Under a Watchful Eye(105)

I hid from Ida-also-known-as-Wendy, and Eunice-also-known-as-Natalie.

I did not meet them at the gate at the prescribed time, the usual time. I made them come up, come back, to the house.

They didn’t like that either. By this time in our one-sided arrangement, I am sure that they never wanted to see Hunter’s Tor Hall again, let alone set foot inside the grounds. But they arrived in my car and they came up through the trees to find me. From the top floor, I watched them moving slowly up and through the grassy terraces, one level at a time. And I hid from them.

They looked in the cellar, they looked in the cottage, they looked in the woods and in Elysium and Summerland, and inside every other room from which the projections were once made.

I heard their cries when they saw the signs of my desecration, of the emptying of those filing cabinets, the strewing about of the organization’s history.

I heard their frantic footsteps pause at the bottom of the stairs that led up to his rooms, and to the white corridor with the black doors.

Like the scratching of mice beneath the floors of old houses, I heard their tense, sibilant whispers. They argued, I think, about who was to venture up those stairs, to see if the writer was hiding up there, where he had been forbidden to go – in the very place they had said was no longer safe for anyone to set foot, not even themselves.

They moved away, and I heard the heels of their new shoes, upon their weary feet, clatter back down the stairs. I suspected they might go for the car, and drive back to my home. Alternatively, they might race down to the cottage to induce the process of separation. A process, I believed, that they had no longer practised with such vigour while ensconced in my home. Perhaps they had got out of the habit, and perhaps it could not be induced so freely now. But they would try to reopen a connection with what was restless here, for sure, and through it they would cajole the malignant and the maleficent to find me.

They went for the car.

From the second floor, I briefly watched them trying to run through the long grass of the terraces.

And I chose my moment.

What I had been whispering for hours I suddenly screamed.

‘They are here. Here! Eunice, Ida, Wendy, Natalie, Eunice, Ida, Wendy, Natalie . . . Betrayers. See how they run. They have spent your money! On themselves! Snakes!’

I chanted my poison through each and every room as I fled down to the basement.

I lit up that dusty tomb as I descended, room by room.

The timbers were old and damp, but something in the paint on the walls caught far faster than I had anticipated. The hot embers of the papers slipped through the floorboards. In those cavities, the dross of the ages proved as eager for the heat and light as those who still staggered about those passages by night.

I had no real idea if Thin Len would make an appearance. I had never seen him at the Tor. He’d loped through my dreams and through my home, and reared up in the local woods once, but never appeared at the Tor. Amongst all of the horrors that house had presented to me, that may have been the only mercy that it ever granted.

Until that afternoon.

A day of glorious, golden and shimmering summer sunshine. I could see for miles, right across the plains and hills of Dartmoor, and I could see the tiered gardens at the front of the Hall even more clearly.

As I peered from an unshuttered window on the ground floor, while the house above and around me smoked and crackled and crisped, and even though my eyes smarted and my vision was blurred from the smoke, I saw him.

Thin Len.

From a distance, I watched the visible parts of him circle and then fall upon the accused.

How the grass seemed to flatten in the wind, the same wind that fanned the fires of this house into the inferno, the catastrophe that left it charred and black, with half the roof open to the sky the following morning.

I saw Thin Len briefly, a thing dark and long that glided as if swept forwards by the motion of the wind-ruffled grass. A thing that articulated itself like a frantic, damaged insect, when it closed upon those it had come for.

When it cast about them in the tall grass, I heard their cries. That is when I looked away.

Crouched down on the dirty floorboards, I scratched at my scalp like a lunatic, and then stuffed my fingers inside my ears.

I had refused to watch Thin Len take the second one. But I did see him snatch away the first one. Natalie, I think. The sack was suddenly taut on a face at three hundred feet, and up went those arms so tight in the black sleeves. A raggedy scarecrow, striding, flinging itself . . . And then down it seemed to collapse, and up shot the scream of the woman beneath it, and she must have been heard a mile away.

The other woman fell into the long grass, exhausted or too frightened to move, I don’t know. I never got the chance to ask.

I hunkered down in the smoke and heat in that room, and I clutched my head and shuddered with a terrible anticipation that he would come for me next, and that Len, that very day, would add three more soul-bodies to the nocturnal procession at the Tor.

Coughing, my eyes streaming, and no longer able to abide the smoke, I left the building through the kitchen. I’d left every external door on the ground floor open, so that the breeze could assist the progress of the fires inside. Some of the fires seemed to have petered out once the paper had finished burning, but others must have continued. Eventually, like the master of the house, they must have raged.

Outside, I stood for a long time and waited, with my eyes shut against . . . what never came for me.