Under a Watchful Eye

by Adam Nevill

  8

  I Can See in an Absence of Light

  When sleep came, its condition was fitful and harassed by an awful dream set inside his house, though the interior was enlarged enough to hold him and Ewan, and those others, forever.

  Seb was much changed, into a naked thing, luminous as a pale worm in dark clay, a skeletal, hairless creature without genitals. A crude operation had been performed between his legs and the wound had been stitched shut with the brown twine that he kept under the kitchen sink.

  Exhausted by the long marches down the never-ending hallways of the building, he had struggled to see through a mist. Dim light the colour of mercury illumined little.

  Crouched behind Ewan, the ranting giant, whose crown of hair had stuck to his skull and neck, Seb had felt perversely safer.

  Like a bearded prophet with a paunch, naked save for a loincloth, Ewan had forged ahead on his thin legs, and swept one arm about in the air as he read from a cluster of dirty papers. Incanting words that Seb never caught, Ewan forced a swift pace. He wanted no delays in their reaching the far-off stutter of pale light that soundlessly flickered ahead.

  Behind Seb others crawled. They were old, filled with fear and eager for him to lead them to a place that he was unaware of. He preferred not to look at them, but heard their bare hands and knees bumping upon the floorboards that soon turned to wet bricks. He also caught snatches of their nonsensical entreaties as he moved.

  ‘Is the light over there?’ someone asked.

  ‘Have you seen my sister?’ another said, as if in answer.

  ‘I cannot get back,’ a voice uttered in a tone that verged on panic.

  Up ahead something waited within the distant whitish static. Perhaps something on the ceiling was worshipped, or just longed for. It never became apparent to Seb, but the crowd considered the light to be a way out of the damp culvert that ran with cold, black water.

  Eventually Ewan discarded the papers and took to swinging one of his old shoes like a priest’s censer. The shoe was filled with soil which Ewan used to fingerpaint a figure onto the moist bricks. Childish images of the same thing, but all the worse for the crude composition that depicted a long, hunched form that moved about on all fours, with its head concealed inside a bag.

  ‘We find ourselves and we find the way back,’ he said to Seb, and someone behind Seb shrieked, ‘Yes!’ in what sounded like a paroxysm of devotion.

  Seb was soon holding aloft his best salad bowl, a vessel choked with filth so that he might resupply the tatty shoe in Ewan’s hand. And down that masonry chute they all stumbled while Ewan spread the graffiti.

  At the threshold of the room of the flashing light, Ewan had leaned down and looped a belt around Seb’s throat. Then dragged him into a flickering space where the sound went backwards.

  With his legs beset by a paralysing sensation of pins and needles, Seb was hauled around a floor that reeked like an ape’s enclosure in a sun-baked zoo. Whimpering with determination to reach the light, he found himself slipping back the way they had already journeyed, until he staggered anew across the wet bricks of the culvert.

  Occasionally, someone would scream from above, someone hanging upside down and reaching for him with their long arms. But within the herd of thin, muttering people, Seb kept moving towards the light.

  The end of the nightmare was horrible without containing much specific imagery. Seb woke, suffering an impression that his body had just been suspended within a dark space, where gravity had ceased to exist. His feet had risen above his head towards something close to his soles. Whatever was above him had suggested itself as a large, open mouth, moving in circles as he struggled to keep his body on the mattress.

  When Seb awoke, his face was taut with dried tears. He sat up, panting for breath, afraid, and almost too alert to have been asleep. Fragments of the dream struck him with an unnatural vividness.

  He sensed that his mother and father had been inside the stuttering light. Had they called out to him? He wasn’t sure when he woke up, but a sense of them had made him yearn for the intermittent light with a ferocity that should have broken him from the nightmare.

  He remained dazed and shaken for several minutes. Recollections from the previous evening seeped into his mind. He hated himself for how quickly he’d become immobilized by cowardice.

  Seb looked at the clock. It had gone two in the afternoon.

  How?

  He’d been exhausted for weeks. He then tried to explain the nightmare with the intensification of his feelings of victimization. They could be responsible for the awful claustrophobia of the dream, which made him resent Ewan even more than he already did, if that were possible. Ewan had reached deeper into his existence. His physical pollution of the house, and his maddening, autistic will was but the first level of torment. It was as if Ewan was now unwilling to be without him at any time, even as he slept.

  Seb swung his legs out of bed.

  Pausing in the corridor outside his room, he could hear footsteps upstairs. Feet shuffling and bumping, interspersed with a low chatter from the television.

  A cupboard was opened and closed, the dulled sound audible through the ceiling. A light clicked on. The ring-pull of a can was cracked and emitted a hiss of gas. The noise of the television rose higher and a picture in the hallway vibrated. A solid object fell to the floor of the living room, bounced and rolled.

  Seb went up, drifting through a familiar scent cloud; the sweat of cattle, 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 his airways was futile. The entire building was filled with the stench. It was seeping out of the living room that Ewan occupied. No doubt the miasma had filled the kitchen and his office too.

  Imagining that he might smell Ewan everywhere, and on all of his things, for weeks brought Seb close to a convulsion. That’s how it had gone down in London. Ewan’s odours had been absorbed by the upholstery, thickened in the confines of wardrobes and drawers, and drifted from every book cover and ornament, his spoor ever present for weeks after he’d gone.

  Ewan could not remain here. Seb would have to run to town and withdraw money, should he need to pay for a room for Ewan until he knew what the man wanted. One payment and that would be it, just like in London. He loathed himself for contemplating this appeasement, but was unable to think of another way of ridding the house of this stinking menace.

  He’d need to do some research and consult a solicitor about obtaining a restraining order, but didn’t imagine that getting one would be easy. The police and courts would have to be involved. Maybe police intervention would frighten Ewan enough to stop appearing. Though Ewan might also move his tactics up a notch. He’d promised as much. Explaining his predicament to the police, without appearing mad himself, was something Seb also struggled to imagine.

  On the first-floor landing, Seb broke out in a sudden and uncomfortable sweat. From the kitchen, on the floor above, he heard the whoosh of the boiler. The central heating was on. Electric lights burned in every room on the next floor, save the living room, where only the television screen’s white light flickered around the door, which had been left ajar.

  Into the lounge Seb burst.

  And was immediately disoriented. The television blared and flashed in the darkness. Canned laughter crackled the speakers. The floor thumped and transmitted the sound into Seb’s chest.

  The screen was showing a music channel: Scuzz.

  A warm day out too, but the balcony doors were closed and the blinds drawn.

  Stale cider and fast-food smells competed with the other odours. Seb coughed to clear his airways but it sounded more like retching.

  In the gloom on the far side of the room, Ewan’s gangly shape was slumped into Seb’s favourite chair. One shoe had been removed and Ewan had placed a discoloured foot upon his lap. Only when something exploded white on the television, did Seb see the full horror of that
foot.

  Yellow teeth gritted and nose creased, Ewan concentrated as two of his dirty claws scratched the psoriasis on his instep.

  ‘Jesus,’ Seb said, at the same time as his foot connected with an empty cider can and sent it skidding into another two empties beneath the side table. They were all labelled as a brand of extra-strong cider.

  His thoughts bumped into each other and careened away into nothingness. He only retained the presence of mind to locate the remote control on the coffee table. He snatched it up and turned the volume of the television down.

  Ewan pulled the remnant of a black sock over his foot and ankle. ‘It itches,’ he said, smiling.

  ‘I’m not surprised.’

  When they’d cohabited, Ewan had always staked out the living room as his own territory, and sat too close to the screen like a child that had never been told otherwise. He now seemed intent on repeating the habit, in line with turning the room into an unnerving facsimile of his old bedroom in Wylding Lane. A disorderly nest.

  Seb was choked more by exasperation than the smell. Did that make him forget what he wanted to say? Perhaps the intense way Ewan looked at him was disarming. Ewan had no time for the glance. His eyes were still and he looked at Seb like a cat that Seb remembered from his childhood. A cat that would sit and stare with black eyes that had always made him feel uneasy and guilty, as if its suspicions of Seb’s unacceptable thoughts had become more than a hunch.

  Ewan, like the cat, was really expecting some kind of challenge or attack. Those were the eyes of someone incapable of trust, who pushed his luck and awaited reprisals.

  Suffering an aversion to meeting Ewan’s black eyes – one that writhed in his gut – Seb looked away.

  About the living room were the books that Ewan had taken off the shelves, flicked through and discarded, open and face-down. A first edition of an Oliver Onions collection lay beside the chair that Ewan had slumped into. An empty cider can was placed upon the dust jacket.

  Seb rushed across the room and retrieved the book. The jacket was marked by a drying ring of liquid that smelled vinegary. ‘Jesus Christ!’

  Ewan sniggered.

  ‘Do you know how valuable this is?’

  Ewan shrugged. ‘It’s just a book.’

  ‘My book!’

  ‘Oops,’ he replied in a placid tone before he giggled. ‘Would you listen to him?’

  ‘Listen to me!’ It was then that Seb noticed a stained rucksack and two bulging bin liners arranged messily beside Ewan’s chair. Luggage.

  So Ewan had been out that morning, while Seb slept, to fetch his things. Another two cans of extra-strong cider were balanced on the arm of Seb’s favourite chair. A king-size Mars bar and three bags of crisps lay upon the coffee table. The provisions must have been inside Ewan’s grubby rucksack, or procured while Seb had been lost to the world and dreaming of another place.

  The front door locked itself once it was pulled to. Seb laid the book down. ‘You . . . you’ve been out. And then you let yourself back in. How? How the hell did you get back in here?’

  ‘With a key.’ If anything, Ewan seemed surprised that he was being questioned about how he came to be sitting in Seb’s chair with the bags beside his feet.

  ‘Key?’ Seb queried, beginning to feel soft-limbed and weightless again from the sheer preposterousness of the situation.

  ‘It was on a hook in the kitchen.’

  Ewan had taken the spare front door keys from the hook on the back of the kitchen door. What else had he taken? Seb noticed that the door to his office was ajar.

  ‘That’s it! Police.’ Seb ran for the landline phone.

  Ewan was amused. ‘I went to collect a few of my things. I have something very interesting to show you. I told you about it yesterday.’

  Seb’s fingers paused on the phone. He invested every ounce of dismissive incredulity he possessed into his voice. ‘I’m not interested in anything that you have to tell me. You took my keys and let yourself into my house! A private building. Are you bloody insane?’

  ‘I didn’t think you’d mind.’

  There was a plate on the floor, smeared with tomato sauce. Takeaway papers were screwed up beside the plate. At the sight of those, the room seemed to judder in Seb’s vision. He’s eating in here!

  Seb took a deep breath, then placed a hand against his racing heart. He sat on the sofa. ‘We need to talk.’

  ‘What about?’

  ‘What do you think?’

  ‘I’ve been waiting ages for you to wake up.’

  Seb closed his eyes, steadied himself, lowered his voice. ‘You can’t stay here. Put the keys on the table. Right now.’

  Ewan stared at him, his expression wilting to pitying amusement, the eyes swimming with inebriation.

  ‘Look at this place,’ Seb said, his voice hampered by his panting breath. ‘Look at what you’ve done to it, in a matter of hours.’

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

  Seb slapped his hands against the sofa cushions. ‘Can you not see?’

  ‘What do you mean? I can see plenty. It’s you I worry about.’

  With an upturned face, Seb appealed for support from some higher power. He could not let himself be drawn into another exchange with Ewan, one that promised to be baffling, devoid of reason and conducted in this atmosphere of his unwashed body and clothes.

  ‘I want you out. Now.’ Something squealed in Seb’s voice, which made him sound foolish and impotent.

  ‘Sorry, why?’

  ‘You were never invited! And the mess! The bloody mess. It stinks in here! You are ruining my books. My things. Everything.’ Holding his head in his hands, Seb added, ‘Jesus, Jesus, Jesus. This is my home. You are not welcome here. What are you doing here? What are you doing to me?’

  Ewan’s expression maintained a weary, intoxicated puzzlement. He sniggered again.

  ‘This is no joke.’ Seb’s voice broke again. ‘I know you have problems. But you are your own worst enemy. And they’re not my problems. You need to leave.’

  Reaching over the side of his chair, Ewan picked up a can of cider. Leisurely, he took a throaty swig. Observing this simple, unapologetic and carefree act made Seb realize that he despised Ewan so intensely that he wanted him destroyed. Wanted to destroy him.

  ‘Did you not hear what I said? You have to go.’

  ‘Sorry, go where?’

  Seb raised his hands into the air. ‘How do I know? That’s not my concern. Anywhere that’s not here. Wherever you crawled out of.’

  ‘No,’ Ewan said, with a shake of his head. ‘Can’t go back there.’

  ‘Home. Your mother, if she is still alive.’

  ‘She is, but no. She’s done her bit.’

  History was determined to repeat itself on a foetid loop of greasy hair. With a tremendous concentration of will, Seb kept his voice steady. ‘I don’t want you here. Find a room somewhere.’

  As if carefully considering the advice, Ewan took another casual swig of his cider. ‘Not really my scene any more.’ He started to laugh. ‘And I don’t have enough money. Those rooms are also terrible places. I’ve lived in a few. I prefer it here.’

  Seb could barely hold enough air inside his chest to speak. ‘Does any of what you’re saying strike you as absurd?’

  ‘I don’t follow.’

  ‘You just show up here. At my home. It’s been twelve years since you pitched up in London, and you were hardly welcome there either. We weren’t even close when you dropped out of college. In fact, we hated each other. But you . . . you come here, and get inside and just . . .’

  ‘What, sorry?’

  ‘Refuse to leave when I ask you to. Is this some kind of revenge?’

  Ewan shrugged.

  ‘This is my home. I decide what happens here. Do you understand that?’

  ‘I think you’re missing the point –’

  ‘No! You are missing the point. This is a private residence, not a dri
nkers’ hostel. You have no rights here. You even took my keys. My keys! I could have you arrested with one phone call.’

  Ewan looked at the can in his hand. A glum, morose expression took over his face.

  ‘Can you not see that I am a very private person?’ Seb persisted.

  ‘So am I. But this is big enough for two people. Ample.’

  ‘What you think is irrelevant. You’re just not listening to what I’m saying, are you?’

  ‘I am.’

  ‘Then get the fuck out!’ Seb pointed at the door. ‘I don’t want you here. I don’t want you anywhere near me, ever.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘You’re confused. You’ve just missed the point.’

  Seb thought on who he should call first, the police or Social Services.

  ‘Somewhere along the line, you got it all wrong,’ Ewan said.

  Seb’s face was in his hands again. This time he clawed at his scalp. He couldn’t bear to look at Ewan. He spoke into the floor instead. ‘I’ll find you somewhere to go. I’ll pay. We’ll meet on neutral ground. You can show me whatever you want to show me and then you can piss off. How’s that?’

  There was a long silence. ‘It’s a nice offer. But I’m not so sure it’s the right thing to do. You see, I don’t want to live on my own any more. It’s too hard to keep everything going. It’s better I stay here. And we’ve so much to discuss. I need to set you right, and you owe me.’

  Seb stood up and wrenched open the blinds, nearly breaking them. He threw the balcony doors wide. Ewan blinked in the sharp, lemony light.

  Seb clutched at the chip paper and seized the top of the nearest bin liner beside the chair that Ewan was slumped in.

  Ewan leapt up. ‘Leave it!’

  Seb dropped the bin liner and stepped away, his scalp prickling.

  Ewan’s eyes were wild, the cheeks flushed, the thick lips trembling. ‘Don’t touch that!’ He made an effort to calm himself, his eyes fixed upon the bin bags. ‘Just leave that. You have no idea what I went through to get that. No idea how valuable it is.’

  This was the closest Ewan had come to the drunken rages of their undergraduate days. And now that he was on his feet and excitable, he began to weave. He pointed a dirty finger at Seb’s face but didn’t speak, or couldn’t think of what to say.