Under a Watchful Eye(71)

I’ve never been able to stop the sound of that water running through my sleep. It’s always in my dreams.

[Mark Fry]: So what happened when you left?

[Liza]: Oh, they weren’t happy. Alice and Fay were very manipulative. I only managed to extricate myself by pleading poverty. I told them that I had run out of money, and they demanded proof. Can you believe that? I had to produce bank statements. I had to sign an official document of confidentiality on entrance too, and another on exit. I was threatened.

[Mark Fry]: How so?

[Liza]: Oh, it was all very subtle. They said they had attracted others, who would never ascend. Hinderers. The defective. Hinderers, who had been drawn there, to HIM. And they said that if I betrayed the contract of silence, there would be consequences that they had little control over. These others, the hinderers, were very protective of HIM.

[Mark Fry]: Did you believe them?

[Liza]: Of course. I had no doubt at all. I’d seen things, those figures outside my room, and I could sense them at the Tor, and more of them the longer that I was there. There was something wrong with the place. With that entire area. Not only inside the house.

And right at the end, Alice told me to never forget that ‘some of the dead are still in place’.





19


Stand Beside the Door and Let It Take You


Seb stopped the tape recording of Liza. He reached for his drink. ‘Ewan. You bloody idiot. You bastard.’

Seb was drunk. Three large glasses of whiskey on top of three glasses of red wine. There had been beer earlier too, in the bar before dinner. How many pints? Two, no three. Only two. Four?

There was a judder about the edges of the furniture, the edge of the wall that led to the bathroom.

Slow down.

He looked at Hazzard’s books on the table.

Something insidious had placed itself between his life and the sun. A minor writer and cult leader who had been dead for over thirty years.

Impossible.

The situation was preposterous. Fiction was becoming fact.

But what could they want from him now? What did they expect from him? And why him, anyway? Because he knew Ewan? Had Ewan infected him? That horrible misfit by the harbour with her doublespeak: had she guided Ewan? But what guided her?

He had no answers.

Seb gulped at the bourbon until his glass was empty, sat back and winced through the after-burn.

He put the news on the television, the sound muted. He needed to keep close some evidence of a real world governed by natural laws, one filled with a predictably chaotic humanity.

He refilled his glass and took to pacing the room. From out of despair his rage unfurled. He felt unstable and capable of violence. Restraint unwound over a core of vengeful paranoia, suspicion, and a bile that he flung, in his imagination, at a dozen faces with whom he’d clashed as a professional writer. He wanted to destroy something, to smash it. But what? His battle was with the intangible, the unpredictable; the unpredictably intangible. Something that could appear at any time. Motives unknown. Intentions malicious. There were entities capable of killing a man by manifestation alone.

Through sheer terror.

Had he brought this upon himself, by wanting to be left alone, to live differently? Was that no longer allowed?

This was going nowhere. He capped the whiskey bottle and decided to get ready for bed. The spirit was making him feel unlike himself, impulsive, hot, and full of destructive compulsions.

He felt absurd too, foolish, and self-pitying. Perhaps he was so worn out that he’d gone past the ability to think meaningfully. His thoughts were dispersing. They now seemed feeble and nonsensical.

Seb clumsily switched the TV off, stripped to his underwear and lay down. Made himself comfortable before using the switches beside the headboard to douse the lights. After that, he must have fallen asleep.

Until a recurring swoop beneath his closed eyelids made vomiting a concern. He opened his eyes several times and directed his unstable focus upon the red light of the television standby button, until the rotations in his vision calmed.

The dream he then stepped into was no less unsavoury than the state of mind that produced it.

When he next awoke he had a vague recall of having dreamed.

The only details retained by his intoxicated mind came as a sense of having been within a chattering crowd in complete darkness. A lightless space in which a great many bewildering requests had been made of him. And there had been a noise like a wind, or maybe it had been water rushing through an enclosed space.

He sat up in bed and switched a light on. Realizing just how disoriented and dehydrated he was, he clambered out of bed and went into the bathroom to gulp down three glasses of water, something he wished he’d done before going to bed. By suppressing his body’s urge to expel the contents of its stomach, he knew he’d assured a more severe hangover, and a lengthy period of feeling toxic the following day. He’d been careless with drink, and at a time like this. He returned to bed angry with himself and passed out.

Can you ask my daughter to come and fetch me?

He thought this had been spoken from inside another dream, and then was certain the voice had come from inside his actual room. Perhaps it had been spoken in the bathroom from where someone was now running a bath?

They buried me over there.

‘Where?’ he replied aloud to the woman sitting beside his bed. He didn’t see her face, or any of her body because the light that issued from her was too dim. From her voice alone he knew that she was elderly and upset. He could smell her perfume too, something similar to dead flowers.