Under a Watchful Eye(7)
When Seb’s last parent went, his mother, he’d spent two years on antidepressants wearing a security guard’s uniform, and then he’d got lucky. Horror became the new black in publishing and he was noticed.
But why had his own past noticed him now?
Seb remained in bed with the blinds down. Sometime in mid-afternoon he drifted to sleep.
4
Broken Night
A dream of winter, of charcoal skies and grey light. And he walks amongst people he does not know. People who move on their hands and knees. They appear helpless, perhaps lost, or even blind.
‘Is the light over there?’ he is asked.
‘Have you seen my sister?’ he is asked.
‘I cannot get back,’ he is told.
He is on the contoured hillocks of a golf course. A place he often crosses to reach the pub at Churston Court. And up and down those manicured mounds of grass he walks, but more quickly now to remove himself from those drawn to him who are given to crawling like infants. He won’t look at them directly again. They’re too thin and near transparent in some of their parts. The only face he looked into reminded him of creased, wet newspaper.
A wide, hazy sea lies directly ahead of him. Sounds of a distant crowd carries from the opposite direction. Seb turns and sees a large white building, three storeys high, the front flat and white like a vast mausoleum. A building he has never seen before. The patio before the entrance is full of people, and his mother’s voice rises from the crowd. He wants to run for her. She has been gone for nine years, but he thinks he can see her, wearing a red coat.
Seb calls out, ‘What?’ and, in unison, the group points at the sky.
His mother’s voice breaks free from the chatter of the crowd. ‘Come back!’ or maybe she says, ‘Go back!’
He is a boy and has become a younger self in the way selves effortlessly switch within dreams. He remains on the golf course, but the grass is now sawdust, just like that of the butcher’s shop that he used to visit with his nan, where it was scattered over the lino of a cold floor. Sawdust with blood mixed into it. The blood was dark and he was always told not to touch the floor with his small, questing hands. He’d liked the cold sausage and iron smells of the shop.
Seb’s legs sink to the knee into the dust and wood chips, and he soon becomes breathless in an attempt to break free. Water flows fiercely somewhere nearby, as if from between the dunes. He cannot see it and fears the water will appear between the small slopes and cover his head and mouth.
Another enters the sawdust landscape, a thing with a covered head and a whitish body low to the ground. Seb can hear a wet snuffling and he is paralysed with his old terror of dogs.
Those others around him, who are crawling, scatter like crabs beneath upturned rocks. This new entrant moves eagerly to traverse the golf course as Seb flounders and twists and cries for his distant, unreachable mother.
That head, covered by a dirty sack, stiffens with an alertness that communicates an awareness of him, and an anticipation within its horrid form. When it turns to him, Seb cannot find the strength to scream. He stops struggling in the blood-mired sawdust and cries harder.
Into this dream he comes to be sitting in his childhood home, on a green and brown carpet with a pattern that once made him think of chameleons. He sees a silver Christmas tree, a dimpled glass door, a plywood service hatch opening into a kitchen, and the images remind him of what will soon be lost forever. From out of the kitchen comes the sound of wooden sticks being snapped in half while a large, unseen form turns round and round and rubs against the cupboard doors.
When Seb wakes and sees the darkened bedroom and the vertical band of daylight at the edge of the curtains, his relief is immense.
Tracks of dried tears split upon his cheekbones. He is damp and hot, his muscles heavy and his mind groggy from the heavy sleep that overcame him in the middle of the day. But within the early bewilderment of waking, he is aware of a disturbance outside. A noise that issues a dreadful continuity with his dream.
Lying upon his bed, his thoughts stumble and he can’t be certain if the sound is part of the worst nightmare he’s endured in years, or whether it is a sign of a long animal moving around the external walls of the house, looking for access.
Into his mind creeps a sense of a sinewy body with a covered head, pressed into the bricks, and moving like a dog.
5
Incertitude
‘There’s so much I don’t know about you,’ Becky said, once they had returned from the restaurant and settled in the living room. Before they left the house earlier they had set side-by-side on the sofa, but now looked at each other from different sides of the room. It was the evening of another day that hadn’t passed without trauma.
Seb’s frantic invitation to Becky had been accepted and she’d arrived at the weekend, alighting from an afternoon service at Paignton with a small leopard-print case in tow.
Her failure to disguise her shock at how he looked had been immediate. A face unused to smiling, and a mouth unaccustomed to talking, as a tired but frantic mind turned upon itself, could not be concealed by a pressed shirt, smooth cheeks and aftershave.
Seb had spirited her out of the station and into his car. Her visit fell eight days after his sighting of Ewan on the pier, and Seb no longer felt safe outdoors. Even though the weather had distinguished itself with warm sunshine and cloudless skies, he’d barely been outside in four days.