Silence closed around her. It drew her head forward and parted her hands to widen the gap between the curtains. Dim light wavered over the grey window, which appeared to hover in a block of night. With a painful slowness that released her breath in infrequent gasps, she made out what was beyond.
The blankets were rolled back from the bed; they slumped against the footboard. On the exposed mattress lay an old stained bolster. The whitish patches that protruded from it here and there must be lumps of stuffing. Over it the stifled light crawled.
She was staring dully, aching with fear, when something in the room moved. A shadow faltered on the blurred wall. Was someone unseen making for the window? Dry fear clutched her throat. Perhaps it was only the unsteady light, perhaps there was no shadow—for the light was making the bolster appear to shift.
Then, as her lungs agonised for breath, she saw that the object on the bed was indeed moving. It was struggling to raise itself. The lumps of stuffing might be, or might be trying to be, limbs. The swellings and discolourations at the top of the bolster could have been the beginnings of a travesty of a face.
Her mind fought to open her claws of hands, to thrust her away from the window. Was her fascination causing the nightmare to be played out before her? She was still striving to turn when the shadow fled across the wall, and its source appeared beyond the grey window. His face was wrenched out of shape by terror, so that it took her moments to be sure it was Paul. He had gone into the wrong house.
Her sobbing cry released her. She fell on the stairs, but dragged herself erect with her bruised hands. A notion was trying to declare itself—that there had been a sound she ought to have heard. She hurled open the front door. The rockery glowed sodium, tangled in shadows of branches.
As she stood trying to control her mind, to fit together what might have happened, she glimpsed the flashing at the intersection. How could traffic lights be blue? When she realised that it was an ambulance, she began to trudge towards it like a sleepwalker. Already she could see that one of the cars was Paul’s. She hardly needed the sight of the draped body the men in white were bearing away from his car to suggest how he’d been able to enter a house that no longer existed.
She stood on the pavement and began to shake. Could she enter that house too? But when she glanced back, her garden was bare beneath the orange glow. Only the rockery stood there like a cairn over a grave.
The Depths
As Miles emerged, a woman and a pink-eyed dog stumped by. She glanced at the house; then, humming tunelessly, she aimed the same contemptuous look at Miles. As if the lead was a remote control, the dog began to growl. They thought Miles was the same as the house.
He almost wished that were true; at least it would have been a kind of contact. He strolled through West Derby village and groped in his mind for ideas. Pastels drained from the evening sky. Wood pigeons paraded in a tree-lined close. A mother was crying “Don’t you dare go out of this garden again.” A woman was brushing her driveway and singing that she was glad she was Bugs Bunny. Beyond a brace of cars, in a living-room that displayed a bar complete with beer pumps, a couple listened to Beethoven’s Greatest Hits.
Miles sat drinking beer at a table behind the Crown, at the edge of the bowling green. Apart from the click of bowls the summer evening seemed as blank as his mind. Yet the idea had promised to be exactly what he and his publisher needed: no more days of drinking tea until his head swam, of glaring at the sheet of paper in the typewriter while it glared an unanswerable challenge back at him. He hadn’t realised until now how untrustworthy inspirations were.
Perhaps he ought to have foreseen the problem. The owners had told him that there was nothing wrong with the house—nothing except the aloofness and silent disgust of their neighbours. If they had known what had happened there they would never have bought the house; why should they be treated as though by living there they had taken on the guilt?
Still, that was no more unreasonable than the crime itself. The previous owner had been a bank manager, as relaxed as a man could be in his job; his wife had owned a small boutique. They’d seemed entirely at peace with each other. Nobody who had known them could believe what he had done to her. Everyone Miles approached had refused to discuss it, as though by keeping quiet about it they might prevent it from having taken place at all.
The deserted green was smudged with darkness. “We’re closing now,” the barmaid said, surprised that anyone was still outside. Miles lifted the faint sketch of a tankard and gulped a throatful of beer, grimacing. The more he researched the book, the weaker it seemed to be.
To make things worse, he’d told the television interviewer that it was near completion. At least the programme wouldn’t be broadcast for months, by which time he might be well into a book about the locations of murder—but it wasn’t the book he had promised his publisher, and he wasn’t sure that it would have the same appeal.
Long dark houses slumbered beyond an archway between cottages, lit windows hovered in the arch. A signboard reserved a weedy patch of ground for a library. A grey figure was caged by the pillars of the village cross. On the roof of a pub extension, gargoyles began barking, for they were dogs. A cottage claimed to be a sawmill, but the smell seemed to be of manure. Though his brain was taking notes, it wouldn’t stop nagging.
He gazed across Lord Sefton’s estate towards the tower blocks of Cantril Farm. Their windows were broken ranks of small bright perforations in the night. For a moment, as his mind wobbled on the edge of exhaustion, the unstable patterns of light seemed a code that he needed to break to solve his problems. But how could they have anything to do with it? Such a murder in Cantril Farm, in the concrete barracks among which Liverpool communities had been scattered, he might have understood; here in West Derby it didn’t make sense.
As he entered the deserted close, he heard movements beneath eaves. It must be nesting birds, but it was as though the sedate house had secret thoughts. He was grinning as he pushed open his gate, until his hand recoiled. The white gate was stickily red.
It was paint. Someone had written SADIST in an ungainly dripping scrawl. The neighbours could erase that—he wouldn’t be here much longer. He let himself into the house.
For a moment he hesitated, listening to the dark. Nothing fled as he switched on the lights. The hall was just a hall, surmounted by a concertina of stairs; the metal and vinyl of the kitchen gleamed like an Ideal Home display; the corduroy suite sat plump and smug on the dark green pelt of the living-room. He felt as though he were lodging in a show house, without even the company of a shelf of his books.
Yet it was here, from the kitchen to the living-room, that everything had happened—here that the bank manager had systematically rendered his wife unrecognisable as a human being. Miles stood in the empty room and tried to imagine the scene. Had her mind collapsed, or had she been unable to withdraw from what was being done to her? Had her husband known what he was doing, right up to the moment when he’d dug the carving knife into his throat and run headlong at the wall?
It was no good: here at the scene of the crime, Miles found the whole thing literally unimaginable. For an uneasy moment he suspected that that might have been true of the killer and his victim also. As Miles went upstairs, he was planning the compromise to offer his publisher: Murderers’ Houses? Dark Places of the World? Perhaps it mightn’t be such a bad book, after all.
When he switched off the lights, darkness came upstairs from the hall. He lay in bed and watched the shadows of the curtains furling and unfurling above him. He was touching the gate, which felt like flesh; it split open, and his hand plunged in. Though the image was unpleasant it seemed remote, drawing him down into sleep.
The room appeared to have grown much darker when he woke in the grip of utter panic.
He didn’t dare move, not until he knew what was wrong. The shadows were frozen above him, the curtains hung like sheets of lead. His mouth tasted metallic, and made him think of blood. He was sure that he was
n’t alone in the dark. The worst of it was that there was something he mustn’t do—but he had no idea what it was.
He’d begun to search his mind desperately when he realised that was exactly what he ought not to have done. The threat had been waiting in his mind. The thought that welled up was so atrocious that his head began to shudder. He was trying to shake out the thought, to deny that it was his. He grabbed the light cord to scare it back into the dark.
Was the light failing? The room looked steeped in dimness, a grimy fluid whose sediment clung to his eyes. If anything the light had made him worse, for another thought came welling up like bile, and another. They were worse than the atrocities the house had seen. He had to get out of the house.
He slammed his suitcase—thank God he’d lived out of it, rather than use the wardrobe—and dragged it onto the landing. He was halfway down, and the thuds of the case on the stairs were making his scalp crawl, when he realised that he’d left a notebook in the living-room.
He faltered in the hallway. He mustn’t be fully awake: the carpet felt moist underfoot. His skull felt soft and porous, no protection at all for his mind. He had to have the notebook. Shouldering the door aside, he strode blindly into the room.
The light that dangled spiderlike from the central plaster flower showed him the notebook on a fat armchair. Had the chairs soaked up all that had been done here? If he touched them, what might well up? But there was worse in his head, which was seething. He grabbed the notebook and ran into the hall, gasping for air.
His car sounded harsh as a saw among the sleeping houses. He felt as though the neat hygienic façades had cast him out. At least he had to concentrate on his driving, and was deaf to the rest of his mind. The road through Liverpool was as unnaturally bright as a playing field. When the Mersey Tunnel closed overhead he felt that an insubstantial but suffocating burden had settled on his scalp. At last he emerged, only to plunge into darkness.
Though his sleep was free of nightmares, they were waiting whenever he jerked awake. It was as if he kept struggling out of a dark pit, having repeatedly forgotten what was at the top. Sunlight blazed through the curtains as though they were tissue paper, but couldn’t reach inside his head. Eventually, when he couldn’t bear another such awakening, he stumbled to the bathroom.
When he’d washed and shaved he still felt grimy. It must be the lack of sleep. He sat gazing over his desk. The pebble-dashed houses of Neston blazed like the cloudless sky; their outlines were knife-edged. Next door’s drain sounded like someone bubbling the last of a drink through a straw. All this was less vivid than his thoughts—but wasn’t that as it should be?
An hour later he still hadn’t written a word. The nightmares were crowding everything else out of his mind. Even to think required an effort that made his skin feel infested, swarming.
A random insight saved him. Mightn’t it solve both his problems if he wrote the nightmares down? Since he’d had them in the house in West Derby—since he felt they had somehow been produced by the house—couldn’t he discuss them in his book?
He scribbled them out until his tired eyes closed. When he reread what he’d written he grew feverishly ashamed. How could he imagine such things? If anything was obscene, they were. Nothing could have made him write down the idea he’d left until last. Though he was tempted to tear up the notebook, he stuffed it out of sight at the back of a drawer and hurried out to forget.
He sat on the edge of the promenade and gazed across the Dee marshes. Heat-haze made the Welsh hills look like piles of smoke. Families strolled as though this were still a watering place; children played carefully, inhibited by parents. The children seemed wary of Miles; perhaps they sensed his tension, saw how his fingers were digging into his thighs. He must write the book soon, to prove that he could.
Ranks of pebble-dashed houses, street after street of identical Siamese twins, marched him home. They reminded him of cells in a single organism. He wouldn’t starve if he didn’t write—not for a while, at any rate—but he felt uneasy whenever he had to dip into his savings; their unobtrusive growth was reassuring, a talisman of success. He missed his street and had to walk back. Even then he had to peer twice at the street name before he was sure it was his.
He sat in the living-room, too exhausted to make himself dinner. Van Gogh landscapes, frozen in the instant before they became unbearably intense, throbbed on the walls. Shelves of Miles’ novels reminded him of how he’d lost momentum. The last nightmare was still demanding to be written, until he forced it into the depths of his mind. He would rather have no ideas than that.
When he woke, the nightmare had left him. He felt enervated but clean. He lit up his watch, and found he’d slept for hours. It was time for the Book Programme. He’d switched on the television and was turning on the light when he heard his voice at the far end of the room, in the dark.
He was on television, but that was hardly reassuring; his one television interview wasn’t due to be broadcast for months. It was as though he’d slept that time away. His face floated up from the grey of the screen as he sat down, cursing. By the time his book was published, nobody would remember this interview.
The linkman and the editing had invoked another writer now. Good God, was that all they were using of Miles? He remembered the cameras following him into the West Derby house, the neighbours glaring, shaking their heads. It was as though they’d managed to censor him, after all.
No, here he was again. “Jonathan Miles is a crime novelist who feels he can no longer rely on his imagination. Desperate for new ideas, he lived for several weeks in a house where last year a murder was committed.” Miles was already losing his temper, but there was worse to come: they’d used none of his observations about the creative process, only the sequence in which he ushered the camera about the house like Hitchcock in the Psycho trailer. “Viewers who find this distasteful,” the linkman said unctuously, “may be reassured to hear that the murder in question is not so topical or popular as Mr Miles seems to think.”
Miles glared at the screen while the programme came to an end, while an announcer explained that “Where Do You Get Your Ideas?” had been broadcast ahead of schedule because of an industrial dispute. And now here was the news, all of it as bad as Miles felt. A child had been murdered, said a headline; a Chief Constable had described it as the worst case of his career. Miles felt guiltily resentful; no doubt it would help distract people from his book.
Then he sat forward, gaping. Surely he must have misheard; perhaps his insomnia was talking. The newsreader looked unreal as a talking bust, but his voice went on, measured, concerned, inexorable. “The baby was found in a microwave oven. Neighbours broke into the house on hearing the cries, but were unable to locate it in time.” Even worse than the scene he was describing was the fact that it was the last of Miles’ nightmares, the one he had refused to write down.
Couldn’t it have been coincidence? Coincidence, coincidence, the train chattered, and seemed likely to do so all the way to London. If he had somehow been able to predict what was going to happen, he didn’t want to know—especially not now, when he could sense new nightmares forming.
He suppressed them before they grew clear. He needed to keep his mind uncluttered for the meeting with his publisher; he gazed out of the window to relax. Trees turned as they passed, unravelling beneath foliage. On a platform a chorus line of commuters bent to their luggage, one by one. The train drew the sun after it through clouds, like a balloon.
Once out of Euston Station and its random patterns of swarming, he strolled to the publishers. Buildings glared like blocks of salt, which seemed to have drained all moisture from the air. He felt hot and grimy, anxious both to face the worst and to delay. Hugo Burgess had been ominously casual: “If you happen to be in London soon we might have a chat about things…”
A receptionist on a dais that overlooked the foyer kept Miles waiting until he began to sweat. Eventually a lift produced Hugo, smiling apologetically. Was he apologis
ing in advance for what he had to say? “I suppose you saw yourself on television,” he said when they reached his office.
“Yes, I’m afraid so.”
“I shouldn’t give it another thought. The telly people are envious buggers. They begrudge every second they give to discussing books. Sometimes I think they resent the competition and get their own back by being patronising.” He was pawing through the heaps of books and papers on his desk, apparently in search of the phone. “It did occur to me that it would be nice to publish fairly soon,” he murmured.
Miles hadn’t realised that sweat could break out in so many places at once. “I’ve run into some problems.”
Burgess was peering at items he had rediscovered in the heaps. “Yes?” he said without looking up.
Miles summarised his new idea clumsily. Should he have written to Burgess in advance? “I found there simply wasn’t enough material in the West Derby case,” he pleaded.
“Well, we certainly don’t want padding.” When Burgess eventually glanced up he looked encouraging. “The more facts we can offer the better. I think the public is outgrowing fantasy, now that we’re well and truly in the scientific age. People want to feel informed. Writing needs to be as accurate as any other science, don’t you think?” He hauled a glossy pamphlet out of one of the piles. “Yes, here it is. I’d call this the last gasp of fantasy.”
It was a painting, lovingly detailed and photographically realistic, of a girl who was being simultaneously mutilated and raped. It proved to be the cover of a new magazine, Ghastly. Within the pamphlet the editor promised “a quarterly that will wipe out the old horror pulps—everything they didn’t dare to be.”
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