulated me on my first successes. This comes at a time when I feared I had disappointed H, and all of the others who have persisted for so long. I cannot tell you how much their approval has meant. But they assure me that I am at the threshold of the truly wondrous, and am receiving the early intimations.

  And yet it happened as I was resting after a long and fruitless day, in which I was sedated twice with two inducements. The second dose made me terribly sick, frightened and paranoid. But as I lay down that evening, I became aware of being entirely raised up and off the bed. At least two feet of space existed between my body and my consciousness.

  The second time, I was again completely exhausted in mind and body, and suddenly found myself to be hovering over the bed and looking down at myself. I looked into my own eyes and knew at once that I was absent from them.

  I sat up, but my body remained prone. I lay down and repeated the action twice, but I stayed detached.

  The same woman had filed over a dozen reports across two years. Seb could only assume that she’d been a patient in a facility, or the subject of an experiment. Or perhaps all of the information was submitted by volunteers to be collated by this SPR.

  [SPR. Vol. 16. Case No. 79. 1964.

  Mrs Ruby McDougal]

  I saw the room as it had been, though it was much brighter, clearer, with every object illumined from within and made vivid, almost sparkling. The dust motes were a cascade of gold before the window. My face upon the bed was the most surprising thing. Without doubt that was my head upon the pillow, and yet my face seemed so different to the one that I had looked upon in mirrors, so many times before in my life.

  The room I fell asleep in had been dark, but during the experience the room could have been bathed in an unworldly form of moonlight, or illumined by the glow from a soft and magical nightlight. The light was opalescent. But when I saw myself inside the bed, I panicked and woke with a jolt. I opened my eyes and the room was black. Nothing inside the room was visible.

  Seb discovered that the same woman had progressed to mastering an astonishing feat.

  [SPR. Vol. 12. Case No. 29. 1965.

  Mrs Ruby McDougal]

  I stood in the room and watched the session. They were all sitting and continuing with the formulation of the image-making while repeating the renunciation. But I had already left my body and stood behind myself.

  I instinctively became aware of H and turned to see him and Katie. They were outside the room, standing at the window and were smiling at me.

  I felt superior to the other people around me for the first time in my life. Suddenly, I knew that I must get past my husband’s decision to leave. This is what we had come here for. This is what I had stayed for. All of our sacrifices to this point were worthwhile. My sense of succeeding and of belonging created an emotional reaction of such force that I returned to my body with a jolt. When I looked up, I was sat upon the floor again, amongst my group. I looked to the window but could see no one outside.

  How is it that H and Katie can stay outside themselves for so long? If it kills me I will master this!

  Seb abandoned Ruby and picked up with an individual who, he later discovered, had been the subject of over one hundred reports.

  [SPR. Vol. 18. Case No. 31. 1964. ‘V’]

  As I ventured further than my room, the whole house was alight with the same misted radiance, pearl coloured, tinged with grey. My individual senses became one, what H calls the ‘supersense’. I could see everything in the building, but through everything too, through the very walls if I wished. I felt as though I could see the outside and inside of every simple, ordinary object, while instinctively understanding its form and texture. No barriers stood before me. Whatever was behind me I already knew was there without looking. The feeling was incredible.

  The world was the same but fundamentally changed. The world was charged with an energy from somewhere else entirely.

  I could have been joy incarnate. My very being was so buoyant, and I was in command of four dimensions.

  When I thought of my husband, whom I had left in the bed, I at once came to be standing beside the bed in our room, and looking down upon him as he lay next to my physical body. That had never happened before, but I pitied my poor body and its sense of vacancy, while wishing for my husband to wake and to see me.

  My mind has never been so clear as it was that night, so active but unstained by doubt. All was comprehensible instantaneously – myself, the world, my relationships, the past, the point of everything. It was incredible and yet I was entirely passive, a mere observer, and not thinking of my environment analytically at all during the experience.

  I saw three other forms drifting in the corridor outside our room. And we were the light! We, the apparitions, lit the place. But my shock at seeing others ended my projection. When I came to, it was as if my mind had suddenly filled with shadows and was encircled with those familiar bands of discomfort, that formed from tension and anxiety. All of my fears were back in place.

  Nonetheless, Diane was very pleased with my account in the morning. She tells me that my vehicle of vitality is loose and immediately advanced me to the adepts. I have not been more thrilled by anything in my entire life. She says she wants me to attempt a journey further afield, maybe to one of the test sites, and to report back on what I see there.

  H, Diane, the adepts, the building, test sites . . . Seb’s mind groped for more specifics and context, but the background remained opaque. The documents were focused entirely upon the sensations of the case studies, and the very experience of this curious disassociation within a patient’s consciousness. He assumed that there was no need for the subjects to explain the purpose, the theory, or the history of a project that they were already familiar with.

  He wondered how these files had come into Ewan’s possession. The SPR reports were all written either before Ewan had been born, or when he was a child. But this was material that Ewan had wanted him to integrate into an autobiographical book, to augment his own testimony.

  Seb removed all of the files from the first bag. Carefully, he placed the folders into chronological order, spreading them across the floor of his office. And began reading from the beginning, replacing the files around his feet as he progressed.

  By the time he had finished the contents of the first bag, it had become dark outside without him noticing nightfall. He stood up, feeling uncomfortably exposed with all of the curtains and blinds open, and moved into the lounge to fix himself a strong drink.

  The cold smell of the sea had filled the top floor of the house. He closed the balcony doors and began drawing the blinds for the night.

  As he read the reports, he had realized that, had he read them only a few weeks before, he would have scoffed at the accounts and felt awkward on behalf of the narrators and their tone of sincerity within such a scale of communal delusion. He even imagined himself groaning out loud, as he’d always done when imagined experiences were transformed into beliefs. But he now acknowledged he had been affected in a way few would understand. He imagined his experience of the files was similar to someone reading voraciously about a serious illness that they’d just been diagnosed as having.

  Seb sat in the living room and stared into space for a long time afterwards. The lost voices of the SPR continued to speak excitedly within his memory. They seemed to revolve, chattering like a crowd.

  . . . Silver light turning fast, raising my body into the air . . .

  . . . I could penetrate the walls with ease . . .

  . . . The inducements are far too strong, but H insists that my fall was a blessing because it led to me looking down u
pon my body from somewhere beneath the ceiling . . .

  . . . So this is vitality. This is health. I had been ill for so long and in pain that I had forgotten what it was like to be well . . .

  . . . I saw the roof of the facility and the signs that had been put there for those who can reach such an elevation. I reported back on exactly what I had seen. Though H is ill, he held my hands and tears glistened in his eyes . . .

  . . . The spiritual body has no weight at all . . .

  . . . the sensation on entering the blackness is now quite wonderful . . .

  . . . Once I let go of my fear I feel like an animal freed from captivity. Beyond the darkness, I am assured there is a light everlasting . . .

  . . . To think is to move now. My bilocation is becoming instantaneous. H and Diane are paying me a great deal of attention. I feel the other girls are becoming frightfully jealous . . .

  . . . Exultation . . . Exhilaration . . . Radiant light . . . my spirit-body freed . . . peace and vigour . . . the flow of energy . . . in the air but facing down and seeing my body that still writhed and twitched in its pain . . . my etheric form . . .

  Some of the testimony had made Seb mutter out loud because it induced the full force of a recent dream that had been far too vivid. These sections of the reports he’d also transcribed into a notepad.