Twenty-eight

‘Heart attack. A big one.’ The news about Mrs Roth was delivered quickly by Stephen. The head porter had been waiting for Seth to come in for the evening shift. Piotr stood beside Stephen, beaming. The nurse, Imee, had found Mrs Roth at the usual time, six o’clock, when she’d taken her breakfast in that morning.

But to his barely concealed amazement, Seth wasn’t asked about the events of that night. Whether she had called down at all. Nothing. Neither of his colleagues seemed upset either. At least she wouldn’t be troubling them again, that seemed to be the tone: relief. Stephen was even whistling, which Seth only remembered him ever doing after receiving a big tip. He clapped Seth on the shoulder too, which he had never done before, and then passed through the fire door to enter the staircase that would take him down to his flat.

A ninety-two-year-old woman’s sudden death in the night as a result of heart failure, while alone in her room, was hardly likely to arouse suspicion or instigate a forensic investigation. Wasn’t that exactly what he’d been telling himself, as if he had been rehearsing a mantra, as he’d stumbled towards all four points of the compass looking for a way out of London over the last few days? And tonight he had to assume, with a relief that made him shake, that he’d got away with it.

A respite short-lived. His fear of the police swiftly turned into a terror of what occupied apartment sixteen, of what it was capable of, and of what it might want from him next. Because there was no saying no. It changed him. The same as when he was painting – he could forget who he was. He became its tool, its assassin. He understood that now. The hooded boy, that stinking bastard in the parka, had said as much. They’d make him a great artist, liberate him from living death, if he did things for them. Like murder. Fucking murder.

When Piotr went home, Seth waited out the hours under the hum of the lights in reception. And it was not an easy wait. What was left of his conscience kept him company as gravity increased its pressure in the building. In anticipation. It was palpable. Sleeping or awake, things happened here. On terms that were not his own.

At certain times he would be required to act. Always. Here. To be complicit in a vengeful business he seemed to have brought back to life. Business long unfinished at Barrington House. And he could do little but guess at its origins, while having no control over its ghastly outcome. But people had to die here. Old people. Maybe lots of them. Old bitches who had harmed the thing that was once a man in apartment sixteen.

Impossible. Just preposterous. But happening, right now.

He fidgeted in the leather chair, or paced up and down the hall.

By eleven he’d smoked 12.5 grams of hand-rolling tobacco: Drum Yellow. Too wired to yawn, he stared at the screens of the security monitors, the greenish view never changing. He drew nothing. His desire to re-create the world in red and ochre and black upon his walls was absent. He now knew such insight demanded a terrible price. His new talent was only there by virtue of a collaboration with something in this building. A presence that wouldn’t let him leave the city.

Jesus Christ.

Why had he waited until he had no control over anything? His dreams, his actions, and now his movements were not his own. And to have been pulled back here tonight. To have been summoned and not given any choice in the matter accounted for this brief renewal in his health. The stomach cramps and nausea and dizzy spells had gone. Completely.

Had they ever existed? Yes, and he feared their return. Would do anything not to feel like that again. Seth slid his face into his hands and shut his eyes. Shut his eyes at the impossibility of it all. Of what had been done.

The hours passed him like indifferent pedestrians. Six thirty became midnight. But where was the watchdog? The hooded one, able to enter his dreams at will and shepherd him around the streets of London and the floors of Barrington House for its own purposes. Maybe the boy was here right now spying on him. Able to read his thoughts and be aware of his every intention.

Or maybe Seth was schizophrenic and hallucinating. No one else could see the figure of the boy. And Mrs Roth had been unable to see anything in the dark flat, which to his eyes was a place lit red. And he was seeing the city in a way all others were blind to. Maybe this was how it was for those who killed because of the voices in their heads, or obeyed commands uttered by visions of the dead or heard messages from televisions and radios. So maybe it was time. That time to surrender. To turn himself in to the authorities. How was that done? They would have to come to him. He could get sick if he tried to go to them. Break down before he even reached whatever doctor or constable was required to remove him from life. And could any of it even be explained?

A terrible shudder racked his body. A lump closed his throat down. He clawed at his cheeks and tried not to cry. ‘Jesus. Jesus. Jesus Christ,’ he said. There was no barrier between sleep and waking. No division between what was real and what was not real. All of it was the same thing. Coming together. Out of him and into him.

‘Come on Seth. They’s got summat to show you.’ The hooded child’s voice woke him at two and his sinuses filled with the scent of firework sulphur, cold winter streets, cheap clothing and the seared flesh that stuck to it.

The boy’s coat swished as he turned and walked away from the reception desk. How long had he been standing there watching him? The thing in the hood moved to the lift doors and paused to wait for Seth, hands in the pockets of its snorkel coat. ‘Don’t mess about, Seth. Get the keys.’

‘Go on, Seth. Look. She’s in there now. Where she belongs. Down there with the rest of them.’

He couldn’t stop the shaking in his arms, or in his hands that tried to cover his eyes, or in his legs that seemed ready to give way and reduce him to his knees.

Up there hanging on the wall at the very end of the hall was Mrs Roth. Depicted in bright oil paint. Recognition carried an impact that stopped the ticking of his watch, the pulse and pull of blood in his veins, the flit and reprise of thought. But by no means was it a literal portrayal of the former resident of flat eighteen. More of an impression of her. Incorporating suggestions of her distress at the very end. Distress both at her dispatch and at her sudden realization of her fate thereafter, because there was no end to awareness.

The skin of the face was twisted about the skull. Skewed somehow as if wrenched by invisible hands. The watery eyes had been rearranged. They were on different parts of her head now, but they were hers for sure. Bright with surprise and wide with something else. Thin bones, stripped of flesh, clawed for purchase where there was none in the black torrent of upward. Through which she seemed to both travel and hang. A frail configuration of sticks taken away. Away with it all. With no delay.

‘No,’ Seth mumbled.

Here he was again, between the red walls, to view a painting that was absent the last time he’d knelt before some contortion inside a gilt frame. This one was new. And worse than all the images combined of Mrs Roth that he’d seen on the night of her death. Because this one told him where she was now. Where he’d put her. And his sense of incapacitation was stronger than ever, if it was possible, as he lost himself before those bones in the rags of a nightdress, propelled through the dark.

‘There’s more, Seth. Come on,’ the boy said, and stood outside the mirrored room. ‘Gotta see it through, Seth.’

Seth turned away from the painting. Forced himself to remember where all his limbs were, so he could move, directed by the boy, to the mirrored room. He felt ready to scream, but never for a moment did he even consider resisting the will of the hooded boy. An unpleasant desire to see even more, until he was again taken to the boundary of himself, to endure the psychic strain of these creations, pressed him into that mirrored room.

Where a new exhibition had been organized for his eyes. The fragmentation of face series was gone. In its place he was treated to five blank canvases, reflecting an impossible sense of depth no two-dimensional medium should have been able to create, preceded by a triptych that began next to the door he had entered.

The three new paintings were in frames, but still gleamed wetly as if recently finished. He could smell the oil paint from where he knelt. It was a series of paintings in which, as he sat still and unblinking, he glimpsed something resembling a narrative. The first two pictures were separated from the third by a mirror positioned directly across from its counterpart on the opposing wall, creating an infinite silver corridor that retreated to a distant pinpoint.

In the first picture, out of the smudge of background came the suggestion of a staircase in Barrington House. He recognized it immediately from the hundreds of times he had walked those passages on patrol. Only here the walls were coloured like dried blood. Orange orbs glowed to light the darker places using some technique and mix of colour he couldn’t help but think masterly, despite the sight of the three figures in the foreground. Monstrous things that made him recoil.

Three men in evening dress, with peeled heads and thick sullen lips that parted with an imbecile vacancy, moved up the stairs on legs that never fully formed or separated from the grey swoops at the bottom of the frame. And it was as if all three figures grew from the same source and were in possession of only one arm. There was an oversized and raw hand at the end of the arm, clutching a metal object that had been designed for hammering or shooting.

Which is precisely what they seemed to be doing to the swathe of bloodied robes and naked limbs inside the next frame. It could have been a fourth figure, and the three grotesque idiot figures, their faces now animated with a hideous mirth, were destroying it. No face was visible within the wet linen that surrounded the victim, only two thin legs that shot out from the coils of the slaughter in progress.

In the third and final picture only the fourth figure – the victim – remained in view. It was inside some kind of transparent membrane that possessed a bluish tinge to its see-through walls. But the victim now resembled meat still wet on the bone, and it lay upon a gore-sodden platform of some kind. What looked like a head, with no face, hung over the side, flattened and misshapen, with the solitary eye closed. A long shadow crept away from it like running blood and filled the entire lower portion of the picture. And beside the crude plinth it lay upon was a red rag that could have been a mask or some sort of deflated hood, with a partial face still embossed upon the front of it.

And then something moved. Quickly and backwards, in the mirror before him.

A figure. The indistinct face reddish, as before, but hunched over and vanishing the same moment he caught sight of it. Leaving only a reflection of himself, seated and bewildered, in the silvery corridor of mirrors.

‘Others are gonna get done in later for what they did to our friend, Seth. And you got to help out wiv ’em,’ the hooded boy said, faceless inside the tatty fur trim that circled the hood.

‘No,’ Seth said, unable to stop the shaking that began again as he crawled towards the door. ‘No more. No more. I don’t want to do any more.’

The boy crossed the room quickly and blocked the door. Seth winced as his mouth filled with the smell of scorched flesh and charred cloth. ‘You bring them Shafers down here. Call ’em up and get ’em down here quick,’ the boy said. ‘You owes us. We got a deal, like.’

Behind him and up above him at the same time, he then heard a sound that washed his face of colour. A distant wind. Moving anti-clockwise, beyond the ceiling of the mirrored room, with the faint suggestion that within the turbulence, many voices were crying out in the blindness and unreason of terror.

‘And be quick about it, like. It can’t stay open for long, uvverwise too many fings get out, like. And we want them old Shafer cunts chucked in before it closes.’

‘A fire? What do you mean?’ Mrs Shafer’s waxy face confronted him from the open doorway. Then she looked away, down the stained hallway of her flat, in the direction of the distant bedroom, where her husband was still in bed, and cried out, ‘I don’t know what he’s saying, dear. Something about a fire?’

‘Who is it?’ Mr Shafer called out in that southern accent of his.

‘It’s. ’ Mrs Shafer couldn’t remember his name. ‘The porter!’

‘Hold on, would you? Let me get. my glasses.’ Mr Shafer sounded preoccupied and breathless. He must have been trying to get out of bed.

In all the excitement his wife’s bottom lip quivered and her eyes were watery from interrupted sleep. ‘Are you sure?’ she said to Seth. In her tone a prelude to hysteria was making itself known.

Seth nodded. ‘Afraid so, ma’am. We have to evacuate. Now.’ He had to get them out of their apartment and into number sixteen quickly, before anyone heard or saw what he was doing. The floor above was occupied, and if Mrs Shafer raised her voice any higher, he wouldn’t be surprised to hear a door unlatch up there.

‘But. I’ll have to get dressed. I mean, look at me.’ She was in her nightdress; a baggy red garment beneath a scruffy tartan housecoat that looked like it had been made for a man. Whatever was on her head – a wig under a scarf, or possibly real hair dyed black – had begun to drape about her ears. They were multi-millionaires – Stephen had once mentioned a fortune of over one hundred million – and they dressed like vagrants. They disgusted him.

‘There’s no time, ma’am,’ he said, raising his voice to a command. ‘Go and get your husband. Now.’

Immediately she shambled back inside the apartment and Seth wished he’d been as firm with her before, during all of those evenings when she’d tormented him with her pettiness. But she wouldn’t be able to inflict herself upon him for much longer, not if she walked between those mirrors. The very thought of them, and of what flickered through their silver-white depths, and of what was spinning above it all, made him so weak he leant against the door frame to wipe the sweat from his forehead. His skin was cold. He felt sick.

Mrs Shafer reappeared further down the hallway, holding her husband by one elbow and leading him out of their bedroom. A black walking stick in his other hand, Mr Shafer looked up, blinking. ‘Where is he? Who is it, dear?’

‘He’s there!’ she scolded the old man. ‘Right before your eyes. We have to get out because of a fire and you’re asking me these questions now? I mean, for God’s sake.’

As usual Mr Shafer fell silent, knowing better than to argue. He just sighed with the fall of every foot, his face tense from the exertion.

‘We’ll take the lift.’ Seth struggled to find his voice. The enormity of what he was doing took his breath away: waking elderly residents in the early hours with a story about a fire, in order to lead them to a grisly execution in there.

He held the door of the lift open and watched them shuffle inside. Seth crammed himself in too, ignoring Mrs Shafer’s murmurs of annoyance.

He stopped the lift on the eighth floor, but they didn’t seem to notice they’d gone up instead of down. ‘Here we are,’ Seth said. ‘That’s it,’ he added, helping Mrs Shafer out onto the landing by holding her arm.

He then steered them toward the unlocked door of apartment sixteen; left shut but on the latch. ‘We’re going to evacuate through this apartment. Downstairs is blocked,’ he said, praying they wouldn’t question his instructions that were patently ridiculous: there were no external fire escapes and they were on the eighth floor, between flats sixteen and seventeen. It was no place to make an evacuation.

‘Well I guess we better do what the young man says,’ Mrs Shafer said to her husband, leaning down and shouting into his face.

‘Well, yeah, but where’s the fire marshal?’ he asked her. ‘This man isn’t qualified. I’d like a word with the fire marshal. I mean, do you smell smoke? I thought I did back there,’ he said to his wife, but allowed himself to be led.

Only when he came to cross the threshold of the flat and enter the red hall did Mr Shafer stop. ‘Let go, dear. Let go. I said let go a me. This ain’t right. Where are we? This says sixteen, right there on the door. It’s that apartment, dear. He’s taking us into that apartment.’

No mistaking the emphasis. Seth’s neck stiffened.

Bewildered, Mrs Shafer stopped tugging on her husband’s thin but wilful arm and looked about herself until she also saw the number on the door. ‘What? I don’t understand? In here. We can’t go in here.’ Her voice was rising again.

‘What is the meaning of this?’ Mr Shafer demanded, his voice growing in strength and volume. A voice of business, one that must have come in useful when he was amassing all of those millions.

‘Look. There is. I’m trying to help,’ Seth said uselessly as they talked over him.

Mr Shafer was pushing his way back out now, around the bulk of his wife. His head was lowered with a determination to escape. ‘Call Stephen now. I want to speak to whoever is in charge. This is ridiculous.’

Seth tried to regain control of his voice. ‘You have to. You must. In there.’

‘I’m not going anywhere until I’ve seen the fire marshal. Stand aside.’ The old man prodded Seth in the stomach with his cane.

He shouldn’t have done that. Belittled him with the stick. Shouldn’t have touched him. Seth couldn’t breathe. Inside he felt himself go black. And too hot for reason to act as a coolant.

Mrs Shafer was still looking at the brass number on the door, then down inside the unlit hallway, then back towards her husband with her mouth open and her eyes all wild, when Seth kicked the stick out of her husband’s hand.

It hit the wall.

Mrs Schafer screamed.

Seizing the old banker by the collar of his nightgown, and then fisting another handful of thermal cloth near the small of his back, Seth lifted the figure from the ground and walked quickly through the front door. Mr Shafer’s feet never touched the ground.

‘Outta my way,’ Seth said to Mrs Shafer, his teeth clenched. And she stood aside, which surprised him. Just stood aside and let him pass, like he was carrying an unruly child to a family car on a trip the child had spoiled with a tantrum.

Mr Shafer never made a sound. Not a word. Nothing. Just hung from Seth’s hands and let himself be carried down the hallway. It was only when they stood outside the partially open door of the mirrored room, where the sound of the wind inside embraced them and the unnaturally cold air gusted out to burn their faces, that Mr Shafer spoke. He said, ‘Oh dear God. No. Not in there.’

Seth kicked the door open.

The lights might have been off, but it was clear the air of that room was occupied. Alive and electric with wind and animate with something else on the floor he couldn’t see, but could hear as a swish of eager movement around the edges. Just audible under the spinning.

As if he were simply throwing a log into a furnace, he hurled Mr Shafer into the room. Head first, into the darkness. And the old man didn’t make a sound as he hit the floor, as if something was there to catch him when he came down in the dark. But Seth didn’t have time to stop and think about what he was doing and what had become of his victim – best not to think of that – he just returned his attention to Mrs Shafer, who stood mute in the entrance to the hallway and stared at him.

He grabbed hold of her and marched her through the flat. ‘That’s it. That’s it. Come on. Here we go,’ he said to himself, to drown out the part of his mind that was screaming at him to stop.

She didn’t make a fuss either. Just whimpered. Dazed with shock, she even walked right into the room after her husband, requiring not so much as a shove. And it was noisy in there now. In the dark it sounded as if the ceiling had opened to let in a thousand voices all crying out at the same time, but not to each other. It was as if they couldn’t see each other, but were crowded together in some terrible dark confusion.

Seth closed the door on it all. Then fell to his knees and held the handle with hands white as bone, forcing it up so nothing could get out. And he tried to shut his ears to the new sounds defining themselves from out of the wind, and the cries so thick inside that room.

When he heard the bumping up against the door, as if someone had lost their balance and fallen heavily against the other side, he desperately wanted to take his hands from the brass door handle and block his ears, but knew he couldn’t afford to leave the door unsecured. This instinct for self-preservation was reinforced when out of the circling swept-away voices came a snarling in the foreground, like a dog worrying something between its teeth, up near the door where he had heard the bumping. And when someone tried to twist the handle down on the other side to get out, Seth was sure he heard the scrabbling of clawed feet on a wooden floor.

The wind and the voices were gone, the red lights were switched on, the paintings were all covered with dust sheets, and Mr Shafer was dead. Seth could see that straight away; the eyes turned around and gone all white, the mouth wide open, the hands frozen into claws and the legs wide apart. You didn’t strike a pose like that when you were still breathing.

But his wife was moving. She was hunched over before the mirror on the wall opposite the door. On her knees. Tottering ever so slightly, from side to side, and looking into the mirror for something she had lost in there. Her lips were moving too, but no sound was coming out of her mouth.

Seth locked her inside apartment sixteen in case they came back for her, and then carried the frozen bundle of sticks that was her husband’s body up the stairs to their flat. He then placed the thing that had once been Mr Shafer back inside the bed and covered it with the sheets, up to the chin, all the time taking care not to look at the face. And then went back down to collect Mrs Shafer, or whatever was left of her.

She was still kneeling, but now silently rocking back and forth. Her mind must have gone out like a blown fuse. And she offered no resistance as he coaxed her to her feet and slowly walked her out of the flat and into the lift.

‘She’s finished, Seth,’ the hooded boy said, reappearing when Seth guided Mrs Shafer out of the flat. ‘She won’t say nuffin’. Her head’s all bust inside. It was the ’usband he wanted most. Don’t forget his stick. Take it up wiv his missus. He won’t need it where he’s gone. You’s done well, mate. Our friend’s gonna be pleased.’

‘I don’t want to do any more. It’s finished. You tell him that.’

‘Nah ah. Yous don’t tell us nuffin’. We tells you what to do, like. And I fink you might be ready for a little treat for being so helpful and all. Summat nice might be comin’ along soon. ’Stead of all these old uns.’

Seth scowled at the reeking thing in the tatty hood, who trailed him as he led Mrs Shafer inside her apartment. He decided to put her back on her knees beside the bed. The Shafers only had an occasional visiting nurse, but they always came down in the early evening to walk to the local shop on Motcomb Street. Piotr would soon notice they’d not been around for a while. He’d check on them soon enough.