Thirty-four

There he was, standing in the side street directly across from where they sat.

The silhouette emerged from the dusty shadows and orange light emitted from the interior of a bar; hands in pockets, the oval mouth of the hood turned in their direction, watching. Briefly it disappeared behind the shambling passage of a number nineteen bus and then reappeared. ‘Barrington House,’ he heard Apryl say, as if it were some cue for the hooded figure to appear and molest their privacy.

And now she was looking too. Out into the darkness that quickly fell and absorbed detail, merging brick with concrete with car with road, swallowing walking legs and fading colour into the vagueness of London dusk. But no matter how keen her pretty eyes were, he already knew she would be unable to see that sentinel. Watching and waiting, the figure was there for him and him alone.

‘What is it? Someone you know?’

Seth shook his head, his face draining further beyond its normal pallor. ‘No. I thought it was.’ He turned his attention back to her, but failed to concentrate on what she was saying as his eyes darted, continually, back to whatever it was on the street that had so abruptly stolen his attention from her. ‘Tell me about Felix Hessen,’ he said, suddenly serious and failing to acknowledge the arrival of two plates on the table, one sizzling, the other steaming. ‘Please.’

He ignored his food and listened intently while she concluded a brief history of Hessen by telling him that his vision had remained unfinished because none of the apocryphal oils had survived. But she never gave him the full story. She often checked herself. There were certain details she omitted to tell him. Particularly from the unofficial history she had pieced together. She didn’t tell him of what Mrs Roth or Tom Shafer or Lillian had said about the changes in the building, or of what they had all dreamed of after Hessen’s arrival: the things they saw in mirrors and paintings and on the stairs, and heard behind his front door. All of this she didn’t mention, preferring to portray Hessen as a misunderstood eccentric and recluse, thinking it would appeal to Seth’s sense of himself.

He began to ask tight, direct questions. Probing her about Hessen’s study of the occult, about theories of his disappearance, what was known about his ideas, his obsession with death, the titles of journals and books that mentioned his peculiar life, why he studied anatomy, and what she thought he was trying to achieve. And during her attempts to satisfy his insatiable need for information, she mentioned the Vortex.

Seth’s face stiffened with shock, or fear, she wasn’t sure which. His eyes became wild and his voice shook as he pressed her, over and over again, for details of this Vortex, for clarification of Hessen’s desire to stare into it. Did she have other books? Could he read her great-aunt’s journals? It was important, he said, and he even stretched one hand across the table to hold her wrist tightly. ‘I have to know, Apryl,’ he said, looking into the street, his bottom lip moving as he muttered something to himself. ‘Please, it’s very important to me. To my work. Can you help me?’

‘Why, Seth? Why is it so important?’ she said, smiling and trying to put him at ease.

‘I can’t really say why. Not yet. But maybe soon.’

‘I really want to help you, Seth. And do whatever I can. I’m so intrigued by your work. Miles will be too. I think he will want to help you once he sees how talented you are. And he’ll be better at explaining Hessen than me. I’m no academic.’

‘You do all right.’ Seth looked down at his plate. Pushed some basmati rice about with his fork. Closed his eyes for a few seconds, then excused himself and went to the toilet. Where he remained for ten minutes.

When he came back one of his hands was shaking. She pretended not to notice, but asked him why he wasn’t eating. At which he sniggered nervously and said he preferred to smoke. Then looked back outside again, to that spot across the street that so fascinated him.

Apryl was losing him. He looked so utterly miserable. His fidgeting had become manic and he was trying to catch his breath as if in the clench of an acute anxiety attack. At any moment she suspected he might make an excuse and leave.

She reached across to him and held his hand. ‘Something’s wrong, Seth. Don’t be embarrassed. I can see you’ve been under a lot of strain. Would you feel better if we went back to your place? Maybe you could show me your work. If you feel uncomfortable here.’

‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘I. It’s just. I. ’ But he couldn’t finish.

‘Let me get the bill. We’ll go somewhere more comfortable.’

Outside on the street, Seth walked too fast for Apryl to keep up in high heels, and she asked him to slow down.

‘I’m sorry. Really sorry, Apryl,’ he said three times.

‘It’s OK. It really is,’ she said. It was freezing. A dry dusty wind whipped them from behind.

‘Sometimes. It’s just. I get. It’s hard to describe.’

‘Then don’t try. Let’s just get you home.’

‘It’s good of you. Really is. I feel so embarrassed.’

‘Don’t be silly. Shall I get something? Maybe some wine?’

‘I have some, I think. In the fridge. There’s not much in my room. Just a fridge and a bed. It’s more a place to work. But it’s pretty shocking. I mean, it’s a bit of a mess.’

‘You don’t have to apologize, Seth. You should see some of my old apartments back home.’

‘Yeah?’ But he was distracted again and jumpy. Watching anyone who passed them, and peering across the street into darkened shop doorways or up narrow side streets.

From Upper Street to where he lived in Hackney, the atmosphere changed. She felt it as much as noticed it. There were fewer people on the streets and the shops were run down. They passed betting stores and unappealing pubs, a plethora of fast-food places with home-made advertisements in the windows. Large rectangular cages of social housing surrounded by iron fences loomed up and over the pockets of cramped Victorian buildings.

‘I hope I’m not being too forward. I don’t want to intrude.’

‘No. Not at all,’ he said, distracted, then looked over his shoulder. ‘I’d really like to know what you think. There’s no one I want to show more than you, Apryl. I think you’ll understand. I really do.’

‘Why?’

‘Everything you’ve said about Hessen’s vision. I think I’ve been chasing the same thing.’

Thirty-five

Up the dark and cluttered stairwells she climbed, all the time wishing she hadn’t insisted on seeing his painting. But not from a fear of him – she thought him harmless. Intense and emotional and sensitive, but not aggressive. But there was another side to his character she had only just begun to understand. Seth’s self-absorption and rapidly changing moods, the endless tangents that sprang from his hurried and excitable monologues she could deal with, but that haunted look, and at the root of it something akin to real terror, unsettled her far more here than in the restaurant. Because she could see it better in him now. As if he was drawing her closer to something she should be afraid of too.

But when she thought of him living above this scruffy pub, in a warren of peeling walls, smelly carpets and dark passageways, with its grubby windows overlooking cluttered yards and vandalized garages, she even felt sympathy for Seth and his dismal life. Working nights at Barrington House in the glaring white light of that reception area, and sleeping in one of these rooms during the day, only to wake late in this depressing neighbourhood filled with the damaged and the dangerous and the marginalized, while trying to complete some abstract and tortuous vision – it was enough to send anyone crazy. But then she put a stop to her natural empathy intruding upon her purpose: she was here to discover the extent of his involvement with that terrible thing, that murderous force, that still haunted Barrington House.

Up she went behind him in a building that stank of male sweat, of fried food and damp clothes dried on radiators, all making her wince as she climbed too many staircases and turned tight corners, while all about her corridors vanished into darkness, or stopped before reddish doors.

When finally he turned from the stairs and led her across a landing cluttered with old wardrobes, tables and broken chairs, and then down a narrow passageway to his door, she was exhausted. And as Seth opened his door, she looked down with irritation at her leg to inspect where she had scraped it against some splintered object in the dark. The fine material of her stocking had run down to the heel of her shoe in three places.

‘It’s in a terrible mess. Please understand, it’s just a work space. I don’t usually live like this.’

‘Sure. Let me in. I don’t like it out here,’ she said, a hint of annoyance hardening her voice as she peered over her shoulder into the dark passageway they had just squeezed through. The place should be condemned. How could anyone live here?

I don’t usually live like this.

Who could? Without losing their mind.

He’d painted the fucking walls.

Covered three-quarters of the entire room with a mural most psychiatrists would attribute to the work of the insane.

The figures hanging in that darkness with no end shut all of her senses down, apart from that of sight. It was childlike in its simplicity. Primitivism loud and raw. Eschewing literal portraiture to immerse the onlooker in a shock of distortion and psychic panic.

She had to sit down. On the bed, where she gaped at the walls. At the twisted things, grinning or shrieking before the infinite and the lightless.

‘It’s just a place for ideas. Studies of figures. The preliminary sketches are behind you. I did most of them at night. And I’ve got lots more in that case and in those folders. I’m just trying to find the colours on the walls. A combination of textures in the background too that really. really arrests.’

It certainly did that. If Hessen had ever painted, his work would have looked like this. She took her eyes from the wall and looked at the floor, covered in sheets saturated with paint and grease stains. In one corner of the room was a mess of tangled clothing. Apart from the old yellowing fridge and the sweaty bed there was nothing. Not a thing was permitted to distract her gaze from the walls and what cried out upon them, disfigured, crucified, flayed and nailed in place.

The tormented and tortured never asked for a dialogue, or suggested much of a narrative; they just existed to create seizure in whoever looked at them. They hit her with a fist of horror, but also with a cold shock of recognition. As if the bleakest and most painful experience in the viewer – the disabling moments of doubt and despair, the choking of self-loathing and hate, the binding of grief and the tether of fear – had all been personified in these figures. They were the same morbid flashes of the half-formed in agony, enduring a violence of disintegration, that Hessen had begun to sketch in his work dated 1938. But Seth had taken the ideas another step forward, using Hessen’s studies as a platform, so all that they promised could be achieved on the bigger canvas and in the richness of oils.

‘You have seen his paintings, Seth. Somewhere. You must have. Tell me, Seth. Please. It’s why you work in that building. You knew.’

He shook his head and stepped away from the window, where he had been standing witnessing her paralysis before his walls. ‘No. I never knew about him. Not in my entire life. I studied Brueghel and Bosch and Dix and Grosz. They all appealed to me. Maybe that’s what made me right for this. To continue the work. And London is the perfect medium to get it out. The divide is thinner here. Nothing leaves.’

‘What do you mean?’ she asked, half understanding but not wanting to process the truth.

‘Something happened to me. In my dreams. At work. Here. And bits of the dreams came into my head when I woke up. Then the world was different from how it was before. I thought I was mad. I started seeing things, Apryl. After the noises in apartment sixteen. Like it was trying to get my attention. So I went in. And I saw the paintings. And understood what I’d been seeing. What I’d been shown in my dreams, by a master.’

He stopped talking. The look on her face silenced him. When he’d mentioned the paintings in apartment sixteen, Apryl felt the skin shrink under her hair.

‘Paintings? Hessen’s paintings are still inside the flat?’ She stood up. ‘Tell me, Seth. Tell me the truth. There are paintings still inside that flat?’

He turned his face away and grimaced as if someone had just entered the room, then said, ‘Fuck off.’

‘What?’

‘Sorry. Not you.’

‘Seth?’

He shook his head. His mouth moved, as if he was about to speak to the door, then he turned his face away, drew his hands over his white quivery features and sighed. ‘It’s. it’s not safe.’

‘Safe? I don’t understand. What do you mean?’

He slumped on the bed and held his head in his hands. ‘I can’t say. You wouldn’t believe me. I should never have gone in there. It’s not allowed. You can’t tell anyone. I just needed to make sure no one had broken in. Because of the sounds. And the phone call. But then I saw them. The paintings. My God, those paintings.’

After he finished speaking, he looked again at the red door of his room, as if someone had suddenly knocked, or called from the other side.

‘You watch your mouf, cunt, when you’s talkin’ to me. And you’s gonna show her them pictures, Seth. Our mate says so. He wants to meet the little tart. Shovin’ her fucking snout in, like. Just like her old aunty-bitch. Well there’s plenty to see if you go to the right places. Ain’t there? You’s knows that better than anyone, mate. So you bring her up them stairs. You know where.

‘She’s the last one, Seth. You’s almost done, mate. And you’s’ll get what’s comin’. He’s gonna fix things for you. Yous’ll do alright out of this, mate. You’s comin’ to live there with us. Do some paintin’s and stuff and live downstairs. Close like. We’s always gonna be together, like. So you’s do as you is fuckin’ told, like, and bring that tart up them stairs.’

‘What paintings? Hessen’s paintings?’

Seth heaved out a great sigh. Then swallowed. He took his eyes from the door and looked at her, with pity, she thought. ‘You have to understand. Nothing has ever given me so many ideas before. No other artist has ever spoken to me in the same way. He’s taught me to do everything all over again. Taught me how to find a voice, Apryl. But. ’

Apryl felt dizzy. Disoriented from his crazy mixed-up talk and the sudden realization that Hessen’s paintings actually existed. It was like reading Lillian’s journals all over again. And to have it confirmed like this. By this nervous obsessive young man with eyes so bruised by lack of sleep he was beginning to look like he had a terminal illness.

‘I need a drink.’ Apryl gulped at the cheap and acidic white wine Seth kept in his fridge. At least it was cold. Then she sat on the bed again to put herself back together. ‘Seth, I want to know what is still inside apartment sixteen.’

He winced and slopped wine into a dirty coffee mug, then lit another cigarette.

‘I want to know what happened, Seth. To my great-aunt. To the others. You know he killed them, Seth. That he’s still in the building. You know that, don’t you?’

His body seemed to deflate as it sat on the edge of the bed. He hung his head down between his knees, his bony spine arching upward, every joint visible through his thin shirt. She crossed her legs so quickly they hissed. ‘Did you help him?’

Seth raised his head. ‘I was tricked.’

‘How? How did you do it?’

He looked at her, his face pale, his eyes wild, feral. ‘I just let it back in. I didn’t know. ’ He swallowed, looked up at the door, his wide eyes watering. ‘Then it was too late.’

She put her hand on his forearm. He looked down at it and sobbed.

She spoke to herself as much as to Seth. ‘No one would believe us anyway. About what we know. What only we know.’ Then her eyes suddenly hardened to an intensity that clearly frightened him. ‘But he has to be sent back, Seth. You know that. Whatever he is coming through has to be closed. He killed my family. And you helped him. So now you are going to help me. Or there will be trouble. More than you can handle. And Miles knows. My friend. He knows everything too, so nothing had better happen to me when I go into sixteen and shut that shit hole down. You get it?’

Outside the room, someone stumbled through the darkness and swore in a heavy Irish brogue. They both started on the bed. Apryl clapped a hand to her chest.

Seth swallowed. ‘It’s not that. I could get you in there easy. Easy. It’s not that.’

‘Then what?’

He looked at the door and whispered, as if terrified someone might hear him. ‘It’s not safe.’

April felt her skin ice and then shrink around her muscles. ‘How?’

‘The apartment. Changes things. Seeing it isn’t safe. And. I don’t think everyone can. is able. to see it. the paintings. ’ He said this with such conviction she shivered as if suddenly affected by a draught from under one of the old wooden window frames, painted white and peeling.

He pointed at the wall. ‘This is nothing compared to what he has done. It’s just a facsimile. But his painting is. it’s not right. It’s just impossible. They change. They’re alive.’ And then he had to look away as if unable to withstand the sight of her fear. ‘He’s still in there. Hessen. In that flat. And he’s not alone.’