Under a Watchful Eye

by Adam Nevill

  With what? Memories, bits of things he’d read, or had they been suggested to him? They hinder.

  He didn’t want to be inside the room. He tugged jeans on. Staggered through the vestibule beside the bathroom to the door of the room, using his hands against the walls.

  Unsteady on his feet, his balance shot, he didn’t know where he was going, but he wanted some other place that hadn’t been filled with voices. He really had to get out, just out and into . . .

  The corridor outside his room, on the third floor of the hotel. Pale blue carpet, cream walls, ceiling lights.

  Aiming for the landing before the lifts, he was surprised to see that the two fire doors down there were closed. The glass fitted into the top half of each door was reinforced internally by wire mesh. Fire doors, they were usually held back, but at night they must close. But someone was visible through the single pane of glass. Seb stopped moving. A night owl, night porter, someone with an early start. Sun will be up soon.

  Whoever was wearing the dark coat moved away, and swiftly, across the floor of the landing on the other side of the glass. They turned and vanished into a lift or onto the staircase. There is no staircase on that side, just the two lift doors.

  A faint bump behind his back brought him about quickly. He lost his balance and lurched sideways, but caught sight of the origin of the sound. He’d seen whoever had just withdrawn their face from the panel of glass in one of the doors that sealed the opposite end of the corridor. That passage, beyond those fire doors, contained the staircase. Yes, he remembered now. But didn’t want to go down there because someone had been watching him. As they had moved backwards quickly, the smudge of a pale face had closed its mouth. An aperture disconcertingly dark and wide as if it had been in the act of calling out but soundlessly.

  Seb moved his head from side to side on his shoulders. He tried to see through the reinforced glass panels and into the spaces beyond to identify who was on the other side of the fire doors.

  And it was then he saw something move again through one glass panel. What appeared to be the back of a dark coat retreating, while seeming to shrink in size. It was as if he was watching a figure moving at speed, and across a distance much longer than the one that existed beyond the closed doors.

  Maybe what he’d thought was movement behind the glass panel of the fire door was his own reflection as he’d turned around.

  Please let it be.

  Perhaps the face had been a part of his mirrored flesh too, and the open mouth some dark feature of the corridor beyond, superimposed through the refraction of light. Maybe he’d even mistaken a fire extinguisher for something else?

  Under closer inspection, the panels in the fire doors now revealed no movement, or any other sign of a presence beyond the glass.

  Above his head the lights buzzed at the end of his hearing. He could smell the fragrance of carpet cleaner. It reminded him of an airport lounge, or a boardroom. A sense of stillness and emptiness within these communal corridors made a mundane entry into his awareness.

  At the same time, he became aware of how cold he was while standing shirtless in a hotel corridor.

  20

  A Tight Glove Pulled from my Finger

  ‘Bad night?’ Mark Fry came into Seb’s room, smiling. He probably believed a hangover responsible for Seb’s downcast face and crumpled appearance.

  Mark taught sociology and film studies classes at a local college of further education and his classes had finished in mid-afternoon. For this Seb was grateful because he didn’t want to be on his own.

  He looked at Mark with a dour and humourless expression that encouraged Mark to straighten his face. Being unable to explain to Mark why he was a wreck was frustrating but the least of his troubles.

  Seb nodded at the recordings. They were stacked on the table beside the tape player and Hazzard’s books. ‘All yours, Mark. And thank you again.’

  ‘My pleasure. I pulled some favours with the admin staff and they copied the SPR stuff for me this morning.’ He parked the wheeled case that he’d brought with him beside the table.

  With his foot, Seb tapped the large treasury box he’d left under the table. ‘I’ll leave Ewan’s notes with you for the time being. See if you can make out more than I managed.’

  ‘I’m an expert at reading poor handwriting. Years of practice. Everything is typed now, though the quality of the content hasn’t been improved by Microsoft Word.’

  Seb was too preoccupied to smile.

  ‘Were they of any use?’ Mark asked, as he raised Hinderers in the Passage from the table.

  Not a question that was easy for Seb to answer. He’d read parts of each collection after starting on them at around four a.m. He’d not attempted to return to sleep following the disturbance and had sat alone in his room with the television murmuring, drinking endless cups of coffee until Mark arrived.

  The best two Hazzard stories, which resembled plotted short fiction, were the two stories that Seb had read years ago. Structured narratives, found in traditionally told stories, were absent in most of Hazzard’s work. The majority of the tales were better defined as surreal, weird imaginings, filled with ghastly images. Plots were added to some of the stories in the first anthology, though awkwardly, as if the recorded experiences were unsuited to logic.

  The earlier stories were akin to cosmic fever dreams in which distant, astral shapes communicated with the narrators through sensations, and often before a background of blinding light.

  The narrators were inveterate spies. Voyeurs with unscrupulous motives who often enacted revenge on earthbound rivals through the projection of malign versions of themselves. If the stories were biographical then the manipulations of Hazzard’s ‘astral body’, his gift no less, had never been put to positive use. In this respect the author appeared to have been a mentor to Ewan Alexander.

  Had he read the books with innocent eyes, Seb might have been impressed by the author’s resistance to spells, rites, and rituals to evoke the supernormal. Unworldly phenomena was just there without question, and was always becoming within the ordinary world for those with special talents, those who had accessed other planes in a dreamy loosening of their consciousness.

  Mythology was often referenced to attest to the existence of other places. Realms that folklore had long tried to encompass, or to explain. Hazzard had definitively explained the ghost, poltergeist, premonition, revenant, demon and angel. At least to himself.

  The author always recounted stories from the point of view of the ghost, the astral double. The leaps of the imagination into fantastical spheres and celestially lighted realms had reminded Seb of Machen’s Hill of Dreams. But Hazzard’s spectral visitants were depicted as visionaries, explorers, sirens and femmes fatales, or playboys turned revenant. Authorial wishful thinking, perhaps, which failed to rid the works fully of the ordinary, mundane and unpleasant settings in which they must have been written, like prison.

  The fetishistic adoration of female archetypes and their fashions, and the sinister voyeurism, persisted in each anthology.

  By the last four stories in the first collection, the celestial light was dimming from the ethereal landscapes and had become grey and misty before fading to black; places filled with shadowy forms and strange cries from unseen faces.

  The rising and flying ‘doubles’ stopped soaring and ascending to the heavens, their inner power and sense of greatness diminishing to what appeared to be a sickening habit. They began to stagger and crawl, not fly. Eventually, the narrators became captives to something they accessed against their wills. They were no longer tethered to the body or to the earth and its conditions. They were stricken and only saw one ill-defined region superimposed over another.

  By necessity, life then became a struggle to keep the darkness from intruding upon the world. And separation from the body could happen randomly, at any time. Leaving the body became a permanent affliction, and the very promise of a dreadful destination. But it had all stirred a sense of a
we within Seb too.

  As Mark had alluded, the tone of the stories altered radically in the second volume. Those tales didn’t suit beginnings, middles and ends either, because all three conditions were often the same thing and there were few resolutions to the situations described.

  In Hazzard’s final stories, the transcendent quality of the first collection had entirely degraded into the grotesque. An obsession with piercing light had conversely become an obsession with light’s absence. A peculiar terror akin to vertigo and of falling into the sky from the earth, and then falling even further beyond the earth’s atmosphere and into a cold and endless space, was a dominant theme. As an idea, travelling through space at dizzying speeds was soon replaced by a confinement in dreary rooms. Memories of places and situations were stuck on repeat.

  The scale of infinity was transformed into an enclosed maze without end or purpose. The damp tunnel became a much-used metaphor. This was also the very realm that Seb now appeared to be glimpsing against his will.

  The final tales degenerated into pure studies of claustrophobia, panic, shock and fear, but all leading to a terror that was mindless in the narrators.

  Much of the horror came from the characters accepting their inevitable confinement within the ‘greylands’. They were witnesses, near-passive observers, not active entities in control of their destinies. The end.

  But there was tension and suspense, though it never arose from a character’s resistance to such a ghastly fate, but through their full acknowledgement of the dreadful eventuality before it occurred.

  In the stories ‘Broken Night’, ‘Flight from Malignant Forms’, ‘Second Death’ and ‘Incertitude’ the astral doubles had even watched their earthly remains buried and cremated, then crawled around gravesides and the dark places where their ashes had been sprinkled, unaware of how long they had been keeping vigil beside a door that had closed forever. Eventually, they forgot who they had once been. The spiritual entropy was the most terrifying thing of all for the reader to grasp.

  The tales were often master classes of apprehension, but few would have been as affected by Hazzard’s literary output as Seb had been. You had to be a participant in the subject matter for the writing to achieve its full effect.

  There were a few lines in ‘Flight from Malignant Forms’ that Seb doubted he would ever forget: ‘In the greylands we found others in different form. They wept in our faces or clawed us from out of the mist. If they are angels or the souls of the departed, then none should be hasty for the dark.’

  Hazzard must have wondered if he were shouting down a well when he wrote the books.

  Even with Mark Fry in the room, Seb was still fighting a need to collapse onto the bed. Tiredness and the nauseous dregs of his hangover had made him too weak to do much beside remaining prostrate all day. His hands were shaking again.

  He knew how uncomfortable he was making his visitor. Perhaps Mark thought him an alcoholic or mentally ill, and perhaps he was both of those things.

  ‘I have to go there,’ Seb said quietly.

  Mark never spoke and was probably suppressing a mad giggle. Seb wouldn’t blame him.

  ‘I need to take the files back. Find out what they want.’

  ‘Sorry?’ Mark ventured.

  Seb faced the floor as if in defeat. ‘They were here. Last night. They followed me here. They can follow me anywhere. In the stories . . . There’s a connection between the stories and me.’ Seb pointed at the two volumes of stories. ‘I am the image that they focus upon. He knows about me. He knows.’

  ‘Who, sorry?’

  ‘Mark . . . There’s a lot that I haven’t told you about why I am here. Why I am not at my best right now.’

  ‘The blackmail?’

  Seb nodded. ‘Yes. But you wouldn’t believe me.’

  ‘I’d like to hear it, all the same.’

  Seb laughed humourlessly. ‘Oh, you’d get a kick out of it. It’d be weird enough for you, all right. It’d be cool.’

  Seb then paused to wonder about his reputation. Mark was a writer. Would Mark find the temptation too great to resist going online to mention their meeting in social media, to write an article about his visit?

  Seb Logan has lost the plot. His unhealthy obsession with a minor horror writer, astral projector and leader of the nefarious SPR cult led to the author’s unravelling in a hotel room in Manchester.

  How could he think of his reputation at a time like this?

  Seb felt guilty for thinking so badly of the man who had been nothing but friendly and helpful, particularly given the sudden and odd appearance he’d made in Mark’s life. ‘I’m sorry, Mark. I’m going through . . . a lot right now. And I’m not sure what to do.’

  ‘I’ll keep confidential, if that’s what you’re worried about.’ Mark sat down upon the chair drawn out from the table. ‘It hasn’t escaped me that you’re under a lot of strain, Seb. I thought it might have been about your writing, but I am guessing this is something personal that I have no right to ask about.’

  ‘Neither, really. It’s not what you think. I wish it was. I’ve never experienced anything like this. It’s just not normal, or logical. It shouldn’t be happening, but it is. And it started when Ewan appeared . . . I’m sorry. I probably shouldn’t say any more.’

  Mark fidgeted. ‘I’m a good listener, Seb. And maybe I can help. You never know. Try me.’

  When Seb had finished his account it had gone six and he was close to missing his train. He realized he didn’t care. He’d come loose from the world he knew. At one time catching a train would have caused him paroxysms of anxiety. But the train would take him home and from there he must journey to the Tor. That was inevitable. Like a character in one of Hazzard’s stories, he must seek his fate in the unknown. He must go and find whatever was still in place, what it was that had been left behind.

  Mark’s mouth was actually open. Seb had deliberately avoided the man’s eyes, so as not to have been put off while he recounted the events of the last few weeks to this aficionado of the esoteric. Any flicker of discomfort, disbelief, or even mockery in Mark Fry’s expression might have shortened or tempered his confession. But when he’d eventually returned his gaze to Mark, his visitor was clearly unnerved by a story that should have been treated with hilarity, scepticism and a concern for Seb’s mental health. Surely there was a limit to the amount of rope that Mark Fry would feed out before calling time on crazy Sebastian Logan. ‘That’s pretty incredible,’ was all he said.

  ‘Please don’t tell me that you believe me.’

  Mark narrowed his eyes and lowered his voice in the manner of an official about to impart grave news. ‘Seb, I’d be the last person to judge you, but what people think they have seen and experienced, and what they have actually seen and experienced, are often the same thing to them. And I’m less inclined to care about the difference than most people are.’

  That was probably the best reaction he could have received from anyone. You withdrew from the mad or you humoured them. Mark had opted for the latter course.

  ‘And considering what I am known for, Mark, the books I write, you can imagine how impossible it would be for any rational person to accept what I have just confided in you. They’d see a connection between the two things. Cause and effect.’

  ‘But you think that going to Hunter’s Tor will stop this? These dreams, the visions? Maybe it’ll be like some kind of catharsis? You’ll see that the place is derelict and harmless and that will help you . . .’ Mark winced and rephrased the end of the sentence. ‘Deal with the visions, I mean.’ He’d wanted to say hallucinations. ‘I’m not judging you, Seb. Please don’t think that I am. But have you seen a doctor? Had a scan and stuff?’ That had been hard for Mark to say and Seb didn’t hold it against him.

  ‘Nothing wrong with my eyes. No headaches, symptoms, head injury, contributing illnesses or conditions. I’m a bit reclusive, but there’s nothing in my lifestyle to explain this if it’s all in my head. It just started happeni
ng, a few weeks ago, when Ewan arrived. And then he was actually killed. But not by anything living. And it’s getting worse, Mark. Last night . . .’

  ‘You were going to say something.’

  ‘It’s like I am being summoned, you know? My presence is required, somewhere. All signs are pointing to the Tor.’

  ‘An empty building. It might even be in use now for something else. Who knows? I haven’t checked, or even thought about it much until now. National Trust might have it.’

  ‘They don’t. I looked. It’s not even on a Google aerial map as anything but a blurry image of something grey. There is nothing online about that building or its legacy. It’s like it doesn’t exist. Don’t you find that odd? It’s as if anyone aware of the place, and I mean aware of what it was used for, is no longer around. And when they were around, they were too terrified of that place to say anything about it. Besides Liza and her two friends, at the end of their lives. But Liza also says, quite clearly, that it never ended for her.’

  ‘What . . . I mean, what would you do, when you got there?’

  ‘I don’t know. But I’d leave those behind.’ Seb nodded at the case containing the SPR files. ‘And if this woman, and whoever else Ewan was dealing with, are present, I’ll ask them what it is that they want from me. But I have to go. As soon as I get home, I have to go. To make them leave me alone, somehow. Them, and whoever it is that is with them.’

  The hinderer. Head in a sack. Moving like a dog against the wall of your home. Thin Len . . . ‘Oh, Jesus.’

  Mark leaned forwards, his small eyes widening behind the oblong spectacle frames. ‘Amazing.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘This! This whole thing. I mean, you actually think that Hazzard is behind this. That he’s projecting at you. From the grave. I love it. I’m sorry, but I love it.’