Five Stories High

by Jonathan Oliver

  Excuse me?

  He sighed. The foul crimes done in my days of nature. What crimes, you should have said.

  All right. What crimes?

  Crimes, he said, against science. What other kind is there?

  (That made sense. As far as Dad was concerned, there were no others, nothing serious enough to count as a crime. Murder, theft, burning down buildings; he’d always maintain that anybody who did that sort of thing must be sick, not bad. No sane man would do something that would harm others and, more to the point, himself, when he got caught. But bad science in any form was an unpardonable offence.)

  Let me get this straight, I said. You’ve gone to hell just because somebody disproved your theory.

  He was within an ace of losing his temper with me, so nothing unusual there. No, of course not, he said. First there is no hell, except in the sense of Doctor Faustus, act one scene three, why, this is hell, nor am I out of it. Second, not because my theory was disproved, but because it wasn’t.

  Excuse me, I said gently. But it was.

  It wasn’t. That ominous growl I knew so well. The fools thought it was, but the refutation is flawed. The theory is sound. He paused to pull himself together. My crime is that I was never able to show what was wrong with the refutation. I failed. And so, here I am.

  That’s so unfair, I said. You were clever enough to discover the theory. The fact that you weren’t clever enough to defend it really shouldn’t count against you. After all, nobody’s perfect.

  A little hiss, intake of breath. I should have known better, he said. How could I expect you to understand? You never showed any interest in my work.

  That hurt. I did my best, I said. But you were a maths genius, there’s only a few hundred people in the whole world clever enough to understand your work. As it happens, I’m not one of them. You can’t blame me for that.

  I don’t think he was listening to me. I like what you’ve done with this room, he said. It’s very plain and undistracting. A person could really concentrate in here.

  Concentrate and be concentrated, I replied, like orange juice. That made him laugh. He never laughed because he was amused, only to mark a valid point. That’s all right, then, he said. I’ll let you get on with whatever it was you were doing.

  I must have looked away for a moment. When I looked back, the armour was back on its stand. I breathed out slowly, waiting for the dream to fade. But it didn’t. Therefore, since my dreams always fade, it can’t have been a dream. That’s scientific logic, that is.

  THERE’S NOW SOME stupid law that limits how much petrol you can buy in a can. You can fill your car’s tank with the stuff, drive it away and siphon it out at your leisure, but you can only buy one silly little canful. However, I figured that one can would be all it’d take. Just as well, considering the criminal price of petrol these days.

  I’d actually started splashing it around the walls when I realised what I was doing and made myself stop. Are you out of your mind, I asked myself. You can’t go burning your house down. For a start, it’s other people’s house too, and what harm did they ever do you? More to the point, this isn’t the way to go. If this place is getting you down, leave. Go somewhere else. Burning it to the ground is excessive.

  (I read a story once where the hero’s chickens were killed by a wolf. He bought more chickens. The wolf got in and killed them all. He bought more chickens, barricaded the henhouse, but the wolf broke in anyway. So he bought yet more chickens and sat up all night; and when the wolf got in, he nailed a plank over the gap, then set light to the henhouse. The fire spread and burned down the farm, but at least he beat the wolf. I couldn’t really see what was wrong with that.)

  Fortunately I’d only used about a cupful of petrol. I put the cap back on the can, and tried scrubbing what I’d spilt out of the carpet and the wallpaper with washing-up liquid. Waste of time. Also, didn’t he say something about confined to fast in fires? Setting light to the place would just make him feel at home.

  It must have been a dream, except that the armour now has a visor and a sword.

  ANYWAY, I DECIDED to cut my losses and list it as collect-only. Someone bought it for nearly as much as I paid for it, and settled up immediately. He said he’d get back to me about picking it up. I haven’t heard from him since.

  Work seemed to have dried up. I called my agent several times, but all I got was her answering service. I left about a dozen messages. She didn’t call me back. She always calls back. I deduced that time had frozen and was standing still, with me trapped in a moment, like a fly in amber.

  What can you do to pass the time when time is standing still?

  Consider the snail, who moves slowly under the weight of his captive environment. Everything else rushes past him – the world must seem very fast, if you’re a snail. Consider a reverse scenario, where you’re a naturally quick-moving creature stranded in the Kingdom of the Gastropods. If snails had clocks, their seconds would probably feel like hours. Which is a somewhat awkward way of saying that how you perceive time depends on what size you are, on what you are. A shape-shifter can be any damn thing he chooses. Therefore it inevitably follows that he can choose how he perceives time, or can choose a shape in which he experiences time in a disconcertingly unusual form. Query: since I could be anybody I wanted to be, why in God’s name did I spend so much of my life being me? Now that’s not just stupid, it’s perverse.

  The idea of my father trapped in some sort of ghastly purgatory burned me up, so to speak. All an illusion, needless to say, a dream with a side serving of allegory. But consider it logically, as a true scientist is obliged to do. If his theory was right, then in the middle of everything there’s a core of third space; in that core, there are no laws of physics as we understand them, it’s a sort of ontological Somalia. Therefore, everything that contains – a house, a snail-shell, a suit of armour – has inside it a sort of priest’s hole between the container and the thing contained, in which things can be hidden, or can hide.

  Consider a portrait as a container, a shell – a rigid outer layer of dried paint contains the image of a living person, trapped in a bubble between paint and canvas. Years, centuries after their death, the subjects of the painting live on, so vivid and alive that their eyes follow you round the room. Is there a third space in a portrait?

  That was when I remembered the cupboard under the stairs.

  STUPID OF ME to have forgotten all about it. Not our stairs, naturally, since we don’t have them. What my wife used to call the cupboard-under-the-stairs is a space where the stairwell outside, leading to the next floor, intrudes on the space of this house, creating a sort of plasterboard bubble (like the ones the earth has, see above) which you could easily overlook, as we did when we first moved in. But one evening, when I got back from a tiresome day with the polystyrene people, I found my wife staring fixedly at the wall. That wasn’t like her. “What’s the matter?” I said.

  “That wall,” she replied. “It’s not right.”

  “It’s a wall.”

  “It’s an anomaly,” she corrected. “It doesn’t correspond.”

  “You’ve lost me.”

  She explained irritably. The wall in this room projected further into the living space than it did in the room next door. She made me follow her and quantify, with a tape measure.

  “So it does,” I said. “What’s for dinner?”

  She got a hammer and knocked on the offending wall. It was hollow.

  I was the one who made the connection between the partition and the stairwell. She was the one who hit on the idea of knocking through and creating some much-needed storage space. She got a builder in, and for a week or so the air was thick with dust and the floor was covered in plastic groundsheets, and when everything got back to normal we had a cupboard, with a door on it. I don’t know what she put in there, only that I was forbidden to clutter it up with my junk. I forgot about it – which in retrospect is a strange thing to do – and hadn’t given it a thought for
a very long time. Certainly not since she left me.

  So, having remembered it, I went to look for it. It wasn’t there.

  Now it’s entirely possible that at some point before she left, she got sick of it and had it boarded up and plastered over, and neglected to tell me. She did things like that, reasonably arguing that I wasn’t interested anyhow, so why waste her breath? I think I’d have noticed another intrusion by builders, but maybe she had it done at the same time as something else, and I simply didn’t register the departure of the cupboard. Possible verging on quite likely. Far more likely than that a cupboard should have healed over, like a cut lip.

  I tapped around till the wall sounded hollow, then attacked it with a hammer and a big screwdriver. I’m not a violent man, but by the time I’d finally located the boarded-up door and got it open, that wall knew it had been in a fight. Just as well I don’t go faint at the sight of rubble.

  Eyrengrove Lodge; a clue, and I was too thick to pick up on it. Eggs, for crying out loud; the thin hard shell, and, inside, the shapeless potential (once it hatches, it can be anything it wants to). And if you think that sounds a trifle far-fetched, consider the blowfly and other similarly utterly charming creatures, who lay their eggs in cuts and wounds. Or maybe I’m just looking too hard for connections, like a tenured scholar. Eggs and snails and puppy-dogs’ tails; once I’m in the room, my brain starts to race and I come up with all sorts of weird stuff.

  So that was where she’d stored all her finished paintings. A stupid choice, as it turned out, because the damp had got to them. The faces were spoiled and twisted with mould, swollen into lumps with moisture, blurred and melted, as you’d imagine a human face might be after three months in quicklime. Several of them had been leached almost blank. Most were beyond recognition. There was one which I think was me, but the canvas had rotted away, leaving a big hole where my face should have been. The only one that had survived intact was a portrait of my father, in his ceremonial clobber for receiving his prize. I have to say, it was a fantastic piece of work – my father in his habit, as he lived – and she’d caught the old devil to perfection, even though she’d never met him and must have been working off a few old blurred photographs she found on some website.

  THAT NIGHT, I had the most appalling nightmare. I remember it all vividly, but I’d rather not talk about it.

  I woke up to find that the post had already arrived. There was the usual random crap, and a letter. It was on good quality paper and the letterhead was the Department of Theoretical Mathematics of the University of – well, none of your business where.

  They were pleased to be able to inform me that one of their research fellows, a Dr Shastri, had successfully disproved the disproof of my father’s theory. A fat wad of equations was enclosed. It meant nothing to me, and everything. My father’s work, the letter went on, was thereby vindicated, and the proof would be published in some journal with a long and instantly forgettable name in six months time. The letter was signed by someone I hadn’t heard of, the Someone-or-other Professor of Theoretical Maths.

  Some things you simply can’t afford to take on trust. There was a phone number on the letterhead. I rang it. No reply, which was fair enough, given that where they were, it was 3am. I spent an agonising day waiting around until it was nine in the morning over there, and phoned. The professor was surprised to hear from me, but very pleased. He confirmed it: everything in the letter was true. Then I thanked him. No, thank you, he said. I made an excuse and ended the call. Then, just to be sure, I Googled him and his department and his university, just to make sure they existed. They did. So that was all right.

  I tried shape-shifting a few times after that, but of course it didn’t work any more. I tried calling my agent, but the number just rang and rang. So I went into the room and packed the armour up in a collection of old cardboard boxes, and sure enough the buyer called to collect it almost immediately afterwards. He didn’t want the sword, and I’ve kept that, as a sort of trophy; mounted on the wall, in lieu of all those spoiled paintings.

  After that, I must confess, I cancelled my endowment of the Someone-or-other Chair of Theoretical Mathematics at the University of wherever. For one thing, I could no longer afford it, since I couldn’t shape-shift any more; the endowment had bled me of every penny I ever earned by shape-shifting, so I figured they’d had their fair share out of me. Also, there was no more need, was there? They’d done what I asked them, eventually.

  NATURALLY, I HAVE a hypothesis or two, but I’m not going to share them with you. If my life has taught me anything, it’s that no good ever comes of publishing your theories.

  Well, almost. I have a theory about why I got stabbed. My guess is that I was set up by the man who hired me. I think he wanted to appear to be dead without actually dying; so he hired me to be in the wrong place at the wrong time, and another poor fool to stick me with a knife. My survival must have come as a bitter disappointment to him, but what the hell. I’ve disappointed better men than him in my time, God only knows.

  But (if I’m right) that was really just a side-show and nothing to do with the main issue – unless I actually died as a result of the stabbing and was re-animated, zombie-like, by the room. That would account for my lack of vital signs, but not for the subsequent all-clear from the doctor when I was examined in my own shape, or my continued existence, come to that. Unless it was my shape-shifted avatar that died, while my true form – and so on, and so forth. Mere speculation with an insufficiency of data. Bad science. Men have burned in hell for less, apparently.

  For the rest; don’t ask me. I’m very poor these days, living off the trickle of royalties from my father’s books (now triumphantly back in print since he’s been vindicated; they sell like hot cakes in academic circles. Just like hot cakes. When did you last buy a hot cake?) so I can’t afford to endow a chair to tell me what happened, or what it meant, or whether it was even possible.

  The question I ask myself is: after all that, bearing in mind the true, awful significance of my father’s work and the sheer hell I lived through for so long (why, this is hell, nor am I out of it; see above, and passim), is this really just a stupid, cliché-ridden, titillate-your-atrophied-survival-instincts ghost story? Or is it something that can be written up for the journals, a case study in deliberate manipulation of the third space – which I do think they ought to name after him, in the tradition of America, Van Diemen’s Land or the Murray River; he discovered it, after all, so it really should bear his name.

  I kept hoping that now it was all over, my wife would come back. She hasn’t. I suspected, and now I believe, that she’s gone forever. I think the house digested her, at the same time it made sauerkraut out of her paintings, and me. I read a good joke in a book once. Death rescues a man from drowning. What did you save me for, the man asks. For later, says Death. Yup, that’s me.

  My fault, of course. I brought my father into this house, which he then took for his own, somewhere he could finally call home. I carried him everywhere with me, like Aeneas did from the flames of Troy upon his shoulder the old Anchises bear, like the snail. My fault. Serves me right for being from all over the bloody place.

  Talking of names, by the way, I changed mine. Call it a last desperate act of shape-shifting. My letters now arrive addressed to D. Grey, and it’s really depressing how few people get the reference. Also, I redecorated – boy, did I redecorate, though I still can’t shift that lingering smell of petrol, if that’s what it is. I did it all myself. Five layers of wallpaper on every wall, sealed with ten coats of emulsion; also, I put three good-quality mortise locks on the door of the room and threw the keys in the river. If the priest ever comes back, he can stay in his hole and rot.

  NOTES ON IRONGROVE LODGE

  I HAVE LOST everything but the desire to find Irongrove Lodge. I suppose my recent circumstances have given me renewed impetus to find the house, for I am now without a home. I am writing this in a hostel; they have let us in early tonight because it
is so cold. This will be the worst winter in decades, they say. Many will die.

  I try to keep myself separate from the other residents, but still they insist on engaging me in conversation, indulging their own sense of the camaraderie of the streets. It’s ridiculous; many of these indigents would as soon stab me for a packet of cigarettes or a bottle as help me out.

  “I hear you’re interested in ghost stories,” one said, his drink-ruined face thrust disconcertingly close to mine.

  “I’m not sure where you heard that,” I told him, but he was not to be dissuaded.

  He told me that when he was a child, his bedroom was haunted. On the most silent, most starless nights, she would appear – the white lady. She would say nothing, merely stand before him, staring, pinning him to the bed with her terrible gaze, before climbing in beside him. He remembers that she was warm, not cold as ghosts are supposed to be. Even so, he was frozen with fear, and could do nothing as the white lady climbed atop him, the only thing separating her face from his a stained and stinking veil. Each time, he would pass out and when he came to, the ghost would be gone, though her smell would linger.

  Of course, I recognised the signs of the Night Hag straight away. A common enough complaint, especially in childhood – sleep paralysis. Even so, I allowed the man to finish his story, and he seemed happier for having done so, unburdened.

  I had set a precedent, because his was not the only ghost story. Most of the men who frequented the hostel had one to share. Once I objected – convinced that the ghosts were phantoms of the bottle or spirits summoned by chemicals – and the story-teller became irate; violence was threatened. And so I endured their tales.

  One man stopped part way through his story. To be honest, I hadn’t been listening, instead concentrating on my notes. I only realised that the story had come to a premature halt when a beery breath wafted into my face.