Under a Watchful Eye(34)

‘There are techniques?’

‘They have to be practised for years, in the right environment, and under the supervision and control of mentors before it’s feasible. It’s not easy, what I do, oh no. For most it’s impossible and always will be, no matter how hard they try. But not for all. And I have been preparing and learning a great secret for years.’

Seb barely managed to repress the derogatory snort that had gathered behind his face like a sneeze.

‘But the first time was an accident. You see, I nearly died. Massive fit. Maybe from bad gear. I’d separated my consciousness before, using LSD, and other things. Loads of times. I’d known about this experience years earlier, before I first met you. As difficult as the books were to get hold of, I’d even read everything that Hazzard ever wrote. Both of his books before I was twenty-one.’

‘Hazzard? M. L. Hazzard, the writer?’

Nodding his head, Ewan narrowed his eyes knowingly.

Seb knew of M. L. Hazzard. Aficionados of the weird would probably be aware of him too. Years before, Seb had read a couple of Hazzard short stories in long out-of-print horror anthologies, but he’d never forgotten one of them. ‘Many Communications Must Remain in Doubt’, it had been called. A simple but affecting story of a man who continually haunted a beautiful young woman by travelling in spirit-form to her home each night, to watch her undress, before lingering by the bed to inhabit her space and scent. Eventually the woman wakes and the narrator reveals himself, but wearing a goatish mask, the horns extending into the air. The man had wanted the woman to believe that he was Pan, and that she had been chosen for special instructions, but she dies of fright. She had a heart murmur that the stalker never knew about. The story ends with a description of a paranoid man in a house that he hasn’t left in two months, on the other side of town, as he hides a goat mask in the loft, between a box of Christmas decorations and some board games from his childhood. He makes a cup of tea, but his hands are shaking and he can’t speak.

The anthology in which Seb had first read the story had actually been one of Ewan’s books: Night’s Longest Hours. Derleth may even have been the editor. It had been published by Consul, Seb thought, someone like that, and Ewan’s copy had been bound in sticky tape.

‘I tried all kinds of things to achieve what the Master did.’

‘Master? Who, Hazzard?’ But before Seb said any more, he began to feel cold. The goat mask? Could a hood or sack be put to the same use in the interest of striking terror into a man? That black form in the trees of Marriage Wood that he and Becky had seen, and crawling across the golf course in the dream, what had that been? Ewan must have used a costume to make his point more dramatically.

Seb thought about the rucksack in the living room and wondered what he might find inside it. He shifted about on the floor and rattled the chest of drawers. ‘Please, continue. You were saying, the first time, it was an accident.’

‘Yes. I nearly died, or even died. They weren’t sure afterwards. But I felt myself die. And it was the most peaceful thing that I have ever experienced. I was aware of it. All of it. Dying. Actually dying. Totally aware of it, as if death was magnified inside my mind. My toes went first, then my feet, then my legs. They just became absent. My abdomen, my chest and then my neck just shut off. But the focus of my consciousness in that room was intense, everything was so clearly defined around me. I was shutting down, but I was more aware of the world than I had ever been.’

Ewan paused to swallow and moisten his lips. ‘But then I was looking at myself. Standing upright and looking down at myself. Like in Hazzard’s stories, I was looking at myself from nothing. I was in two places. I could see myself on the floorboards in a room in that terrible house. My eyes were open but totally vacant . . . I wasn’t there any more. And I remember thinking how thin I looked. And how long my body was, as if I’d never realized what I actually looked like. It wasn’t the same as looking in the mirror. I looked . . . strange.

‘That didn’t matter, that body on the floor. I felt nothing for it. But I still knew that it was me. I knew that I had split. I didn’t care that I had separated. I felt euphoric. I was euphoria.’

Ewan lay back and briefly closed his eyes in bliss from recall alone. ‘The experience was so gentle and beautiful. I was in love and loved more than I had ever been . . . It was more powerful, more transporting than the effect of any drug that I’d ever taken. Here was true joy. I was free. It was all over, the struggle. I was completely free of myself. And yet, I understood everything too. Or I was about to understand and . . . about to know everything, instinctively and all at once. It was like I was on the edge . . . of that.

‘I watched one of the two people that I was with, and he touched me. I could see the back of his head. I watched him shake me really hard. And I suddenly fell forwards. It was like stumbling in a dream, like stepping off a kerb that you haven’t seen, or a step that suddenly appears under your foot. There was this sickening jolt and I woke up on the floor, back inside that body that I had just been looking at. My body. And the experience was over. Completely.

‘I cried because I had come back. For the first time in my life, I really wanted to die. I wished that I had died. That was the first time it happened and it changed my life. It changed everything.’

Seb realized that, if his experiences in the last two weeks had never happened, Ewan had said nothing that couldn’t be explained as the result of drug use, mental illness or a combination of the two. ‘The first time?’