Under a Watchful Eye(92)

With his arms wrapped around his torso and his hands tucked beneath his armpits, Seb rocked himself back and forth on the stairs. Lips aquiver, his jaw worked hopelessly at the darkness as he mouthed words of nonsensical encouragement to himself.

Below, in the main hall, from where the sounds of water now trickled, the dim sheen of the other occupants became visible without the aid of his torch. The only mercy being that they remained vague. But he closed his eyes tight on this sense of a small procession of figures that produced the pale phosphorescence as they fumbled their way blindly through the darkness of the lower building. Very little was revealed by the moist iridescence that issued from whatever hung from their navels, and for that he was also grateful. But from those wet abdominal stubs came the thin light.

Closed doors were no obstacle to these hinderers either. They simply seemed to come through them, or their motions and muffled whispers appeared where walls should have stood. Without light he was no longer sure that he was even inside the building.

My sister. She was . . .

That came from behind his back, from a room at the far end of the corridor. The broken utterance was followed by a faint sob. Seb found the strength and the will to move his legs again. Upstairs was becoming too noisy.

Back on the ground floor he never found any evidence of the water that he now heard bubbling like a brook.

The Passage.

Downstairs, closer to the earth, the Tor’s internal darkness was more active than ever. Ahead of him and behind him, glimmers of mercury continued to appear and vanish. Partial evidence of articulated forms passed across his meagre sight, repeating like bits of film stuck in a projector. He wanted to believe his own disordered mind was screening these fragments on the inside of his eyelids, but his eyes were so wide they smarted as if they were open beneath the sea.

There was a great crawling in progress here, and perhaps towards the vague recall of a lighter place that had once been known. Maybe this was a search for what had been left behind.

When the collective suggestions of the wasted became too much for Seb to endure, he shuffled towards the kitchens with one hand held outwards, while the other clutched at his car keys. But even squinting in the lightless spaces failed to rid their movements from within his mind.

Beyond the front entrance of the Hall, and as far down the lower terraces as his torchlight reached, the progress of the external hinderers appeared inexorable, slow, and then somehow too quick for his eyes to follow through the grass, as if they were flickering out of his vision to re-emerge from behind waves of darkness. But in the warm and salty rain that began to fall in the early hours of the morning, most of the hunched forms seemed intent on getting somewhere. Some did no more than stare upwards, but the thought of passing through them to reach his car was unbearable.

Too afraid to risk the night-blackened woods, Seb returned to the Hall. This had to stop, and soon, or he would lose more than his wits. He’d begun talking to himself inside his own head, but it took him some time to realize that his thoughts had become audible.

Downstairs was now too busy with the alumni, so this time he went up with his eyes mostly closed and his shaking hands sliding across the dirty walls to find doorways that he wished to avoid.

His eventual discovery of the now-unlocked door that opened onto the staircase that rose to the top floor was incapable of causing him any further alarm. He’d reached capacity. By the time he made it onto those stairs, he also seemed ready to escape from himself. He believed he would soon be forced from his own mind in search of a relief from the unrelenting terror being sustained within his skull. And he couldn’t delay this any longer. His presence was clearly required.

Up there.

For a while he even believed himself to be alone in the very place where he had once lived: M. L. Hazzard, the Master.

Seb flicked the torch on to see where he was standing, and like his old friend, Ewan, he saw that he had entered a corridor made up of plain white walls and black doors. The floor was thick with dust, the air swollen with the silence of its vacancy.

Was the space holding its breath?

He helps those who come inside his house.

Seb rediscovered his voice. From a whimper to a croak to something much stronger, he began to speak aloud. And the sound of his voice was the only thing that kept a sense of himself in place between his ears. Talking also seemed to remind him of the contact between his feet and the floorboards. ‘I came! Are you here?’

Seb fell silent for fear that one of the six black doors might be pulled open from the other side.

He remembered a detail from Ewan’s notes, and walked to the third door on the right. Opened it.

In the reflection on the window opposite the door, he watched himself walk into the room.

Inside the room, he saw the painting that Ewan had described. An oil painting of a boy. A boy sat on a chair. His hair was thick, curly and blonde. The child held a bear. Directly under the painting sat the same red velvet armchair, with the same bear still sat upon the chair, propped up by a cushion. But it was a much older bear than the one depicted in the painting because this one’s fur had been worn smooth in places.

Curiously, the room was bare save for what resembled props. A couch with the row of antique toys lined along the length of the seat, dominated by a large doll. This was an unappealing effigy of a baby girl wearing a hand-knitted cardigan over a white dress. Its hair may have been butchered by a child left alone with scissors. The shiny face was wide with surprise.