Thirty-seven

When Apryl arrived at one in the morning, Barrington House was enshrouded by a wet darkness. The lights in most of the apartments were out. Only in the communal areas did the discoloured electric bulbs illumine the hazy stairwells and dismal landings. But there was nothing comforting about this light, nothing warm, and nothing about the dim glow to make a person want to take shelter in there, even if it was wet outside.

At the end of the reception area Seth watched Apryl peer through the main doors, at the place he occupied once the sun was dead. Around her silhouette the night was a blur of depth and reflection, like a combination of inner and outer worlds. Two separate places joined on the thin layer of glass.

She was wrapped in a long, dark coat and her hair was concealed by a headscarf. He could almost smell her. That sweet sweet smell. Even on the other side of the door, before she let herself in with the pass code, he anticipated the taste of her.

Behind Apryl’s svelte shape, he caught the shudder and then the rattling whoosh of a black cab passing away. Had she come by taxi? He’d told her not to. Not to allow anyone to see her enter this building tonight. Or to tell anyone where she was going. They had a deal. Who knew how things could go up there? Just the thought made him sick with fear.

He looked up at the ceiling. Bits of whatever was in there must have escaped from the mirrored room back when the residents and Barrington House were younger – before the building was aged by what came through, by what it now held within its feeble bricks.

He had come to think it began when life began and that this building was nothing but a keyhole through which a few draughts had snuck. But he could only guess at the invisible byways by which its influence had then spread. Hessen used it to find allies and to destroy enemies. From amongst those close to his presence, and that of the terrible collective that used madness and nightmare to make itself known in the places it could only be brought into by men like Hessen. And not sent back.

Hessen had waited fifty years for someone to finish his business. He was greater than Seth, and Seth could not defy his will. His tutor had waited too long for this opportunity. Had even hobbled Mrs Roth and the Shafers to keep them close, all this time, while he waited. Never forgetting. Unforgiving. Pure in purpose as an artist must be.

Seth clambered out from behind his desk and walked over to greet Apryl. ‘You came in a cab. I told you not to. I told you to be discreet.’

‘I didn’t. I only took a cab to Sloane Street, and then walked from there. Like you said.’ She reached out and touched his arm. ‘It’s OK. You can trust me, Seth. I want you to trust me.’

Looking into her pretty eyes and then letting his stare linger on her red lips, glossy with a scarlet that contrasted so arrestingly with the white skin of her face, he would believe her. Cabs always passed by this place, looking for fares in the richest part of town. That’s all it was. But God he was jumpy.

‘You have the keys?’ she asked.

He fished them out of his pocket. Made them jingle on the silver hoop in front of her face. ‘Remember, if anyone sees you, if the head porter sees you, you don’t mention number sixteen. He won’t be around, but just in case. OK?’

‘Sure. Right.’ She was nervous but her eyes were excited. He liked that. Stupidly, he wanted to kiss her before she went in there. But the thought of where she was going made him swallow to try and force the panic back down his throat.

‘Let me get the pager. Then we’ll go up by the stairs. The lift makes too much noise. Sometimes it gets stuck. I don’t want to leave anything to chance.’

‘Seth. What you’re doing – it has to stop. You know that. And we are going to stop it. Together. You understand that, don’t you? What you brought in can be sent back. Somehow.’

It did something to his stomach, the way she looked at him. Right into the middle of him. He shivered in a nice way. Felt a bit dizzy too. She was the kind of woman he could just look at. For ever.

But she really did not have a clue.

Thirty-eight

She followed him up the stairs, behind his narrow shoulders in the blue blazer and his long thin legs in the creased flannel trousers. He walked quickly and whenever he turned to take the next set of stairs, she noticed how pale his face was. And how quickly his lips moved as he muttered to himself.

Breathing harder than she liked, or thought she ought to, she went up seemingly endless stairs thickly carpeted in green. Twice on the verge of losing her balance in the high-heeled boots she had worn, she skipped after him, trying to control her fear. The idea of going inside that apartment made her nauseous with the wrong kind of excitement. She had not been an accessory to Hessen’s end, or to the destruction of his art, but she could not stop wondering what his presence would do to defend itself against a threat or an intrusion.

At least Miles was outside the building awaiting her signal. She’d given him the pass code to the front door and directions on how to find the flat once he was inside. If she felt threatened she would summon him immediately. He’d tried to stop her coming here tonight, but this arrangement was his compromise.

And then Seth stopped walking. Turned to her quickly. His face a shock of nerves, his hands clenched. ‘Here we are,’ he whispered, his voice weakened either by the climb or by the prospect of trespassing.

She looked over Seth’s shoulder at the door marked with the number 16, fixed in brass on the teak. This is where Hessen had lived and worked. Where he had tried to seal himself off from scrutiny and interference within the city he drew his inspiration from. The place in which he suffered and where he nearly revised the direction of modern art. But a place where he also achieved the most extraordinary contact with an unseen world. And where his own face was mutilated before he was put away by her flesh and blood, who had led her here in a strange, meandering confession in a series of handwritten journals. But this was now a place that needed to be sealed by more than a locked front door. Whatever still allowed Hessen access needed to be removed and destroyed, and more thoroughly than the last attempt in 1949. Exactly how this was going to be achieved she wasn’t at all sure. But searching the apartment, she swore to herself, was at least a start.

‘You ready?’ Seth whispered.

She nodded.

‘Let me go in first. You wait here. Until I call you.’

‘Sure,’ she thought she said, but her voice was so faint now it probably sank through the warm air and vanished around her knees.

Carefully, Seth unlocked the door.

The moment the front door closed behind Seth, Apryl flipped open her cell phone and hissed into it. ‘It’s me. Yes, yes, I’m fine. I’m outside the flat now. He’s gone inside. I’m going to leave the phone on and hold it in my hand so you can hear everything. OK, I will. It’ll be fine.’

Thirty-nine

Leaving the catch on, Seth pulled the door shut behind him.

The lights were on in the hallway. Stretching away like a red funnel the passage looked fleshy, with clots of shadow pooling on the floor in the spaces between the lamps. And the place was silent. Every painting was covered in muslin as it had been the last time he visited here, accompanied. Pushing the recollection away he walked down the blood-lit hall to the mirrored room, with his skin acutely aware of how the air swelled about him, as if some restless energy rolled and thickened about these rooms, even when he was not here.

And things seemed to be quiet tonight in the mirrored room. From the other side of the door he heard no one cry out from the ceiling in a far-off rushing of air. There was no bumping or crawling or dragging of something out of sight. Nothing. Just the still, cold air in which the greatest art man had ever known hung behind its coverings.

He paused a moment. Slowed down the spinning in his head. Steeled himself against what he might see, against what might be shared with him tonight, and against thoughts of what would become of Apryl, sweet Apryl. In there, in that room. She was the last one. The boy had said so. He’d learn to live with himself later. If that Miles guy raised the alarm, then so what? What could he or anyone prove? He’d say she forced him to show her that apartment because she was obsessed with some conspiracy about a dead painter. He just had to hold his nerve and keep that door shut until they took what they wanted. But would she still be breathing afterwards, like old Mrs Shafer? She’d have to be. What the fuck could he do with a dead girl? Where was the boy? He had to speak to the boy before he put Apryl inside.

He swallowed and opened the door, looked into the cold, unlit room. Nothing but the bare wooden floor, the covered picture frames and the empty mirrors. His body shuddered with relief. Maybe, just maybe nothing was going to happen tonight. You never knew, he told himself, when you had dealings with such things.

Reaching inside the door, he felt the bump of the light switch and flicked it down to flood the space with faint reddish light. Some unseen curator had concealed the paintings again, but left the four large mirrors that faced each other uncovered, their silvery corridors reflecting each other and tunnelling away to the furthest reaches of light and sight. Carefully, he walked into the middle of the room, watching the mirrors for movement. For the one who wanted to meet Apryl.

But saw only himself.

Seth then steeled himself against the very idea of what would shriek and twist and unravel between the borders of the gilt frames before his eyes tonight. It had been prepared. Was he to unveil them? Would that kick things off then, and get it all going round and round?

Time to collect his guest.

But as he turned to face the door, a sudden dart of movement pulled his eyes to the mirror on his right, above the empty fireplace. When he turned to look all he saw in the glass was a reflection of his own shabby visage again – shoulders hunched, face tense and pale.

It was nothing. Just his imagination.

But then again, at the periphery of his vision, to his left, he detected a quick but distant movement inside another mirror. He turned quickly to look into the glass. And saw nothing again save his own dark eyes reflected back at him.

It struck him that the mirrors were connected at the side of each reflection. As if all four faced each other to offer some means of passage for whatever flitted within them. Before serving as an exit for whatever was taken back inside.

Anticipating a circular movement, he looked quickly to the next mirror, at the head of the rectangular room. And saw a pale shape flap across the bottom of the silvery square, halfway down the tunnel of reflection, but closer to the surface of the glass than before. With a smear of red this time, a momentary blossom of scarlet near the floor of the mirror, as if a coloured face atop a stooped body was turned inward, towards the room where he now stood alone.

He was too afraid to turn and see how close it came to the skin of glass in the next mirror, the one behind him. The skin on his neck goosed from an unwelcome static.

He moved his eyes down and to the right, but couldn’t bear to turn his head completely. Instead, he stared at the wooden floor at his feet. And listened.

The lights hummed. There was no other sound. Or maybe there was. In the distance. Maybe it was the far-off traffic from the world beyond the curtains, windows and walls. Or the swish of an approaching storm, draping its hem across the roofs and through the stony ravines of street and lane as it came towards Barrington House.

No. It wasn’t moving forward, it was moving down and from a great distance that lessened by the second.

A moment of dizzying panic filled every molecule within his body, before he suddenly broke from a stunned paralysis and made for the door. But the hooded boy stood before him, in the open doorway of the room. Hands in pockets, face drawn back into the volume of dark hood, he said, They’s coming for the tart, Seth. They want to show her the next bit. He didn’t get the aunty-bitch, but he’ll have the tart, mate. You can be sure of that, like.’

The enormity of what the delinquent was suggesting stopped his breath. Seth shook his head. His nervous smile made him feel idiotic. ‘No. I don’t want to.’ He took another step towards the boy.

The hood shook. ‘Nah-ah. You’s gonna get her in here fast like. It don’t stay open for long. I told you before. You’s got to be quick, like. Get the tart in here and shut that fuckin’ door behind you. You know how it’s done, mate. You’s gettin’ good at it. So don’t go gettin’ all soft in the ’ead, like. She’s just using you, mate. Finks you is a cunt, like. She’s tryin’ to fuck it up for us. So she’s gonna disappear. Summat special tonight, Seth. She’s goin’ right off the edge. Down there wiv him, our mate.’

‘But what do I do with the body? I can’t just put her in a bed and walk away. There’s a guy. He knows she’s here.’

The boy closed the door of the mirrored room with them both inside it. Looked up. ‘Won’t be no body, mate. I told ya, like. Gonna be nuffin left of that tart once he’s had his way. She’s going off the edge, like he did. All them years ago. Won’t be fuck all left, innit.’

‘But—’

‘He’s comin’! It’s all going off, mate.’ The voice was tight with childish glee. The little arms left the pockets and a row of fingertips all melted together were displayed.

Above them, the light flickered. Then suddenly dimmed. It was like a cloud moving over the sun. Shadow tinted the room, then darkened the very air before his eyes. And there was a voice from beyond the room, but too far away to be a part of this place. A voice that called his name: ‘Seth? Seth? You’re freaking me out now. Where are you?’

It was Apryl. ‘Apryl, no!’ he cried out. ‘Don’t come in. Stop!’

‘You’s shut your gob!’ The boy shouted at him, then raised stubby arms as if to start a fight with him.

Then the temperature suddenly collapsed to a cold he could feel like frosted pins inside his bones. What was left of the room – the walls and floor and skirting board, the hooded boy, the very substance of the solid and visible – melted into darkness so quickly he could no longer see the wood beneath his feet.

Instinct begged him to flee. To rush quickly for the direction of the door and to leave the building, with Apryl in tow. But he knew he had no choice. He had been so limited in this city ever since he’d arrived, and choice was no longer an asset he could command. Had it ever been?

And this meeting was inevitable anyway. Whatever presence had been inhabiting his dreams and watching him from afar, and opening his eyes to the world, would eventually present itself. He’d always suspected as much.

He took two faltering steps towards where his memory told him the door was, every muscle in his body shaking from the icy temperature and from the sudden sweep of cries that came down from above, circling, helpless, and torn about by the cold turbulence.

From behind him something issued a sigh. It filled the cold room with a rasp that seemed to have escaped from lungs greater than anything that could possibly be housed inside a man’s chest. The sound continued in one long exhalation, dispersing like a frosted gas to the four corners of the room, rolling across the floor to swallow the last traces of definition before him.

There was no sign of his hooded companion. No trace of him now. Or of warmth, or of any evidence that the world existed or had ever done.

And down came the rest of them. From above, in a multitude of distant cries and screams. Moving so fast towards him, he wanted to be sick with terror on the floor he couldn’t see.

He took several stumbling steps on legs he could barely feel, and was sure his heart would stop and his blood would freeze, then shatter, if anything touched him in here, in the darkness.

Behind him, so close now, and competing with the maelstrom from above that he dared not look into for fear of seeing its descent, he heard the sound of footsteps upon a hard floor.

The tone of the continuous sigh that gushed and filled this blind place rose in a note of expectation. Or excitement. Within the shroud of his fear, he didn’t know. Couldn’t possibly think clearly. Didn’t know much at all any more – which way he was facing, if his feet were still on the floor, whether his body was tilting back, down and down and down to the place where a floor should have been. Or why in a place of no north or south, no ground or sky, he could still see so far ahead of himself. Or maybe it was an inch from the end of his nose. But he could just make out something red that moved as he blinked and tried to focus. And it only became clear for splinters of seconds in which he glimpsed what appeared to be a red cloth bound about a small head. With sharp features pressing hard against the taut scarlet fabric. And out of what could have been an open mouth came the sigh.

Seth covered his eyes when the cold burnt the flesh of his face.