Aickman's Heirs

by Simon Strantzas

  He had slept for hours, had awoken up disoriented with no clear idea of what time it was. Miss Pickaver looked refreshed and relaxed, the exact opposite, he supposed, of how he looked. She had been out to purchase some groceries: olives in a reddish goo, strange tubs of pureed meat, cheese pastes, drinkable yogurts, boxed milk, tins depicting sauerkraut and tiny sausages, dried packets that apparently could be reconstituted into soup or, at least, broth. He stared at it all, as if stunned.

  “Feeling better?” she asked brightly.

  He nodded weakly. She had done her hair, he noticed now, and had applied a thick unnaturally dark shade of lipstick. “Are we going out?” he asked.

  She gave a peal of laughter. “I’ve been out, darling. There’s no point in your going out, especially not now. It’s nearly night again. You slept the sleep of the dead.”

  The sleep of the dead, he thought now, nursing a bowl of tepid tea as he sat at the window, staring out. The other apartments, the ones on the real third floor, all had balconies, but all theirs had was the window. On one of the balconies below, he watched the backs of a man and a woman, the man holding the woman around the waist as they stared out across the courtyard and through the gap in the buildings to the sea beyond.

  He followed their gaze. The light, he had to admit, was beautiful, just as Miss Pickaver had suggested it would be, and if he sat at just the right angle he had a glimpse of the beach. It was littered with bodies. Mostly Eastern Europeans or Germans, he guessed, based on the gold chains they wore and on the fact that the women were blond and seemingly topless. The men, he noticed now, mostly wore nothing at all, lying baking nude in the sun, their flesh leathery, as if being cured.

  “Is it a nude beach?” he asked.

  But Miss Pickaver, in front of the bathroom mirror plucking her eyebrows, humming softly to herself, didn’t seem to hear. He couldn’t bring himself to repeat the question. He did not want to be accused by Miss Pickaver of staring at the nudes on the beach. That seemed a humiliation.

  When he looked back down at the balcony, the couple were no longer there. He shifted his chair. In the courtyard below, a couple crossed back and forth, their heads bent toward one another. Was it the same couple? He didn’t know. The man was about his age, the woman, roughly, the age of Miss Pickaver. There was, now that he thought about it, a physical resemblance as well, both to him and to Miss Pickaver, but they were in the long shadow cast by the building and their faces were turned away, so perhaps that was partly imagined. But when he realized from the cloying smell of her perfume that Miss Pickaver had left the mirror and was standing behind him, he pointed them out to her.

  “Like us, no?” he said, and smiled.

  She leaned forward and squinted, then drew slowly back. “I don’t see the resemblance,” she said. Then she kissed him on the top of his head. He imagined the dark stain the lipstick must have left there. “Will you help me carry down my bag?” she asked.

  “Your bag?”

  “I catch the train in an hour,” she said. “For my little tour.”

  “You’re leaving already?” he said, beginning to panic a little.

  She crossed her arms, stared at him. “This is what you wanted,” she said in a clipped voice. “You wanted to stay put. This is what we agreed on.”

  But had it been? They’d barely arrived and already she was going. He didn’t know the place, he hardly knew how to get to town, but when he voiced these complaints she opened the fridge and gestured at its contents.

  “You needn’t go to town,” she said. “You have everything you need right here.” She patiently batted away all his objections until, fifteen minutes later, an ordinary white car pulled into the courtyard below, honked.

  “There’s my ride,” she said.

  “But it’s not a taxi,” he said. “It’s just someone’s car.”

  “That’s how taxis are here,” she claimed.

  “But—”

  “Who’s been here before?” she asked. “You or I?”

  Confused, he hauled her bag down the stairs and to the elevator and sent it down. “No point in you coming down. I’ll have the driver come in and get it,” she said. “You don’t need to bother.”

  #

  He lingered at the window until darkness, and then lingered a little longer. Long after dark there was the noise of the couple walking around below, the gentle murmur of their voices. Though, over time, that murmur became less and less gentle, finally concluding in a shriek from one or the other of them. He kept listening, wondering if he should go down and check on them, but there was only silence. After a while, he closed the window and went to bed.

  But he couldn’t sleep. His body had no idea what time it was, and he had slept too long during the day, and so he lay in the dark staring up at the ceiling. Perhaps he should have gone with Miss Pickaver. Perhaps he should have done 12 countries in 10 days or whatever it was, expanded his horizons a little—no, this was only nervousness about being left alone. He did not want to see twelve countries. He did not want to see even one country, but now that he was here in this one there was little he could do.

  He lay in bed, obsessing, tossing and turning until quite late, one or two in the morning, and then got up and found a book. He tried to read, but the words weren’t sticking with him, and after a few pages he had no idea what he’d read. So he turned off the light and went back to the window, resting his elbows on the sill.

  There was a moon out now, pale and bitten into, but still casting a fair amount of grayish light. If he leaned far enough out, he could see, below and to the left, the pale white glow of the balcony for the room on the real third floor that was closest to him. There was a dark shape on it, large, though difficult to say whether it was the man or the woman. From time to time it moved a little, or settled in a different way.

  Down below, on paving of the courtyard, a dark blotch of some sort, largish, much bigger than a man. Hard to say exactly what it was, however, and it was in any case motionless. Maybe it wasn’t anything at all, a trick of the light. But if it wasn’t a trick of the light, what could it be?

  He stayed there, staring down, eyes flicking from the shape in the courtyard to the shape on the balcony, until, after a while, close to morning, he began to feel sleepy and went to bed.

  #

  3.

  When he stumbled awake it was well past noon. He poured out something pink from a jug in the fridge, found it to be slightly sour, but whether it was supposed to be like that he was at a loss to determine. He put it away, poured himself a glass of rusty water from the tap.

  Before he knew it he was back at the window, looking down. Whatever had been in the courtyard the night before had left no sign of its presence. When he leaned out he could see the balcony below, but it was bare, no drink glasses or shoes or bits of clothing to indicate who had been there.

  What would he do today? He could find the town, wander through it, just to expend a few hours. Or he could stay here, up in the apartment, read a little, relax, stare out the window.

  There was a buzzing sound, unfamiliar but insistent. At first he thought it must be the door, but then it continued and he realized it wasn’t coming from the door but from the kitchen, from the telephone on the wall there. Why bother to answer it? he wondered. It wouldn’t be for him—nobody knew he was here, at least nobody who mattered. He would just ignore it.

  But it was hard to ignore. It just kept ringing and ringing. After a while he got up and went into the kitchen and stayed there, staring at it. Each time it rang, it shook slightly in its cradle. No, he wouldn’t answer it. But it was all he could do not to answer it.

  It rang perhaps thirty more times and then stopped. He took a deep breath and slowly let it out and then headed back to the window. By the time he arrived there, the phone had started ringing again.

  It might be Miss Pickaver, he told himself this time, less because he believed it and more because of the idea of hearing the phone ring over and over again seemed im
possible. Maybe it is for me after all.

  But when he picked the phone up the connection was odd, thick with static. “Hello?” he said. When he had no response, he added, “Miss Pickaver?”

  A voice that sounded very distant said something in another language, maybe French, maybe not. Or maybe it was just the distorted echo of what Hovell had said. He waited a long moment for the voice to say something else. When nothing was forthcoming he hung up the telephone.

  #

  Late in the afternoon, he managed to make it downstairs. The concierge was there now, sitting in the lodge just beside the door. It wasn’t the same man as yesterday, or at least didn’t look like the same. Maybe it was a job shared by two different people, or maybe it was just one person who, depending on what he wore and his mood, could look very different.

  Hovell tried to make the man understand what he wanted. Town he repeated, again and again, then the actual name of the town, with both pronunciations he had heard, but the concierge just looked blank. The concierge said something back in French, a question judging by the intonation, but Hovell couldn’t understand a word of it.

  After a while he gave up and went towards the front door. But quickly the concierge was in front of him, between him and the door, gesticulating, pushing him back.

  “What’s wrong?” asked Hovell. “I just want to go outside.”

  But when he reached for the door again, the concierge knocked his hand away.

  Under normal circumstances this would have been enough to turn Hovell around, send him back up the stairs, but with everything else that had gone on, he was not himself. He reached out and grasped the concierge by both shoulders and moved him out of the way, and then went out the door. This time, the man did not try to stop him.

  #

  He crossed the courtyard to find the gate he had originally come through locked, so circled around the edges of the compound until he found a place where the fence met a wall and he was able to climb up and over. Nothing on the other side looked familiar. Immediately he was lost, and when he started out in what he thought might be the direction of the town center he found himself squirreling around small little streets which gradually became larger and emptier, the houses sparser and sparser. He hadn’t paid any attention when Miss Pickaver had led them from the train station, he’d been too tired. He should have paid attention. He tried to work his way back to the complex but the streets seemed different going the other way on them, and quickly he was off course. There were streets and houses, but no town center. And then, suddenly, he was at the beach.

  He felt immediately conspicuous, dressed as he was in the same khaki trousers and ratty sweater and worn gum-bottomed shoes that he wore to putter around the garden at home. He was overdressed. The most anyone on the beach was wearing was a thin strip of fabric over their fork, if fork was the right word, and the majority were not wearing even that. Most were nude, scattered in clusters here and there on the beach, and in the few moments he looked out over them none of them moved, as if the sun had reduced them to a sort of paralysis.

  “Please?” said a voice behind him, in a thick guttural accent. Russian, maybe.

  He turned to see a tall, bronzed man who was completely bald and completely nude, greased from head to toe with some sort of oil. A gold watch glinted on his wrist. His eyes were hidden behind a pair of goggles with dark, protective lenses.

  “I seem to have gotten lost,” said Hovell. It was disconcerting, he realized, to talk to a man naked except for watch and goggles. He felt as if some sort of rule of etiquette was being violated, but wasn’t sure whether he or the bronzed man was the one violating it.

  “This you can say,” said the bronzed man, crossing his arms. “This they all say.”

  “But it’s true,” protested Hovell.

  “If you care to have your look, we shall have our look too,” the man said, and reached out to take hold of Hovell’s sweater.

  Hovell recoiled, stepping rapidly backward. For a moment the man held on tight and then he suddenly let go. Hovell stumbled and almost went down in the sand. He rushed quickly away, the giddy laughter of the bronzed man ringing loud behind him.

  #

  It was nearly dark by the time he found the complex again, which revealed itself to him just at the moment when he’d finally given up looking for it. The gate was still locked and though he rang the buzzer the concierge never came to open it. He circled the complex until he found the place he had climbed over and climbed back in that way. It was more difficult coming back in than going out, and he tore open the knee of his trousers.

  In the twilight he crossed the courtyard. The same couple, or a couple very much like them, were there once again tonight, walking arm in arm, heads inclined toward one another, and he thought again of the resemblance of the middle-aged man to himself and of the younger woman to Miss Pickaver. He was tempted to approach them, and indeed had started towards them. But as he came closer he realized that something was happening between them, that what he had taken to be a genial arm-in-arm was the man holding the woman’s arm so tightly she couldn’t release it. He was pulling her forward, and the reason her head was inclined as it was was because it was hard for her to do otherwise. And yet, the woman did not cry out. Surely if she was in trouble, if she needed him, she would cry out.

  Unsure, he drifted toward them anyway until, with a sudden burst of speed they darted away. He stayed there for a moment confused, looking after them, and then went inside. The concierge was there, waiting, and immediately began to wag his finger at him, but whether for climbing the fence or for some other reason, Hovell was at a loss to say. Hovell pushed past him and climbed the stairs.

  By the time he reached his own window and was looking out of it, the couple had gone. There were however two men wearing what looked, in the growing darkness, like uniforms. Police perhaps, or people dressed to look like police. What did the police over here dress like anyway? He watched them walk in a unified step across the courtyard and enter his building.

  The next hour he spent waiting for them to knock at his door. They did not knock, but knowing they could at any moment was enough to keep him agitated and upset. In his head he imagined what he would tell them about climbing the fence, about accidentally wandering onto the beach. He found his hands moving, gesticulating his innocence to the empty air. He tried for the first time to close the metal shutters over the window, to keep them from seeing him through the window, but though the mechanism made a humming sound the shutters did not come down. Eventually, he took a blanket and a pillow and locked himself in the bathroom to wait for morning. There had been no need to leave the apartment—why had he done it? He would not, he promised himself, leave the apartment again until Miss Pickaver returned.

  #

  4.

  He was awoken by a narrow strip of light coming under the bathroom door and shining into his eye. He was sore all over from the hardness of the bathroom floor, from having to prop his feet on the bidet as he slept. No, in the light of day, it seemed foolish to have panicked. He hadn’t done anything wrong, there was no reason the police would have come for him. He had let his imagination run away from him.

  But still, he did not leave the apartment. He moved from room to room, reading, looking idly out the window. He sampled more of the unfamiliar tins that Miss Pickaver had bought, and though he wasn’t fully taken by any of it, some of it was at least slightly better than edible. It was good to relax, he told himself. Before long, he would feel like himself again.

  Twilight found him at the window watching for the couple, but tonight they were nowhere to be seen. Or, rather, now there was only the man, walking and pacing the courtyard all on his own, in a seemingly agitated state. Perhaps Hovell had started watching for them too late, after the woman had already gone in. Or perhaps the woman was elsewhere tonight. Or perhaps—but no, what other reasonable possibilities were there? No point letting his imagination run away with him.

  He would read and then fa
ll asleep, Hovell told himself. No late night for him. Not tonight. But instead he found himself still at the window, the lights of the apartment extinguished behind him so as to see better. How much time went by, he wasn’t sure. An hour maybe, or maybe more. And then, suddenly, he noticed again the shape on the balcony, the man there—he was almost sure now it was the man—visible in the moonlight and in contrast to the white metal of the balcony. Another watcher, much like himself, unable to sleep. But what was there to see at night?

  And then the clouds shifted and he realized it was there again, on the paving stones of the courtyard: the large black shape, the heap or mound of something. One moment it hadn’t been and then now, suddenly, it was. What was it? He felt the hair rising on the back of his neck as his mind darted from terror to terror, offering each as a way to fill the mystery.

  But no, it was ridiculous to think this way. He was letting his imagination run away with him again. There must be an explanation. If he went down, he’d find what it was.

  He did not move from the window.

  The figure on the balcony, he noticed, didn’t move either. It must be staring down at the same black heap, just like me. Unless, he suddenly realized with a start, it’s staring up at me.

  It was as if the figure had taken this thought of his as its cue. He watched as it clambered onto the rail of the balcony and then, before Hovell could do anything or even cry out, it jumped.

  #

  He clattered his way down the stairs, heart pounding, and rushed past the closed concierge’s box and out into the courtyard. The body was nowhere to be seen, no human figure was sprawled on the pavement below the balcony. But wasn’t the fall enough to kill it? Or him, rather? Maybe he had crawled away.