Haunts

by Stephen Jones

  Trevelyan listened as the department went to rest around him, as his colleagues locked their offices and called their goodbyes and trailed out, their footsteps like the pock of rain on cold stone. The lights dimmed, turning the corridor beyond the frosted glass wall of his office into a shadowed thing, and the passing staff into edgeless, moving shapes. As he watched, Trevelyan wished that had could be on the other side of the glass, could be walking along the corridor with them, unaware of writing that created itself, of long-gone academics and their savage opinions.

  One of the dark shapes stopped by his door. The edges of it rippled against the mottled glass, and for a moment Trevelyan thought it was some new aspect of Rathbone, writing that had plaited and formed itself into a figure, was coming for him on spindle, text legs. He tensed, and then the shape knocked on the door and opened it without waiting for a response.

  “Hello,” said Severn. “I saw the light and thought I’d pop my head in.”

  “Hello,” said Trevelyan, his heart shuddering.

  “I’ve been thinking about your Rathbone papers,” said Severn. “I wondered what you had thought you might do with them? He might have been a terrible man, and I didn’t like him, but he’s still a part of this place’s history.” He waved a vague hand at the ceiling, somehow taking in not just the department but the building and the campus beyond. “History isn’t always pleasant, is it? But we have to treasure it.”

  “I don’t know,” said Trevelyan, feeling a dreadful black humor bubbling in his throat. “Maybe the university library might want them, or I may give them to his estate. I haven’t thought about it.”

  “Estate?” said Severn. “Oh, no, you misunderstand me. Rathbone retired years ago, but he isn’t dead.” The room was dim but not dark, the light warm and diffuse. “This is very unusual,” said the care assistant whose name Trevelyan could not remember. “Mr. Rathbone hasn’t had a visitor for such a long time, and he’s such a sweet old man.”

  “Sweet?” asked Trevelyan, startled.

  “Yes,” said the care assistant. “I mean, he doesn’t speak much these days, but when does he’s always polite and he’s so kind. And generous! He helped Mary’s son with his homework last year when he heard her talk about how he couldn’t understand the book he was reading.”

  I’ll bet he did, thought Trevelyan bitterly. I’ll just bet. “Can I see him?” he asked.

  “If he’s awake,” the young man replied. “It’s late, but it’d be good for Mr. R to have a visitor.”

  Mr. R? thought Trevelyan as the care assistant went to the huddled shape in the chair on the far side of the room. After a moment, he turned and beckoned Trevelyan over. “Mr. R,” he whispered as Trevelyan came close, “you have a guest. Someone’s come all the way from the university to see you. Isn’t that nice? Well, I’ll leave you to talk. Not too long, now, we don’t want you getting too tired, do we?” The care assistant shot Trevelyan a look as he went past, stern and sure and protective.

  Trevelyan wasn’t sure what he expected, but the grizzled, hunched figure in the chair wasn’t it. All the way to the rest home, driving through streets that were filling with the night, he had imagined some unholy terror lurking in a room that smelled of candles and incense, but the man in front of him looked delicate to the point of frailty, shriveled, his skin sallow and thin. He didn’t look frightening, simply pathetic, a hunched and decaying thing whose eyes, crusted and rimmed with the dry, raw touch of age, hadn’t focused on him.

  “Can you hear me?” Trevelyan asked, and was surprised to hear tenderness in his voice. This man had terrified him, tortured him, and yet Trevelyan felt the anger that had helped drive him here slip away in the face of this withered, pathetic thing.

  “Hello?” he said, and withdrew the article from the envelope in his bag. The pages were creased now, and the ever-moving writing was clumped in the creases as though it had flowed there and was struggling to escape. “You wrote this,” Trevelyan continued. “You keep writing it, and I need you to stop. It has to stop. You have to stop.” Rathbone did not reply. The only indication that he had heard, that he knew Trevelyan was there at all, was a brief nod of his head, birdlike and fragile, when he saw the papers.

  “Please,” said Trevelyan. “This is my work, and you’re destroying it. You’re frightening people, frightening me. Someone I know has already killed himself because of what you’re doing. I don’t know how you’re doing it, I don’t know why, but please stop. Please.” Rathbone still didn’t respond and, frustrated, Trevelyan crouched by him, dropping the paper onto the man’s legs, stick thin inside shiny, worn suit pants. At the sound of their dry rustle, Rathbone tilted his head down. A line of spittle slipped over his lower lip and trailed down to the edge of the uppermost sheet, glinting. One trembling hand came up and drifted across the sheets and then jerked violently, sending them wafting to the floor about his feet. He wore check carpet slippers, Trevelyan saw, and felt that black mirth roil again in him. A demon who wears slippers, he thought, and then, with surprising speed, Rathbone’s hand darted forward and clasped around his wrist.

  “It’s not me,” said the old man, in a voice like pages turning. “Not me.”

  “It is,” said Trevelyan, trying to pull his wrist away but unable to, and surprised by the man’s strength.

  “No. Not me, not any more. I was that person, but no more.” Rathbone coughed as though he wasn’t used to speaking, swallowed, and carried on. “No one comes, no one visits. I’m alone, because of what I was. Was I so bad? Yes. Yes, I was, but no more. I try to be kind now, to not be the person I was. That…” and the hand finally let go of Trevelyan’s wrist and waved at the paper on the floor, “… isn’t me. Whoever it is, it isn’t me.”

  “It is,” said Trevelyan. “It’s you. It’s how you were.”

  “Yes,” said the old man, and Trevelyan was horrified to see tears roll from his eyes. “I was him, but not now. I’m old and I’m so lonely here and I have so much time to think. I look back at him, and I don’t recognize him even though I know who he was. I’ve tried to change, to be different. Tried to be the person I should have been all these years and I am, I do it, but it’s not enough. I can feel it, every time that other me does what I used to do. It hurts. It hurts so much. I’m here, but I’m out there as well, and I don’t want to be. I’m so tired.

  “Please, can you stop him?”

  “I don’t know,” said Trevelyan. “I was hoping you could.”

  “No,” croaked Rathbone. “Not me. I can’t. I haven’t the strength. I’ve tried, tried to stop it but I can’t. I’m too old, too weak. You have to. Promise me. Promise.”

  “I’ll try,” said Trevelyan.

  “Promise,” said Rathbone again, drool slipping once more from the side of his mouth and slicking across his chin. Trevelyan watched as tears gathered and spilled from the older man’s eyes, their rheumy blue irises lost in sclera that were yellowed and exhausted. The room lights reflected on the trickling liquid as he spoke. “Promise,” he murmured again. “Promise.”

  *

  The door to McTeague’s office was locked but the keys Trevelyan had taken from the departmental office allowed him to enter. Once inside, he shut the door and locked it again. He did not turn on the overhead light, instead flicking on the desk lamp. Its pale yellow light crept across the walls and ceiling, making the shadows huddle together in the corners. The office looked bigger now that it had been cleared out, the floor bare and the walls like old ivory. The bookshelves, free of their tottering masses of books and magazines, stood sentinel against the walls and the desk, its scarred surface bare, had been pushed back into the far corner. Dust had gathered across the surfaces and a smell of neglect and abandonment had gathered in the few days since Trevelyan had been here with Jenni.

  Trevelyan dragged the desk back to its place in front of the window, deliberately not looking out at the courtyard below. Even in the darkness, the paved ground that had been McTeague’s landing place glared up
in mute appeal. He removed his article from his bag, shaking it out of the envelope and placing it on the desk. Most of the additional comments had faded down to grey slivers now, so that in the dim light his writing looked scarred and weary. A tight smile on his face, he took a pen from his pocket and then, very deliberately, crossed out one of the extra comments with a heavy black line. Underneath, he wrote the word Nonsense and then recapped his pen and put it back in his pocket. Sitting back in the chair, Trevelyan waited.

  It did not take long. Around him, the air seemed to thicken. Shadows that had, only moments earlier, been light suddenly darkened to a gravid, opaque gloom. The temperature dropped, raising gooseflesh on his arms, and the lamp flickered, guttering like candlelight before catching again and returning to full strength, buzzing and humming as it did so. Trevelyan tried not to shiver, removing Rathbone’s book from his bag and clutching it; its solidity was oddly reassuring. This has to work, he thought. This has to work. He repeated it silently, rolling the book tightly in his fist. The word he had written on the paper seemed to glow, gleaming blackly. He rolled the book tighter, twisting the cover and pages around into a dense tube, and then relaxed his grip and let it spring back into shape. It flapped as it did so, sending a breath of old paper across his hands. He rolled it again, released it. Rolled it; released it. Rolled it, and there was a noise, of fingers dragging across stone and of insects rattling their wings, and Rathbone stepped out of the far shadows and into the light.

  It was the Rathbone of the cover’s rear, an anonymous-looking middle-aged man in formal clothes with short, bristling hair, not the shrunken thing he had been earlier that evening. He wore a neat suit, in a somber grey that spoke of conformity and rigidity. His shoes shone, clean but not ostentatious, and his shirt collar clutched tightly at his wattle neck. His bearing was controlled, his hands held clenched in front of him, one gripping the other as though to stop it flying away like some bone-white bird of fury. He looked respectable, conservative, unobtrusive.

  Except in his face.

  Rathbone’s pupils glinted out from the pooled shadows that hung below his brows, and in that glitter was fervent anger. His grave-worm lips were pressed together, tight and thin and sour, and his chin sloped away from them as if to escape their bitter attentions. The lamplight flashed across the lenses of his spectacles, glinting. His hair was swept back and thick, shiny with pomade, and the smell of it was cloying and sweet. He stepped forwards and Trevelyan saw that, at his very edges, Rathbone was blurring slightly as though he was continually being made, unmade, made again from the shadows around him. His feet made no sound as he stepped forward.

  “You ignore my advice?” asked Rathbone, pointing at the paper on the desk. His voice was dry. He took another step forward, his hand trembling as he continued to point.

  “Advice given freely, meant only to help, and yet you consider it ‘nonsense’?” He came forward, leaning over the desk so that he was between the light and Trevelyan. He cast no shadow, Trevelyan saw, but the light falling through him onto the desk was hazy, splintered. This close, Rathbone’s edge was impossible to define. Strands of him, of his substance, unknitted from his body and trailed away, growing thinner and indistinct the farther away from him it went. It gave him a greying corona like an aura gone desiccated and lifeless.

  “You believe my advice to be flawed?” asked Rathbone, with dangerous politeness. “Incorrect in some way? Do you believe you know this subject better than I?”

  Trevelyan didn’t reply. Instead, he reached into his bag and pulled out the sheaf of photocopies and printouts, dropping them onto the desk in front of him. It had been a hard job to find them and copy them, and now he would see if it had been worth it or not. He leaned forward, ignoring how close he was to Rathbone, ignoring the way his skin prickled as though there was a source of electricity nearby, and chose one at random, picking a sentence and speaking it aloud.

  ‘“A man with no valid ideas.’”

  “What?” said Rathbone. Trevelyan felt a wash of cold, writhing fear jittering across his skin and into his belly. He pushed the paper aside and picked up a new one.

  ‘“Empty of originality, dull and likely to illuminate no one.’” I’m reading to something that’s not even a real ghost, he thought. It’s a fragment of one man, his vitriol, let loose and made independent.

  “I beg your pardon?” said Rathbone, and when Trevelyan risked looking up at him, he saw that he had backed away a step. His edges were blurring further, mutable and frenzied, and Trevelyan thought his expression had changed, shifting from anger to a kind of cold dismay.

  ‘“Broad-brush arguments that never hit the mark,”‘ said Trevelyan, reading from another paper,” and then “‘a mystery why this work has been published’” from a fourth.

  “They were fools!” hissed Rathbone, his edges dancing like the tips of ocean waves. “They didn’t understand what I was saying!”

  “Not nice when the tables are turned, is it?” said Trevelyan, leaning back in his seat. His heart yammered so that he felt sure Rathbone would see his shirt trembling above it. He felt brittle, dangling above a place both vast and desolate, with only one way forward and no way back.

  “It’s so easy to feel under attack, isn’t it?” Trevelyan lifted another of the copied reviews from the desk, smiling as insolently as he could manage, and read, “‘Feeble ideas buttressed by writing as dull and lifeless as day-old custard.’ Now, that’s harsh, isn’t it?”

  “How dare you?” shrieked Rathbone, his voice like flies battering against metal. “How dare you?” and he dashed forward, those eyes seeming to sweep up all the light in the room and draw it in until Trevelyan could focus on nothing else, not papers nor print nor walls nor the lamp at his side. There was simply Rathbone, gray and bristling.

  “They were fools, all of them!” hissed Rathbone again, his voice dropping now to a sibilant whisper. “They know nothing. I spent my life at this university, reading and listening and understanding, and I know those texts better than those people ever could.”

  “Really?” Trevelyan managed to say. Rathbone’s face was all, a vast cold moon hanging before him.

  “Yes! And you, you choose to ignore my advice and yet you take that of your friends? Some of them not even in the English department. What understanding have they of the written word? Of art? Of literature? Scientists!”

  He’s not touched me, thought Trevelyan and his confidence suddenly, shockingly, felt genuine rather than a brittle carapace, because I don’t think he can! It’s all words and written savagery, an intellectual violence not a physical one! He grinned, leaning forward. Rathbone fell back as though they were in some stylized gavotte and Trevelyan grinned more widely. He let the book fall from his fist and reached for the last time into his bag. He continued looking at Rathbone, whose entire body was breaking apart and reforming now, only his face remaining constant, hanging above the shifting, dust-cloud shadows that swirled below his neck.

  “It’s your book, isn’t it? Your creation? Your life’s work? Only it’s not very good, is it?” asked Trevelyan. He felt a rough edge under his fingers and clasped the last object he needed, lifting it from his bag. It rattled as he placed it on the desk by the book. His grin was painful now, stretching at the edges of his face and pulling at his muscles. He reached for the book, knowing that Rathbone was watching. The maddening scritch of new words being written came from his article again, now buried under other paper. He ignored it. Without looking down, keeping his gaze firmly on the figure ahead of him, Trevelyan lifted the book.

  Rathbone’s face was growing again, filling the room. It came towards Trevelyan, the crown of the head brushing against the ceiling and the chin grazing the surface of the desk, ruffling the papers. “You dare to stand against me?” Rathbone asked, and his voice boomed around the room like the rattle of closing doors and dropping lids.

  “Yes,” said Trevelyan simply, and tore a page from the book.

  It felt good; no, it
felt wonderful. The paper made a noise like a ragged exhalation as it came away from the binding, and Rathbone screamed, wordless and terrible. Trevelyan tore another page away, dropping the two into the metal bin by his feet. He tore another, then clamped his hand around a wedge of pages and yanked at them, feeling them tug loose from the cover like teeth from diseased gums. He dropped them, seeing them flutter like butterflies at the edges of his vision, and then Rathbone was over the desk, crashing back to a more normal size and shape—a stiff, weary man screeching helplessly, “No, no, no” over and over again as his hands waved around in a semaphore of anger and despair.

  Trevelyan risked looking down, sweeping the papers off the surface of the desk and into the bin before dropping the remains of the book on top of them. He picked up the last object he had taken from his bag and shook it; the rattlesnake chatter of it sounded good in his ears. Pushing open the box, he removed a match.

  When he struck it, the dancing light was somehow brighter than that of the lamp, a shimmering flame that filled the room. It washed across Rathbone, pushing him back even farther, scoring his face to a sickly orange and withering his body to little more than a smear in the glare. Trevelyan held the match for a second, twisting it so that the wooden stem was truly alight, and then dropped it into the bin with the paper.

  The sheets ignited with slow, lazy grace. The flames moved along one page and then stepped across to another, pirouetting as they went to catch more in their grip. When they came to the book, they burned more brightly, as though fed by unseen fuel. First, the cover shriveled from blue to brown, curling, and then the pages within it caught and burned. Trevelyan heard Rathbone yowl, inhuman and thin, and then more loose pages were swallowed by the growing conflagration and the yowl turned into a scream of pure vitriol.