by Adam Nevill
‘Wendy,’ Giles said, in a voice that was barely keeping a lid on his crimson thoughts, ‘would you mind if I spoke to my client alone? We’ve some business to discuss. That’s why I am here. That’s why I have travelled all the way down from London. Isn’t that so, Seb? To discuss business with my client.’
‘We have a full involvement in our partner’s work,’ Wendy said. ‘There’s nothing about Seb or his books, or his agreements with you, that we are not conversant with, Giles.’
‘Seb?’ Giles said. His bewilderment waged a war with his anger at this woman’s manner. And yes, the more he considered the situation, the more aware he became of the tension that the women had introduced into the room. I could read it in his eyes.
Was one of these women my girlfriend, then? He must have wondered. He glanced again at the washing piled beside him. The underwear looked expensive, as did the dresses, though they didn’t appear particularly well cared for, strewn about like that, like territorial markers.
He would struggle to accept my romantic involvement with either of them. He would have been equally mystified by what either of them saw in me, in that state.
‘Nat!’ Wendy said, and so suddenly that Giles flinched. ‘The outline, if you please.’
‘Oh, oh. Of course. Let me fetch it.’ Natalie rose from her chair and teetered into my office.
‘Seb?’ Giles tried again to reach me. ‘Seb, can you tell me what this is about? We’ve several important matters to discuss.’
I merely shrugged, my posture suggesting the haplessness that I felt.
That was the first time that Giles had looked upon me with pity too.
Nat bustled into the living room and handed the old paper file to Giles. ‘The proposal!’ Breathless with glee, she added, ‘People will be astonished!’
‘Will they, now?’ Giles replied. He took the file from Nat’s outstretched hand. I watched her fingers tremble, and the sight of her yellowing nails made Giles recoil. She’d transformed herself into something feminine, but forgotten to pay attention to her hands.
‘Nat,’ Wendy said sharply, and glared with disapproval at her friend, if that’s what Natalie even was.
‘I’m sorry. But it’s just so exciting!’ Natalie said. She came and sat beside me, on the other arm of the chair. Tentatively, she reached out a veiny, quivering hand and placed it upon my shoulder.
Giles glanced at the folder in his hand. ‘API’ was stencilled at the top of the file. API, what does that mean? I watched my agent’s confusion increase. There couldn’t have been more than three sheets of paper inside the file. ‘Seb, what is this?’
‘We’ve told you what it is. The proposal. Isn’t that what you need?’ Wendy said.
Giles opened the file and the scent of old card became noticeable in the room. He looked at the letterheaded API folio, all browned with age around the edges. He began reading the first paragraph.
Wendy and Nat extended their heads towards him, like hungry birds inside a dirty nest.
After several minutes, Giles looked up at me. ‘What is this, Seb? An outline for a short-story collection?’
‘Something far more ambitious than Yellow Teeth,’ Wendy said, her own grin back in place, while she wrinkled her nose at the mention of my last novel. ‘We think he may have missed the point in Yellow Teeth. You could say, he may have missed the boat entirely. But that book served a purpose, didn’t it, Seb? Kept it all going. Though this is a far more accurate and comprehensive vision of his ideas.’
Giles ignored Wendy. ‘Is there any more of this, Seb?’
‘Of course,’ Wendy said. ‘Nat. Bring it in. He might as well begin as he’s finally deigned to visit us. No time like the present.’
‘Bring what in?’ Giles asked.
‘Oh, you’ll see!’ Nat said, her voice breaking into a squeal, before she returned from my office carrying a thin pile of printer paper, pinched at the top by a red paperclip. Nat dropped the manuscript in Giles’s lap before returning, somewhat clumsily in her shoes, to sit beside me.
Giles glanced at the cover page: The Hades Intake. 12 Strange Experiences. It was dedicated to ‘Our Master, M. L. Hazzard’.
I caught a combination of recognition, and an even deeper confusion, filling Giles’s eyes. He’d recognized the name Hazzard immediately, as he was a character in Yellow Teeth – the cross-dressing leader of the SPR. Giles frowned. Strange experiences: that’s also what the author, Hazzard, had called his own stories in Yellow Teeth. ‘This is some kind of sequel then, to Yellow Teeth?’ he said this distractedly.
Wendy raised her thick black eyebrows and answered for me, as she had done all afternoon. ‘In a manner of speaking. But this is the best thing he’s ever written down.’
‘Yes. We’re quite a team,’ Nat added. ‘We share everything.’
Written down? An odd expression, and Giles stiffened when he heard it. ‘A team? Seb, is this a bloody joke?’ Giles shook his head. ‘Seb. This is a short-story collection.’
‘Oh, no,’ Nat said, correcting Giles. ‘They’re not stories. They’re experiences. Strange experiences. And this material has been in the works for some time.’
‘Please, begin. We’re not going anywhere,’ Wendy said, and nodded at the thin manuscript that lay in Giles’s lap, which seemed to be growing heavier as each second of the madness continued.
‘Begin?’ Giles said. ‘Seb, you know that Pan won’t accept a collection of horror stories. No serious publisher will. We’re all expecting a novel. Is this a digression while you work on a new book? A companion piece to ‘Teeth?’
‘It’s what he wants, isn’t it, Seb?’ Wendy added.
He, an unusual and reverential emphasis on a pronoun for an author too. Wendy hadn’t been referring to me either and that really baffled Giles.
Giles raised his hands, palm upwards. ‘What the hell is going on here?’
Characters: yes, that’s what Wendy and Natalie were becoming in Giles’s mind too. And as he reinterpreted the two women in that room, I knew that his scalp had receded beneath his hair. Right then, he must have thought of Yellow Teeth – the story of a writer whose life had been taken over by a sinister organization of astral projectors.
Joyce and Veronica. The two women in the story . . . The women of the SPR. And SPR was very similar to the API?
Giles began to smile. A joke. Yes, he thought it was all a joke. I must have set him up! This was an elaborate practical joke because what he had in his lap was a sequel. And for half a second he was convinced by his own theory.
But the garden . . . the bins . . . and Seb’s appearance . . .
Giles and I held each other’s eyes and Giles knew in a heartbeat that there wasn’t a trace of humour or mischievousness in his client’s thoughts.
Natalie and Wendy each acknowledged the moment too, in which the penny had dropped for my literary agent.
Briefly, and judging by his pallor, I think Giles may then have entertained an image lingering from his reading of Yellow Teeth. I believe he might have imagined a long form, with its head covered by a dirty sack, crawling along the wall of the very building in which he sat.
He dropped his eyes and read the opening line of the first story, entitled, ‘We Are Unshrouded. We Have Enlarged’.
I know the opening line off by heart, because it was the first thing that M. L. Hazzard ever communicated to me, during my third morning as the writer-in-residence at the Tor.
‘And out of the trees they come, the thin people. They cry with joy because one of them says she has seen the light. They all vanish into the tunnel and fall silent.’
31
River of Darkness
‘They betrayed you . . . See how they live now. See! They have deserted you. Enriched themselves. They embezzle the organization. They have grown rich while you waste away here. Where are they now? Tell me? Where are Eunice and Ida? Where are Wendy and Natalie? Where? Where are they? Where are those who have changed their names to throw you off their sce
nt, and who try to live without your guidance in another place entirely? Do you sense them here, ever? No, because they have gone. Flown. They have left you all alone. They have chosen comfort over the mission! They have no interest in your plight. They have forsaken your greatness.’
I have lain upon Diane’s bed, night after night. With my eyes shut tight I have spoken aloud to the darkness when the house is at its most populous. I have said these things and many other things too.
Did you think that when you speak alone that no one hears you? Have you no idea of what glides beside you, briefly, but intent, unsure of itself or its whereabouts, but snatching, with much transformed hands, at the fading echoes of your words that appear in another place, like over there?
Trust me, eventually, something will hear you, if you choose the right place and the right time.
By day, after so many exhausting nights, I have crept inside the rooms that were once occupied by the living M. L. Hazzard and his female persona, Diane. And upon this insecure ground I have planted my seeds, and I have nurtured them with narratives.
I have laid out the pictures of Wendy and Natalie, all about the rooms. Upon the dresser and the side table, upon the floor and the pillow cases, I have placed their images.
I have fitted their likenesses within the mirror frames from which he looks out, and I have placed their faces in the pockets of the empty garments. I have redecorated the walls of Hazzard’s rooms with the pictures that I took of these women in my old home. There are no cards left on the card table, only their faces, upturned: Natalie and Wendy.
At the end of each week, when the women collected me from the Tor and took me home from my residency, for a few hours so that I could administer and maintain their deception, I took the pictures and I printed them.
If Wendy went out to shop, or to sun herself on my balcony, and while Natalie was charged with the task of watching me closely, I took pictures of Natalie instead of taking care of the tasks that they had set for me: paying the household bills, corresponding with my agent and publishers, or making purchases with my credit cards to supply each of them with the luxuries with which they have become so fond, since taking up residence in my life and home.
Yes, I took pictures of Natalie with her newly set hair, napping in my room. I took pictures of Wendy asleep on the sun lounger on the balcony, during the high summer months.
I have discreetly taken pictures of those stalwarts of the API dining and drunk on wine, from my wine rack. I have surreptitiously photographed them sleeping and awake. And amongst the pictures of them, I have intermingled the pictures of my home, inside and outside, when it was a place to be proud of, even beautiful. I have taken these images and I have placed the images in another place, so that they can be seen. So that two things can come together.
I have recorded my voice too, and one that repetitively intones my case and reinforces their deception. Until its battery fades, I have played the phone to announce details of this betrayal in Diane’s dressing room and bedroom, in case she ever wearily manages to return and affect her ghastly, but hopeless, occupation of those dim, forgotten and decrepit places that lie in darkness, deep in Dartmoor.
And when she had lingered and touched her once-fine garments with those vaporous bones, there was a chance that she would hear me calling out to the darkness, a place where a certain stream crosses over the land of the living. A place where so many wills were renounced unto the deep.
I plotted with the dust and the shadows, and with those things that still staggered and stooped and crawled through there. Down on my knees did I go, into the nightly stream of the grey and the withered, and I spoke aloud to the lost.
I chattered like an ape about the grave betrayals that had taken place, and of how the living servants of the projectors had abandoned their posts, and left all to crawl eternally in darkness with no hope of light.
I said their names in every corner and empty room: Eunice, Ida, Wendy, Natalie. Traitors!
‘Help those who have come into your house!’ I screamed in the lowest and darkest places of that building, while clawing my face.
Dressed in Diane’s finery, in those stale rags, with my beard flowing and my yellow teeth bared at the sky, I have circled the rose garden for many nights, with the others. And I have bellowed out my case. ‘Betrayed! Betrayed! Master, you are betrayed!’
And in the black woods where so many crawl and whimper, I have also pleaded my case. ‘Doctor, your staff have gone! They ran away! Abandoned you! You are abandoned on the earthbound sphere!’
After eight weeks, I had nothing left to lose save that part of me that still glowed and sometimes flickered, a dimming ember that would soon have been doused forever.
I know that I was eventually heard. And I know that the good doctor was most displeased. I filled my ears with rags at those times when he roared, and when he raged.
‘Tonight, they will come. Look upon their clothes, the finery. Smell the scents that they have drenched their treacherous bodies with. See those, see them who have betrayed you, abandoned you, left you . . . Bring them across and let them answer to these charges. Len! Len! Len! Thin Len will deliver them unto you!’
It had to happen that night, on a Friday when I expected the weekly inspection and the collection of my pages. Once I lit the fuse there was no going back for me.
In the cellars I had found the cans and bottles and containers of white spirit and paraffin and gasoline for the old lawnmowers that must have once roared upon the terraces when Hazzard had been living; when he had stared out from the top floor of the Tor, to survey all that he was master of. And with those flammable fluids I soaked the basement.
The very files of the projectors I used as tapers and wicks, fuses and kindling. Every copy of Theophanic Mutations by Mark Fry was reduced to nothing more than a reeking fuel itself, torn apart and laid out in the rooms of the alumni. I soaked everything that was hazardous and combustible.
Perhaps that night when the alumni returned to writhe upon the ceilings, and to crawl through the dim corridors, even they would have seen the lights of the fires like a beacon. I like to think so.
Whether I was to circle the rose garden for all eternity, or to walk from that place a freed but much-changed man, I had decided that Friday would be the day to herald my awakening.
Whatever befell me that night, I knew that I would not spend another night as the only living soul at the Tor. It’s the one lesson that the API refused to learn since its inception, that everyone has a limit. And by then, I had truly gone some way beyond my own.
I hid from Ida-also-known-as-Wendy, and Eunice-also-known-as-Natalie.
I did not meet them at the gate at the prescribed time, the usual time. I made them come up, come back, to the house.
They didn’t like that either. By this time in our one-sided arrangement, I am sure that they never wanted to see Hunter’s Tor Hall again, let alone set foot inside the grounds. But they arrived in my car and they came up through the trees to find me. From the top floor, I watched them moving slowly up and through the grassy terraces, one level at a time. And I hid from them.
They looked in the cellar, they looked in the cottage, they looked in the woods and in Elysium and Summerland, and inside every other room from which the projections were once made.
I heard their cries when they saw the signs of my desecration, of the emptying of those filing cabinets, the strewing about of the organization’s history.
I heard their frantic footsteps pause at the bottom of the stairs that led up to his rooms, and to the white corridor with the black doors.
Like the scratching of mice beneath the floors of old houses, I heard their tense, sibilant whispers. They argued, I think, about who was to venture up those stairs, to see if the writer was hiding up there, where he had been forbidden to go – in the very place they had said was no longer safe for anyone to set foot, not even themselves.
They moved away, and I heard the heels of their new shoes, upon th
eir weary feet, clatter back down the stairs. I suspected they might go for the car, and drive back to my home. Alternatively, they might race down to the cottage to induce the process of separation. A process, I believed, that they had no longer practised with such vigour while ensconced in my home. Perhaps they had got out of the habit, and perhaps it could not be induced so freely now. But they would try to reopen a connection with what was restless here, for sure, and through it they would cajole the malignant and the maleficent to find me.
They went for the car.
From the second floor, I briefly watched them trying to run through the long grass of the terraces.
And I chose my moment.
What I had been whispering for hours I suddenly screamed.
‘They are here. Here! Eunice, Ida, Wendy, Natalie, Eunice, Ida, Wendy, Natalie . . . Betrayers. See how they run. They have spent your money! On themselves! Snakes!’
I chanted my poison through each and every room as I fled down to the basement.
I lit up that dusty tomb as I descended, room by room.
The timbers were old and damp, but something in the paint on the walls caught far faster than I had anticipated. The hot embers of the papers slipped through the floorboards. In those cavities, the dross of the ages proved as eager for the heat and light as those who still staggered about those passages by night.
I had no real idea if Thin Len would make an appearance. I had never seen him at the Tor. He’d loped through my dreams and through my home, and reared up in the local woods once, but never appeared at the Tor. Amongst all of the horrors that house had presented to me, that may have been the only mercy that it ever granted.
Until that afternoon.
A day of glorious, golden and shimmering summer sunshine. I could see for miles, right across the plains and hills of Dartmoor, and I could see the tiered gardens at the front of the Hall even more clearly.
As I peered from an unshuttered window on the ground floor, while the house above and around me smoked and crackled and crisped, and even though my eyes smarted and my vision was blurred from the smoke, I saw him.