by Tim Lebbon
Only a quick trip down those stairs, past the faceless front doors, through the front garden that felt farther away from the street than it should . . .
Peter had known his father. Cain had no doubt of that, simply from the way the landlord had spoken of the old man. He really did go to the extremes, didn’t he? He could never have made something like that up, and he could not be talking of anyone else. Perhaps their meeting that evening would shed some light on the old man.
Yet this worried Cain. His limited understanding of his father came from his own perspective, no one else’s. He had never met anyone who knew the man, and the Voice and Face had only talked of him in their professional capacity. They had never seen him alive, never looked into his eyes and seen the dark seed of madness nestling there like a cancer. Talking to someone who had known his father threatened to give Cain a whole new angle on his existence, and he was not sure he truly wanted that. He had spent the years since his father’s death trying to come to terms with what the old man had done to him, and why, and though there was much left unknown, Cain felt that he had reached some level of understanding and acceptance. When he met Peter that evening, his whole world could be turned on its head.
He should ring the Voice and reveal his fears, tell him what he thought was happening here. They’re all against me, he would say. I’m so alone. But the Voice may well suggest a return to Afresh, whether he believed Cain’s tales or not, and that was something Cain could not abide. The place had never been a prison, but now that he had tasted real freedom—however strange—it would crush him if he ever had to return.
He sat on the settee, leaned back, and closed his eyes. He had no intention of sleeping. Besides, something kept him alert. There was a gentle tapping coming from the chest in the living room, the place where the main representation of his past was locked away. Much as he tried to ignore it, Cain wanted to listen to whatever message it had to convey. He looked at the chest to see if it was moving. It had shifted a few inches out of the corner where he had left it . . . or perhaps he was mistaken. It seemed to have turned as well, but maybe the settee had shifted as he sat down, subtly altering the angle from which he viewed the room.
The chest had been silent for all his years at Afresh. Perhaps now whatever was inside tasted its own freedom at last.
Humming started somewhere, that tune again, and Cain accompanied it with a soft whistle. He stopped suddenly and the humming followed suit, and from far away he thought he heard pan pipes continuing on for a note or two before falling silent.
“There’s the room next door,” a voice said, and Cain recognized it as his own. Talking to himself? Why not? He closed his eyes again and sat back, and before he knew it the steady tapping and humming from the chest had nursed him into sleep.
He sees the shadow, even though it is pitch black. It’s a strange sight, like seeing a beam of light at midday, and stranger still because a shadow is less than nothing. It is an obscuring of light, and in this place of utter darkness that is impossible. Yet the shadow sits beside him, a solid presence that shifts and changes as time passes by. And now and then it talks to him.
“Must be a day gone by now,” it says.
“Yes, at least.” Cain nods and nothing changes. He closes his eyes, but the darkness is no less intense, even though he senses an inner light struggling to be released. He wonders whether this is what his father is looking for, but he is too afraid to find out.
It is very quiet in the room, not because this is a test of silence, but because there is nothing to say. Cain would sing a song if he knew any. Childish tunes that may have formed in his mind were eradicated years ago by the siren, and now music is something that lives only in the regular drum of his heartbeat, the strum of blood rushing through his ears. He finds no pleasure in these sounds, because they are perceptible only when he is alone.
Sometimes the shadow hums. The tune is unfamiliar to the child Cain, but the dreaming adult Cain knows it of old. Knows it, but still cannot name it. He goes to hum along, but the shadow tenses beside him, aware of what he is about to do. Cain can feel the waves of disapproval emanating from it. He always thought that the shadow hummed the tune, but now it seems to come from everywhere. Perhaps such complete darkness gives the shadow free rein.
Cain lifts his hand in front of his face and flexes his fingers, but he can see nothing. Only the subtle displacement of air confirms that his hand is even there at all.
“Maybe two days,” the shadow says. “How would you know? How could you tell?”
“I think just a day,” the young Cain says, and the dreaming Cain is amazed and impressed at his own calmness. I may have been here for days, but I sound so cool, he thinks, but he is talking about himself, and the admiration falters. Then why can’t I really remember any of this?
Sometimes his father slips some food into the room, and Cain finds it by sense. Not touch or smell: He simply knows where to look. Although the young, innocent Cain finds nothing remarkable in this, the dreaming Cain is shocked. Could I do that now? he thinks, certain that the answer would be no.
“I think even three days,” the shadow says, “or maybe even a week Without the sun, you just can’t tell. Pure Sight could tell you, if it fucking existed. Hah! Pure Sight? What a fool the old fuck is!”
Cain wants to admonish the shadow, but talking to something not there would only invite in madness.
“You’ll remember this in the future,” the shadow says. “Maybe when you need to, or maybe not. Perhaps just in a dream, though you might think it’s little more than a nightmare. You’ll remember this. Hello, you! Hello Cain! And you’ll hear me talking.”
“You’re not there,” Cain says, and a brief flash of light hurts his eyes. The siren explodes into the room and he slumps to the floor, screaming, his hands covering his ears. “Not fair!” he yells, but the shadow is whooping somewhere else, a victory yell.
Cain sits up again, both of his imprisoned minds reeling from the effects of the siren. It strikes at the very heart of him, and he has long suspected that it is so much more than a simple sound. He doesn’t know exactly what it is—something in his head, touching a place that hurts the most—but he is certain that he does not wish to feel it again.
“Cain’s got Pure Sight!” the shadow yells. “So fucking pure he’s seeing lights! Hah! The old fuck must be mighty pleased with you now.”
Cain tries to move away from the shadow, but it is everywhere. Instead he tries to close his mind to its presence. But like the siren, it seems to be something that bypasses his senses as well as using them. He is aware of the shadow inside him, and the more he thinks of it the more it grins, like the potential of violence threatening him with a dark bite.
“Leave me alone!” Cain whispers, and he sees lights again, dancing and weaving in front of him, before the siren screams out to shatter his mind once more. It takes him longer to recover this time, and when he does the shadow seems to have vanished. The pitch darkness is now just that, with nothing else hiding behind its folds of void, and Cain sits in the center of the room with his eyes closed. The young Cain hopes to dream himself old and out of here, and the older Cain knows that this will never work. Somewhere outside, his father paces the rooms and halls of the rambling country home, knowing what he is doing to his one and only son. That hurts Cain more than anything the siren, or the shadow, can ever do.
“You think he gives a fuck?” the shadow’s voice whispers from somewhere farther away than the walls, and it starts humming that unknown tune again, as if its inscrutability is mockery itself.
There’s the room next door, the shadow said, and Cain snapped awake.
There was a brief thumping, a cackling, and as he sat up on the sofa the chest smacked down on the floor. It had moved several inches from its last position. Cain stood and pushed it back into the corner, flush with two walls to make it more difficult for it to move. It was heavy and it scratched the floor as it moved. He glanced at the extravagant padlock, patter
ned with twists of fake gold and silver, but he had lost the key years ago. Even if that were not the case, he would never open it.
There’s the room next door. The door next to Cain’s, with the scratches down its length, had almost become invisible over the past couple of days. There had been more on his mind, and the story of Vlad and how he had been killed had taken a backseat. That was the past, while it was the present obsessing him. Now it was something he could investigate without having to venture downstairs past those staring doors. He glanced at his watch; six o’clock—two hours until he had to go and meet Peter, hear about his father from another’s viewpoint for the first time ever. He had to do something to fill that time.
Grabbing a short knife from the kitchen—to help him break open the door, he assured himself, not as protection, not at all—he went to his front door and looked through the spy hole. The small landing was deserted, and standing quietly outside, holding his breath, he could hear no sign of anyone else in the house. Whistler may still be there in his flat, but if so he was utterly silent. Paying whatever weird respect he owed to his Followers, perhaps.
Cain turned to the door next to his own and examined it. It was actually slightly shorter and narrower than his own, not a true front door at all, more a glorified hatch. It must lead into whatever roof space was left around the edges of his attic flat. He traced the deep scratches with his fingers, wincing as a splinter slid beneath his skin. If something with claws had found it desirable to get inside, then perhaps he should not. But his curiosity was fired now, and if there was anything threatening in there, he had the knife.
He tried the handle, but the door was locked. There was no spare key above the frame this time, so he tried to prize the knife blade in past the handle to slip back the latch. He had read about doing this in a dozen crime books, never once believing that he would one day be doing it himself. In books, the perpetrator was inevitably looking for evidence of a murder, or his kidnapped wife. This was not quite so worthy, and Cain had no reason to believe that it would work. He heaved, the wood groaned and split, and with a metallic snick the handle suddenly flipped up and the door opened. Breaking and entering twice in one day, he thought, surprised. The Face would be proud.
As the door swung inward a smell wafted out, and Cain stepped back in a panic. Death, he thought, I’ll smell old death like in Whistler’s flat, and perhaps they’re all in on this together! But though the smell was one of age, it was stale rather than rank, the odors of dust and time, dried paper and old clothes giving home to insects and mold. It was also the stench of a room that had not been used for a long time, and Cain wondered whether anyone had been in here since Vlad’s death.
The police, surely? But somehow the thought of their intrusion seemed too mundane for such a place and such a death.
He felt on the wall inside the door, surprised to find a light switch. Before he flicked it he paused, closed his eyes, and considered what it was he may find. Whether or not Vlad had been his real name—and it seemed unlikely—the last occupant of his flat had been a strange sort, put in a wheelchair by a circus accident and living on the second floor of a house without a lift. Who knew what he had been up to? Nobody Cain had spoken to had seemed to like the old Russian very much.
Perhaps they had picked on him, just as they were picking on Cain.
He flicked the switch and opened his eyes.
It was a corridor more than a room, one wall sloped with the roof to form a triangular space just tall enough for Cain to stand in. Not that he could stand, such was the profusion of boxes, bags, and loose items stacked in there. That smell of age and must came at him again, as if given new life by the light, and he coughed as dust settled on his throat. When he finally realized what filled the attic, he knew he was breathing in dust from the skin of a dead man.
Circus paraphernalia. Vlad must have traveled far and wide during his life as a trapeze artist, and he had gathered all manner of items on his journeys. One box overflowed with colorful clown’s clothing, as if the clown’s spirit was eager to rise. Another held juggling sticks, some of their tips blackened with fire, others sharpened to a deadly point. Tied bags of clothes were piled at the junction of sloping wall and floor; they had been there for so long that they seemed to have sunk down and merged, almost blending into the structure. He wondered what he would find were he to delve deep into their depths, and whose names would be written in the clothing, and where those people were now.
The tall wall was unlined. The partition’s timber studs showed through, bearing half a dozen old posters. They had all faded with time, and the one farthest away had sprouted an impressive array of fungi across its bottom half, but they all proclaimed the Great Vladosvic as the most talented trapeze artist the world had ever seen. Vlad was depicted performing various daring acts of acrobatics, all of them seemingly without a safety net. Cain wondered which backflip or triple spin had dashed him to the sawdust and broken his back.
When Cain clambered into the attic space, he had a brief, intense sensation of shifting farther than one single step. It was as if this room were in another city, not under the eaves next to his own flat. He stood still for a few moments, letting his stomach settle, gathering his balance, shaking his head. The feeling had gone. Perhaps he was just tired.
He began lifting the lids on boxes and ripping open polyethylene bags to peer inside. Some of the contents were enigmatic in the extreme: a lady’s leotard, sequinned with fake diamonds and bearing an oily handprint across one breast; a whip, which he thought must have been for controlling animals, before he saw the wicked blades tied into each of its nine tails; a false leg, socket grubby with use; and in one bag, a crystal ball. It swam with colors, and however still Cain remained, the ball’s depths seemed to shift and swirl, as if excited by the sudden presence of light after so long. Perhaps the sudden temperature change caused by the open door was affecting the crystal. He lifted it from the small wooden pedestal that supported it, held it in both hands, and tried to shield it from the light. Nothing changed. Cain stared closer and colors swam without touching, like exotic fish in an endless mating dance.
And then shadows filled the ball, and Cain dropped it to the bare timber floor. It rolled between his feet and drifted sideways, disappearing into the pile of bags and boxes stacked against the sloping wall.
Cain turned, shaken, readying himself to move on, and saw something that seemed so out of place. Leaning against the vertical wall stood an old changing mirror. Half the lightbulbs were missing, the glass was cracked in several places, and it was smeared with something that looked like dried blood. The smear spelled out words that Cain did not wish to see: I’m here because they think I’m just like them.
He knelt before the mirror and stared. He reached out to touch the glass, a dark crack distorted his reflected hand into a wizened claw, and he recalled the story of Dorian Gray. Perhaps Vlad had sat here before this old mirror to find his prime again, and when something had happened—something that drove him in here to hide instead of merely reminisce—he had written a message to his younger self: I’m here because they think I’m just like them.
Perturbed, but hardly surprised, Cain moved on. If anywhere would have contained hidden truths, it was this room with the wounded door.
Another sprawl of faded writing faced him from one of the posters: They won’t leave me alone. It too was written in blood, and some of its message had flaked to the floor as if forgotten with its writer’s death. Cain knew who the words referred to, and already a picture was beginning to build. Vlad must have come here, rented Flat Five—even though he relied a lot on his wheelchair—and then found himself vilified by the others in the house. Set upon. Toyed with. I’m here because they think I’m just like them, he had written, and in that strange dream Sister Josephine had said to Cain, You know the Way already, for sure, you just need showing.
And what was the Way, if not Pure Sight?
Perhaps I’m just like Vlad, he thought.
&n
bsp; There was another message painted on a circus admission price board. Cain had to lean down and blow away a layer of dust to reveal it fully, but when he sat back on his haunches he saw: They tell me I’m not who I am. That chilled Cain to the core. Not only had they abused Vlad, they had confused him as well, and what had happened to him in the end? Eaten, if Peter was to be believed. This crippled old trapeze artist had been found miles from here, minus his wheelchair, with his stomach eaten away. Did he know himself when he died? Cain thought. Or had they tortured him that much?
And as if to taunt him more, that was when Cain saw the wheelchair. It was folded neatly and tucked behind several split bags at the rear of the attic space. He could not reach it from where he squatted, and neither did he wish to. Even the light barely touched it. Chrome glowed, leather merged with the dark, and Cain was sure that dried bloodstains on the wheelchair would reveal their own obvious message.
Strange . . . they never even found his wheelchair, Peter had told him on his first day here.
He had to leave. This place had been a refuge, a sanctuary for the crippled old man, and the difficulty he must have faced getting in here made it feel even more special. By leaving the room as it was after his death, the landlord had revealed the true extent of the invasion into Vlad’s life. The bloody writing spoke of that, splayed as it was across important references to his history, as if to obscure his past just as the others in the house had endeavored to offend his identity. And much as Cain suddenly felt empathy for that victimized man, he did not feel that he should be here. This was a private place, made more so by its user’s death. Perhaps it would change in the future, but right now it should remain as it was, lonely and sad.
Scrawled on the floor at Cain’s feet, previously unseen, six words: They know I’m going to tell.
Those claw marks on the door? Cain thought. What put them here? And why?