Under a Watchful Eye(51)

The unpleasant smell arising from the bags, however, proved inexhaustible and spread to fill the office. Seb opened every window on the top floor and cast wide the balcony doors in the living room to disperse the stale odour of Ewan and his dusty paper.

For an inspection of the rucksack, he’d backed the car onto the drive and worn gardening gloves to examine the contents in the garage.

He’d immediately shovelled the articles of clothing into a refuse sack, as well as a pair of shoes, the soles worn paper-thin from Ewan’s wanderings. An old Nokia phone he put to one side. The battery was dead and there was no charger. An antique Sony Walkman with a broken lid was unearthed, along with twenty compact discs of music, including Bathory, Emperor, Blood Frenzy, The 13th Floor Elevators and Coil. Seb tossed the music and the Walkman into the refuse bag.

From what he could establish from Ewan’s effects, the value of his friend’s estate amounted to six pounds and thirty-seven pence. The money was stored in the toe of a venomous shoe.

Seb had returned upstairs with the ancient mobile phone. Everything else in the rucksack he’d buried in the wheelie bin intended for household waste. A collection was due on Thursday.

The bin bags that Ewan had been carrying contained fifty-four manila folders. They were old, a pale green in colour and instigated a memory of school stationery in the seventies. Each folder had been stamped ‘Society of Psychophysical Research (SPR) – CONFIDENTIAL’. This was followed by a title: ‘Case Studies’, a volume number, and then a date. At a glance, most of the folders originated in the sixties.

The actual reports inside the folders were mottled and issued a fragrance of dried damp, but the text was visible. Each sheet of paper functioned as an official form, was identical in design and filled with black type. The headers of each document repeated the information on the front of the file, but the index classification on each report was followed by the name of the subject who’d given testimony. Some of the same names appeared across multiple reports in the first few folders.

Randomly removing reports from the bin liners, Seb read haphazardly but compulsively. His reaction became fascination combined with horror.

[SPR. Vol. 7. Case No. 28. 1963. Mrs K. Harlow]

I found myself at a great height again. I looked down upon the world from a distance that I found terrible. So much so that I came to quite shaken, and gripped by an impression that a vast expanse of black space had just surrounded me. The tiny white bed from which I had risen had been visible below. And yet, I knew, in some other form, that I had been inside that bed the whole time.

[SPR. Vol. 10. Case No. 107. 1963.

Mrs Ruby McDougal]

H and Diane have congratulated me on my first successes. This comes at a time when I feared I had disappointed H, and all of the others who have persisted for so long. I cannot tell you how much their approval has meant. But they assure me that I am at the threshold of the truly wondrous, and am receiving the early intimations.

And yet it happened as I was resting after a long and fruitless day, in which I was sedated twice with two inducements. The second dose made me terribly sick, frightened and paranoid. But as I lay down that evening, I became aware of being entirely raised up and off the bed. At least two feet of space existed between my body and my consciousness.

The second time, I was again completely exhausted in mind and body, and suddenly found myself to be hovering over the bed and looking down at myself. I looked into my own eyes and knew at once that I was absent from them.

I sat up, but my body remained prone. I lay down and repeated the action twice, but I stayed detached.





The same woman had filed over a dozen reports across two years. Seb could only assume that she’d been a patient in a facility, or the subject of an experiment. Or perhaps all of the information was submitted by volunteers to be collated by this SPR.

[SPR. Vol. 16. Case No. 79. 1964.

Mrs Ruby McDougal]

I saw the room as it had been, though it was much brighter, clearer, with every object illumined from within and made vivid, almost sparkling. The dust motes were a cascade of gold before the window. My face upon the bed was the most surprising thing. Without doubt that was my head upon the pillow, and yet my face seemed so different to the one that I had looked upon in mirrors, so many times before in my life.

The room I fell asleep in had been dark, but during the experience the room could have been bathed in an unworldly form of moonlight, or illumined by the glow from a soft and magical nightlight. The light was opalescent. But when I saw myself inside the bed, I panicked and woke with a jolt. I opened my eyes and the room was black. Nothing inside the room was visible.





Seb discovered that the same woman had progressed to mastering an astonishing feat.

[SPR. Vol. 12. Case No. 29. 1965.

Mrs Ruby McDougal]

I stood in the room and watched the session. They were all sitting and continuing with the formulation of the image-making while repeating the renunciation. But I had already left my body and stood behind myself.

I instinctively became aware of H and turned to see him and Katie. They were outside the room, standing at the window and were smiling at me.

I felt superior to the other people around me for the first time in my life. Suddenly, I knew that I must get past my husband’s decision to leave. This is what we had come here for. This is what I had stayed for. All of our sacrifices to this point were worthwhile. My sense of succeeding and of belonging created an emotional reaction of such force that I returned to my body with a jolt. When I looked up, I was sat upon the floor again, amongst my group. I looked to the window but could see no one outside.