Under a Watchful Eye

by Adam Nevill

  24

  Thousands of Invisible Cords

  ‘If you have company tonight, I’d advise against using your torch. Some of our alumni are better formed than others. Or so we find. Most of the time they remain still, though, and quiet. They wait in the darkness. They wait for the light.’

  Seb closed his eyes to let that information settle. It seemed easier to endure with his eyes shut. At Joyce’s mention of ‘company’ Seb’s scalp had been ready to rise from his skull. And within the frantic din of his thoughts he knew that these minutes alone with Joyce were crucial. Within this brief window before she left him alone, because that is what she planned to do, he must learn as much as he could about his current plight. ‘For years. They’ve been here for years, haven’t they?’

  ‘They have no way of knowing how long they have waited for ascent. There is no time over there. What may feel like a few minutes might amount to decades, or even longer. But we all wait for ascent, do we not, in different ways? And all change inside the passage. The longer one remains, the more one transforms in readiness for the higher spheres. And transcendence is all that he has ever sought. Do you know your way? You’ve been up here, with Mark, haven’t you?’

  He no longer found Joyce as sinister when apart from Veronica. Unkempt, clearly unwashed if he ever stood too close to her, and a woman stricken with bad nerves, but she was as sad and as desperate a figure as he had ever encountered in his life. Alive maybe, but as trapped as those other things, and somehow bound to serve the mad schemes of a long-dead sociopath. Hazzard had been right: Seb recalled something he’d read in the second collection about there being first deaths and second deaths, but neither being conclusive. These women were guided by whatever lingered here. And what he would not doubt was their capacity to end his life, and then to maroon him here in the darkness, forever. The idea brought into his mind an image of thin limbs struggling through the black waters of a misted culvert.

  Wendy had also mentioned a discussion that would take place the following morning, about ‘terms’, so they would not want him to die tonight. Nor had the return of the files been their primary concern. He could only assume from their disingenuous spiel, that the purpose of his stay at the Tor was to remove the last of his resistance to what they had planned for his future. A fate that had been set in motion after Ewan had unwittingly seconded him as some kind of ghost-writer for M. L. Hazzard.

  Seb looked at the ceiling. What choice did he have? ‘Are there others like you . . . in the SPR? Others still alive?’

  ‘SPR! I haven’t heard us called that in a long time. But only Veronica and I have residential appointments now. We keep things going.’ Joyce giggled again, near-coquettishly, though Seb failed to detect anything amorous or humorous in their exchange. ‘But we’ve members all over the world. Not so many these days, alas, but our work continues.’

  ‘You live in this building?’

  Joyce continued to lead him deeper into the main corridor of the first-floor passage. ‘Oh no, the Tor is solely for the use of the alumni. Their work is far from finished.’

  ‘Finished? It’s an empty building, falling apart.’

  Joyce smiled at Seb, over her shoulder, the lined face and watery eyes alive with a cherished delusion. ‘Yes, I suppose it’s seen better days in this sphere, but better days will come again, with your help. The earthbound and celestial will mingle again. Have no doubt.’

  When she stopped walking, Joyce spread her arms within Seb’s torchlight, as if she were offering him access to palatial accommodation of a five-star hotel. ‘Take your pick. Bit dusty, but I’m sure you can make yourself comfortable.’

  ‘I’m not sleeping here. I’m not staying here, Joyce.’

  ‘Oh, but you must.’ Shocked, she threw her hands to her cheeks. The woman was half-crazed. Veronica threatened him and this one coerced him with her instability. A double-act of lunacy.

  Joyce then peered at the locked white door before the stairwell that led to the top storey, and with an expression of fearful expectation that made the lining of Seb’s stomach prickle. She’d deliberately drawn his attention to that door.

  ‘Who are you? You and Veronica?’

  ‘I’m not permitted to go into that.’

  ‘You cannot just terrorize and force a person to do something against their will.’

  ‘Oh, but it’s not like that. If you only open your mind and your heart, you’ll see—’

  ‘I’ll see horror and pain and confusion. I’ve seen enough of it already. There is nothing healthy or sane about this place. And there never was. It’s wrong. It’s very wrong. And you bloody know it. Hazzard was a criminal. A fraud. His entire enterprise was based upon deception and extortion. And it’s over. Long over. Surely you can see that? No good has ever come of what he started, for anyone, least of all for him. He got lucky with something. Something extraordinary but terrible. Something ghastly that should never have been attempted. You cannot possibly expect that anyone sane would want anything to do with it. There is no light. There is no ascent. Not any more, Joyce. What little I know has made me sure of that. And the two of you are maintaining a madman’s final scam. So what is the point of carrying on? You are wasting your lives.’

  ‘You mustn’t say that. You mustn’t say things like that here.’ Joyce’s eyes widened and she struggled to resist them straying once more to the white door at the end of the corridor. And then she looked at Seb and mouthed the word, please.

  Seb stepped closer to her. Her entire body was trembling. When he gripped the outside of her arms, she dipped her head and collapsed against him as if she hadn’t been held in a long time. When she looked up at him, her face stricken with fear, she sniffed back her tears and whispered, ‘Please, help us. We need you. We can’t fail. We can’t fail him or he’ll never let us go . . .’

  ‘We can leave. I have a car. I’ll take you with me. Today.’

  ‘Would you?’ she said, and then sobbed.

  ‘Yes.’

  And then the woman seemed to remember something crucial and she regained control of herself. She began to smile like an imbecile. ‘We’ve forgone temptation and earthly comforts for a reason, Seb. Our purpose here is greater. We’re wedded to that and that alone. You must try to understand. You and I, we couldn’t be together. Not in that way.’

  ‘What?’ Seb released her shoulders. ‘I never suggested anything of the sort.’

  ‘Please. Don’t be embarrassed. The earthly conditions are full of temptations and distractions, and so much pain. There is only pain and misery when we are earthbound, and we can never truly know ourselves. You know that. We’ve read your books. Some of them. Well, bits of them. Bits of one of them, at least. But we’ve read enough to know that you understand this better than anyone. It’s in your vision, the pain. We’re all earthbound prisoners and it’s not possible to ever find our true potential. But there are other places, and it is to those that we must reach into. Like he said, “Into wonder we must walk.”’

  ‘Jesus. How did you become . . . this . . . ?’

  Joyce frowned at Seb, as if he had asked her a stupid question. ‘I was called and I came.’ She said this with an air of self-importance and her eyes shone with something approaching awe. ‘Oh, I was much younger back then. A child really. Nineteen, or eighteen, I don’t much remember. And the society had seen better days when we arrived, but the commitment lasts much longer than what we call life, Sebastian.’

  Seb stared at her with abject revulsion. ‘You murdered Ewan. You killed a man. You and Veronica and . . .’ Seb looked at the white door . . . ‘that thing, up there, and whatever else is still coming out of here. You all did it.’

  Joyce recoiled from him and clasped her hands together, squeezing her eyes shut at the recall of something so unpleasant. ‘Ewan . . . He stole from us. He was trusted . . .’

  ‘Did he deserve that?’

  ‘He came here with an agenda. That wasn’t right. That has never been permitted. Ego, self-intere
st . . . No, no, no. And he was warned . . . He was warned about what . . .’

  ‘Joyce. You killed a man. How many others have you murdered?’

  ‘He said he was a poet. A poet? But he wasn’t capable . . . It wasn’t satisfactory. We were all very disappointed in his . . . ability. And the drinking!’

  Joyce returned her attention to the white door in the passageway, the door that led to the next floor of the dark house. She dropped her voice to a whisper. ‘When he enquired about Ewan, he was not pleased. You can’t imagine . . . And it was with great regret that he called upon one who is forever lost . . . but he only did it to protect us. Don’t you see? No one has ventured as far as him, or discovered so much in the light, and in the darkness too.’ For the last two words she uttered, her whispered voice became so faint as to be almost undetectable, but Seb heard her.

  ‘That thing that came to my home,’ he whispered. ‘How do I . . . get rid of it. You have to tell me.’

  ‘It is not permitted.’

  Seb grabbed her arms again. They felt especially thin and unpleasant as he squeezed the near-rotten wool that hung from her old bones. ‘That thing, in the hood. Tell me how to get rid of it!’

  ‘Ewan. It was sent for Ewan.’

  ‘Is it here? Thin Len?’

  Joyce’s eyes grew wide. ‘Sometimes.’

  ‘Now?’

  She shook her head as her eyes filled with horror. And yet her mouth displayed a horrible grin, the visible teeth both yellow and grey in the torch’s light. ‘Thin Len. They hanged him. A long time ago. A thief who was once dismissed by the lady of this house. He worked here. While her husband was away the lady sent him packing . . . But Len came back. Crept back inside this house and he throttled all of the little children in the nursery. The maid, she helped him. She loved him. They were both hanged in Plymouth. Then Len came back again, and he crept inside here like an old dog. He never left that second time . . .’ Joyce’s eyes moved to the white door. ‘He showed us the story while we slept.’ She winced. ‘Oh, and so many times, you can’t imagine.’

  Thin Len. The face in the trees. The whining dog in your home. The crawling of it outside your window.

  Seb felt giddy at what had been recounted: a preposterous folk tale to anyone not suffering his predicament. He barely found the strength to speak. ‘And Hazzard . . . He has some control of it? Can direct . . .’

  Joyce’s grin grew wider, as if she were proud of her peripheral association with such a vile pact. ‘But with you it can be different, Sebastian. Don’t you see? Now that you are here you do not need to be sought. Ewan brought us together for a reason. We know that now. We’re all confident that you’re far better equipped to assist his legacy. A great literary legacy. We couldn’t be more excited.’

  Talking to the desperate living dregs of what Hazzard had founded and then lost was making Seb feel about as unstable as they clearly were.

  This woman must have been here as a teenager, and perhaps in the early eighties as Hazzard was dying. She’d never left him either, or been allowed to. Maybe she would return after her own first death too.

  Seb turned about and walked to the stairs.

  ‘Seb! Seb!’ Joyce whispered insistently, and she kept on calling after him until her voice was lost in the lightless depths of the old hall.

  Outside the Tor, Seb could see Mark engaged in an animated discussion with Veronica. Or, at least, Mark seemed agitated and that accounted for the wild gesticulations that he was making with the one hand that he kept thrusting into the air, as if pointing at the sky. Veronica regarded him with what amounted to a contemptuous indifference.

  Seb walked over.

  ‘No. No. Not again. I can’t get any more . . .’ Mark stopped talking when he became aware of Seb’s approach.

  Veronica redirected her thin smile towards Seb. ‘I hope you have found a room to your liking.’

  ‘Shut up!’ Seb barked into Veronica’s face. She did nothing but blink and resume a display of her mottled grin; an expression still filled with an unaccountable loathing for him from the first time they met.

  Seb seized Mark by the elbow and forced him away from the woman. ‘What the fuck? Mark, what the fuck?’ He looked into the eyes of a man with whom he’d spent the last three days, realizing that he hadn’t a clue who Mark Fry really was. The man’s face was pebbled with droplets of perspiration. He also looked about as guilty as anyone could manage.

  Mark shrugged his arm free of Seb’s hand and glanced at the top floor of Tor Hall. ‘I was on notice. Ever since I wrote that bloody book. They made me buy the whole print run, except for a few review copies that I couldn’t get back. Shit, I hadn’t heard from them in years. I thought I was off the hook.’

  ‘You bastard.’

  ‘I had no choice. You know what they can do, you know their reach . . . And you got me involved again. Don’t forget that. So thanks, mate.’

  ‘Fuck yourself. Those women on your tapes, what about them?’

  Mark swallowed and shook his head. ‘This place reached out one final time when my book was published.’

  ‘Webster and Buchanan?’

  ‘Unfortunate enough to have been friends with Hazzard. I don’t know much more about them. I think he had plans for them too, but it didn’t work out. Or for me . . . but I managed to persuade them that I was no good. They didn’t need much convincing. They hated Mutations. Doesn’t appear that Ewan was up to the task either.’

  ‘To hell with Mutations! And it didn’t work out for those others, is that so? Funny way of putting it! You know what happened to them.’

  ‘I hope it works out for you, Seb. I really do.’

  ‘You could have warned me.’

  ‘What good would that have done? Once . . . once you are part of the image forming. Like I am. Like Ewan was. That’s all it takes. If that thing up there . . . if he is made aware of us. If he has a sense of us . . . and has an image of us. I think that’s how it works. And it can’t be undone. I’ve tried. And no one will ever believe you. No one sane. They’ll think you’re mad. They’ll think you’re seeing things. They commit perfect crimes here, Seb. Don’t you get it? And they’re so bloody greedy. They made me take out loans. I’m bankrupt.’

  ‘You better get me out of this, and fast. I am not staying here.’

  ‘You have to. Where can you go? Home? Manchester? You can’t hide anywhere. Neither of us can. Distance doesn’t matter. We’re in the flood now, Seb. We’re in Hazzard’s stream. He goes backwards and forwards. Time doesn’t mean a thing over there. But you don’t have to be swept away.’

  ‘How? How is this possible? It’s just not real. It can’t be happening,’ Seb said uselessly, and more to the sky than to Mark.

  ‘You ask me that? How can I explain this? But you help them and maybe they’ll cut you some slack. There’s no other way. You have a publisher and readers. You get paid to write. That’s what they’re after, money, and exposure for his ideas. You think death has shrunk Hazzard’s ambition? I’d say it’s made it worse. But I tried to explain to them, on your behalf, that it’s not all that simple. You know, with books, and with horror always being a hard sell, and your last book about the ship not being so good . . . But they’re expecting a film too. So be prepared. You’ll have to manage their expectations from the start. That’s the first thing you need to do, because they think that you are a big, fat cash cow.’

  Seb was almost in tears when he said, ‘I don’t want this . . .’

  ‘I’m sorry, Seb.’ Mark looked at his watch and winced. ‘Gotta get a move on. Train to catch. I’ve a taxi coming. Local driver. Oh, and the locals, watch out for them. Some of them help Joyce and Veronica. Feed them. Stuff like that. “Them up at the college”, that’s how they referred to these bitches while I was mooching about. I knew something was up ten years ago before I even saw this bloody place. I found boxes of food by that gate. They were left there by people from round here. Some kind of bloody tithe or tribute, I don’t know,
to sustain the SPR. But there are surviving connections from when Hazzard was alive. Only it’s all going wrong, I think. The network they’ve used for years is literally dying off. They’re skint and barely hanging on now. They think you’re the answer to their prayers.’

  Seb sank to his knees and placed his strengthless hands upon his seemingly hollow thighs. His legs seemed incapable of supporting his weight.

  Mark glanced at Veronica, then whispered to Seb from the side of his mouth. ‘You can get through it. I did. They made me bring my books here and they insisted I stayed one night. You know, to make a point.’ He closed his eyes and winced at the memory. ‘They’re crazy, Seb. Both of them. They don’t even have running water. They use a stream. There’s no electricity here either. They exist in some bloody awful cottage over at the back. Place is cut off, but they keep it all going, for him, Hazzard. I don’t think they have much choice either. I’m guessing they’re all that’s left of the last SPR intake before Hazzard died. They’ve been here for bloody decades, going mad. And Hazzard will not release his last two followers. Don’t trust them. Just write the bloody book and hope for the best.’ Mark turned away and began moving down the slope, heading for the overgrown lower parkland.

  25

  The Discarded Coat

  They had left him hours before. Not long after Mark disappeared from sight, the two women had walked away and disappeared behind the house, without a single backward glance.

  Still dazed from shock, Seb had followed them at a distance, until they passed the walled garden and vanished into the woods beyond the roses.

  He’d returned to the Hall, slumped upon a wall before the portico, and sat with the disarray of his thoughts for company. Occasionally, a shiver touched his neck as if a breeze or a cloud’s shadow had passed over him.