Haunts

by Stephen Jones

  The comments themselves were as vitriolic as before, he saw. One sentence, Lazy material, man!, leaped out at him immediately, and he found many others like it. There was a barely restrained fury to the comments, to the parade of words (no! weak! idiot!), that made them difficult to read. On the last page, Trevelyan found another addition, written in a space of its own and larger, as though to ensure it was read.

  You have listened to nothing, learned nothing from my earlier comments and suggestions. As a result, this paper is flawed and lazy, and I cannot allow it to go to publication. When you have the good grace to make the amendments that I have suggested, perhaps then I may be more amenable to allowing it to face public scrutiny. Until then, however; I insist that it stays unread by all except you and me.

  DRR

  After he had finished reading, Trevelyan very carefully put the papers back into the envelope, stood, and went to his study. He placed it in his bag and went to leave the room, but stopped. In the half-dark, he thought about the paper, about the comments, about McTeague and Jenni and himself, and then in a low voice, he said, “No. It’s my paper. It goes in the form I want.” And then, trying not to think at all, trying to pretend that things were normal, he went to bed.

  He didn’t sleep. In a darkness that felt brittle and full of edges, Trevelyan lay in his bed and helplessly teased at the situation like he would a holed tooth with his tongue. If not McTeague, then who? And it wasn’t McTeague, it couldn’t be—messages from dead men were the stuff of stories, the things he read and wrote about and taught, not things that happened in the warmth of a campus summer. So, another member of the Five (Four, he thought sharply, the Four)? But if so, why? What was the point? It didn’t make any sense; at least with McTeague, there had been a kind of obscene, degraded logic to it, but not any of the others. Breen, Darber, Jenni, none of them stood to gain from it, and none had shown an inclination towards cruelty before. And besides, how had they intercepted it from the post, preventing it from reaching the magazine? Trevelyan was baffled, drawing his knees up to his chest as the night crept about him.

  Sounds came from downstairs.

  At first, he thought it was the midnight rhythms of the house settling, but it wasn’t. It had none of the languid spread of normal night noises, none of the unwinding ease of them. Instead, it was a hurried, tenser sound, a chittering that made him think of palsied teeth. It was lurid, feverish, growing louder, more urgent, filling the room and pressing the darkness down against him like old, damp sacking. He reached out and turned on his bedside lamp, but the wan electric light made no difference; the sound shivered around him.

  Eventually, Trevelyan had to move; it was that or remain frozen in his bed all night, he told himself, nestled under his quilt like a child, and he would not do that. No. No. This was his house, his home, he had bought it, was paying for it still, had arranged things within it the way he wanted them. It bore his imprint, held his reflection, was his place, and he would not be trapped within any part of it by something as simple as sound. Taking hold of his irritation, his tiredness, his fear, Trevelyan rose from the bed and went to the door. Quickly, before his sense of anger faded, he opened the door.

  The hallway was filled with a shifting darkness, the shadows flowing across the walls like oil on the surface of water. It was words, Trevelyan saw, words creating themselves out of nothing, flowing black lines expanding and forming, some collapsing down to unintelligible strings of shapes that could be letters but that were so tiny it was impossible to make out individual characteristics. They moved, worm-like and sinuous and impossible, their noise the frantic, dry scratching of branches against old glass.

  The lines swirled now, funneling around the doorway but never quite crossing the edge of the light that fell out around him, remaining just beyond it. When they came close to the light’s glimmer, the words and sentences and paragraphs reared away, rising from the floor like threatened insects, Devil’s Coachmen showing their armored bellies or scorpions lifting claws that glinted half-seen and dull. He saw words form and disappear in the tangles, close enough now to read, paltry and ill-thought and once simply NO in heavy, rigid capitals. Trevelyan couldn’t scream; the words seemed to have dwindled his voice and breath to little more than a failing wheeze. They clustered, closer and tighter, closer and tighter, until they were dancing near Trevelyan’s feet, filling the whole of the hallway.

  Very slowly, Trevelyan shut the door and stepped back into his room, into the cradling arms of the light from his bedside lamp. Lines of words, writing he knew, crept under the door before the light drove them away, stupid looping alongside confused and pointless. Now on his bed, he pulled the quilt up around his chest. Words continued emerging and vanishing under the door as, silently, he prayed for morning.

  The sunlight, pale and weak and clean, came with summer’s earliness, for which Trevelyan was grateful. The souring darkness that had trembled and bled under his door only retreated with its arrival, and was completely gone by the time he risked looking into the hallway. The walls were unmarked, the floors clear, and the noise had faded like the last static of a dying radio. Going downstairs, the house itself felt tired, exhausted after a long and aching battle, and the closer to his study he came, the greater this impression became. The room throbbed, the bitter center of an infection that had taken root during the night, and when he opened the door, it smelled sickened and dry and old.

  The room was dark, but the darkness contracted as Trevelyan watched, swirling like ink flowing down a plug-hole until only a dense patch remained gathered around the envelope on his desk and then this too was gone. Weary, Trevelyan shook the papers out onto the desk without touching them; they were still covered with writing, different from the previous day, thicker and more layered, some of the words faded and others glaring and new. Using a pencil to lift each sheet, he flicked through the pages until he came to the last one. The longer comment had faded down to a dusty, wretched grey, and over it, written in large, black letters, was a single savage NO.

  *

  Campus was busy, buffeting Trevelyan as he walked. He was exhausted, and had the feeling that his world was shifting, bucking under him like the deck of a ship that he had not even known he was on. All these people, have they got any idea? he wondered, looking at the students around him, and thought that they didn’t, couldn’t. How could they? If he tried to talk to any of them, would they think him mad? Probably. Were it not for the packet of papers in his bag, he might have suspected that himself.

  “Do you think it’s funny?”

  Trevelyan started, his reverie broken by Darber, who had stepped out in front of him, blocking his path. Darber looked different and for a moment, Trevelyan couldn’t work out why, and then he realized: he was angry. His face, normally so smooth, was twisted into an ugly snarl Trevelyan couldn’t remember Darber ever wearing before. He couldn’t remember him showing any emotion, really, other than a kind of faintly amused disdain. The man wasn’t just angry, he saw, but disheveled as well, his suit wrinkled, his shirt unbuttoned. He was tieless and was holding something, waving it at Trevelyan as he spoke.

  “I don’t appreciate this sort of thing. You and Grey may be upset, that’s fine, but I couldn’t have helped the man.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” said Trevelyan, but he thought that perhaps he did. It was papers that Darber was holding and shaking that told him, a sheaf that rattled like snakeskin.

  “Nonsense,” said Darber, an attempt at composure showing on his face. He shook the papers again and Trevelyan caught sight of printed text covered with the now-familiar writing. “I mean, is it a joke? If so, it’s not funny, it’s just offensive. By all means criticize me to my face, but to attack my work like this, work that you clearly don’t really understand? It’s childish.” Darber danced the papers under Trevelyan’s nose again, and he smelled the sour, trapped odor of age, even though the sheets that Darber held were a new, bright white. Even upside down, he made out the w
ords You are a fool, man!

  “We didn’t write those things,” said Trevelyan, but Darber only grinned, his face grey and wretched.

  “You and Grey have always hated me, I know that, but I thought you could be professional about it.”

  “We don’t hate you,” said Trevelyan. “We didn’t write those things, I promise you. Look, I got one myself,” and he reached in his bag and withdrew his article, holding it out for Darber to see. Darber knocked Trevelyan’s outstretched hand down without looking at it.

  “I don’t give a fuck,” said Darber. “Just stay away from me, you and that bitch too.” And with that, he turned and strode away, not looking back even when Trevelyan called him.

  Trevelyan made his way to the department common room, and as he went, he thought he could hear the insistent scratch of new words being created rising from his bag. He wondered what would happen when he opened it; would they burst out in a shower of ink, coating the room, or would he simply find the papers bloating obscenely, swollen with words that were not his? Would they have spread to the other books and papers in there? He looked around him and wondered about how far the writing would go, whether it would take over, eventually cover the world. Would everything he knew and valued and loved eventually vanish under a swirling, vehement black tide? He saw it then, saw himself staggering through a world where the shadows had become the lightest thing around him, paler than the ever-expanding blackness, saw himself climbing out of a window to escape it, or taking pills or slipping his head into a noose in an anonymous room and kicking away a stool, somehow finding a way to follow McTeague, and then he was angry again, and he opened his bag.

  The envelope fell out onto the table in front of him. As he watched, it bulged and shook slightly, as though the papers within were breathing. He picked it up and upended it, shaking the contents loose. They fluttered out, falling to the table in scattered drifts. Trevelyan picked up the sheet nearest to him, seeing his own writing caged by new words. Moron caught his eye, as did imbecile and poor and, once, dolt. Dolt? he thought. Who speaks like that? Who uses that as an insult? Fully two-thirds of his own work had been literally blotted out; thick black lines now lay across his own writing, obscuring it completely, and over it were new words, new phrases.

  New ideas.

  “My God, where did you get a Rathbone from?” asked a voice from his side.

  Severn was the oldest member of the department, if not the oldest member of the university staff. “That takes me back,” he said, lowering himself into the chair next to Trevelyan without waiting for Trevelyan to reply. “May I see?” He was reaching, Trevelyan saw, for the papers, surprisingly fast for an old man, and before Trevelyan could move them out of reach, he had hold of them and they were gone. Trevelyan wanted to say something, a warning, but his voice had abandoned him. He waited for the writing to writhe, to flow around Severn’s fingers, to create new words over the old. For the man to scream.

  “He was a nasty piece of work, wasn’t he? Where did you find this? One of the old filing cabinets, I suppose?” Severn looked expectantly at Trevelyan who, confused, nodded.

  “We used to dread getting one of these, back when I started. All that criticism and never a positive thing to say about anything or anyone. I tell you, I don’t miss seeing these in my pigeonhole.”

  Trevelyan thought that he was probably gaping; his mouth was definitely open and he shut it with an audible pop. His brain leapt, darting back over what Severn had said, trying to drag some sense from it. “You recognize it?” he managed to say. “The writing? You know it?”

  “Of course,” said Severn, looking more closely at Trevelyan. “Are you all right? You look pale.”

  “I didn’t sleep well,” replied Trevelyan. “Please, tell me about—” he tailed off, waving his hand at the paper. He still didn’t know how to describe it—criticism? Abuse? Attack? All those and more.

  “It was written by a man called Rathbone, David Robert Rathbone. Look, he signed this one DRR, but he sometimes used to put DR Rathbone, which used to make us laugh, only never so he could hear us. We used to joke that he hoped that people would read it as Dr. Rathbone. He wasn’t a doctor, you see, only a lecturer, and not even a good one. He was a glorified administrator, really, good at pushing pencils and forms around but less good with the academic end of things. You know the sort.” Trevelyan nodded again, terrified of interrupting Severn and slowing the flow of information. There were no answers yet, but Severn was finally giving him a framework for his questions.

  “He was here when I started, and he was the strictest man I ever met. The department was run by Nixon, who was mostly old and senile, like me.” Severn looked slyly at Trevelyan, waiting. Trevelyan merely returned his look, hoping his expression conveyed the message Of course not, Severn, you’re as sharp as ever without needing to say it. He liked Severn well enough, but sometimes he could be difficult if he thought you weren’t deferential enough to him.

  “Rathbone was Deputy Head, but essentially, he ran the department. He was a tyrant, controlled very thing. What’s that modern phrase? Micromanaged, that’s it! He micromanaged things. Everything had to go through him, every order for books or stationery, every change to timetables or the syllabus. He made us all show him our research papers, journal articles, book chapters, what have you, before we were allowed to send them out. He claimed it was to ensure that the department’s reputation wasn’t adversely affected by poor work, but really it was because he was a critical old woman who couldn’t stand the thought of someone having ideas better than his own. I don’t think he even wanted to take credit for the ideas, not really. I think he just wanted to stop anything coming out of the department that he hadn’t made his own in some way, molded it the way he thought it ought to be.”

  Trevelyan watched, as Severn held the paper up before him, waiting for the lines of text to move. They remained still, their heavy black print visible through the paper like veins under skin. Severn was looking at the writing, making sad little laughing sounds as he read it. Finally, he lowered it and looked at Trevelyan and said, “Have you read this? It’s terrible isn’t it? That he could be so vicious, I mean, and no one challenged it.”

  “What happened?”

  “To Rathbone? He retired in the end, and no one was sorry to see him go. The department was a miserable place under him, especially at the end.”

  “The end? Why?”

  “Because of his book,” said Severn simply. “Because of the reviews it received.”

  *

  The volume wasn’t hard to find; there were several in the library, one of which Trevelyan stole.

  It was slim, a 1970s paperback, and it was dusty with lack of use. It smelled of old thought, of fustiness and abandoned shelves, and it left its marks across Trevelyan’s fingers in grime like the powder from moths’ wings. He flicked through its brittle, cheap pages, feeling the waft of air across his face and tasting the paper’s shedding skin. Its pages, he noticed, were unmarked, which made him smile grimly. Its cover was a light blue, decorated with a line drawing of a quill and parchment. The picture was badly executed, or maybe badly reproduced, and it looked rough and cheap. On the rear cover was a grainy head and shoulders picture of an unsmiling man in a shirt and tie. Rathbone, in all his grim glory.

  Trevelyan tried to see into the man’s eyes, but they were lost in the poor print quality of the photograph, mere dark ovals hanging under a pale forehead and black-slash eyebrows. He ran his finger across the picture, not sure what to expect, but felt only the not-quite-smooth cover of a poorly bound and produced book. Where had such malevolence come from, he wondered? Where had that hate birthed?

  How could it still be here now?

  Even in print, Trevelyan thought he might have known that Rathbone was the author; the tone of the essays that formed each chapter of the book was dismissive, showing in the way in which he swept aside earlier ideas about the various works he was analyzing. Rathbone was a man of absolutes, leaving no
space for discussion. The problem was, most of his ideas were at best unoriginal and, at worst, old and stale. They would have been dated at the time the book was published, thought Trevelyan. In his Introduction, Rathbone said they were “a summation of many years’ teaching and thinking,” but Trevelyan found little evidence in what he read of anything original or creative or progressive. If this was the pinnacle of Rathbone’s career, it was a stunted, low thing and it left little legacy.

  In his office, Trevelyan took his article from his bag and put it on the table beside the book. It was now almost entirely black with additional text, illegible marks covering illegible marks, and he felt a wave of helpless fury. Even now, as he watched, swirling lines of words were creeping out over the edge of paper. They looked like the shadows of distant airplanes as they slipped across the surface of the table, like the X-rays of broken limbs made fluid and animate. They slithered around the edges of Rathbone’s book, gathering about it but not touching it, until the tabletop was black with them, was bucking like the surface of an ink sea.

  All except Rathbone’s book, which was an island of pallid serenity on the table, a blue square of stillness at the heart of pulsing, malignant motion. Trevelyan gazed at it, hating it, hating Rathbone, and not knowing what to do about it. He reached out, lifting the book from the table, letting the shifting words rush in to fill the space it left behind so that the desktop was entirely covered, and held it in front of his face, flicking through its pages again.

  “What are you?” he murmured. “What are you, and what do you want from me?” There was no reply. He wanted to ask it again, but didn’t; if he was to escape from Rathbone, from the criticism and the bullying and the impossibility if it all, he would have to find his own solutions.

  Trevelyan placed the book back onto the table, watching as venomous words shifted out from under it, clearing it a space. He reached out, knocking the book farther away from him so that it slid across the tabletop and Rathbone’s writing danced out of its way and flowed in behind it, always leaving it unmarked. Trevelyan tried to think; what had Severn said? That it was the book that made things bad? No, not just the book, but the book and the reviews, and as he remembered he thought that maybe, just maybe, he might have a chance.