Under a Watchful Eye(91)

Fearing he’d given his position away with the torch, he moved across the reception hall to the adjacent room at the front of the building. His breathing was so loud he imagined he was being followed by someone panting with excitement behind his shoulders.

Another face awaited him in the second room, as if summoned to the walls by his light. At a pane at the foot of a patio door, from within the inky surround of night, Seb detected an impression of human features stricken by despair. So deeply lined was the flesh, the head appeared ready to crumble. The piteous thing was also entirely bereft of hair.

The image blended within the grime on the glass and vanished almost as soon as he became aware of it, and he was left wondering again if he had seen anything at all.

He desperately regretted opening the shutters. Perhaps there was a good reason for the windows being blocked. Joyce had advised against using the torch because light was no asset here. Not using it might be the only way to get through the night. Better only to hear them and not see their faces.

Get through this he must.

Outside, the distant cries gradually increased in frequency and Seb wondered whether people or animals were passing the front of the Hall. Whatever roamed out there seemed to be lost amongst the long grass of the far terraces, and often wept amidst the beseeching sounds of what resembled words. Words that blended with the nocturnal cries of unsettled birds. Only the sudden howl of an animal in great distress finally forced him away from the front of the building altogether. That was around eleven.

Deeper inside the lightless Hall he ventured.

Sometime before midnight he crept inside an upstairs room, a former bedroom of the SPR. In the darkness he sat beside the door and huddled down.

A long period of time passed that he didn’t keep track of. Looking at his watch seemed to make time trickle more slowly or even stop completely.

Inside that empty room he even dared to hope that he’d found shelter. Only within absolute darkness, when he developed a better sense of what he had come to share the room with, did his face and thoughts twist to a rictus.

Eyes swivelling within his skull, he detected a motion up near the ceiling, above the bed.

A terrible palsy came into his hands. His legs felt weaker than they had ever been. He fingered the torch and became better aware of a swishing motion, one gentle and interspersed with short exhalations. This was followed by an involuntary gasp, as if someone had been plunged into freezing water, near the ceiling. He feared a struggle was in progress, up there. There followed a raking of the air as if someone was being throttled or was drowning in the darkness.

Soon after, a faint illumination appeared in the air, on the other side of the room and at least six feet from the ground. Or was that his eyes? It was so dark he no longer knew if he could see a light, or whether a colour was being projected from his own brain to alleviate the void about him. The frail glow didn’t increase in intensity, but it was moving. Yes, it trembled or quivered and there grew a hint of moistness within the vague aura.

Witless with fright, Seb turned on the torch.

Whatever half-formed antics he partially lit on the ceiling, and only for a moment before he abruptly switched the torch off, gave him an impression that a form was suspended above the empty bed. And those had been limbs writhing and snatching at the empty air as if eager to reach the mattress below. He might have seen a thin hand too and a smudge of a sharp foot, kicking, or pushing at the empty air.

Might that have been an open mouth sinking upwards?

Seb went out of that room on his hands and knees, groping with his arms spread wide, his passage far too noisy for the stealth that he wanted so desperately. And yet, in the next room that he crawled into, whatever was already inside that space must have turned to him as he entered on all fours.

He heard its feet scrape across a floorboard and the shuffle of a body that wasn’t his own.

Without thinking, he switched the torch on, and the beam seemed more intense than ever, a white transparent blade, cylindrical and bustling with dust.

The penumbra of the torch beam’s circumference fell across one dirty corner. And in that corner he developed a notion, because he refused to look closely, that the space was occupied by a crouched form. One that may have been facing or looking into the wall. But even in his peripheral vision, he believed the form was both hairless and shivering. Something in that room was as white as a fish’s belly and spiny with emaciation. When it appeared to rise upwards as if intending to stand, Seb killed the torch and scampered backwards. But into the wall he crashed, and then the door, painfully cracking his skull during his rout.

A condition of absolute darkness existed in the passage outside, and in that blankness he was beset by the dull rasps of several bodies rubbing against the walls, and close to the ground like dogs.

Seb stumbled to what he hoped was the top of the staircase, then feared a fall and risked a brief usage of the torch that was now jumping in his right hand.

He lit the stairwell and a portion of the passage below. A space empty mere hours before, but suggesting motion now. He had looked down there for little more than a fraction of a second before he killed the light. And in the chaos of his own mind, he then attempted to process what he’d glimpsed.

A blotchy scalp, straggling with wisps of colourless hair. An arm more bone than flesh that had reached up to delicately finger a bare wall. Little jerks of grey shapes near the front entrance, like unpleasant pets impatiently awaiting release. And all underlaid by the incoherent rustle of papery voices that seemed too quiet, or even too far away, from where the sounds emerged.