Under a Watchful Eye(50)

Seb felt that he should say, how odd, or how strange, but the constriction of his throat strangled a response.

Now that she had a listener, Dot’s story became irrepressible. ‘But I says to her, like I’m telling you now, that Mr Alexander was not even here that night. Could not have been. No way, I says to her. Me husband wakes up when anyone comes through that door of a night. And we were nearly empty as it is. There was only the lady in two and a couple up on the next floor. Elderly like, and they’re always back in their room by nine. So it couldn’t have been a friend of Mr Alexander’s. How would he have got in here, for one thing?

‘We’d checked with the maid who does the rooms in the mornings and she said his bed hadn’t been slept in either of them nights that he wasn’t here, so he weren’t here. No way. But it gets stranger, really odd, like. Because the elderly couple up in five had said that on the day before Mr Alexander came back, that they had seen someone in here too, this room. With summat over their face, and looking out the window as they came in from the garden, and it give them quite a shock. They come in and says to Ray that the fella in number three needs his head seeing to, you know? That his jokes weren’t funny. If there’d been kids here, they said they might have been really frightened.’

Seb had to concentrate on making himself speak loud enough to be heard. ‘They saw something . . . someone?’

‘Hard to say and I only heard this through me husband. And when I asked them the next day, the Gibsons, like, they didn’t want to talk about it. You know, it made them quite angry. But Mr Alexander wasn’t even here that day. Hadn’t been in his bed and, like I said, we would have seen him come through the front door.

‘It must have been the curtains and the light, you know, on the glass. That’s what I reckon, but they swore blind that they saw this fella in this room, at the window and looking down. Clearly like. They said he was wearing an old suit too. That’s right. It’s the details that make it so strange. I mean, an old black suit, with this big head, they said. Mrs Gibson said it was like a horse’s hood, you know. A horse with a white sack over this long head, but with eye holes cut in it. I mean, I don’t know what they were on themselves. Because they said he shrank too. Got smaller, you know. Then he wasn’t there at all.

‘But don’t you think it’s odd that the lady in number two says she saw something very similar in the hall, outside this room?’

Dot pulled a face as if she’d bitten into something unpleasant while she let Seb imagine what she’d described for him. ‘I don’t like anything like that, you know. It does my head in. And no one has ever said nothing like that, not here, and we’ve had this place thirty years. But it made me think, you know, about this chap in number three. It was another reason to not want him staying here. I’m not being cruel, because we’re as open-minded as the next person, but it still seems odd that the other guests should start seeing things. I’d like to say that they was making it all up, but I’m not sure that I can.’

After his tour of the place of death, Ray helped Seb carry the two big bin bags and Ewan’s rucksack to Seb’s car, parked at the kerb out front. Ray and Dot were visibly relieved to get ‘shot of them’. With the police reluctant to take them off their hands and Ewan’s mother not wanting it, Ray and Dot hadn’t known what to do with the three bags and had left them in their office.

‘We was gonna give it a few weeks and then put ’em out for the bin men,’ Ray had said, before Seb drove away. ‘They’re a bit whiffy, even with the windows open.’





13


Indeed, I Have Seen my Sister


[Society of Psychophysical Research – SPR. Vol. 4. Case No. 37. 1963. ‘Mr B’]

This place that we appear in, I know, is analogous to the world I left, and to its time and the natural laws that govern it. We can see the world we leave exactly as it was before we left it, though the light is very different. But we also stand at the gateway to immortality, to eternal life. Of this, I have no doubt now.

I have actually taken my first step on the journey that begins after bodily death, and have renounced my will and been in the presence of something far greater, perhaps even God. But to also preserve my individuality, to be myself but changed and better as I venture deeper, is a miracle in itself, and the greatest journey that a man can embark upon. H was right and I have remained sceptical of my wife’s obsession for far too long.

H commands my utmost respect, he has my faith. Like Christ, a comparison my wife so often made, he has remained steadfast in his beliefs, despite derision and persecution. He has been committed to his purpose, as we must be.





Seb had returned home and placed Ewan’s bags on the floor of his office. And then circled them for hours. Several pots of coffee had succeeded in palpitating his heart and making his skin clammy.

After the shock of Ewan’s death, he knew he was teetering on the brink of a new obsession. Despite the carousel of the past few weeks, sweeping him from terror to rage and back to terror, an awakening was underway within his imagination; a stirring of whatever had first compelled him to dedicate his life to writing fiction, over thirty years before. That unstable core of impressions and ideas was excavating itself from the rubble of the dulling process that had engulfed him across the previous two years.