Apartment 16 (29 page)

Instinctively he believed that if he moved back eastward, back towards the Green Man, he would feel better again. Something was letting him know he was not allowed to leave the city. Something he had willingly gone into partnership with the night he opened the door to apartment sixteen.

Finally he stood before the glass screen, behind which sat a fat man in a red waistcoat. Seth rediscovered his voice and asked for a ticket to Birmingham.

The man looked exasperated. ‘Have you not heard the announcements or seen the signs? No services to Birmingham today.’

‘What?’

‘No services from Euston.’

‘So how do you get to Birmingham?’

‘Marylebone. Chiltern Railways. Or the coach station at Victoria.’

But just the names of those distant places, so far off in the cluttered and crowded city, doused the last flicker of his spirits. He wanted to punch the wall until his hand was jelly and bone fragment loose inside purple skin.

‘Can you move aside for the next customer,’ the man in the red waistcoat said.

Seth drifted away from the counter. He knew the Tube and the buses wouldn’t take him anywhere he wanted to go, and he didn’t have the strength to walk any further. All of his energy was gone apart from the reserve set aside to feed his panic. Even if he managed to reach another station the swift sickness would swamp him again.

He had to sleep. To go home and lie down. Maybe he could try later, after some sleep. He could think of nothing else now, and refused to even acknowledge the hooded boy who waited for him outside the ticket office, and who then fell into step beside him as he left the station.

The following day he tried to walk south, but could go no further than the Strand, where he vomited in a pub toilet.

The north presented an impossible maze. He was disoriented by brick walls, pointy black roofs, iron railings, bitter air and the half-seen whitish things that called out to him from building sites and moved quicker than rats down there in the uprooted foundations. His effort to escape was turned back to the centre, where he discovered himself to be in the evening, somewhere between Camden and Euston, wasted by hunger and exhaustion.

On the third day, in the east, he nearly suffocated between a row of grey terraced houses with front gardens full of rubbish. He shook and wept, watched by Pakistani children in strange clothes. And then he turned for home: the only direction that offered any relief from the nausea, the hot-cold sweats, the gasping for breath, and the constant calls from the bone-things in windows with their yellowy faces and wide-open maws.

The next evening, he went back to work.

TWENTY-SEVEN

Outside the Shafers’ apartment the smells of Barrington House clouded: wood polish, carpet shampoo, brass cleaner, and dust. And something else. A hint of sulphur. Of something recently burnt, like gunpowder.

Descending and ascending on either side of the elevator, the stairwells were lit by the electric lights, but the very air was gloom. Half-lit like a photograph taken in poor light. It made Apryl uneasy, but strangely apathetic too. Unless she kept moving and focused on specific tasks, she could imagine herself just lying or sitting in silence and waiting, alone, in here. But waiting for what?

At the thought of knocking on the Shafers’ door, her stomach went hollow with nerves. They were old and difficult and didn’t want to be disturbed. Stephen and Piotr had said as much. Their rejection of her request to meet them was down to their connection to Hessen and what they had done to him. With her great-uncle Reggie leading the way. Only under emotional stress had Mrs Roth confided in her. Maybe she had even expected her own end was near. The thought made Apryl deeply uncomfortable, as she must have been one of the last people to see Betty Roth alive. Stephen confirmed as much that morning when she arrived.

But the elderly resident had confided enough, and Lillian herself had hinted at the same ghastly series of events occurring half a century ago. But in her fear of interrupting Mrs Roth’s scant and haphazard disclosure, she had failed to ask about Reginald’s death. Not even Lillian had been able to share those details, because the final truth of what happened back then was too unpalatable for Mrs Roth and her great-aunt to recount. And so she was left with suggestions of Hessen’s evocations of unnatural powers and terrifying sounds, of hideous paintings and a plague of nightmares that even direct confrontation with the man had failed to erase. Things she too had glimpsed and was terrified of encountering again in these dim halls and wretched rooms, where the shadows were all wrong and where every mirror she looked into suggested a presence. She looked about, anxious when her eyes moved over the mirror on the landing.

But there had been a conflict and it had ended badly for Hessen. Of that she was certain. A murder they had kept secret all these years. A secret that drove them apart and into isolation and madness. But it was a story she would have retold now. She would know how Reginald died, and how Hessen had been murdered, and she would know this afternoon.

She raised her hand.

Her index finger met the cold brass of the door buzzer.

She pressed the button softly, too softly. It made no sound. She depressed it more firmly and held it down within the decorative brass surround.

What did you do here?

There was a pause and then the buzzer vibrated against the tip of her finger. At the same time, behind the heavy wood of the front door she heard a faint chime.

And across the greyish glass of the window in the stairwell, the weak sun must have moved its face further behind the ever-present cloud, because she felt the air cool and darken about her.

She stepped back and waited. And waited. Because no one came. She leant forward and pressed the bell button again. And again.

And then she heard footsteps rapidly descending from the floor above, down the communal stairwell, and felt the guilty urge to run away like a kid. The waiting was draining her confidence, her purpose. A shadow reared up the wall and she turned to greet the figure coming down in such haste. It must be a child, to move with such alacrity and speed. But could a child cast such a shadow?

To her right voices eventually came forward from deep inside the apartment. They gathered around the sound of the chime. A woman’s voice, sharp and anxious. Though Apryl could not make out the words. And then much closer. Close enough to be directly on the other side of the door, an elderly man’s voice came to life. ‘Well I’m trying to find out.’ It was raised in annoyance and directed back down the hallway towards the distant cries of the woman.

Apryl looked back at the staircase. The shadow grew larger but thinner and dissipated up near the ceiling. The footsteps on the stairs stopped. No one came around the bend in the staircase. ‘Hello?’ she said, her voice weak. ‘Who’s there?’

‘Who is it?’ For an old man, the voice on the other side of the Shafers’ front door was surprisingly strong, his American accent still detectable, though tempered by decades spent in London. His voice was directed at her, so she guessed he was peering through the little spyhole in the door. She could hear the rasp of his breath from the exertion of moving.

She looked away from the stairwell, suddenly eager to get inside the apartment with the elderly couple. ‘Hi, my name is Apryl. I just wanted—’

‘Who? I can’t hear you?’

She sighed with exasperation. ‘Apryl Beckford, sir! Can I come in, please?’

‘I can’t hear you.’ And then he shouted behind himself again, at the woman. ‘I said I can’t hear them. So how do I know? Would you just quit it! I said I’d take care of it. Don’t bother. Don’t bother getting up. I said I don’t need you.’

‘I just wanted to . . .’ Apryl began to say. No use, he wasn’t listening and couldn’t hear her even if he was.

Old fingers scraped and fumbled at the latch as if it were the first time they had performed the operation. Tom Shafer’s breathing grew louder and more strained, as if he were lifting something heavy.

When a gap appeared between the edge of the door and the frame, the man was so tiny she had to look down to see his face, which nudged forward. Severely lined baggy skin, dotted with bright white stubble, hung about a wet mouth, from which the lips had withdrawn. A rivulet of clear drool shone in a deep ravine at the corner of his mouth. Thick glasses magnified his watery eyes. They were so dark as to appear black in the moist discoloured whites. A blue mesh baseball cap was perched untidily on the little figure’s head.

‘Yes?’ Like that of a cigar smoker, his rough voice seemed to emerge from somewhere behind his breastbone and was liquescent but incongruously deep and bone dry at the same time.

‘Hello sir. You don’t know me.’ She spoke loudly, but not at a volume that would carry to the woman back inside the apartment who she assumed was Mrs Shafer. ‘I’m the great-niece of Lillian from apartment thirty-nine and I really need to speak with you, sir. Please, just for a few minutes.’ The door was partially open, but she instinctively felt it could close very quickly. She cast a final nervous look over her shoulder at the staircase, suffering the feeling that whatever had thrown such a shadow and moved so swiftly was now waiting just out of sight, and listening.

Occasionally blinking, Tom Shafer looked at her in silence. His expression crumpled into an anxious suspicion that she felt was a near-permanent feature. Slowly, he shuffled his body about to look behind him, down the hall, as if making sure his wife was not visible. Then turned back to face her. ‘You look just like your aunt. But I can’t see you. I’m sorry. We told Stephen. He should have made that clear.’ He began to close the door.

Apryl stepped forward, surprising herself. ‘Please, sir. I have to know what happened to my great-aunt and uncle. They were your friends. Your neighbours.’

He breathed out noisily. ‘That was all a long time ago. We don’t remember anything.’

‘I know about Felix Hessen.’

At the mention of that name, he looked up, his wet eyes startled into an animation they’d previously lacked.

‘I just need to know if what my great-aunt wrote is true. That’s all. Some closure on her life. Please sir, it’s just for me and my mother. We won’t tell a soul.’

Tom Shafer squinted at her. His heavy glasses moved up his small nose. ‘Young lady, your great-aunt was as crazy as a snake. And you’re starting to remind me of her. She used to come up here with just the same attitude. We don’t want to be bothered by any of that.’

That?
What did he mean? She smarted at his flippant remark about Lillian. ‘She had her problems. I know that. But you know why too. Mrs Roth told me. She told me what happened. Before she died.’

The door reopened, wider than before. ‘Betty wouldn’t say a word. She was many things, but she was no gossip.’ Despite his wizened body and little head in the ludicrously oversized hat, she was again surprised by the power of his deep voice. It suddenly made her feel foolish and guilty, like a kid caught misbehaving and bothering adults.

She cleared her throat. ‘Mrs Roth didn’t tell me everything. But she was very frightened before she died. And she needed to confide in someone. In me. She felt she was in danger. That something in the past was having repercussions right now. She told me about the paintings, sir. And about Hessen’s accident. What he did here. How he changed things for all of you. My great-aunt wrote of it too, in her diaries. Between them they’ve told me a lot of things. Including what happened after Hessen came back here and started tormenting you all over again.’

Tom Shafer didn’t speak for a while, but the tension of the space between them was filled with his raspy breath. He suddenly looked ill and terribly frail as if he could easily fall and not get up again.

‘I just want a few minutes of your time. That’s all. I have to know.’

‘I can’t. I’m sorry. My wife . . .’

This aged and fragile man suddenly made her think of Lillian, alone and afraid and abandoned, but never relenting in her struggle to escape the ghosts in her memories that had become the terrors of her every day. She’d never given up. Not like Mrs Roth and the Shafers, imprisoned here until death with their nurses and pettiness and powerlessness. Apryl wiped at the tear that tickled her cheek.

Without looking at her, as if he was too ashamed to meet her eye, Tom Shafer opened his front door and then hobbled away into the darkened hallway. He paused after a few unsteady steps and turned his head to the side. ‘You coming in or what?’

Dabbing at her nose, Apryl walked behind him. But now she was inside she wasn’t even sure she wanted to hear what he had to say.

‘Keep your voice down,’ he whispered. ‘If you disturb my wife you’ll have to leave.’

She nodded, but wondered whether he’d said this out of protectiveness for his wife or out of fear of her.

She followed him between the bare and stained walls of the hallway and into a large living room. It appeared the couple only used the one little corner of this space, the part with the television and the two worn armchairs huddled together about a little table on wheels, covered with small Evian bottles, tissues, sweets, a half-eaten bunch of purple grapes and scattered packets of medication. The rest of the room was empty save for an ancient sideboard and a dinner table piled high with cardboard boxes, faded towels and wrinkled bed linen. It was another poorly lit and miserable little pocket of Barrington House. With all their money they lived like bums in one corner of a penthouse. The carpeted floor was covered with crumbs and bits of paper. There were no pictures on the walls. No mirrors. Only the outlines of frames that once hung there, the paper bleached around the dark rectangles and squares.

The
Financial Times
was spread over one of the two chairs. ‘Take a seat. I can’t offer you a drink. It’d take me an hour to get to the kitchen and back. And we don’t have that much time.’

‘Please, don’t apologize. I’m sorry to disturb you. I really am. I know I came here uninvited. I don’t want anything but a few words. An explanation. It’s just—’ She swallowed the tightness in her throat. ‘—I’ve found out so many things since I’ve been here. Things I now wish I didn’t know. But I can’t go home without knowing the rest of my great-aunt Lillian’s story.’

After falling into the chair and panting to get his breath back, Tom Shafer peered up at her. His aged face was calm now, his stare unfaltering, resigned, with no time for social discomfort despite the squalor of his surroundings. ‘You really do look like Lilly,’ he said, and finally smiled. ‘She was a very beautiful lady.’

Apryl’s face suddenly suffused with warmth at what he’d just said. Not because he thought her attractive, but because he’d confirmed the connection between her and Lillian. ‘Thank you. She really was, wasn’t she? I’ve seen the pictures of her and Reginald.’

Tom Shafer kept on smiling. ‘Sometimes it hurt just to look at them. They were something else.’ He looked away, at nothing in particular. Just out there into the scruffy room he occupied every day. ‘But things change. Enjoy what you have when it’s there. Don’t go looking for trouble.’ It sounded like a warning. He looked back at her. ‘I hear you’re going to sell that place of Lilly’s. Well I’m going to ask you to do it, right away, and to get out. Don’t waste any more of your life here than you have to.’

‘What makes you say that?’

‘I thought you knew.’

She avoided his eyes and looked instead at her hands clasped in her lap. ‘I know some things. But not everything. I can’t put all the pieces together.’

‘And you think I can?’

‘But you were there. Back then.’

He shook his head. ‘But who can say what happened? I’m not sure I can. Betty sure couldn’t. Nor Lilly. And the others aren’t with us any more. It was not something in the normal course of a person’s experience. Not something we were prepared for, or could deal with. It should never have happened. We just got caught up in it because we were too proud and too damn stupid to get out when we had a chance.’

‘But caught up in what?’

He let out a long sigh. ‘I don’t suppose it makes a goddamn bit of difference who knows now. I can’t believe Betty told you anything. I really can’t. But who would believe a damn one of us old fools? And I have no idea what the hell Lilly was writing. She wasn’t herself. Not for a long time. It all beats the hell out of me, but something happened for sure. By God, we’ve paid our dues for it. We all have.’

Apryl looked down at her lap again, feeling herself fill up with a familiar frustration and despair. ‘But you can tell me how Reginald died. Lillian couldn’t bear to write it down.’

Tom Shafer looked up at her. ‘You ever heard the expression that two people can love each other too much? Well that was Lilly and Reggie. We never thought she’d survive Reggie’s passing, and I guess we were right in some ways about that.’