The New Uncanny

by Priest, Christopher

  He was glad if they assumed he’d been squinting in the dimness of the hotel bar only at the badges pinned above their long slim thighs. Each badge bore the image of a winged young woman dressed in a chain-mail bikini and a virtually transparent robe, an outfit both girls had copied apart from the wings. The sword in her hand indicated their names, Primmy and Barbaria. ‘Edwin Ferguson,’ he said.

  ‘That’s an old name,’ Primmy commented.

  ‘You need to be old to know all the tricks.’

  ‘I like a good trick, don’t you, Primmy? Are you going to show us yours, Edwin?’

  However guilty he couldn’t help feeling, he thought he might feel worse if he let the opportunity pass. ‘I only give private performances,’ he said.

  ‘Is it going to be all for us?’ Primmy cried.

  Barbaria bent her head and an eyebrow towards her, prompting Ferguson to assure the girls ‘It’s all right, I didn’t think you were angels.’

  ‘Why not?’ Primmy demanded.

  He pointed at her badge – at least, he hoped it was clear that was where he was pointing. ‘No wings.’

  ‘Sometimes we are,’ Barbaria said. ‘We can be all kinds.’

  ‘Depends who we’re with.’

  ‘I’m looking forward to finding out. What roles you like playing, I mean.’

  He made the sudden silence the occasion for a sip of Scotch followed by a larger one. ‘You’re looking at them,’ Barbaria said.

  ‘And they’re all you’ll be seeing,’ Primmy said.

  He was able to mistake this for a promise until they turned away as a man strolled into the bar. He was at least as old as Ferguson and even stouter, with greying hair that Ferguson thought far too long for his age. Nevertheless the girls stood up eagerly, although Primmy lingered to say ‘Thanks for the fun.’

  ‘Is that all?’ When she tried to appear prim instead of primitive Ferguson was provoked to add ‘Maybe you shouldn’t come out in public dressed like that. You might give some people the wrong idea.’

  ‘We were at the masquerade.’

  ‘You’ve been doing some of that all right.’ Loud enough for her to catch he said, ‘And what do you get up to the rest of the time?’

  Barbaria turned long enough to inform him ‘We’re social workers.’

  ‘Is that what they call it these days?’ he might have retorted except for feeling obsolete. As the girls each took the newcomer by an arm Ferguson saw that the man’s badge depicted a bronzed bruiser in sandals and loincloth and crown, who was brandishing a blade at a lengthy name Ferguson felt expected to recognise. He drained his Scotch and murmured to the barman ‘Who’s he?’

  ‘One of their writers.’

  In his sleeveless denim outfit the fellow didn’t look much like one, or his age. Was being a writer all it took to have girls hanging on your arms? Perhaps now Ferguson had time to write the book he imagined he contained, the rest would follow. The idea seemed so variously disloyal that he felt his face glow like the light of a brake he’d applied too belatedly to himself, and he hurried not much better than blindly out of the bar.

  He hadn’t reached the lifts when the lobby grew loudly crowded with people emerging from the conference suite. While a few were fantastically costumed, most struck him as not much less anonymous and awkward than himself. The hotel notice-board identified their event as a Fantasy Weekend, but it didn’t mean the kind of fantasy he’d yielded to imagining. At least, it certainly didn’t for him.

  He kept his back to the mirror in the lift once he’d jabbed the button. On its way the lift opened to admit a view of the second-floor corridor, where badged individuals and their noise and drinks were spilling out of a room. For a moment he wished he were in there, but the room sounded too small for the revellers who were. That was one reason why the wish fell away before the corridor did.

  The adjacent lift had just delivered someone to the third floor. Ferguson glimpsed their shadow vanishing around the corner ahead as he made for his room. From the corner, he saw the door next to his standing ajar. ‘Good night,’ he called as it shut, because the clinically pallid corridor with its equally colourless doors separated by timid abstract pastels made him lose all sense of himself. His last word was echoed in such a muffled voice that he couldn’t be sure of its gender.

  Once the lock on his door had given his card the green light he left the card in a slot inside the stubby vestibule to drape the room with indirect lighting. The word flat might have been invented for the accommodation: the boxy wardrobe and dressing-table, the single angular nominally padded chair, the double bed tucking nothingness up tight. Perhaps the midget television might provide some company – distraction, at any rate.

  A fat old man with a threadbare grizzly scalp met him in the bathroom. The sight fired up the taste of his Indian dinner, the taste of which rose in a volcanic belch. ‘Pardon,’ he said almost as inadvertently, rousing a muffled echo. He wasn’t apologising to his reflection; he didn’t even watch the old fool mouth the syllables. He lifted the toilet seat and its lid with the toe of his shoe, and the plastic ovals rapped the tiled wall. The small room seemed to have an echo for everything. He dragged his baggy zip down to fumble himself forth, and had hardly started pouring when the noise became a duet. The other performer was in the adjoining bathroom.

  Urinating in company always made Ferguson feel like a shy child, and he faltered to a dribble that trailed off to a drip. Was his neighbour suffering from the identical problem? Straining never helped, and the silence aggravated his inhibition just as much. He could only hum to lessen his awareness or pretend it wasn’t troubling him. ‘Let’s Do It’ always came into his head on these occasions, and he might have added words – one of his rhymes for bees, ‘People who have finished having pees’ or ‘Women who are down upon their knees’, that used to amuse Elizabeth whenever he sang them at random – if his neighbour hadn’t joined in.

  He still couldn’t identify the gender from the voice. His own was shriller than it had any right or need to be. Perhaps his fellow guest was borrowing his solution to the urinary annoyance; they hummed louder once Ferguson did. He squeezed his eyes shut and then managed to relax them, and was rewarded with activity where it mattered. Something had worked for his neighbour as well. The streams dwindled and fell silent simultaneously, and he was shaking himself dry when he heard a clink through the wall.

  His neighbour had put a glass down, but it was ridiculous to fancy they’d been using a glassful of water to imitate his sounds. He pulled a tissue out of the box by the sink to blow his nose. As he dropped the wad in the toilet he heard a nasal trumpeting in the adjacent bathroom.

  If it sounded very much like his, did it have much leeway to sound different? Hooking the toilet seat with the side of his shoe, he let it drop along with its lid on the pedestal, and was unsurprised to hear an echo through the wall. Both toilets flushed while he turned back to the sink. He had barely started brushing his teeth when the sound was imitated in the other bathroom.

  The old wreck in the mirror let his wrinkled mouth hang open, displaying all his front teeth and the gap one had left last month. How could such a tiny noise be audible through the wall? How could his? He decided he’d heard an echo until another bout of brushing was copied beyond the mockingly blank wall. His neighbour must be making the noise in some other way, unless they were attacking their teeth with a savagery that sounded demonic. ‘Hope they all drop out of your head,’ Ferguson spluttered and spat in the sink.

  The answering spit was fierce enough for an insult. The words that followed were repeated in exactly Ferguson’s tone, as far as he could distinguish the qualities of the voice. Was it deliberately muffled? Perhaps the speaker was obscuring it with a hand, hiding their ruined teeth from the other mirror, a notion that prompted Ferguson to blurt ‘What must you look like?’

  Although he thought he’d only muttered it, the question came back through the wall. The idiotic trick must be affecting him more than he realised
. ‘I know how I look,’ he couldn’t help retorting as he wiped foam off his lips. ‘I think I’m better off not knowing how you do.’

  He was unable to imagine a sufficiently grotesque costume for them. Perhaps they passed for normal until an event like this weekend’s gave them licence not to be. Well before they finished echoing his latest remarks he was sick of the joke, if it could be called one. ‘Very funny,’ he responded, wondering why he’d waited for the mimicry to finish. ‘Thanks for the laugh. Just what I needed. I haven’t been so entertained since –’

  He didn’t know. When the partial sentence came back neutered through the wall, he had the uneasy idea that the imitator was about to complete it for him. It faltered as he had, but he wasn’t about to finish it off. He couldn’t just blame the clown beyond the wall for the whole asinine situation; there was a clown in here too, looking foolish and pathetic, not to mention incapable of controlling his own behaviour. If he didn’t make any more noise, the other would have nothing to mimic. He turned off the light, muting the switch with his hand, before tiptoeing out of the room.

  For the duration of a couple of prolonged but silent breaths he was able to enjoy the possibility that his neighbour might be lingering in the bathroom for another noise to echo, and then the enforced hush set about troubling him. It emphasised the anonymity of the bedroom, which felt close to empty even of him. He wasn’t going to be forced to act as if he weren’t there. Grabbing the remote control from the shelf that enthroned the dwarf television, he threw himself on the bed.

  Did he just hear the springs yield beneath him, or was there an answering twang in the adjacent bedroom? He supported his shoulders with a pillow and awakened the television with a shrill whisper of static. Dismissing the Frugotel information menu, he began to search the channels: a comedy film teeming with teenagers even louder than the party he’d seen from the lift, a report of a polo game where all the players were in wheelchairs, a documentary about a drug that was meant to retard ageing, an episode of a reality series called Fostered for a Fortnight, another by the name of From a Previous Relationship… He hadn’t reached the second channel when, with barely a second’s delay each time, a television beyond the wall behind his head commenced dogging his progress.

  His neighbour was entitled to watch television too. The order of the browsing needn’t be significant, since it was the obvious one. Ferguson felt irrational for wondering what would happen if he reversed it – at least, until he did so and heard the other television copy him. Changing channels at random produced the same result, and he had to struggle not to shout at the wall. How could he watch the programme he’d been tempted to? Without the sound, of course.

  He buttoned it before poking the keys to summon the Frugrownup channel, where he came in some way through an act of the kind the channel offered the no doubt solitary members of its audience. The rhythmic activity was as noiseless as it was vigorous, so that he couldn’t help fancying that the participants were all straining to produce a sound. At least he’d called up silence in the next room too, and his body had begun to show signs of emulating that of the man on the screen by the time he heard a noise through the wall.

  Somebody was panting. It grew louder and more dramatic, keeping pace with the efforts on the television. His neighbour had given in to the same temptation, Ferguson tried to think, but weren’t the gasps too theatrical even for this sort of film, and oddly androgynous? Was the other guest producing them to taunt him? Without question there was just a solitary voice, and he could hear faint laughter too. It was muffled by distance, unless there were more people in the next room, covering their mouths so as to titter at his situation. That was beginning to seem as contemptible as his attempts to pick up the girls in the bar. He switched off the television, and the panting stopped at once.

  He lurched away from the bed and stumbled to the window. The hotel was indeed reflected across the deserted downtown street, where the front of a building was largely composed of glass. He could see his room and his faint self in the elongated window of an unlit office, but no sign of the next room. Could its occupant really have seen the reflection of the programme Ferguson had been watching? Perhaps they were using binoculars, or their eyes were keener than his. He dragged the dun curtains together, to be rewarded by a clash of curtain rings on the far side of the wall. ‘Show’s over,’ he mouthed and saw the old man beyond the dressing-table risk a triumphant grin. ‘Try and get to me now,’ they both said silently as he began to undress. He heard no further sound through the wall as he dumped his clothes on the chair and wriggled under the sheet and the dishevelled quilt before darkening the room.

  The silence in the other one felt so frustrated that he nearly laughed aloud, but he wasn’t about to invite an imitation. He closed his eyes and edged the quilt over his exposed ear and sought the dark. It swarmed with thoughts, of which the most bearable was the book he’d imagined writing. Even this seemed potentially troubling now – the idea of a couple who fell in love at first sight only to be separated for the rest of their lives. When at last they met again they would be too changed and too senile to recognise each other. In their final moments one would regain the memory, which would seem to keep them together for eternity. Who would have it, or could it somehow be granted to both? The more Ferguson worried the idea the less likely it felt, and he was glad when the Scotch and the bottle of wine he’d had at dinner conspired to sink him in the dark.

  A voice wakened him. He thought it was his own, despite its lack of shape. ‘Elizabeth,’ it repeated, or more accurately ‘Livadeth.’ It was talking in its sleep – no, replicating how he must have talked in his. ‘Weary of you,’ it said.

  He wouldn’t have said that, ever. He must have been asking where she was. ‘I bloody am of you,’ he informed his imitator. As soon as the remark started to be echoed he thumped the wall above the rudimentary headboard. ‘Enough,’ he yelled. ‘Enough.’

  The thumping was mimicked, and so was every repetition of the word. He might have been competing for the last one. He groped for the light-switch above the ledge that was Frugotel’s version of a bedside table, and was marching or at any rate limping at speed towards the corridor before he grasped that he shouldn’t leave the room while he was naked. Grabbing his trousers, he danced an ungainly impromptu hornpipe to don them, accompanied by echoes next door of the thuds of his bare feet. This enraged him so much that he almost forgot to retrieve his key as he stalked into the corridor.

  It was deserted. If there was muffled laughter, surely it was downstairs. He pounded on the next door with both fists, so hard that the plastic digits of its number seemed to tremble. No doubt that was partly because of the pounding that answered his. ‘Stop this bloody game right now,’ he shouted. ‘Normal people need their sleep.’

  He was echoed so closely that they might as well have been speaking in chorus. ‘That’s all. You’ve had–’ he said and felt idiotic for attempting to catch the imitator out by stopping unexpectedly, all the more so when it didn’t work. ‘You’ve had your chance,’ he declared and shoved his face at the spyhole in the door. The darkness beyond it only convinced him that he was being observed. Having dealt the door a final thump, he tramped to grab the phone from the ledge by his bed.

  The receptionist hadn’t finished announcing herself when he said ‘Can you do something about whoever’s next door?’

  ‘What seems to be the problem, sir?’

  ‘They’re–’ He might have demanded whether she could hear the echo of his side of the conversation, but he didn’t want to seem irrational. ‘They’re making all sorts of noise,’ he said. ‘I’ve asked them to stop but they won’t.’

  ‘Which room is that, sir?’

  ‘They’re in 339.’

  ‘Just a moment.’ After several of those the phone rang in the next room. It was answered immediately, but only by a childish imitation. ‘Ring ring,’ the voice said in falsetto. ‘Ring ring.’

  The phone fell silent, and so did the
mimicry. As he strained to hear more than the labouring of his heart, the receptionist said ‘Is that Mr Ferguson?’

  ‘There’s just me here, yes. Why?’

  ‘I’m afraid you’re mistaken.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘We’ve got nobody in 339.’

  ‘Don’t give me that. You told me you were full. You couldn’t change my booking.’

  ‘It was a late cancellation.’

  ‘Well, someone’s in there. I can hear them. I’ve heard them all the time we’ve been talking. Maybe some of this weird lot you’re full up with have managed to get in.’ The muttered repetition of his protests had begun to madden him. ‘Don’t take my word for it,’ he urged. ‘Go and see.’

  There was silence at his ear and beyond the wall. Eventually the receptionist said ‘Somebody will come up.’

  Ferguson replaced the receiver and was devoting his energy to making no further sound when he wondered if his complaints might have warned off his tormentor. Suppose the person fled and left him looking like a fool? He sprinted to the door despite the twinges of his heart and leaned into the corridor. It was empty, and his neighbour hadn’t had time to dodge out of sight along it. He glared towards 339 until he heard a lift hum and stop humming, and a large man in the yellow Frugotel uniform appeared around the corner.

  Other than frowning at Ferguson, he refrained from any comment. Once he’d finished peering through the spyhole he rapped on the door of 339. ‘Staff,’ he called. ‘Can I have a word, please.’

  Ferguson wouldn’t have been surprised if the man had received every one of them back, but apparently the prankster wasn’t so easily tempted. The man knocked harder and then slid a card into the lock. Brandishing the card like an identification and a threat, he advanced into the room. Ferguson mostly heard his own heart, but there were also the click of a light switch and the scrawny rattle of a shower curtain. He waited for the sounds to be followed up, and then he snatched his key card out of the slot on the wall and padded heavily into the corridor. ‘What’s the hold-up? Who–’