Under a Watchful Eye(4)

Could it be?

Seb turned about, and felt his vision drawn over the parked cars and to the man in black. He was now standing on the far side of the green within the shadow of the fir trees and behind a waist-high wall of breccia stone before the Hotel Connair.

He’d been on the pier mere seconds before. Impossible.

Seb could now make out the presence of lank hair and a baseball cap. A jaw covered by a black beard. The surrounding flesh issued an unhealthy pallor reminiscent of cream cheese, near-noisome at a glance.

The figure raised a long arm. The hand and wrist were as blanched as the face.

Seb moved hesitantly across the beach road. The world looked as it usually did, though his vision twitched from shock. But the world was not the same. Where had sound gone? He might have been sleepwalking.

A car braked hard and Seb saw suppressed fury in an elderly face behind the windscreen that he’d nearly rolled across. He waved an apology to the driver and stumbled back to the bench where he’d left his bag.

The temporary suspension of the world ended. A universe of raw sound rushed like the sea into a cave and filled his ears.

A mournful chorus from the gulls upon their lamp-post perches.

The gritty bounce of a rubber ball on tarmac.

A car door slammed.

The grunt of a motorbike on the Esplanade Road . . .

The end of the episode left him shaken and as cold as a bather emerging into a crosswind.

The watcher behind the wall had vanished.





3


A Sack with a Narrow Opening


Breathless and barely recalling the journey home, Seb fell into the house.

Without the presence of mind to remove his coat and shoes, he ran upstairs and took to pacing the living room. He only paused to sweep up a brandy bottle from the drinks’ cabinet. He chugged the brandy over a glass before resuming his anxious laps of the room.

By natural law it was impossible for a man to appear and disappear and then reappear.

A brain tumour?

There had been no headaches, no dizziness prior to these sightings. Nothing physically wrong with him for a long time and never seriously. Paranoia about his health ensured that he paid for regular check-ups and even annual, full-body screenings.

Dementia? At fifty? It was possible. He’d have to pursue some kind of test, and no doubt a search on ‘Doctor Google’ would fan his fear into hysteria.

Schizophrenia had been rife in his father’s side of the family. Several relatives had seen terrible things and believed in them. One of them, a cousin he’d not seen since he was a child, had taken his own life. Two more had managed their condition with drugs. They’d told him at his grandfather’s funeral over twenty years before. That was the most likely scenario, the past returning in the form of a family taint.

He imagined selling the house and liquidating his investments to pay for a long-term residency in a care home. He saw powerful psychotropic drugs sedating the ghastly visions of his near future. All alone in a white room, he imagined being unable to identify himself until his mind eventually winked out.

Seb scrabbled for the phone to make an appointment at the local surgery. Then put the phone down.

The memory of it on the pier, the sight of it in the shallows, reintroduced a hideous suspicion about the figure’s identity.

Ewan?

Ewan Alexander? Why would he now be seeing Ewan Alexander, of all people, so near his home? A man he’d all but suppressed in his memory. Ewan was the kind of person you wanted either to forget, or to stare aghast at from a safe distance. It was the improbability of seeing him here, not just the nature of his appearance, that had shaken Seb.

Ewan had always been a tragic case, never physically threatening. He’d only turned nasty when Seb met a girl and escaped Ewan’s influence. God, remember Julie? But Ewan had been as excluded and powerless as a man could be in life. A lost soul. Socially inept. A misfit. A chronic alcoholic. An eater of acid.

Brandy flowed. Seb’s feet shuffled through the rooms of his sanctuary.

It wasn’t him. Can’t be.

Seb had not seen him in . . . let me think . . . twelve years. Not since the last brief intrusion. That had been in London and Ewan had knocked on the front door and not just appeared out of nothing. He’d also called on the telephone the following year and left a garbled message intended for someone else. But that was all another lifetime away.

Seb opened the balcony doors and sucked the cool sea air into his chest. They had no mutual acquaintances. Ewan had no business being down here. But if he was here, then how had he done that?

Dear God. What if he was dead? That would have been his ghost.

Unable to appreciate the view, because of what might appear outside and look up, Seb retreated from the balcony.

Over at the kitchen counter he visualized the lone figure, watching amongst wind-beaten trees. He scratched through the ruin of his logic and attempted to convince himself that he was safe and sane, that Ewan Alexander had not been glimpsed in four different places in as many days.

The scaffolding of wishful thinking, that he was mistaken, or confused, or unwell, collapsed. His mind insisted on marrying an unhappy year, buried deep in his past, to that sickly face, crammed beneath a baseball cap.

He had seen Ewan that morning. And he had seen and heard him while feeling agitated, unwell, and even deranged.

So how did he cause that? Why had sound changed? How had the textures of the world dispersed, or been swapped with another place? Was ‘place’ even the right word? Environment? Sphere?