Under a Watchful Eye(37)

‘Let me guess, Ewan: the next chapter ended badly for you. Just like everything else in your life. Yet no lessons were learned. So here’s an interpretation of my own: you are attempting some desperate last resort at my expense, because you’ve nowhere else to go. This is the end of your line. Right here.’

Ewan had closed his eyes before Seb finished.

Seb woke. Sat up quickly. Fought his way free of the duvet and clambered off the mattress as if that could remove him from where he had just been while asleep.

He had not registered seeing any walls in the large, partially lit space that he’d just dreamed of. Behind the figures surrounding him, the borders had dissolved to black. Those others had been suspended in the air.

Seb couldn’t recall a single face now, only suggestions of the naked and grey condition of the bodies bumping together, up there.

From each navel, including his own, a snaking silvery cord had disappeared into the darkness of the floor. The stems had appeared as flexible and rubbery as flesh, while shining like liquid mercury.

Awake, he now thought of those cords as strange metallic weeds. He also thought of fungal growths in caves, mushrooming from out of rock.

All of the people in the dream had been agitated. They had talked in hurried whispers while moving their arms in small circular movements as if they were underwater. Beneath them, where a floor should have been, water had flowed. Black water without a trace of foam or a reflection. An underground stream in some kind of cavern and the people had been anchored to its bottom by the silvered cords extending from their abdomens. The water had rushed across the bottom of the room and travelled into a darkness without definition or relief.

He’d scraped his fingers at the ceiling and slapped it with his hands. The surface had issued a hollow sound but been too hard to break. He’d known that he would never escape the tunnel.

The only illumination in the space had come from a dim, metallic light issuing from the figures themselves and from their silver cords, as they all drifted. And either the surface above them was lowering or the water was rising. An elderly man beside Seb had wept, as if knowing they would soon submerge in the fast current and be swept away into nothingness.

Nearby, out of his view, a woman had said, ‘Sink. Heavy, heavy. Sink deep.’ She’d seemed excited by the prospect of doing so.

Others had begun to repeat that phrase as if it were a command or prayer. As his anxiety had also turned to a dreadful joy, Seb had felt a compulsion to contribute to the chorus.

The water rose and his cord shrivelled like a disused umbilicus. Where it grew out of his abdomen the flesh had turned black. The stem then issued a far weaker light.

He’d woken.

What had Ewan said earlier about it being time he was involved in something more ambitious? Involved in something dangerous; had that been the inference?

Seb looked about the bed. His room was dark but the silhouettes of the furniture were visible. Light didn’t so much shine beneath the door from the passage outside, as seep inside. A soft, grey light tinged a glacial blue.

When he opened his bedroom door he realized that the lights in the corridor were switched off. Despite that, he was seeing too much of the passage without the aid of electric light. This dull glow in his home suggested an overspill, one steady and unflickering, but from where did it shine?

Streetlights above the front drive were too distant to penetrate the building. Without interior light the house remained dark at night. The source confounded him.

The television upstairs? Was Ewan in the living room again?

As he tried to fathom out the luminosity in the corridor, his awareness of a peculiar discomfort grew. This was nothing physical, like being hot or cold. What he tried to dismiss as an after-effect of the nightmare persisted as apprehension. He suspected he was about to meet someone unpleasant. The very atmosphere of the building had altered and now swelled with the anticipation of a presence, or the arrival of something.

Taking shorter breaths, if he took them at all, Seb was reminded of how he’d felt when Ewan appeared to him outdoors. A static prickle passed through the fine hairs on the nape of his neck and needled his scalp.

Ewan. Ewan must have been projecting again.

Whether by shaking or punching the man awake, Seb would stop whatever was being initiated. But before he took a single step towards Ewan’s room, Seb turned in the direction of the staircase because of what he could now hear.

The sound was coming from above him. Though the noise was muted through the walls and ceiling, someone was in distress and weeping upstairs in the living area.

Ewan?

As quietly as he could manage, Seb walked barefoot to the stairs and went up. He’d only taken a few steps when the weeping ceased and was replaced by a voice, or voices, that stayed low and whispered together sibilantly.

The light on the staircase had now changed, and he would have been surprised if a television could transmit an illumination capable of making the walls and stairs appear so drab, if not neglected.

Seb continued up.

Within the strange light his own home now appeared much older. He peered about the landing and was made to think of shuttered and locked-away places, where dust and dross gathered behind boarded windows, and flat surfaces turned grey and powdery. Unrestored and lacking in human habitation for decades.

Before Seb made the landing, the distant murmur of voices was accompanied by the noise of dry paper shifting about the wooden floorboards. It could have been the riffling of a book’s pages by a breeze.