Some Will Not Sleep: Selected Horrors

by Adam Nevill

  In the kitchen, the lamps are lit but the jugs are empty. I look inside them and dry belches rise to my mouth. My eyes screw up from the hot-fire cramps that pinch my inner softness between tweezer fingers. Nothing in the enamel ‘Dainty Maid’ fridge either. Vanilla light glows thickly around the frosted-glass shelves and sends me reeling back to the table. I can’t stop my snorting sounds or the licking tongue, dry as toast, that comes through my puffy lips to touch the cool ivory jugs.

  Then I hear the song. Saul’s chant is coming through the kitchen wall that attaches us to the mother’s house. Strange barking music with the family’s chorus beneath his dog sounds. Slipping to the cold, tiled floor, neatly swept by the mother, I feel their rhythms and howls pulling at my clammy body. Making sucking sounds with my belly, I squirm across the floor and out the back door to the milky green grass.

  Now there is a fight inside me between two voices. Something whispers about the gate and escape, pulling my squinty eyes across to the arch in the trees, where the metal ring hangs against the dark planks. But the other voice is screaming.

  I go looking for milk.

  Crying, I move like a thing, yellow and soft, that has fallen from a fisherman’s rough hand into the grass. Slowly, I make my way to the back door of the mother’s house. I can’t stop myself and the screaming voice inside me softens. That’s it, just a sip to feel better, it sings.

  The expectation of milk eases the gritty feeling inside the pipes and tubes beneath my skin, and my naked flesh shines under the biggest moon, set low in the night sky over the milky green grass whose caressing blades sweep and brush beneath me, feeding me towards her kitchen. Crawling over the little step before the door, I wince at the roughness of stone against my pale underside.

  Pink oil has been lit in four lamps inside her kitchen and it’s as if I am still on the floor of our house. Things are much the same in here, save for the wooden service hatch set between the wall cabinets and work surface. Little curved dents on the swept tiles, made by the father’s feet, make me stand up. The family’s song has eased to a halt. A smacking of lips begins on the other side of the hatch.

  Snuffling takes over from my dry-mouth panting and I see my hands reach for the hatch. Thick fingers work by themselves to nudge and press about for the plastic hole, big enough for a thumb. The wooden doors of the hatch slide through the runners soundlessly and make a hole for the kitchen light to fall through. Staring into the moving darkness, my eyes follow a funnel of pink light, dropping like a ray through a church window.

  Before my eyes, pallid shapes move about the floor. Wet and tangled, the family squirms before the mother who sways back on her haunches. A moist face pauses in its feeding and whimpers a message up to the provider. Another’s lips part to show rows of small square teeth before turning away from me. They all mewl, then twist aside, and the pinky light strikes her.

  Tiny fingers pinch the hem of the floral dress and hold it under her chins. Her eyes are full of excitement. Unveiled is the swollen belly with its pasture of teats among the white hairs. Opaque tears of sweet milk, so thick and dangly, fall to the family and melt something inside me.

  With a broad smile, mother invites me to join them.

  Yellow Teeth

  I made a terrible mistake.

  It’s hard to remember how he came to be here. The precise transaction of words that allowed Ewan inside escape me now. Did I ever actually invite him across the threshold of my home? I cannot remember doing that. All that remains is a sense of an awkward, fretting reluctance on my part to permit any intrusion into my orderly existence. A resistance that he brushed aside with the waft of one dirty hand. And in no time, the silence, the white walls, the absence of dust, the right angles, the open spaces were lost, for ever.

  His need for shelter and support became a wheedling insistence. I remember that much. A cry for help from an old friend, though he was never more than an acquaintance at best. He had nowhere else to go. He just kept calling and calling and calling.

  The frequency of his visits to my one-bedroom flat in Bayswater, and the first home that I’d ever owned, increased over the summer until he began to cry in my presence. Dishevelled and drunk before noon, with his big, shiny face held in a cage of long fingers, the nails black with dirt, he would sob. Paralysed by discomfort, I would just watch and fidget.

  But at times, I also wanted to laugh out loud at the long, oily hair hanging like old rope from beneath a baseball cap that was jammed onto the crown of his unusual skull: flat at the back, but flush with the flabby neck and showing no definition to the shoulders. The squashed-up face was immediately monstrous to an onlooker too, with that low brow above the dark eyes, the nose a porcine snout, and those damn teeth creating an orifice both bestial and curiously feminine. Yes, there was something peculiarly sexual about his mouth that compelled me to stare and to experience a disgust akin to the revulsion I once experienced when suddenly confronted by the genitals of a female baboon in a zoo. Perhaps it was the fringe of black beard that made his lips appear so red, so engorged, and perhaps it was the contrast of the bright, wet lips that made his square teeth appear so yellow. A prehistoric mouth, I remember thinking; there was simply nothing contemporary about it.

  I’d not seen Ewan once in the ten years since he dropped out of university in his first year. He’d just arrived in London that spring, fresh from a decade of disappointment and mishap, of which the details remain unclear to me. But he claimed to have been betrayed, mistreated and set upon many times. And he always spoke in grand platitudes about his plight, as if he’d endured a form of biblical suffering alone, for so long.

  Blinking bloodshot eyes at the vaulted ceiling of King’s Cross station, one huge hand holding a single bin-bag full of paper, he seems to have begun searching for me as soon as he arrived in the city. Where else could he go? He was tired of being alone.

  When I think back now, I realise how soon, in my own home, I became his hostage. Even before he spent a night under my roof, the roles had been assigned, with Ewan slouched in my favourite chair, where I used to sit and read beside the sash window that overlooked a chestnut tree. The place I felt most comfortable. A spot that protected me. And there I was, always diminished in shadow on the sofa, merely listening.

  I’d arranged the room around my favourite chair. It was an apex of a triangle that offered the best reception from the stereo speakers, and the most ideal view of the television, the prints and photographs on the walls, my book collection, my towers of CDs and my collection of absinthe bottles. All gone now. But pushing me aside in the hallway the moment I had the front door open, Ewan would make straight for that chair, like some impostor with pretensions to a throne. He’d never pause to remove the ripped anorak, or to kick off the worn-out schoolish shoes, split across the bridge of the toes, the soles ground down to a rubber membrane by his endless, directionless walks around the city.

  Twice I had seen him in West London before he came to call the first time; a tall but hunched figure in an old raincoat, muttering anxiously to himself, never looking another in the eye. Pacing, agitated, jobless, alone, whispering and getting closer to the one thing that he considered companionable and safe, and twice I’d avoided him. Ducking into a second-hand clothes shop the first time, and back-pedalling into the mouth of Queensway tube station during the second sighting.

  So how did he find me? Who gave him my address? Few of my crowd at university that I remained in contact with even remembered him. And none of them had heard from him since he’d dropped out. He must have followed me home from the street. Come across me as I shopped for organic produce, or antiques on the Portobello Road. But then how did he know where to look in the first place? How did he find the specific area in West London? Am I to believe that it was coincidence? I don’t know. He would never tell me and only smile whenever I asked him how he found me. He liked to know things that I did not.

  But then he was there, with me, all of the time. He and I and that awful smell
that he brought with him.

  Whenever I opened the front door, the smell would rush out to embrace me from the long hall. One week after his status changed from visitor to resident, the odour still startled me: the sweat of cattle, sharp and choking; a foot odour close to the waft of regurgitation; the kidney and shellfish of a male groin too long unclean; and something else, like burned bone, binding all of the other flavours together.

  Coughing to clear my airways was no use; the entire flat had filled with his scent. Seeping from the living room he occupied, clouding down the hallway, filling the kitchen and bathroom, lingering fresh in my room to the ceiling, the smell was everywhere and on all of my things. Absorbed by upholstery and fabric, thick in the confined spaces of wardrobe and drawer, drifting from every book cover and ornament, his spore was ever present.

  And I remember our first confrontation clearly. It was a Monday evening after I’d returned home from the studio, one week since his ‘stay’ began, and as I unlaced my shoes in the hallway I broke out into a sudden and uncomfortable sweat. Even though it had been a hot day, all of the windows in the flat were closed and the curtains were drawn in each room. From the kitchen I heard the whoosh of the central heating boiler. Electric lights burned in every room save the lounge, where only the television screen offered any illumination, and a white-blue light flickered under the closed door. He never switched the set off and sat far too close to the screen, like a child that had never been told otherwise. He’d already staked out that room as his own territory, and turned it into an unnerving facsimile of his room in halls at university. A disorderly nest, I thought, with the smell of a landfill.

  I hung up my coat and dropped my briefcase in the kitchen. My nails cut half-moons into the palm of each hand. Clenching my teeth until my jaw ached, I surveyed the mess he’d made. Pools of milk, scattered granules of sugar and dregs of tea were spilled across the steel surfaces around the cooker. Something red had dried hard over a gas ring and trickled down the glass of the oven door: tomato sauce from a can of Scooby-Doo pasta shapes I found abandoned and sticky on a stool before the breakfast bar. A brown clump of exhausted teabags stained the draining board. A clutter of soiled crockery and long black hairs filled the dry sink. Two saucepans encrusted with dried soup sat on the breadboard beside a tub of my butter, congealing with the lid off. Beside the kettle, with his black fingerprints on the plastic handle, four of my compact discs lay face-down in a galaxy of scattered sea salt.

  A gravity of exhaustion dropped through me and I leaned against a wall. The place had been spotless that morning. Before work, I’d already cleaned his mess from the weekend. Since I’d granted him a few days to sort himself out, a similar soiling had awaited me each evening. I was too tired for this. Too fatigued for my run in the park. Couldn’t face cleaning up in order to cook. Already he was eroding my routines, sapping my will and ruining the place that I considered a sanctuary. Enough of this, I said to myself, again.

  But the stench outside the living room was worst of all, almost pulsing from under the door. I went to knock, then paused and loathed myself for this enduring but pathetic display of courtesy. Why maintain the charade of playing the perfect host? He had no respect for me, my privacy or my possessions.

  Strangled by an anger that I recognised as unhealthy, I turned away from the living-room door. Too enraged to articulate my grievances, to speak to Ewan in a coherent manner, and to appear reasonable, I walked away. Or was it something else? If I am honest, I now acknowledge that I was also afraid to enter the lounge and to confront him. It was fear, but not a fear for my own safety. More an emotion similar to wandering through a smell of corruption in a wood and declining to investigate in case some tortured image in the undergrowth was impressed upon the memory. Even then, at the beginning, I was afraid of what I might see in the rooms that Ewan had occupied.

  I’d snapped at him before. I’d lost my temper and raised my voice, but only succeeded in driving him deeper into self-pity and an absorbing despair, in itself fatiguing to watch.

  I went to my room to change. A territory that I had been increasingly withdrawing inside, as if driven into the very keep of my castle by the intrusion of noise, and the filth of a plague that had blithely breached the walls. I decided to take a shower too, and to try and calm down before the impending confrontation; I’d need a clear head and steady voice to penetrate his peculiar childlike reason, and his convenient inability to comprehend most of what I said that was not in his favour.

  But my attempt to calm down was derailed the moment that I set foot inside my bedroom. That day, he had been in there. Again. Either he lacked the intelligence to cover his tracks or he exhibited a wilful disregard for my wishes. After the last time, I asked him not to go into my room. But I could clearly see open drawers in my filing cabinet and the indent of his backside on my duvet as he’d sat and examined things. Private things.

  Into the lounge I burst.

  And was immediately disoriented. Canned laughter crackled from the speakers. The floor vibrated. I coughed. Covered my nose and mouth. In my mind I saw an image of long, yellow toenails and underwear soiled brown like a corpse’s shroud. In my mouth I could taste his body. I coughed again, though it sounded more like retching.

  In the gloom I spied his dark shape slumped into my favourite chair. One shoe had been removed and the pale foot was placed in his lap. In the cartoon on the television something exploded white and, for a second, I saw the full horror of that foot. Yellow teeth gritted and nose ruffled, eyes slit, brow furrowed, he concentrated as two of his dirty claws scratched against the crispy red psoriasis on his instep.

  ‘Jesus,’ I said, as my foot kicked an empty beer can and sent it skidding into the teacups beneath the littered coffee table. I snatched the remote control off the table and turned the television volume down. Ewan pulled the remnant of the sock over the foot and ankle.

  ‘It itches,’ he said, smiling.

  ‘I’m not surprised.’ My chest was tight. My mind blocked. What was I going to say? I was choked with rage. Did this make me forget what I was going to say? Perhaps the intense way he stared at me was disarming. He seemed uninterested in the glance; his eyes were always still. He looked at me like a cat that my family used to have when I was a child. A cat that would sit and stare. Its black eyes made me feel vulnerable and guilty somehow, as if its suspicions of my unacceptable thoughts were something more than a hunch. But he, like the cat, was really expecting some kind of challenge or attack. These were the eyes of someone incapable of trust.

  I looked away. I suffered an aversion – one that writhed in my gut – to meeting his eyes and I loathed myself. If I could not hold and return his stare then it was no surprise that he was ruining my home.

  Around the living room I saw all of the books that he’d taken off the shelves, flicked through and then discarded open and face-down. He could concentrate on nothing but cartoons and pictures in magazines. I saw my hardback first edition of Walter de la Mare beside his chair. There was a mug of tea placed upon the dust jacket.

  I rushed across the room and retrieved the book. The jacket was marked by a cup ring. ‘Jesus Christ.’

  He sniggered.

  ‘Do you know how valuable this is?’

  Ewan shrugged. ‘It’s just a book.’

  ‘My book!’

  ‘Sorry,’ he replied in an automatic, placid tone of voice.

  ‘How many times have I told you about this?’ I stared about the room and waved a hand at the debris.

  He sniggered again. ‘Would you listen to him.’

  Briefly, I closed my eyes, took a breath, and I sat on the sofa. ‘We need to talk.’

  ‘What about?’

  ‘What do you think? Like I’ve told you nearly every night this week, you can’t stay here any longer.’

  He stared at me, his expression blank.

  ‘Look at this place. Look at what you’ve done to it.’

  Nonchalantly, he surveyed the room. ‘Sorry
, what am I looking at?’

  I slapped my hands against the leather sofa. ‘Can you not see?’

  ‘Sorry, what do you mean?’

  I stared up and through the ceiling as if appealing to some other for support. No, I would not be drawn into another of these endless, circular exchanges that were baffling, devoid of reason and conducted in an atmosphere of his unwashed body and clothes. ‘You can’t stay here. I want you out. Tonight.’ Something squealed in my tone of voice, which made me sound foolish and impotent.

  ‘Sorry, why?’

  A blockage was finally removed from the well. ‘The mess! The fucking mess. The garbage. The old newspapers. The dirty cups and plates. The food spilled everywhere. The heating is on full. It’s twenty-four degrees outside. The windows and curtains are closed. It stinks in here! You are ruining my books. My things. Everything.’

  His expression never changed from a weary puzzlement. ‘But I get cold.’

  I tried to control my voice. ‘I know you have problems. But you are your own worst enemy. You make no effort.’

  ‘In what way, sorry?’

  Holding my head in my hands, I said, ‘Jesus, Jesus, Jesus.’

  He sniggered.

  ‘It’s not funny. This is not a joke.’ I heard my voice begin to break again.

  He reached over the side of his chair, picked up a beer can and took a throaty swig. I watched, transfixed by frustration. Observing this simple, unapologetic, seemingly carefree act made me realise that I despised him. ‘Did you hear what I said? You have to go.’

  ‘Sorry, where?’

  I raised both hands into the air. ‘I don’t know. Anywhere that’s not here. Home. You have parents.’

  ‘No,’ he said conclusively, with a shake of his head. ‘Can’t go there. I never want to see them again.’

  I cut him off, not wanting to kick-start another self-pitying ramble in which he moaned about those who had wronged him, without ever possessing the gumption to acknowledge his own role in the dispute. In his mind, he was blameless, always, like now. ‘Well, you have to go somewhere. Find a place. I can’t live like this any more.’