by Adam Nevill
Mr Shafer lifted his skull and grinned at Seth. ‘He can do it.’
This seemed to placate his wife. ‘Well, don’t just stand there,’ she said to Seth.
‘What?’ he said.
Mr Shafer shook his head. ‘Another idiot. Not a bright man, are you?’
‘You could get a monkey to sit behind that desk downstairs,’ his wife added. They both laughed together, enjoying their first moment of agreement in what seemed like a long time.
Mr Shafer stood up and pressed a coin into Seth’s hand. ‘Here. This might help.’ Seth opened his hand. There was a ten-pence piece in his palm.
‘Now you see,’ Mrs Shafer said. ‘That’s what it takes. How did I guess? This is a service we have already paid for. You have no right to expect a tip.’
Seth tried to pull away from Mr Shafer. ‘What are you doing?’ The old man’s fingers had suddenly become busy as knitting needles about Seth’s belt buckle.
‘Please. No. I don’t want to.’
‘It’s not like it’s much to ask. Do you think Stephen would be pleased to hear about this?’ Mrs Shafer said from the corner.
Seth swatted Mr Shafer’s insistent fingers away from his crotch. His attentions seized by what Mrs Shafer did next, he took a step away. ‘Oh God, no.’ In the corner, she’d pushed her abdomen higher in the air and drew the kimono slowly from her rear in a parody of seductiveness. Revealed for the moment Seth could bear to look at it was a wet slit with grey lips and pinkish insides, opened in the middle of her hirsute backside.
‘Well?’ she then shrieked at him.
‘Be careful, Seth!’ a voice called from behind.
The hooded boy stood in the doorway of the living room.
‘Who is he?’ Mrs Shafer screamed, pulling her great skirt down and mercifully concealing the fleshy eye.
‘What is the meaning of this?’ Mr Shafer asked Seth. His eyes had become squinty and his mouth stretched into a mean suture.
‘But what can I do?’ Seth asked the hooded boy. His words quivered and his jaw started to tremble.
‘You got to do ’em. They deserve it.’
‘Call Stephen!’ Mrs Shafer screeched at her husband.
‘I intend to,’ her husband replied, and staggered across to a phone on top of a stack of medical catalogues.
‘How?’ Seth asked the hooded boy. Never had he felt so weak and useless. ‘I can’t.’
‘You have to. They had it comin’ a long time. They knows it.’
Seth gritted his teeth and felt the comforting glow of anger replace his panic and fear. Soon, a great molten power coursed through his every limb. Mrs Shafer could sense it. ‘Hurry, dear,’ she said to her husband. ‘I think he’s unstable.’
The old man groaned under the weight of the handset. He squinted at the keypad and one of his fingers hovered above the buttons. Seth walked across to him and seized the phone. The old man held on. ‘How dare you?’ he said. And then, ‘Let go or you’ll be very sorry.’ Seth pushed him away.
Immediately, the old man collapsed on the dirty carpet and began to moan. The phone fell after him, down and into the petrified deformity of bone and parchment skin to crack against his skull.
‘Now you’ve done it!’ Mrs Shafer shouted, before she began to scream. The noise was hideous and deafening.
Seth looked at the hooded boy. Who nodded.
Seizing the brass stem of a lamp stand from behind the wreckage of a dozen cardboard boxes, Seth pulled the whole thing free of the floor and wall. The electric cord snapped from the base and left the plug in the socket. He strode towards the corner of the living room where the bulk that was Mrs Shafer trembled. She stopped her screaming to ask him, ‘Have you lost your mind?’
‘I hope so.’ He brought the heavy base of the lamp down against her upturned face.
‘Oh,’ she said, in a daze after the thunk of antique walnut and metal against her tiny features. Then she sat up and tried to regain her dignity. She wiped a strand of bloodied hair from off her forehead and pouted her lips as if to apply lipstick.
Seth brought the lamp down even harder. Like wielding a pickaxe, every muscle and tendon in his back and arms went into the second blow.
‘That’s it,’ the hooded boy said from behind, his words partly obscuring the crunch of skull.
Seth laughed to prevent himself from falling to his knees and weeping. Mrs Shafer stopped talking but her lips still moved. He brought the lamp stand down again and again and again against her face, hoping the great body would stop trembling under the kimono. It didn’t seem ready to stop so he slammed the base of the lamp into her abdomen. After the second strike against her distended belly he heard something tear under the kimono and her entire body appeared to soften and finally relax.
‘My wife. My wife. My wife,’ Mr Shafer cried out in a weak voice from the floor, where he lay tangled in his own disability.
‘Don’t feel sorry for him,’ the hooded boy advised Seth. ‘They’ll all feel sorry for themselves at the end, but they had this comin’.’
Seth nodded in agreement and walked across the carpet to finish Mr Shafer off. Under his feet something squelched. It was fluid seeping from under Mrs Shafer’s kimono.
‘It’s not that hard once you start,’ Seth said in amazement to the hooded boy. ‘You just lose your temper and go all hot.’
‘That’s right.’
‘But what amazes me most is that they’re nothing. In the end, they mean nothing.’
The hooded boy nodded excitedly.
Seth brought the lamp stand down into the middle of Mr Shafer’s body. It was as if a giant metal foot had trodden upon dry twigs on a forest floor.
‘There’s another fing you need to see tonight, Seth. I’s been told to show you,’ the hooded boy said.
‘No, please. Not in here.’ Seth stood outside apartment sixteen. The teak veneer shone like gold, and from beneath the heavy door a reddish glow dispersed across the green carpet of the landing. From within the flat he sensed a resolution to a journey that filled his body with panic. And with it came the far-off sound of something he’d heard before but could not place. Voices. Swirling about. Rotating, but going backwards like a record. Faint, like the sound of crying children inside a distant house, heard on a winter’s afternoon, just as the sun is dying into dark clouds. Forlorn. And fast becoming a much bigger chorus. Inside the apartment but elsewhere. Above him.
His body rigid with fear, he tried to step away, but the door just moved closer.
‘You have to,’ the hooded boy said. ‘He wants to show you all them other ones, them down there that can’t get out. They’s all waiting. He’s got it open just for you, mate.’
Twisting and pushing his limbs against the heavy thickness of air that swelled against his back and threatened to topple him forward, Seth tried to resist. He knew instinctively that if he were to cross the threshold of this place something terrible would happen. He would be forced to confront something that could stop his heart with a bang.
And then they were standing in a red hallway on the other side of the door he never saw open. Side by side. Him and the boy that smelled of burnt flesh, of exhausted gunpowder and singed cardboard. A smell that filled his nostrils and seared the back of his throat. Made it difficult to breathe, while the circling sound of the chattering crowd moved closer like a playground full of terror. It was coming from further down the reddish hallway, as if a room behind one of these heavy doors contained a whirlpooling violence of air in which so many people were caught up and dragged backwards, around and around, until they were too dizzy to do anything but scream.
Already he could sense himself falling a long way down if he opened the wrong door. So far down into that sound and at such great speed.
The boy stood behind him. ‘Go on, Seth.’
The hooded presence pushed Seth forward. His legs were numb, his feet beset by pins and needles. His jaw seized up and he struggled to breathe. But down the hallway and across the black a
nd white squares of marble he went. Beneath the old glass lamps that threw out the dirty light that never reached the ceiling which he couldn’t see, and that was too dim to illumine much of the reddish walls. Ox-blood red around the big pictures in the gilt frames. Heavy gold frames, acting like the frames of windows beyond which existence had stopped while the void moved.
The void. Absorbing his stare. Pulling it from his body, leaving the rest of his face behind. Tugging it towards the flat darkness of the pictures. Paintings of an absence that made him feel both cold and afraid of heights at the same time, as if he could fall through into it.
But if he stared long enough at the darkness inside any of the frames, things could be seen. Ever so faintly, emerging like pale fish from still, lightless and forgotten waters.
Here and there he began to think he could see things moving quickly. A flash of grey bone. A smudge of face looking back over a shoulder. Teeth yellow and chattery. Then gone. Or was it just a trick of the faint light that distorted any real sense of shape among the swirls of paint?
But as he passed the largest rectangular frame he was sure he saw the wet brick walls of a shaft descending away from the picture frame. And within the tunnel the pallid silhouette of something turned and scurried away, but backwards.
Gradually, as he passed more of the large, dark backgrounds in the picture frames, new shapes emerged and took more definite form. And the paintings began to resemble distant unlit rooms. Inside them he caught sight of things huddled and twisted. The faces were covered or turned away from the light. Other frames issued impressions of fleshy presences, whose mottled skin was like discarded clothing, empty of the rigidity supplied by muscle and bone but still moving. Moving against thin pins that nailed the flayed opacity to walls stained with rust or rot.
And then he too was moving forward. Pushed onward against his will, flitting past the occupants of so many dark rooms within the frames he passed. Wanting to look straight ahead, or at his feet, at anything but the terrible walls and what hung upon them, he wrestled with his neck to stop his head whipping from side to side. But he still caught glimpses of things at the edge of his vision, or up ahead in other picture frames, as his eyes stubbornly refused to obey his will. He clenched his jaw to stop himself screaming at the tangled things, gnawed to the bone. The torn things. Fragments of fleshiness ripped like cloth. Sometimes a smudged whitish face, caught in the act of a scream, hung in space. Until, on either side of the walls, a terrible momentum gathered. As if a call had gone out and summoned the subjects of the portraits to gather for an audience.
Dim faces, transformed by animal features, soon pressed outward from the darkness. Limbs dangled with an increasing frequency. All obscured by the poor light as if a full revelation would be too much of a shock, even in a dream. But the women still tried to show him their dirty teeth. And the men, tied in knots, revealed a rapture of pain so great it made their shrieking faces turn blue and disintegrate around the edges.
And then he was inside another room off the middle of the corridor where the swirling sound was at its loudest. He had to cover his eyes and crouch down, to make himself small, where he shivered against the cold air that swooped about his body. Air that carried a hundred voices all telling a frantic story.
Against the wall. Against the wall. Smash it against the wall.
I can’t. I won’t. He said he’d come back. Wait here. I know it’s cold, but wait here, love.
Stamp on it. Break it.
Seth peeked through his fingers, terrified but compelled to see who was speaking and shouting and screaming all about him.
Bleached faces groaned but kept their eyes closed. They rose and faded on the dark walls.
I coughed it up. Coughed up my heart.
Was that an ape? The thing with the hair around the mouth?
I fink he’s coming. Fink he’s coming down. There’ll be hell to pay now.
Could an old woman have such teeth?
Excuse me. Please. Excuse me. I think I fell down.
He saw three baby-things with big heads and doll bodies hanging against some wet bricks in a sewer.
Are you all asleep? I’m sorry, but are you all asleep? I need the doctor. But the door is locked. I’m sorry to wake you, but they turned all the lights off.
The walls were paint. The ceilings were paint. It was still wet. Reddish but dark, like blood or moist rust.
He turned to look at a black beak that said, Blood. It’s in the blood, but it vanished and he watched hind legs kick away into the liquid shadows.
Oh Jesus Christ.
There were no angles where the walls ended and the ceiling began. What had been a room was now just a space.
To his left, at head height, four women turned about on their hands and knees. All of their joints were in the wrong places. Teeth and hair grew in clumps from out of the grey and pink flesh of their bodies.
Hello? Is somebody there? Who are you? Please help me.
In between a procession of bluish bony things that dragged themselves through the darkness in a circle, round and round at the edge of the room, up near where the ceiling should have been, following each other’s paralysed legs and useless hooves, and beyond the chitter-chattery teeth, clacking like the muzzles of wooden horses, was an intense blackness. It moved. Seethed.
Seth screamed and a terribly thin figure rushed at him on all fours, its wisps of hair wild in the freezing wind, but then suddenly fell away, or was yanked backwards, so that something else, inside a sackcloth bag, could struggle forward on its elbows, its eyeholes stitched shut, hissing and desperate to reach him but blind and unable to locate him.
Am I awake? Please. Can you tell me, am I awake?
Everything in here was suspended in a freezing ether. An eternity of living oil in which so many things drowned and resurfaced before being sucked back down again. The room had transformed into a terrible broth of liquid and gas in which these things were all stuck and barely aware of each other. Some crawled blindly and bumped into others they then challenged or screamed at, insane with fear. Others hung silent, or were pinned fast against the darkness momentarily, before fading back into the void once again. The roar of the wind was the roar of tens of thousands of voices. Vertigo tried to turn Seth’s stomach inside out when he realized he was but a pinprick in a seething that stretched forever.
He covered his eyes. Stood up and started to stagger about. To feel for the door he’d slipped through. There was no door. He had to peek between his fingers again, but it was so dark now he couldn’t even see his feet. And things were brushing against him in the moving air. Something like a tongue lapped between his fingers. A dry, bristly face pushed into his stomach. Was it speaking or gnawing? Thin fingers touched then pressed against his face. The tips were cold but urgent in their examination as if suddenly surprised to find him here in the darkness. A hand grabbed his thigh and squeezed. A woman screamed. A hide of scabs brushed the back of one hand. An awful sexual panting erupted behind him and he sensed the feverish motion of something wet and raw directed at him in the darkness.
Seth staggered towards where the walls had once been. He’d taken no more than a few steps when the temperature plummeted. His body froze. Shivering with a violence that made it hard to breathe, and even with his eyes closed, he sensed that he stood near the edge of a precipice. The floor of the room had become nothing but a small platform in a bottomless night. A darkness overcrowded with suffering and confusion and madness. And it was all crawling onto the platform with him as though the room were a solitary life raft in a freezing black sea.
He fell to the ground and clung to the floor, while the deformed and fragmented subjects of what he had mistaken for paintings in the hallway clambered over him.
It was the phone ringing that pulled him out of sleep with a cry. It was a strangled sound that suddenly disintegrated into an anguished sobbing, a noise he had never heard himself make before. And as the bright yellow light of the reception area burned into his w
ide eyes, and the solidity of the leather chair pressed against his back, his sobbing turned into panting.
Tears dried on his face. He coughed to clear his throat of mucus. His hands gripped the arms of the chair until they became bloodless, as if they were still obeying some command designed to prevent him from falling from a great height.
Seth looked about him, the sudden shock of consciousness sobering him from terror. The familiar world of security monitors, clipboards and ringing house phones reassembled around him and chased the vestiges of suffocating darkness out of his mind. The nightmare drained away, as, mercifully, did his waking notion that all he had just witnessed had been real.
He was ill. Really ill. He must be.
Someone wanted him. On the phone. Jesus, how long had it been ringing? What time was it? He swung about in his chair and yanked the receiver from the switchboard.
He cleared his throat and quickly and instinctively spoke into the phone. ‘Seth speaking.’
Bad line. But someone was speaking inside the crackles and static. ‘In here,’ he thought they said. Or was it ‘Down here’? It was a man’s voice, but not one he recognized. He looked at the switchboard. The red light was flashing for flat number sixteen.
Recalling bits of the dream, Seth dropped the phone.
NINE
The mirror was turned so it faced the wall. All night long it had reflected nothing but the noble image of her great-aunt and uncle in dusty oil paint, instead of her lying frightened and tense in bed.
She had turned the mirror round because it frightened her. But it was just a long mirror in a dark room, in an old apartment, in a strange city, in which a tired and excitable girl had become overwhelmed by all the things she had seen, thought and imagined. Just an overwrought mind imagining a presence in a mirror. Nothing more.
Dim morning light hovered around the window frames, emitting a thin greyish haze through the net curtains. She hadn’t closed the drapes the night before in order not to feel trapped, as if the windows above Lowndes Square offered the possibility of a quick escape. All the lamps were still on too, along with the ceiling lights.