Under a Watchful Eye

by Adam Nevill

  Even outside in strong sunlight, with a blue and cloudless sky above his head, the prospect of the night ahead had made him experience a physical frailty decades beyond his age. But the consequences of defying these unstable remnants of the SPR didn’t bear consideration. If he drove home, then what of later, what of tonight? Something would be sent after him. Was it better to be at home, in his own room, and to have his final cries unheard by any save those that gathered about the bed? Would he choose heart failure at home over a night at the Tor? That’s what his life had come down to: stay or die.

  He was useful to Veronica and Joyce and what they served. That was all he had in his favour: their desperation for money. They had been forgotten and were captives. Mark had said as much, though how much he could believe of what any of them said was open to question. But who else could Veronica and Joyce turn to?

  They must have seen Ewan as an opportunity and snatched at him to placate that restless presence on the top floor. He imagined Ewan’s bragging about his literary prowess after being caught trespassing. The fool had got in way over his head, had scarpered and lasted two weeks on the run. His last bad scene. Too much defiance from Seb too would fatally stretch the patience of Veronica and Joyce. Seb imagined they made reports to whatever existed higher up the food chain.

  When a suspicion that he was being watched from the top windows of the Tor became uncomfortable, Seb went back inside. Indoors, he clung to a wall until an episode of panic passed. He then looked about himself in the musty darkness.

  So how was it done? How was a night endured here? Mark Fry had managed it. Ewan too. But when Seb thought of those figures on the train, and of what he’d dreamed into life inside his hotel room in Manchester, he bent double and closed his eyes.

  ‘Oh, dear God.’

  They were coming tonight.

  Seb collected three blankets from the SPR bedrooms and took them downstairs to beat as much dust from them as he could using his bare hands. He unshuttered the windows in one of the large rooms and spread the blankets on the dirty sofa. One would go beneath him and two on top. Though he didn’t expect to sleep.

  The light that passed through the grimy glass was welcome and would last until around nine p.m. He even wondered if spending the night outside would be safer, until he recalled a dream of being chased across the golf links in Churston by something with its head covered by a dirty sack.

  Thin Len. The strangler. Child-killer.

  Indoors it is.

  He had most of one bottle of water left, and that would have to last until morning. The apple and banana he’d put inside his rucksack, and the flapjack that he’d bought while stopping for petrol early that morning would have to sustain him, though the mere idea of anything inside his stomach made him nauseous.

  Seb also wondered if he should take the opportunity to look at the files in the basement. Maybe he could learn something useful. But his desire to get out of the building became greater. Until the dying of the light he would stay in the open.

  Half a mile from the Tor, he came across an ivy-choked cottage, the home of Joyce and Veronica. They’d made no effort to maintain the small gardens. Two greening sheets of polythene had been untidily weighted down with bricks upon one part of the roof.

  He suffered a quick and hideous vision of the two creatures being a part of his life from now on, his existence much reduced and compromised while he remained within their orbit. It would be like having two of Ewan around, only it would be much worse. Even worse than that. When does this end?

  And what came next? A co-written book with all proceeds going to the SPR? Or did they have something more evangelical in mind, so that he would be required to put his name and reputation behind their cause?

  Maybe they would accept a cheque now and leave him alone.

  No, because he wanted to be in print again. That’s what they claimed. Hazzard wasn’t giving up on the earthbound prison.

  How was this material to be narrated, even dictated to him? Inside there? Seb looked in the direction of Hunter’s Tor Hall and needed to sit down to stop the shaking that came to his legs.

  He couldn’t have made up a situation as outlandish for one of his own books, but here he was, trying to peer through the windows of a hovel and the home of M. L. Hazzard’s two surviving curators.

  Through an open window at the side of the building, Seb spied the interior of a scruffy and overcrowded living room. Two large blue Calor Gas tanks and a twin-plate camping stove were visible. He briefly pondered why they had not made part of the Tor habitable and then he remembered Joyce’s reference to ‘the alumni’. That alone satisfied his curiosity about the living arrangements.

  He moved off and walked the grounds for a few hours more, using what paths he could find in the woods and overgrown meadows. In places, he caught glimpses of the distant boundary walls.

  Eventually, at dusk, the effects of exhaustion upon his nerves encouraged him to return to the Tor, to wait it out.

  He heard the first one just after nine p.m.

  26

  A Vast Blackness, Infinity

  The sun had all but disappeared. The evening chill was moist upon the grass. And from the grounds at the rear of the building there came a voice. No words that he could make out, but a woman’s voice that carried through the otherwise silent and still dusk.

  Seb stirred from where he was sitting with his back against the front doors, his thoughts momentarily adrift.

  He found no one at the rear of the building where he’d hoped to come across Joyce, perhaps on a scouting mission to make sure that he’d stayed put. Maybe they knew where he was anyway, at any time.

  How they communicated with what existed within the Hall, and if that was aware of him too, he had to establish before any attempt could be made to severe the connection. The process of projection had taken a great deal out of Ewan. It wasn’t easy, and maybe that could be used in his favour too.

  When he was nearer to the rose garden, Seb heard the woman’s voice again, though it came from much closer to where he stood.

  They buried me over there.

  There was no menace or threat in the tone, but that had been the voice of an elderly woman, and a tone weighted by resignation. What had been said was horribly familiar.

  Seb saw no one, and nothing behind or around him.

  The foliage was dark now, the smell of the flowers fainter. He was reminded of the strangeness of his feelings when near the garden earlier.

  Voice shaking, he called out ‘Hello’ several times and circled the oval garden. Went round twice, and wondered why he’d felt compelled to make a second pass of the darkening roses.

  No one replied. He never heard the voice again.

  The momentum of nightfall encouraged him to return to the building, but as he walked back to the house, a second voice spoke from inside the walled garden. And again, he was sure he had heard the voice of an elderly woman.

  Can you ask my daughter to come and get me?

  Not a footfall did he hear from within that enclosed area. Not so much as a twig snapping. And yet the more he thought of the voice, which still rang out inside his skull, he also wondered if those words had been generated from within his own mind.

  By the time he reached the hall, he was shivering from the cold and had zipped his waterproof jacket up to his throat. Catching sight of the reflection of his pale face and wild eyes in one of the windows that he’d unshuttered filled him with a disgust at his own helplessness.

  A dirty, ancient blanket about his shoulders, he sat alone in the part-furnished front room until ten, resting his lower back upon the tall skirting boards beneath the window. His loathing for Ewan, Veronica and Joyce was the only relief from a fear as crippling as a cramp in cold water.

  As the light failed outside its dirty windows, his unpleasant sense of expectation gradually evolved into an apprehension about a growing occupancy beneath the roof of Hunter’s Tor Hall. He tried to assure himself that only his imaginatio
n was being affected by the atmosphere of a strange, abandoned building. But, as much as he tried to use his reason to defeat these impressions of an impending cohabitation, he remained sensitive to a feeling that the stale air was beginning to move itself in vague currents, as if it were being displaced by the entrance of new forms.

  From outside the window came the distant sound of a man weeping. This was just after half ten, when visibility was shrinking by a few metres each minute.

  What may have been another two voices outside came soon after the weeping passed away, but from separate directions.

  Those who had called out gave an impression of being scattered in the gathering darkness and lost to each other. The noises may even have arisen from the beaks of birds, or even the muzzles of animals. One of the cries had reminded Seb of an anxious sheep.

  He stood up and turned his torch on. He shone it at the broad window he’d sat beneath, to make certain that there was no one outside. And unveiled a smudge at the window.

  His first thought was that it was a face, looking in. A near negative of a woman’s face. Or maybe an after-image, transparent and almost part of the light’s reflection upon the dirty glass.

  Or had it been an illusion partly formed from the grime and the greying air outside?

  Within his memory lingered the texture of the hair on what may have been a head, hanging dry and white about empty eye sockets. Seb turned about, in case what he had seen had been a reflection of someone standing behind him. His torch flashed across bare white walls.

  Fearing he’d given his position away with the torch, he moved across the reception hall to the adjacent room at the front of the building. His breathing was so loud he imagined he was being followed by someone panting with excitement behind his shoulders.

  Another face awaited him in the second room, as if summoned to the walls by his light. At a pane at the foot of a patio door, from within the inky surround of night, Seb detected an impression of human features stricken by despair. So deeply lined was the flesh, the head appeared ready to crumble. The piteous thing was also entirely bereft of hair.

  The image blended within the grime on the glass and vanished almost as soon as he became aware of it, and he was left wondering again if he had seen anything at all.

  He desperately regretted opening the shutters. Perhaps there was a good reason for the windows being blocked. Joyce had advised against using the torch because light was no asset here. Not using it might be the only way to get through the night. Better only to hear them and not see their faces.

  Get through this he must.

  Outside, the distant cries gradually increased in frequency and Seb wondered whether people or animals were passing the front of the Hall. Whatever roamed out there seemed to be lost amongst the long grass of the far terraces, and often wept amidst the beseeching sounds of what resembled words. Words that blended with the nocturnal cries of unsettled birds. Only the sudden howl of an animal in great distress finally forced him away from the front of the building altogether. That was around eleven.

  Deeper inside the lightless Hall he ventured.

  Sometime before midnight he crept inside an upstairs room, a former bedroom of the SPR. In the darkness he sat beside the door and huddled down.

  A long period of time passed that he didn’t keep track of. Looking at his watch seemed to make time trickle more slowly or even stop completely.

  Inside that empty room he even dared to hope that he’d found shelter. Only within absolute darkness, when he developed a better sense of what he had come to share the room with, did his face and thoughts twist to a rictus.

  Eyes swivelling within his skull, he detected a motion up near the ceiling, above the bed.

  A terrible palsy came into his hands. His legs felt weaker than they had ever been. He fingered the torch and became better aware of a swishing motion, one gentle and interspersed with short exhalations. This was followed by an involuntary gasp, as if someone had been plunged into freezing water, near the ceiling. He feared a struggle was in progress, up there. There followed a raking of the air as if someone was being throttled or was drowning in the darkness.

  Soon after, a faint illumination appeared in the air, on the other side of the room and at least six feet from the ground. Or was that his eyes? It was so dark he no longer knew if he could see a light, or whether a colour was being projected from his own brain to alleviate the void about him. The frail glow didn’t increase in intensity, but it was moving. Yes, it trembled or quivered and there grew a hint of moistness within the vague aura.

  Witless with fright, Seb turned on the torch.

  Whatever half-formed antics he partially lit on the ceiling, and only for a moment before he abruptly switched the torch off, gave him an impression that a form was suspended above the empty bed. And those had been limbs writhing and snatching at the empty air as if eager to reach the mattress below. He might have seen a thin hand too and a smudge of a sharp foot, kicking, or pushing at the empty air.

  Might that have been an open mouth sinking upwards?

  Seb went out of that room on his hands and knees, groping with his arms spread wide, his passage far too noisy for the stealth that he wanted so desperately. And yet, in the next room that he crawled into, whatever was already inside that space must have turned to him as he entered on all fours.

  He heard its feet scrape across a floorboard and the shuffle of a body that wasn’t his own.

  Without thinking, he switched the torch on, and the beam seemed more intense than ever, a white transparent blade, cylindrical and bustling with dust.

  The penumbra of the torch beam’s circumference fell across one dirty corner. And in that corner he developed a notion, because he refused to look closely, that the space was occupied by a crouched form. One that may have been facing or looking into the wall. But even in his peripheral vision, he believed the form was both hairless and shivering. Something in that room was as white as a fish’s belly and spiny with emaciation. When it appeared to rise upwards as if intending to stand, Seb killed the torch and scampered backwards. But into the wall he crashed, and then the door, painfully cracking his skull during his rout.

  A condition of absolute darkness existed in the passage outside, and in that blankness he was beset by the dull rasps of several bodies rubbing against the walls, and close to the ground like dogs.

  Seb stumbled to what he hoped was the top of the staircase, then feared a fall and risked a brief usage of the torch that was now jumping in his right hand.

  He lit the stairwell and a portion of the passage below. A space empty mere hours before, but suggesting motion now. He had looked down there for little more than a fraction of a second before he killed the light. And in the chaos of his own mind, he then attempted to process what he’d glimpsed.

  A blotchy scalp, straggling with wisps of colourless hair. An arm more bone than flesh that had reached up to delicately finger a bare wall. Little jerks of grey shapes near the front entrance, like unpleasant pets impatiently awaiting release. And all underlaid by the incoherent rustle of papery voices that seemed too quiet, or even too far away, from where the sounds emerged.

  With his arms wrapped around his torso and his hands tucked beneath his armpits, Seb rocked himself back and forth on the stairs. Lips aquiver, his jaw worked hopelessly at the darkness as he mouthed words of nonsensical encouragement to himself.

  Below, in the main hall, from where the sounds of water now trickled, the dim sheen of the other occupants became visible without the aid of his torch. The only mercy being that they remained vague. But he closed his eyes tight on this sense of a small procession of figures that produced the pale phosphorescence as they fumbled their way blindly through the darkness of the lower building. Very little was revealed by the moist iridescence that issued from whatever hung from their navels, and for that he was also grateful. But from those wet abdominal stubs came the thin light.

  Closed doors were no obstacle to these hinderers either. Th
ey simply seemed to come through them, or their motions and muffled whispers appeared where walls should have stood. Without light he was no longer sure that he was even inside the building.

  My sister. She was . . .

  That came from behind his back, from a room at the far end of the corridor. The broken utterance was followed by a faint sob. Seb found the strength and the will to move his legs again. Upstairs was becoming too noisy.

  Back on the ground floor he never found any evidence of the water that he now heard bubbling like a brook.

  The Passage.

  Downstairs, closer to the earth, the Tor’s internal darkness was more active than ever. Ahead of him and behind him, glimmers of mercury continued to appear and vanish. Partial evidence of articulated forms passed across his meagre sight, repeating like bits of film stuck in a projector. He wanted to believe his own disordered mind was screening these fragments on the inside of his eyelids, but his eyes were so wide they smarted as if they were open beneath the sea.

  There was a great crawling in progress here, and perhaps towards the vague recall of a lighter place that had once been known. Maybe this was a search for what had been left behind.

  When the collective suggestions of the wasted became too much for Seb to endure, he shuffled towards the kitchens with one hand held outwards, while the other clutched at his car keys. But even squinting in the lightless spaces failed to rid their movements from within his mind.

  Beyond the front entrance of the Hall, and as far down the lower terraces as his torchlight reached, the progress of the external hinderers appeared inexorable, slow, and then somehow too quick for his eyes to follow through the grass, as if they were flickering out of his vision to re-emerge from behind waves of darkness. But in the warm and salty rain that began to fall in the early hours of the morning, most of the hunched forms seemed intent on getting somewhere. Some did no more than stare upwards, but the thought of passing through them to reach his car was unbearable.

  Too afraid to risk the night-blackened woods, Seb returned to the Hall. This had to stop, and soon, or he would lose more than his wits. He’d begun talking to himself inside his own head, but it took him some time to realize that his thoughts had become audible.