Under a Watchful Eye(42)

‘What?’ Shock left Seb dizzy. Ewan had been through his personal financial records. When he’d been asleep, Ewan must have rummaged through the bank statements in his office. Seb’s body shook with anger, disbelief, confusion, the cold. ‘You . . . you went through my files.’

Ewan wrinkled his nose. ‘So what?’

Seb went for him, swinging his limp arms. He landed a punch on Ewan’s chest, and another blow on the side of that greasy head.

Ewan partially ducked out of the third swing, but Seb reached for his jacket, the throat, that tangled hair. He wanted to tear Ewan apart with his bare hands.

‘Get off.’ Ewan broke from Seb’s clutches, then snatched at one of his forearms. And with a strength that surprised Seb, Ewan swung him around in a circle until his feet left the turf. When Ewan let go of his arm, Seb’s feet didn’t regain the earth for several seconds.

Pain seized his diaphragm as the air was forced from his lungs on impact with the ground. He landed hard, rolled through the wet verdure, momentarily unsure of where his arms and legs were. When his lungs finally filled, his will to fight was gone. He wanted to be sick.

Ewan’s shoes skittered in their haste to leave him behind. Off through the grass he went, a raggedy vagrant, returning to the stony path they had staggered up to reach the common. But Ewan was not trying to get away from Seb. He was going somewhere to save himself. Seb’s fate meant nothing to this old friend. It never had done.

He brought this into your life and now he’s running away.

An hour later, Seb stood outside his house. The front door was open but he made no attempt to enter. Merely looking inside at the familiar coat rack and framed pictures made him feel like an invalid handicapped by his own terror. He might have been a ghost himself, revisiting a place from which he’d been expelled and could no longer claim as his own.

All the time wondering if something was waiting inside, he repeatedly scoured the windows to make certain that nothing was looking out. Perhaps it crouched in its own sickly luminance, in a dim corner of a room, a form indistinct but exuding the gravest threat to his mind, life, and what came after.

‘Oh, Jesus,’ he said and bent double to let the dizziness pass. A sudden recollection of that shadow on the wall, its motion, its reaching for him, had made him giddy. Mere suggestions of the thin arms and much-changed hands were literally sickening. And the grief in it, the guttural noises of a beast insensible with rage, the sight of it rising . . . He could not bear to remember how he’d felt when Ewan had shut him inside the bedroom with it.

He now felt a great need to sit down, to be comforted. The incremental death of his own scepticism had left him a very nervous man, somewhat bewildered and increasingly prone to mutter to himself and to twitch. A rapid ageing seemed to be upon him. He knew he stood at the boundary of new terrain in which he had no guide and no foreknowledge.

Without doubt, the dreams had come with Ewan, like a cerebral infection transmitted by psychic means. And what could he understand of the black passage and its watery bottom, in which strange umbilical growths had anchored a congregation of strangers?

The distant face in the woods and its every intimation of malevolence, its derangement, had been no act of the imagination either. It was the same thing that had crawled along the outside wall of his home and hunted him across the golf links in a dream. These had been premonitions and forebodings of what had started to become. Right here, around him. And had not the very materials of the world, ordinary items like a sun umbrella and his own bloody towels, become charged with a supernormal character before his very eyes?

There was an existence beyond this one, then, though what evidence of an afterlife he’d encountered brought him no comfort or hope. Attempts to comprehend this halfway place, this passage, where ‘hinderers’ existed, enlarged his mind into what may have been an antechamber of madness.

You’re probably fucked.

Ewan had truly disrupted the world that Seb had taken for granted. Not only with squalor, but by creating a new environment where the unnatural existed. ‘Ewan, you bastard.’

Preposterous. He was afraid his mind was coming apart from the sheer strain of what was trying to enter it. Reason would not respond, or even meet this new reality halfway. Only his imagination sufficed.

Perhaps this state could only occur at certain times, though, and only near Ewan? He wanted to believe that, because the alternative didn’t bear thinking about. He just wanted this all to stop.

The prospect of removing Ewan from his life, by any possible means, now seemed justified. But feeling that murderous impulse was not the same as carrying out the task. Though who would miss Ewan? He’d damned himself a long time ago. It was obvious that Ewan had long forfeited more than his health and personal happiness. Ewan had come here with the purpose of threatening, extorting and blackmail through means too unique for belief, or for referral to the law.

That thing had been an agent for someone else. Ewan had mentioned a ‘misunderstanding’. There were others involved in this too. Collusion didn’t strike him as improbable. But collusion with what?

Seb’s sole task must now be the prevention of a further tarnishing by association. But where was Ewan? Had he come back here?

He had nowhere else to go.

Seb drew the latch on the shed door, a wooden hutch at the foot of his rear garden. From within the jumble of tools that smelled of oil and rust, he removed the steel-bladed ‘moon’, a lawn-edging tool. At the very least he’d make Ewan understand that he could never come back to this house in any form.