Some Will Not Sleep: Selected Horrors

by Adam Nevill

  The remainder of the reception sparkled. It was all very quiet and civilised. Not a bad little environment in which to pass twelve hours while reading the great books under a good overhead light in a comfortable leather chair that could be reclined. The three nightly patrols could be done in fifteen minutes each, and who was watching to say that I even did them? Though it was always my intention to complete the patrols; it would be good to stretch my legs after sitting still for hours, and it was also one of my duties, and what little I was being paid to do, I would do. I am a recluse, but that is no screen for laziness.

  And during my first four weeks, I often eased backwards in the recliner and congratulated myself on discovering a successful escape route from life and its responsibilities. I had pulled it off. I was actually free, at last, of them. Free to reverse my absolute ignorance of most subjects too, because I had created an opportunity to re-educate myself with what I thought significant. I began reading the historians, the philosophers, the popular scientists. I made lists of all the things that I wanted to know. I spent my days, between shifts, in bookshops and public libraries, making careful choices. I took a broadsheet newspaper in with me each night and subscribed to two literary journals as insurance. And if I liked, which I often did, I would just sit and stare into the rain. A much derided and underrated pastime, though one that must be meted out or the mind can turn against itself.

  My new position was showing so much promise that I even began to prefer a night shift to the days that I spent in my dim lodgings. Though only until my second month, when Dulle Griet Huis decided to show its true self to me.

  At first the alterations within the building were barely perceptible: minor alterations in temperature and lighting that I easily shrugged off. But these atmospheric changes soon intensified to command my full attention and discourage me from making the second patrol at 2 a.m., when the activity reached its peak.

  I began to feel uncomfortable using the staircases. And it took time to define exactly what was making me feel peculiar. But I reduced it to an unaccountable manifestation of enclosure. After midnight, when a silence fell over the world outside, my chest would tighten from more than exertion, the air would feel unnaturally cold about me, and I would struggle to catch my breath, while all the time something pushed at my thoughts. Squeezed them into sudden frenzies of recollection and paranoia and fear that seemed unaccountable when I returned to my desk downstairs.

  The sudden claustrophobic feeling was accompanied by shadows. In every case, at the edge of my sight, I would catch sudden flits of movement. Movement loaded with the expectation of an appearance behind it. Only no one ever came into view. The shadows seemed to come down the stairs after me, as if their owners were closely following my descent to the ground. Or at times, as I walked to a lower floor, a shadow, that was not my own, would rush around a corner on the stairwell ahead of me.

  A few times I even called out, ‘Hello there?’ But no one answered or showed themselves. When I stood still and applied a steady and careful scrutiny to my surroundings there was no longer any evidence of these moving shadows at all. But the lights on the walls, and the ceiling lights on each landing, would dim. It gave me the impression that either my sight was failing or the environment in which I stood was gradually disappearing into darkness.

  Or did the lights dim? Was all this merely a result of my tired eyes? These were only vague and peripheral hallucinations and I was unaccustomed to night work. I was not, after all, a nocturnal animal and was only becoming one by design. Who could say how it would affect me? So I passed the phenomenon off as the early signs of sleep deprivation, as it always happened at around two in the morning when my need for rest was at its peak.

  The noises were more alarming because of their unaccountability. They came after the beginning of the shadows. Joined them, in fact. And I knew after checking the duty roster that the sounds were originating from inside empty apartments.

  It was as if a tremendous wind could gust through an open window on the outside of the building and narrow its way through the rooms and corridors of the penthouse apartments, before striking the front doors, from the inside, with terrific force. A blow that made the doors bang, then shake in their frames.

  Perhaps, I’d thought, this might have been caused by strong air currents, or updrafts from the air-risers. I knew nothing of the physics of air circulation in these old buildings and there was, of course, no one to ask. But the sudden boom and tremble of a door beside me, at the precise moment of my passing across the landing, began to do strange things to my nerves, and to my imagination. I suffered the unsettling notion that someone had thrown their full weight against the inner surface of a front door, as a disturbed guard dog will hurl its body at a door at the sound of a postman. My increasing paranoia suggested that something inside the empty apartments was demanding my attention.

  ‘Excuse me?’ I would say to the closed doors. ‘It’s me. Jack. The nightwatchman. Everything OK?’ But there was never an answer and I realised there was no one to answer because, when I checked the desk ledger, the affected flats were clearly marked VACANT. But the noises occurred even if it was a windless and calm night. And on both sides of the building too.

  Still, this was a dream job and by the middle of my third month I convinced myself that I could live with the malfunctioning lights, the strange inner winds and the odd mental side-effects of working nights. But no sooner had I renewed my vow to stay than my tolerance of Dulle Griet Huis was challenged again, though by a more tangible threat.

  What began to introduce itself to me from the occupied apartments was more alarming than any tricks that the lights or air currents were playing on my senses. And I had never seen such a collection of the aged assembled under one roof. A community at the height of dysfunction and eccentricity too, and one that had kept itself completely hidden from me for the first ten weeks of my employment. I suspected that it was my stubborn presence within the building that had awoken them.

  The first residents that I saw were the Al Farez Hussein sisters, of number 22, who were both over one hundred years of age. Or so Manuel told me once the sisters began to make an occasional appearance during my shift. And I had no reason to disbelieve him.

  Upon entering the building (though Manuel had no recollection of them leaving during his day shift), they would walk at an impossibly slow pace across reception, as if they were performing an odd Regency dance that had been slowed down to such a degree that they didn’t appear to move anywhere but slowly up and down, from one foot to the other.

  After offering a customary smile and wave, I would return my eyes to my book, only to then be fooled by the illusion of the sisters making quicker progress across reception. And their speedier movements, glimpsed in my peripheral vision, were aided by them dropping to all fours and scurrying.

  Impossible and no doubt another strange quirk of sleep deprivation. Because the two figures, swaddled in robes, one in white and the other in black, were so shrunken and hunched that it would have been impossible for them to move with any rapidity, let alone ease.

  They never spoke a word to me in any language, but their eyes were always fixed upon me as they made their way to the elevator doors. One small face, treacle-brown and wrinkled like a raisin, would turn to me, so that the two small glints of obsidian within the collapsed flesh of the eye sockets could study me. The other wore a mask. A golden beaked mask, attached to her face by a series of chains that disappeared inside her burka. I believe it was supposed to represent the face of a hawk.

  But there were unappealing curiosities within that building far graver than the sisters.

  The first thing I noticed about Mrs Goldstein from number 30 was her extraordinary hairstyle: a perfect bulb of silver wisps. But completely transparent from any angle. And through the illusory lustre of this spherical creation, her birdlike skull, bleached between the liver spots, would present itself horribly. Her nose was a papery blade, while the flesh of her avian features was
as transparent as boiled chicken skin in the places where her make-up had rubbed away. At the age of 98 her body had also wizened to such an extent that the top of her head only reached the bottom of my ribcage. But she moved quickly, in a spidery manner, from the front entrance to the lift doors in reception, aided by two black sticks that moved like quick chopsticks. I never saw her wear anything but high heels and the ancient black suits that her maid, Olive, hung from her skeletal body. She made me think of a marionette with a papier mâché devil face. She was no sight for the faint-hearted, certainly not at night.

  Mrs Goldstein and Olive resided in a palatial three-bedroom penthouse. And Mrs Goldstein did not care for me at all. Olive told me. Whispered it to me with a smile as her round Filipino face passed my desk one evening. ‘She think you too young to be porter. Not married. No children. He up to no good, she say.’ Olive soon became fond of reporting to me all of her mistress’s disparaging remarks about me.

  I began to see the pair once each night at eight. Olive would bring her mistress downstairs for a short walk around the square outside the front of the building. Or so they said. Again, as with the Hussein sisters, I was stricken with the uncomfortable notion that they had only come inside reception to stare at me.

  According to the desk ledger, all of the other permanent residents were female too, but bedridden so I never saw them. Though I would sometimes hear their nurses talking in the stairwells.

  But it was number 18 on the eighth floor that housed not only the building’s longest-standing resident but also its most sinister occupants: Mrs Van den Bergh and her full-time nurse, Helma.

  My first brush with Helma and Mrs Van den Bergh created such a powerful impression upon me that I suffered a nightmare the following day while I slept at home. A long, random and tortuous dream scenario in which I was wed to ancient Mrs Van den Bergh in a meadow, while my parents and two sisters were slaughtered with Halal knives in a pen nearby to the accompanying sound of clapping children and excited young women; a crowd that I was unable to see clearly, but which circled the corral in a strange slow dance.

  Inexplicable, or, after all that has happened since, perhaps not.

  Mrs Van den Bergh was a long, skeletal individual who bore little resemblance to the living, and was confined to a wheelchair as ancient as its occupant. The first time we were introduced, I was reminded of the minor royal of an Egyptian dynasty who had been unwrapped and displayed in a case in the British Museum, in London, where I had once seen it as a teenager during a school trip. Mrs Van den Bergh’s skin was so mottled with liverish discolourations she appeared brown-skinned in any light. Her gender was indistinguishable too, and the black capillaries visible beneath the translucent skin of her bald head and her hands reminded me of the baby birds that fall from nests and that I sometimes found as a child.

  Always dressed in a leisure suit, faded like a candlewick bedspread in a Schipperskwartier squat and stained down the front, the heiress was contained in her chair by canvas ankle and wrist straps as if she were a danger to the public. And yet her eyes were as clear and blue as the arctic waters that lap around an iceberg.

  Despite her shocking appearance, Mrs Van den Bergh had once been a great beauty, in possession of a brilliant mind. She had laid waste to three husbands and was worth over one hundred million euros from property ownership. She had also been a notorious high-society nymphomaniac. ‘A tart! Dreadful!’ Helma told me, with one of her conspiratorial asides, on our very first meeting. Mrs Van den Bergh then apparently entered a kleptomaniac phase before finally becoming a pyromaniac. In short, a maniac. ‘She brought the dark man here.’

  Helma’s comment about the ‘dark man’ confused me – was this a racial slur? – and when I tried to question her about it, Helma only smiled enigmatically. Helma would never answer any direct questions; Helma liked to talk at me. I was only there to listen; it was the role that she had assigned to me. But she could tell that I was curious about her ward and she would occasionally elaborate when I frowned at some provocative remark or suggestive detail.

  According to Helma, a trauma in the 1930s had transformed Mrs Van den Bergh into a deeply disturbed young woman. It was the birth of her ‘gaga child’ that caused the breakdown; an incident she never recovered from. ‘Gaga child’ was an infantile expression that I had never heard before, but Helma was referring to children born with both mental and physical disabilities that were unacceptable in high society, or as heirs. Children that were shipped off and contained within a private sanatorium in Carlsbad, along with several Habsburg princes of which the world still knows nothing, according to Helma.

  It was an odd revelation to confide in the uniformed security guard, and as a result it was a story that I disbelieved.

  Apparently, Mrs Van den Bergh’s two equally glittering and talented sisters then spent the next seventy years containing their damaged and errant elder sister at Dulle Griet Huis. Having spent small fortunes both on hush money to extinguish scandals and for treatment at the best Swiss facilities, it seemed they had finally settled on an expensive method of security combined with sedation that Helma excelled at. Though Helma never presented the treatment to me in that way.

  In this part of the world, I also quickly learned that it was not unusual for an employee, with a live-in position, to make themselves indispensable to an elderly resident who had hired them, or for whom they were recruited as guardians by trustees. It was grotesque in the tradition of the Gothic, and redolent of the age when hysterical wives were secured in locked attics. If people had seen how Mrs Van den Bergh had lived under the occupation of Helma, they would have taken their chances in a Romanian nursing home.

  Helma was a garrulous, paranoid and profoundly manipulative woman in her fifties, but still almost half a century younger than her patient. In my third month, the frequency of Helma’s visitations to my desk increased to at least once each night that I was on duty. Sometimes, to my chagrin, she would stay an hour and talk at me.

  Helma also slipped into the habit of wheeling Mrs Van den Bergh down to reception and leaving her beside my desk, while she ‘popped out’ to fetch nick-nacks from the store open late on Kleine Hondstraat. Why these items were not procured during the day remained a mystery, but I began to suspect that Helma wanted me and the heiress to become acquainted. Though how we would form a connection was doubly mystifying.

  Mrs Van den Bergh’s mind was long gone. During these short but uncomfortable periods when she sat beside my desk, there were odd moments of lucidity from her, in which an impeccable voice would rise from the chair and wish me ‘Good morning’. But most of the time, there were only streams of gibberish about someone called ‘Florine’, before Helma returned to the building and reclaimed her ward from beside my desk.

  It wasn’t until my fifteenth week as the nightwatchman of Dulle Griet Huis that I was reluctantly drawn across the threshold of their penthouse and plunged into the insane world that the apartment enclosed.

  During my second patrol, at midnight, one Sunday evening, the front door to flat 18 was open before I completed the final set of stairs to the landing of the eighth floor. And Helma was waiting for me, wearing a pair of Jimmy Choo shoes, silk fishnet tights, a pink Chanel suit and more make-up than a drag queen’s eyelids could support. ‘Oh, Jack. I need to ask you a big favour. Would you watch Mrs Van den Bergh for an hour? I have to pop out. Something’s come up and it’s very important. An emergency.’

  Emergency, my ass, I had thought. ‘Afraid I can’t. I have to watch the cameras downstairs.’

  Helma’s eyes both brightened and hardened and they held me still. This was not a woman who would be defied. ‘It’ll be all right for a little while. Now, she’s been fed and had her medicine, so she won’t be any trouble at all. This is for you.’ Helma’s lacquered claws stuffed two twenty-Euro notes into one of my hands, and then squashed my fingers shut over my paper-filled palm.

  I tried again to refuse, then attempted to give the money back, but I found
myself swiftly ‘shoo-shoo’d’, as if Helma were talking to a house cat, and then manoeuvred inside the flat. Upon entrance, I wondered if I was now on some kind of illegal payroll and complicit in the imprisonment and extortion of Dulle Griet Huis’s equivalent of Howard Hughes.

  Then, from the living room, before I could get my bearings in the dingy hallway of the penthouse, a familiar voice began to shriek. ‘Florine! Florine! Florine! Let them out! Please God, let them out! Florine!’ It was Mrs Van den Bergh, and no doubt disturbed from some drugged nap by the volume of Helma’s voice in the hallway as she ushered me deeper into the dark and cluttered interior of the apartment. Helma had been guiding me toward the kitchen, but stopped to shout through an open door on the right-hand side of the hallway. ‘Stop it! You’re just showing off because Jack’s here! You only want attention!’

  It didn’t sound like showing off to me, and I cringed inside my skin at the awkwardness of the whole situation. I had come to Dulle Griet Huis to avoid interaction with other people, as well as the predictable conflicts that would result.

  ‘Florine! Florine! Florine! She’s hitting me!’ from Mrs Van den Bergh.

  ‘Enough! Enough of that!’ Helma screamed.

  From the hall, I peered into the living room while Helma and Mrs Van den Bergh screeched at each other like two vultures in a nest fighting over a vole.

  Around the room, sealed boxes marked FRAGILE competed for space with sloping heaps of documents and printed receipts. Letters piled up in drifts against mimsy porcelain figures and silver utensils. It looked like someone was running a business, or a racket. Every other door in the hall was secured by a deadlock. I never found out why, though, after what Helma and Mrs Van den Bergh revealed to me, any further curiosity about their living arrangements was short-lived.

  Amongst the debris, Mrs Van den Bergh and her chair were walled into a corner by a large television set. Her hairless, shrieking head looked ghastly when lit up by the greens and whites of the flickering screen.