Under a Watchful Eye

by Adam Nevill

  Between the edge of the wooded parkland and the Hall, a series of tiered lawns were now just visible amidst waist-deep nettles, weeds and brambles. The terraces extended to a stone patio, bristling with weeds, that encircled the front of the building.

  Mark and Seb trudged upwards in weary silence, moving wherever a path became visible.

  Before the front door a final terrace surrounded an oval garden, or what was called a circus. Short borders of masonry formed an avenue, interspersed with garden plots that were a morass of weeds and wildflowers.

  Inside the portico the panelled doors were locked. Above them a semicircular fanlight had been designed like a rose and the glass was intact.

  Once closer to the walls, Seb noted how the white stucco and paint had flaked to reveal a pebble-dash of dark bricks. Moss stained the paintwork in long beards beneath the ragged gutters.

  The ground and first floors were shuttered, though the top-storey windows were uncovered. The glass up there was black and reflective. Not so much as a ceiling could be seen inside.

  Staring up and into the inner darkness transmitted a peculiar, unwelcome feeling of exposure, so Seb moved his attention to the slope they had just ascended, and looked further out. The view from the house reached for miles, a vista of great hills, shaded fields and plains, tufted with patches of woodland.

  Exploring the rear of the building, they waded through long grass and discovered a disused tennis court, the net rotted away. Curling about a row of cider apple trees, the old chain-link fence was orange with corrosion and had collapsed into metal tongues.

  Another twenty metres beyond the court a walled garden of red brick was intact. Whatever had been planted inside had rioted and thrust itself untidily at the sky. Faint engravings of narrow footpaths, marked by overgrown earthen banks, disappeared into more parkland which obscured the far boundary of the estate.

  Hunter’s Tor seemed endless, a wild infinity. A place for a mind to stretch unto its furthest reach.

  Seb briefly imagined figures dressed in white, sat at patio tables outside the front and rear doors. How they must have surveyed the landscaped gardens and the distant hills. How they must have discussed journeys to places still further afield, invisible to the naked eye, while their bodies had remained inert inside this great white edifice.

  Mark removed his rucksack. ‘No one here, Seb.’ The back of his shirt was dark with sweat. ‘Place is abandoned. Hasn’t seen any attention in years. All locked up and forgotten.’

  Alone, Seb continued further down the path beside the walled garden, seeking outbuildings. On his left, a wooden door with flaking green paint appeared inside an arch in a wall. The gateway was sealed with a corroded padlock, though the bottom of the door had rotted through.

  He ducked under a cascade of white blossom, as the path rounded a slope, and then stopped, startled by the sudden, vibrant intensity of an unruly rose garden. Even from twenty feet the vanilla-peachy fragrance of the flowers was overpowering, the air above transformed into a dogfight of butterflies and bees, circling, fluttering, alighting and diving into the pink, red and white flowers. A backdrop of trees with winter-green foliage made the tangle even more fervent.

  But how did Seb account for a fresh onset of unease here, so near these flowers? The longer he stared at the roses, the more the ecstatic activity of the fauna suggested agitation, rather than rapture, before such a fragrant bounty.

  Overwrought, Seb crouched and uncapped a bottle of water. The exertion of the trek to the Hall, following weeks of disrupted sleep, had taken a toll. His nerves had peaked and crashed like surf all morning. That’s all this was. And now he’d stopped moving, the pungent scents and the warmth of the midday sun against his head made him drowsy. He yawned. His eyes watered.

  Yet, at the sight of this neglected but thriving rose garden, his feelings continued to oscillate between suffusions of romantic delight and agitation from being so close to it. He imagined he might have walked into a place already occupied, albeit thinly, though with an intelligence, or approximation of such, and that he was now under its scrutiny. He suspected the flowers were aware of him. This was a place he’d never want to be alone.

  Seb moved away from the roses and returned to the house to find Mark.

  ‘Seb! Seb!’

  Can’t he keep his bloody voice down? ‘Ssh.’ Seb held a finger to his lips.

  Mark was stood to the side of the house, his eyes wide with excitement. ‘What you said about being expected . . . Look. The patio doors at the back are locked, but this side door isn’t. So maybe they wanted you to go through the tradesman’s entrance.’ Mark chuckled.

  Seb’s legs weakened as Mark pushed the side entrance open. ‘Let us go inside. Let us enlarge,’ Mark said, quietly, as if with reverence, which made Seb feel even worse.

  Ewan had been here. They had wanted him to come. ‘We drop off the files, then hit the road.’ Seb wasn’t sure if Mark heard him.

  His weight depressing the floorboards inside, Mark clicked his torch on.

  ‘Amazing. There’s still stuff here.’

  And there truly was in the first room they entered, the kitchen. Above cupboards, a dozen shelves laddered to a peeling ceiling. Oddments of crockery and an incomplete dinner set remained in place. A dark blue Aga in a tiled hearth stood at the opposite end of the kitchen. A clutter of pans covered the rusting hotplates. Mismatching bowls and glasses were dotted about an open cabinet beside the stove. Three dozen ancient cookbooks mouldered upon two wooden tables that sat side-by-side in the middle of the floor.

  Seb stroked the kitchen surfaces with his index finger to confirm the room was filmed with dust. ‘Hasn’t been used in years.’

  Apart from some soft matches and a few items of tarnished cutlery, the drawers were empty. The room seemed to have been improperly cleared many years before.

  No daylight penetrated the shutters on the windows of the ground floor. The hallway beyond the kitchen and empty scullery were panelled in dark wood, creating dour tones that effected a deeper sense of darkness.

  They moved beyond the daylight falling through the side door. Their torches created a sepia fog, comprising a myriad of dust particles falling like an endless rain.

  The pictures were gone from the walls. Only an empty umbrella stand and a stool with scuffed, wooden legs remained in the hall. Upon the seat was an alpine hat. It had been placed upon a folded scarf of yellow silk. A pair of hand-stitched leather gloves completed the ensemble.

  Mark shone his torch on the articles of clothing. ‘Do you think they were Hazzard’s?’ He took a picture.

  Seb struggled to hear much besides the rush of blood through his ears. His eyes felt as if they had extended from their sockets to become as large as eggs, white and filled with suppressed hysteria. If he heard a noise beyond those of their feet and Mark’s voice, he wondered if his bowels would give out.

  In the two larger downstairs rooms at the front, the brownish outlines of missing picture frames were visible. Bookcases covered two walls in one of the large front rooms, but their empty white shelves now foamed with grey dust. The mantles were clear of bric-a-brac.

  Dreary spaces, their lines softened by successive layers of cobwebs, the walls stained by the desiccated spore of insects, the floors gritty with rodent droppings; a sense of meagreness and poverty was now suggested along with an incomplete flight.

  There were also hints of a Spartan, clinical character to these rooms. It was possible to imagine them being airy once, bright with sunlight, and facing the tremendous view of the moors beyond the closed shutters.

  Some furniture had survived in the largest living room: an ancient settee and two large armchairs, the fabric worn on the seats and armrests. One chair had a tartan blanket draped over the headrest, as if it were a ghostly reminder of an old figure who’d once sat there.

  After inspecting the first three rooms together, Mark surrendered to his eagerness and began roaming, hurriedly, as if a time limit had been impos
ed upon their search of the former SPR headquarters. His feet banged about the floorboards and his torch beam excitedly scythed across the walls and doors.

  Reluctant to be left behind, Seb followed as best he could, tracking the excessive noise of Mark’s feet into a long dining room in which a table without chairs awaited. The cabinets also offered nothing more than bare shelves behind dirty glass. Beneath the window the indentations of a sideboard’s legs still pocked a threadbare rug that covered most of the floor.

  Mark rushed out as soon as Seb arrived. From further along the passage that bisected the width of the building, he called out, ‘Seb! In here! Quick,’ as if he’d found what he was looking for. ‘Check it out. His study? Do you think?’

  That room had once been an office for someone. A desk remained, an antique hardwood. A Remington portable typewriter sat uncovered beside two pencils, a large stone paperweight and an empty blue glass. The shelves above the small desk were empty.

  ‘And look. Still here.’ Mark’s torch lit up a table beneath the shuttered window. Upon it a cluster of framed photographs stood upright. Mark began to raise them and blow away dust. There were nine portraits.

  ‘That was Prudence Carey when she was younger,’ Mark said. ‘I’ve seen that picture before.’ It had been shot in black and white and featured an attractive woman with dark hair, seated in a stylized pose, looking over her shoulder. Seb guessed it had been taken no later than the thirties.

  Two of the colour pictures captured an elderly woman beside a flower bed, and perhaps this was part of the Tor’s now neglected gardens. It had probably been taken in the early seventies. ‘I’m guessing that could be her when she was older,’ Mark offered.

  ‘There he is,’ Mark said so suddenly he made Seb jump. He held up another picture frame and jabbed his pudgy hand at the portrait of a small, smartly dressed man with a slender face, sharp cheekbones and dark eyes. He was handsome in a way that was pretty. ‘The Master.’

  In another photograph the same figure wore a carnation on the jacket of his suit and stared dreamily into the distance, his hair immaculately styled with brilliantine. It looked like a portfolio shot taken some time after the Second World War.

  In another gilt frame the same man, though much older, was standing beside an E-Type Jaguar and wore a pale macintosh coat and a small alpine hat. The print was blanched by sunlight, but Seb estimated that it had been taken in the sixties. Gloves and oblong sunglasses also issued signs of a subtle though deliberate concealment. One hand rested on the roof of the sports car. The dandy grown up.

  ‘So who’s that?’ Seb asked. The final three portraits featured another woman. Slender, near willowy, her face heavily but tastefully made-up in each photograph.

  She wore a simple black dress in one picture and held a glass of sherry. A stole was draped over one arm, the only embellishment that added a theatrical flourish. One eyebrow was also arched in mock-disapproval at whoever held the camera, the eyes alluring and mischievous. She stood as if in the first position of ballet, her sling-back shoes pointy-toed and high-heeled, her slender shins shimmering in nylon. Elegant, quietly glamorous, even sexy, and posed before a large fireplace. Seb had not long shone his torch on that fireplace in one of the downstairs rooms.

  The beauty wore a hat and veil in the sole headshot. Behind a gauzy veil, her painted eyes were made feline with eyeliner, and feminized further with false lashes. Shiny, dark and slightly parted lips smiled beneath the veil. The siren.

  ‘Diane? You think?’ Mark said. ‘The eyes and nose, same as the male persona. See?’ He pointed to one of the younger shots of the man.

  He was right. This was Hazzard, and convincingly transformed into a fashionable society beauty. Nothing too dramatic or camp. This was an artful mimicry of the female without a hint of the spectacle of drag. It could have been the portrait of a film star.

  In the final picture, the transvestite was older and dressed in a long mink coat, the glossy fur shimmering. Her hair was concealed by a hat, or white turban, the eyes completely hidden by sunglasses. A beauty spot had been delicately impressed beneath one eye. Long satin gloves covered the delicate forearms, and patent leather boots encased her legs, adding a subtle charge of the erotic and revealing the fetish at the heart of the persona. Age seemed to have transformed the alter-ego into something more imperious too. The gaiety and prettiness had vanished from this colder, fuller, but still handsome face.

  The actual evidence of Hazzard’s eccentricity, the split gender and the feminine half, cultivated with such care and enthusiasm, startled Seb. He found it hard to equate Diane with the terminable morbidity of Hazzard’s second collection of ‘Strange Experiences’.

  The life of the man seemed too large to be accommodated by any experience at his disposal. Despite his perilous situation, Seb couldn’t deny the compelling aura that this master of lies and subterfuge, of disguise and theatre, still managed to issue from old photographs. While enmeshed in a tawdry history of under-employment, imprisonment and fraud, Hazzard had also achieved something extraordinary inside a grand country house. He had accomplished something that no robed guru or bearded, self-proclaimed prophet of the same era, had ever mastered in their more celebrated compounds or temples. Hazzard was an original.

  ‘Just bloody incredible.’ Mark took photos of the portraits. Then switched his tablet for a small camera that he cupped in one hand. ‘You know who should come here and film this? That Kyle Freeman fella. I love his stuff.’

  Seb looked at the ceiling. ‘Let’s go. Upstairs.’

  ‘Let us go out of here and enlarge upstairs.’

  ‘Mark. Please. Stop saying that.’

  The bare floorboards became an amplifier of their footsteps. They might have been wearing shoes with tipped heels as they walked into the shrinking circles where their torch beams ended on the brown walls, the circles of light growing brighter as they narrowed, the darkness welling behind their shoulders. Both of them sneezed, as if one had set off the other.

  The first floor existed in total darkness. Twelve rooms arranged around a broad corridor that ran through the building widthways, with the staircase opening in the middle of the floor. And like the hall below, these walls were wood-panelled, the doors large and thick with yellowing emulsion.

  Every bedroom door had been left open, and inside each room the wood panelling ended at a picture rail. Wallpaper stained brown with age continued to the cracked and flaking ceilings. And, as if awaiting new guests and donors, the old SPR beds remained. All were neatly made with a white sheet folded over a cream blanket. Any other furniture had been cleared, leaving dark patches and scratches on the wooden floorboards.

  ‘This is where they projected from,’ Mark said in the first bedroom they entered, his eyes wild with excitement. ‘From these actual rooms. Incredible, isn’t it?’

  It was something, for sure, and Seb’s own gaze flitted across the walls as if he expected to see a prostrate shape, still hovering above its earthbound double. He felt no admiration, only trepidation.

  A locked door blocked the stairwell and any access to the top floor where Hazzard must have lived.

  ‘Don’t! Please. Don’t,’ Seb said, as Mark heaved and pushed at the door, rattling it within the frame. ‘Let’s look downstairs again. There’ll be a cellar.’ Seb realized he lacked the courage to go any higher. Whatever was up there, he wasn’t ready to see. He needed to go back down and regroup his wits before Mark forced his way into what remained upstairs.

  Near the kitchen, behind a door they’d previously mistaken for a pantry, a staircase descended to a lower ground level and opened into a large storage room. The walls flaked and were lined with rusting pipes and a later addition of strip-lights.

  A second flight of shorter stairs rose to a broad trapdoor, once used for receiving supplies and the fuel required to maintain a large house. Most significantly, the room was lined with long metal cabinets, each labelled chronologically. It was the SPR archive.

  Ma
rk wasted no time and began hauling open drawers, his thick fingers soon flicking through the folders inside. He held the butt of the torch handle between his teeth.

  ‘Look here,’ Seb said, shining his torch at the floor around two tables. The surfaces immediately struck Seb as too bright.

  ‘What?’ Mark asked, without even looking over his shoulder.

  ‘The floor.’ It was tracked with scuffs that hadn’t been recoated in dust. The surfaces of the two tables were definitely cleaner than they should have been too. One was cluttered with stationery, biros and copier paper, some of it reasonably modern and still in place. ‘Someone has been in here, recently.’ More footprints became visible beneath the table. A track had also been worn through the dross, to and from the filing cabinets.

  Mark rose from his knees, wincing. ‘Ewan?’

  Seb nodded. ‘I think so. That bastard was in here.’

  ‘But look around,’ Mark said, smiling, and indicating the emptiness and signs of dereliction. ‘There is no SPR any more. Your mate got inside and took some files. And there’s far more than reports in these cabinets, Seb. That first one is full of accounts. Bank statements. Utility bills. Receipts. Masses of them going back decades. Evidence of a fully functioning business and household. It’s a treasure trove. It’s just bloody amazing! The explanation of how the organization was run must be inside this room.’ Mark returned to the cabinets.

  The squeal of the drawer runners grated on Seb’s nerves. ‘All undisturbed, Mark, and for so long? How is that possible for a building of this size? No inheritance, will or probate? No further occupancy? I don’t buy it.’