Twenty-four

‘What are you doing?’

The sharp voice pierced him from behind. Seth didn’t even need to turn to identify who had caught him unlocking the door of apartment sixteen. It was a voice he’d heard on the house phone most nights for the last six months. But when he did turn to face Mrs Roth and saw her dressed in a pale blue housecoat and red slippers, the childlike vulnerability had gone, along with the frailty and confusion she exhibited last time they met, outside this very door. Now her hair was perfect; the bulb of thin silver covering the mottled skull hadn’t even touched the pillow. She’d sat up all night waiting for the sounds to begin.

Panicked at being caught trespassing – he could be sacked for entering this flat, and would be blamed for the noises coming out of it – Seth tried to speak. But failed, muted by his own fear. Mrs Roth would be sure to tell Stephen first thing at daybreak, if not before. She wasn’t just angry; she was furious at the sight of him before that door with keys in hand. Her face was red, her bottom lip trembling with emotion, the small eyes sharpened by rage. She raised her arm, the elbow bent, the quilted sleeve of her housecoat slipping down an emaciated forearm, stained with blue veins and continents of liverish discolorations.

‘I asked you a question. What are you doing?’ Her voice rose as she spoke until she was shouting. It could carry. He wanted to shut her up, but was powerless to act, to placate her. She was too clever. Too aware of the weakness of others, of his lowly status, and of her instant advantage as a resident. Too eager to expose and torment.

Seth swallowed. ‘I heard something. I thought someone had broken in.’

‘Liar. You are a liar. It’s you. You! You make the noises in there. I knew it! You do it to frighten me because you know I am upstairs. You are a terrible man to frighten an old woman. I want Stephen now. Call Stephen. Now!’

He felt sick. Couldn’t dislodge that huge lump of fear clogged behind his breastbone. It was like being a kid again. She always flustered him.

Bitch.

The very sight of her filled him with a rage of such intensity he imagined smashing her dried-up stick body against a wall. That idiotically big head, the threadbare hair, the pointy, vicious face above that child-puppet body of old sticks and loose flesh: why couldn’t she die? Her own family despised her. She couldn’t keep a nurse for more than a month. Reduced them to tears every day. No one could work for her. Or stand her. She had even driven the taciturn Stephen grey with her impossible demands.

Seth felt himself go white with loathing from head to toe. An antipathy that frightened him; the kind that would astonish him once it passed. Something he regularly experienced now, but never grew accustomed to; he’d never before been able to hate with such intensity, or to create from it with such integrity. And didn’t she understand that he had no choice – that something far greater than him was calling him up here to study its genius?

At last he found his tongue, but managed to suppress the anger, quickly thinking of a tactic to sidestep this mess. ‘I am responsible for the health and safety of the residents in this building at night. And I am sick of the noises in here.’ He jabbed a finger at the door. ‘And I can do nothing because of some stupid rule about the key. And you phone every night complaining to me about the noises in the empty flat beneath you. It’s gone on for too long, Mrs Roth. And tonight, I decided to go inside. So phone Stephen if you want. I really don’t care. Because I’ve had enough.’

At first she seemed startled that anyone would dare to take such a defiant tone with her. But the anger gradually softened from her face, only to be replaced with an expression of suspicion as she regarded him in silence, and thought on what he’d said. After a few seconds of deliberation, she raised the crooked hand again, showed him her big knuckles and fingers lumpy with arthritis. ‘Don’t you lie to me. You have been going in there. At night. And moving things. Making noises.’

Seth did his best to muster a stance of impotent frustration. It wasn’t hard, he’d had plenty of practice. He shook his head, stared at the ceiling as if to beseech a higher power. This had to be good; even though most of the sting had gone from her voice. ‘Mrs Roth, you believe what you want to believe. I am only doing my job. Would you rather I sat downstairs and ignored a break-in? So be it.’ He locked the door and walked towards the stairs.

‘Where are you going?’ she asked, the bent finger jabbing the air again.

‘I’m going back downstairs, Mrs Roth. Isn’t that what you want?’

‘Don’t be a bloody idiot. Get it open. I want to see for myself. Go on, open it. Now.’

He tried to fight a smile. He could tell Stephen she forced him to open the flat because of the noises, and that he only entered the apartment to finally shut her up. He should have called first, but he didn’t want to wake Stephen, knowing how tough he had it with Janet being so sick and everything. Maybe he and Stephen could keep it between themselves. Didn’t they have an arrangement of sorts, anyway? So what was the point of making trouble?

But what would Mrs Roth think of the paintings? He imagined her pale with shock, moments before the impact of a stroke; envisaged some tiny black blood vessel inside that heavy brain, its hard wall cracking, springing a lethal leak.

And she would ruin everything if she survived the ordeal of looking at them, by shrieking her ignorant complaints at Stephen. Seth might be fired; no head porter job for him. At the very least, the locks would be changed and the door alarmed. Sealed off from him. His access would be over.

Why tonight? Why did she have to make her move tonight? He was desperate to see the last room. Terrified, but alert to the potential of its influence on his own work, back at the Green Man. On the walls. Wet on the walls. So vivid. Something to bring the London art world to its knees. Oh yes, he was having his doubts. Was sick with fear at what he was doing, what he was becoming, what he was seeing inside his very home. But an artist must be courageous, and what was flowing from his hands was too spectacular to deny.

‘You bloody fool! I own the flat, it’s my property. Get it open. I’m telling you to open that door. Do as you are told.’

He started to fret again. To taste panic at the back of his mouth. He removed the keys from his pocket. Fumbled with them. But how was this possible? How did Mrs Roth own this place and the ghastly wonders inside it?

And then another voice spoke. From the stairwell, behind Mrs Roth. A voice he also knew well, its words coming from the cold, windy shadows of deserted council flats, from the rain-blurred streets of Hackney, and from the dim horrors inside the rooms of the Green Man. His hooded companion had returned. ‘Go on, Seth. Open it up for the old lady. There’s someone down there who wants to see her. An old friend, like. She’ll be taken care of. She’ll get what’s coming.’

Inside the mouth of the stairwell and half-obscured by the wall, Seth glimpsed the lowered cowl of nylon hood. The face was lost in darkness and the melted hands were tucked away in the rustling oversized pockets.

She’ll get what’s coming.

What did he mean? Seth felt sick.

‘Give them to me! Get out of my way!’ Mrs Roth came across the landing, quick on those clawed feet for an old lady. Her face animated by fury at his indecision, one of her lumpy hands snatched for the bunch of keys.

He held them up, out of her reach. Stared down at her, keeping his voice even. ‘Please. Would you just let me do my job?’

It was no use; she gave him no choice. He slid the frontdoor key inside the lock. He was not responsible.

‘Hurry up. Hurry. Why are you just standing there?’

Seth unlocked the door and pushed it open. He stood there and stared into the darkness in front of him. A cold draught wiped across his face and made his neck shiver.

Around his elbow he felt the clutch of her hand. Despite her anger and the way she had spoken to him, she still expected to be escorted in there. And protected.

He glanced down at her. Could see how agitated she had become. How frightened she was of the place. What did she know about it? She knew something. She’d lived in this building since the Second World War, and must have known the former resident of this apartment. They had been neighbours. And now she owned the flat.

Seth led her into the darkness, pausing inside the front door to reach for the lights. Into the hallway came the crimson glow.

‘Don’t they work? It’s so dark. Have you got a torch?’

So her eyes weren’t that good. No surprises there; she was nearly a hundred. Seth looked over his shoulder quickly. The hooded boy stood on the landing, watching.

‘Leave the door open. I don’t like it,’ Mrs Roth muttered. ‘Can you see anything?’ The strength had gone from her voice. Now she was just a frightened old lady, squeezing his elbow. Asking for reassurance. How could he ever have been afraid of her?

And yes, Seth could see everything: the paintings covered by the dirty ivory sheets, hung upon red walls, and all lit by the dim rose light silting through patterned glass. Just as he’d left it. But Mrs Roth didn’t appear to notice the paintings, which he thought odd. She was still complaining about the dark. Pressing herself against him, her head only rising to his bottom rib. A flicker of sympathy caught in his chest before he banished it, knowing this was no mark of friendship between them, or of respect. She despised him. She needed him now, that was all. In the morning she’d be reporting him to Stephen. Ruining everything between him and the treasures in this sacred place.

‘Can you see anyone?’ Her voice was shaky and imploring. Then she called out, ‘Who’s there?’ into the darkness; the obtuse tone was back in place, but seemed to lose its power inside the hallway.

‘Mrs Roth, who lived here?’

‘A terrible man,’ she said. The strength in her voice was slipping away again. She sounded confused and frightened. Misery and fear combined to sag around her mouth, to bow her head, as if she were being forced to remember something acutely painful. She seemed more stooped over than ever before. ‘We don’t want him coming back.’

He led her down to the middle of the hallway, aware of her breathing, that seemed laboured, as if she were enduring some strenuous exertion as opposed to merely wandering on slippered feet between these red walls. Walls she took no notice of. He heard her whimper.

‘An artist lived here, didn’t he, Mrs Roth?’

Mrs Roth said nothing as she looked at the closed doors.

‘Someone you didn’t like. Probably didn’t understand. So tell me, Mrs Roth, who was he, this terrible man? And what did you do to him?’

‘I don’t want to think of him. Don’t ask me again. I don’t want to talk about him. I don’t want to remember him. Not in here. I bought this place to get rid of him.’ And then, her voice practically a whisper, ‘After he’d already left.’

‘What did he do, Mrs Roth?’

‘Shut up!’ she suddenly shrieked, then pointed at the door to the mirrored room. ‘In there. Do you hear it? I can hear him in there. He’s laughing. It can’t be. We got rid of him.’ The sudden force of her fear made Seth jump. She was shaking. White with shock and looking so frail now, he was practically holding her up: a papier-mâché puppet with bones of bamboo.

‘He can’t come back. It can’t be him. Someone is playing a trick on us. We got rid of him. We wouldn’t allow him to be here. Open that door. Open that door and turn the lights on. I want to see. I don’t believe it.’

Unsure of what to do and so aware of the power inside that room, he hesitated. Just standing near the door made him tense with an unpleasant anticipation. And Mrs Roth was witless with fear. Was trembling against him. What could she hear? She said she could hear him laughing. But Seth could not hear laughter. Just the wind. Yes, the suggestion of a far-off wind. The sense of some tremendous cold distance approaching, as if a black sea were making its way towards them on some impossible tide. One that washed in from above them, and somehow below them at the same time.

‘No. It’s not safe. We have to go,’ he whispered desperately at her.

‘Open it! Open the door. I want to see. This isn’t right. It’s not right. He can’t come back.’ She was becoming hysterical. The perfect dome of silvery hair was falling apart. What pitiful remnants of blood still survived inside her veins appeared to have drained from the surface of her skin. She looked ready to collapse; her flesh had taken on a greyish tinge and he was seeing far too much of the whites of her eyes.

But he couldn’t just stand here and let her scream. She might wake someone. Right now another resident might be banging on Stephen’s door, or calling the front desk. Or worse, the police. He was losing control again. Control of this stupid panicking old bitch. Anger replaced his unease and fear. Anger could do that; it had its uses. ‘All right. All right,’ he said, his teeth clenched in a grimace. He reached out and seized the cold brass handle of the door. But when the moment came to give the handle one full turn, it was pulled from his hand. Opened from inside with a force that made them both cry out.

Seth sat behind his desk. Unmoving. Staring at the glass of the front doors and the blue-black of dawn behind. Shivers ran across his skin, beginning somewhere inside, but spreading out and over his entire form. In the ceiling the lights made tinkling sounds from their own heat. Somewhere outside, a powerful car accelerated into the distance.

He wanted to keep his mind clear but couldn’t even follow the action on the television screen below the desktop. It was just a senseless mosaic of flickers and colours and distant voices. The pictures in his head were far more compelling. And they refused to stop or be still, but surged forward to reassemble the events that had occurred so quickly around him upstairs.

He remembered jumping back, instinctively, away from the dark, empty rectangle of space behind that middle door. At least that’s what it had looked like. A room that failed to materialize when the door had been torn from his hands by an eagerness within.

And then he saw Mrs Roth fall. Slowly, sideways. Down to the marble tiles at his feet. She went down quietly. Never cried out for help. Or got her arms out to break her fall. Just hit the hard tiles with a smacking sound. And lay still, with her face turned towards the door. She looked dazed. Her lips moved but she made no sound.

Seth had looked into the room. Some of the dim reddish light from the hall fell through the doorway, to reveal the glint of a distant mirror and the suggestion of long, shadowy rectangles on the opposite wall. As if solid, tangible matter had suddenly recomposed itself inside that space that had previously appeared dark and empty. And just for the briefest moment, he was sure he saw something lope quickly across the face of the door. From right to left. Hunched over. Indistinct and moving with a rustle, just below the sound of the approaching wind.

‘Quick, Seth. Quick. We got a deal, mate. I told you. So hurry it up. Put her in. Put her inside. There’s not much time,’ the hooded boy had said from behind him.

Mrs Roth had seen something too. Her eyes bulged from a face so ashen it looked like a plaster death mask. They seemed strained to bursting around the corneas and were fixed, unblinking, on the open doorway. A long dribble of spittle hung from the side of her mouth closest to the floor. She began to make a low moaning sound, like an animal. A frightened, wounded animal trying to breathe from injured lungs and growl at its attacker at the same time.

Seth felt disgusted by her. Repulsed at this display of incapacity. Wanted to get away from the broken figure on the floor.

She wouldn’t listen to him. Not a word. It served her right. The stupid bitch shouldn’t have been in here. He’d tried to tell her.

‘Seth. Seth,’ the boy said in an urgent, hissing voice. ‘Do it. Do it. Put her inside. Get rid of her. You got to be quick. It don’t stay open for long. And she’s hurt bad. Yous’ll get in trouble. They’ll blame you. Do it. Do it now.’

And that compelled him to kneel down beside the old lady. To reach for her narrow, pointy shoulders. He acted on the instinctive assurance that once he put her inside this room, the problem would be solved. Once and for all. So he did it.

She moaned as he tried to move her, but she didn’t move her eyes from the doorway. She felt so thin and hard under the nightgown. The housecoat flapped open. It was hard to get a grip.

‘Quick, Seth. Quick like. Put her in and close the door. You got to. Do it now. Do the bitch.’

Desperate to put an end to this confusion, this fear, this terrible suspension of reason and decency, he slipped his hands under her warm armpits, hoisted her up in front of him and turned her to face the door. Limp, unmoving, and now strangely silent, she hung from his hands, her eyes still open, about to be offered to the room.

You should never move an old person who’s had a fall. He remembered the first-aid training they’d had down in the staffroom. They can go into shock. She’d probably busted her hip. But they were past all that now. Way past it all.

‘That’s it. Get her in. Put the bitch inside,’ the hooded boy said, his voice breathless with excitement and starting to break into a humourless, eager laugh. ‘But don’t look up, Seth. Just don’t look up.’

Seth obeyed. Knowing this was going to lead to a swift end to the nuisance she had become, he walked forward. Not breaking his step, or looking left, right, or up above as he marched to the middle of the room. And then he laid her down.

It felt like walking through a dream in there. His own body was weightless. The air was strangely thick around him and so terribly cold it punched the breath from his lungs.

Nothing made sense, but it didn’t need to, as he immediately obeyed the rules of this space and did what he had to. Did what was asked of him. Did what was necessary in a room in which the ceiling – he was quite sure of this without even looking up – had vanished and become a terrific circling of air and half-formed voices. Rushing downward from somewhere miles away towards where he stood, a cold and fathomless turbulence above his head was rotating backwards at a frightening speed and getting closer. Spiralling down. He’d heard this sound before and hoped it had been a distant radio. But he knew for certain now that it was no such thing. It was the infinity he had seen depicted in the oil paintings that hung upon these red walls. And it existed with a force and energy that made him feel more insignificant than he had ever felt before any wonder of nature.

As quickly as he could, Seth turned and scurried back towards the door and the hall outside. He lurched through the doorway, his legs shaking, knowing that he was only back in the hallway because he had been allowed to leave the room. And then he wasted no time in closing the door behind him. He kept his eyes down, so that when the door moved on its arc to become flush with the doorway, he never saw, clearly, what it was that suddenly rushed across the room and covered Mrs Roth up.

Her scream was short. Started deep. Went high, warbled, then ceased abruptly. This was followed by a loud snap, then a series of dry cracklings that put in his mind the image of fresh celery being broken between strong hands. And of dry kindling being snapped to fit into a small fireplace.

And the noise of the wind, that inexplicable circling, the static crackle swooping, and inside it the sense of figures being swept away, their voices whipping through the air, suddenly built up to a crescendo he was sure every resident in Barrington House could hear while sitting bolt upright in their beds. A climax of such force that he waited, cringing, for the sound of the windows to blow out.

It never came. And before the noise suddenly stopped he heard what sounded like an assembly of hooves against a wooden floor, scraping in their haste to get to the place he’d left Mrs Roth.

The silence that followed was almost harder to endure than the preceding series of noises that had sapped all feeling from his arms and legs. Because it wasn’t a tranquil silence. Instead, it was loaded with anticipation. And when the silence lengthened Seth wondered if whatever grisly business had been conducted on the other side of the door had finally been concluded.

The hooded boy had moved down the hallway from the place where he had directed the proceedings. He stood beside Seth, who winced at the sudden gust of spent gunpowder and singed cardboard.

‘You’s done all right, Seth.’ The boy giggled and the hood of the parka trembled from the activity inside that Seth was glad he could not see. ‘Bitch had it comin’, mate. Bitch. Old bitch. He’s gonna be pleased wiv us, mate. He’s wanted that old bitch for ages, like. Now you get inside there and clean up, mate. You’s ain’t finished yet.’

He had to go back inside there. And clean up. A terrible shudder racked his body and he bit his bottom lip to prevent the mighty sobs that wanted to shake him from head to foot.

‘Come on Seth. You’s got to be fast else yous’ll get caught, mate.’

Pressed against the door of the mirrored room, Seth listened intently. Strained to hear through that heavy wood to search out any sign of occupation or activity. If he’d heard anything he was sure he would have fled and not stopped running until he’d cleared the building. But he heard nothing. It was only the gradual recession of his shock and fear that made him think again of Mrs Roth. An aged woman lying on the floor of a flat he should never have set foot inside. A woman badly injured now, or worse. He opened the door.

And saw her lying on the floor, hunched up, in much the same position he had left her, on her side, facing the mirror. The mirror in which he could see her face, contorted into a mask of such extreme fright he could almost hear the scream all over again. And above the reflection of Mrs Roth’s unmoving clump of nightgown and stick limbs he saw a flurry of movement.

Way down inside the mirror, inside the silvery rectangular tunnel of reflections created by its position opposite another identical mirror on the facing wall, something moved in quick flits like the images from a film struggling through a projector. But whatever it was he thought he had seen vanished before he had taken more than two steps into the room. Even after all he had endured and heard and seen in this place, he was still sickened with fright at the suggestion of something long and pale, with a reddish smear for a head, moving away inside the reflective distance of the mirror. And it was dragging a pale blue lump by the ankle, away from this room and deep into whatever existed down there.

Seth then turned and briefly looked about him, at all eight of the undraped paintings; one on either side of the mirrors positioned in the centre of each wall. And inside him everything seemed to stop moving, as if shut down by the sheer force of the images.

Each painting depicted the same face, but in different states of disintegration amid a terrible upward blast of air, moving so fast it must have seared the flesh from the bone with the efficiency of an acetylene torch. It was as if the entire demolition of the head above the seated body had occurred instantly. The eight portraits showed, in sequence, the head of the figure being pulled apart, torn and then sucked upward, while the body was still fastened to a chair. He recognized the bits of face in the piecemeal head. It was Mrs Roth.

Seth closed his eyes and shook himself. Rubbed at his face.

Don’t look up.

He knelt beside the cold body of Mrs Roth. He prodded and whispered to her, but elicited no response from the stiff shape, bunched inside the blue housecoat. Her eyes were still open, but he preferred not to look into them, either in the reflection of the mirror or on the actual face, that had been stretched by terror into the rictus of a scream that barely had time to leave the lipless mouth.

Wasting no more time, he scooped up the bundle of bone and its lolling head and moved quickly with it through the flat, out the door, up one flight of stairs, through the open door of flat eighteen, and then down the hallway to the master bedroom. And positioned the body at the foot of the bed, as if it had fallen heavily, head first against the floor, after losing its balance. Not even little Imee was roused by the sounds he made. Perhaps that tormented drudge only responded to the sound of a bell.

Seth then stood back and surveyed his work. Satisfied with the position of the shrunken, broken thing, with one foot tangled in its bedclothes, he turned on his heel and moved quickly out of the flat. He pulled the front door closed behind him and then went back downstairs to apartment sixteen to cover both his tracks and the paintings in the mirrored room, deciding he would keep his eyes closed when so near the shrieking horror of that face, depicted in paint still wet.