by Adam Nevill
And saw her lying on the floor, hunched up, in much the same position he had left her, on her side, facing the mirror. The mirror in which he could see her face, contorted into a mask of such extreme fright he could almost hear the scream all over again. And above the reflection of Mrs Roth’s unmoving clump of nightgown and stick limbs he saw a flurry of movement.
Way down inside the mirror, inside the silvery rectangular tunnel of reflections created by its position opposite another identical mirror on the facing wall, something moved in quick flits like the images from a film struggling through a projector. But whatever it was he thought he had seen vanished before he had taken more than two steps into the room. Even after all he had endured and heard and seen in this place, he was still sickened with fright at the suggestion of something long and pale, with a reddish smear for a head, moving away inside the reflective distance of the mirror. And it was dragging a pale blue lump by the ankle, away from this room and deep into whatever existed down there.
Seth then turned and briefly looked about him, at all eight of the undraped paintings; one on either side of the mirrors positioned in the centre of each wall. And inside him everything seemed to stop moving, as if shut down by the sheer force of the images.
Each painting depicted the same face, but in different states of disintegration amid a terrible upward blast of air, moving so fast it must have seared the flesh from the bone with the efficiency of an acetylene torch. It was as if the entire demolition of the head above the seated body had occurred instantly. The eight portraits showed, in sequence, the head of the figure being pulled apart, torn and then sucked upward, while the body was still fastened to a chair. He recognized the bits of face in the piecemeal head. It was Mrs Roth.
Seth closed his eyes and shook himself. Rubbed at his face.
Don’t look up.
He knelt beside the cold body of Mrs Roth. He prodded and whispered to her, but elicited no response from the stiff shape, bunched inside the blue housecoat. Her eyes were still open, but he preferred not to look into them, either in the reflection of the mirror or on the actual face, that had been stretched by terror into the rictus of a scream that barely had time to leave the lipless mouth.
Wasting no more time, he scooped up the bundle of bone and its lolling head and moved quickly with it through the flat, out the door, up one flight of stairs, through the open door of flat eighteen, and then down the hallway to the master bedroom. And positioned the body at the foot of the bed, as if it had fallen heavily, head first against the floor, after losing its balance. Not even little Imee was roused by the sounds he made. Perhaps that tormented drudge only responded to the sound of a bell.
Seth then stood back and surveyed his work. Satisfied with the position of the shrunken, broken thing, with one foot tangled in its bedclothes, he turned on his heel and moved quickly out of the flat. He pulled the front door closed behind him and then went back downstairs to apartment sixteen to cover both his tracks and the paintings in the mirrored room, deciding he would keep his eyes closed when so near the shrieking horror of that face, depicted in paint still wet.
TWENTY-FIVE
‘They killed him, Miles. They murdered him.’
Miles paused in the process of removing his jacket. ‘Who? What are you talking about?’
Apryl was breathless, wasn’t making any sense – she knew it – but couldn’t stop herself the moment Miles entered her room at the hotel. ‘My great-uncle, Reginald, Mrs Roth’s husband and Tom Shafer. The men who lived there. In Barrington House. They killed him. They went to confront him. About the dreams. The shadows. They thought he was haunting them. Like my great-aunt, in the journals. It all changed after he moved in. Then he had some kind of accident. And it all got worse after that. Don’t you see it all makes sense?’
‘No, I don’t. What the hell are you talking about?’
‘The residents killed him. They saw the paintings. In his apartment. They must have destroyed them. Burned them. And killed him too. He didn’t disappear. They killed him.’
‘Sweetheart. Please. Sweetheart, sit down. Here. Please. Slow down. I don’t understand. It doesn’t make any sense. You’re talking like a crazy thing.’
But Apryl continued to pace back and forth. ‘She didn’t mean to tell me, but she wanted to. Part of her wanted to confess. She’s very old, Miles. But she’s not senile. Oh, no. She’s as sharp as a cut-throat razor. She knows exactly what she’s doing. My God, she’s a control freak. But she can’t control her conscience. No. It’s why she’s such a miserable bitch. She’s got a guilty conscience. And she wants to confess to someone. Anyone. I caught her at a vulnerable moment. Whenever she wakes, she’s vulnerable. Her judgement is impaired – you know how it can be – and she just needs to get it off her chest.
‘She’s so spoilt she’s still like a child,’ she went on. ‘But she doesn’t have long left now. She knows it. And it’s all been building up inside her. She did something terrible. A long time ago. Lillian too. They all did, and kept it quiet. And now her mind is playing up and she’s convinced that Felix Hessen has come back to the building. For revenge, or something, I don’t know. She claims she has heard him in his apartment again. Moving about underneath her. Like he used to do. She lives right on top of his old place. And the stairs are full of shadows again. Like they used to be. Shadows he brought with him years before. She can hear the voices again and is seeing things and everything. Like Lillian. It’s contagious. It’s so creepy up there. I mean, Jesus, I . . . thought I saw something. Again. But it’s like . . . it’s her conscience. It’s just so fucking gothic, but it explains everything. What happened to Hessen. To the paintings.’
‘Are you out of your mind?’
‘Listen. Listen to me.’ Apryl sat beside him and held his forearm tight with both of her hands.
‘But—’
‘Just listen. Please. Do me a favour, Miles. Just listen to me.’
When Apryl finished a less frantic account of her meeting with Mrs Roth and what she’d gleaned from her, Miles leaned back on the bed and rested on his elbows. He looked at her, his face inscrutable.
‘You see?’ she said, her eyes and hands still flitting with excitement.
‘Jesus, what a terrible story.’
‘Yes. It’s the story of Hessen’s missing years, and of the proof he painted.’
‘Maybe. And it’s just a maybe.’
‘Oh Miles!’
‘Hang on, sweetheart. Just cool your boots. I’d like to speak to this Mrs Roth myself before I make up my mind.’
‘She won’t see you. I’m sure of it. Or me again. I just know it.’
Miles raised his eyebrows. ‘But what do you make of it? All that business about the shadows. And the sound of raised voices in his apartment. It’s pretty damned eerie if you ask me. It’s exactly the same thing Lillian wrote.’
Apryl smiled; she was so excited she wanted to scream. ‘Isn’t it! Have you read all the journals? Tell me you have.’
A frown creased his forehead. ‘I have. Finished the last legible one this afternoon at work. In fact, I’ve read some of them twice. But darling, Mrs Roth is probably crazy. Like that Alice character you told me about at the Friends, who claims she knew him. And like your great-aunt . . .’
‘Lillian was nothing like Alice.’ Then Apryl paused and clapped her hands to her cheeks. ‘Oh, God. Alice. Alice said the same thing. About an accident. She said Hessen had an accident. She must have known him. They both must have known him after the war. I think he self-mutilated.’
‘Oh, hang on, girl.’
‘Why not? You’re the expert aren’t you? Didn’t Van Gogh cut his own ear off? Hessen was all alone in there, tormented by his vision. Working furiously. His mind disintegrating. A mind that was never truly like anyone else’s to begin with. You said so. It all adds up. Talking to himself. Shouting. Doing those rituals that got him thrown out of places. God, he must have lost the plot in there and . . . mutilated his own face. His
own beautiful face.’
‘Apryl. Let’s not get carried away. Please. Let’s just bring it down a notch. You’ve no proof. Just a couple of half-crazy old women telling you stories. I mean you were telling me a few moments ago how the residents of Barrington House carried out an Agatha Christie murder mystery. Mrs Roth in the dining room with a candlestick.’
‘If you’re going to laugh at me, Miles, then I want you to leave.’
‘Hey.’
‘I mean it. I followed the clues my great-aunt left me. And it led to this. The man was murdered in his own home. Who knows why? Who knows what he really did to them? She said there were a lot of Jewish people in that building and they would have known he was a fascist. Mrs Roth is Jewish too. I mean, her name? There’s all kinds of motives.’
‘Well, yes, that’s one, and it’s pretty flimsy. Oswald and Diana Mosley had Jewish friends before and after the war. They didn’t rub them out. Different rules applied up top. Far more forgiving of each other’s faux pas, darling. But—’ Apryl turned to him with an expression suggesting a complete absence of patience with his doubt. ‘—if you truly believe he was murdered, then it is a matter for the police.’
She nodded. ‘But I need to know more. Find out more.’
‘How?’
‘I need to go back and talk to the Shafers. Get it all confirmed. They’re still alive. I’ll even stop them in the street if I have to. I still don’t know how Reginald died. I didn’t get the chance to ask. But I know, I just know, it’s connected to this.’ She turned and looked at Miles. ‘I want the whole story. For Lillian’s sake.’
TWENTY-SIX
Bruised by worry and lack of sleep and from having seen things he had no defence against, Seth didn’t recognize his own frightened eyes staring back at him from the dirty mirror he kept on the mantel in his room. He looked away. Inside his mind a crowd jostled in fear.
He struggled to breathe. His heart beat too fast and cold sweat leaked from his pores. He couldn’t sit still and paced up and down his room instead, looking from the walls to the windows. He thought he might be sick.
What had he done?
Shivering by the glowing radiator, he rolled and lit another cigarette; the sixth in as many minutes. Smoked half of it then stubbed it out in the saucer already overcrowded with a hundred other butts on a thick bed of ash. The sight made him feel worse.
He couldn’t remember the last time he’d eaten. He’d been living off mugs of tea and cigarettes for days. Too much tobacco, caffeine and stale air. Nor could he recall the last time he’d opened a window.
The watery grey light of the late-afternoon sun, soon to die into dusk, turned the orange fabric of the curtains whitish in the places they were most worn.
The grubby half-light revealed red-black colours smeared across two walls. The sight of it made his guts convulse. How had it come to this, to fall so far? Had he lost his mind? Or was this a new mind that painted such fragments of faces and body parts over his walls before killing an old woman?
Dear God, did he?
He wasn’t sure what he’d done. In his memory the events of the previous night had a jerky, insubstantial quality. If he could only slow his head down for a moment, maybe then he could remember what he had done, and what he had seen in that flat, on the walls. See if any of it was possible. But his hands still seemed to bear the weight of her bony body. And he couldn’t suppress the image of Mrs Roth lying on the floor, her face stricken but staring. Or of the quick shadow racing across the floor of the mirrored room and covering her up. The room he’d carried her into like a priest taking a sacrifice into the heart of a temple. And then he recalled her body on the floor of her own bedroom, where he’d planted it, at the foot of the bed, unmoving and broken. Where they would find it today. Her nurse would be there already. Any moment someone could call, maybe Stephen, maybe the police.
In the mirror – what did he see in that mirror? Something scrabbling like a thin white bird with a broken wing, with something red stretched over a face that didn’t look right. And dragging her away, deep into the reflection.
He couldn’t trust his memories. Couldn’t even distinguish what was real and what was a nightmare. No. It was not possible. He’d been hallucinating for weeks. First the dreams and then the visions of that boy. His sick mind had made it all up. This is what happened when you spent too much time alone. Sleep deprived, not eating properly, depressed and anxious, a consciousness turns on itself. He’d left the path so long ago and now he couldn’t get back on it. It was too late for all that.
Seth sat down again. Closed his eyes. Clenched his teeth and bit down against the sudden re-emergence in his mind of Mrs Roth’s sharp dead face, and against the morbid hints of that other head framed on the walls of the mirrored room. The one coming apart, being stripped down to the bone. In paint that was still wet.
He had to leave London. Get out of this vandalized and smeared room. Get away from apartment sixteen and what it made him do. Break out of this blockade of misery, aggression and indifference the city was perpetually shrouded within.
He’d completed a shift pattern and now had a few days off work. If questioned, he could say he’d only gone home to visit his mother. Then his desertion of the city might not be seen as an admission of guilt, were he suspected of causing Mrs Roth’s death.
Clinging on to this logic, he rose to his feet. Unsteady on tired legs, his vision almost pixelating from lack of sleep, he fumbled through the pile of clothes in one corner and retrieved a rucksack. Stuffed some dirty clothes inside it. Then snatched up his overcoat, keys and wallet, before leaving and locking his room – a room that was a testament to delusion, to mania, to futility. A place he would never set foot inside again.
The traffic never stopped on New North Road. He waited by the kerb, blinking in the dim light that still managed to make his eyes burn. Cold winds buffeted him from three directions. Dusty, fume-drenched air swirled up around his face.
Eventually the lights changed. He moved on, further up the Essex Road, into Islington. Angel tube station his target. And then King’s Cross and away. As he moved he shivered and sweated at the same time. Feared a re-emergence of the fever. He just didn’t feel right. Staggering about to avoid the loitering pedestrians, he felt like he was either stuck in one place or moving backwards.
The sky was so low. Disconsolate and grey, it appeared to be no more than a few yards above the top storeys of the tallest buildings. Sodden with muck, it silted a brownish murk down to the ugly red bricks and stained concrete of the buildings, so that it was hard to see much further than a few hundred feet ahead.
And the people here, how they looked like the final dregs of a diseased race. Shambling under the grotesque loads of their fat bodies. Huffing irritably, elbowing and shouldering each other as they walked the cramped pavements. He tried not to stare at these faces about him. What had the city done to them? They made him feel sick.
Everyone was being worn down in increments here. Some, like him, had just fallen further than the others. And it didn’t help to dwell too long on those who were most damaged, in case you hastened your own descent to their musty forgotten corners: the stale bedsits, the damp rooms and labyrinthine concrete estates where trees didn’t grow and where the air constantly shouted with the belligerent voice of the fast angry traffic.
Away from this. Oh God, to just be removed from this place that didn’t work. A city regenerating its timeless contamination through the misery of the occupants. That was how it found nourishment. By dousing hope and disturbing minds. By instigating crisis and breakdown. With the shock of poverty and the tyranny of wealth. With the eternal frustration of being late; the suffocation of mania and the binding of neurosis; the perpetual cycle of despair and euphoria; the murderous anger at the trespasser who sits too close; the dead stares of faces at bus windows; the mute absorption and quiet humiliation of the underground; delinquency and drink; a thousand different tongues snapping in selfish insistence. City of th
e damned. So ugly, so frenetic. And all beneath the white sun in the forever greyness of sky. Where the damned are swallowed and forget who they are. He loathed it.
His horror spurred him on. Made him walk faster even though he was out of breath and uncomfortably sweaty under his bag. In the dull windows of the shops and cafes he caught glimpses of himself: shabby and hunched over like a beggar with its old sack. And when he saw his face it looked sickeningly white. Bleached by fear, sharpened by anxiety, lengthened by misery, but the eyes were full of the bewilderment of a man tormented by an absence of sleep. ‘Jesus Christ,’ he whispered, amongst the other mumblings in which he rehearsed the directions of his journey, over and over again: ‘Northern City Line to King’s Cross. Buy a ticket to Birmingham. Get on the first train . . .’
Near the glassy face of a building society he rested before the final surge to Angel tube station. He was close to the crossroads and the air was all wrong. It felt like a hand on his chest was holding him back while his legs went numb with pins and needles. At this place a stream of visions poured into his head, appearing and vanishing quicker than heartbeats. They were everywhere, the damned.
The two tramps on a bench told him to fuck off. They were using drink to hold back their own visions.
This was a place only the mad could see. But the insane are so filled up with it they can only stand and stare, or wander and mutter like forgotten prophets and dethroned kings.
‘You cunt of a whore,’ he said to the pavement that tripped him up. ‘You cunting shite of Christ the devil,’ he said, before spitting at the speeding cars. ‘Stinking bile and shit of shit of shit . . .’ he said at the tube station when he found it closed due to industrial action.