XII. Shadows
Everything was hazy in its outline, dim and grey; it was like walking through a building shaped from ashes. To my right was the door to the front room. I reached out; it swung open before my fingers touched the handle.
Three people sat inside, in the gloom. The clothes they wore were all old, out of date—styles belonging to the ’fifties or early ’sixties. A pale woman, with a pudgy, unhealthy looking face, sat on the sofa, her arm round a thin, frightened-looking boy whose sharp, ferrety face told me the name of the man he would become. The woman’s face was hard and stony. She was talking, or at least her lips moved, but no sound came.
In an armchair across the room from me sat a man. His hair was greying and untidy; he sat in his braces and shirt-sleeves. His face had the sharpness of the boy’s, but none of the fright. It was like a hawk’s, pointed, angular, and cruel. His mouth was pressed into a tight, thin line, his jaw clenched, as the woman spoke. His eyebrows were sharply defined and black, his eyes green. There was only one person he could be.
Now he started talking, too, his mouth as silent as the woman’s. He spoke slowly and with grim relish, I could tell that by the hard smile cracking the lines of his mouth, the way his tongue licked at his thin lips. He hadn’t shaved, by the look of him, for a couple of days. His hands were long and knuckly, with hair on the backs, and they gripped convulsively at the chair’s arms, whitening as they did. They were the only animated part of him; he was slumped as if in exhaustion or despair. One of his fingers punctured the chair’s arm and sank in. My eyes drawn to them, I saw that chair and sofa were both thickly skeined with cobwebs.
Suddenly the man in the chair stopped speaking. He blinked once, then frowned. He gripped the chair arms again, this time as levers, and pushed himself to his feet. The woman stopped speaking. She froze. So did the child, not that he’d been moving much to begin with. The woman’s mouth hung open. As I watched, a spider crawled out of it.
Slowly the man in the armchair turned his head and looked at me. His eyes were like two points of greenish phosphorescence. I was reminded of how rotten meat was said to glow sometimes. I wondered if it looked like that.
He looked at me for a long time. I don’t know how long. Seconds, minutes, perhaps even hours. That’s what it felt like. Hours. Then he smiled. His teeth were yellow.
George Fuller was still smiling at me. His eyes were unblinking as the rest, but they weren’t dead, weren’t frozen; they were full of hateful life. He put his hands in his pockets and took a step forwards, still smiling. His wife and child sat, immobile; moments frozen, trapped in time like flies in amber.
Fuller kept on walking, slowly and steadily, relishing the moment, as if he had forever. His eyes were hypnotic, mesmerising me. It was the first time I’d seen him with eyes, with anything other than sockets. The first time he’d had a real face in my presence. His eyes burned; burned, and called. And I couldn’t look away. There was no escape, no chance, no hope, no . . .
I tore my gaze clear, stumbled back from the door. Fuller’s hands shot out in a futile attempt to catch me and his mouth opened in a roar of cheated rage, as silent as every other cry in that house had so far been, just before the door slammed shut.
Then I heard him laugh again. I turned, towards the front door, where the sound had come from. There was nothing. Nothing I could see. The front door, the sunlight gleaming through the pane in the top of it, was the most inviting sight I’d ever seen, but I couldn’t go, not now. I was in it and couldn’t back out. This was to the death.
Unwillingly I backed away, to the foot of the stairs, where a noise made me look up. I wish I hadn’t. A girl was standing at the top of the flight. She wore a school uniform and the upper part of her body was in shadow; ragged blonde hair dangled down into view. As I watched, she began to descend, and the light rose to catch her face. Her hands were held out, feeling her way down, because she had no eyes, not anymore. Fuller laughed again. The girl kept coming. There was only one exit; the kitchen door, now almost at my back. I tore it open and bolted through. Behind me, he laughed on and on. Then the door slammed and I was in darkness.
I kept my back pressed against the doorway for long seconds after that, just to make sure no one was going to try pushing it open. No one did. Each part of the house had its own monsters. Except that in reality there was only one monster, and it was called George Fuller. The whole house was his—was him, now. Here, it was a different day, a different year. A different reality. The thing in the room, in the hall; all the things that had been done here, that had seeped and soaked into timbers and bricks like a slow poison and lingered on there, tainting everything. Trapped moments of hideous times. But where was Fuller himself? The real Fuller, not these fragments of him?
I dug my lighter from my pocket, for once glad I smoked, and struck the wheel, using the flame for light. All around me, I could hear noises. Whispers. Giggles. Children crying. Memories, or inventions of his? The lighter grew unbearably hot; I shut the flame off.
Fuller laughed, somewhere in the blackness. I gasped for breath.
Total blackness. Total fear. Paralysing. The temptation just to stand still, not to move, not to make a sound, was overwhelming. Pretend not to be there in the hope it would pass me by. Or to run back down the hall, batter down the front door and stagger away, admit defeat.
I heard Fuller’s laughter again, high-pitched and gloating, and felt my fists clench. He wanted that, wanted me to believe there was no stopping him. I blundered forward, hands held out ahead of me, groping in the dark. I badly wanted to use the lighter, but I mustn’t waste the fuel. I would need it; at least I prayed I would. I hadn’t gone directly to the bus station after my meeting with Robert Fuller; first I’d stopped at a newsagents to make another purchase. In the inside pocket of my jacket, I felt the reassuring weight of a can of lighter fluid bumping against my ribs.
A dim square of light swam up towards me. As I reached it, colliding with something else, something hard and inanimate, I realised it was the kitchen window; I’d hit the edge of the sink. I squinted through the murky glass. It was bright out; if anything, even warmer and sunnier than before.
Outside, I could see a shed and a scrubby patch of garden. Most of the space was taken up by crazy paving. There was a patch of blackness where one of the flags should have been. Something was hunched in the middle of this, a small, lumpen, shapeless thing, with a nodding, tattered head. Two thin limbs stuck out from the sides, bent, the hands or feet on the end pressed flat against the stones. As I watched, the thing seemed to grow, its body extending upwards out of the blackness as its limbs straightened. Only when it flopped forward and began clawing at the stone, dragging itself free, and its hips and legs began pulling out of the gaping hole, did I understand what it was.
The door of the shed flew open and another figure tottered out, its head lolling on an apparently boneless neck. As the first thing rose unsteadily to its feet, this new apparition began stumbling towards the house. When the first figure was standing, it too began picking its way forward. Advancing, they became clearer; both had long hair. One wore the remnants of jeans—which began sliding down its legs as it came, making its hesitant, unsteady walk even more faltering—the other a floral print dress as tattered and rotted as its face. They reached the house one after the other. The one in the dress pressed its gaping mouth to the window and began to slap its hands against the glass. The other, its head flopping from side to side to shake clods of earth from its hair, reached the door and grasped the handle, making it rattle in its frame. Even when I could hear the sound of wood beginning to crack, it was several seconds before I could look away from the face—if I could call it that—at the window.
I walked slowly backward, fighting to retreat but unable to look away from that ravaged face, those eyes that weren’t there. The light from the window now lit up a section of the floor. As I took another step back, I became aware of someone standing behind me. My heart hammered; I couldn’
t breathe. I couldn’t turn, but I had to; I knew the other person was in my way and would move to intercept me. I tell you that I knew this but I don’t know how I did. I knew two other things; he or she was waiting patiently, and was not breathing.
XIII. The Burning
The sound of wood splitting wide as fresh blows hammered against the back door galvanised me. I let out a strangled cry and spun round, then cried out again.
A young woman wearing a smart trouser suit stood there. She had ash-blonde hair, cut in a pageboy style. She had been attractive once, before the blood had drained from her face to leave it the colour of lard. Like the others, she was eyeless, but, like the others, I knew that she could still see.
We stared at each other for a long time. I realised as we did that the house had become silent again. I glanced back. The figure at the window was still standing there, but was now unmoving, head lolling to one side, arms hanging limp, reduced to little more than a shadow. Thin cracks of light seeped through the fractured back door.
I looked back to the woman in the trouser suit. She kept looking at me for a moment longer. Then she turned, stepping out of my way, and moved her hand to point to a door set in the far wall. She turned to face me once more, stepped backwards into the shadows and was gone.
I looked back at the window and saw emptiness there too, the vacant yard bathed in the warmth of the sun. Only a thin pane of glass between me and the light, but the distance felt stellar. The door. . . . I went to it and put my hand on the knob, unsure of whether or not I should turn it.
The scream from behind it decided for me. I jumped, and the knob turned in my hand, the door opening. It gaped open down a flight of uncarpeted wooden steps.
Where would he have put something for safekeeping?
The cellar.
If he could hide something somewhere . . .
. . . it’d be there.
This was what I’d come for. But the darkness was so forbidding. And then I heard the scream again. There was a struggle, the sound of a blow, the voice that had screamed now shouting.
‘Get your hands off me! Get off me! Leave me alone!’
It was almost hysterical with fear, which was no cause for blame in that place. I’d never heard that quality in that voice before, but I recognised it. I had to move, to fight; I had to believe there was some way of thwarting Fuller because the alternative was too hideous to contemplate. There was a handrail alongside the steps. I grabbed it and forced myself to descend: to the cellar, and George Fuller, and Alison.
I kept a tight grip on the rail; in the darkness, I had no way of telling how far the steps went down—if they went all the way down—or what might be waiting under them.
There was another shout, another blow, and then Fuller’s high, hateful giggling. My eyes were acclimatising slowly to the gloom, but I couldn’t see anything distinctly yet. I fumbled the can of lighter fluid out of my jacket and began prising up the spout. The steps ended. The floor underfoot was uneven, its surface broken.
‘Keep fighting, dear,’ I heard him whisper. ‘I like that. I always have.’
Somehow, I understood him perfectly in that moment, pitying him and loathing him more profoundly than I’d have believed possible all at once. This twisted, stunted apology for a man, curdled and poisoned with the wastage that had been his life, his desires deformed into obsession and hatred, his dreams of having become acts of taking. How many of us will end like George Fuller, one way or the other? And that pain has to be numbed, made to go away; what routes of escape will we find?
Fuller laughed again.
‘Alison!’ I shouted.
The cellar grew still. Then out of the dark I heard her call: ‘John?’ Her voice cracked with relief.
‘Over here,’ I answered, with a confidence I didn’t feel.
‘I wouldn’t excite yourself, my lovely,’ said Fuller.
I never saw the blow coming, of course. I only felt it. I flew backwards and smashed into the cellar wall. My head cracked against the brickwork. Stars exploded in my eyes and the wind that blew between them gushed out of my lungs. I collapsed to the ground. Laughter; that laughter again. Another blow hit me in the side and I felt ribs crack. Trying to breathe, I could only think that this was all wrong; ghosts weren’t supposed to be able to do this. Ghosts were filmy and wispy. Ghosts couldn’t hurt, couldn’t kill. Not like this. But they could.
Oh, they could.
I tried to breathe and succeeded, with a wheezing gasp. ‘Alison,’ I croaked. ‘The book . . . find the——’
His hands were like two packs of ice crushed to my throat. He pinned me back against the bricks. He was whole again at last; he had eyes, burning green as they stared into mine, the only points of clarity. His face was a white smear in the gloom, as white as milk, as snow, as bone. Like an insect grub. A pallor nothing human and living could own. I tried to struggle, but it was like fighting a statue that had been sculpted with its hands around my throat. The cold of his hands was seeping through me, filling me. I was weakening. I couldn’t fight anymore.
Alison ran forward, screaming with fury. There was something in her hands. A length of wood, I think, or an iron rod; some make-do weapon anyway, scavenged from the cellar floor. There was a sickening wet crunch, a feel of impact, things breaking; I could feel the jolt through the icy clutch of his hands. But he wasn’t rocked by the blow, didn’t slacken his grip. She was hitting a dead thing.
He yanked me towards him, and then smashed me into the wall, twice. My left shoulder caught the worst of the second blow and I felt something crack. I screamed in pain as my shoulder seemed to detonate. He flung me aside. I heard his feet gritting in the clinker on the floor, heard a muffled whimper of Alison and the sound of something clattering to the ground. He was breathing; he was dead but he was breathing. It was a hoarse noise, wet and snuffling, like an animal, something between rage and desire.
‘All right, then,’ he said. ‘Let’s play.’
There was a scuffling noise—running? A struggle?—and he was on her. Alison screamed—first in pain, then in terror, then in a tone that had both in it, and something else, some violation more profound than she had believed possible.
I managed to rise. I couldn’t fight him. Not like that. The book. I needed the book. Something glinted on the floor; the can. I snatched it up. Some of the fluid had leaked out, but most was still there. The book. Where was the book?
Then I remembered where I was. What Mr Lloyd had said: such emotions . . . they weigh us down. Anchor us to earth through the objects to which they attach themselves. The book had been one such object, and yes, it would be here somewhere, bricked up in one of the walls, buried under the floorboards, or the clinker here. It had enabled him to reach out, beyond these walls, to infect the world outside. But the house . . . the house itself, years of wasted, bitter life bled into its bricks. . . .
Agonisedly, I crawled for the steps and dragged myself up them. Behind me, Alison screamed and screamed. I had to try and shut out her cries. This was the only help I could give.
I dragged myself into the kitchen, and then staggered out into the hall. No figures here now, no memories; I squirted lighter fuel onto the wallpaper, the stair carpet, the hall carpet—kicked open the living-room door and squirted it onto the carpet there and the old sofa. When the can was empty, I fumbled out my lighter and touched it to the sofa, reeling back as flames roared up and climbed the walls. I staggered back into the kitchen as the fire rushed out into the hallway.
A roar of rage seemed to shake the house’s very walls. I felt him at my side and stumbled away from the grasp of his hands. Fumes billowed through the kitchen. I retched and spat at him. Fuller glared at me, reached out again. He caught my good arm, but his grip was weakening. His face had begun to lose its definition. I staggered past him towards the cellar door.
I staggered down the stairs, shouting Alison’s name. She was huddled at the bottom. Her clothes clung to her in shreds. She whimpered quietly, ro
cking to and fro, but stiffly complied, flinching as though in expectation of agony as I pulled her up the stairs.
The kitchen was full of smoke. I looked back down the stairs and I saw five figures standing there, standing on the cellar floor. There was the woman in the trouser suit and the girl I’d seen on the stairs, holding hands with another girl, also in school uniform, whose hair was very short and dark. A girl in her late teens, with curly hair, wearing bell-bottomed jeans and a pink T-shirt. And another whose brown hair was dragged back into a ponytail, a stud in her nose, wearing a floral print dress. They were all young, and pretty. Or had been once. That was what had drawn him to them, all the things he’d wanted so badly and never possessed, he had finally claimed by fear and force.
I staggered towards the back door, dragging Alison. Fumbled one-handed in my pocket for the keys. They stuck in the lock, turned reluctantly. I dragged the door open and stumbled outside with Alison.
The air in the garden was fresh. I could hear a fire engine in the distance. For a moment the only other sound was Alison’s sobbing, a horrible, almost animal sound that I never, ever want to hear anything like again. And then another noise. Someone whistling. Low and slow, like a funeral dirge; the opening bars of ‘Paint it Black’.
I turned. Fuller managed a dragging step towards us, silhouetted against the kitchen’s flames. There wasn’t much left of him by now; he only had holes for eyes and mouth, and as I watched, first the mouth and then the eyes closed up, leaving his face the same featureless blank it had been to start with. He groped forward another step, and I backed away, but he was beginning to fade now. Soon he was no more than a walking shadow, then not even that; a poisoned whisper, lost on the wind. Through the flame and smoke of the kitchen, I glimpsed five dim figures watching; then the smoke billowed and they were gone.
A HAZY SHADE OF WINTER Page 24