by Mark Samuels
Zachary’s neighbour appeared to be a devotee of strange and disturbing programmes, because the noise, though crackling and static-riddled, incorporated screams, moans, and even, seemingly, long monologues of a macabre, deranged, nature.
Doubtless these programmes constituted the other tenant’s own personal selection, because Zachary could not track the broadcasts on any of the channels currently being transmitted, even with recourse to an up-to-date and extensive terrestrial, cable and satellite guide.
Perhaps, he thought, the other tenant only had access to a series of video cassettes of degraded quality, for the ruinous soundtrack did not indicate the high-end reproduction afforded by modern digital formats.
Had Zachary slept in accordance with the usual workaday pattern, the one he had followed for the last thirty years, and had his sleeping routine not been severely disrupted by months of illness, he might not have developed his obsessive fascination with the viewing habits of the tenant next door. But the lack of an organised daily routine, such as he’d long become accustomed to when employed by the television news company as a journalist, had meant that the hours he was awake and the hours he slept were a confused maze of time.
There were occasions when he discovered it was impossible to sleep before 5 a.m., some when he was exhausted by midday, and others when he had slept through an entire twenty-four hour period altogether.
With his being only a few years shy of retirement age, the state-owned company had decided that it would be possible to grant him his pension early, and thus allow him to battle his undiagnosed organic illness without having the worry of considering when it would be possible for him to return to work. In truth, however, Zachary suspected they were relieved not to have him lingering in the news office.
He looked like a corpse already; his once lustrous shock of thick white hair had all fallen out, and his inability to keep food down, combined with loss of appetite, resulted in a degree of weight loss that was frightening in its rapidity. His joints ached, unsightly purple blotches appeared randomly on his skin, and he had difficulty climbing stairs, or in taking any form of exercise, due to fatigue and shortness of breath.
None of his clothes fitted him properly any more, all of them being far too large for his emaciated frame, and they hung from his body in baggy folds. His overcoat was as huge as a bear’s hide. He disturbed his colleagues, whose displays of sympathy were tinged with the awkwardness that invariably accompanies an ever-present reminder of human mortality, and, since Zachary had no wife or family to support him in his day-to-day life, he imparted to them the details of the suffering he underwent.
An illness that cannot be identified by the medical establishment is an awkward gap, like an unsubstantiated alibi. Though some form of leukaemia was mentioned as a possible explanation, the exact diagnosis was never confirmed.
Had he been at management level it is possible that some advisory or consultative role would have been assigned to him, a privilege by which he might be partially withdrawn from active participation in business affairs but not entirely removed.
But he had given up all ambitions of management in his early thirties, and had been content to forfeit the perks associated with increased responsibilities. He had gradually drifted into becoming the trades-union representative, and had exercised power by way of opposition without responsibility. Though he had sought the adulation that had been his real aim all along via this circuitous route, he had not obtained it. His intrinsic bitterness had been too apparent, even to those who were ideologically in sympathy with him. He did not possess any real sympathy for his fellow man, on an individual basis, and tended to divide them into categories, each according to a scale of general characteristics, such as gender, skin colour, politics and degree of disability.
Naturally, with recent cut-backs, the board felt justified in not extending to Zachary any considerations that were not strictly mandatory, and even his “comrades” were glad to be rid of him, since they had long since seen through his public image. In terms of liberal or leftist views, his conduct was impeccable, but, when it came to personal relationships, it was a case of him being liked for his ideology, not for himself.
And it was exactly the friendship of those his own age he required, but that was neither a business nor an ideological consideration. He had not earned loyalty or respect, because those qualities were not a feature of his own behaviour towards others.
This situation resulted in his being, through his own efforts, cast adrift amidst much younger and more ambitious staff. Either they resented him and his endless “do-gooding” or else they did not remain long in the company’s employ. It was nigh impossible for him to forge meaningful personal relationships.
That Zachary had lived into an age for which he had little hope—and towards which he was utterly antipathetic—was evident to himself and to those members of society with whom he was forced to interact.
The fall of the Berlin Wall had signalled the end of his hopes for the worldwide adoption of atheistic communism. Those insightful people who detected his disappointment were few in number, but their natural, albeit unconscious, recoil at Zachary’s habits and appearance was all the more devastating.
Chiefly, of course, his new personal contacts consisted of those who attempted to stem and reverse the nameless disease that threatened his life—with the doctors and nurses of the local hospital whence he obtained the debilitating drugs by which they attempted to kill his mysterious affliction before he himself was killed by the side-effects.
With regard to his body, Zachary had admitted defeat. He had accepted the creed of seeing his existence as merely a materialistic accident of circumstance, and nothing more than the sum total of what a flesh and blood being could experience during the course of any individual sojourn in total reality.
This stance had been accentuated by age; for he saw all of the events taking place in the world as being echoes of all those that had taken place before, in a form differing only according to minor variations in the cycle.
Wars, famines, earthquakes, floods, massacres, continuous from decade to decade. Only the details changed, only the names and faces; the essence was invariably the same. As a student, manning the barricades of the protests in 1968, and looking forward gladly to another cultural revolution, one along true Marxist lines, he would have sacrificed himself rather than live to see a future where supernatural mumbo-jumbo lingered on as the opiate of capitalistic oppression.
The doctors and nurses all concentrated on his physical well-being, on extending the delay of a natural process. No supernatural force had ever come to his aid. Doubtless someone of a weak mind would have gone to Lourdes to gather with all the other fools in hope of miracles that never came. Lourdes, that Disneyland of the Roman Church!
Perhaps science, Zachary thought, returning to an old theme, would one day finally dethrone the idea of God. It had achieved great gains by virtue of holding out the possibility of its conquering physical death. It was now able to thwart, for a longer period than hitherto, what had always been considered inevitable. Science alone was worthy of a man’s respect. It was a force that drove into disarray all those superstitious fools who challenged materialism and the historical necessity of the eternal revolution.
Zachary did not fear death—for that was mere oblivion, a snuffing out of an insignificant candle-flame—but he feared the pain accompanying the descent into its depths of blackness.
Though he had been a Catholic in youth, he scoffed at the martyrdom of the age of the Apostles, and the iron faith of its saints, for it was many centuries in the past, and now mere legend, if it had ever really existed at all except as propaganda. He laughed at those who still claimed to be believers and who feared they now existed in occupied enemy territory, in a corrosive secular age. They required corrective re-education.
Such an outlandish notion as the soul was the cranky preserve of old women with covered heads who knelt in the corner of near-empty churches. A cover for a co
nspiracy whose aim was to tyrannise over others in the name of a dead god. If there were any answers to the problems confronting humankind they were to be found only in Marxist solidarity. Anyone who thought otherwise was a victim of false consciousness and deserved to be socially ostracised. It was a merciful act really, for, in other times, they might well have been shot for the greater good of the revolution.
Not that Zachary ever voiced these opinions aloud. He had managed to advance his own party agenda—not by being completely open about its aims, but rather by a process of stealth and by discrediting whatever moral authority the reactionary opposition tried to claim. The only loyalty is party loyalty. The party and truth were indivisible.
And he would try not to think about those enemies of the people and their ideas over and over again at night, when he wished to sleep, but he could not escape the fact that his mind proved most active in those darkest hours. During the day he avoided self-reflection, and drowned himself in his books, learning nothing new since he sought out only the ideas of those who confirmed his own viewpoint and who belonged to the party.
Nevertheless he craved thought-extinguishing sleep at the end of it all, sleep that acted like a blessed narcotic, for it alone blotted out all the distractions to which he was prey. When he thought he had conquered the worst of these distractions, and when sleep came more easily, then it was that he began to notice the sounds filtering through the wall separating his apartment from that of the other tenant.
Since it had proven impossible to ignore them, over the course of the first weeks since their advent, he had come to anticipate the distractions and found himself staying awake until they began—always at the same moment, down to the exact second.
It is true that at first they diverted Zachary from his own self-absorption, but their nature was such that any relief was transitory, for they proved only to be a bridge from one form of troubling apprehension to another.
The sounds consisted, as has been mentioned previously, of crackling and static-riddled screaming and moaning, interspersed with lengthy monologues of a self-accusatory cast. Zachary attempted to jot down some gist of the words he’d heard, but the result was a jumbled mix of almost incomprehensible ravings and filthy expletives.
It must not be thought that Zachary, during the early part of the manifestation of his problems with his neighbour, did not attempt to put a stop to them. He hammered on the adjoining wall several times, shouted through it, left notes the following morning, and finally even tried knocking on the entrance to the other tenant’s apartment at all times of the day and night.
Not once did he receive any response and no change was effected in the maddening routine to which Zachary had become a victim. In moments of paranoia, he suspected the other tenant to be engaged upon a vindictive campaign directed against him personally, but for what end he could not conceive.
He eventually contacted the owner of the building and got a list of all the various sub-owners of the flats into which it had been divided. The owners of the apartment of the other tenant were an estate agency, and when Zachary contacted them his enquiry was met with bewilderment.
They informed him, by letter, that although they took complaints of anti-social behaviour, and especially the type of noise pollution that he described, with the utmost seriousness, they were also, in this instance, at a loss to know how they could be of any assistance. Their records clearly indicated that the property in question had been unoccupied for several months, and furthermore, that, during the period in which Zachary claimed the trouble had begun, it had remained unleased to any tenant.
Indeed, such was their concern, they sent a representative almost immediately upon receipt of Zachary’s letter in order to investigate any illegal occupancy, and this person had duly gained entrance to the property, only to report back that there were no signs at all of any squatters or other intruders having gained entrance to the premises.
Given this information, and the lack of any official way forward in order to resolve the situation, Zachary decided to take it upon himself to investigate.
He initially hesitated before this course of action, but his agitation and paranoia had reached such a pitch that it was impossible to do anything else. Zachary had passed night after unbearable night lying awake and listening to the audio horrors streaming through the thin wall separating the other apartment from his own, and he was now entirely in the grip of a single obsession; namely, that of discovering the secret behind the divide.
It was not difficult to gain access to the apartment of the other tenant, and Zachary did so one night after yet another interminable period of lying awake and listening again to the bloodcurdling broadcasts or recordings to which he had been subjected over the course of the previous weeks. On this particular occasion, he felt, he would either put an end to them once and for all or else go mad from their cumulative effect.
Crossing the landing that separated the entrance to his own apartment from the other, he discovered that its door-frame was rotten with age, and guessed that a shoulder charge would, in all likelihood, make it give way entirely, exposing its locks as more decorative than sturdy.
So it proved, and, despite Zachary’s severely weakened state, he found himself stumbling over the threshold into the confines of that mysterious series of rooms adjoining his own.
The noise he’d heard from his own apartment and which he might have expected to cease upon his arrival was now almost deafening in its intensity.
It emanated from a television set. The device appeared to date from the late 1960s or early 1970s. The glow from its black and white images filled the empty room with a haze of electric monochrome shadows.
Zachary moved in front of the screen, and sat down in a chair positioned in the middle of the barren room. Next to one of its legs there was a large clawhammer and about thirty nine-inch nails. Though perplexed by the strange debris left behind by whoever had occupied the apartment before, Zachary’s attention returned to what was being displayed on the screen.
The picture was ruinous, as a result of being imperfectly tuned into the channel on which the images were carried, but he was able to make out the main details despite the interference and snow-bursts of static.
A painfully thin man was imprisoned in an empty room, and seated in a chair. He was gazing at something in abject terror, something currently off-camera, and whatever it was must have been a hideously shocking sight. His features were difficult to distinguish—rendered indistinct by the poor quality of the broadcast, though his crackling screams left no doubt he was gripped by an intolerable sense of anguish.
Zachary was able to tear away his attention from what he saw and heard on the screen long enough to wonder about the machine itself. And in doing so, he was only more horribly astonished. For one thing, the television set was not plugged into a power socket. For another, there was no indoor aerial connected to the set, and no connecting cable to provide input for an outside source of transmission. The device seemed entirely self-contained, as if generating from within itself the nightmarish horrors that Zachary was seeing and hearing.
The screams of the man whose image was displayed on the television set intensified, and Zachary saw that he was using the clawhammer to pierce the flesh of his left arm through with the nails, thereby pinning himself to the chair. Despite the ferocious agony, he did not halt in the act of banging them in one after another. For the second arm, his right, he hammered nails into the underside of the other chair limb and then forced it down onto them, pinning that one too.
When his grisly task was accomplished, the picture closed in on the—until then blurred—face of the torture victim, who was now struggling wildly in the throes of a noxious insanity. His mouth foamed with a black saliva like tar and his eyes bubbled, oozing tears of blood down his pale cheeks.
It was at that moment Zachary found himself staring into his own features, frozen in a grimace of living death, whilst all of the rotten thoughts and all of the hypocrisy, all
of the foul deeds and the lies he’d perpetrated during his life, played out on the television screen in the background, in a repetitive and agonisingly slow sequence of endless slow-motion replays.
He reached down for the hammer and the nails, eager to begin the work of spiritual redemption that lay before him.
*
“Yes,” the estate agent said, “he died a week ago. He had nailed himself onto a chair in the vacant and long empty apartment next door. Probably for some bizarre sexual kick. Quite deranged. But he was, after all, terminally ill.”
There was no denying the scandal, since it had been reported in all the local newspapers.
“But naturally we’re prepared to lower the rent, because we’d rather it was occupied than not.”
The prospective tenant nodded and he decided to sign the tenancy agreement the estate agent had taken out of a briefcase. He had little choice, as he was a declared bankrupt and this was the cheapest accommodation he could find. His career as an author had proven to be a complete financial disaster.
Within a week from the night he moved in he was disturbed by the sound of a television set blaring through the thin dividing wall. Whoever was responsible for the racket seemed to have a taste for watching nothing but horror films.
An Hourglass of the Soul
The afternoon had been an alternating series of English sunshine and showers typical for the time of year. Heavy drops of rain blossomed at the window, in a backdrop of leaden grey skies, before giving way to watery sunlight and a brilliant thin blue haze on the horizon. Robert Drax kept looking over his shoulder at the sight, having been placed in a cubicle at the corner of the building, with his back to a window that arched from one side of the enclosure to the other. The play of light and darkness continued for hours, plunging him cyclically from light to shadow, and lending an air of unreality to his mundane office surroundings. He had been distracted by the transitions, allowing them to occupy his attention and finding in them a welcome relief from his anxiety.