Under a Watchful Eye(90)
How was this material to be narrated, even dictated to him? Inside there? Seb looked in the direction of Hunter’s Tor Hall and needed to sit down to stop the shaking that came to his legs.
He couldn’t have made up a situation as outlandish for one of his own books, but here he was, trying to peer through the windows of a hovel and the home of M. L. Hazzard’s two surviving curators.
Through an open window at the side of the building, Seb spied the interior of a scruffy and overcrowded living room. Two large blue Calor Gas tanks and a twin-plate camping stove were visible. He briefly pondered why they had not made part of the Tor habitable and then he remembered Joyce’s reference to ‘the alumni’. That alone satisfied his curiosity about the living arrangements.
He moved off and walked the grounds for a few hours more, using what paths he could find in the woods and overgrown meadows. In places, he caught glimpses of the distant boundary walls.
Eventually, at dusk, the effects of exhaustion upon his nerves encouraged him to return to the Tor, to wait it out.
He heard the first one just after nine p.m.
26
A Vast Blackness, Infinity
The sun had all but disappeared. The evening chill was moist upon the grass. And from the grounds at the rear of the building there came a voice. No words that he could make out, but a woman’s voice that carried through the otherwise silent and still dusk.
Seb stirred from where he was sitting with his back against the front doors, his thoughts momentarily adrift.
He found no one at the rear of the building where he’d hoped to come across Joyce, perhaps on a scouting mission to make sure that he’d stayed put. Maybe they knew where he was anyway, at any time.
How they communicated with what existed within the Hall, and if that was aware of him too, he had to establish before any attempt could be made to severe the connection. The process of projection had taken a great deal out of Ewan. It wasn’t easy, and maybe that could be used in his favour too.
When he was nearer to the rose garden, Seb heard the woman’s voice again, though it came from much closer to where he stood.
They buried me over there.
There was no menace or threat in the tone, but that had been the voice of an elderly woman, and a tone weighted by resignation. What had been said was horribly familiar.
Seb saw no one, and nothing behind or around him.
The foliage was dark now, the smell of the flowers fainter. He was reminded of the strangeness of his feelings when near the garden earlier.
Voice shaking, he called out ‘Hello’ several times and circled the oval garden. Went round twice, and wondered why he’d felt compelled to make a second pass of the darkening roses.
No one replied. He never heard the voice again.
The momentum of nightfall encouraged him to return to the building, but as he walked back to the house, a second voice spoke from inside the walled garden. And again, he was sure he had heard the voice of an elderly woman.
Can you ask my daughter to come and get me?
Not a footfall did he hear from within that enclosed area. Not so much as a twig snapping. And yet the more he thought of the voice, which still rang out inside his skull, he also wondered if those words had been generated from within his own mind.
By the time he reached the hall, he was shivering from the cold and had zipped his waterproof jacket up to his throat. Catching sight of the reflection of his pale face and wild eyes in one of the windows that he’d unshuttered filled him with a disgust at his own helplessness.
A dirty, ancient blanket about his shoulders, he sat alone in the part-furnished front room until ten, resting his lower back upon the tall skirting boards beneath the window. His loathing for Ewan, Veronica and Joyce was the only relief from a fear as crippling as a cramp in cold water.
As the light failed outside its dirty windows, his unpleasant sense of expectation gradually evolved into an apprehension about a growing occupancy beneath the roof of Hunter’s Tor Hall. He tried to assure himself that only his imagination was being affected by the atmosphere of a strange, abandoned building. But, as much as he tried to use his reason to defeat these impressions of an impending cohabitation, he remained sensitive to a feeling that the stale air was beginning to move itself in vague currents, as if it were being displaced by the entrance of new forms.
From outside the window came the distant sound of a man weeping. This was just after half ten, when visibility was shrinking by a few metres each minute.
What may have been another two voices outside came soon after the weeping passed away, but from separate directions.
Those who had called out gave an impression of being scattered in the gathering darkness and lost to each other. The noises may even have arisen from the beaks of birds, or even the muzzles of animals. One of the cries had reminded Seb of an anxious sheep.
He stood up and turned his torch on. He shone it at the broad window he’d sat beneath, to make certain that there was no one outside. And unveiled a smudge at the window.
His first thought was that it was a face, looking in. A near negative of a woman’s face. Or maybe an after-image, transparent and almost part of the light’s reflection upon the dirty glass.
Or had it been an illusion partly formed from the grime and the greying air outside?
Within his memory lingered the texture of the hair on what may have been a head, hanging dry and white about empty eye sockets. Seb turned about, in case what he had seen had been a reflection of someone standing behind him. His torch flashed across bare white walls.