Haunts

by Stephen Jones

  Whoever had written these notes had spent time doing it; every page was covered in a neat black script that filled the space around his text. Here and there, words or phrases had been scored out and new ones written across them so that the paper had become a palimpsest. The new comments were dry, academic, written in short sentences that speared their meaning quickly. On the final page of the article, the unknown author had written a longer piece

  Dear Boy, this is almost passable work, containing some ideas with facets that are not without interest but that need further work. I would caution you, however, against committing the great heresy of literary criticism: do not look back and impose your own culturally relative views on what you read. Frankenstein’s Monster may well, to your mind, be a good metaphor for the creeping terror of schizophrenia, yet Shelley would have had no concept of schizophrenia. Madness, yes. Bodily disintegration and the plight of the poor and ill, yes. The workings of places like Bedlam and its unfortunate residents, also yes. But schizophrenia? No. Ask yourself: had “schizophrenia” as a concept even been “invented” back when Shelley wrote her novel? Perhaps it might be better to say that Frankenstein’s Monster is a good metaphor for illness generally, for decay and loss of control, rather than to tie it to such a specifically 20th-century concept as “schizophrenia”?

  DRR

  “What?” asked Trevelyan, aloud. The earlier comments had been useful, but this last one missed the point entirely. His paper was about the way in which readers imported their own interpretations onto things, especially when the original writing was as powerful as Shelley’s was. It was what made classics classics: their ability to be constantly reinterpreted and reinvented. Dracula, for instance, might be about the creeping influx of foreign cultures or the unstoppable march of science and technology, or it might be about the spread of AIDS, and in twenty years time it might be about something else entirely. This was one of the themes that Trevelyan’s article had sought to illustrate using Frankenstein, and it was this that his unknown critic had apparently missed.

  It must be a joke, he decided, albeit a complicated one. The depth of knowledge displayed indicated someone with a good grip of literature and theory, which pointed to McTeague, but he was humorless and it did not seem to be his style, not really. Perhaps it was a way for McTeague to say all the things to him that he felt he couldn’t in person? Unlikely; he was well known for arguing with his colleagues over the slightest thing, and did not shy away from outspokenness. It was more likely one of Darber’s odd creations, thought Trevelyan. The psychology lecturer had the time and the sort of mind needed to find this sort of thing funny. He resolved to keep an eye on him.

  *

  The Five met every few weeks, and by coincidence their next meeting was that night. Jenni Grey and Breen, newly engaged, arrived at the bar at the same time as he did, and Darber came in shortly after, and they spent a few minutes catching up and exchanging news. When McTeague came in, he came straight up to Trevelyan and stood over him, saying “Stay away from me.” He spat as he spoke, and his fists clenched. Trevelyan saw the fists and tried to move back, saying “Alex, what?”

  “I know what you’re doing,” said McTeague. “It won’t work.”

  “Alex, what’s wrong?” asked Jenni, standing.

  “He knows,” said McTeague, nodding at a bemused and concerned Trevelyan, who was still watching the older man’s clenching and unclenching fists. His hands were large, the knuckles prominent, the veins snaking around them like rope.

  “Alex, sit down and have a drink,” said Darber.

  “I won’t sit with him, nor drink with him” said McTeague, one finger jabbing towards Trevelyan. “Ask him why.” And with that, he turned and ran from the bar.

  “Alex?” asked Jenni softly to his retreating back. Once he had gone, she turned to the others, her face a question in skin.

  “Strange,” said Darber. “And what did you do to irritate him, Raymond?”

  “I’ve no idea,” said Trevelyan.

  “He’s—” said Jenni, but trailed off. “He’s not himself. He made some comments on a paper of mine,” she said finally, quietly. “They were… odd.”

  “Be honest, they were rude” said Breen, and Trevelyan finally relaxed a little. Maybe it was McTeague who’d written his mysterious criticism after all. If he was about to burn out, it might explain it. McTeague, he thought. Poor, humorless McTeague, with his staid readings and articles on the classics and his dry lectures, has finally begun to lose his mind. It was a simple case of one of academia’s smaller fish beginning to founder and Trevelyan, who had never really been that friendly with the older man, dismissed him from his thoughts.

  That night, McTeague killed himself.

  *

  The funeral took place on a bright day, the mourners’ shadows melting like tar across the grass and headstones. Trevelyan, sweating in his only dark suit, stood by Grey and Breen for the graveside service. Grey was weeping openly while even Breen looked sad, and Trevelyan was uncomfortably aware of how dismissive his last thoughts about McTeague had been; guilt lay in his stomach like undigested dough. Perhaps if he had gone to McTeague, spoken to him, he might not have climbed out of his fourth-floor office window and thrown himself to the ground below, leaving his last mark on the earth in blood and flesh on the concrete apron in front of the English Department offices.

  Perhaps he would still be alive.

  Trevelyan went to the memorial after the service, although it made him uncomfortable. He felt as though he bore a mark that let people see how he had treated McTeague, told what he had thought about him. Attending the gathering was a punishment for his inactivity, self-imposed, to make him feel better and he wondered if other members of the Five felt the same; they were all there. Jenni certainly did and cried almost continually, sometimes quietly and sometimes more noisily, cursing herself for not being a better friend to the dead man.

  “I don’t think you could have helped him,” said Darber, wandering across from one of the loose groups of people by the buffet. “I saw him last week, before the incident in the bar, and he was very odd then. Distracted. He told me that he was tired of being ‘got at,’ but he wouldn’t tell me who was getting at him.”

  “Did you try and help him?” asked Jenni angrily.

  “No,” said Darber, either not noticing or ignoring Jenni’s anger. “There was no point. He and I didn’t really get on and anyway and I only saw him for a moment. I called into his office to give him back the draft of his paper; I’d forgotten to put it in his pigeonhole and I’d made some comments I thought he’d find valuable. He wouldn’t take the paper from me. I thought it was odd, certainly, but not odd enough to make me worry. I tried to talk to him, but he seemed disinclined to speak.”

  Disinclined? thought Trevelyan as Jenni fell softly into more tears and Darber walked away. Poor McTeague, if that was his last human contact!

  During the next weeks, and as the bolus of his guilt receded, Trevelyan thought of McTeague less and less. The coroner’s verdict came and went, confirming what everyone already knew: McTeague had killed himself as a result of unknown stress or stresses in his life. His lectures were parceled out between his colleagues and his photograph taken down from the Current Staff board. Trevelyan continued amending his article, correcting and reworking it according to the feedback he had received and thought useful. The Monday after it was finished, he took copies of it to put in the Five’s pigeonholes, realizing with a sad little jolt that they were the Four now, and that McTeague’s pigeonhole had already been re-allocated; the strip of tape across its bottom edge now held a new name. He wondered if all the traces of McTeague’s existence at the university were being erased as quickly and easily; certainly, no one seemed to want to talk about the man now he was dead. Even Jenni had not mentioned him the last time Trevelyan and she had met. Indeed, Trevelyan had the distinct impression that she deliberately avoided the subject. Perhaps her guilt, like her friendship with the dead man, was great
er than Trevelyan’s. He did not know.

  That night, Jenni rang. She was crying, her conversation broken by sniffs and little animal hitching sounds, and it took Trevelyan a while to calm her enough to explain why she had called him.

  “You want me to what?” he asked after she had finished.

  “Come with me to poor Alexander’s office,” she replied. “Now that the coroner’s verdict is in, the police have released his things. The university want the room cleared, and they asked me to do it because they know I was his friend. You work in the same department, so you can help. Please? I need company, I’m not sure I can go there alone. I asked Davey, but he can’t do it.”

  Davey? thought Trevelyan, before realizing that Jenni meant Breen. Even Breen never used his first name, simply signing himself B or Breen. It didn’t seem to fit, somehow.

  The foyer to the English and Philosophy Building was quiet, the air relaxing into the building’s emptiness. Jenni was waiting for him, huddled into her coat, slumped back on one of the chairs that lined the walls. Her face showed the reddened signs of recent tears, although her eyes were dry. She smiled weakly, standing and saying, “Thanks for this. For coming with me, I mean. I couldn’t have done this alone, not go through his things. It’d be like grave robbing. I mean, I know I’m not keeping any of it, but I’d feel really uncomfortable, you know?”

  Trevelyan nodded, knowing exactly what she meant; the thought of searching through McTeague’s possessions, of boxing them up and passing them on or back, felt insulting, as though they were sullying his memory. It was as if, by packing away his things, they would be packing away McTeague himself, constraining him and storing him like so much useless detritus.

  At the office, Trevelyan let Jenni enter first, thinking she might need a moment alone. In the quiet, Trevelyan heard Jenni sob once, and then a yellow lozenge of light fell through the open doorway, seeping across the carpet like old honey. Briefly, Jenni’s silhouette was caught in it like a fly in amber, and then it was gone and Trevelyan followed her into the room.

  It was a mess. The police search had left things in scattered, untidy piles and this, coupled with McTeague’s own hoarding nature, had left an office claustrophobic with contents. The surface of the desk was lost under papers and books, ragged strips of torn paper sticking out from their closed pages as makeshift markers. Shelves lined the walls, the books they contained piled against each other like broken teeth; more books sat atop the cases, excess from the shelves that had no proper home. Magazines, also with torn paper markers jutting out from their closed pages, were stacked in uneven towers next to the bookcases. Two battered grey filing cabinets stood either side of the window, their drawers labeled with handwritten and peeling stickers. Next to the door, Trevelyan saw, the porters had left a stack of empty boxes.

  “You look at the books,” said Jenni quietly. “I’ll start sorting through his desk.”

  The books were easy; almost all belonged to the department, so he placed them in boxes, sealing them when they were full, labeling them and pulling them into the corridor. The magazines he boxed separately; they would go to McTeague’s mother. The filing cabinets were, oddly, almost empty. Once they were done, he was almost finished; only one more thing to sort.

  “What’s this?” Trevelyan asked, pointing to a clear bag by the waste bin. Jenni, just finishing sorting through the desk drawers, looked around briefly and then said, “The paper from the bin. The police took it to see if there was anything in there that might give them some idea of why he did it, but there was nothing. I think they hoped they’d find a draft suicide note, but there’s just lots of academic notes, they said.” Trevelyan noticed that, as she spoke, Jenni had looked at the window fearfully and then looked away. He had felt it himself, as he sorted and packed. It drew at him, made him want to open it and look down, to experience a little of what McTeague experienced, to see a little of what he saw. It had been raining that night, he remembered; McTeague’s last view of the world had been dark and wet.

  The carpet below the window was stained, and in amongst the remnants of the police fingerprint powder on the window ledge were tiny rings where the raindrops had dried and left behind their ghosts. As Trevelyan knelt to pick up the bag of old papers, something brought him up short. At first, he wasn’t sure what it was except a sense that he had seen something out of place, something jarring, and then he realized.

  Writing.

  Inside the clear plastic bag, most of the sheets had been folded roughly, crumpled in the past and then smoothed again, and the wrinkles across their surfaces looked old and tired. Black type crawled across them, and webbed around the type were handwritten notes, and Trevelyan recognized the handwriting.

  Using the point of a key, Trevelyan tore open the heavy bag. Taking out sheet after sheet of the paper, each different from the last but also terribly, awfully similar, he placed it on the floor. Finally, with perhaps thirty pieces spread out in front of him, Trevelyan leaned back on his haunches and let out a long, uncomfortable breath.

  “What is it?” asked Jenni, looking over at him and the paper.

  “I’m not sure,” replied Trevelyan. “I think it’s what Alexander was working on when he died, but look,” he said, gesturing at the paper about him. Each piece was covered in comment, written in the same brittle handwriting Trevelyan recognized from the additional copy of his own draft research paper. Sometimes, the comments appeared helpful and considered. Trevelyan read one that said This sentence seems overly long: perhaps you could split it into three sentences? Others were shorter, more terse: Lazy writing! Be concise, man! Trevelyan saw one sheet where an entire paragraph had been scored out with a heavy black line and the word NO! written in the margin next to it.

  “I got one of these,” said Trevelyan. “I think Alexander wrote it, as well as his own normal feedback. It was strange.”

  “It’s not his writing,” said Jenni. “Besides, why would he write those things to himself? Some of them are downright nasty.” She was holding a sheet upon which a series of sentences had been crossed out and the phrase Have you learned nothing from earlier comments ? Idiot, was written.

  “If he was stressed and suffering,” said Trevelyan, “he might have done it to try to make himself feel better.”

  “How could this make anyone feel better?” asked Jenni, dropping the paper back onto the floor. “It’s horrible stuff. Have you finished? Can we go?”

  Trevelyan took the papers home with him in the end. Sitting in his study, he read them again and finally thought he could discern their order. If he was right, they showed an increasing aggression to the handwritten comments and a concurrent deterioration of the quality of McTeague’s typed text. The handwritten comments became bullying, hectoring and finally downright unpleasant, and it made him sad to know that McTeague—Alexander—had essentially bullied himself to suicide. The sheets were a mute testimony to it, a goodbye note written in oblique parts, desolate and angry and bitter. He sealed them in an envelope and placed them in his drawer; he would pass them to Jenni and let her decide what to do with them.

  He spent the rest of the night making his final changes to his Frankenstein paper and printing it. No more feedback, he decided; now this stands or falls on its own merits. Leaving it in the center of his desk, he went to bed. It had been a long day and sleep felt like a reward for labors completed.

  *

  When he picked up the envelope from his pigeonhole, Trevelyan didn’t have time to read what it contained, instead putting it in his bag with his other paperwork. The envelope was large, had neither sender’s address nor stamp on it and only his name on the front in block capitals: R.E. TREVELYAN. He didn’t remember it until the following night, carrying it into his lounge and opening it whilst lying on his sofa, tearing away the flap of the envelope and upending the contents onto his chest. Trevelyan caught a whiff of something dry, as though the envelope held long-untouched air full of dust and powder, and then a sheaf of white paper tumbled out.


  At first, he couldn’t work out what he was seeing. It was his work, his paper on Frankenstein, but covered in markings. Was it a rejection? No, there was no enclosure from the journal, not even a standard “Thank you but no thank you” slip. Besides, the journal’s editor and he had discussed his paper before he submitted it, and whilst it wasn’t quite a commission, it wasn’t a blind submission either. Had the editor sent it back with his thoughts written on? No, surely any comments or revisions would have been written up properly, or he would have rung Trevelyan to talk them through? He looked again at the comments, and as realization dawned he sat up and the papers fell to the floor in an untidy pile.

  He recognized the handwriting.

  It was McTeague’s, or at least it was the writing he had assumed was McTeague’s, and it should have died with him, buried in a near-anonymous graveyard that Trevelyan was sure the man had never visited in life. And yet, here it was scrawled over the paper, his paper, in cramped, obsessive lines. It was almost too dense to read at points, the letters tangling together and overlapping so that the words themselves were squeezed, as though whoever was writing was desperate to fit as much on the page as possible. The underscores and crossings out were so thick that the ink had bled sideways, feathering into the surrounding words like gathering storm clouds.

  Trevelyan’s first thought was that he had put the wrong paper into the envelope, had accidentally sent an earlier one to the journal, but he dismissed that idea straight away. He knew his own work, and what he could see of the typed text under the handwritten commentary was the final version of the article, and he had only printed one copy. So how had it got here? And how had someone managed to scrawl over it?