by Adam Nevill
Downstairs was now too busy with the alumni, so this time he went up with his eyes mostly closed and his shaking hands sliding across the dirty walls to find doorways that he wished to avoid.
His eventual discovery of the now-unlocked door that opened onto the staircase that rose to the top floor was incapable of causing him any further alarm. He’d reached capacity. By the time he made it onto those stairs, he also seemed ready to escape from himself. He believed he would soon be forced from his own mind in search of a relief from the unrelenting terror being sustained within his skull. And he couldn’t delay this any longer. His presence was clearly required.
Up there.
For a while he even believed himself to be alone in the very place where he had once lived: M. L. Hazzard, the Master.
Seb flicked the torch on to see where he was standing, and like his old friend, Ewan, he saw that he had entered a corridor made up of plain white walls and black doors. The floor was thick with dust, the air swollen with the silence of its vacancy.
Was the space holding its breath?
He helps those who come inside his house.
Seb rediscovered his voice. From a whimper to a croak to something much stronger, he began to speak aloud. And the sound of his voice was the only thing that kept a sense of himself in place between his ears. Talking also seemed to remind him of the contact between his feet and the floorboards. ‘I came! Are you here?’
Seb fell silent for fear that one of the six black doors might be pulled open from the other side.
He remembered a detail from Ewan’s notes, and walked to the third door on the right. Opened it.
In the reflection on the window opposite the door, he watched himself walk into the room.
Inside the room, he saw the painting that Ewan had described. An oil painting of a boy. A boy sat on a chair. His hair was thick, curly and blonde. The child held a bear. Directly under the painting sat the same red velvet armchair, with the same bear still sat upon the chair, propped up by a cushion. But it was a much older bear than the one depicted in the painting because this one’s fur had been worn smooth in places.
Curiously, the room was bare save for what resembled props. A couch with the row of antique toys lined along the length of the seat, dominated by a large doll. This was an unappealing effigy of a baby girl wearing a hand-knitted cardigan over a white dress. Its hair may have been butchered by a child left alone with scissors. The shiny face was wide with surprise.
Another bear sat beside the doll, and then another doll made in the image of an imperial depiction of a Chinese man. The fourth doll was tiny and engulfed by a white smock. Its head was the size of a conker and jet-black in colour.
Upon the rear of an interconnecting door an old lace nightgown, made for a child, hung upon a hook.
To this place, the projectors of the SPR had once been trained to direct their astral bodies. Was that not what Ewan had undergone right here, an assessment? Had this room been some stage in a test? A place of significance to measure progress, before those hapless souls went further out, and beyond those black windows and into a misty void. Was it from here that a waterless stream was used by Hazzard, and from which it became impossible for so many to return?
Seb backed out of the room and closed the door.
In a second room he found the card table. It had been set out for four players. One card was uppermost before each chair.
There were empty bookshelves and a side table with three ornaments arranged upon its surface: a glazed cockerel and two white ceramic bowls patterned with blue flowers. A silver drinks trolley lay disused and furred with dust.
Seb found the master bedroom to be as it was described in Ewan’s notes. It was a woman’s room. A large brass-framed bed remained in place, the lace-edged bedclothes neatly made. There was a little dressing table too, draped in white cloth, the top cluttered with antique perfume bottles.
A smaller dressing room was connected to the bedroom.
Seb shone his torch inside and the darkness receded, a shadow of black molasses withdrawing from the light. A wide alcove revealed a line of women’s coats and dresses. Hat boxes filled the shelf above the dusty garments. At least fifty pairs of shoes, some heavily worn, covered the floor beneath the clothing.
Diane’s room.
And it was always here. Always. Unlit. Behind these walls and in this echoing vastness of an empty building, this was here. Stale, unworn clothes. Furniture recoated with dross.
But was this room also a beacon?
A sudden sense of what reached away, stretching forever, beyond those black windows and above the roof of the Hall, made Seb want to curl into a ball and scream. The beam of his torch wavered as his hand shook.
He’d come up here for a sign, but was now succumbing to an influence. He could feel it. As each moment passed, an impression of the room’s past, and of its occasional occupant, amplified within his imagination to a near unsustainable degree.
He felt more deeply uncomfortable inside his own skin than ever before in his life. The tiniest hairs covering his body extended. Their roots prickled electrically. A terrible anticipation of engaging with the unseen presence forced a whimper from his lips.
His expectation was soon similar to a physical pain and he turned clumsily to flee the room. The white beam of the torch cut across the standing mirror in the far corner of the bedroom.
Whatever sat upright in the mirror’s reflection of the bed had flesh as pale as a bloodless body found frozen in arctic ice. But the figure was not sat up inside the actual bed, but only in the bed’s reflection. His torch quickly confirmed that there was no bewigged head propped up by pillows, with a face painted clumsily, or even ruined to smears by tears, and so large upon a skeletal neck. No teeth the colour of ancient bones were grinning at him now.
Seb panted with relief.
But the room was not done with him and the air filled with a sweet musk. A scent cloud that bloomed to the glutinous pungency of the rose garden outside. About his head came a susurration of something silky.
He then became certain that his feet had risen from the floorboards. Seb even spread his arms for balance. All the blood in his head must have evacuated and left his mind reeling. He blacked out.
And awoke.
From the other side of the bedroom he found himself to be looking back upon himself. There he was, bent with fear, his mouth open in the idiocy of shock, his coat zipped up to the chin.
Seb adjusted his footing to dispel a sense that he was falling forwards. A wave in the sea might have been tipping him over. A queasy sliding of his vision followed, his panic caught in its uneasy wake.
Now he was no longer staring at himself, or outside of himself, but standing in the place on the opposite side of the room that he had just been staring at.
From the corner of his eye, a gliding motion inside the dressing room brought him about.
A sharp inhalation of air was drawn behind his ear.
The flat of a cold hand laid itself between his shoulders.
Seb whimpered, turned and illumined an empty bedroom.
He then directed the torch beam in the direction of the rustle inside the dressing room, to make certain that one of the long fur coats had not just stepped out from the clothing rack.
A black coat draped about a thin form. A pale head wearing a hat and dark glasses.
The torchlight failed to reveal anything.
The cold hand in the darkness touched him again.
Seb lurched for the door and fell into the corridor outside.
The door at his back slammed with enough force to pass a tremor through the entire building.
He sat up on the dirty floor and said, ‘Please . . .’
He could hear nothing but the echo of the door slamming. He put his hands to his ears to dull the noise inside. His ears popped and he thought he might be sick.
When the nausea passed, Seb got back onto his feet and stumbled from the top floor. Torchlight raking th
e floor and walls, he ran through the long shadows that stepped backwards and inside the doors that he passed. And he kept his eyes averted from the fresh movements on the ceilings of the bedrooms. He looked away from the jostling grey patches that made him think of dead, wet skin. Only in the middle room, opposite the stairs that descended to the ground floor, did the urgent sounds of exertion, those exhausted grunts, draw his attention. And in that room he saw another partial form adrift in the air, mostly indistinct save for the stub that protruded like a dead umbilicus from a hollow stomach.
Out through the hallway and the kitchens he fled, shouting to himself to drown out the din of his own mind, and of what groped about his feet in the darkness, muttering.
He found the grass outside and there he fell twice. Back upon his feet, he ran round the house’s walls and made it as far as the rose garden. Blind and wretched with fear, he found himself gripped with a need to find Joyce, to seek her protection and to settle Veronica’s terms to end the night. But soon, nothing could have persuaded him to venture any further down that gravel track, between the walled garden and the night-drenched roses.
Seb turned off the torch and thought of throwing it away into the darkness in case he was tempted to turn it on again before the sun rose. He would not look upon what now circled the rose beds. And he would not see what moved in such numbers, through the trees bordering the path.
A crowd was feeling its way towards the Tor. All of those who had gathered were close to the ground and talking in incomprehensible voices. He could go no further and they were coming closer. Soon, he would be amongst them.
We’ll have to go back, a woman’s voice announced from nearby. There is no light here.
27
Shed the Body’s Veil
The sun had been up for three hours when the two women found the writer in one of the large rooms at the front of the house. He was slumped in the threadbare easy chair that no one had used for more years than they cared to count.
His body was wrapped in an old, but beautifully preserved, fur coat. His wide eyes did not move as the women entered the room. All of the shutters were closed. A heavy pall of stale perfume hung in invisible drapes about the chair.
The two women exchanged glances, until the one with the long hair began to sniff and dab at her eyes. She then raised her face to the ceiling and muttered as if to something that existed beyond the room. Eventually, she picked up the little rucksack that had been dropped beside the chair and peered inside it. ‘Shall I fetch the spades?’ she asked her companion.
The one with the short helmet of hair returned her disdainful gaze to the seated figure. She opened the fur coat that the writer had been wrapped inside and placed her hand against the man’s chest. ‘No. He’s still breathing.’
She snapped her fingers angrily before his face but failed to illicit a response. ‘He’ll come back.’
‘Oh, thank goodness for that! Shall I put the kettle on?’ her companion asked.
‘Please do. We’ll pick up with him later to discuss terms.’
THE END
Part 3
THROUGH THE MIST
28
My Soul Rose Trembling
[SIX MONTHS AFTER I TYPED ‘THE END’]
‘We don’t like it,’ Wendy said. ‘I mean, is that supposed to be us? These . . . creatures? This Joyce? And this horrid Veronica? I don’t think I’ve ever read anything as disrespectful in all my life!’
But you do have yellow teeth, and you do smell, and you are mad, and you are blackmailing me and extorting money from me. So what’s your problem, Veronica? Oh, I’m sorry, I meant to say, Wendy. And one more thing, your haircut is crap. I still don’t know for sure, but I assume that you do it yourself with kitchen scissors, or maybe with a knife and fork. Or does Joyce – sorry, I mean, Nat – step up to the plate with a pair of garden shears and give you a trim? I used no artistic licence in my descriptions of your bloody head, besides changing the colour from a kind of ashy-dusty grey to blonde.
‘Yes, quite!’ Nat said, encouraged by her partner. ‘And our ideas, the very ideas of our organization, you have misrepresented them. I’m afraid this will do nothing for our reputation as an international society.’
Is that so, Joyce? Sorry, I mean, Natalie. But one never sees oneself as one is. Do any of us? You of all people should appreciate that. Though, as you lack even a shred of self-examination, or anything that could be regarded as reason, apart from the low animal cunning that drives your every move, then you would realize how loathsome, absurd and sinister both of you, and your ‘organization’, truly are.
And in my defence, I think I have rendered my association with your ‘organization’ with an unnerving similitude. And isn’t this what you wanted: my imaginative interpretation of the wonders within your dear Master’s vision, and of his illustrious society of projectors?
Well, that’s what you got: the truth. And the funny thing is, as the Master has always claimed about his own less well-known ‘work’, besides changing a few names and hair colours, everything in my book is also true. It’s all true. I wouldn’t even call it fiction, I’d call it an account of a truly strange experience.
‘I mean,’ Wendy said, her face quivering with the anger that hadn’t abated since she’d arrived at my door that morning, clutching the manuscript to her body, ‘you’ve spent six months . . . Six months while we have waited and waited for this book, and yet you produce this . . . This Yellow Teeth thing? And whose teeth are these that you are referring to?’
I cleared my throat. ‘Well, Wendy, it usually takes me over a year to complete a novel. But due to the extraordinary pressure of a deadline that you imposed upon me, and the abandonment of the book that I was writing . . . Not to mention the very vivid “material” that I have been privy to since making your acquaintance, I have been unusually inspired and motivated to complete this draft. I was also granted an extension by my publisher to fine-tune those details about the teeth, and other things.’
Wendy entwined her fingers into what looked like a bony mace and shook that knot of hand angrily. ‘But you haven’t changed all of the names! I mean, you are in it. You. You put yourself in the story! This book wasn’t supposed to be about you, it was supposed to be about him and his life’s work. This is unacceptable. It’s not what we asked for. It’s not what was required.’
‘No, it’s really not, Seb,’ Natalie said. ‘You’ve really been a grave disappointment to us. In fact, I am uncomfortably reminded of a similar experience that we had with your friend, Ewan.’
‘Quite, Nat. Quite so,’ concurred Wendy, nodding her head to add weight to their position.
Nat’s own gorge rose. It seemed she’d waited a long time to have a go at someone. I don’t imagine it has been easy living with Wendy for decades, and in that wretched hovel in the grounds of the Tor, in the service of him and the alumni of the API, or the Association of Psychophysical Investigation. At least, in the story, I did change the acronym of the API to SPR – not that anyone beyond a handful of people even knew anything about the API. ‘You promise so much, you writers. And we’ve taken such a close interest in you, and we presented you with a marvellous opportunity, and provided access to miracles, and then . . . you produce this? You have assassinated us. You let us down, you let the API down, you let him down, you let yourself down.’
Wendy now looked at Nat with something approaching surprised admiration, though this quickly turned to what looked like resentment, as if Wendy had wanted to say these very things to Seb, but had been upstaged by her subordinate. ‘Thank you, Nat,’ she said in such a way as to prompt the end of her colleague’s participation in the discussion.
I fought to suppress a smile of satisfaction. My revenge had been sweet and all that I’d done was write an accurate account of my recent experiences. But it would have been foolish to goad them any more. Despite the tone of the novel, I was sure that the publishing advance would deter them from taking revenge. There are times when being
a disappointment as a writer is advantageous because freedom is the by-product. ‘You asked for an interpretation of my experience of your organization, Wendy, and from the very moment that Ewan reappeared in my life. You wanted me to depict what you have devoted your lives to: him, Hazzard. Well, this is the honest result. I’m afraid I see you in a way that is remarkably at odds with how you perceive yourselves. And I can only write what I feel compelled to write. I’m afraid, as I told you, I cannot write to order. I have more integrity than that. And it’s not as if he can even read it. So be grateful for what you have.’
The two women stared at me in silence. Their shock and suppressed rage seemed to suck the static electricity out of the room and into their quivering bodies. One of Wendy’s eyelids even trembled above that discoloured, egg-yolky eye, and the eyeball appeared to distend from the eye socket. Her forehead purpled and I mused over her blood pressure.
‘I know what this is,’ Wendy all but spat at me. ‘It’s a smear. Revenge. A petulant attempt to protest your grievances. But that was not what we asked for!’
‘Asked for? Is that how you would describe what you have demanded from me, ever since Ewan allowed your shadows to fall across my threshold, and to darken an existence that I was perfectly content with?’
‘Oh no. No, no!’ Wendy cried. ‘We’re not going through all that again. If you cannot see this as an opportunity, then that is not our problem. This book –’ Wendy tapped the manuscript that she had thrown onto the coffee table – ‘is nothing short of a smear campaign.’
‘Then sue me for defamation and libel. After the book is published.’
Wendy’s thin-lipped mouth worked about her dirty teeth but produced no sound. There was a flicker now in her second eyelid.
‘Did you say, published?’ Natalie whispered.
