by Adam Nevill
ADAM NEVILL
Under a
Watchful Eye
MACMILLAN
For Hugh ‘Hershey the Wiseman’ Simmons,
who helped me pull my finger out,
and who always manifested whenever I floundered.
‘The longing had taken me from a world of radiant light, of love and sympathy, and brought me to this dim, shadowy world to which the light could barely penetrate.’
Mme. d’Espérance (Shadow Land, 1897)
Contents
PART 1 YELLOW TEETH
1 Many Communications Must Remain in Doubt
2 This Coat is Too Tight
3 A Sack with a Narrow Opening
4 Broken Night
5 Incertitude
6 Down the Last Valley
7 The Same Event in a Converse Direction
8 I Can See in an Absence of Light
9 Sinking in Darkness, Rising in the White Room
10 Hinderers in the Passage
PART 2 THIS PRISON OF THE FLESH
11 I Am Not Here Any More
12 Second Death
13 Indeed, I Have Seen my Sister
14 Greylands
15 Discarnate Inhabitants of Hades
16 A Dark, Slowly Flowing Flood
17 There Were Two of Me in that Room
18 Born through a Cloudy Medium
19 Stand Beside the Door and Let It Take You
20 A Tight Glove Pulled from my Finger
21 Flight from Malignant Forms
22 Carry Me Softly on Shoeless Feet
23 She Beckoned and I Followed
24 Thousands of Invisible Cords
25 The Discarded Coat
26 A Vast Blackness, Infinity
27 Shed the Body’s Veil
PART 3 THROUGH THE MIST
28 My Soul Rose Trembling
29 Looking at Myself from Nothing
30 In the Body of my Resurrection
31 River of Darkness
Acknowledgements
LOST GIRL
NO ONE GETS OUT ALIVE
THE RITUAL
LAST DAYS
PART 1
YELLOW TEETH
1
Many Communications Must Remain in Doubt
He just appeared at the edge of Seb’s vision.
Tall, dressed in dark clothing and exuding a faint impression of menace, the motionless figure was standing upon the red shoreline like an affront to the pink, blue and yellow doors of the pretty beach huts lining the promenade. The sudden, intense scrutiny gave Seb a start. Momentarily, even a blurred face suggested itself inside his mind, peering about, though his imagination must have been responsible for that.
Seb laid his coffee and notebook down, turned on the bench and squinted into the distance. He was sitting near the cliff edge on the headland south of the beach, and even on such a clear day he’d never make out the man’s eyes at that range. But had they been in the same room, and had he been glared at by an unseemly stranger, Seb’s discomfort would have been the same.
Fifty feet below where Seb was perched between Broadsands and Elberry Cove, the empty sea stretched to a vague horizon. The coastline curved north to Paignton and distant Torquay, the claret shores and grey cliffs reaching for Hope’s Nose. His thoughts had been wandering out there, seeking the elusive impetus for what he was trying to write, but his reverie was obliterated by this abrupt intrusion.
Under closer observation, what became more surprising was that the figure didn’t appear to be standing on the beach. He seemed to be positioned a few feet out from where the sand ended. The man must have been standing ankle-deep in the shallows, or was perched on a submerged rock. This created the impression that the man was standing upon the water. A curious trick of perspective for sure.
From his raised position, Seb could see only the far half of the beach, but no more. A few dogs raced about, darting in and out of the gentle surf, and a few people dawdled and chatted near their frantic pets. Still too cold for bathers in April and there were no pleasure craft out that morning, but the sparse crowd on the beach appeared oblivious to this lone sentinel standing so near to them. Or was he so unsightly that they pretended the man was invisible?
If Seb wasn’t mistaken, a growing stillness had also been imposed by the solitary dark shape. The cries of the seabirds were gradually softening to silence inside his ears. And through the spreading quiescence the sea’s chop rose as his absorption increased. Soon the running water no longer sounded like the sea at all.
Seb felt himself drawn outwards to be engulfed in a moment detached from the world. The breeze dropped. He became disoriented and slightly nauseous. Louder was the gush of the water’s current. His mind cleared and was uncluttered for . . . he didn’t know for how long exactly, but probably only for moments. And then, from far away and behind his head, or from deep within his mind, he heard a voice call his name.
Sebastian.
A train’s steam whistle shrieked as if imitating the cry of the dinosaurs whose grinning and collapsed remains embedded the coastline where the limestone and brick-red breccia sands crushed each other. Seb flinched, but even his gasp seemed to have originated from a mouth behind his shoulder.
Two miles distant, the train carrying holidaymakers chuffed slowly into sight on the opposing headland, making its way to the great viaducts built by Brunel. Clouds of steam billowed and unravelled into vanishing rags of vapour. A long line of carriages, painted chocolate and cream, followed the engine’s slow, military determination.
Seb had lived in the bay for three years, but the train still summoned images of Agatha Christie’s world: flappers and gents with pencil-thin moustaches who dressed for dinner. And he clawed at this nostalgia as if it were buoyant wreckage in deep water with no sight of land. He near begged the presence of the train to return him to the world that he had known only seconds before.
And it did. His fixation with whoever stood on the shore was severed.
When he returned his attention to the beach, and scanned its red length, the watching figure was no longer there either.
Gone.
A few days passed and Seb had nearly forced a rational explanation for the disquieting experience: he was tired, maybe his sugar level was low, he had been mesmerized by the sun-flecked water.
But when he saw the man again he knew who it was.
2
This Coat is Too Tight
Seb had set out his laptop, coffee and water in preparation for the morning’s work on the book that he was struggling to believe in, let alone write. The work in progress barely resembled his previous novels, never rose beyond an imitation of effect and a perfunctory progression of plot, peopled by undefined characters that were mere wraiths of what had been intended.
It had taken him six months to acknowledge that his imagination was failing. The energy at his core was mostly spent, or had leaked away during the writing of his previous novel, a book written with the needle of his inner reader’s compass spinning wildly, in a blizzard of doubt and vain hope, without settling upon any specific direction regarding the book’s quality. He’d remained unsure about the manuscript when he’d delivered to his publisher, as had been his increasingly restless and disheartened readers when it was published.
In the past, the cliff-side gardens in Goodrington, with their panoramic views of the bay, had always been a favourite place to write. Settled on the same bench, he’d worked on two other novels that were special to him. The gardens above the beach huts and promenade, at the north end of Goodrington, were at their best in spring. And that morning, far below his feet, the sea remained dark on either side of a great strip of sunlight. A door in heaven might have cracked to release what glittered
on the water like a million pieces of polished silver, cast all the way to a misted horizon far out at sea. To his right, the surf lapped the shoreline with a pleasing rhythm. If you can’t write here, you can’t cut it anywhere.
Goodrington and distant Brixham might have served as architectural models of coastal towns when sighted at such a remove. Built up the slopes of the hillsides, the white houses with their red roofs were arrayed like Lego structures. Tiny brushes of treetops sprouted from within the settlements and even a toy railway cut behind the seafront. Torbay, and the only place where he’d found peace with himself. But had the place and his comfortable lifestyle made him too content? Was penetrating the surface of the world to recreate its meanings, in unusual and interesting ways, dependent upon times of adversity? He did wonder.
He worried that a flabby self-indulgence had replaced his purpose. Maybe wishful thinking about his books had usurped his critical candour. He’d seen it happen to other writers. Perhaps naivety had swapped places with wisdom and imitation had overrun his trademark strangeness. He also feared that an indifference to the reader had taken hold during the good years. Writing this book had been homework and a chore from the start. But worst of all, he had become incurious.
The palms and the pink and red flowers in the heather sighed, ruffled by a cooling breeze. He inhaled the sweet fragrance of the gardens, placed the computer on his thighs and fired it up.
Long forgotten now, but the first sentence of a new chapter had come to him that morning while he showered. Perhaps the sentence would have invoked the restless urgency that had once driven his writing, near panting alongside him, a mad dog with foamy lips. This opening line might have been the beginning of a scene that would drill through the grey weight of a dull mind to produce a fracture. From a crack would burst the flood.
But Seb never tapped a single key. Way down below, the same solitary figure that he’d seen four days before made a second unwelcome appearance. No features were visible within that spot of bone-white flesh, capped in black, but he was closer.
Once more, Seb suffered the impression he’d caught the figure’s eye and that they were staring at each other across the cliffs and sea. Again, the man wasn’t standing on the dry sand, but seemed to be in the water. Or on it?
Small shapes of children frolicked on the sands of a low tide, a group of people walked dogs, others just meandered behind this sentinel of the shoreline, but none regarded him.
Shielding his eyes, Seb rose and walked to the railing.
The watcher raised his chin as if this distant vigilance had become confrontation.
The effects of another mute communication with the same stranger, and in less than a week, was far worse the second time. Quicker and deeper was Seb’s absorption into that scrutiny. As if struck by a cold updraught of air, he shivered and wanted to shrink to make himself smaller and harder to see. Braced by his own dread, Seb clenched his fists upon the metal fence until his palms hurt.
The swish of the surf, a murmur of faraway traffic, and the oddly clear voice of a boy on the beach faded, until all that he could hear was water running in the distance.
That was not the sea inside his ears, either. This time he was sure about that.
Seb slipped behind the hedgerow, a cover reinforced by a pine growing at a lower level in the gardens. Relief from that distant assiduity was immediate, then cut short by the mention of his name.
Sebastian.
His thoughts slid sideways, queasily. He then feared that his head was dropping to the pavement, or that the ground was rushing towards his face. Where were his feet?
His name had been called from an inner distance and one that took form inside his imagination as a grey and misted space at the edge of his mind. He sensed the drab emptiness was entirely without borders and reached much further than he was glimpsing.
Tasting hormones of terror in a dry mouth, he emerged from behind the shrubbery. Moving his legs was too conscious a manoeuvre.
The stranglehold of the moment abruptly passed and the figure was nowhere to be seen. Not on the water, the sands, the promenade, or in the park behind the beach.
Seb gathered up his things and jammed them inside his rucksack, managing to lose his hat in the process, which slipped down the back of the bench. He was too tense to regroup his wits but restrained himself from breaking into a run. Instead, he followed the serpentine path into Round-ham Gardens, the beauty spot on the headland.
And that was the first time that he didn’t linger to admire the blue expanse of the bay. Distant Torquay was ever a mosaic of white buildings, built over the hills and cliffs, an instant dreamy transport into the Mediterranean. But to hell with the view. Hurrying through a row of pines, their long trunks curved and harrowed for years by the wind, Seb made haste towards Paignton harbour.
Even if the man had been intent on engaging with him, scaling the cliff-side paths behind Seb would have been an impossible feat in the time it had taken Seb to get this far, but he still repeatedly glanced over his shoulder to make sure that he wasn’t being followed.
Hatless and harried, as he moved out of the cliff-side gardens, his mind cast about for an explanation for the irrational sensation. He feared an early onset of dementia, and the worst kind of end that he had imagined for himself. Secondary terrors skimmed over schizophrenia and other hallucination-prone disorders of the mind.
Or had he actually seen a man standing in the water? The same man twice?
He was shaken enough to consider that there was something unnatural about the figure. Perhaps the impossible had been achieved during that strange possession of his mind upon the cliffs; he was even close to believing in the presence of the supernormal. The very subject that had made his name as a writer for so many years. The paranormal had allowed him to become that rarest of writers too: one with a good living. But, regarding the numinous, though he had curiosity and fascination in abundance, he had no faith. Uncharacteristically eager to immerse himself into a crowd, he ran from Paignton harbour to a place he rarely went: the Esplanade.
Unencumbered by family and a confirmed bachelor – having thrown the towel in on all that by thirty-six, fourteen years gone now – the seafront and its attractions had never been designed for him. But the holidaymakers at the tail end of the Easter holiday did not share his reticence. It wasn’t yet May, nor ten in the morning, but due to the warm spring there was already a large gathering of retirees, young families and groups of prospecting teenagers on the front.
Seb mingled amongst the beach blankets, windbreaks and small tents on the beach and hurried across the shoreline in the direction of Preston Sands. Cutting up and onto the Esplanade by the pier, he was engulfed by the fragrant haze of fried sugar and hotdog onions, then beset by the incessant jangle of the arcade’s dark interior. As if he’d forded back across the river Styx and rejoined the living, the assault on his senses was joyous.
He picked up a polystyrene beaker of sweetened coffee to calm his nerves and moved past the shrieks and hurdy-gurdy jingles of the small fairground, pitched beside the adventure playground on the green. Feeling protected and even invigorated by the noise, the very electricity and energy that was relentlessly maintained by a giant pair of throaty speakers, Seb moved to the outskirts of the scene to where the strollers and the stream of cyclists thinned. He found a bench facing the sea and slumped upon it.
Tall white hotels lined up behind his seat. The Lodges, Houses and Palaces still clinging to their Victorian identities. Their cosy familiarity served as a strong arm placed about his shoulders.
Sipping his coffee, Seb made a call to Becky. Recent events had suddenly brought forward one of those times when his need for company, intimacy and affection exceeded his desire for solitude. He’d forgotten what it was like to be intimidated. Yet, in the cliff-side gardens, he’d felt more than merely intruded upon, he’d come away feeling threatened.
As if superimposing itself upon the new scene about Seb, the watcher on the shore’s black s
hape continued to stain his thoughts while he fumbled with his phone. A sense that he was still within the figure’s orbit would not abate.
Becky’s voicemail picked up. Conscious of saying more than usual in a message to her, he also cringed at the note of desperation in his voice. ‘Hi, it’s me. The weather is just fantastic . . . and it’s been a while, so I wondered if you fancied a trip to the seaside . . . Anyway, I’d love to see you again, soon . . . There’s a great new seafood place just opened in Brixham—’
Seb cut off the hesitant stream of inducements because another now called for his attention. The figure in black stood at the pier’s railing between a noodle bar and a seafood concession. And he was closer.
Getting closer.
He couldn’t have been more than a hundred metres away now, which added an even greater intensity to Seb’s discomfort at being observed, and not only from the outside.
On his phone a recorded message played inside his ear, offering a menu of playback, re-record or deletion. And he wished that at least two options were available for far more than a recorded message. He suddenly wanted to undo the beginning of his adult life, because the man standing on the pier, and staring right at him, was becoming horribly familiar.
Can’t be . . .
Seb stood up, upsetting his rucksack and coffee cup.
Two cyclists, riding abreast of each other, whirred past, their heads elongated by helmets into the shape of alien skulls.
Seb trotted across the beach road and slipped between two parked cars to reach the promenade. He clutched at the railings.
His fear was joined by a compulsive curiosity about the stalker’s identity. But more importantly, how had he moved from Goodrington’s shoreline and around the headland to reach the pier? There had been no one behind Seb as he fled the cliff-side gardens. He’d looked back often enough. Of course, it could just be coincidence, two similarly dressed men in different places fixing him with their stare. But Seb was beyond even trying to convince himself of this.