Under a Watchful Eye

by Adam Nevill

  My spirit-body bled through, and nourished the silver cord, it grew thinner in the middle and then detached, became vaporous, disappeared . . . from the ceiling, up near the corner, came unto me a rushing and a force that presented an opening, an aperture. I glimpsed a figure inside . . .

  Over and over again the same experiences were described, though in ecstatic terms and with a sense of triumph that Seb could not share with these distant witnesses. How had all of this contributed to Ewan becoming an unwashed, homeless alcoholic, who was found dead in a guest house with six quid to his name?

  The silver cord has begun to appear for me too. It flickered into life last night for the first time. And I sensed more than saw the slow dark river. I was delighted when I came to. I wept and embraced my friends. If I can return there, to that place, then the detachment, the sinking, the heavy, heavy sinking that they all speak of, will occur. My renunciation to the deep is possible.

  At the repeated references to ‘the silver cord’, the ‘dark tunnel’, the ‘slowly flowing black water’, Seb was unable to stop imagining people being lowered into water they could not see the bottom of, by means of a disintegrating rope. Water driven by a swift current, its passage a subterranean sinus. Perhaps this was a sewer pipe beneath the afterlife, or a burrow into Hades.

  Hadn’t Ewan mentioned Hades?

  He had seen this place too.

  Seb sensed no coercion either, only voluntary participation, and an admiration for this ‘H’ and ‘Diane’. At times, the devotion bordered upon deification.

  The files were also incomplete and must have been part of a much bigger archive. 1967 alone had a file titled Volume 50, containing only the testimonies dated in July of that year.

  Throughout the day, he’d gradually developed a sense of a group of people within a larger community who had come to believe themselves special, even superhuman. They were encouraged by H and Diane to believe it too. A community addicted to a process, and the concentration of their entire will was focused upon repeating it. Another thing that reminded Seb of Ewan.

  The ‘inducement’ must have forced the process. Possibly drugs, but nothing pharmaceutical was ever mentioned. There was also a great deal of contextualizing these experiences as part of a ‘spiritual’, ‘mystical’ and ‘cosmic’ order, with much reference to the ‘spiritual body’, and that was indicative of the time. People had become ‘assured’ of the existence of a hierarchy involving other ‘spheres’, ‘realms’ and ‘dimensions’. A fair number of people too; he had records from at least fifty different individuals who’d participated in the SPR experiments. The names in the later files were different from those at the beginning. One woman, however, who was only ever referred to as ‘J’, seemed to have lived with ‘the Society’ for six years.

  Seb also suspected a high dropout rate.

  ‘My psychical evolving’ and ‘My renunciation of self has been ongoing for a long time’ and ‘My concentration within passivity’ were phrases that suggested the terminology of a cult. Here was a belief system possessing its own idiom, ideology, and terminology that also postured as something scientific.

  There was a great deal of ‘as H directed’ in the files too. H? Who was this ‘H’? Hazzard? Could ‘H’ be an actual reference to M. L. Hazzard, the obscure mystical writer that Ewan had been so enamoured of? Surely not. Seb was no expert on the obscure writer, but was sure that Hazzard’s connection would have been more well known within the horror and weird field. He’d never caught a whiff of it.

  The collective voice of the reports irritated him. There was far too little that distinguished one person from another. The subjects of the reports appeared to be speaking in a group voice. Maybe the transcription of the notes accounted for that. But there was an obsessive and narcissistic quality to the testimonies too, until the recorded ecstasies became morbidly boring.

  Seb went downstairs to bed and found himself on the verge of a profound sadness. He became tearful, but didn’t know why.

  He left the house’s lights on.

  The illumination in his dream was not the same as the electric light in his home.

  His house featured in the dream. But his home suffered a recreation by something too alien, unpleasant and insistent to have been within his mind’s capabilities.

  The nightmare was suffused with a dim, bluish light, the origins of which he had not been able to determine for a while. The glow had partially illumined his chest of drawers, the mirrored wardrobe, the steel light fittings, wooden blinds, the previous day’s clothes folded over the end of the bedstead.

  His own presence within the room was unconnected to an unfolding scene typical of a dream. Dreams did not have such extended pauses either. Nor were they still-life studies.

  A profound sense of expectation had made Seb as anxious as a child separated from its mother.

  The floor of his room was covered with liquid. Black water that reflected no light. As soon as he became aware of the water he also heard the distant hush of a current.

  The first figure to appear in the doorway of his room passed down the corridor outside without noticing him. At the sight of it, his heartbeat had occupied his mouth.

  Exhausted, bent forwards, wading through the black water that made no sound about the figure’s knees and produced no ripples, a terribly thin woman had passed his room.

  Black hair offered the only relief to her pallid form and had concealed most of her face. The lank hair was plastered to her scalp. A thin vapour, similar to what drifted from frozen food introduced to room temperature, wafted from her back and coiled behind her, then vanished. Her bloodless flesh exuded a faint grey light and the outline of her silhouette had perceptibly blurred as she staggered past, moving at an irregular speed, one much slowed, as if gravity worked against her meagre frame. She was there, in the doorway, and then she was gone.

  A second figure passed the door moments later, but on all fours. It’s emaciation and unhealthy complexion were the same as the first figure, though this one’s hair was patchy. What wisps remained drooped like wet bootlaces from the back of a livid scalp. It had once been a man and the definition of the body had shifted in space, just like that of the first figure, before settling again and then blurring once its slow and painful passage continued out of sight. A stubby appendage had hung beneath that figure’s solar plexus. The protrusion was like a dead tongue extending from the middle of a body.

  Other figures were soon drifting by, but Seb had no sense they followed those who had gone before them. All appeared isolated, their sufferings insular.

  Eventually, one of them paused and fumbled about the doorframe before coming inside his bedroom. The visitor was an aged woman, more bone than flesh, her joints pressing out her whitish-blue skin.

  Her nostrils and eyes were pitch black. She whimpered piteously and padded her palsied hands against the walls as if the room had been a sudden, strange and unexpected revelation. Seb retained the impression that she only sensed, rather than saw him, sitting in his bed and paralysed with fright. But she had wanted to find him.

  At this point the room and even the building altered. The house was still familiar, though rendered almost as a photographic negative. New objects appeared. A cushioned easy chair of indeterminate colour and pattern came to exist in one corner. It was covered by an old blanket and several discarded newspapers. None of which belonged to him.

  A second figure came inside the room. Its white arms were spidery on the dim walls that they traversed, scratching and near clawing for something that made the creature whinny with either excitement or desperation. At that point in the dream, Seb was choked with a terror that the apparition might turn and face him. And yet he never awoke.

  This form also exuded the faint vapour and displayed the thick nub, or dead remnant of an appendage about the solar plexus. The silhouette blurred out during its quicker movements closer to the bed, before settling again when it came to be still.

  An iron-framed hospital bed app
eared alongside Seb’s bed. The bars were painted white, the bed linen was white, the legs ended in casters.

  He experienced an unaccountable sense of his parents, as if they were close by, and he cried out for his mother and father. This was heard by the visitors. The elderly woman, who had come inside the room first, dropped to her knees in the black water, but without making a splash. She then clutched her long hands to her wasted face and emitted a groan, a sound filled with a misery so deep that Seb’s own anguish was reduced to that of a child merely suffering a bad dream.

  Two other naked forms waded inside the room, hurrying as much as their wasted legs would allow. They had heard him too. And as the space filled, the walls of Seb’s room became increasingly vaporous, vaguer, dissolving away entirely where the blue-grey light had failed in the inkier corners. This very light, he finally came to realize, was emitted by his own form.

  Soon he was looking at wet bricks around his bed and a curved ceiling above his head. The articles of his own furniture had disappeared, along with the hospital bed and the easy chair. The gushing of the water, as it funnelled through the dark bricks, became louder.

  This was no longer a room in a house, but a tunnel.

  The four figures about the bed groped closer.

  Seb covered his face so as not to see their eyes.

  A croaking, female voice made a sudden, desperate entreaty. ‘Which sphere is this? Can anyone tell me which sphere this is?’

  ‘I can’t get back,’ another voice called out.

  Nothing touched him, but a third voice filled one of his ears. ‘Is this the second death? This is not my greater self. Where are the everlasting arms?’

  The voices barked and echoed in the long, brick tunnel, an old sewer, and one cold and disturbed by a wind.

  ‘I can’t get back!’

  ‘Can you help me? I know you are close. Where is the light? Do you know?’

  ‘I can’t get back!’

  A wind came from an aperture that never became visible in the distance to which they had all been struggling, barely upright or on all fours. The water flowed away, around their thin limbs, and continued into the darkness.

  When they reached for Seb’s legs, he screamed and the light in his own form went out.

  A final voice spoke from the void, and with a weary resignation. The words became fainter as if the speaker were moving away from him. ‘A time of darkness.’

  14

  Greylands

  Once Seb had read the SPR files, he organized Ewan’s papers. As much as it was possible to systemize such a disparate hoard of fragments.

  He’d not suffered another vivid dream either, for six days and counting. Which was just as well, because the last one had felt too unlike a dream. Seb had subsequently tried to convince himself that the nightmare had been an aftershock, and not an attachment. A week without Ewan, and the house had also returned to its natural state.

  As Seb had deciphered Ewan’s jottings, so disturbing had he found their contents that he’d given serious consideration to their destruction. Twice he’d stopped short of consigning every scrap of paper to the recycling bin, and only hesitated because what he managed to read had cultivated more of the green shoots of his desire to really write again. What a story this would make, had been a thought on repeat. And maybe he could even claim the story was factual, as Ewan’s beloved M. L. Hazzard had done with his own obscure works. No one would believe Seb either.

  His desk and the floor of his office were soon covered by SPR files and stacks of Ewan’s dog-eared notes, date-ordered where possible. The jumbled dossier that Ewan had left behind, and its considerable marginalia, had taken Seb five long days to struggle through. The unreadable parts comprised two thirds of the documentation and had been consigned to a separate cardboard treasury box. So severe was the text’s illegibility it might have been coded, but without the author to decipher the text, some sections would remain a permanent mystery. Even though most of that consignment had been illegible, Seb worked out enough to know that every sentence began with a thickly scored ‘I’.

  The piecemeal journal was entirely handwritten, in a variety of biro colours. At the bottom of the bag Seb had found some small pens, the type that Argos stores put out for customers to fill in their order tickets. Even a pencil had been employed at one point.

  Cheap A4 pads, photocopying paper, flyers for National Trust properties and bus timetables had been used by Ewan to record his thoughts and experiences. All of the paper was smeared with grubby fingerprints and some pages had been obliterated by stains. A few folios were stuck together with what Seb hoped was food. He’d even uncovered a Hello Kitty notepad that Ewan must have found, or stolen, before tearing out the pages used by the previous juvenile owner. That spiral-bound notebook had entries dated within the last year, but stank more heinously than anything else, as if Ewan had kept it close to his unwashed flesh; perhaps hidden from sight like a prisoner of war concealing a journal. But concealed from whom, and why?

  Seb guessed the archive amounted to a decade’s worth of hastily written notes. Those dated within the last two years appeared on pieces of paper that gradually diminished in size, the handwriting matching the shrinkage of the paper.

  The entire mess demonstrated a confusion and convolution that Ewan had expected him to transform painstakingly into an interesting book, before evangelizing the work for the ‘author’s’ sole benefit.

  But, God, how he had died . . . Thoughts of that nature had to be suppressed. And yet, the irony was not subtle. Here he was, working his way through Ewan’s archive and thinking about a new book, though never the one that Ewan had planned.

  Seb’s impression of the bigger picture surrounding Ewan’s life also remained frustratingly vague. A direct connection between the projecting subjects of the SPR in the sixties and what he had seen of Ewan’s last two weeks remained elusive.

  No records had been dated to indicate the month preceding Ewan’s arrival in Torbay. The sections Ewan had dated Seb managed to translate more easily. They may have been written at a time when Ewan was lucky enough to write on a stable surface, like a table.

  Ewan’s accreditation of his whereabouts during his experiments was also inconsistent, though Willesden Green, Wisbech, Kettering, Yeovil and Gloucester were mentioned. ‘A caravan/Barmouth’ featured intermittently too, six years before his demise in Devon.

  The contents of the stable period ranged from a grotesque self-importance, to screeds of dull, hyperbolic descriptions of ‘my gift’. But what else did Ewan have to write about, once he’d rendered himself unable to function in the real world? Which must have increased the attraction of his ‘gift’ as an escape route.

  Look where it got you.

  It was possible that Ewan also considered himself to be two people: a higher self that roamed beyond space and time, and the wretched, physical form, or ‘prison’, that hunted for intoxicants and endured a miserable, transient existence.

  Drug use was a constant theme in the jottings, as were his difficulties with finding MDMA, his substance of choice. Legal highs he embraced as something of a divine intervention at one point during his mission. He had been staying somewhere in Yeovil, and then Gloucester, and like an amateur chemist Ewan had combined all kinds of compounds to ‘really burrow down and go much further, to stay for longer’. And yet Ewan’s diary proved that he had little control over when these out-of-body episodes occurred.

  As for travelling beyond the remit of his ‘physical prison’, he rarely appeared to make it beyond his mother’s spare bedroom, or from the other demoralizing places that he’d inhabited. For two years the separation ‘never happened once’. Ultimately, Ewan’s projections had remained random, unpredictable and fleeting for the best part of a decade. He’d remained a man unfilled and underfed by the experience, famished, even starving at times for a salvation that slowly ruined him.

  How the random acts of disassociating his consciousness had progressed to Ewan’s evident ab
ility to enter the state at will, to control it and to appear as an apparition, was the missing link. Had Ewan found a mentor, or even a substance, that allowed him to take his inconsistent ability to the next level? This SPR and its inducements offered the only clue.

  What was legible in what he took to be the later, more inconsistent periods culminated in what Seb hoped were the psychotic fantasies of an addict. And only within these did Seb discover anything relating to what might have entered his home during the last night of Ewan’s intrusion – the very form that had brought death to Ewan in Paignton.

  Written in black ink, inside the Hello Kitty jotting pad, were sections that Ewan had entitled: The Greylands.

  It was like a blackout. Different. Everything went dark. A loss of consciousness? Complete darkness. Was this the time of darkness that they had told me about? But this was more like a void. More than darkness. It was nothingness.

  Consciousness returned. I moved out of the void and was rushing through the cold, in a wind. But I came to be inside the house again.

  Partial awakening with only dream-like awareness inside. I was half in the world, but it was very dim and not properly formed, even formless in places. Something always unreal and misty about these rooms. I was only half aware, but the edges of doorways and furniture were vague. Objects doubled, or one thing went over another, like two images in fog. Some of the images belonged to me and I saw things that I owned as a child. So was I projecting that? Never experienced that before. Not what I expected.

  But I was definitely still in the building and able to move about more freely.

  Another fragment in the Hello Kitty pad suggested a location with a physical basis. It reminded Seb of the SPR reports about the tests set by the mysterious ‘H’ and ‘Diane’. Other participants were mentioned but only referred to as ‘they’.