Under a Watchful Eye(104)

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.