“But it saw me full on. It’s jealous of its place, and there was I peering through without permission, like a nosy neighbour through a hole in the fence. I know what it is. I know what happened.
“It lurks before us, in the everyday. It’s the boss of all the things hidden in plain sight. Terrible things, they are. Appalling things. Just almost in reach. Brazen and invisible.
“It caught my glances. It can move through whatever I see.
“For most people it’s just chance, isn’t it? What shapes they see in a tangle of wire. There’s a thousand pictures there, and when you look, some of them just appear. But now . . . the thing in the lines chooses the pictures for me. It can thrust itself forward. It makes me see it. It’s found its way through. To me. Through what I see. I opened a door into my perception.”
She sounded frozen with terror. I was not equipped for that kind of adult fear, and my mouth worked silently for something to say.
“That was a long, long journey home. Every time I peeked through the cracks in my fingers, I saw that thing crawling for me.
“It waited ready to pounce, and when I opened my eyes even a crack I opened the door again. I saw the back of a woman’s jumper, and in the details of the fabric the thing leapt for me. I glimpsed a yard of broken paving and I noticed just the lines that showed me the thing . . . baying.
“I had to shut my eyes quick. I groped my way home.
“And then I taped my eyes shut and I tried to think about things.”
There was silence for a time.
“See, there was always the easy way, that scared me rotten, because I was never one for blood and pain,” she said suddenly, and her voice was harder. “I held the scissors in front of my eyes a couple of times, but even bandaged blind as I was I couldn’t bear it. I suppose I could’ve gone to a doctor. I can pull strings, I could pull in a few favours, have them do the job without pain.
“But you know I never . . . really . . . reckoned . . . that’s what I’d do,” she said thoughtfully. “What if you found a way to close the door? Eh? And you’d already put out your eyes? You’d feel such a fool, wouldn’t you?
“And you know it wouldn’t be good enough to wear pads and eyepatches and all. I tried. You catch glimpses. You see the glimmers of light and maybe a few of your own hairs, and that’s the doorway right there, when the hairs cross in the corner of your eye so that if you notice just a few of them in just the right way, they look like something coming for you. That’s a doorway.
“It’s . . . unbearable . . . having sight, but trapping it like that.
“I’m not giving up. See . . .” Her voice lowered, and she spoke conspiratorially. “I still think I can close the door. I learnt to see. I can unlearn. I’m looking for ways. I want to see a wall as bricks again. Nothing more. That’s why you read for me,” she said. “Research. Can’t look at it myself, of course—too many edges and lines and so on on a printed page—so you do it for me. And you’re a good boy to do it.”
I’ve thought about what she said many times, and still it makes no sense to me. The books I read to Mrs. Miller were school textbooks, old and dull village histories, the occasional romantic novel. I think that she must have been talking of some of her other visitors, who perhaps read her more esoteric stuff than I did. Either that, or the information she sought was buried very cleverly in the banal prose I faltered through.
“In the meantime, there’s another way of surviving,” she said. “Leave the eyes where they are, but don’t give them any details.
“That thing can force me to notice its shape, but only in what’s there. That’s how it travels. You imagine if I saw a field of wheat. Doesn’t even bear thinking about! A million million little edges, a million lines. You could make pictures of damn anything out of them, couldn’t you? It wouldn’t take any effort at all for the damn thing to make me notice it. The damn lurker. Or in a gravel drive or, or a building site, or a lawn . . .
“But I can outsmart it.” The note of cunning in her voice made her sound deranged. “Keep it away till I work out how to close it off.
“I had to prepare this blind, with the wrappings round my head. Took me a while, but here I am now. Safe. I’m safe in my little cold room. I keep the walls flat white. I covered the windows and painted them too. I made my cloak out of plastic, so’s I can’t catch a glimpse of cotton weave or anything when I wake up.
“I keep my place nice and . . . simple. When it was all done, I unwrapped the bandages from my head, and I blinked slowly . . . and I was alright. Clean walls, no cracks, no features. I don’t look at my hands often or for long. Too many creases. Your mother makes me a good healthy soup looks like cream, so if I accidentally look in the bowl, there’s no broccoli or rice or tangled-up spaghetti to make lines and edges.
“I open and shut the door so damned quick because I can only afford a moment. That thing is ready to pounce. It wouldn’t take a second for it to leap up at me out of the sight of your hair or your books or whatever.”
Her voice ebbed out. I waited a minute for her to resume, but she did not do so. Eventually I knocked nervously on the door and called her name. There was no answer. I put my ear to the door. I could hear her crying, quietly.
I went home without the bowl. My mother pursed her lips a little but said nothing. I didn’t tell her any of what Mrs. Miller had said.
The next time I delivered Mrs. Miller’s food, in a new container, she whispered harshly to me: “It preys on my eyes, all the white. Nothing to see. Can’t look out the window, can’t read, can’t gaze at my nails. Preys on my mind.
“Not even my memories are left,” she said. “It’s colonising them. I remember things . . . happy times . . . and the thing’s waiting in the texture of my dress, or in the crumbs of my birthday cake. I didn’t notice it then. But I can see it now. My memories aren’t mine anymore. Not even my imaginings. Last night I thought about going to the seaside, and the thing was there in the foam on the waves.”
She spoke very little the next few times I visited her. I read the chapters she demanded, and she grunted curtly in response. She ate quickly.
Her other visitors were there more often now, as the spring came in. I saw them in new combinations and situations: the glamourous young woman arguing with the friendly drunk; an old man sobbing at the far end of the hall. The aggressive man was often there, cajoling and moaning, and occasionally talking conversationally through the door, being answered like an equal. Other times he screamed at her as usual.
I arrived on a chilly day to find the drunken cockney sleeping a few feet from the door, snoring gutturally. I gave Mrs. Miller her food and then sat on my coat and read to her from a women’s magazine as she ate.
When she had finished her food I waited with my arms outstretched, ready to snatch the bowl from her. I remember that I was very uneasy, that I sensed something wrong. I was looking around me anxiously, but everything seemed normal. I looked down at my coat and the crumpled magazine, at the man who still sprawled comatose in the hall.
As I heard Mrs. Miller’s hands on the door, I realised what had changed. The drunken man was not snoring. He was holding his breath.
For a tiny moment I thought he had died, but I could see his body trembling, and my eyes began to open wide and I stretched my mouth to scream a warning, but the door had already begun to swing in its arc, and before I could even exhale the stinking man pushed himself up faster than I would have thought him capable and bore down on me with bloodshot eyes.
I managed to keen as he reached me, and the door faltered for an instant as Mrs. Miller heard my voice. But the man grabbed hold of me in a terrifying fug of alcohol. He reached down and snatched my coat from the floor, tugged at the jumper I had tied around my waist with his other hand, and hurled me hard at the door.
It flew open, smacking Mrs. Miller aside. I was screaming and crying. My eyes hurt at the sudden burst of cold white light from all the walls. I saw Mrs. Miller rubbing her head in the corner, strugg
ling to her senses. The staggering, drunken man hurled my checked coat and my patterned jumper in front of her, reached down and snatched my feet, tugged me out of the room in an agony of splinters. I wailed snottily with fear.
Behind me, Mrs. Miller began to scream and curse, but I could not hear her well because the man had clutched me to him and pulled my head to his chest. I fought and cried and felt myself lurch as he leaned forward and slammed the door closed. He held it shut.
When I fought myself free of him I heard him shouting.
“I told you, you slapper,” he wailed. “I fucking told you, you silly old whore. I fucking warned you it was time . . .” Behind his voice I could hear shrieks from the room. Both of them kept shouting and crying and screaming, and the floorboards pounded, and the door shook, and I heard something else as well.
As if the notes of all the different noises in the house fell into a chance meeting, and sounded like more than dissonance. The shouts and bangs and cries of fear combined in a sudden audible illusion like another presence.
Like a snarling voice. A lingering, hungry exhalation.
I ran then, screaming and terrified, my skin freezing in my T-shirt. I was sobbing and retching with fear, little bleats bursting from me. I stumbled home and was sick in my mother’s room, and kept crying and crying as she grabbed hold of me and I tried to tell her what had happened, until I was drowsy and confused and I fell into silence.
My mother said nothing about Mrs. Miller. The next Wednesday we got up early and went to the zoo, the two of us, and at the time I would usually be knocking on Mrs. Miller’s door I was laughing at camels. The Wednesday after that I was taken to see a film, and the one after that my mother stayed in bed and sent me to fetch cigarettes and bread from the local shop, and I made our breakfast and ate it in her room.
My friends could tell that something had changed in the yellow house, but they did not speak to me about it, and it quickly became uninteresting to them.
I saw the Asian woman once more, smoking with her friends in the park several weeks later, and to my amazement she nodded to me and came over, interrupting her companions’ conversation.
“Are you alright?” she asked me peremptorily. “How you doing?”
I nodded shyly back and told her that I was fine, thank you, and how was she?
She nodded and walked away.
I never saw the drunken, violent man again.
There were people I could probably have gone to to understand more about what had happened to Mrs. Miller. There was a story that I could chase, if I wanted to. People I had never seen before came to my house and spoke quietly to my mother, and looked at me with what I suppose was pity or concern. I could have asked them. But I was thinking more and more about my own life. I didn’t want to know Mrs. Miller’s details.
I went back to the yellow house once, nearly a year after that awful morning. It was winter. I remembered the last time I spoke to Mrs. Miller and I felt so much older it was almost giddying. It seemed such a vastly long time ago.
I crept up to the house one evening, trying the keys I still had, which to my surprise worked. The hallway was freezing, dark, and stinking more strongly than ever. I hesitated, then pushed open Mrs. Miller’s door.
It opened easily, without a sound. The occasional muffled noise from the street seemed so distant it was like a memory. I entered.
She had covered the windows very carefully, and still no light made its way through from outside. It was extremely dark. I waited until I could see better in the ambient glow from the outside hallway.
I was alone.
My old coat and jumper lay spread-eagled in the corner of the room. I shivered to see them, went over and fingered them softly. They were damp and mildewing, covered in wet dust.
The white paint was crumbling off the wall in scabs. It looked as if it had been left untended for several years. I could not believe the extent of the decay.
I turned slowly around and gazed at each wall in turn. I took in the chaotic, intricate patterns of crumbling paint and damp plaster. They looked like maps, like a rocky landscape.
I looked for a long time at the wall farthest from my jacket. I was very cold. After a long time I saw a shape in the ruined paint. I moved closer with a dumb curiosity far stronger than any fear.
In the crumbling texture of the wall was a spreading anatomy of cracks that—seen from a certain angle, caught just right in the scraps of light—looked in outline something like a woman. As I stared at it it took shape, and I stopped noticing the extraneous lines, and focused without effort or decision on the relevant ones. I saw a woman looking out at me.
I could make out the suggestion of her face. The patch of rot which constituted it made it look as if she was screaming.
One of her arms was flung back away from her body, which seemed to strain against it, as if she was being pulled away by her hand and was fighting to escape, and was failing. At the end of her crack-arm, in the space where her captor would be, the paint had fallen away in a great slab, uncovering a huge patch of wet, stained, textured cement.
And in that dark infinity of markings, I could make out any shape I wanted.
GO BETWEEN
Something was in the bread. Morley was cutting, and on the fourth strike of the knife, the metal braked.
Behind him his friends talked over their food. Morley prised the dough apart and touched something smooth. He had marked it with a scratch. Morley could see the thing’s colour, a drab charcoal. He frowned. It had been a long time since this had happened.
“What’s up?” someone said to him, and when he turned his face was relaxed.
“It’s gone mouldy.”
He put the bread in the rubbish, where he could reach it again.
When the others were gone Morley took the bread out and pulled it apart. From its crumbs he drew a tube, a grey baton that fit thickly in his hand. The line of a seal was just visible at one end. Morley did not open it. He turned it over. There were instructions on it, in small type, embossed as if punched out from within.
CONCEAL BY RUBBISH BIN AT EASTERNMOST EXIT ST. JAMES PARK, it said. ASAP. YWBC.
Morley turned it over. He felt the crack of its opening and the larger more ragged mark he had made. The mar made him anxious.
He packaged it tightly in a hard cardboard tube. Walking to the park, he clutched the cylinder, until he realised how he must look, and he turned slowly and he hoped seemingly idly to see who if anyone was watching him, and he relaxed his grip on the tube until he thought perhaps it was too much and that someone might now be able to snatch it. He reached the gate with relief and paused, fussed ostentatiously with his newspaper, put down the tube and tucked it up to the bin with his foot before walking away.
The next day he completed the evaluations he was working on. Morley ate lunch out, and when he headed for home he stopped and bought two new hardbacks, started to read one on the train. (He opened it with a moment’s frisson, but it was all there.) He had ice cream in a cinema café until the next showing of a film that he sat through until the end of the final credits. He ate at a pizzeria, sitting outside, reading his book, but nothing did any good.
Through it all he never stopped waiting. He imagined the park wardens, the dustmen and -women becoming intrigued by the cardboard tube, looking to see that they were not watched and taking it from the piles they collected. He imagined them opening his package, unscrewing that grey rod and drawing out whatever it was he had been charged to deliver. He should be calmer, he knew, but it had been so many months since he had last had to do this. Finally, two days later, when he thought it must have arrived wherever it was going, he felt relief.
He pushed his life back into its usual shape, quickly. Though he could not think that this was the last of it, he was pleased that he had not obsessed as he sometimes did, that he had lost only two days to his duty. Early on it had been more. He was so successful that when he at last received another instruction it came as a shock.
> October, and Morley was enjoying London’s autumn smell. In a newsagent’s he picked up a copy of the Standard, and hesitated by the chocolate, looking at the low-fat version he had trained himself to pretend he liked but suddenly hungry for a real bar, which with guilty devil-may-care he took and paid for. He unwrapped it as he walked. The first bite he swallowed: it was on the second that his teeth touched something hard and he gasped and came halting, and stared into the wet and melting sweet at something much darker and more cold inside.
He stared at the chocolate and thought but I was about to take the other one. It was a long time since he had dwelled on that phenomenon. He had thought himself inured to his instructors’ unerring knowledge of what he would pick.
In the first months he had been constantly aghast at the fact, had imagined unseen cadres watching him, gauging what he was about to buy, somehow pushing their messages into things just before he touched them, but that was impossible. The inserts were there already, waiting for him.
Morley, always knowing that it was useless, had attempted to trick those who contacted him. In shops he would hover for many seconds, his hand over a specific item; he would pick it up, walk on, then suddenly return and grab a replacement.
It made no difference. For weeks and months at a time his shopping was untouched, but when they wanted to pass on a command, he could not evade them. Twice, obscurely shaped, opaque containers were delivered in products he knew he had taken quickly and at random: in a jar of mayonnaise; threaded through a pack of dustbin liners.
Once Morley had spent days living only off translucent products, holding each glass or plastic container up to the light to see it was uncontaminated by commands before buying it, but he had been too hungry to continue like that for long.
The chocolate contained something like a fat pen-lid. Thankfully Morley had not bitten it.
LEAVE ON YOUR SEAT ON THE LAST SOUTHBOUND VICTORIA LINE TRAIN BETWEEN PIMLICO AND VAUXHALL, it said. ASAP. YWBC.
Looking for Jake Page 10