Under a Watchful Eye(100)

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.