Which is worse, do you think: poring over a document for hours, trying and failing to make any sense of it, or reading something that looks like gibberish and immediately understanding every word?
I called Mum that evening. It wasn’t my usual day for phoning her, which is probably why she asked if there was anything wrong.
“Everything’s fine, Mum,” I said. “I just felt like a chat, that’s all.”
What I wanted was to test out how she sounded. I thought that maybe – maybe – she was going to tell me there was something wrong with Claire, that she’d been hospitalised, or that she’d been having nightmares again, or something.
I thought Mum was bound to have noticed by now. How could she not, when she and Claire had always been so close? Who was she going to risk telling, though? She probably felt as trapped and frightened as I did.
“How are the twins?” I said.
“The twins?” She paused. Why are you really calling, Willy? I could hear her thoughts, quite distinctly. She might as well have asked the question out loud. “They’re fine, love, so far as I know. Emma’s still dating that boy of hers.”
Rhys and Emma were in the sixth form by then, they had their own lives. I experienced a sudden and painful longing for the days before, when we had truly been a family, when the silences between us were of familiar contentment, when an afternoon up in the woods playing pirates with Rhys and Emma took on a bright luminosity that could never be explained, either while it was going on or once it was past.
To think that those times were not the real life, but a prelude to this one. I felt weak with sorrow. The maggot had been in the apple all along.
THE NEXT MESSAGE came two days later, in an envelope this time, a single sheet of white notepaper printed all over in tiny black capitals:
From the outside, the house is square and white. On the inside, there are many galleries, many halls, many sets of cellar steps and many cellars, though you will not see those cellars because he will not show you. Think of those trapped there, Will – you do not want to become one of those trapped there. He will offer, and you will want to take, though you must refuse. He has a map of the city that shows the cracks in it, the soft places, the city’s many ways of dying. London, she is a toy city, a patch of peeling lichen on the rotting stump beneath. Will you call me, Willy darling? I would love to hear your voice, just one more time.
The final note came on the Tuesday, written on the same white notepaper but in Claire’s normal handwriting:
Dearest Will,
I thought I’d drop you a quick line, darling, because Sarah says you called her the other evening and sounded out of sorts. Don’t tell her I said anything – she told me I shouldn’t worry you – but I found myself feeling anxious about you and so here I am.
You know you could tell me anything, Willy, don’t you? Anything at all.
Em and Rhys are fine. They think of you as an older brother, you know that, too.
You’re in our thoughts, always. I’m so proud of you, darling,
Claire
I PLACED ALL four letters in a drawer and tried to forget about them. What it must have cost Claire to write them – how she must have fought herself – was something I didn’t want to think about.
My mind was made up, in any case. I had emailed Mccabe, confirming that I would return to Greystone Lodge on the Wednesday morning, as he suggested. I told myself it was because I was curious to see Fawcett’s diary – presuming Mccabe really did have it – but that wasn’t the whole reason, or even the larger part of it.
The truth was, the house had ensnared me somehow, the idea of it. An idea like a spider’s web, stretched tautly across the void that had opened up at the heart of my life. And I had stumbled into it, and was caught.
“HERE IT IS,” Mccabe said. He handed me the journal. The covers were dog-eared and faded, marked in several places by what looked like water stains. They were also faintly tacky, as if the notebook – which was about the same size and weight as an ordinary paperback – had been recently handled by someone with sweaty palms.
I didn’t like the look of it, to be honest. I know it sounds ludicrous to say this – like a line from a cheap horror film – but there was something malign in the feel of it, those horrible sticky covers beneath my fingers, as if the anxiety and paranoia that had overtaken Fawcett during those years had transferred themselves to the physical substance of his diary.
The thing’s contaminated, I thought. I glanced up at Mccabe and saw he was smiling. His expression was not so much friendly as self-satisfied, a contemptuous little moue of I told you so that made me feel like punching him. Or throwing the book in his face and getting the hell out of there.
I didn’t do either. I opened Fawcett’s diary instead, steeling myself against the contact, turning the pages slowly and carefully as if I were handling a museum artefact, which I suppose I was.
Fawcett’s handwriting was small and upright and, unusually for a doctor, clearly legible, though it became more tangled and unevenly spaced towards the end. Certain phrases leapt out at me: ‘reminded her of when we were children’, ‘and seems symptomatic of her agony of mind’, and ‘Am I the fiend, or is she? The way she cried, afterwards, I no longer know’.
Some parts of entries had been underlined, and here and there other pieces of paper – letters, or parts of letters – had been inserted between the pages.
My feelings of loathing aside, it was a fascinating object.
“Has anyone else seen this?” I asked Mccabe. “Does anyone know it exists, even? This book could be very valuable.” Valuable to scholars, was what I meant. Who else would want it? To be valuable at all, a thing must be wanted.
“It is I who should be telling you this, surely?” Mccabe smiled again, less ominously this time. “And in answer to your question, no – no one knows it exists. There was a lot of interest in this diary fifty years ago, but no one was able to locate it and in the end most parties accepted that either it was lost or had never existed. In fact it was here, in this house, all the time. There were a number of storage boxes in the cellar beneath the garden flat, dating from before the house was converted. No one seemed to know who they belonged to, and so they stayed where they were. I finally managed to track down the firm of solicitors who handled the sale of Denise Cracknell’s property after she died. I asked if I might purchase the boxes, as I thought the contents might be of historical interest. The solicitors eventually conceded that Cracknell had no living relatives – her daughter was dead by this time, and she had no children – and that I was welcome to dispose of the boxes as I saw fit.”
“There’s a cellar underneath the garden flat?” I said. Accepting that the garden flat was itself a basement space, the presence of what would effectively be a second cellar seemed unlikely, certainly in a house of this age.
“There is,” Mccabe said. He looked at me hard. Many cellars, his eyes seemed to say. Many halls. “It was never converted, for some reason. It doesn’t appear in the plans for the garden flat, either. Strictly speaking it still belongs to Denise Cracknell.” He paused. “But you already know that, don’t you?”
“I’m sorry?”
“Come now, Mr Randle. Willy. You came here to purchase something. The question now is: do you want that thing, or not?”
THE HOUSE HAD felt different from the moment I entered it. If I tell you it was darker you won’t understand, not properly, because it wasn’t a question of the quantity of light, more the quality, which now seemed richer and deeper, more golden. I had the sense that more of the house was being revealed, corners and aspects and textures I had been unable to see before, not in the ordinary light, but could now, because this light was different.
I rang the doorbell and spoke into the intercom. The door opened with a neat little thunk and I stepped inside. I noticed the difference at once – the light, as I say, and something else, something bigger. This is it, I found myself thinking, and a feeling swept through me, that ju
ddering sensation of no that will sometimes come over you the instant before you do something stupid, something you know you’ll regret for ever afterwards but don’t dare pull back from.
Your friends are watching, most likely. Just imagine what a dork you’ll look if you duck out now.
I saw there was a door beneath the stairs, not the kind that usually leads to an understairs cupboard, but a full-height door. It’s the entrance to the garden flat, I thought, then realised that couldn’t be right, because the garden flat had its own private entrance, a flight of stone steps leading down into the basement courtyard, where the broken bike was.
Another way in, then? Only why would there be? I didn’t remember the door being there on my first visit, but I supposed it must have been. Doors don’t just appear overnight.
Think of those trapped there, Will, you do not want to become one of those trapped there. The words from Claire’s postcard came back to me, floating on the radiant air like motes of dust. I stifled a laugh and carried on up the stairs. The door to Flat 1 was standing open, and I could see it was the source of the light, the golden light which – I understood now – must be flooding in through the high Georgian windows of Mccabe’s main living room.
I FELL SILENT. The change in Mccabe was disturbing. Staggering. The affable man of means, the easy-going eccentric salesman of esoterica – these had been merely aspects, costumes, put on because they amused him or suited his purpose or probably both.
The thought came to me: how and why did you ever believe you had the upper hand here?
“I’m not sure what you mean,” I stammered. My master spy act was a royal fuck up, clearly. I’d have to settle for innocent oaf instead. Our friend from the north. “I came to have a look at the diary. I’m not sure I want to buy it, to be honest.”
“Well, you should be. This thing is priceless. To the right collector.” He took Fawcett’s journal from my hands, replaced it in its protective plastic covering. I felt a pang of regret, coupled with the frantic urge to snatch it back. To read such a thing, to be party to its sordid secrets. It would be like watching live footage of an execution, the blade biting deep before letting go, the red drops pattering, the realisation.
To savour these succulent gobbets at leisure, overripe meat, tempered with spices so rich in stimulants they may kill you, in sufficient quantity.
Edward Fawcett, selling his soul.
Allowing entry.
Privileged access to the core of one man’s agony. Such knowledge was, as Mccabe suggested, surely priceless.
I took a jerky step backwards. The air rasped at the back of my throat. I imagined atoms of oxygen and nitrogen, chafing the pink of my gullet like grains of sand.
Mccabe smiled.
“We can come back to the journal later, if you change your mind. On the other hand, I have something else here that might be more to your taste.”
He set the sheathed notebook aside on the glass Bauhaus table, then picked up something else, a slim cardboard wallet of the kind used to store photographs. PRONTAPRINT, it said on the front. The familiar blue-and-yellow logo was faded almost to transparency, a smiling woman and a child with a beach ball, the ghosts of twenty years ago or even longer. Could you even still get camera film processed? All those times, all those holidays, all those crap photos: people’s heads chopped off, or everything slightly blurred from where someone had moved the camera at the last minute.
Posting the film off to the processors in the PRONTAPRINT envelope then having to wait a fortnight to get your pictures.
36 exposures or 24.
Glossy or matte.
The disappeared past.
“What’s in here?” I asked. “I don’t buy dodgy photographs.” I knew about the artefacts some of them collected, the murder nuts – there’d been a thread on one of the forums (not Memento Mori) about crime scene photos, how to source the original negatives. Photos of Fred West’s basement, that kind of thing.
I’d had to stop reading that one after a while.
“See for yourself,” Mccabe said. He handed me the cardboard wallet, folded his arms. I opened the flap. Inside were half a dozen photographs – exposures. Like the PRONTAPRINT logo they were faded. That’s what happens with cheap film, isn’t it? The chemicals depreciate over time, leaching out the colours.
1: a busy shopping street in a historic town centre. I can’t tell where it is – either I’ve never been there or there’s nothing in the photograph to clearly identify it. Branches of C&A and Woolworths, Freeman, Hardy & Willis, names that are fading into obscurity, like the photograph itself.
2: a woman’s face, in profile, close-up and slightly blurry. She looks pale, but that could be down to the proximity of the camera. The colours of her jacket blaze brighter – red chunky wool with a black fake fur collar. I recognise it at once. It is familiar from forever.
3: the exterior of a house, a bulbous 1930s semi with a lilac tree in the front garden and coloured glass in a circular fanlight above the front door. The roof is red and pointed, like a clown’s hat. A sign upon the wrought iron gate: Innisfree.
4: the interior of a room (in the same house?) Dingy half-light, an indistinct view of shrubs and a waterlogged lawn – a back room then, probably. There are curtains (brown and gold) and a carpet (reddish), one of those spindly 1950s Ercol sofas and two matching chairs. The woman from exposure 2 is sitting on one of the chairs – her red jacket can be seen, quite clearly, hanging from the back of it. She is staring directly at the photographer, her eyes partially cancelled out by the camera flash.
5: the same image, but taken closer to the woman. The second chair cannot be seen, and only half of the sofa remains visible. The woman’s hands are in her lap, and she is holding something – a piece of fabric, a cloth bag, it’s hard to tell. Her expression is difficult to read, but the more I look at her the more she seems to be looking straight at me. Not at the photographer, at me. As if she knew I would be there to see her. Not then, not then. But sometime.
6: close-up on her face. She stares at me, glassily. Her pupils are dilated, as if she’s been drugged. There’s a place, she says slowly. I’ve seen it. Oh God, Willy, get them away from me.
It came to me that I was seeing her final moments as herself.
“Aunty Claire,” I breathed. The photograph shook in my hand. I felt an urgent need to defecate. I wondered distantly if I was going to be sick.
“She was with us for fifteen days,” Mccabe said. “Of course, none of you remember that.”
I felt the world turn. That’s an expression people use when they want to convey something marvellous. Words are too easy sometimes, too trite. This was something I felt happen, like the movement of grinding machinery beneath my feet. As if the workings of the universe had suddenly been revealed to me, slick with grease and blood.
The world as an ant farm.
We made an ant farm once, me and the twins. Plaster of Paris tunnels, with a sheet of glass over. A long rectangular chamber at one end where you put the food in.
“She was gone five minutes,” I whispered. “Not even that.”
“Yes, well,” Mccabe said. He coughed, covering his mouth, as if he was embarrassed. “You’re very alike, aren’t you?”
“She’s my aunt. My mother’s sister. Of course we’re alike.”
“I don’t mean like that. I mean you’re careless, loose with your memories, always searching. That’s the wonderful thing about searchers – we don’t need to look for them, they find us. I didn’t abduct your aunt, in case you’re wondering. She came willingly. Like you.”
“So what happens now? You’re going to keep me prisoner here for fifteen days?”
Mccabe laughed. “It doesn’t work like that, I’ve just told you. We’re not criminals. You want to leave? You leave. There’s no pursuit, no punishment. When the war is already won, the victor can afford a measure of leniency.”
He took the wallet of photographs out of my hands and began sorting through them.
“Early history of mental disturbance, attempted suicide, a sense of displacement. Suggestible and unusually sensitive to others’ distress. Sweet meat. Ah,” he said. “I’d forgotten about this one. Take a look.”
He separated one of the prints – exposures – from the others, handed it across to me then replaced the other pictures in the cardboard folder. The photo I was holding showed the grey stone frontage of a small terraced cottage. At the front door and apparently about to let himself inside stood a middle-aged man, someone who looked vaguely familiar but who I couldn’t place at all until I suddenly remembered where I’d seen another photograph of him – a profile picture on the comments threads of Memento Mori.
The man was Lionel Rose.
“All that rushing for trains.” Mccabe shook his head. “He needn’t have bothered. He’s of no interest.”
“And yet you bothered to take this photograph, or to have it taken. I presume that’s his cottage in Yorkshire?”
“Just, you know, teasing.”
“You wanted to prove you could hunt him down. If you wanted to.”
“A bit of fun.”
“What did you do to Claire?” I said. My voice was shaking, but I felt disconnected from it, as if the words I was speaking were part of a play on the radio, and I was listening to find out what happened next. I was in shock, I suppose. You hear these stories, don’t you, people diving off the Great Barrier Reef, having their leg taken off at the knee by a shark and the person not even realising until they try climbing out of the water.
Five Stories High Page 9