by Adam Nevill
He prayed for the strength to destroy the city with a hammer.
He’d have to continue on foot. Stumble down the Pentonville Road to King’s Cross Station. Rage drove him. He ground his teeth to sand. He would not be defied. Not by the uneven pavement, the lights that never changed, the sudden roadworks that forced a lengthy diversion, or the yellowy faces that looked up, beseeching, with their horrible parchment mouths moving in the darkened windows of basement flats. Something like a crab, with legs as thin, scuttled behind a dusty privet hedge. He closed his eyes against it.
It seemed to take hours, with frequent stops becoming necessary to wipe the sweat from his eyes and readjust the backpack that was close to giving him a spinal injury. His vision was beginning to dissolve at the edges into white flashes. Sound was slowing down, and elongating.
At King’s Cross most of the road was open around the front of the station and surrounded by orange plastic mesh. No one was working in the strata of tarmac, soil and clay piping. The signs had been knocked down. People were walking across them. The sound of their heels against the dented tin ricocheted inside his skull. The roof of his brain was a bruise now, pushing darkness into his eyes.
Two police cars were parked outside the main entrance to the station, but he couldn’t see the officers. Six feral dogs on rope leads were fighting, blocking the main entrance. One of the owners had a beard that reached his waist. It was grey and tangled into dreadlocks. The other was a skinny punk with acne-covered cheeks and stripy leggings, trying to sell the Big Issue. They tugged at the ropes fastened to their dogs and swore at each other. People with jobs walked past the commotion eating sandwiches from Pret A Manger and talking on mobile phones. Inside the station someone was screaming, ‘Get your stinkin’ hands of me. Get them off me you stinkin’ ape,’ and then three police officers burst out of the station dragging a black woman out. She had no shoes. All of the officers had lost their hats.
The black woman looked derelict, homeless, insane from huffing crack. In one hand she still clutched the stub of a half-chewed baguette. Two little Chinese women followed the struggle. They wore the red and white uniforms of catering staff. Their expressions were identical – silent indifference.
If he’d had a gun, Seth believed this would be the time to start shooting. To clear his path of dogs and degenerates. But the red flare of anger only made him feel weaker. Close to a faint.
Once inside King’s Cross Station, and once he’d managed to keep his eyes focused on the departures board, he realized he was in the wrong place. Trains didn’t run from King’s Cross to Birmingham New Street. It was Euston he needed. Fucking Euston.
Hands on his knees, head bowed, he tried to contain both his anger at himself and his delirium from lack of sleep. It had been so long since he’d left London for even a day. A year since he’d travelled to Birmingham. He’d forgotten how to get out. But he would get out. He’d walk all day if necessary, until he collapsed, to find a way to leave this hell.
Back out on the Euston Road, he plodded west. Euston Station wasn’t far. The signs said so. Above him the sky was turning white. Or rather, he could see a bright shimmer through the gaseous sheet of grey. His face was hot and now his vision swam. Streets, buildings, lamps, cars, stunted trees, road signs and pedestrians all rotated and blurred about him. If he lay down he would pass out.
Slowly, slowly, he made his way up the long white glaring tunnel of the road to the station. A sudden flood of hope pushed him across the grass to the main doors of Euston.
But inside the station he felt even worse. The effect was immediate. He began to panic. Within the glare of white lights and chatter of sound, the push and sweep of the crowds, the buffeting of bags and screech of cases on wheels, he felt an overriding desire to run back outside.
An echoing announcement he couldn’t fully understand was listing delays and cancellations. He couldn’t see Birmingham on the departures board. Woozy and screwing up his eyes against the vertical judder in his eyesight, he soon found it too painful to look up at all.
He went in search of help, which was in short supply. Non-existent in fact. He decided he would ask at the ticket office, then saw the enormous queues that turned in serpentine coils and decided he’d better head for the toilets. But in the middle of making his way through the crowd on the main concourse he suddenly paused. Standing before the red-yellow smear of the Burger King facade was the figure of a hooded child. His hands were pressed deep into the nylon pockets of the snorkel coat and the face was lost in darkness, but he turned in Seth’s direction.
A man behind Seth knocked him off balance, then wheeled round in a whirl of overcoat and tie not in order to apologise but to grimace. Seth looked back to where he’d seen the hooded figure, but it had gone.
Breathing hard from the shock at the sighting, he told himself it was a hallucination. But then he caught a flash of schoolish trousers and scuffed chunky-heeled shoes flitting past a concession that sold sunglasses and watches.
Impossible; the boy couldn’t move so quickly. There were other kids in here. it must have been one of them. He was being paranoid; was paranoid and sick. He pushed his way through a cluster of French travellers and headed for the ticket office.
But maybe the boy was here to prevent him from leaving. There had been nothing but obstacles in his path since he left the Green Man. It was like the whole city was conspiring to keep him stuck within certain boundaries.
In the queue, he kept his eyes down and closed so he wouldn’t see something in a hood watching him. Trying to focus his vision, he took deep breaths of the warmish air to hold the panic back; the panic boiling at the back of his throat and threatening to come up as a high-pitched scream. It made him want to tear at his clothes and run madly through the crowd.
Instinctively he believed that if he moved back eastward, back towards the Green Man, he would feel better again. Something was letting him know he was not allowed to leave the city. Something he had willingly gone into partnership with the night he opened the door to apartment sixteen.
Finally he stood before the glass screen, behind which sat a fat man in a red waistcoat. Seth rediscovered his voice and asked for a ticket to Birmingham.
The man looked exasperated. ‘Have you not heard the announcements or seen the signs? No services to Birmingham today.’
‘What?’
‘No services from Euston.’
‘So how do you get to Birmingham?’
‘Marylebone. Chiltern Railways. Or the coach station at Victoria.’
But just the names of those distant places, so far off in the cluttered and crowded city, doused the last flicker of his spirits. He wanted to punch the wall until his hand was jelly and bone fragment loose inside purple skin.
‘Can you move aside for the next customer,’ the man in the red waistcoat said.
Seth drifted away from the counter. He knew the Tube and the buses wouldn’t take him anywhere he wanted to go, and he didn’t have the strength to walk any further. All of his energy was gone apart from the reserve set aside to feed his panic. Even if he managed to reach another station the swift sickness would swamp him again.
He had to sleep. To go home and lie down. Maybe he could try later, after some sleep. He could think of nothing else now, and refused to even acknowledge the hooded boy who waited for him outside the ticket office, and who then fell into step beside him as he left the station.
The following day he tried to walk south, but could go no further than the Strand, where he vomited in a pub toilet.
The north presented an impossible maze. He was disoriented by brick walls, pointy black roofs, iron railings, bitter air and the half-seen whitish things that called out to him from building sites and moved quicker than rats down there in the uprooted foundations. His effort to escape was turned back to the centre, where he discovered himself to be in the evening, somewhere between Camden and Euston, wasted by hunger and exhaustion.
On the third day, in the east, he
nearly suffocated between a row of grey terraced houses with front gardens full of rubbish. He shook and wept, watched by Pakistani children in strange clothes. And then he turned for home: the only direction that offered any relief from the nausea, the hot-cold sweats, the gasping for breath, and the constant calls from the bone-things in windows with their yellowy faces and wide-open maws.
The next evening, he went back to work.
TWENTY-SEVEN
Outside the Shafers’ apartment the smells of Barrington House clouded: wood polish, carpet shampoo, brass cleaner, and dust. And something else. A hint of sulphur. Of something recently burnt, like gunpowder.
Descending and ascending on either side of the elevator, the stairwells were lit by the electric lights, but the very air was gloom. Half-lit like a photograph taken in poor light. It made Apryl uneasy, but strangely apathetic too. Unless she kept moving and focused on specific tasks, she could imagine herself just lying or sitting in silence and waiting, alone, in here. But waiting for what?
At the thought of knocking on the Shafers’ door, her stomach went hollow with nerves. They were old and difficult and didn’t want to be disturbed. Stephen and Piotr had said as much. Their rejection of her request to meet them was down to their connection to Hessen and what they had done to him. With her great-uncle Reggie leading the way. Only under emotional stress had Mrs Roth confided in her. Maybe she had even expected her own end was near. The thought made Apryl deeply uncomfortable, as she must have been one of the last people to see Betty Roth alive. Stephen confirmed as much that morning when she arrived.
But the elderly resident had confided enough, and Lillian herself had hinted at the same ghastly series of events occurring half a century ago. But in her fear of interrupting Mrs Roth’s scant and haphazard disclosure, she had failed to ask about Reginald’s death. Not even Lillian had been able to share those details, because the final truth of what happened back then was too unpalatable for Mrs Roth and her great-aunt to recount. And so she was left with suggestions of Hessen’s evocations of unnatural powers and terrifying sounds, of hideous paintings and a plague of nightmares that even direct confrontation with the man had failed to erase. Things she too had glimpsed and was terrified of encountering again in these dim halls and wretched rooms, where the shadows were all wrong and where every mirror she looked into suggested a presence. She looked about, anxious when her eyes moved over the mirror on the landing.
But there had been a conflict and it had ended badly for Hessen. Of that she was certain. A murder they had kept secret all these years. A secret that drove them apart and into isolation and madness. But it was a story she would have retold now. She would know how Reginald died, and how Hessen had been murdered, and she would know this afternoon.
She raised her hand.
Her index finger met the cold brass of the door buzzer.
She pressed the button softly, too softly. It made no sound. She depressed it more firmly and held it down within the decorative brass surround.
What did you do here?
There was a pause and then the buzzer vibrated against the tip of her finger. At the same time, behind the heavy wood of the front door she heard a faint chime.
And across the greyish glass of the window in the stairwell, the weak sun must have moved its face further behind the ever-present cloud, because she felt the air cool and darken about her.
She stepped back and waited. And waited. Because no one came. She leant forward and pressed the bell button again. And again.
And then she heard footsteps rapidly descending from the floor above, down the communal stairwell, and felt the guilty urge to run away like a kid. The waiting was draining her confidence, her purpose. A shadow reared up the wall and she turned to greet the figure coming down in such haste. It must be a child, to move with such alacrity and speed. But could a child cast such a shadow?
To her right voices eventually came forward from deep inside the apartment. They gathered around the sound of the chime. A woman’s voice, sharp and anxious. Though Apryl could not make out the words. And then much closer. Close enough to be directly on the other side of the door, an elderly man’s voice came to life. ‘Well I’m trying to find out.’ It was raised in annoyance and directed back down the hallway towards the distant cries of the woman.
Apryl looked back at the staircase. The shadow grew larger but thinner and dissipated up near the ceiling. The footsteps on the stairs stopped. No one came around the bend in the staircase. ‘Hello?’ she said, her voice weak. ‘Who’s there?’
‘Who is it?’ For an old man, the voice on the other side of the Shafers’ front door was surprisingly strong, his American accent still detectable, though tempered by decades spent in London. His voice was directed at her, so she guessed he was peering through the little spyhole in the door. She could hear the rasp of his breath from the exertion of moving.
She looked away from the stairwell, suddenly eager to get inside the apartment with the elderly couple. ‘Hi, my name is Apryl. I just wanted—’
‘Who? I can’t hear you?’
She sighed with exasperation. ‘Apryl Beckford, sir! Can I come in, please?’
‘I can’t hear you.’ And then he shouted behind himself again, at the woman. ‘I said I can’t hear them. So how do I know? Would you just quit it! I said I’d take care of it. Don’t bother. Don’t bother getting up. I said I don’t need you.’
‘I just wanted to . . .’ Apryl began to say. No use, he wasn’t listening and couldn’t hear her even if he was.
Old fingers scraped and fumbled at the latch as if it were the first time they had performed the operation. Tom Shafer’s breathing grew louder and more strained, as if he were lifting something heavy.
When a gap appeared between the edge of the door and the frame, the man was so tiny she had to look down to see his face, which nudged forward. Severely lined baggy skin, dotted with bright white stubble, hung about a wet mouth, from which the lips had withdrawn. A rivulet of clear drool shone in a deep ravine at the corner of his mouth. Thick glasses magnified his watery eyes. They were so dark as to appear black in the moist discoloured whites. A blue mesh baseball cap was perched untidily on the little figure’s head.
‘Yes?’ Like that of a cigar smoker, his rough voice seemed to emerge from somewhere behind his breastbone and was liquescent but incongruously deep and bone dry at the same time.
‘Hello sir. You don’t know me.’ She spoke loudly, but not at a volume that would carry to the woman back inside the apartment who she assumed was Mrs Shafer. ‘I’m the great-niece of Lillian from apartment thirty-nine and I really need to speak with you, sir. Please, just for a few minutes.’ The door was partially open, but she instinctively felt it could close very quickly. She cast a final nervous look over her shoulder at the staircase, suffering the feeling that whatever had thrown such a shadow and moved so swiftly was now waiting just out of sight, and listening.
Occasionally blinking, Tom Shafer looked at her in silence. His expression crumpled into an anxious suspicion that she felt was a near-permanent feature. Slowly, he shuffled his body about to look behind him, down the hall, as if making sure his wife was not visible. Then turned back to face her. ‘You look just like your aunt. But I can’t see you. I’m sorry. We told Stephen. He should have made that clear.’ He began to close the door.
Apryl stepped forward, surprising herself. ‘Please, sir. I have to know what happened to my great-aunt and uncle. They were your friends. Your neighbours.’
He breathed out noisily. ‘That was all a long time ago. We don’t remember anything.’
‘I know about Felix Hessen.’
At the mention of that name, he looked up, his wet eyes startled into an animation they’d previously lacked.
‘I just need to know if what my great-aunt wrote is true. That’s all. Some closure on her life. Please sir, it’s just for me and my mother. We won’t tell a soul.’
Tom Shafer squinted at her. His heavy glasses mov
ed up his small nose. ‘Young lady, your great-aunt was as crazy as a snake. And you’re starting to remind me of her. She used to come up here with just the same attitude. We don’t want to be bothered by any of that.’
That? What did he mean? She smarted at his flippant remark about Lillian. ‘She had her problems. I know that. But you know why too. Mrs Roth told me. She told me what happened. Before she died.’
The door reopened, wider than before. ‘Betty wouldn’t say a word. She was many things, but she was no gossip.’ Despite his wizened body and little head in the ludicrously oversized hat, she was again surprised by the power of his deep voice. It suddenly made her feel foolish and guilty, like a kid caught misbehaving and bothering adults.
She cleared her throat. ‘Mrs Roth didn’t tell me everything. But she was very frightened before she died. And she needed to confide in someone. In me. She felt she was in danger. That something in the past was having repercussions right now. She told me about the paintings, sir. And about Hessen’s accident. What he did here. How he changed things for all of you. My great-aunt wrote of it too, in her diaries. Between them they’ve told me a lot of things. Including what happened after Hessen came back here and started tormenting you all over again.’
Tom Shafer didn’t speak for a while, but the tension of the space between them was filled with his raspy breath. He suddenly looked ill and terribly frail as if he could easily fall and not get up again.
‘I just want a few minutes of your time. That’s all. I have to know.’
‘I can’t. I’m sorry. My wife . . .’
This aged and fragile man suddenly made her think of Lillian, alone and afraid and abandoned, but never relenting in her struggle to escape the ghosts in her memories that had become the terrors of her every day. She’d never given up. Not like Mrs Roth and the Shafers, imprisoned here until death with their nurses and pettiness and powerlessness. Apryl wiped at the tear that tickled her cheek.