by Adam Nevill
As the crowd rushed past the ballroom, the main door clicked open and something glided inside. I pulled back from the curtains and held my breath while the little girl kept mumbling to the nasty toys. I wanted to cover my ears. A crazy part of me wanted it all to end; wanted me to step out from behind the curtains and offer myself to the tall figure down there on the dancefloor. Holding the tatty parasol over its head, it spun around quickly like it was moving on tiny, silent wheels under its long musty skirts, while sniffing at the air for me. Under the white net attached to the brim of the rotten hat and tucked into the high collars of the dress, I saw a bit of face that looked like the skin on a rice pudding. I would have screamed but there was no air inside me.
I looked over to where the little girl had been sitting. She had gone, but something was moving on the floor. Squirming. I blinked my eyes fast, and for a moment, it looked like all of her toys were trembling. But when I squinted at the Golly, with the bits of curly white hair on its head, the doll lay perfectly still where she had dropped it. The little girl may have hidden me, but I was glad that she had gone.
Way off in the stifling distance of the big house, I then heard a scream; a cry full of all the panic and terror and woe in the whole world. The figure with the umbrella spun around on the dancefloor and then rushed out of the ballroom towards the sound.
I slipped out from behind the curtains. A busy chattering sound came from the distance. It got louder until it echoed through the corridor, and the ballroom, and almost covered the sounds of the wailing boy. His cries were swirling round and round, bouncing off walls and closed doors, like he was running far off inside the house, and in a circle that he couldn’t get out of.
I crept down the stairs at the side of the stage and ran to the long strip of burning sunlight that I could see shining through one side of the patio doors. I pulled at the big rectangle of wood until it splintered and revealed broken glass in a door-frame and lots of thick grass outside.
For the first time since I’d seen the old woman, scratching about the front entrance, I truly believed that I could escape. I imagined myself climbing through the gap that I was making, and running down the hill to the gate, while they were all busy inside with the crying boy. But just as my breathing went all quick and shaky with the glee of escape, I heard a whump sound on the floor behind me, like something had just dropped to the floor from the stage. Teeny vibrations tickled the soles of my feet. Then I heard something coming across the floor toward me, with a shuffle, like a body was dragging itself real quick.
I couldn’t bear to look behind and see another one close up, so I snatched at the board and I pulled with all my strength at the bit not nailed down. The whole thing bent and made a gap. Sideways, I squeezed a leg, hip, arm and a shoulder out. My head was suddenly bathed in warm sunlight and fresh air.
One of them must have reached out right then, and grabbed my left arm under the shoulder at the moment I had made it outside. The fingers and thumb were so cold that they burned my skin. And even though my face was in daylight, everything went dark in my eyes except for the little white flashes that you get when you stand up too fast.
I wanted to be sick. I tried to pull away, but one side of my body was all slow and heavy and full of pins and needles. I let go of the hardboard sheet and it slapped shut like a mouse trap. Behind my head, I heard a sound like celery snapping and something shrieked into my ear, which made me go deafish for a week.
Sitting down in the grass outside, I was sick down my jumper. Mucus and bits of spaghetti hoops that looked all white and smelled real bad. I looked back at the place that I had climbed through and my bleary eyes saw an arm that was mostly bone, stuck between the wood and door-frame. I made myself roll away and then get to my knees on the grass that was flattened down.
Moving around the outside of the house, back toward the front of the building and the path that would take me down to the gate, I wondered if I’d bashed my left side. The shoulder and hip had stopped tingling but were achy and cold and stiff. I found it hard to move and wondered if that was what broken bones felt like. My skin was wet with sweat too, and I was shivery and cold. I just wanted to lie down in the long grass. Twice I stopped to be sick. Only spit came out with burping sounds.
Near the front of the house, I got down on my good side and I started to crawl, real slow, through the long grass, down the hill, making sure that the path was on my left, so that I didn’t get lost in the meadow. I only took one look back at the house and will wish for ever that I never did.
One side of the front door was still open from where we went in. And I could see a crowd in the doorway, all bustling in the sunlight that fell on their raggedy clothes. They were making a hooting sound and fighting over something; a small shape that looked dark and wet. It was all limp too and between the thin, snatching hands it came apart, piece by piece.
In my room, at the end of my bed, Nana Alice has closed her eyes. But she’s not sleeping. She’s just sitting quietly and rubbing her doll hand like she’s polishing treasure.
The Original Occupant
R easons for the male mid-life crisis are well documented, so I need not trouble the reader with too detailed an interpretation of the affliction. But the consequences arising from the death throes of youth, and an individual’s grapple with a more precise awareness of its own mortality, were extraordinary in the case of William Atterton. Word of his dilemma came to me through Henry Berringer.
William Atterton, Henry Berringer and I were all fellows of St Leonard’s College and shared the same alumni affiliations, including a club in St James’s where Henry and I enjoyed a regular dinner on the first Friday of each month, complemented by a stroll along The Mall with cigars to close. There were many predictable aspects to our dining ritual, chief among them a discussion of Atterton and the precarious life he led.
It was towards the end of June that Henry updated me on the latest ‘Atterton news’. Only a few weeks earlier Henry had bumped into our mutual acquaintance in Covent Garden carrying ‘a hundredweight’ of travel books and self-sufficiency manuals. Over an impromptu luncheon, Atterton told Henry of his intention to resign from his position in the City in order to pursue a ‘far simpler existence in the sub-arctic forests of Northern Sweden. Four seasons, if nothing else. I’ll see it through for one entire year. And for the first time in ages I’m going to be aware of my surroundings, Henry. The changes in nature, the sky, the birdsong, the very air –’
‘The ice and snow,’ Henry was compelled to interject.
‘Yes, damn it! The ice and snow. And I shall lovingly observe every crystal and flake at my leisure.’
‘Which will be considerable,’ said Henry. ‘Would not a couple of weeks or even a month out there be more prudent?’
‘No! I’ll not be one of those look-at-little-me chaps, alone in a cabin for a fortnight. You won’t understand, Henry, but I’m realising more and more that my whole life has been a matter of compromise and half-measures. To tell you the truth, I’m not sure I ever pursued a real dream of my own. I can’t even recall how I came to be this person, or what I ever wanted to do in life. But I do know one thing: that after thirty years in the City I’ve not done it.’
On hearing this news, I immediately drew the same conclusions as Henry. We were both unsure precisely what Atterton was escaping from this time, because this plan certainly had the makings of an escape and there were plenty of reasons for one. Though I risk sounding like a gossip, Atterton had always been something of a meddler. Particularly in the pockets of others. Some years ago, he made property speculations in which several dear friends lost considerable sums of money. His involvement in a restaurant is alleged to have caused its swift closure, and his mismanagement of several accounts led to the impoverishment of at least one pension fund. To exacerbate his fiscal troubles, at the start of what we shall call his crisis, there was evidence of meddling both in a friend’s marriage and then with a colleague’s daughter, working as an intern at his firm
, with barely a weekend to spare between the two affairs. As to his resignation from the company, there has been some talk in the City that it was not entirely a matter of choice.
But during discussion of this Scandinavian venture, Henry had never seen the man’s face so animate. He described Atterton’s eyes as being fixed with a peculiar quality akin to euphoria. Atterton was a committed man.
‘And what, dare I say, will you do for one entire year in the woods?’ Henry had asked him, shortly before paying the bill for their lunch. This was the only question that Atterton wished to be asked on the matter. Beside his fondness for Thoreau’s Walden, and his long eulogised backpacking holiday in Scandinavia as a student, Atterton had this to say: ‘Walk. Swim in the Alvar. Sleep outdoors. Explore. Get back to my sketching. I haven’t touched a pencil in twenty years. There won’t be enough hours in the day. And you should see the place I have purchased for my exile, Henry. What they call a Fritidshus, or Stuga, meaning summer house. It’s thirty kilometres from the nearest town, and situated in a prehistoric forest festooned with runestones. There’s even a wooden church that has been around since the fourteenth century. I shall be suffering from brass rubber’s elbow by the end of summer.’
Henry was beginning to share Atterton’s excitement and feel the first twitches of envy, until he inquired how they might stay in touch.
‘Now there’s the rub, Henry. No phone masts where I’m going. And I’m not even connected to the mains. I shall be drawing my bath from a well, running a generator on oil and cooking my freshly caught fish on a wood-fired stove. It’s all very basic. I plan to spend my evenings by the fire, Henry, reading. I’m taking the complete works of Dickens and Tolstoy for starters. So I anticipate we will be corresponding by letter.’
Henry is not the sort of man to dampen a friend’s spirits, but as Atterton held forth about his plans for isolating himself in the backwoods of another country, he was filled with a schoolmarmish suspicion that things had not been properly thought through.
‘I want to be tested again, Henry. Really tested.’ As indeed he was, but not in the manner that he anticipated.
So, in early August, into the wild ventured Atterton accompanied by a large collection of books and several cases of warm clothing, leaving Henry with the sole task of checking on his flat in Chelsea to flush the toilet from time to time, and attend to other matters in a bachelor’s absence. And so too, towards the end of August, began their correspondence. Which swiftly failed to take the course that either man envisaged.
I spent the remainder of the summer and most of autumn abroad, but on my return Henry and I fell into our first Friday of the month routine. But my dear friend was much changed. At his request, we took possession of a table close to the kitchens of the club’s dining room, rather than our usual seats overlooking Green Park. During dinner Henry also displayed all the signs of a high agitation, which were only partially relieved when the staff closed the curtains. ‘I tell you, I’ve had enough of damn trees in a high wind,’ he said, and waved away my invitation to take our stroll along The Mall. Instead, we retired to the library with a decanter of brandy, where he promised to explain his mood and the events of the summer, which served as the cause of his discomfort. It became immediately apparent that Atterton, or ‘poor Atterton’ as Henry now referred to him, was to be the sole topic of conversation as tradition dictated. Only this time the tale Henry told was different from any other that I had ever heard, and must have influenced my decision to take a cab home to Knightsbridge, forgoing my usual walk home around the leafy perimeter of Hyde Park.
‘I can well understand a sophisticated man’s desire for solitude in a more natural environment, and even his yearning for a more historical way of life, but I did fear that a lack or, in Atterton’s case, a total absence of society could lead to an excess of inner dialogue, which can only result in one’s consciousness turning upon itself. And during our brief correspondence, it appeared that just such a thing had befallen the poor fellow.
‘There were three letters, and only the first one contained any trace of his initial enthusiasm for this Swedish venture. I can be prone to an underestimation of my fellow man, but it was never the selection of supplies, gathering of fuel, the workings of the generator or the outdoor orientating skills that gave him trouble. On the contrary, during his second week out there, he’d removed a ghastly decoration of horseshoes from the property, was repainting the house in the traditional deep red of the area and replacing roof slates with an enthusiasm befitting a scout on a camping trip. He was hiking well into the bright nights, had begun fishing in local waters and had completed the Everyman editions of both Bleak House and Little Dorrit.
‘But after reading the second letter, I couldn’t help but suspect that Atterton had become uneasy in his surroundings. The valley – no more than twenty kilometres across, in northeastern Jämtland – was entirely cut off. I mean, that was the whole point, to get away. But the area’s sparse, and mostly elderly, population seemed to have exercised a wilful obstinacy in remaining divorced from modern Sweden.
‘Despite the incredible beauty of the land, and its abundance of wildlife, Atterton believed that the local population were committed to turning tourism away at the door. Atterton’s Swedish was almost non-existent, and their English was uncharacteristically poor for Scandinavia, so what little contact he had with his nearest neighbours, during his walks, was only ever conducted at the border of the valley, and he found it to be entirely unsatisfactory in nature. The people there had either taken to some sect of Protestantism with a fanatical bent, or were observing the dictates of some kind of folklore to an irrational degree. They spent far too much time in church, and any building or fence or gate he came across on his wanderings was festooned with iron horseshoes.
‘And what’s more, they seemed wary of him. Not afraid of him, but for him, he felt. Once or twice, at the general store and post office, that he cycled ten kilometres to reach, he’d been told about “bad land”, or some kind of “bad luck” in the area. An elderly man who had learned some English in the merchant navy advised him to leave well before the end of September, when what little summer congress that frequented those parts would migrate to other places before the long night fell. What was equally alarming was the manner in which other Swedes appeared only too happy to avoid the place. Odd, considering the plethora of standing runestones and several wooden churches of immense antiquity dotted about the woods. Even trails for hikers seemed to circumnavigate the region on every map.
‘Atterton did admit, however, that his curiosity about the region far outweighed his reservations; a remark which sounded a chime of alarm inside me, knowing how our mutual friend could be impervious to reason and logic in his passing enthusiasms.
‘Anyway, another four weeks passed before I received the next letter. And moments after reading his hastily scribbled handwriting, I made a cursory inspection of airline timetables and looked into car hire in Northern Sweden.
‘Here, see for yourself.’ Henry handed me the third letter from Atterton.
Dear Henry
I plan to be gone from here by the week’s end. I anticipate arriving in London a few days after you receive this letter. I cannot alarm you any more than I have alarmed myself, Henry, but there is something not right about this place. With the late sun gone, the valley has begun to show me a different face. I no longer spend much time outdoors if I can help it.
Do not think me foolish, but I am not at all comfortable with the trees after midday. As for this wind, I had no idea that gusts of cold air could create such a sound of violence amongst deciduous woodland; it’s unseasonably strong and cold too for autumn, and savage. The forest is restless, but not quite in the same way that a wood is animated by air currents alone; I believe the core disturbance comes from the standing stones.
They were benign in midsummer; though even then I was not particularly fond of that hill on which the circle stands. But I have made the very grave error of visiti
ng that place when the sun is behind the clouds or going down. And I believe I may have interfered with some kind of indigenous custom.
I can only imagine that it was some of the locals who had tethered the pig inside the stones. You see, while I was out walking yesterday evening, I heard the most desperate and baleful cries, carried on the north wind from the direction of the circle. I went up and found a wretched boar tied to the central plinth. Surrounded by enough dead fowl, strung up between the circle of dolmens, to satisfy a large appetite. Some kind of barbaric ritual in progress. The plinth had been literally bathed in the blood of the birds. I found it appalling. So, I cut the boar free, and wished him well as he made haste into the forest. But, in hindsight, I believe he had been installed there for my protection. As some kind of trade.
You see, the entire time I was among the stones, I felt that I was being watched. You get an extra sense out here in the wild, Henry. You come to trust it. And I believe the scent of blood, and the shrieking of a pig, had attracted something else to that place. I felt a presence in the wind that seemed to come at me from all points of the compass. Air that cut to the bone and left me damp inside my clothes and hair and the very marrow of my bones.
I didn’t hang around. I set off for home feeling more peculiar than I can adequately describe. To be honest, I became more frightened than I had ever been as a child at night. But my fear was combined with a sort of disorientation, and a conviction of my utter insignificance out here amongst these black trees. The noise of them, Henry. It felt like I was being shipwrecked by an angry sea.
I’d not gone far before I heard a dreadful commotion from the direction in which I had just come: the freed boar in some considerable distress. Though it sounded frightfully like a child at the time. Then its cries ceased with an abruptness worse than the preceding shrieks.