Under a Watchful Eye(23)
By nine, Ewan had finished his fifth drink and the last of the beer in the fridge. After a final salvo of slurred, repetitive reproaches, he’d fallen asleep on the sofa where he’d remained sprawled. Within the soiled clothes his relaxed limbs had looked terribly thin in contrast to the small belly and flabby neck.
He’d briefly snapped awake twice, his expression near unrecognizable, doleful and confused, as if he had been struggling to identify where he was. Ewan was not only drunk, but spent.
Reluctant to close the blinds, in case the gesture intimated that Ewan had been accepted as an overnight guest, Seb had opened a window and left the room. He’d then remained in the kitchen for an hour, his elbows set on the granite counter, chin cupped in his hands, hungry but nauseous. He realized he knew as little now of Ewan’s reasons for seeking him out as he’d known before the man had entered the house.
The time for shaking Ewan awake and asking him to leave had passed. Even if he had managed to coerce him off the premises, he imagined Ewan making a nuisance of himself on the drive, shouting drunkenly and frightening his elderly neighbours. If he did go away, he’d only turn up again, and who could tell what shape he’d be in?
He would have to kick him out in the morning when Ewan was sober, but only after forcing him to make clear his intentions.
Seb left the kitchen and retired to his room just after eleven, his chest tight and his mind racing.
He undressed, reflecting upon how he had slept in the same bed with an attractive woman the previous evening, inside his smart, modern house. A place where he’d been surrounded and confirmed by the evidence of his achievements. The sudden change in his circumstances seemed absurd, even unmoored from reality. But that was how Ewan had operated in their house at university, and in his room in London, by infecting an environment physically, and in other ways too.
Not this one. Not this time.
It was preposterous. At the age of nineteen, when he didn’t know any better, he had made the mistake of befriending a dangerous misfit. How could he still be paying for the error at the age of fifty? Maybe he would continue to pay for it until one of them died.
Until he fell asleep, Seb listened to the snoring that reverberated through the ceiling.
8
I Can See in an Absence of Light
When sleep came, its condition was fitful and harassed by an awful dream set inside his house, though the interior was enlarged enough to hold him and Ewan, and those others, forever.
Seb was much changed, into a naked thing, luminous as a pale worm in dark clay, a skeletal, hairless creature without genitals. A crude operation had been performed between his legs and the wound had been stitched shut with the brown twine that he kept under the kitchen sink.
Exhausted by the long marches down the never-ending hallways of the building, he had struggled to see through a mist. Dim light the colour of mercury illumined little.
Crouched behind Ewan, the ranting giant, whose crown of hair had stuck to his skull and neck, Seb had felt perversely safer.
Like a bearded prophet with a paunch, naked save for a loincloth, Ewan had forged ahead on his thin legs, and swept one arm about in the air as he read from a cluster of dirty papers. Incanting words that Seb never caught, Ewan forced a swift pace. He wanted no delays in their reaching the far-off stutter of pale light that soundlessly flickered ahead.
Behind Seb others crawled. They were old, filled with fear and eager for him to lead them to a place that he was unaware of. He preferred not to look at them, but heard their bare hands and knees bumping upon the floorboards that soon turned to wet bricks. He also caught snatches of their nonsensical entreaties as he moved.
‘Is the light over there?’ someone asked.
‘Have you seen my sister?’ another said, as if in answer.
‘I cannot get back,’ a voice uttered in a tone that verged on panic.
Up ahead something waited within the distant whitish static. Perhaps something on the ceiling was worshipped, or just longed for. It never became apparent to Seb, but the crowd considered the light to be a way out of the damp culvert that ran with cold, black water.
Eventually Ewan discarded the papers and took to swinging one of his old shoes like a priest’s censer. The shoe was filled with soil which Ewan used to fingerpaint a figure onto the moist bricks. Childish images of the same thing, but all the worse for the crude composition that depicted a long, hunched form that moved about on all fours, with its head concealed inside a bag.
‘We find ourselves and we find the way back,’ he said to Seb, and someone behind Seb shrieked, ‘Yes!’ in what sounded like a paroxysm of devotion.
Seb was soon holding aloft his best salad bowl, a vessel choked with filth so that he might resupply the tatty shoe in Ewan’s hand. And down that masonry chute they all stumbled while Ewan spread the graffiti.
At the threshold of the room of the flashing light, Ewan had leaned down and looped a belt around Seb’s throat. Then dragged him into a flickering space where the sound went backwards.
With his legs beset by a paralysing sensation of pins and needles, Seb was hauled around a floor that reeked like an ape’s enclosure in a sun-baked zoo. Whimpering with determination to reach the light, he found himself slipping back the way they had already journeyed, until he staggered anew across the wet bricks of the culvert.
Occasionally, someone would scream from above, someone hanging upside down and reaching for him with their long arms. But within the herd of thin, muttering people, Seb kept moving towards the light.