Under a Watchful Eye

by Adam Nevill

  [Mark Fry]: What were the images that he gave you to focus on?

  [Liza]: The river, always. The river and the tunnel, the silver cord. You have to understand that what is left, what is buried behind consciousness, still has properties, thoughts, feelings, though they are different. It’s all a part of you, but not as you have ever known yourself to be. But this part of us can be induced by desire, by the will, if you are prepared. The vital body can rise or fall.

  [Mark Fry]: How did it start, the projection? Can you describe it?

  [Liza]: When it eventually began to happen for me it was always a drop, like a sudden fall, as if I’d tripped. And then I would sink.

  I remember my first few projections quite clearly. Some people went up, but I sank through the bed. Went down. And then I would find myself close to my bed in the darkness. The building was always very dark, like a photograph or film that had never been lit properly. And it’s very strange because the only light came from me, from what I was in that form, what I had become.

  Inside this light I felt as if I was intoxicated. What I could see swum around me. The room was blurred and poorly defined. I had a very poor sense of balance too.

  [Mark Fry]: What could you see when you projected?

  [Liza]: I could see what was closest to me more clearly. But I couldn’t see for any distance. I could always hear water too, the river, the psychic stream, but when I found it the water was black.

  I also suffered a terrible feeling of anxiety, of foreboding the whole time that I projected. It wasn’t what I expected, but I was told that this was inevitable at the start.

  If I ever saw myself, my body, back inside the bed, I would always return. Just black out. That’s what it was like. And then I would come to, inside my body, feeling ill from the formula. The side effects, the nausea, could last for days. It was very strong. You had to pace yourself and recover between each projection. No doubt at all in my mind now that what we were taking was illegal. And I started to suspect that all those reports and stories in the archive were lies. The ones from the sixties. Why had so many people had such incredible experiences while we only struggled in the darkness? I always asked too many questions. They weren’t welcome.

  [Mark Fry]: Did you see anyone else when you were projecting?

  [Liza]: Oh, yes, once I began to make it outside my room. That was in my fifth month at the Tor. But I never saw these others clearly. They were in the hall outside. Two very dim figures. There were only seven of us in residence at that time, but I was quite sure that the two I saw were not the projections of those in residence. They were not aware of each other, or of me. I tried to call out to them. But it was like calling out in a dream to deaf people. I had no voice. No strength. Everything was slow and laboured.

  HE claimed that I was in Hades when I projected. This is the sphere closest to where we are now, but we were also told that it was possible, in time, to go further. Much further if you persisted, and if you worked at loosening your vehicle of vitality. Otherwise you remained earthbound. But the cost on your health, let alone the financial cost, became more and more obvious the longer I was there. I’m afraid I lost my faith in HIM.

  [Mark Fry]: Did you ever go any further than the Tor?

  [Liza]: Only once, and I never wanted to try again.

  [pause]

  [Mark Fry]: Can you tell me about it?

  [Sound of Liza clearing her throat]

  [Liza]: I was ill at the time. I’d had a chest infection that became quite serious. It was very cold at the Tor, and damp. You had to wrap up, you know. The cold seemed to get inside your bones. Even with the fires going you never warmed up. I used to think it was the moors, the air, the atmosphere. I’d say it rained there at least four days each week. But I wasn’t so sure by the end. I wasn’t certain of a great many things, even of who I was, or who I had become. I lost sight of that, and what was important, or should have been important to me. But I missed my husband, Eric. He was my first husband. I think I went mad when I lost him. I never stopped grieving. I never have.

  [Mark Fry]: But you managed to travel further, just this once?

  [Liza]: Oh yes. I was feverish with an awful cough. And I had been resting and it happened, just like that. I projected.

  I’d been thinking of my daughter because I missed her terribly and I was regretting everything that I had done. I wanted to see her quite desperately. And I remember the sinking feeling, though that time I sank deeper, and more suddenly.

  Then I was moving. I was travelling through the darkness. At speed across fields. I think they were fields and that I was in the countryside but I could barely see a thing. One could have passed it off as a dream. But I became very aware of her presence. I could actually sense her all around me. My daughter. My feelings for her, and how much, how intensely I loved her as if she were a small child again . . . It was like I was flooded with her. It was the most intense connection.

  I then became briefly aware of her, as if she were no more than a few feet below me. That’s when I actually saw her. She was asleep and it was as if we were in the same room, but I was unable to speak to her.

  I became too upset, too eager to communicate with her and I was returned to my sickbed at the Tor. But this sense of her, of how close we had once been, persisted. It lingered for days, and when I was well enough I called her. They listened to your calls, Alice and Fay. From another line they listened to the calls. But it was the strangest thing, on the night that I’d seen my daughter, she said that I had been in her thoughts too, and that she had been very worried about me. She said she had called and she had written to the SPR, though I had received nothing. So why do you think that was?

  Anyway, I told her that I had been ill and that I had a sense that we had come together across a great distance. She never believed in what I was doing and had always disapproved of the SPR. It was what finally estranged us. But she admitted that she had felt a presence in her room, on the very night that I had projected. She was living in London and she had awoken feeling terribly hot and frightened. And she had been unable to dispel the idea that there was a presence, some thing, inside her room with her.

  She turned on the lights, but still believed that the presence remained there, in her room. She said she was paralysed with a sense of dread, as if that emotion, the dread, had occupied the room. And she knew that what had entered her room was in pain. She said she’d thought it was drowning, or that it couldn’t breathe, and she believed that it was me, or was somehow connected to me.

  This upset her for days because she had sensed me, her own mother, in terrible distress. And she had feared for me, at some deep instinctive level, after the presence had passed away. I even remember the word she used to describe the episode. She had said it had been ‘horrifying’ for her. Horrifying. It had not been a pleasant experience for me either. Quite the opposite. It left us both shaken and very upset. And it worsened my doubts about Summerland. Elysium, ha! This was HIS fabled paradise belt that we were supposed to find? It was horrid.

  I left the SPR not long after. It was the furthest I’d ever travelled and the very last time that I consciously attempted the procedure. But I’d gone too far, you see. It was too late to stop by then. I’d loosened something inside myself. It’s hard to describe, but for many years, I could not prevent myself from sinking into the darkness again, over and over again.

  When I think of how many times we practised the cultivation, it was as if we were programming ourselves. I think that was the whole point.

  The image was always of the silver cord in the slow, dark river. Silver light turning fast, faster and faster and making me sink. With the water all around, the psychic stream. And then we were the light, the turning light, and we released ourselves from our bond and we focused on the sinking, the heavy, heavy sinking into the black and peaceful water. This represented the renunciation of the will to the deep.

  I’ve never been able to stop the sound of that water running through my sleep. It�
��s always in my dreams.

  [Mark Fry]: So what happened when you left?

  [Liza]: Oh, they weren’t happy. Alice and Fay were very manipulative. I only managed to extricate myself by pleading poverty. I told them that I had run out of money, and they demanded proof. Can you believe that? I had to produce bank statements. I had to sign an official document of confidentiality on entrance too, and another on exit. I was threatened.

  [Mark Fry]: How so?

  [Liza]: Oh, it was all very subtle. They said they had attracted others, who would never ascend. Hinderers. The defective. Hinderers, who had been drawn there, to HIM. And they said that if I betrayed the contract of silence, there would be consequences that they had little control over. These others, the hinderers, were very protective of HIM.

  [Mark Fry]: Did you believe them?

  [Liza]: Of course. I had no doubt at all. I’d seen things, those figures outside my room, and I could sense them at the Tor, and more of them the longer that I was there. There was something wrong with the place. With that entire area. Not only inside the house.

  And right at the end, Alice told me to never forget that ‘some of the dead are still in place’.

  19

  Stand Beside the Door and Let It Take You

  Seb stopped the tape recording of Liza. He reached for his drink. ‘Ewan. You bloody idiot. You bastard.’

  Seb was drunk. Three large glasses of whiskey on top of three glasses of red wine. There had been beer earlier too, in the bar before dinner. How many pints? Two, no three. Only two. Four?

  There was a judder about the edges of the furniture, the edge of the wall that led to the bathroom.

  Slow down.

  He looked at Hazzard’s books on the table.

  Something insidious had placed itself between his life and the sun. A minor writer and cult leader who had been dead for over thirty years.

  Impossible.

  The situation was preposterous. Fiction was becoming fact.

  But what could they want from him now? What did they expect from him? And why him, anyway? Because he knew Ewan? Had Ewan infected him? That horrible misfit by the harbour with her doublespeak: had she guided Ewan? But what guided her?

  He had no answers.

  Seb gulped at the bourbon until his glass was empty, sat back and winced through the after-burn.

  He put the news on the television, the sound muted. He needed to keep close some evidence of a real world governed by natural laws, one filled with a predictably chaotic humanity.

  He refilled his glass and took to pacing the room. From out of despair his rage unfurled. He felt unstable and capable of violence. Restraint unwound over a core of vengeful paranoia, suspicion, and a bile that he flung, in his imagination, at a dozen faces with whom he’d clashed as a professional writer. He wanted to destroy something, to smash it. But what? His battle was with the intangible, the unpredictable; the unpredictably intangible. Something that could appear at any time. Motives unknown. Intentions malicious. There were entities capable of killing a man by manifestation alone.

  Through sheer terror.

  Had he brought this upon himself, by wanting to be left alone, to live differently? Was that no longer allowed?

  This was going nowhere. He capped the whiskey bottle and decided to get ready for bed. The spirit was making him feel unlike himself, impulsive, hot, and full of destructive compulsions.

  He felt absurd too, foolish, and self-pitying. Perhaps he was so worn out that he’d gone past the ability to think meaningfully. His thoughts were dispersing. They now seemed feeble and nonsensical.

  Seb clumsily switched the TV off, stripped to his underwear and lay down. Made himself comfortable before using the switches beside the headboard to douse the lights. After that, he must have fallen asleep.

  Until a recurring swoop beneath his closed eyelids made vomiting a concern. He opened his eyes several times and directed his unstable focus upon the red light of the television standby button, until the rotations in his vision calmed.

  The dream he then stepped into was no less unsavoury than the state of mind that produced it.

  When he next awoke he had a vague recall of having dreamed.

  The only details retained by his intoxicated mind came as a sense of having been within a chattering crowd in complete darkness. A lightless space in which a great many bewildering requests had been made of him. And there had been a noise like a wind, or maybe it had been water rushing through an enclosed space.

  He sat up in bed and switched a light on. Realizing just how disoriented and dehydrated he was, he clambered out of bed and went into the bathroom to gulp down three glasses of water, something he wished he’d done before going to bed. By suppressing his body’s urge to expel the contents of its stomach, he knew he’d assured a more severe hangover, and a lengthy period of feeling toxic the following day. He’d been careless with drink, and at a time like this. He returned to bed angry with himself and passed out.

  Can you ask my daughter to come and fetch me?

  He thought this had been spoken from inside another dream, and then was certain the voice had come from inside his actual room. Perhaps it had been spoken in the bathroom from where someone was now running a bath?

  They buried me over there.

  ‘Where?’ he replied aloud to the woman sitting beside his bed. He didn’t see her face, or any of her body because the light that issued from her was too dim. From her voice alone he knew that she was elderly and upset. He could smell her perfume too, something similar to dead flowers.

  The work must be completed. And then we will discuss terms.

  ‘Definitely not. No. No. No,’ he shouted down the dim, white corridor that formed at the end of his bed.

  Paint flaked from the walls of his room. The ceiling was stained yellow with water rings.

  I am making progress on the fear and dread.

  ‘You shouldn’t even be in here,’ he said to the woman who now stood beside the bed. She’d come from out of a door further down the white corridor, three times. The third time she’d made it inside his hotel room. She wore a long satin dress, a headscarf and dark glasses. A fur stole culminated in the face of a grinning animal, a horrible fox. Something black stained the front of her gown too, like the residue of a wound. There was a faint light behind her, or around her. But surely this was also part of the dream. He knew he was dreaming, but his level of awareness was unpleasant.

  Sink. Heavy, heavy. Sink deep.

  Legs going heavy. Sink downwards and stand free. Reduce breathing. Blank mind. Blank mind. Blank mind.

  Enlarge yourself. Float out.

  From here to there, and back again.

  . . . sinking, heavy, heavy . . .

  . . . everything’s gone black . . .

  Let us go out of ourselves!

  In delirium Seb felt his feet moving upwards and towards the ceiling.

  No, his legs were still upon the bed. But he was clutching the mattress with his fingers to prevent himself from rising.

  . . . we are the soul-bodied . . .

  Thin Len was so tall and he went through that nursery on all fours like a big spider.

  Let us enlarge!

  . . . this awakening was not like the others . . .

  You’re never as alive as you are when you leave your body.

  Leave your body and walk a few feet over months.

  . . . the gliding, the gliding of the double, the gliding, the gliding, the gliding of the double . . .

  This coat is too tight . . .

  Cast thyself down!

  I can’t get back!

  Is this the second death? This is not my greater self. Where are the everlasting arms?

  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!

  The voices filled the room, overlapped each other, rotated, repeated. Seb had been listening to them for hours, or only heard them once
. He didn’t know.

  The room was bigger than it should have been. It was a building cluttered with dark and heavy furniture. High ceilings soared above his head, then went further and further upwards.

  He was inside a tunnel that smelled of wet bricks and stagnant water.

  No, he was inside his hotel room.

  The old house again.

  No, he was outside in darkness, beside a river.

  The room, this was his hotel room!

  There was nothing there at all, nothing there at all . . .

  He was in a field of black grass. The air was misty.

  The room, in the hotel.

  The old building with high ceilings, furniture everywhere.

  The hotel room.

  A corridor of black doors.

  Seb sat up in the very bed that seemed intent on releasing him into the air. He whimpered at the darkness that pressed upon him from all sides.

  They let go of his hands, but his fingers remained as cold as their own had been, those people who had been sitting beside him.

  He threw his body back against the wall and shouted, ‘Get out!’

  Fumbling at the stiff, plastic light switches, he became aware of a glimmer above his head. Before the first light came on in the room, he looked up for a fraction of a second and saw a pale smudge submerge into darkness, as if it had been enveloped by water flowing across the ceiling.

  You’re dreaming. That’s all.

  There was no one in his room. The walls, floor, bed, desk, and chair were now present again. The silencing of the voices was absolute. Everything visible was now contained within four walls and held in place by gravity. That realization made Seb gasp and he was close to sobbing with relief.

  He got out of bed and turned every light on. Blinked, and then blinked some more.

  3:00 a.m. on the screen of his phone.

  Seb held his face for a while, pulling his eyelids down as far as they would go before pain became an issue. He touched a wall with a shaking hand. Belched, sat back down on the bed, his head sunk between his knees, and he told himself that he’d only been dreaming of those places and voices. He could not accept that a dream in the dark had the ability to replace the world with another place – a teeming space, and one peopled so quickly.