by Adam Nevill
I know he had been aware of me that time. Perhaps the faint tapping of the typewriter keys had carried to . . . but to where? I don’t really know.
I moved myself out of the chair and swiftly to the door of the study and I called out what I had wished to say for some time. I asked him for mercy. I cried out and said I could not continue for much longer, that the visions were becoming too much, that when they dispersed from my head they drew my mind out from my body.
You see, there are places on this earth that help us to get out of ourselves, that make us enlarge in spirit, and this is one of them.
But in that corridor outside the study, I caught sight of an iridescence that hindered. Rags of a soul-body, and those shreds fled as if Hazzard had been disturbed in his bathroom, and was gripped by a mortification at the sight of his own unclothed form.
Withered were the smears of the Master’s legs too. Outstretched were the bones upon which Hazzard’s sharp fingers trembled to a blur. But the fingernails were painted a dark colour, so I assumed that it was Diane that time. I could smell her too, and that day she smelled like the rank water left in a vase, once the roses have all died.
Quickly, she grew smaller in my sight, as if she were skittering down a slope that could not have existed inside that passage. And yet I perceived evidence of a black wig, one too static and clumsily propped upon a small skull, as if to re-enact some former period of glamour that was once enjoyed amidst a coterie of admirers.
At other times, Diane is better put together, and when I hear her tipped heels approaching, I make sure to get down upon the dusty floor and to avert my eyes.
At those times, Diane will wear a black wig, a hat and dark glasses and cover herself as much as she is able. To catch sight of her face in a reflection can produce a terrible shock that makes me fear for my heart. The sudden crushing pressure of the air through which she stares, the miasma of the scent, the horrible, queasy flopping inside my belly as if I am being turned upside down, but finding nothing below my feet, is too much to bear for more than moments. One can never get used to it.
Only during those rare appearances do I get a sense that she knows I am here, or at least has a sense that someone inhabits these rooms below her, like a rat. A rat that scratches its fingers upon the typewriter’s keys.
When Hazzard comes in his male form, he rises in rooms adjacent to those that I rest within. At these times, I imagine that the double is in a grim mood. I judge this by the sounds that come through the walls. I imagine him squinting too, as if near-sighted, as he pants with rage and utters those bitter, indecipherable exclamations and gropes about the empty rooms, feeling his way about the grimy walls, looking for his past, I think. Or maybe he even searches for another who is no longer around. Who can say what it is that the restless dead still seek?
Alas, the entire collaborative venture is futile, and I have done all that can be done. I have fashioned enough material for three experiences within my first month at the Tor. I have often said aloud, ‘These strange experiences have no commercial value. Not any more.’ I have tried repeatedly to tell him that his ghastly snatches of the numinous are destined for an even greater obscurity than he knew before.
I have called out, ‘There is no future for you! Not out there! Not now!’ But I don’t think he hears because the visions keep returning and forming, and I see again and again the sights that have made my hair whiten, and that have shrivelled me inside and left me trembling and sobbing against the hard floors of the Tor, or slumped upon the typewriter and unable to rouse unless others come and slap my cheeks hard.
Others.
There are others in his service beyond the two women who call themselves Wendy and Natalie, and who arrive at the end of each week to take my papers away.
As ‘Mark Fry’ said, local people do put boxes of food outside the gates, the food that sustains me. I’ve never seen anyone make the drop-offs, but I have heard distant car engines and the strident sound of a car horn. It blares three times in the distance to let me know that such basic food-stuffs, and often expired dry goods, have arrived. When I arrive at the gates the car has gone and the box of food is in the grass outside the wall. I think they spit onto the food.
This locally sourced food supply sustained the last of the API too. Their story is in the files. I have read over half of them now.
Such wonders and terrors abound in the archive. The two emotions were inextricable for those who once detached.
I suspect that Natalie is a local girl who was once asked to come inside to function as a nurse for the dying Master and who was never permitted to leave. Few names are entered in the later files, but I suspect her real name is Eunice and that she arrived in 1982. You see, there was once a ‘Eunice’ who changed the beds and bathed the bed sores until the entries in the archive ceased in 1986. She seemed to be the only member of staff who was still carrying out these duties two years after ‘the Master’ died in 1984.
And I am fairly certain that Wendy is actually the ‘Ida’ of the files, who travelled here during a rootless period of transience in 1981, and who seems to have since imposed herself as a spokesperson for the API, and heir-apparent to Hazzard’s domain.
These two characters, Eunice and Ida, who have remained loyal after his passing, were the very same individuals who must have lit the fires beneath the two remaining and very elderly ‘projectors’ and acolytes – Faye and Alice – who expired within long comas in the rooms upstairs that were once named Elysium and Summerland. These amateur cremations both occurred in 1984. The coincidence of both deaths occurring in the same year did not escape me, and left me wondering if both ‘first deaths’ were hastened, and if Faye and Alice were burned alive.
I can only imagine that Eunice and Ida arranged for the disposal of the remains of Fay and Alice so that there were no impediments from the authorities, or distant relatives, to hamper the continuing work of the Association of Psychophysical Investigation, with its rigorous schedule of projecting, and its sundry fundraising activities. Perhaps they even grew tired of attending to the invalids. But this is supposition on my part.
The ashes of the final projectors were either scattered amongst the roses, or if their bodies didn’t burn properly, as had been indicated within records made in 1979 and 1981, when others also suffered the same tawdry fate of expiry and burial at the Tor, the carcasses of the poor old wretches would have been rolled into shallow trenches. Some of those were dug by Ida in 1981. I have to imagine that Hazzard ordered it.
To the API there are first deaths and second deaths, and then eternity. I fear all three, but the latter condition the most.
I suspect too, that one day, Eunice and Ida, under their guises of Natalie and Wendy, anticipate performing the same crude disposal of my own physical remains, once this work has finally destroyed me.
Nonetheless, the sound of my frantic typing can be heard all over the building. One writes to live, and it has always been thus.
I am working on a third strange experience now, drawn from the usual fragments of nightmare gibberish. This latest was given to me three nights ago. I woke, trying to scream, certain that a cold hand had been placed over my mouth and nose within total darkness. On my awakening, the very room was full of the smell of dead roses.
I will give you the first lines that came to me with such urgency, in something of a verse narrated by Diane, in a singsong voice:
‘I hang in space above water.
I am pupae.
My face is no more.
I am sure that I came from down there,
So with these arms that I cannot see,
I reach to where the bed must be . . .’
I put one copy of the completed pieces – as finished as they can be – inside the files in the basement for safekeeping, and then I type another copy for my agent, to whom they will assuredly go.
Poor Giles.
30
In the Body of my Resurrection
[TWO MONTHS LATER]
After my literary agent, Giles White, depressed the buzzer a third time, I imagine that he stepped back from the door and took a better look around himself.
This was just not like me at all, and even the closed blinds would be less alarming than the sight of the rear garden. The lawn at the back and the four flower beds that I had once tended so carefully were not so much overgrown as engulfed. The garden had returned to the wild. The sun umbrella on the lawn had not been taken down for some time and the canvas was mildew-green. Beside the front door, bin bags were stacked beside an already full wheelie bin.
Giles had visited the house many times since I’d moved to the coast, but on this visit it must have appeared that the mind of the occupier had withdrawn from the external world. And perhaps to huddle within incessant preoccupations, deep inside the building. Nothing unusual there for a writer, as Giles would know, though not this one. Not Sebastian Logan.
He knew that I despised uncleanliness and disorganization. In fact, he may even have interpreted Yellow Teeth as evidence of an author working through issues on this very subject. Particularly when considering the years that I had spent struggling on low incomes, while living in bedsits and shared accommodation, and into my forties. Giles knew that story.
The plot of Yellow Teeth had concentrated on the theme of intrusion too, but of a particular kind: the imposition of the chaotic and disorderly into the life of the orderly, the unclean forced upon the clean. I’d even depicted myself as the lead character, and a horror novelist at that, living in this very house.
The biographical detail, this casting of myself as the protagonist, had been met with enthusiasm by my publisher. They’d liked the angle of Yellow Teeth. Giles had also been thrilled by his own inclusion in the story, as my actual literary agent.
I had told Giles to ‘come at midday’ in my last message. That had been sent two weeks before, and the last time that I had been permitted to enter my own home. I’d also mentioned that I had been unwell and unable to travel to London, and that ‘leaving the area’ made me ‘uncomfortable these days’. I’d been impossible to contact by phone too, because there is no phone signal at the Tor.
Ten foreign-language editions had already been negotiated for Yellow Teeth. Queries about film and TV rights were also stacking up. A decision would have to be made soon about which film production company we chose to go with. Even without the full proposals that I had promised to write, there was talk of a new two-book deal. Deadlines needed to be set down. My editor even claimed that Yellow Teeth possessed the strange edge that had been missing since my first two novels. How dare she? But, nonetheless, there was urgent business to discuss. Which is why Giles had travelled to Brixham to investigate me.
I imagine out there on my front doorstep, his annoyance became anger – Does he no longer care about his future?
He’d have heard a bolt slide through a lock, a chain removed from a latch. Then the door widened to reveal my face. A visage that was hard to identify.
‘Seb . . .’ Giles didn’t know what else to say to me.
How long had it been since I’d washed my hair? And in all the years he’d known me, I’d never worn a beard. Beards were certainly fashionable, though mine suggested anything but the hipster. My get-up that day was hobo.
Though my hair had always been flecked with salt and pepper, it was now the colour of dirty snow, oily and matched by the ragged beard. My appearance was worsened by the jogging bottoms and the stained shirt that I wore beneath the bathrobe. Giles almost suppressed his distaste at the spectacle of my face, and how my features had been narrowed by weight loss, lined with anxiety and harrowed by misery. All compounded by sleeplessness. And Jesus Christ, the teeth! He must have noticed my mouth. A mist of halitosis would have clung to the threshold. When was the last time that I had seen a dentist? Within the tangled moustache and beard, my lips had begun to appear too dark. I’d seen them in the windows of the Tor, as the sun faded outside. Giles would have glimpsed the wet, yellow ivory in my poorly maintained mouth.
Yellow Teeth.
He just stared, aghast at the transformation of his once neat, unflashy, shy client, whom he considered a friend.
‘Giles. It’s been a while. You look well.’
‘It has been.’ Giles couldn’t bring himself to return the compliment.
‘Won’t you please come in?’ I turned away from the door.
I’ve seen enough, must have come to the tip of his tongue, though Giles would never be so rude, unless he was talking to an editor.
He followed me up the stairs and into the living room on the second floor.
‘A drink?’ I mumbled, without even looking at Giles, but I wafted one hand towards the uncapped bottle of bourbon on the coffee table.
‘No, thanks.’ It was only noon.
Giles also restrained himself from asking for the balcony doors to be opened, but I saw him look at them. The room reeked of fried food, my sweat, expensive perfumes, and what suggested an unemptied kitchen bin.
He took a seat on the side of the couch not filled with laundry that was either waiting to go into the washing machine or had come out and been forgotten about. How did I know? It wasn’t my laundry.
Giles peered around the room and at the soiled plates amongst dirty coffee cups and magazines. My bookshelves were all but empty. My framed pictures of the original cover artwork and the movie posters had been removed. ‘Your pictures?’
‘Gone,’ I said, as I eased myself into a seat opposite the couch. The only light in the room was thin and murky, and was cast from the table lamp beside the bookcases. ‘Sold,’ I said, and I looked at the walls as if trying to recall the pictures.
‘Sold? Why?’ Giles knew that I couldn’t be short of money. I’d always been careful with money – a little tight, if Giles were honest – and even after his fifteen per cent and the tax deductions by HMRC, I could not have been left wanting after the advance of Yellow Teeth. The advance had already been earned out by foreign rights sales.
I could only shrug. ‘This place too. It’ll go next . . .’ And then I stopped myself and glanced at the door. As if on cue, a toilet flushed downstairs, followed by a door opening and closing.
I had company.
Right then, Giles noticed that several items of discarded clothing didn’t belong to me, a large brassiere and a pair of opaque, patterned tights.
He looked to me for some direction, some explanation, but none was forthcoming. I continued to stare at the diningroom door in anticipation of one who would soon step through it. ‘They’ll be here soon,’ I said, and my bearded mouth settled into a sneer. ‘They want to be present.’
‘Who?’ Giles asked.
I never answered him.
‘Seb. Are you . . . I mean, are you all right?’
‘Do I look it?’ My bloodshot eyes had filmed and glistened with tears. ‘Seeing you, my old friend, just brings it back.’
‘What?’
‘How it was. Before.’
‘I don’t follow. Before what, Seb?’
And then Giles’s attention was drawn towards the door, and to the arched entrance of the kitchen beyond the dining room. Giles even started at the sight of the two women who had appeared, as if from thin air, and who now stood within the two entrances.
The woman with the long hair, dyed a vivid magenta, seemed barely able to contain her excitement, though what she was so ecstatic about escaped Giles. The second woman, with the short blonde hair, smiled at him, but not in any way that could be described as warm. Her expression was close to provocation, as if she had just caught us talking behind her back.
Giles stood up. ‘Hello.’
He looked to me to prompt a round of introductions. But I continued to gaze, morosely, at the ceiling.
The woman with the short hair came into the room and sat on the arm of my chair and Giles must have noticed how I withdrew from her presence as she sat down. She wore a black dress complemented by bright costume jewellery. Expensive gl
asses framed her carefully painted eyes.
The second woman came out of the kitchen, but sat at a distance and at the dining table. She drew out a chair carefully as if she had entered a crowded room while a speech was in progress. She was wearing one of those gossamer, hippy-chic dresses and high-heeled shoes.
‘Well. Introductions are in order,’ said the woman who’d sat beside me.
‘This is Wendy,’ I said, without looking at the woman on my left. ‘And that’s Natalie,’
‘Pleased to meet you. Giles White,’ Giles said, looking from side to side in bemusement as the room bloomed with the scent of Chanel perfume.
‘It’s been so exciting to see the last book received with such enthusiasm,’ Wendy said. ‘And we’re delighted to tell you that Seb has been working on something else, something very special. Though we think the publisher can do a bit better with what they pay him for his work. Particularly as there’ll be nothing else like it, out there.’
I watched Giles shift in his seat. ‘Sorry, who are . . . ?’ He turned away from Wendy’s amused and mocking face. ‘Seb, I’m sorry, but we really should be discussing this more formally. Why don’t we take a walk? We could pop into that pub we went to last time—’
‘What’s wrong with here?’ Wendy asked. ‘And you don’t need a pub to get drunk in. Seb’s happy to do that anywhere these days.’
I lowered my eyes to the floor when she spoke about me. I felt my thin body shudder within that wretched bathrobe.
‘But he’s been very busy,’ Wendy added. ‘Hit a rich vein. You could say he’s been channelling something unique.’
Maintaining a stiff smile, Giles struggled to restrain his temper. ‘There’s material for the new book? Is that so, Seb? I must say, it’s all news to me.’
‘Well it would be, wouldn’t it, with you so far away, with your lunches and things, your authors and parties in London?’ Wendy emphasized ‘London’ as if she had singled the city out for particular scorn.