Eighteen

At 3 a.m. Seth let himself into apartment sixteen. And until twenty past the hour, stood still.

The moment he flicked the lights on, shards of a recent nightmare fell out of his memory: the black and white marble tiles, the long reddish walls of the hallway, the ancient doors, the large rectangular paintings arranged in perfect symmetry, and all lit up by the dirty light struggling to escape from the discoloured glass of the shades. Yes, he had been here before. It was like a prolonged sense of déjà vu and it defied all the rules in life he’d taken for granted.

But one significant detail was different. In the dream, the paintings had been uncovered. Now, they were concealed by long sheets of aged cloth. Seth closed the front door behind him. Wincing, he dropped the steel key ring from his damaged hand into the pocket of his trousers.

Something had drawn his attention to this place. Something that moved within as he passed the front door. Something that had called out to him through the house phone and implanted visions in his sleeping mind. Something that had followed him home.

His troubles had intensified right after the first disturbance in this flat. What he had put down to depression and sleep deprivation and isolation could be attributed to this place. He felt it.

Impossible, but confirmed. Right here and right now.

And it was inevitable he would come in here. He had been summoned.

He shuddered. It felt like shock, seeing this. But the circling of his frantic thoughts ceased. For the first time in so long, his mind was clear of everything but a terror that escalated into awe. A feeling so acute he could barely draw breath.

Into the hallway he walked slowly, on unsteady feet, unable to postpone any longer this rendezvous with a place that had been empty for half a century.

All of the interior doors off the hallway were closed, and he recoiled at the thought of opening the middle door on the left-hand side, the door leading into the place where the definition of walls, floor and ceiling had been worn away by a freezing infinity of darkness, where things he had mistaken for paintings suddenly moved. At first around him, and then all over him. The sensation had come out of the dream with him, still clinging.

Pausing by the first painting in the hallway, Seth willed himself to lift the dusty muslin from the picture frame. It was the size of a large window. With trembling fingers he unhooked the fabric from the bottom corner of the heavy frame. He tried to raise it slowly. But as he disturbed the bottom of the sheet, so loosely wrapped about the frame, it dropped with a heavy sweep and landed on the floor with a whump.

Like a blow to the gut, the impact of the thing depicted in oil paint hit him immediately. This shock swiftly turned into nausea and disorientation, as if the contorted thing in the suit and tie was transmitting its torment directly into his own body.

Seth staggered backwards, unable to take his eyes from the painting, or to even blink. What was it? This thing torn apart, with a face wiped away by a sweep of whitish pain? And yet he instinctively understood the smouldering angst of its exposed entrails. At once he felt an involvement with the figure’s violent demise, its loss of itself, its disintegration.

It was not a depiction of anything human or animal. But it suggested both. There were elements in it he could distinguish – the open howling mouth; teeth covered in a film of blood; an oversized tongue flapping; the suggestion of a throat twisted in a choke; an eye, or something that resembled an eye, only positioned on the wrong part of the blurred head, wide open and so full of its own capacity for terror and torment that Seth could not meet it with his own stare. He wanted it covered again, that blood-filled eye, that scarlet pupil, engorged and ready to burst. It looked so real, despite its distortion in the swirl of a missing face.

Whoever the figure had once been was now destroyed. Remnants of its suit and tie were still in place, in some dreadful parody of formality, but the limbs had gone. Ragged stumps mingled with the ochre aura that seemed to sanctify its mutilation.

These were the throes of death. But suspended in this terrible black space for all eternity. Not life, but an animation of sorts. A motion after death, repeated to infinity. He understood the message immediately.

Seth turned his back on the tortured statement, the wet meat encased in fabric. But he experienced a kind of euphoria, an awe at the hand that had managed to capture the very height of terror and obliteration. He thought of his own sketches, littered about the crusted carpet of his room at the Green Man. Remembered the hooded figure in his dream, wandering through a landscape of dog-shit grass and pissed-on concrete, who whispered mad child logic about getting stuck in things, in places, after death. Trapped for a very long time. Until the darkness came. Was this the darkness?

The next painting, stretching six feet high and at least four wide, impacted against his excited mind in the same way that being drenched by a thrown pail of freezing water shatters comprehension and creates disorientation. It immobilized everything inside him except the electricity of terror. And that was its whole purpose: to be something only the insane would look upon and be able to bear.

And after he gathered his breath, his balance, his shaky sense of place and self, he noticed the background in which the figure was suspended. This performance of violence and fragmentation was nothing without the depths behind it. Baboon-snouted and eyeless, but horribly twisted in the vestment of a floral housecoat, bloodied and still moist, the figure hung upon complete darkness. A total absence that still managed to transmit the cold of deep space and the ungraspable length and breadth of forever. It was the most marvellous use of impasto, he thought, ridiculously, while wanting to laugh hysterically before the dripping blasphemy. A background surface that pushed its subject out as if it were about to drop at his feet, where it would howl and thrash its broken claws in an agony that had continued for so long it made a century seem barely a beginning.

Yes, he knew at once he was catching glimpses of things that had risen to the surface of an endless freezing darkness. An eternity where terrible things were deposited, but would flood upward towards a pinpoint of light whenever an aperture was made. As it had been in here. This place no one could live in. Where no one was supposed to be. But someone had been in here to depict these things.

Seth staggered drunkenly from frame to frame and hauled the coverings down. He let them slide off images that struck him so mute he couldn’t manage a scream. Nothing but an occasional babyish mewl in the face of things skipping on their animal bones, or blinded by stitched-up flaps, spitting like dying cats with black gums and needle teeth, kicking like the hanged in black-and-white newsreels, with limbs knotted around themselves and head shapes turned to roars, flayed like lambs, or as pink as the dead young of mice.

And all the deformity and distortion he glimpsed, he knew himself capable of recreating. Depictions of the potential inside himself hung all about this reddish corridor, like gleaming cadavers in a butcher’s cold room. Yellow fat, spiky bone, slick red: the meat and grease of human horror.

He too had glimpsed the first signs of this bestial rage, this annihilation of reason and decency, in the most prosaic of places. On a bus. On windy London streets. Browsing in the bright aisles of a supermarket. This terrible contamination made up of ugliness, cruelty and self-destruction, of compulsive narcissism, greed and hate, of bright flaring madness, had begun to emerge and crowd about him in the city. He observed it in others now they were stripped of the inscrutable facade of skin. He’d learned to see through, and down, to where the Devil lived. Hell was a living place inside every membrane of flesh that temporarily passed itself off as human.

Seth slumped to his knees. Tears stung his eyes, a merciful briny respite from what was nailed to the walls in front of him, roaring and contorted.

Genius.

He wept before the genius. Wept with gratitude at what he had been shown. A master class to guide his own pathetic scratchings and daubing. He needed to start again. The moment he got home. Cover the haemorrhages of paint with soiled bandages before making new scars on the walls and ceiling of his room. And then he would come back in here, night after night, to fill himself with this terror and learn how to re-create what was truly walking in this city. His squalid room would become a temple to a new renaissance. He’d work until he fell. Capture this impact, this dissolution of identity and the sickening jolt that came when standing before it.

On his hands and knees he crept to the nearest door. Opened it. Saw illumined, in the vague reddish light from the hall, walls filled with further wonders under cover. He wanted to be sick, to ejaculate and piss himself at the same time. It was too much. He had to take this filthy medicine carefully, in staged amounts, or he would lose the last bit of his mind he needed to create his own vision in oil.

In the next room, the one that terrified him in the dream, he peeked through the door and saw long, beautiful mirrors on each wall between shielded paintings. And he knew the visions under wraps in there could stop his heart or paralyse him with a stroke were he to look for too long. So he clambered to his feet and turned about, desperate to get out of the place where the paintings screamed at him. It was a din. A cacophony. They all wanted him to look and lose himself inside them. But before he could crawl away from the mirrored room he saw something move. From the corner of his eye.

Three times, moving too quickly for legs, it came at the surface of one of the mirrors, from deep inside the reflection of its counterpart on the opposite wall. And then vanished when he turned to stare. Too quick for his eyes to follow. Gone. Either back inside the reflection or vanishing from the fragment of his exhausted mind that could see such things.

There was no one in the room. Nothing so tall and thin. With a covered face. So tightly bound and red. He must have seen himself. Merging with the red walls. The murder walls all about him.

Seth broke from the apartment. He wiped at his eyes and pulled the wet shirt from the small of his back. Closed the front door and locked it. Went for the stairs. But paused before he descended, unable to move as he heard the inner doors of apartment sixteen closing, one by one.

Dawn was beginning to raise the solid darkness from the city outside, to thin and crispen the dense cold of the night air, but even the merest glimmer of daylight hurt the back of his eyes. Legs heavy with exhaustion, he pushed himself up the stairs inside the Green Man.

Ordinarily after a night shift, he would return to his room and slump into his unmade bed. Brace himself against the damp sheets and then fall into a coma. But not today. He had work to do.

Despite the painful swelling and bruising that still raged from the beating, he was engorged with inspiration. It had been years since he’d felt this way, utterly preoccupied by ideas and images. And now he was compelled to dash them out before they evaporated from his mind.

After he’d left apartment sixteen, he’d sat behind the porter’s desk and immediately filled two sketch pads with drawings. Just letting his bruised hands scratch the pencils blunt. A kind of automatic drawing had taken him over, filling page after page with suggestions and fragments of what he had seen up there.

And now he had work to do on his own walls. There was no time to waste. The desire to create could leave him again. For years even, if he didn’t throw his entire being into his art right now. His very will and what dexterity his damaged muscles and tendons and sinews retained had to make their mark up there. On the walls.

The wall beside the bed and above the discoloured radiator he had left running and smeared with hasty impressions of the abominations he had seen about London. But he couldn’t abandon the line. The perfection of the line. The artist in apartment sixteen had kept it intact beneath the chaos of colour and the violence of his brushwork. Seth could tell.

So the feeble beginnings on his own meagre walls would need to be covered with something black and smooth and flecked to suggest the greatest distances imaginable. Then he could begin again, and return to the impromptu canvas over and over until he was satisfied he had captured something of the spirit of those masterpieces in number sixteen. He needed to emulate the shock, the incapacity, and the complete involvement he experienced before them. He must acquire the style. But the subjects in here would be his own.

He needed space. The table and chairs and wardrobe had hampered his movements all through the night after the beating, when he’d hobbled about trying to splash and swipe an impression of those weasel faces onto the faded wallpaper.

The bed would stay. Now and again he would have to grab naps in the coming weeks. A few hours here and there. No more. He didn’t want to waste time when his whole frame prickled with this static, when every finger and toe buzzed with an idea, an image he could not allow to die or fade from his memory.

And to think he had once been ashamed of these thoughts, these grotesque impressions of the world. How he had longed to be like others, considering his sensitivity a curse, a spoiler of any real chance of happiness. It was no curse. He was blessed. As the artist of those paintings had been. Given an epiphany when the alternative was routine and senseless comfort. Imbued with divine insight when ordinary eyes were glazed with illusion and a nonchalant acknowledgement of the surface of things. This was his one chance to inject meaning into his existence. To attain a purpose. To re-create an impression of whatever he was beginning to see in this city. Things he had learned to see, or been taught to see by god knows what.

He didn’t want to think about why and how this impossible connection had been made. Couldn’t allow himself to question its source, intention or meaning. It was just there and had brought him back from the dead. These nights alone had woken him up. Slapped him awake and made him realize that nothing mattered beside the vision; the insight into whatever was opening up in his dreams and eyes. Art. He would exist solely to create, no matter how great the sacrifice or loss.

The very thought of going back into that red place, of unveiling those things of horror and magic, chilled his skin. But filled him with a glee that made his soul shiver.