Under a Watchful Eye(93)

Another bear sat beside the doll, and then another doll made in the image of an imperial depiction of a Chinese man. The fourth doll was tiny and engulfed by a white smock. Its head was the size of a conker and jet-black in colour.

Upon the rear of an interconnecting door an old lace nightgown, made for a child, hung upon a hook.

To this place, the projectors of the SPR had once been trained to direct their astral bodies. Was that not what Ewan had undergone right here, an assessment? Had this room been some stage in a test? A place of significance to measure progress, before those hapless souls went further out, and beyond those black windows and into a misty void. Was it from here that a waterless stream was used by Hazzard, and from which it became impossible for so many to return?

Seb backed out of the room and closed the door.

In a second room he found the card table. It had been set out for four players. One card was uppermost before each chair.

There were empty bookshelves and a side table with three ornaments arranged upon its surface: a glazed cockerel and two white ceramic bowls patterned with blue flowers. A silver drinks trolley lay disused and furred with dust.

Seb found the master bedroom to be as it was described in Ewan’s notes. It was a woman’s room. A large brass-framed bed remained in place, the lace-edged bedclothes neatly made. There was a little dressing table too, draped in white cloth, the top cluttered with antique perfume bottles.

A smaller dressing room was connected to the bedroom.

Seb shone his torch inside and the darkness receded, a shadow of black molasses withdrawing from the light. A wide alcove revealed a line of women’s coats and dresses. Hat boxes filled the shelf above the dusty garments. At least fifty pairs of shoes, some heavily worn, covered the floor beneath the clothing.

Diane’s room.

And it was always here. Always. Unlit. Behind these walls and in this echoing vastness of an empty building, this was here. Stale, unworn clothes. Furniture recoated with dross.

But was this room also a beacon?

A sudden sense of what reached away, stretching forever, beyond those black windows and above the roof of the Hall, made Seb want to curl into a ball and scream. The beam of his torch wavered as his hand shook.

He’d come up here for a sign, but was now succumbing to an influence. He could feel it. As each moment passed, an impression of the room’s past, and of its occasional occupant, amplified within his imagination to a near unsustainable degree.

He felt more deeply uncomfortable inside his own skin than ever before in his life. The tiniest hairs covering his body extended. Their roots prickled electrically. A terrible anticipation of engaging with the unseen presence forced a whimper from his lips.

His expectation was soon similar to a physical pain and he turned clumsily to flee the room. The white beam of the torch cut across the standing mirror in the far corner of the bedroom.

Whatever sat upright in the mirror’s reflection of the bed had flesh as pale as a bloodless body found frozen in arctic ice. But the figure was not sat up inside the actual bed, but only in the bed’s reflection. His torch quickly confirmed that there was no bewigged head propped up by pillows, with a face painted clumsily, or even ruined to smears by tears, and so large upon a skeletal neck. No teeth the colour of ancient bones were grinning at him now.

Seb panted with relief.

But the room was not done with him and the air filled with a sweet musk. A scent cloud that bloomed to the glutinous pungency of the rose garden outside. About his head came a susurration of something silky.

He then became certain that his feet had risen from the floorboards. Seb even spread his arms for balance. All the blood in his head must have evacuated and left his mind reeling. He blacked out.

And awoke.

From the other side of the bedroom he found himself to be looking back upon himself. There he was, bent with fear, his mouth open in the idiocy of shock, his coat zipped up to the chin.

Seb adjusted his footing to dispel a sense that he was falling forwards. A wave in the sea might have been tipping him over. A queasy sliding of his vision followed, his panic caught in its uneasy wake.

Now he was no longer staring at himself, or outside of himself, but standing in the place on the opposite side of the room that he had just been staring at.

From the corner of his eye, a gliding motion inside the dressing room brought him about.

A sharp inhalation of air was drawn behind his ear.

The flat of a cold hand laid itself between his shoulders.

Seb whimpered, turned and illumined an empty bedroom.

He then directed the torch beam in the direction of the rustle inside the dressing room, to make certain that one of the long fur coats had not just stepped out from the clothing rack.

A black coat draped about a thin form. A pale head wearing a hat and dark glasses.

The torchlight failed to reveal anything.

The cold hand in the darkness touched him again.

Seb lurched for the door and fell into the corridor outside.

The door at his back slammed with enough force to pass a tremor through the entire building.

He sat up on the dirty floor and said, ‘Please . . .’

He could hear nothing but the echo of the door slamming. He put his hands to his ears to dull the noise inside. His ears popped and he thought he might be sick.

When the nausea passed, Seb got back onto his feet and stumbled from the top floor. Torchlight raking the floor and walls, he ran through the long shadows that stepped backwards and inside the doors that he passed. And he kept his eyes averted from the fresh movements on the ceilings of the bedrooms. He looked away from the jostling grey patches that made him think of dead, wet skin. Only in the middle room, opposite the stairs that descended to the ground floor, did the urgent sounds of exertion, those exhausted grunts, draw his attention. And in that room he saw another partial form adrift in the air, mostly indistinct save for the stub that protruded like a dead umbilicus from a hollow stomach.