Under a Watchful Eye

by Adam Nevill

  ‘I’m glad you find it entertaining.’

  ‘No, I really didn’t mean it like that. And I’d like to come with you.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘I know the place. Where it is. Would you mind?’

  Seb nearly wept with relief at the mere notion that he might not have to go alone to an isolated building on Dartmoor, and to a place that must be the very generator of his nightmares. He wanted to grab and hug Mark Fry, but then recalled the images of what he’d seen inside his own home. These images combined with the residuals of his recent dreams and he knew he’d be putting Mark in danger by allowing the man to accompany him. ‘I can’t let you come with me.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because I think you’d be putting yourself in grave danger, Mark. Maybe even as much as I am in now. I wouldn’t ask a best friend, even a family member to do this for me, and I hardly know you. I don’t . . . this will sound funny, Mark, but I don’t want you on my conscience.’

  ‘Please. Call it professional curiosity.’ Mark then looked around himself, as if casting about the floor for the words that he wished to express. He tapped the two Hazzard books on the table. ‘Look, I haven’t been this excited about the SPR in years. Not since I saw your files. That whole project was incomplete for me. I barely scratched the surface of what was going on there. I know almost nothing about its peak years, in the sixties. But since you pitched up – you, Sebastian Logan, of all people – I’ve been so bloody excited by this again, and by Hazzard. It’s like Christmas. How many opportunities does a man like me get to hang out with one of his favourite writers, and to go with him to the place where Hazzard ran his cult?

  ‘If someone is there . . . if there are more files. Evidence. Just, wow. Wow. Fucking wow! It would actually be cruel if you prevented me from tagging along. I’d be going of my own free will.’

  Seb started to grin because he knew that Mark Fry wasn’t exaggerating. It would be an act of cruelty to deny him participation.

  Wasn’t it Seb that they wanted, not Mark Fry? And Mark knew more about Hazzard and the SPR than he ever would. Mark also knew how to find Hunter’s Tor Hall. Seb looked at his watch. ‘I want to go tomorrow.’

  ‘If I come down with you, I can still be back for Sunday. That gives me time to do the lesson planning I need to do before next week. I can do my marking on the train home. I’ll just need somewhere to crash for a night.’

  ‘There’s one more train after the one I’ve missed tonight. How long would it take you to get a bag together?’

  21

  Flight from Malignant Forms

  ‘Hazzard had a couple of disciples. Other writers,’ Mark offered as they chugged out of Exeter St David’s station, where the service had deposited most of the remaining passengers. ‘Did you know?’

  They sat across from each other at a table in the middle of the Quiet Carriage at the rear of the train. Night had fallen. Beyond the windows the world was a blur of orange lights, half-seen landscapes, unlit industrial and agricultural buildings, a greyland. Between them on the table were strewn a litter of empty sandwich packets, coffee cups and four bottles of Doom Bar from the catering service. Victuals that had sustained them on the evening train.

  ‘Disciples? Which writers? Horror writers?’

  ‘Not really. Have you read Bertrand Webster?’

  Seb shook his head. ‘But I know the name. He wrote science fiction?’

  ‘That’s what he’s known for. There’s a Masters collection coming out of a Bertrand Webster series. But he wrote three stories in the Hazzard vein at the end of his career. They came out in a small press, in the mid-nineties, but were picked up and reprinted in some ‘best of’ genre anthologies. When I read them, I was sure they were Hazzard stories, but they couldn’t have been because Hazzard was dead when they were written.’

  Mark sat back and narrowed his eyes to a squint as if to aid his recall. ‘There’s one called “A Mere Sense of Identity”. And one called “The Long Dim Tunnel”. But “Wandering Down Eternal Corridors” is the best of the three. That’s very creepy and strange, about a building that never ends, full of the dead who don’t know that they’re dead. In fact, all three stories have “hinderers” in them. Hazzard’s best creation. Webster never wrote any horror, except for those three stories, which is a pity, because he was bloody good. But in the author comments at the end of the small press book, he called Hazzard “the criminally neglected master of the Strange Experience”. I never found out if Webster was part of the SPR, but I suspect he might have had a connection.’

  ‘You didn’t track him down?’

  ‘He was dead when I looked. Alcoholic, someone said on a message board. Drank himself to death in the late nineties after dropping from sight. The other writer, Moira Buchanan, topped herself in the late eighties. Don’t know much about her, but her Hazzard-influenced stories are really strange too. At one time, Buchanan wrote these big sagas about families in Scotland for libraries. All of her books are out of print now and there’s nothing supernatural in them at all. I read two of them and they were more like Gothic romances than anything else. But she dedicated her three horror stories to Hazzard as “the Master”. Right at the end of her career.’

  ‘Which is what M. R. James called Le Fanu.’

  ‘Yes, but these two fairly minor pulp writers bestowed the same august title on Hazzard. Maybe they were both affiliated to the SPR. I doubt I’ll ever find out. Moira Buchanan’s horror tales are exactly like the final Hazzard stories in Hinderers. I can dig them out for you. “Come to Light” was the first one. “The Earthly Dark of the Burrow” came next and is very good, very claustrophobic and mad. And there’s one called “Before I Knew I Was Dead”. That was the last thing Buchanan ever wrote, apparently. Very depressing story as she succumbed to suicidal thoughts.

  ‘Strange that one writer drinks himself to death and another commits suicide, after each writing three stories in Hazzard’s voice, which were entirely different to anything they had ever written before. And they both called him a master, like he was their master. I love that kind of thing, though. People fell under his spell, I guess. Like Ewan, but for him it was only through reading Hazzard’s obscure stories, years after the Master had died. That’s really freaky.’

  ‘Isn’t it.’ The unnerving connection between Ewan’s desire for Seb to write a book for him and the mimicry of Hazzard’s voice in another two writers, whose lives ended in miserable, tragic circumstances, confused and unsettled him even more than the contents page in the anthology had done the night before. The very pressure of unease’s gravity grew denser and Seb found himself slightly short of breath while Mark enthused about the literary connections.

  Mark stood up and moved out from behind the table. ‘I need the loo and am going to seek out another bottle of Doom Bar. Might as well make a night of it. You want anything?’

  Seb shook his head. ‘No thanks. But take this.’ He gave Mark a ten-pound note. ‘No arguments. I’m covering all of your expenses.’

  ‘You don’t have to.’

  ‘Mark, I want to. And I’m feeling as guilty as hell, as well as being really glad that you’re here. I’m still conflicted about this, but I owe you one.’

  Mark smiled. ‘Any time.’

  Seb settled into his seat. For once the Quiet Carriage was fulfilling all that it promised. He wasn’t even sure how many people were still aboard the train. He couldn’t see any passengers, but across the aisle some bags were visible in the overhead racks. Warm air and the gentle shifting of the carriage produced a lulling effect.

  Seb opened his eyes. Exhaustion had overrun him and he’d fallen asleep and then stumbled in his dream, as if one of his legs had suddenly become shorter than the other and pitched him over.

  The train might now have been rolling through the countryside close to the Teign estuary. From the position of his reclined head he could see no lights outside. Perhaps they were in a tunnel or an unlit seascape existed outside. He yawned. />
  Mark hadn’t returned from the buffet car.

  Two rows away, towards the end of the carriage, he became aware of the top of a grey head, the hair completely white. It had risen and then sprouted over the back of the seat and appeared unhealthily thin and unkempt.

  Seb had no recollection of anyone occupying that seat before now. A sudden image of an elderly form pushing itself up the backrest, as if to peer over the headrest like a naughty child, made him tense.

  Across the aisle, the windows were mostly obscured by the headrests. But the panes of glass were blackened by an absence of light outside the train, so the visible portion of the windows were mirrored and reflecting the carriage across the aisle, at head height.

  Seb still needed to squint, and lean across the table, to better make sense of who sat in the chair two rows away. What he saw reflected back at him from the glass suggested a ball of screwed-up newspaper. Without any doubt, the blurred, grey thing was also responsible for the colourless hair drooping over the chair back.

  Slowly, Seb got to his feet, the edge of the table keeping him bent at the waist. ‘Anyone . . .’ he said, but had no idea how to finish the sentence. A tiny prickle ran up his back.

  The reflection of the papery lump seemed to be moving in a way that suggested a hinge action within its form, like a jaw opening and closing. The white hair also moved, as if caused by the motions of a mouth working at the air.

  Seb slid out from behind the table. Better to leave the carriage than verify the existence of a creased face, or a body in a far worse state below the chin.

  The reflected head also rose as he stood upright in the aisle, though it remained facing forward and continued to work its mouth. This seemed worse than the head turning around, as if it could sense him without the use of its eyes. And when the pallid scalp became more visible, and when he saw how the pate was stained by large, black moles, from which the sketchy fronds of dead hair protruded, Seb lurched for the door at the front of the Quiet Carriage.

  He got into the vestibule between the carriages. And stopped when a hot waft of effluence spilled from the toilet on his left.

  The train rounded a bend at speed and he careened like a drunk to the next door.

  The carriage ahead, Carriage B, promised a welcome sense of occupancy. Several people had stood up and were reaching for their luggage from the overhead racks, down at the far end. Perhaps the train was approaching Torquay, which would mean they were nearing the end of the line. This could all stop and he’d be safe with Mark Fry. Maybe we’d be better off sleeping in the same room tonight.

  Seb was just about to punch the green button that would open the sliding door into Carriage B, when he managed to get a better view of the people at the end of that carriage. What he saw made him unwilling to look at them for long.

  They seemed in no better physical condition than the thing inside the Quiet Carriage. Those thin arms no longer appeared to be reaching for their luggage, either. Whoever was down there was raising their arms either to indicate distress and a summons for help, or it was some form of mad elation. Perhaps it was both. And for a split second, Seb believed that he had seen something soft and silvery hanging at the waists of what he’d just mistaken for a group of passengers.

  He fell away from the door and turned into the stench of faecal sewage. There was a sound of gushing water as if the toilet was flooding from both pan and sink.

  In the other direction, whoever he had seen in the Quiet Carriage was on all fours now, and either crawling, or searching for something, on the floor, towards the end of the aisle. Seb saw evidence of what might have been withered legs and a spiny back before he closed his eyes on the world around him.

  The door to Carriage B shuddered open.

  Seb cried out, ‘Please no,’ in a voice that would have filled him with shame in ordinary circumstances. His entire body flinched with such force that his feet left the floor at the height of a few millimetres. The colour of true terror, he realized uselessly, and the cowardice that it induces, was not yellow after all: it was as white as a bloodless face that could only mutter to itself. And that was the kind of face that he presented to Mark Fry as he came through the door, holding a bottle of Doom Bar and a plastic pint glass.

  Mark stepped back. ‘Shit! You jumped me.’

  As he took in the panicked statement of a man, pressed against the door of a moving train, as if he wished to get off before the next station, Mark followed this with, ‘You all right, Seb?’

  22

  Carry Me Softly on Shoeless Feet

  ‘See it?’ Mark Fry pointed at the top of the gate.

  Seb nodded. He’d seen the signage poking through the treeline as they approached the Tor. Reddish iron flaked through paint bubbling off a decorative feature that arched over the gates. The inscription remained clear. ‘Let us go out of ourselves. Let us enlarge.’

  Dark ivy re-skinned what was visible of the boundary wall. Nettles, brambles, unkempt shrubs, weeds and long grass encroached over the stone posts and erupted through the bars of the gate. During their passage to the edge of Hunter’s Tor Hall, many other signs of a growing remoteness and wildness had combined to ratchet Seb’s anxiety to the foothills of panic. A feeling that he struggled to quell, even after frequent stops to drink water and urinate behind trees. Delaying the inevitable only made the inevitable worse.

  Early that morning, after leaving the A38 between Buckfastleigh and Ivybridge, they’d headed into the interior of Dartmoor until they were moving slowly on B roads. Eventually, the satnav screen was entirely green save for a minor road they’d crawled along in the direction of the Hall. Google Maps on Mark’s tablet and Seb’s smartphone, augmented by Mark’s ten-year-old recollections, had got them as close to the estate as was possible by road. The last of the tarmac scratched a thin line through ten miles of hilly farmland, visible in glimpses through the trees enclosing the lane.

  After their frail phone signals had flickered their last, Seb had pulled onto a grassy verge at the side of the lane. From there they had walked for over a mile, on the remnants of a stone-chip path, often forcing their way through the prickly, damp verdure, to arrive at the gates.

  Mark swallowed a half-litre bottle of water and gasped. ‘There’s a slope on the other side of this wall that goes up to the house. I’m guessing what’s left of a driveway does too. That’s all I saw last time from higher ground.’ He turned around and pointed. ‘I climbed a hill over there. This house was in the distance, a big white place. And I followed this wall as far as I could in both directions, for about half a mile each way. The bracken was so thick and I didn’t have a ladder so I couldn’t get inside. I ran out of light and time.’ He’d kept up a near-relentless banter ever since they’d left Seb’s house, and Seb had found it a welcome distraction from the successive waves of nauseating anxiety that he’d endured.

  There was no need for a ladder at the Tor now. If the gates had been chained shut when Mark was here ten years before, they weren’t any longer. ‘No lock,’ Mark said as they inspected the gate.

  ‘Because they know I’m coming.’

  Mark looked at Seb, his expression quizzical but softened by uncertainty, and even sympathy. His struggle with Seb’s claims about what had appeared on the train, at his Manchester hotel, and elsewhere, had continued through the evening and into the morning they’d spent at Seb’s house in Brixham.

  ‘That woman?’ was all Mark said, quietly.

  ‘She’s expecting me.’

  ‘Well, let’s find out if anyone is in, eh?’ Mark said cheerfully, though it sounded forced.

  Pushing and lifting one gate between them, they made enough of an opening to squeeze into the grounds.

  The overgrown thickets they then crashed through must once have been part of a landscaped woodland garden. Seb was no gardener but he recognized some of the plants, the rhododendrons, azaleas and camellias. They grew untamed about the feet of the larger trees. Deeper inside, the vivid purple buddleia fl
owers reached out of the undergrowth, and swathes of pink and rose-red verbena erupted upon a mass of stems where the shrubs were better spaced. The air thickened with the hum and frenetic antics of bees. Had the circumstances been different, Seb may have found the untamed gardens beautiful.

  It was hard going through the lower levels. They couldn’t see for more than a few metres in any direction. Nothing had been topped or felled for decades. Only the crunch and slide of gravel beneath their feet provided any indication that they were still on the original drive. After a few hundred metres further in, an expanse of grass became visible through a border of overhanging tree branches.

  ‘Look here.’ Mark touched the white stone rim of a pond, the water entirely covered by vegetation. Part of a stone bench emerged from the undergrowth concealing the water. Further along, the stamen of a cast-iron fountain, resembling an open flower, appeared close to another concealed water feature. Relics of former follies and grottoes built by Prudence Carey’s family, and now reclaimed by nature.

  All Seb knew of the Carey family Mark had told him the previous evening. In the 1920s a business empire of grand hotels had enabled Prudence’s father to buy a near-dilapidated eighteenth-century country house. It now appeared the property was determined to return to a prerestorative state.

  ‘Impressive,’ was all Mark offered when the house finally came into view upon the summit of the hill.

  Seb’s own first impression of the house was that it proved its Georgian origins, probably Neo-Classical Revival. It wouldn’t have been out of place as a temple in Rome or a museum in London. A large building, simply designed and undecorated. Typically Palladian style with strong, vertical lines, squat windows on the lower ground floor with long sash windows above. A pillared portico framed a grand front entrance.

  The spectacle also called for an awed consideration of Hazzard’s ambition. The cross-dressing con man, the dishonourably discharged private from the Signals Regiment, the convict and former barman at a holiday camp had dispossessed Prudence Carey of her family seat with his talk of projection and celestial spheres, astral doubles and paradise belts. Many others had flocked here to hear the gifted ‘doctor’ speak, and to maintain his lifestyle. A lifestyle befitting a status that he’d elected for himself. Hazzard had genuinely believed that he could fly and he had reached the social climber’s mountain peak.