Apartment 16 (10 page)

The void. Absorbing his stare. Pulling it from his body, leaving the rest of his face behind. Tugging it towards the flat darkness of the pictures. Paintings of an absence that made him feel both cold and afraid of heights at the same time, as if he could fall through into it.

But if he stared long enough at the darkness inside any of the frames, things could be seen. Ever so faintly, emerging like pale fish from still, lightless and forgotten waters.

Here and there he began to think he could see things moving quickly. A flash of grey bone. A smudge of face looking back over a shoulder. Teeth yellow and chattery. Then gone. Or was it just a trick of the faint light that distorted any real sense of shape among the swirls of paint?

But as he passed the largest rectangular frame he was sure he saw the wet brick walls of a shaft descending away from the picture frame. And within the tunnel the pallid silhouette of something turned and scurried away, but backwards.

Gradually, as he passed more of the large, dark backgrounds in the picture frames, new shapes emerged and took more definite form. And the paintings began to resemble distant unlit rooms. Inside them he caught sight of things huddled and twisted. The faces were covered or turned away from the light. Other frames issued impressions of fleshy presences, whose mottled skin was like discarded clothing, empty of the rigidity supplied by muscle and bone but still moving. Moving against thin pins that nailed the flayed opacity to walls stained with rust or rot.

And then he too was moving forward. Pushed onward against his will, flitting past the occupants of so many dark rooms within the frames he passed. Wanting to look straight ahead, or at his feet, at anything but the terrible walls and what hung upon them, he wrestled with his neck to stop his head whipping from side to side. But he still caught glimpses of things at the edge of his vision, or up ahead in other picture frames, as his eyes stubbornly refused to obey his will. He clenched his jaw to stop himself screaming at the tangled things, gnawed to the bone. The torn things. Fragments of fleshiness ripped like cloth. Sometimes a smudged whitish face, caught in the act of a scream, hung in space. Until, on either side of the walls, a terrible momentum gathered. As if a call had gone out and summoned the subjects of the portraits to gather for an audience.

Dim faces, transformed by animal features, soon pressed outward from the darkness. Limbs dangled with an increasing frequency. All obscured by the poor light as if a full revelation would be too much of a shock, even in a dream. But the women still tried to show him their dirty teeth. And the men, tied in knots, revealed a rapture of pain so great it made their shrieking faces turn blue and disintegrate around the edges.

And then he was inside another room off the middle of the corridor where the swirling sound was at its loudest. He had to cover his eyes and crouch down, to make himself small, where he shivered against the cold air that swooped about his body. Air that carried a hundred voices all telling a frantic story.

Against the wall. Against the wall. Smash it against the wall.

I can’t. I won’t. He said he’d come back. Wait here. I know it’s cold, but wait here, love.

Stamp on it. Break it.

Seth peeked through his fingers, terrified but compelled to see who was speaking and shouting and screaming all about him.

Bleached faces groaned but kept their eyes closed. They rose and faded on the dark walls.

I coughed it up. Coughed up my heart.

Was that an ape? The thing with the hair around the mouth?

I fink he’s coming. Fink he’s coming down. There’ll be hell to pay now.

Could an old woman have such teeth?

Excuse me. Please. Excuse me. I think I fell down.

He saw three baby-things with big heads and doll bodies hanging against some wet bricks in a sewer.

Are you all asleep? I’m sorry, but are you all asleep? I need the doctor. But the door is locked. I’m sorry to wake you, but they turned all the lights off.

The walls were paint. The ceilings were paint. It was still wet. Reddish but dark, like blood or moist rust.

He turned to look at a black beak that said,
Blood. It’s in the blood,
but it vanished and he watched hind legs kick away into the liquid shadows.

Oh Jesus Christ.

There were no angles where the walls ended and the ceiling began. What had been a room was now just a space.

To his left, at head height, four women turned about on their hands and knees. All of their joints were in the wrong places. Teeth and hair grew in clumps from out of the grey and pink flesh of their bodies.

Hello? Is somebody there? Who are you? Please help me.

In between a procession of bluish bony things that dragged themselves through the darkness in a circle, round and round at the edge of the room, up near where the ceiling should have been, following each other’s paralysed legs and useless hooves, and beyond the chitter-chattery teeth, clacking like the muzzles of wooden horses, was an intense blackness. It moved. Seethed.

Seth screamed and a terribly thin figure rushed at him on all fours, its wisps of hair wild in the freezing wind, but then suddenly fell away, or was yanked backwards, so that something else, inside a sackcloth bag, could struggle forward on its elbows, its eyeholes stitched shut, hissing and desperate to reach him but blind and unable to locate him.

Am I awake? Please. Can you tell me, am I awake?

Everything in here was suspended in a freezing ether. An eternity of living oil in which so many things drowned and resurfaced before being sucked back down again. The room had transformed into a terrible broth of liquid and gas in which these things were all stuck and barely aware of each other. Some crawled blindly and bumped into others they then challenged or screamed at, insane with fear. Others hung silent, or were pinned fast against the darkness momentarily, before fading back into the void once again. The roar of the wind was the roar of tens of thousands of voices. Vertigo tried to turn Seth’s stomach inside out when he realized he was but a pinprick in a seething that stretched forever.

He covered his eyes. Stood up and started to stagger about. To feel for the door he’d slipped through. There was no door. He had to peek between his fingers again, but it was so dark now he couldn’t even see his feet. And things were brushing against him in the moving air. Something like a tongue lapped between his fingers. A dry, bristly face pushed into his stomach. Was it speaking or gnawing? Thin fingers touched then pressed against his face. The tips were cold but urgent in their examination as if suddenly surprised to find him here in the darkness. A hand grabbed his thigh and squeezed. A woman screamed. A hide of scabs brushed the back of one hand. An awful sexual panting erupted behind him and he sensed the feverish motion of something wet and raw directed at him in the darkness.

Seth staggered towards where the walls had once been. He’d taken no more than a few steps when the temperature plummeted. His body froze. Shivering with a violence that made it hard to breathe, and even with his eyes closed, he sensed that he stood near the edge of a precipice. The floor of the room had become nothing but a small platform in a bottomless night. A darkness overcrowded with suffering and confusion and madness. And it was all crawling onto the platform with him as though the room were a solitary life raft in a freezing black sea.

He fell to the ground and clung to the floor, while the deformed and fragmented subjects of what he had mistaken for paintings in the hallway clambered over him.

It was the phone ringing that pulled him out of sleep with a cry. It was a strangled sound that suddenly disintegrated into an anguished sobbing, a noise he had never heard himself make before. And as the bright yellow light of the reception area burned into his wide eyes, and the solidity of the leather chair pressed against his back, his sobbing turned into panting.

Tears dried on his face. He coughed to clear his throat of mucus. His hands gripped the arms of the chair until they became bloodless, as if they were still obeying some command designed to prevent him from falling from a great height.

Seth looked about him, the sudden shock of consciousness sobering him from terror. The familiar world of security monitors, clipboards and ringing house phones reassembled around him and chased the vestiges of suffocating darkness out of his mind. The nightmare drained away, as, mercifully, did his waking notion that all he had just witnessed had been real.

He was ill. Really ill. He must be.

Someone wanted him. On the phone. Jesus, how long had it been ringing? What time was it? He swung about in his chair and yanked the receiver from the switchboard.

He cleared his throat and quickly and instinctively spoke into the phone. ‘Seth speaking.’

Bad line. But someone was speaking inside the crackles and static. ‘In here,’ he thought they said. Or was it ‘Down here’? It was a man’s voice, but not one he recognized. He looked at the switchboard. The red light was flashing for flat number sixteen.

Recalling bits of the dream, Seth dropped the phone.

NINE

The mirror was turned so it faced the wall. All night long it had reflected nothing but the noble image of her great-aunt and uncle in dusty oil paint, instead of her lying frightened and tense in bed.

She had turned the mirror round because it frightened her. But it was just a long mirror in a dark room, in an old apartment, in a strange city, in which a tired and excitable girl had become overwhelmed by all the things she had seen, thought and imagined. Just an overwrought mind imagining a presence in a mirror. Nothing more.

Dim morning light hovered around the window frames, emitting a thin greyish haze through the net curtains. She hadn’t closed the drapes the night before in order not to feel trapped, as if the windows above Lowndes Square offered the possibility of a quick escape. All the lamps were still on too, along with the ceiling lights.

Confounded by how her mind had invented terrors to torment her, she clambered out of bed and looked out at the sky, already dark, and rippled with stripes of tangerine. It was as if night was ready to reclaim the earth again at nine in the morning.

Tired and tense, as if she hadn’t slept at all, she pulled the net curtains back to allow more light inside. As she rearranged the gauzy fuss, something hit the floor at her feet and bounced. A blue and white saucer lay upside down on the carpet and near it was an iron key with butterfly-wing handles. About the right size for the drawers of the bureau. She moved quickly to the heavy and dark piece of furniture opposite the foot of the bed.

The key turned in the first lock with a tiny thump that she felt in her fingers rather than heard.

There were so many tickets in there. For train and plane travel – even tickets for journeys by sea. They were arranged into stacks by year and then secured with red rubber bands in the uppermost drawer. But not a single ticket had been clipped, stamped or torn along the perforated strip. These were tickets for journeys planned but never taken. And most of them listed the United States as the destination. From as far back as 1949, Lillian had been planning to go home.

Apryl thought about what Stephen had said about Lillian’s final farewells as she left the building for her morning wanderings. There had been a little case with her too, with an expired passport and a plane ticket inside, clearly packed for an overseas journey, on the day she died. But why had Lillian broken contact with her sister and family, when the United States was such an important a place for her to reach? It didn’t add up.

She’d heard of ritual obsessives and their precise but irrational routines, and this was further evidence of her great-aunt’s deteriorating mind. A demise beginning four decades earlier. Wearing an antique hat and veil and launching out of the building with America in mind as her destination, only to return confused and disoriented an hour later, before she reset herself and began the process all over again the following day. If it hadn’t been her own aunt and benefactor she might have smiled at the idea; but instead she wondered how in this day and age so wealthy a woman had been allowed to go on like that for so long.

In the drawer below there were copies of birth certificates for Lillian and Reginald, some old unfranked stamps, Reginald’s service medals, his wedding ring, and hair clippings in a plastic sachet. Beneath all this lay a densely stacked assortment of private papers that looked like investment statements, insurance documents and household bills, neatly ordered inside linen envelopes. Her aunt had been meticulous as well as batshit crazy. Apryl figured she’d have to make sense of it all later.

The opening of the bottom drawer, unless there was a safe or bank vault somewhere, represented the last undiscovered remains of Great-aunt Lillian’s estate. The scent issuing from it pierced her sinuses with the strong but not unpleasant fragrance of pencil shavings, dust, and dry ink. It clouded over her face and then quickly sank back into the dark wooden space that she could see was full of books. All with plain covers and from a time when book binding and production was seen as a craft. Each volume had a woven fabric or leather cover. Dusty and neglected but of some quality – which just about summed up the end of her great-aunt’s life.

Opening the red book on the top of the stack revealed lined pages filled with handwriting, but with no dates given. She flicked through the stiff pages and soon realized that a separate sheet had been used for each entry, written by an unsteady hand.

The writing was difficult to decipher. Was that a
b?
And what at first looked like an
s
was actually an
f.
It also slanted so far to the right that the longer strokes were in danger of lying flat and crushing the vowels against the blue lines on the paper. She flicked through to the last entry. It said something about ‘trying again in the morning’. And ‘taking the Bayswater Road, which I’ve not seen in years’.

Going back to the first page, she pressed her finger under each word and moved her lips like a child learning to read, slowly moving through parts of the scrawl, and abandoning whole sentences and paragraphs when the jumble of letters and scratchings defeated her. But on occasion an individual word would stand out, or even a clause, such as: ‘further than before here. Years ago.’ And: ‘There are cracks to get through where he won’t follow. Or be waiting.’ At least that’s what seemed to have been written, but she couldn’t be sure and the tiny muscles behind her eyes were beginning to strain. The light in the bedroom was too dim for the task.

She put the first journal aside and raised five more out of the drawer. The writing in these was similar to the first, but at least one volume had months written above the entries, though there were often question marks following them – ‘June?’ – as if Lillian were unaware of the date as she wrote.

There were twenty of these journals in total and Apryl placed them all on the top of the bureau in the exact order in which they had been removed from the drawer, assuming that Lillian’s arrangement followed a chronological pattern, with the oldest diaries at the bottom.

She was right. The writing was much clearer in the last journal to leave the drawer. It was nearly all legible and very attractive to look at. And there were no errors, as if what had been written had been carefully composed.

Delaying the phone calls she had to make, Apryl went back over to the bed and sank into the musty goose-feather pillows. And from the first journal she began to read pages at random:

Highgate and the Heath are entirely lost to me now. I have accepted this. I went there to remember so many of the walks we took together. But they will have to live on in memory alone. And I haven’t seen St Paul’s in at least six months. I cannot get near the city. It is too difficult. After my episode on the underground, I have sworn off travelling below ground. The breathlessness and anxiety may be acute outdoors in the street, but they are doubly so below ground in those tight tunnels. Even my afternoons at the Library and British Museum in Bloomsbury are in jeopardy.

Not those too? I keep asking myself in despair. When will this tormenting end and what will I finally be left with? The tightness in my chest and the flickering of my vision has occurred twice in the reading room like the slow onset of some appalling migraine. I had water brought to me. The second time a man with terrible breath tried to take advantage of me.

Doctor Hardy still insists I am healthy. But how can I be? Doctor Shelley claims I am an agoraphobic and will insist on meddling with my childhood memories. Soon I will have exhausted the wisdom of Harley Street. I dare not tell them about the mirrors. The rest shall have to go downstairs too.

Most of the other entries in the journal were along similar lines. Catalogues of fatigue and curious bodily sensations in different locations around London that Apryl couldn’t picture or even place on a map. But it seemed that her aunt had suffered acute anxiety attacks whenever she strayed too far from Barrington House.

Increasingly, the entries became lists of directions she assumed her aunt had tried to follow in order to leave, or even escape, London. Train stations abounded: Euston, King’s Cross, Liverpool Street, Paddington, Charing Cross, Victoria. Lillian had tried to reach them all but succumbed to an attack of nerves combined with unpleasant and paralysing physical symptoms at each attempt. Something she began to refer to as
the sickness
.

Or maybe she was attempting to test some kind of boundary she felt had been imposed upon her freedom. Sometimes it seemed these obsessive journeys were taken as a form of reconnaissance.

Some entries involved other people who were never described in any real detail, because her dead husband, to whom these journals were addressed, was already familiar with them:

East, I can reach no further than Holborn. To the West his boundary encroaches deeper. Today I was forced to call Marjory from the street to cancel luncheon. I can go no further in that direction than the Duke of York’s Headquarters. Bridge is an impossibility because Holland Park may as well be in China considering how far I can reach out these days.

With every cancellation the girls wonder about me. I can hear it in their voices and they are nervous with me, though they are good enough to try and conceal it if they ever come to dinner in Mayfair. If I cancel many more appointments or refuse invitations I fear I shall have no friends left at all. And I’m satisfied that crossing the river is not an option. I have been thwarted on the Westminster Bridge twice after setting off with my head held high, only to be overcome by the profound dizziness and weariness that made me faint before I was helped to a bench like an unfortunate blind woman.

It is so hard to countenance now as I sit here writing to you, as clear-minded and upright as I have taken for my right in life. But along the Embankment to Grosvenor Road I can do little but crawl like a cat miserable with some internal injury and gaze across at Wandsworth as if it were paradise. A place I never wished to visit when you were alive, darling. But would gladly go barefoot and penniless amongst the cranes and concrete if it meant I could be free of him, and this sickness he has brought me. And the others have it too. They cannot fool me. Beatrice has not been further than Claridges for a year now. And when I told her I had been sick on my shoes in Pimlico she stopped returning my calls as if I were the contagion. She is a cowardly thing, and a terrible bully. We can’t keep the staff. She takes this imprisonment out on those who are not to blame. She will not allow the idea that
he
is behind this appalling situation to even enter her mind. And the Shafers are sweet enough to me, but have begun to complain of bad hips as if they are already old and infirm. Their silly heads are firmly buried in the sand, my darling. As long as a few old friends still visit them they tell themselves they do not need to leave the building. And they still will not tell me what happened the day they tried to flee London from King’s Cross.