The Traveller and Other Stories

by Stuart Neville

  She sat down at the first computer and waited for what seemed an unreasonably long time.

  As Helen fussed at something in her little office at the back, she called out, “Would you like a cup of tea? A coffee, maybe?”

  Catherine almost said, yes, a coffee, please, but then she remembered the one she’d just had with a scone. She wasn’t in the habit of drinking coffee, finding it made her jittery. Along with the three cups of tea she’d had that morning already, she decided against any more caffeine.

  “No, thank you,” she said.

  A small red light blinked into life on the front of the computer terminal before her. She pressed the power button and waited while the machine booted up, her nails digging into her palms as she watched hourglasses and spinning wheels.

  Finally, at last, the login dialogue appeared. Catherine knew her membership number and password by heart, and she typed them in, one stabbing forefinger at a time, clunk-clunk-clunk-clunk. Now the desktop and the scattering of icons. She chose the one for the web-browser, click-click.

  Catherine knew how to do a Google search, having attended a class on using the internet at this very library. She typed once more, forefingers seeking out the keys, jabbing at them as if they were getting a scolding.

  Woman holds me down on bed.

  A few seconds of spinning wheels, then a list of results.

  “Goodness,” she said. “Oh, my goodness.”

  This wasn’t what she expected to see. Not at all. She scanned the list, the lurid descriptions, thinking, surely the library would block this sort of thing?

  “Everything all right, Catherine?”

  Helen’s voice from behind, coming towards her. Catherine grabbed the mouse, couldn’t see the pointer on the screen, jiggled the mouse around until she found it.

  Helen, right behind her.

  “No,” Catherine whispered, and her finger reflexively hit the left button, clicking a link to who knows what.

  A page loaded on the screen.

  Erotic Stories for Couples, it said.

  And there was a photograph. Not entirely pornographic, but certainly not appropriate for a Tuesday morning at the library.

  “What are you . . .”

  Helen’s voiced tailed off, her question answering itself.

  “You might want to keep that sort of thing for home,” Helen said. “I’m not judging, mind, just saying. There’s a time and a—”

  “I didn’t mean to search for that,” Catherine said, rather too forcefully.

  Helen reached around her and took the mouse, guided the pointer up to the top of the browser window, and miraculously made the Google home page appear in its place.

  “Then what did you mean to search for?”

  Catherine felt herself stiffen, unused to sharing details of her life with people, even those she knew passably well.

  “A . . . a dream I keep having. At least, I think it’s a dream. It doesn’t feel like one when it’s happening.”

  Helen took the seat next to her. “What kind of dream?”

  Catherine took a breath, clutched her hands together in her lap. “No. No, it’s all right, I don’t want to trouble you with my old nonsense.”

  “Tell me,” Helen said, placing a hand on her forearm.

  Catherine remained still and silent until Helen squeezed her arm.

  “I wake up,” she said. “That’s the thing, you see, I’m wide awake when it happens. I know I am. I can see everything around me, I can hear everything. And I know there’s someone with me. A woman. It’s always the same woman. It’s like she’s holding me.”

  Catherine wrapped her arms around herself, tight.

  “And I try to ask, who’s there? But she holds my mouth shut. I try to turn my head, but she’s holding it in place. I can’t move my arms or my legs, she’s got me pinned down, and she’s so strong. So, so strong. But she’s gentle, too, she doesn’t hurt me. Not really. And then she starts whispering to me. That’s when I try to scream, but I can’t. She’s holding my jaw too tight, and my tongue won’t work.”

  She realised she’d been digging her nails into her upper arms. A small angry sting remained there when she took her hands away.

  “And then she’s gone,” Catherine said. “She just . . . dissolves away, and I can move again.”

  Helen sat with her chin resting on her hand, her elbow on the desk. “How often does this happen? When did it start?”

  “The first time was about six months ago, then it happened again a couple of weeks later. And a couple of weeks after that. But it’s happening more often now. Twice this week. It’s getting to be so I’m afraid to go to sleep in case she comes again.”

  Helen remained quiet, watching.

  “I suppose you think I’ve gone mad,” Catherine said.

  Helen smiled. “Not at all. It’s called sleep paralysis. I’ve never had it myself, but my husband has had it a few times.”

  “Sleep paralysis,” Catherine echoed.

  “From what I’ve read, the brain sends out a hormone that stops you from moving while you dream, but sometimes it overlaps with waking. You’re awake but you’re dreaming, and that hormone has you paralysed. It’s sometimes accompanied by hallucinations, very often an old woman. The Night Hag.”

  “The Night Hag?”

  “My husband saw her at the foot of the bed, then she’d climb on top of him and hold him down. Scared the life out of him.”

  Catherine nodded. “It is . . . frightening.”

  Bloody terrifying, she thought.

  Helen stood. “Wait here.”

  Catherine watched as she crossed the library and browsed the nonfiction section, running her fingertip first along one row of spines, then another. Eventually she found what she was looking for, pulling a large book with a colourful cover from the shelf. She carried it back to Catherine and set it on the desk with a thump.

  “Let’s see,” Helen said, fanning through the pages. “Here.”

  She turned the book so Catherine could read the title at the top of the page.

  A Terrifying Nocturnal Visitor: The Night Hag.

  Below the title, a reproduction of an old painting, a grotesque image. A woman lay on her back, her head and shoulders falling back off the bed, her breasts indecently close to spilling out of her nightclothes. And perched on her stomach, a squat devil of a creature, grey skin, long red tongue hanging from its gaping mouth.

  “Well, she doesn’t look like that,” Catherine said.

  “Read the text,” Helen said. “It might help you understand what’s happening.”

  “Maybe,” Catherine said, but she suspected it wouldn’t.

  “You said it started six months ago,” Helen said.

  “That’s right.”

  “Wasn’t that around the time your mother . . . the accident?”

  Catherine looked at the creature on the woman’s chest. Its gnarled features, its wicked gaze.

  “Around then, yes,” she said.

  “Perhaps it’s related. Grief can do strange things to a person’s mind.”

  Catherine didn’t respond, having been given an answer to a question she hadn’t wanted to ask. Of course it had occurred to her that the appearance of the woman in her bed coincided with her mother’s death—in fact, the woman had first visited the night of her mother’s funeral—but she had refused to link the two in any way.

  “You okay, Catherine?”

  Helen’s words pulled her from the idea, the ridiculous notion dissolving in her mind like steamy breath on a morning breeze.

  “Yes, I’m fine,” she said, but she really wasn’t.

  Not at all.

  Catherine took the book home and read the piece six times. The book was about dreams, their meanings and interpretations. She leafed through it, mostly hokum about symb
olism, the names Freud and Jung appearing here and there, along with a host of other shysters and heathens. But the section on the Night Hag felt true and real.

  For some, the Hag stood in a corner, watching. For others, she sat on her victim’s chest. And for many, like Catherine, she held her prey down. Sometimes she wasn’t a she at all.

  Catherine read it again after her dinner of a fishcake and boiled potatoes. She read the hysterical accounts of old crones and their watching and sitting and holding. But the most important passage of all, the one she read over and over, was that the Night Hag was not real. Not real at all, only a dream for the waking, a malfunction of the brain.

  “Not real,” she said aloud several times as she fetched herself a cup of hot chocolate and two digestive biscuits. She said it again, numerous times, as she dressed for bed, even as she brushed her teeth, spitting toothpaste onto the mirror over the washbasin.

  She said it one last time as she pulled the bedclothes up to her chin and closed her eyes.

  “Not real,” she said, and believed it to be true.

  She is awake. This is certain. She sees the room in the half-light, the nightstand, the lamp, the mobile phone. Someone is here. They embrace her, pinning her arms to her side. A leg wrapped around hers, pressing it down onto the mattress. She wants to lift her head, but a hand forces it into the pillow.

  The woman is back. The Night Hag.

  Catherine wants to tell her to go away, to leave her alone, but the hand has closed around her jaw, sealing it shut.

  The lips against her ear, the hot breath.

  Oh God, oh Jesus, make it stop.

  Catherine can’t see the blackened hand, but she can feel it, the fingertips seeking her lips, pressing between, penetrating, the jagged nail against her teeth, scratching her gums.

  The woman giggles.

  I know what you did, she says.

  Now Catherine must scream. She must, but she can’t. Her throat won’t open to let it out. Her cries gurgle there, drowning.

  I know what you did.

  Now, at last, Catherine can open her mouth. She screams, a high wailing cry, and her arms and legs are free. Turning in the bed, rolling over, she sees the shape of a woman crawl away, sinking down the side of the bed, out of view.

  Catherine cries out once more, a formless howl.

  I know what you did.

  Catherine opened her door to Pastor John Lipton exactly one hour after she’d called him. She had offered to walk to the church, but he said no need, he would come to her. A panicked sixty minutes later, she had tidied and hoovered every room that he might possibly enter, including her small kitchen, to which she brought him.

  “I like what you’ve done with the place,” he said as he took a seat at the fold-out table.

  “Thank you,” she said, even though she hadn’t done anything to the house she’d been renting for half a year. The same tired off-white paint and avocado tiles covered the walls, the same linoleum flooring underfoot as when she’d moved in. “Tea? Coffee?”

  “Tea would be lovely,” Pastor John said.

  Catherine had boiled the kettle in preparation only a few minutes before and it hissed and bubbled immediately when she flicked the switch. Two matching mugs sat ready, along with a caddy full of teabags and a sealed jar of instant coffee. A sheet of clingfilm covered a plate of biscuits. They talked as she prepared the tea.

  “You seem to have found your feet,” Pastor John said. “After everything that happened, it’s good to see you soldiering on.”

  “I’ve you and everyone at the church to thank,” Catherine said, “the way you all rallied round me.”

  “Well, that’s the whole point of the church, isn’t it? It’s not just a building. It’s a community. Have you thought any more about getting out and about? A little job somewhere, maybe? Even volunteering. It does you no good to stay cooped up here all the time.”

  “Maybe in a month or two,” Catherine said. “I seem to be able to fill my days without too much trouble. Sugar?”

  “One, please,” he said. “It’s not just a matter of filling time, though, is it? It’s also about connecting with people.”

  Catherine placed the two steaming mugs on the table, removed the clingfilm from the plate of biscuits.

  “I see people,” she said. “When I go to the shops, and there’s Helen at the library, and everyone at church.”

  “You need more than that,” he said. “You were a carer for your mother for . . . how long?”

  “Nearly thirty years,” Catherine said, sitting down.

  “And now she’s gone, what do you do with yourself?”

  “Like I said, church, the library. The shops once or twice a week. I keep busy.”

  “Okay, but think about it. There’s lots you could contribute. Don’t shut yourself away. Anyway, what was it you wanted to talk about?”

  Catherine dropped her gaze to her tea, still untouched on the table in front of her. She had been certain of the question she wanted to ask when she called Pastor John an hour ago, but now the certainty cracked.

  Pastor John reached out, touched his fingertips—

  to her teeth

  —to her forearm.

  “Catherine, what’s wrong?”

  “You believe in heaven,” she said, her voice small and trembling.

  “Of course.”

  “And hell?”

  “I don’t know if it’s a fiery lake or not, but yes, I believe there is a place that is apart from God.”

  “Is there another place?” she asked, unable to look at him.

  A pause, and then he asked, “What do you mean?”

  “Is there a place that’s neither heaven nor hell? Somewhere different?”

  “Do you mean somewhere like purgatory? That’s not something I believe in.”

  She scratched the side of her index finger with her thumbnail, peeling skin away.

  “Catherine, what is this about?”

  She looked at him, saw the concern on his face, and she felt a shameful wave of foolishness.

  “Has something happened?” he asked.

  She shook her head, no.

  “I’ve just remembered,” she said. “I’m sorry, I have an appointment. I need to go.”

  The wind blew hard across the municipal cemetery, no trees to break it, no structures other than the maintenance buildings down by the gates. Miserable drizzle came with the wind, dragged from the low grey cloud and into Catherine’s cheeks and ears. She pulled up her coat’s collar and wished she’d worn the new anorak she’d bought herself for Christmas.

  Dead flowers lay scattered on her mother’s grave, the vase having long tipped over. It had been six weeks since she’d last visited. At first, she’d come every day, then every few days, then once a week. Then a month. That’s how these things go, she supposed. A fresh grave is like a new toy to a child, a thing that loses its shine as days go by. All of the plots in this row appeared neglected, old leaves clustered in the gravel, ornaments toppled.

  Catherine felt no guilt. Instead, she felt relief. She wasn’t sure what she had expected to find other than the modest headstone and a rectangle of white gravel hemmed in by a low wall of granite. Some sign of disturbance, perhaps. A corner of the concrete cap broken away, earth pushed aside.

  “You’re dead in there,” she said. “You’re nothing but bones and old skin and you can’t hurt me. Not anymore.”

  At Pastor John’s insistence, Catherine had gone to a grief counsellor after her mother had perished. An effeminate young man whom Catherine assumed to be one of those, as her mother would have put it.

  “I only need this one appointment,” she had told him as he sat in the opposite armchair in his inoffensive little office.

  “Oh?” he had replied, smiling gently and raising his eyebrows.

&
nbsp; “You see, I’m not grieving. I’m glad she’s dead.”

  He said nothing. She felt a mild disappointment that he didn’t express some surprise.

  “I prayed she would die,” Catherine continued, unbidden. “I’ve been praying for a long time. I didn’t love her. She didn’t love me. She made bloody sure I had nothing resembling a life, I was nothing more than a servant to her, and now she’s gone and I’m glad. The night she died, I thanked the Lord Jesus for freeing me of her.”

  He remained quiet for a moment, then said, “Catherine, when we lose someone so suddenly, and in such circumstances, it can be difficult to process how we—”

  “Oh, pish-posh. I’ve visited her grave every day for the last fortnight, and do you know what I’ve done each time? I’ve spat on it.”

  Now she stood there, rolling saliva around her tongue. When she had a good mouthful, she leaned over and propelled it as hard and as far as she could. Had it not been for the wind, it would have reached the headstone.

  “And stay dead,” she said.

  She is awake. This is certain. She sees the room in the half-light, the nightstand, the lamp, the mobile phone. Someone is here. They embrace her, pinning her arms to her side. A leg wrapped around hers, pressing it down onto the mattress. She wants to lift her head, but a hand forces it into the pillow.

  And something else.

  A high repetitive shrieking. Not her, not the Hag, but something else.

  The smoke alarm in the hall downstairs.

  There is a fire.

  Oh God, no, please, not that.

  Lips against her ear, a breathy giggle. Fingers creeping to her lips, between, nails scratching at her teeth and gums.

  I know what you did.

  Catherine screams with every breath, but each one is trapped in her throat, drowned out by the smoke alarm and the voice in her ear.

  I know what you did.

  Catherine fell out of bed, landed hard on her shoulder, her legs following, still tangled in the duvet. She kicked herself free and scrambled to her feet, reaching for the door. The floor tilted beneath her, and she fell again, the carpet tearing at her chin. She used the handle to haul herself upright, opened the door, and stumbled out onto the small landing. A moment of disorientation as she navigated the darkness, thinking of her mother’s house, the place she had lived for fifty years. The upstairs landing in that house, while it stood, had been long and wide, not the small square of the place she now rented. The top of the stairs in that house was more than a few feet away, and she gasped with shock as her toes reached into cool and smoky air. She grabbed for the handrail, but it was not there, not in this house, and her knuckles slammed into hard plaster and coarse wallpaper.