by Adam Nevill
I crept down the hallway and glanced into the kitchen. The squalor had returned with what I suspected was renewed vigour, and I briefly marvelled at how one man could produce so much filth and waste.
I moved down the hallway to the bathroom. Closed the door and stuffed my ears with wet toilet paper. Under a powerful blast of hot water, I scrubbed and scratched at my flesh in the shower. I felt violated.
When I’d finished in the bathroom, the soundtrack in the living room had changed, and I recalled what Michael had said in the street. Beside the discordant thumping of Ewan’s feet on the floor of the living room as he danced about drunkenly, he was now playing a new CD. It wasn’t music exactly, unless it was one of those industrial noise outfits like Coil, but I heard a series of elongated sounds, as if recorded backwards in a fuzz of static and played at a slow rotation. An electric cacophony scratching itself around the ceiling of my living room, but all going the wrong way. Yes, it was like a record being pushed backwards against a stylus.
It made me tense, and fragile. The sound was inside my head and it made me writhe inside my skin, as if a chunk of polystyrene was being scraped down a windowpane next to my ear.
I listened outside the door of the living room. Through the swollen and fetid air, I heard Ewan talking to someone. It was hard to make out any words, but the tone of his voice surprised me because he seemed to be pleading with an individual that he was familiar with.
Unable to face another confrontation, or even the sight of his red face and oily dreadlocks, I moved silently into my bedroom. I pulled my dresser against the door to block access, and then changed my bedlinen. Lying in bed, with that insane, menacing noise coming at me through the walls, I thought of calling the police. But it was getting late, and I didn’t have the strength, or the presence of mind, to fully articulate all that I was feeling to the authorities. I made another vow to do it in the morning.
Sometime near 3 a.m. I was woken from an unpleasant dream, experienced in sleep that was fitful at best. The dream existed in my memory more as a sense of something unpleasant than as a definite narrative. But I awoke feeling as if I had been tightly bound, within a dark space where gravity had ceased to exist and in which my feet rose above my head towards something close to their soles. An aperture that suggested a large, open mouth, one moving in circles above me, while I struggled to keep my body on the mattress.
I could again hear the terrible vortex too, the maelstrom of live current and static in the living room, but it was also horribly mixed with something far worse than anything that I’d heard before. This new sound had yanked me from sleep and lasted for no more than a few minutes, but they were minutes in which every single second stretched itself, until my fear and discomfort became unbearable. I heard what I can only compare to the deep croaking of a bullfrog, as if the amplified sound had been stretched backwards and played in a perverse surround-sound effect, circling the living room, up near the ceiling. Between these amphibian barks was a sound not dissimilar to an old woman in the final stages of emphysema whom I’d once heard coughing in a hospital ward.
Shortly after the coughing or barking ceased, and at the exact instant that one tremendous phosphorescent flash lit up the hallway outside my room and shone beneath my door, I heard Ewan leave the lounge. This was followed by the hurried sound of his bare feet slapping down the hallway to my room. Staring at the door, my every hair on end, I watched the handle snapped up and down from the outside. Ewan was trying to get in.
I sat up in bed and pulled my knees up against my chest. ‘What do you want?’
‘Let me in,’ Ewan demanded, his voice slurred by drink and breathless with excitement.
‘No!’
But the door now began to bang against the dresser, which immediately rocked back and forth. He made a gap and threw his shoulder against the door.
‘Fuck off!’ I roared, but heard nothing besides his laboured breathing. He hurled himself against the wood repeatedly, until the dresser began to inch further away from the door-frame.
By the time I had my mobile phone open to call the police, the dresser had slid away from the door and Ewan was inside the room.
He was naked save for his fetid boxer shorts. Face red and covered with a sheen of oily sweat, his eyes full of maniacal excitement but struggling to focus, he tottered back and forth on the spot. ‘She’s here,’ he declared, and waved his hands above his head. ‘Fluttering, fluttering all about. She’s here. She’s so beautiful, it hurts to look at her.’
I said nothing. Completely worn down, even resigned somehow, my fight had fled in the face of Ewan’s insanity. I just listened to him rant at me for over ten minutes, endlessly repeating the same jubilant boast about the ‘Goddess’s arrival and beauty’. Eventually, Ewan’s drunkenness and fatigue overwhelmed him and he stalked out of my room to weave his way back to the living room.
I sat still until he turned off the Necrophile Autopsy album at around 4.30 a.m., and fell into a coma of exhaustion with my nose filled with the scent of his soiled white flesh that had polluted my room – belly of a fish, vinegar-sweat of vomit.
It was the last night I would ever spend in the flat.
Julie met me at eight in the evening, at a bar at Notting Hill Gate. We each had a couple of drinks for courage in the beer garden, the indigo sky above us streaked with apricot as dusk set in. We then headed to my place, our intention to introduce the civilising presence of a woman in order to persuade Ewan to leave the flat.
From the distance, when we reached the top of Moscow Road, we saw the brilliant white flashes erupting from around the curtains of the living room. Several other pedestrians had also paused on their way to Queensway, or the Whiteleys Shopping Centre, to stare at the flickering phosphorescence.
Julie giggled nervously. ‘What’s he doing up there, setting off fireworks?’
I squeezed her hand.
We entered the communal hallway and Julie said, ‘Oh, my God, the smell. I think I’m going to be sick.’
I pressed a finger to my lips and swallowed the impulse to cough. Even on the stairs, the miasma clung to our faces before penetrating our mouths and noses in a belligerent, insistent manner.
‘What could make a smell like that?’ Julie whispered.
‘Someone who hasn’t washed for two years,’ I replied. But this stench, surely, went beyond the bacteria that incubate on an unwashed body and within soiled clothes. Again, I detected what I imagined to be the stench of burning bones, incendiary and sulphurous and cloying.
On the landing outside the front door, Julie shook her head at the noise and pressed her fingertips inside her ears. A painfully distorted and warped sound was in full swing again, but seemingly in the living room and up above our heads too. Inside the unlit hallway, vibrations thrummed through the floor, the walls and the very air. Ewan must have fused the circuits too, because the lights weren’t working at all. ‘Nothing,’ I said, after flicking the light switch in the passage up and down.
‘But how . . .’ She didn’t need to finish her question. I had also arrived at the same realisation that it could not have been the television or stereo, or any other appliance, making the sounds and incandescent flickers and flashes that had guided us down the passage and deeper inside the thickening bestial stench.
Eyes in a squint, and with one forearm across my nose and mouth, I led the way to the living-room door. Behind me, with both hands clamped over her ears, Julie followed, her face pale and intense in the brief washes of sickly light that almost crackled across the moist curves of our eyeballs. We stopped by the door and dithered, staring at each other.
‘Go in,’ she said, breathlessly. ‘Go in. See what the fuck he’s doing.’
Unsteady on my feet, disoriented by the circling noise, I said, ‘Stay outside.’ And added, ‘He’s probably naked.’
I don’t think Julie heard me. She was just staring at the door of the living room, her face set with a purpose that I recognised and should have tried to d
eter. Nauseous to the tips of my fingers, I was unable to recover enough courage to do much but vacillate. And Julie pushed herself around me and opened the living-room door.
‘No!’ I cried out, but it was too late. She stepped through the doorway and into the maelstrom of white strobe and the lurching shadows. The door shut behind her with a force that made me jump. But the scream that followed her entrance into the living room snapped me out of my paralysis.
Before my hand managed to grasp the door handle, the discordant rotation of sound did not so much stop as implode, as if being sucked back through a tiny aperture in the ceiling, on the other side of the door. I yanked the handle down and stumbled into the room.
At first, the scene that confronted me seemed anticlimactic. It was dark; there was no illumination beyond a faint bluish residue of light with no definable source. That faded in seconds, leaving only a yellow glow of street-light that seeped around the curtains. But on seeing the expressions on the faces of the two occupants, I realised that something extraordinary had just occurred within that room.
Standing still, with her arms at her sides, Julie stared fixedly at the far corner where two walls joined the ceiling. Her expression struck me as peculiarly childlike as she gaped, her eyes wide with either shock or wonder or a combination of the two emotions.
The second figure in the room was Ewan, and he was standing where the coffee table had once been. He was completely naked, his beard, hair and body wet and dripping, the moisture adding an ugly prehistoric aspect to his red and grimacing face. The floor was also sodden. Ewan remained motionless but glared at Julie with a look of such antipathy and loathing that my blood slowed. His fists were clenched and stringy muscles corded his sallow forearms.
I snatched Julie’s elbow and, although she turned towards me, she did not immediately recognise me, or even where she was. Amidst the distraction of complete shock, she looked through me, or past me, or even inside herself.
I led her, like an obedient, sleepy child pulled from the back seat of a car after a long drive, out of the living room, down the hall, out the front door and away from the reeking darkness of my home. I took her away, as much for her safety as to escape the sight of Ewan’s fierce, wet face.
Julie stopped sobbing in the back of the black cab that I’d hailed from Queensway to take us to her flat. Looking peculiarly thin and weak, she leaned against me in the back of the car and refused to speak as I stroked her hair, my own thoughts frantic. What had she just seen? What the hell was Ewan doing in that room, naked? What was the source of the flashing light? Had Julie seen the origin? Was that why she’d been gaping at the ceiling?
By the time we had reached her flat, Julie had fallen asleep on my shoulder. I roused her into a stumbling drowsiness, to get her inside and into bed, still fully dressed. She curled her body around me. I asked her if she was ill, and if I should call a doctor, but she shook her head. ‘Tell me, baby,’ I pleaded. ‘For God’s sake, tell me. What did you see?’
‘I can’t really remember. I just felt so sick and dizzy in that room. The smell. It nearly made me faint. And the lightning. It was like lightning and it blinded me. And I slipped. The floor was all wet. But when I looked at Ewan, I saw something falling onto his face.’
‘What? His face?’
‘Something wet. A jet of something that was silvery, like mercury. It was coming out of the corner of the ceiling and splashing onto his face. Into his mouth . . . I’m so tired, baby.’ She was asleep in minutes after the short confession. Over the next few days, I managed to get even less out of her.
Although the police called at the flat twice that week, they never raised an answer from inside. Holly and Michael moved out four days after me. Not so much because of the noise – though they claimed that it remained a considerable nuisance – but because of an electrical fault of some kind. They told me that a massive surge of power had melted their fuse box and most of the cables around the mainframe. Their landlord was struggling to repair the extensive damage, or even identify the cause of the fault, so they and the cats were set up with temporary accommodation in Westbourne Grove.
The next day I extracted a promise of financial assistance from my father and then employed a barrister specialising in civil law. He began to prepare my case for a forcible removal of Ewan from my property. Bizarrely, because Ewan hadn’t technically forced his way inside, and had a key to the front door, I had to pursue a private prosecution, and these things, I found, took time. It seemed the police had neither the time nor the brief to do much at all. So I stayed at Julie’s for the next four weeks, unwilling to even set foot in my own home again until Ewan, the terrible smell that he brought with him, and the sounds were gone.
But every other day during that month of exile, I still made my way back to the flat and stood across the road and watched the flashing lights around the curtains of the living room. Down on the pavement, night after night, I thought to myself: this is how civilisation ends. Standards decline, accountability ends, the rule of law is impotent, the thugs take over and do what they will. And those of us softened by convention, courtesy and all the privileges of post-historical freedom are dispossessed, victimised and turned into refugees in our own neighbourhoods and homes. It was the first time in my life that I’d ever felt tested. Really tested. And I’d proven myself incapable of meeting the challenge. But in my defence, there was no preparation in life for characters like Ewan, or the strange things that they worshipped.
On the Monday of the fourth week, there was no flashing at the windows. Nor on the Wednesday, Thursday or Friday. I could barely contain my excitement and I even dared to think that Ewan had left after reading the summons posted through the door, requesting his appearance in a magistrate’s court.
Julie made me promise that I would not enter the flat without the police. My barrister also advised against it. But curiosity and self-righteous anger made the decision for me. This was, after all, my home.
On a Sunday morning, one month after I had abandoned my own sanctuary, I snuck away from Julie’s flat on the pretence that I was going for a run in Kensington Palace Gardens, and I went to my flat. My desire to know if Ewan was inside was bolstered by mental images of my smashed record and CD collection. The mere thought of what he might have done to my books could leave me shaking.
But I dithered in the street below for nearly an hour, buying a smoothie and a latte, before quizzing the owners of the Cypriot shop, the Kurdish 24-hour store and the staff of the Greek restaurant about Ewan. All of them claimed they had not seen him for over a week. ‘Good customer. He has the sweet tooth, aye,’ the Kurdish owner of the grocery said. ‘But the smell?’ He shrugged his shoulders. ‘Maybe not so many Mars Bars, aye? He better off with the soap, aye?’ I forced a laugh and hoped that it sounded sincere; for me, Ewan was no laughing matter.
Eventually, in the bright sunlight and under a blue sky, I rang the buzzer, beside the street-level door, to my own apartment. There was no response, but I never really expected one. Encouraged, I entered the communal hallway of the building.
The stench of Ewan’s occupation was still present. Very much so, but again something had altered within it. The dreadful burned-bone smell had been overwhelmed by an odour of meat left in a dustbin on a hot day. I pulled the neck of my shirt up and covered my nose. I expected to find Ewan’s body; the anticipation filled me with a macabre optimism.
Inside the flat, the curtains were closed and the lights were out. Nothing flickered from beneath the living-room door. Three times I shouted Ewan’s name, but there was no answer.
The instinctive awareness of vacancy is a strange extra sense, but one much under-appreciated. My hunch that the flat was empty was reinforced by the sharp scent of stale urine, a penetrating reek of ammonia and phosphate timelessly associated with abandoned places. What had once been a show home for a young West London professional now reeked like a derelict squat, stained by the piss of drunks. The bathroom looked like a nightclub toilet left
to dry; I couldn’t bear even to look inside the toilet pan, and the entire floor was sticky. As were the veneered floorboards of the hall, all tacky beneath the soles of my running shoes. Briefly, my rage flared at the realisation that Ewan had been urinating on the floors and walls, and potentially for the entire time that I had been absent from the flat. The cream walls had a tidemark. Dust and grime had become ingrained in the dry piss. When a peculiar, numb resignation took hold of me, my rage seeped away.
I inspected my room, where the greatest saturation of his excreta was visible on the bed, the soft furnishings and on clothing. The moment the whole place was cleaned by professionals, I also knew that I would put the flat on the market. I doubted that the most powerful cleaning agents would ever get rid of the smell.
Drawing blinds and curtains and opening windows as I moved from room to room, I let the sunlight illumine the destruction, the filth and the desecration of a place that I had once called home. The worst mess waited for me in the kitchen. Where I had once sautéed mushrooms, drizzled olive oil onto salads, and oven-baked seasoned Mediterranean vegetables, the meaty scent of human excrement dominated. And then I saw the walls.
A bolus of revulsion rose from my already queasy stomach. Was this a warning to intruders, or some hideous parody of religious iconography in a place of worship? Drawn in human shit, the images on the walls resembled something a precocious but deeply disturbed child might finger-paint in a specialist nursery school. Some kind of abhorrent forest had been daubed onto the Pacific Blue of my walls. Lumpy and crusting branches smeared away from the impression of the trunks. But it was the suggestion of what sat in the highest branches of this faecal arboretum that made me turn away, more in fear than in disgust. A sophisticated level of detail had been applied to the depiction of a group of figures with tatty heads and large mouths, all huddled into themselves. The mouths were filled with tilting spikes.