by Adam Nevill
And while The Book of Light worked its way to the surface, and to discoverability, I took to the streets and shared my message with anyone who would listen. This message was greater than me; it had been imparted to me from a higher source.
The recalcitrant, the rude and those I deemed so helplessly entangled in the hierarchy and its sophisticated system of lies and false hope were occasionally dispatched by my own hand. I likened my wet workings to the smashing of false idols, or the destruction of grotesque puppets. I lived off the proceeds that I looted from their broken remains.
I found that others with nothing to lose were only too happy to engage in such acts of holy vengeance too; many even took responsibility for my excesses. But in prison they found there was no greater opportunity to evangelise and recruit more soldiers of light, and those with greater skills and motivation for the more direct and uncompromising side of our faith.
The acts of destruction and chaos attributable to The Book of Light swiftly led to it being banned, but its verses and cantos will never go away. For one thing, they have been sprayed all over the city. And though brutal attempts to belittle and suppress the book were generated from the highest levels of commerce and government, and punishments were excruciating for the book’s advocates, The Book of Light persisted orally and was evangelised by the multitudes of the put-upon, disenfranchised, dispossessed, exiled, imprisoned and left behind.
I had hoped for a slow and bloodless revolution, but the implementation of the Light’s core tenets was inevitably crude at times. During the initial sackings of the luxury apartments, and of those giant monoliths of glass in the heart of the city, many died, and many continue to die as hell is consumed by the very rage that it created within its subjects. Once people realised that the pain should be projected outwards, and not bled into toilet bowls, and that we were only held in check by a few bewigged apes and self-crowned impostors, and as long as we maintained our stamina for the promise of future light, great changes could be effected quickly.
I have no more control of the dispersal of the book and its message, and the subsequent anarchy that it causes, than does the man whose foot carelessly treads upon a nest of ants. But out of destruction grows new light in the myriad shrines and temples that have spread through this city, appearing anywhere from the many wretched blocks of flats to the garbage fires of the homeless who gather beneath the stars.
There also remains a great and bloody wrangling between factions who vie for my favour, and who misinterpret my message of love, fairness, equality and justice. It is hard to see my egalitarian vision among streets filled with so much broken glass, burned-out cars and charred corpses, and particularly when all that one can hear in the city is the sirens, screams, the distant crumps of explosions, and the clatter of small-arms fire. But gradually things are simplifying and becoming clearer. When people ask me, ‘Where is this light?’ I say, ‘Soon. Soon, my friend. Soon, you will have eyes to see this light.’
To have got this far is the cause of much satisfaction to me as I sit in my plain little room and continue to reflect before Father Suarez’s small wooden Reliquary. In the mornings I can peer down from my solitary window and observe the genuflections of the naked executives who have been found guilty of exploitation. They are brought here in chains and smeared in their own excrement, at gunpoint, each day. And yet, alongside their daily debasement, I also receive news of how meritocracies and cooperatives are forming in the industries, and how the vast divide between the wealthy and the poor is narrowing. The enforced dispersal of hoarded wealth, I am told, has been like an explosion of light and hope through a blighted land.
The light itself remains curious in its absence. Its source is as ineffable as it ever was. Its distillation is proving impossible. But it is out there, somewhere, and inside all of us. Of that I must remain certain.
Little Black Lamb
The memory would just appear in Douglas’s mind. The occurrences were similar to those odd dreams that occasionally woke him with a jolt, and he could never fathom the origin of those. There seemed to be no trigger to explain his recall of this particular place, and no personal context in the recollection of the location either. But the memory repeatedly returned to Douglas at random moments, so he assumed he was either recalling a specific place and unable to attach it to an experience of his own, or he was imagining the site.
The image was also accompanied by apprehension. The kind of response he’d usually associate with the recollection of unfortunate episodes from his own past, or acknowledgements of unflattering revelations about himself, after long-dangling pennies had finally dropped.
The insistent and repetitive appearance of the location in his thoughts, and the shortening periods between each recurrence of the scene, eventually compelled him to consider the episode with a great deal more effort. And the more he pondered the fragment, and the more detail and context he attempted to extract, the greater was his alarm – for he was uncertain that this was even one of his own memories.
Perhaps something bad had happened there. But where was there?
Dread became entwined within his unease when the replays became hourly, repeated like radio commercials that he detested. And after another week of insistent replays, Douglas was more convinced by the bizarre notion that the scene was someone else’s obsession that he’d been loaned; the uncomfortable equivalent of mistaking a similar coat for his own, only to discover that the fit around his shoulders and the contents of the pockets were unfamiliar.
He eventually mentioned the situation to his wife, Sandra, and she immediately said, ‘That is so strange, Doug. Me too.’
Following the onset of their first false memories, more of the weird visions began to occur in Douglas and Sandra’s minds. Each occurrence remained unprovoked by a particular situation that either of them could determine.
For Douglas, each scene that formed in his thoughts suggested that he was on the edge of a much broader scene, after an event under an open sky. These unpopulated images all featured irrelevant spaces too, or ‘non-spaces’ as he was soon referring to them. ‘Dear, another non-space just popped into my mind.’
The very first scene had featured an area of uncut but flattened grass, surrounded by dim trees, their lower trunks choked by nettles and blackberry vines. In the middle of the grass clearing was an old tin drinking trough for cattle. The following scene had featured gravel and litter interspersed about long weeds, beside a railway embankment. A grassy area beside a phone mast, or some kind of telecommunications antenna, ringed by a spiked fence, followed the glimpse of the railway sidings. Overgrown turf between the uprights of an electricity pylon came swiftly on the tail of another persistent image of a strip of weeds, beside the chain-link fence of an industrial estate; a grey, featureless building set some distance away. The latest and most persistent scene featured a few yards of wet soil adjacent to an agricultural building with boarded-up windows.
‘Mine are similar to what you describe, but all indoors,’ Sandra confided in him during their first exchange on the matter. ‘There is no before, or after, in these rooms. There is only this place from another time. Drab, poorly decorated rooms, from the sixties or seventies, I think. And I feel that I was once there, and that I was even present for something that happened there, only I don’t know what it was. And whoever else was involved is no longer there either . . .
‘When I see the rooms I sense that I was sickened at the time that I was there. Not ill, but repulsed . . . remorseful, and very tired. That fatigue you get after a period of excitement.’ She was close to an analogy of sexual misconduct but stopped short to spare Doug’s feelings. They were both on their second marriage and had been together for ten years. Shortly before she met Doug, and while her previous marriage disintegrated, Sandra had been susceptible to many temptations and had drunk herself into a persona that she hardly recognised now, and preferred not to remember. Doug didn’t know about any of that.
‘I was ultimately unhappy in t
hese places that I am seeing, but I also know that I have never lived in any of these rooms. I can’t even remember visiting them either. Yes, it is like I am remembering a place where something unpleasant happened to me. Or that I did something regrettable there. Maybe a combination of both. An incident that caused a trauma that never faded, only I have no idea what it was.’
‘Because you’ve never been in those places and whatever happened was never your own misfortune?’
‘But I remember these rooms more clearly than I remember important scenes from my childhood. These are quite . . . urgent. I can’t even imagine when I was supposed to have been in these rooms either. They seem timeless, even enshrined, but completely ordinary.
‘I’m getting a bit worried, Doug.’
‘As am I, but I’d be far more concerned if they didn’t appear so natural. So authentic.’
Sandra didn’t need to communicate her agreement with more than a look, but on the subject of communication she did venture, ‘Is someone sending them to us?’
Her embarrassment became obvious, as was Doug’s on her behalf for saying something of this nature so easily. Though he’d been struck by the same idea too.
The problem with the online checklists that help to identify the early onset of Alzheimer’s or dementia was that both Douglas and Sandra felt they’d already been suffering from every symptom before the visions began. ‘Visions’: that’s what they had taken to calling them.
Douglas and Sandra were both sixty four and drank moderately, and neither of them was a high risk for dementia according to their family histories. The questionnaire asked if they were regularly forgetting names and dates and repeating themselves. Yes. Difficulties with concentration? Yes. Having trouble with what should be familiar appliances? Yes, and especially the boiler for Doug and one of the television remotes for Sandra. Difficulties with language, finding the right word, stopping in the middle of sentences? I should say so. Getting confused about times and places? When have we not? Misplacing things? Check: every day. Growing increasingly tired of obligations? Hell, yes. Not recognising your own reflection? Well, no, but we can’t recognise our own thoughts, dear!
They each took a medical and a neurological assessment at their local surgery. Douglas’s blood pressure had worsened and Sandra discovered that she was borderline diabetic, but the GP and nurse were unconcerned about dementia in either of them and advised dietary adjustments.
Unconvinced by this, they pursued a second opinion and paid a specialist private clinic for a home visit and screening. On the ‘Mental Status’ test, Doug scored 26 out of 30; to her delight, Sandra hit 28 out of 30. On that scale only a dip below 24 was cause for concern about dementia.
The remaining options, to make certain that they were not losing their minds, were gene testing and mental imaging, but both their GP and the clinic believed these assessments unnecessary.
Douglas began to wonder if there might be a connection between the visions and their home. They had lived in the three-bedroom terraced house for five years and been content and undisturbed by anything besides one break-in the previous year. Their shed had been broken into but nothing was taken. In fact, something was left behind. A pair of protective gloves that were heavily soiled and brittle with age.
The house had been built in the twenties and little untoward had shown up on the survey, besides some work required for the roof. The vendor had been an ordinary middle-aged woman called June, who’d been tasked with selling her elderly mother’s house to pay for her care. At the time of the purchase, the mother, Alice, lived in a care home. She had owned the house with her husband since the early seventies.
The neighbours had said nothing remarkable or even specific about the previous owners, besides their being devoutly religious.
Alice’s husband had died in the early nineties and the widow had led a quiet life in the house until she’d been moved to a care home. Douglas knew nothing else. His due diligence of the area and house had been thorough and revealed the neighbourhood and property to be entirely average.
And none of Sandra’s visions ever featured the rooms of their home.
The problem escalated when each of them was beset by compulsions to engage in irrational behaviour, beginning four weeks after the first of their false recollections.
Twice after Douglas came into the house and failed to raise Sandra with a call, he’d come across her outside, when he looked through the kitchen windows. She’d been standing at the foot of the garden, beside the shed, and staring at the houses beyond their fence. The second time it had been raining heavily and although Sandra wore a waterproof she’d failed to put the hood up. When she’d responded to Douglas’s call from the back door, she’d seemed dazed for a few seconds, and had then made her way back to the house, though unsteadily.
Seeing her so thin, wet and near enfeebled, as if from an onslaught of strong emotion, had made Doug think that Sandra was now old, and in that peculiar childlike way that transforms the elderly.
Sandra admitted she’d been overcome by an urgent need to be outside the house, before she’d submitted to a kind of ‘daydreamy feeling’ when in the open air. ‘But it isn’t what I wanted . . . it wasn’t right. That wasn’t right, just standing there thinking of another empty room. It was like I hadn’t gone far enough, or I should have been doing something with my hands . . . but I don’t know what, Doug.’
Doug wasn’t sure what Sandra had meant by that, but neither was she.
Douglas also veered off course. The sight of three distant hills that he was passing on an A road triggered an incident. He’d even released an involuntary gasp at the sight of the hills and an image had tried to form inside his mind, almost overpoweringly, but had dispelled just as rapidly and left him with no memory of anything but a patch of flattened grass and wet soil. He’d been driving to a hardware store that he’d never used before, to buy some decorating materials.
The hills had once been farmland but were undergoing a transformation and were becoming a new residential estate. Most of the hills displayed the vast, ugly red gouges of earthworks in progress. A multitude of narrow grey houses were being erected and packed together like hutches. Douglas pointlessly wondered how big the gardens were and how each house must overlook those at the front and back. He’d also suffered a wholly irrational feeling of guilt and remorse, as well as a terror of getting in trouble. Those hills meant something to a deep and indefinable part of his mind.
With the aid of the satnav, he found a road close to the hills. When the road became a broad, unsurfaced area rutted and split by heavy plant vehicles, he’d stopped the car and found himself at the rear of a deserted and silent construction site, bereft of the industrial processes that had thus far mutilated the hills. He proceeded on foot to the nearest slope and to the only hillside that had managed to retain a meagre copse of trees and some pasture.
He was certain that he’d never visited this place before. And yet, by the time he’d clumsily surmounted the remnants of a gate, ignoring the PRIVATE PROPERTY: EXCALIBUR CONSTRUCTION sign, and slipped his way up the slope to the first trees, he knew that something inside the tiny wood was a source of beguiling significance to him.
In the centre of the wood Douglas came across a place he recognised: the setting of the very first of his visions. A drinking trough for cattle, made from galvanised tin, was set in a rough circle of trampled grass, corralled by short, spindly trees and waist-high bracken. Two worn paths led in and out of the clearing upon which cattle or sheep must once have plodded to drink from the greening metal basin. As in his vision, the place was wet and the ground was covered by slippery leaves that had fallen from the messy circle of trees. The sun was obscured by dense, low clouds that created the air quality and the coloration of the foliage in his vision.
The very sight of the metal trough was a source of revulsion. But the lingering miasma of livestock and the dried algae on the metal basin were not responsible for the strength of Douglas’s reaction. He
became dizzy and bent double, his vision speckling with motes of light like dust particles falling through sunshine. A great fatigue gripped his thighs and shoulders and the palms of his hands burned. He might have just defaced these hills alone with a pickaxe, and erected those grey houses with his own hands, rather than merely walked up an incline from the car.
The fatigue passed after a few minutes.
He experienced a baffling anger as he plunged into the thick undergrowth on the far side of the clearing. He wasn’t even vaguely aware of what he would find nearby but was certain that he was expected by something deeper inside that shrunken wood. He would recognise whatever it was when he came across it.
The undergrowth halted his progress. Blackberry vines tore his sopping trousers and scratched the skin of his calves. And he found nothing, but only because he wasn’t able to get far enough inside. Not far enough. Just like Sandra, what he sought was beyond his reach.
Refusing to be deterred, and assured that his unknown purpose was one of importance, Douglas burrowed into the old wood from another three angles. By the time he’d trampled down enough undergrowth to get deeper among the trees, he found what had drawn him up there: a cairn or miniature dolmen that had collapsed. The large grey stones might have been part of the rubble from a collapsed wall, or of a natural outcrop of indigenous rock, or something much older, transported here. How would he ever know?
By that time, his coat was bemired with moisture, wet bark and moss. His shoes were caked in mud and his trousers spattered and holed. But this was it. There was something hidden beneath these stones. Or maybe it was kept in place by them.
Bracing his thighs, his spine bent, he gripped the first rock and began to lever it loose.
During the two weeks that followed Doug’s discovery of the ancient suitcase near the construction site, his false recollections of waste ground lessened. This made him suspect that he had accomplished a task and that whatever was directing him had allowed him to stand down.