TWENTY-NINE

‘Apryl, please. Just take it easy. For your own sake. You’re starting to worry me. I mean, really worry me.’ Miles leant over his desk, his fingers wound tightly together, trying to look into Apryl’s wild and excitable eyes and to still them because they were flicking about and blinking as fast as the thoughts and ideas were streaming into her head.

‘I’m starting to worry myself. Jesus.’ She stood up again from the chair on the other side of Miles’s desk. Could not keep still, and walked across his office to the door. Then stopped, and clasped both hands on either side of her cheeks. ‘I have to, Miles. I have to do something. I can’t walk away from this. People are dying. Lillian tried to help them, but they wouldn’t listen.’

‘Have you any idea, any idea at all how preposterous this all is? I mean, you are suggesting that Hessen is still in that building in some . . . some . . . I don’t know, altered state and murdering those who wronged him back in the forties, one by one. Listen to yourself, woman. It’s nuts.’

Apryl was deep in thought and did nothing but shrug Miles off. She removed her hands from her cheeks and slapped them against her tight-skirted hips. ‘I need to go in there at night. That’s when it all happens. When people are in danger. And someone is helping him. That’s what Mr Shafer said. Before he was killed. Murdered. I’m sure of it now. Mrs Roth, then him. And I’m responsible.’ She turned to Miles, her eyes moistening with tears. ‘Don’t you see? I made them talk to me and now they’re dead.’

Miles sunk his head into his hands and slowly drew his long fingers down his face. ‘I cannot believe I am hearing any of this come out of your lovely mouth. You know, a gay friend of mine claims that all women are latently mad, and by degrees the lunacy gradually surfaces. Right now, you are a testament to his insight.’

Apryl sat down and sniffed, then dabbed her eyes with a tissue. ‘I’m not going to cry . . .’ By the time she was attempting to pronounce the last word a big bubble popped in her throat and she was crying. ‘Fucking eyeliner’s going to go everywhere,’ she said, sniffing again.

Miles came around the desk to her. ‘Hey. Hey. Go easy on yourself. You are putting yourself under a lot of strain. Just sell that bloody flat and put all of this behind you. Come on.’

She moved away from his embrace and shook her head. ‘I can’t. I just keep thinking of Lillian. All those years, Miles. On her own. That terrible . . . thing, frightening her. Night after night. That poor old lady. Who lost the love of her life. And then suffered for so long without him. And . . . I know what it’s like. Hessen, I mean . . . I saw him too.’

‘What?’

‘You’re not someone I can tell things like that to.’

‘Hey. Now that’s not fair.’

‘You’re not. But I did. It . . . he was in the mirror I brought up from the basement. And in the painting of Lillian and Reggie. And in other places. Whenever I’m in that building, Hessen is watching me. Trying to scare me away, I think. Because I’m getting closer to him. He follows me about, like he did the others, who just hid and waited for the end. Lillian never did. That brave, brave woman tried to escape every day for fifty years. Every day, Miles. After he killed her husband. Drove him out that fucking window.’ Out of the corner of her eye, she caught the look of disbelief and pity on Miles’s face. ‘You’ve never seen him, Miles. And be glad you never have.’ She said this with such force she surprised herself, and Miles leant back, away from her.

‘Before I even met Betty Roth and Tom Shafer, I’d already seen the same thing. In mirrors, paintings. Hessen. The residents didn’t suggest it to me. I saw it independently. Because when I arrived he’d become more active again. Because someone is helping him. That’s what Tom Shafer said. Shafer was as sane as you and me. He said someone in that building is helping Hessen now. To kill, Miles. To kill those terrified old people. Hessen’s been able to keep Lillian and the others all stuck there, and has tormented them with his population of the Vortex, or whatever the fuck he brought into that building, but he hasn’t been able to kill them. Not until now. Because now someone in that building, maybe someone who works there, is doing his bidding. Maybe all of them. Piotr, Jorge, Stephen. This morning, when Stephen told me about the Shafers, I pressed him about the coincidence of three elderly residents dying like this. Three people who knew Hessen. Tried to talk to him about what Betty Roth and Tom Shafer had insinuated about Hessen still being in the building. And he looked really uncomfortable. Cagey, you know? He’s avoided me ever since. And there’s another guy too I haven’t met. Who only works the night shifts. Or who knows? Maybe it’s a resident behind all this. They could all be in on it.’

‘Then go to the police.’

‘Don’t be fucking ridiculous.’

‘Because that is how your story will sound. Because it is fucking ridiculous. It’s wild and unsubstantiated. You can’t just go around accusing people of murder.’

Apryl turned to him, her face tight and fierce. Miles raised one hand, palm outward, in an appeal for silence. ‘Now hang on. Let me finish. Mrs Roth and this Shafer chap were in their nineties. Their nineties, Apryl. That is a fact. People in their nineties can keel over at any moment. That is also a fact. Your great-aunt had been ill for a long time, and she was in her eighties. There was no evidence of foul play in any one of these deaths. That is a fact. Heart failure, strokes, all natural causes. I’ve no doubt at all that they knew Hessen. Or that his antisocial behaviour and his paintings, which they destroyed I might add, affected them profoundly. They never forgot him or his work. And I’m also beginning to believe they may have killed him and burned the evidence. But as they got older, their minds . . . well, their memories became less effective. And now the trauma of the original crime and its lingering influence have warped into this . . . this ghost story.’

Apryl sat quietly and stared at the floor. ‘But why didn’t they ever leave Barrington House? Explain that.’

Miles shrugged. ‘I really don’t know. The rich often huddle together in a castle-keep mentality. Look at all of these gated communities springing up. Safety in numbers.’

‘That’s bullshit. None of them have gone more than a block from the building in fifty years. Fifty years, Miles.’

For a moment Miles looked at his lap in silence, his eyes half shut, his lips pursed. Then he said, ‘OK, OK. Let’s look at this from another perspective then. From within your current point of view. And I am only speaking hypothetically here. By no way is this an endorsement of your theory—’

Apryl waved a hand in the air with frustration. ‘Yes. Yes. Just tell me.’

‘Well let’s just say, for argument’s sake, that Hessen did summon something into Barrington House. Something demoniac. From one of those rituals he learned from Crowley. And that the Vortex exists somewhere in that building. If this is truly the case, then what in hell are you going to be able to do about it?’

She had no idea. None at all. But she was going back to Barrington House. To stake it out. To harass Stephen, the rest of the staff, whoever she could suspect of an involvement. And she was going to get proof . . . somehow. She’d even break into apartment sixteen if she had to, to find out what the hell was still inside that place. There had to be something, inside there, allowing Hessen’s presence to remain. Something that her great-uncle and his friends overlooked so long ago. Betty had been hearing Hessen at night in there, right up until she died. She said it had become worse all over again. The noises, the voices. It was all coming out of there, that apartment. Where it began, so long ago.

Something was going down inside that place. Something very wrong that she had found impossible to accept, no matter how hard she thought about it. Until now. Until Betty and Tom died. That was no coincidence. So soon after Lillian. People were dying who had known things about Felix Hessen. Who had made him and his art disappear. And maybe there were others, still inside that dreadful building. Trapped. People in grave danger. Imprisoned and stalked and tormented like Lillian and her circle from way back, until the time was right to take revenge, if that’s what it was; something coming back from the dead to settle a score. And she couldn’t just leave them in such a situation. That crazy bastard had killed her great-aunt and uncle, her own flesh and blood. And maybe even now, after death, they were still trapped inside the building, like Hessen. Didn’t Lillian suggest as much? She couldn’t leave her there, in limbo, for ever. Inside those terrible places with those hideous things he painted.

But as she walked away from Miles’s office at the Tate, with the wind gusting and darkness coming down over every building and turning the stone a darker grey, she felt herself suddenly seize up inside, in a paralysis of fear, at the very thought of setting foot inside Barrington House again, at night. Could I, she asked herself, as she steadied her body against a bus stop with one hand, could I get trapped inside there too?

THIRTY

And the next night Seth waited for the call, all the time unable to stop shivering in the warm reception area. Anticipating the moment the solemn hooded figure would appear before his desk, to instruct him on who was next. Who he was to escort not merely to their death, but to something infinitely worse that came after.

But would the boy come for him first? Or would it be the police, wishing to speak to the porter on duty when two of the most senior residents had died within a week of each other?

It had been just over two hours since Stephen left him alone. The head porter had been waiting for Seth to come in, and had told him there was ‘some more terrible, terrible news’. Mr Shafer had died in the night and his wife had suffered some kind of breakdown. ‘Looked like a stroke to me. Poor thing must have lost the plot when she realized her husband was dead. They were very close, you know. They had their moments. We all know that. But they were inseparable.’

And Stephen had nearly called him at the Green Man this time, to ask how he’d missed finding Mrs Shafer while he was on patrol in the night. Mrs Benedetti from flat five had discovered Mrs Shafer on the first-floor landing the following morning just before six, looking as if she had been slowly making her way down to the ground floor all through the night. She was found, still dressed in her nightgown, on her hands and knees, catatonic with shock and cowering in front of the mirror on that landing, as if she was looking at something above her. But then Stephen had assumed by the state of Mrs Shafer that her husband must have died after Seth’s last patrol at two and that she’d lost the presence of mind to raise the alarm.

‘Terrified. Absolutely witless,’ Mrs Benedetti had told the front desk before Piotr went up to investigate. An ambulance was then called and Stephen ventured up to the Shafers’ apartment to find the front door open. Inside the main bedroom he found Mr Shafer, still tucked up where Seth had left him. ‘His face, Seth. Must have been very bad at the end for him. Perhaps that’s what set her off.’

‘Must have been,’ Seth had muttered, his entire body so tense he expected his mind to snap like a corroded rubber band stretched too far.

‘And you know what they say, Seth. Death comes in threes. Makes you wonder who’s next, eh?’ Stephen had said, trying to add levity to a conversation that made Seth so deeply uncomfortable he’d forgotten to breathe. ‘Or was Lillian the first? Which would make Shafer number three. Who knows? Still, let’s keep our chins up, eh?’ he added, with a smile that seemed to be battling with his casual solemnity.

Had he got away with it? Too early to tell. But he would be caught soon enough. Surely. Because he sensed his work here was unfinished; and knew that another death during his shift would certainly put him under suspicion. There had been no sign that he would be released from the tasks set him by the presence upstairs. From his involvement in it all, to procure revenge, because that was what this was: a murderous vengeance, and there was no refusing a call when it came. He wondered who was left; who else had wronged that enduring genius in apartment sixteen. He just had to sit here and await guidance.

But what would become of him when his grisly work was finally done? He wondered this with a tightening of the gut, followed by a wave of anxiety so acute it made his heart hammer and his head feel dizzy.

Despite his fearful anticipation of the malevolent presence that required so much of him, his hands seemed to automatically resume their work with charcoal and paper. As if they had a story to tell, and needed to record the further progression of this nightmare there was no waking from, his scratching and smudging and rubbing on a sketch pad were soon audible in reception.

Unaware of the passing of the early evening, and only mildly conscious of the pain in his bladder that demanded he urinate, Seth withdrew inside himself to where the world had been reshaped. For once he wasn’t disturbed by the men from Claridge’s delivering Mrs Roth’s supper, or by the calls from Glock for cabs, or by the shuffling nuisance of Mrs Shafer. He was permitted to fill the hours and the pages with what only he and the presence in apartment sixteen could see of the world.

It wasn’t the hooded boy who finally interrupted his frantic work just after the security clock clicked nine; it was the appearance of an attractive young woman standing in front of the reception desk of Barrington House.

She was pretty. Verging on beautiful. Unchanged. Unlike the creatures with the lumpy grey complexions hidden by makeup whom he saw on his journey to and from the building, or glimpsed on his rare forages for food in Hackney. This one was slender and well-groomed, and walked with grace. Like something off the silver screen; a vision from the past.

He’d never met her before, but had seen her captured on the security monitors coming in through the back door of the east block. An American girl. The niece or something of crazy old Lillian who snuffed it in a black cab. The girl Piotr lusted after, always rolling his eyes whenever he mentioned her. And Seth could see why.

So chic in a black leather jacket and that tight pencil skirt and high heels, her hair styled like a film star from the forties, with her big dark eyes flicking up to the camera as she came in through the rear doors, either alone or with that guy with the half-smile, like he knew something about you he kept to himself for fear of embarrassing you.

But tonight she came through the main entrance of the west wing alone and into reception to speak to him. Immediately, his eyes dropped to the flash of the new leather of her boots, and to the smoky gauze of dark nylon clinging to her shapely knees. Then his stare roamed up across her tight curves to her pale throat and pretty turned-up nose. She smelled so good.

His body warmed with desire. A feeling so alien and incongruous its sudden re-emergence made him dizzy. Glock’s escorts used to make him feel the same way when their painted and scented loveliness had been summoned to service the rotund body of the director. He’d forgotten a woman’s body could offer any pleasure.

Seth stood up, both to receive her as he had been taught to greet all residents and visitors, and also to continue his admiration of her figure before it was concealed against the front of his desk.

Under that smile she was nervous. ‘Hello,’ she said, with a beautiful painted mouth and perfect white teeth. He felt his idea of himself immediately shrink and hunch into something unkempt and unwashed. His uniform was a creased disgrace. His shirt unclean, the collar brown and rubbery against his skin. He could not recall the last time he had bathed or shaved. Or cared about such things.

‘Good evening, miss. How can I help?’

THIRTY-ONE

It had been a while since anyone had called her ‘miss’ here. Apryl’s smile changed into something not so tight.

Despite the intense stare and the look of harried surprise on his pale face, this one was younger and less sure of himself than the others. She hadn’t seen him before, but she made him nervous; he kept clearing his throat and was unable to hold her stare for long. She’d seen this look many times before, in the faces of men infatuated with her.

‘I’m sorry to bother you so late. I’m not staying here any more, but I’ve been coming back in the day to show real-estate people an apartment. And when I was leaving the building this morning I saw an ambulance out front. So I just wanted to check in and make sure it was nothing serious. What happened to Mrs Roth made me a bit jumpy.’ She would have continued to keep up the charade, but the sudden clench of anxiety on the porter’s face stalled her. ‘Was it serious?’

The porter cleared his throat. ‘Yes. Someone died.’

Someone else, she wanted to say. ‘I am sorry. Who . . . was it sudden?’

He cleared his throat. ‘He was quite old. Mr Shafer hadn’t been well for a long time.’

‘Oh, my God. The ambulance? Was that him? I mean how . . . When did it happen? I was only just there with him . . .’

‘Would you like to sit down, miss?’ He motioned for her to sit in one of the cane chairs arranged before the garden windows. ‘Can I get you something?’

‘No. Thank you. I’m just . . . a bit shaken. After what happened . . . to Mrs Roth. But what about his wife? Mrs Shafer? Is she all right?’

‘Not really. No. She’s taken it very badly and is in hospital.’

Apryl shook her head. ‘I’m so sorry. Look at me here, being so selfish. It must be hard for you. I know how close you guys get to the residents. Stephen said you become part of the family. And to lose two of your people so quickly. I am sorry.’

When she said that the expression in his quick eyes changed again and she thought she detected embarrassment, even guilt, as he still failed to look her in the eye. Painfully shy too, and possibly disappointed in life. To be young and working night shifts in a building like this, it had to be tough.

Slowly, she crossed her legs, and didn’t hurry to correct her hemline, which slithered along her sleek thigh. ‘Please, why don’t you sit down? Tell me what happened. Maybe it will help to talk about it. And I haven’t even introduced myself properly. I’m Apryl. Lillian’s great-niece. Lillian Archer . . . who also passed away recently.’

He cleared his throat. His eyes flicked from her face to her legs, back to her face, to the floor. ‘Seth.’ He sat in the chair opposite her. Perched on the end and rearranged his hands and feet several times. ‘I believe it was very quick. For Mr Shafer. Heart attack they say. I wasn’t here when they found him. I work night shifts. But I was told this evening when I came in. You see, miss—’

‘Apryl, please. You can call me Apryl.’

‘Apryl. Many of the residents here are quite elderly. It’s a terrible loss, of course, but it happens quite often. I mean, it’s not unusual.’

She nodded. ‘So I hear. But isn’t it so strange that three people should die in such a short time? I mean, they all knew each other, from way back. Did you know that?’

He looked up from his shoes quickly, but said nothing.

Apryl nodded. ‘My great-aunt wrote all about it. And Mrs Roth told me a few things too. And Mr Shafer. Right before they died. You know, they all thought they were in danger here.’

Seth’s face was very pale now and one of his hands started to twitch. He tucked it under his thigh. ‘Were you . . .’ He paused and cleared his throat. ‘Were you and Mrs Roth close?’

‘She was helping me with some research about my great-aunt. And this building. They both lived here for a long time.’ Apryl paused, noticing how alert Seth had become.

‘Research?’ he said quickly, then swallowed and leant forward as if afraid he might fail to hear everything she said.

‘Yes. Because so few people seem to be aware that an artist lived at Barrington House.’

‘Mmm,’ he said, and his face was so drained and twitchy it was becoming uncomfortable to look at.

‘After the Second World War. They all knew him. Mrs Roth, my great-aunt, the Shafers. He disappeared, you know. Did you know that?’ Apryl watched Seth’s face closely so no flicker of recognition could escape her scrutiny.

‘No,’ he blurted out. Then gathered himself to control his voice. ‘What was his name? The painter? I studied fine art.’

Odd how he assumed the artist was male and a painter. His body and his quick anxious eyes were betraying him. He knew something. He spent all night here; could hear and see and come across all kinds of things. She shivered at the thought of what might be roaming these corridors at night. What could come out of that empty but still active place. A place Mrs Roth had bought in order to keep it silent; as though she had purchased the scene of a crime. Stephen had told her she’d bought it and kept it empty for fifty years. Piotr and Jorge had just blinked with incomprehension or mystification when she’d pressed them earlier about Betty Roth and the Shafers. But Stephen had stiffened. And now Seth was twitching.

‘Felix Hessen.’ She watched Seth’s face closely.

He looked into the middle distance and his eyes narrowed as if struggling to recall the name. ‘It sounds familiar. But not a painter I recognize.’

‘Only his sketches survived. And he fell out of favour with the establishment because of his politics. He was a fascist. Was into all kinds of weird things. Like the occult. Used to draw corpses and stuff. Really freaky. Then he came to live here and disappeared. Just vanished from out of this building. Did you not know?’

Seth stood up quickly. He looked like he was going to throw up. He rubbed at his mouth and closed his eyes, then rushed across to his desk. Snatched up a pen and paper. ‘Felix Hessen, you say.’ His voice was a whisper. ‘Sounds German.’

‘Austrian-Swiss.’

‘This is incredible,’ he said to himself, and scratched down the name on a notepad.

His teeth were terribly stained. Brownish. She had no idea what this young man had been through, but the aspect of neglect and melancholy and tension about him suggested he carried a serious burden, like depression. Yeah, maybe there was a touch of the bipolar about him. She recognized the manic signs from what she’d seen in her own mother and in her roommate, Tony, back home.

‘So why here?’ She couldn’t resist the question.

Seth had become preoccupied again, and was staring down the hall as if she was no longer there. ‘Sorry, what?’

‘Why do you work here?’

He suddenly flushed. ‘I . . . Well. . . Well I’m an artist too.’

Apryl sat stunned for several seconds. ‘Then why would a painter hang out here all night? I thought you guys needed natural light and stuff to work by.’

He looked embarrassed. It was another question that seemed to cause him discomfort. ‘Well, I only draw here. Nothing really. Just sketches. Now and again. Ideas. And I thought this would be the ideal job. You know, some peace and quiet. The solitude of night. That’s why they wanted an artist – thought it would suit one.’

‘They?’

‘The building. The management. The ad I saw said the job was ideal for an art student. But then . . . but then it never quite worked out that way. And yet . . .’ He seemed distracted again, anxious and uncomfortable.

Behind the desk on his leather chair, she saw a large white pad and a pencil box. She stood up and moved towards the desk. ‘Is that some of your work?’ When she entered she must have disturbed him. He had been drawing, though she still couldn’t see what. Not clearly from this angle. Leaning forward, she screwed up her eyes and angled her head to one side to get a better look.

Detecting her interest in his sketches, he snatched up the pad and concealed the drawings against his chest, leaving her with only the memory of what she had glimpsed. Of what had momentarily stunned her.

Seth was breathing fast now and beginning to perspire. She could see his forehead glistening.

‘Please. Let me see. I want to see that. Did you do it?’ She couldn’t help herself. Couldn’t restrain her interest, her desperation even, in seeing that sketch.

She reached out for the pad. ‘Go on, please. Let me see.’

He lowered the pad from where he clutched it to his chest. ‘I’m sorry. But . . . Well, my work is not very pleasant . . . I mean, it’s not finished . . . No good. I’d be glad to show you when I’m done.’

And then he looked to his left and swallowed hard, like he’d suddenly seen something unpleasant, even threatening. She followed the direction of his stare, but saw only a wall and an indoor plant with long waxy fronds drooping to the immaculate carpet.

‘Go on, Seth. Show the pretty lady. You’s pictures are good, mate. I told you, didn’t I?’

The terrible reek of damp ashes, spent incendiary chemicals and melted fabric had preceded the arrival of the watching child a fraction of a second before he appeared. But the advance warning did nothing to ease the shock of his appearance. Seth stared at the hooded thing with a stronger aversion than ever before. Of late its presence was an omen for imminent death. He shook his head.

‘You’s shouldn’t be shy, mate. Go on, show the tart. She’ll love ’em. I told yous he was bringing you summat sweet, like. And she’s been sticking her beak everywhere, mate. Looking for ’em. So go on, give the slit a fright.’ The kid giggled and the hood shook in a way Seth found loathsome. ‘Her aunty-bitch was just the same. And she saw more than she bargained for.’

Seth swallowed again, cleared his throat and shook his head, now aware of Apryl watching him intently.

‘Go on, Seth.’ The boy’s voice dropped to something low and mean and uncompromising. ‘Fuckin’ do as you is told, mate.’

Apryl softened her face into a smile and looked straight into his eyes. ‘Seth. What I just saw was . . . good. Please, let me see.’

He looked away from the plant that he seemed to have been having some kind of unhinged communication with, and peered down at what he had drawn. Winced, hesitated, then passed the pad to Apryl. As soon as her painted nails touched the paper, he shoved his hands deep inside his pockets and looked at his shoes, like a bashful and diffident child.

Apryl stood back from the desk and stared into the smear of shading, lines, smudges and scratches, elements that together formed a hunched, faceless and yet tormented parody of an old man, or something composed of sticks and made to look vaguely more human than animal, imprisoned inside some sort of transparent cube or rectangle. Quickly, she flipped over the page.

Seth said something in objection, but she didn’t hear him clearly because she was so engrossed as she stared at a bird-like effigy, clutched in the hands of something implausibly thin. And to the next page she turned, and the next and the next, unaware and uncaring about how fast her heart beat, how quickly her chest rose and fell as if in shock as she observed these dreadful suggestions of torment and incapacitation and despair, as she saw how haunted the eyes and slack the mouths of these things in the porter’s pictures were, and realized how they filled her head and rendered her unable to think or feel anything besides what they demanded of her. When she reached the final sketch she forced herself to look up, to regain her presence of mind. The similarity between the styles was indisputable. They could actually be forgeries of Hessen’s work. ‘I don’t understand why you would say you were unfamiliar with Hessen.’

He looked hurt at the tone of accusation in her voice.

‘Because these look just like Hessen’s sketches. You must have seen his work.’

His eyes flicked from left to right as if searching for a place where he could hide. He had lied. Maybe he’d learned from Mrs Roth or one of the other residents about Hessen, then researched him and begun to replicate the style so convincingly, it was as if . . . as if Hessen himself had drawn them, or at least tutored his hand.

‘Seth, I’m sorry. But I’m at something of a loss here. These could have been drawn by Felix Hessen. I’m no expert on art. But these are so like his pictures. Pictures I’ve spent a lot of time looking at. The ones that survived.’

‘I . . . I don’t know the name. Maybe I saw something once . . .’

He was frightened. Really scared of what she was saying. If she wasn’t careful she’d lose him. ‘Please understand, Seth, why I’m saying this. I find an artist working in this building as a security guard who has produced what look like original Hessen drawings. But you claim you know nothing of him. I don’t know what to say. I mean, how could you not know?’

Seth started to speak. Then stopped. He tried again, but held back.

‘What is it? Tell me. You were going to say something.’

He shook his head. ‘I have seen something.’ He glanced at her then looked away. ‘But I didn’t know it was this Hessen who painted it. I mean, I don’t always check. You know. When I see something I like.’

He was lying again. Jabbering to cover himself and unable to look her in the eye.

‘Where, Seth? Where did you see it? Did you see it here?’

When she said that his fringe shrank back from his forehead. He swallowed but was unable to speak and was showing too much of his eyes. It was the only answer she required.

Her thoughts became frantic. Some of Hessen’s work had survived inside Barrington House. Tom Shafer said they destroyed it all: he and Arthur Roth and her great-uncle Reginald took ‘that crap’ down from the walls and burned it in a basement furnace. And maybe the artist along with it. But not everything went up in smoke.

The story Shafer concocted about Hessen disappearing had frightened her, but her sense of reason had still clamoured that it couldn’t possibly have been true, as if Hessen were some kind of illusionist with a mangled face who could vanish from inside a locked room full of mirrors and ritualistic markings. She had kept telling herself it was bullshit. All day. That his crazy wife had locked the truth down inside him a long time ago. Same with Mrs Roth. Who also tried to confess to something too improbable and terrible to actually say out loud. Something like murder – a murder they were all complicit in.

But as soon as she was inside Barrington House she believed it. She knew, instinctively, that no one – not Lillian nor Betty Roth nor Tom Shafer – had been lying. Stephen had though. And so was Seth now. She could tell. They were both lying to her, covering something up. She could barely breathe.

Only cranks like the Friends of Felix Hessen would ever believe such a thing. But here was Seth, right here in Barrington House, nervous, stuttering, anxious Seth, right underneath the place where so much had been done and now refused to be forgotten. ‘They’re still here, aren’t they? His paintings.’

His hands were shaking and one foot tapped quickly against the floor.

Apryl tried to calm him with a smile. He was freaking out. Though he appeared frightened and vulnerable and not at all threatening, she wondered if he was dangerous. And maybe unstable enough to confess what he knew.

‘I’d like to see more. More of your work. Like this. I mean it. And the work that inspired it. What you saw. In here. I won’t tell a soul. We can keep this between us. And then I’ll share something with you. You see, I know about Felix Hessen. About . . . what he left behind. A legacy. Here. At Barrington House. That no one else knows.’

Seth didn’t speak. It was as if he couldn’t. He just kept swallowing.

She placed the sketch pad upon the desk. ‘We need to talk, Seth. Not here . . .’ She looked about herself nervously. ‘Tomorrow. Can we do that?’

‘I don’t know.’

Reaching out, she touched his hand. ‘I’m not trying to get you in a bind here, Seth. We’ll have a nice dinner. And just talk. It seems like fate. For us to meet like this. When I came here tonight I never expected this. But it’s a connection.’

He began to wet his lips. He wanted to speak but couldn’t regain his voice.

‘Let me give you my number,’ she said. She took the pad from behind the desk and wrote the number of her cell phone down on the top sheet.

THIRTY-TWO

Sitting alone in a window seat of the theatre bar, which was empty at this early hour of the afternoon after the lunchtime crowd had thinned and before the workers rushed in to anaesthetize the day, Seth shifted about in his chair and anxiously scanned Upper Street for her approach.

After a long bath, his first in weeks, and dressing in the cleanest clothes he could find, Seth had briefly looked about the walls in his room. And was satisfied Apryl would be astounded. Particularly when he told her it was just part of a much greater project.

He tidied the floor space too, so that she would be able to walk about and see his work from different angles. Three walls were covered now. And neither the grainy daylight nor the electric light from the unshaded bulb could relieve the darkness in them, or how it crept across the floor and the stained ceiling. Even the corners and right angles where the walls met were lost unless you looked hard to see the joins.

But out of the sheen of flat lightlessness came the figures. Out of a depth that would mystify an audience. How had he created it, she would ask. How was it possible to suggest such a distance? And to convey the sense of the terrible cold that gripped you while staring into it? He had no idea.

Using the small stepladder from the kitchen, he’d increased the height of the piece to improve the sense of the characters being suspended in nothingness. Though he wasn’t sure, either, how he’d then created the effect of movement in his subjects. Because there was motion in the whole piece. The endless cold darkness upon which their torments were repeated to infinity now seemed to seethe as if with strange currents.

Sometimes when his work caught him unawares, he was tempted to believe they were no longer walls at all, but a long space opening to another place, one so vast and deep you would never find the end. And the images of the figures all drawn at various angles, who were rising to the surface as if attracted by the light in his room, still gave him a start whenever he came in. Even if he was merely returning from the toilet and had been away for a few minutes, he would find himself staring in mute shock at what he had done, at what was up there now.

It was impossible to become familiar with them, with all of those things holding themselves, or being held against their will, his lines capturing the tension and resistance in the suggestions of the limbs, or the perfect nuance of an eye open in terror, or the curl of a lip after a despairing scream.

All covered over, redone and then perfected until the best angle and posture had been achieved for each of them. Until the teeth chattered idiotically, and the mouths stretched to issue cries you thought you could hear, and the eyes were red with a pain that made your nerve endings spark.

Because of Apryl, his efforts had redoubled that morning. His hands had been more careful in the way they had swept and cut and reworked the dark red and black swathes from which the twisted figures were born wet and howling. It was as if he had something to prove now, as if an exhibition was being prepared for a sympathetic audience. If his sketches affected her, she would be in awe of his painting.

She was not in danger. Couldn’t be. That hooded kid and their friend in apartment sixteen couldn’t have anything against her. She’d only been in the building five minutes. And there was no need to dwell on Roth and the Shafers. She couldn’t possibly have known them well. And anyway, if she had, she would have applauded their demise. Old scores needed to be settled. And in return maybe he was being rewarded now. They could make anything happen. Like a beautiful girl walking into your life when your mind was in pieces; someone who admired your work and wanted to know you. Someone who could put all of those pieces back together again and make you whole. That hooded freak had suggested as much, had told him that they were bringing a ‘treat’ to him, ‘summat sweet’.

Dare he suggest such a thing to himself? That she was an offering for all he had given to that place of mirrors? Apryl had woken something vital in him that had long been moribund. And despite his dishevelled and haggard appearance, she’d seen something behind it. Intuited something inside him that appealed to her; she had even spoken of fate at their meeting after seeing his sketches. A connection. And now she wanted to see more of his work. To eat and drink with him too. Spend time in his company. This most rare of women might even accompany him home, to gaze upon his walls. These walls would be the test. His art would show her what he was all about. And she would tell him more about his master and why he had come back to visit those who had wronged him so long ago. Was that not what she had been suggesting?

Perhaps the killing was done now, and his work would continue to flourish. Maybe even within the security of a head porter’s position with sexy Apryl as a companion. They could do anything. Bring you to your knees in shuddering horror, or cast you into the freezing nothingness like driftwood, or show you wonders that left you gaping in awe. This was going to work out; he was being rewarded, he told himself over and over again until he believed it, at least for short periods of time. But it had to work out to his advantage, it simply had to, because he had no control over any of it.

He couldn’t lose his nerve when she arrived. He had to keep himself together. Be cool.

And here she was. Walking slowly and checking the names of the buildings as she searched for the place where he’d told her to meet him. A pleasing shudder passed through his body. She was beautiful. Here for him, an artist. God, he was an artist. Finally, an artist.

As she teetered into the bar, he stood up to greet her. The sweet and heady scent she wore stunned him; perfume’s potential for mystery only truly realized when wafting from the pale throat of a beautiful woman. The sound of her high heels clacking so enticingly against the wooden floor turned the barman’s head.

She had dressed for Seth. Dressed to please him. In a simple but elegant black dress under a long overcoat made from fine and expensive-looking wool. The neck of the dress was cut to partially reveal the heavy white softness of her breasts. Her make-up was full but carefully applied to her exquisite features. Shimmering from black to blue, her hair was elegantly arranged on top of her head. And what he could see of her legs glimmered in barely visible stockings, before tapering into black high heels.

‘Hi, Seth. Good to see you again,’ she said, and leant forward to kiss him on either cheek. Briefly, he indulged himself with the scent of her lipstick and with the aroma of her skin as she came close. All of his opening lines vanished. But his eyes flattered her. He shook his head, managed a smile, and said, ‘Wow.’

THIRTY-THREE

To which Apryl laughed. And felt her efforts confirmed. She was a little overdressed, but had come prepared for this afternoon with Seth to become an evening with Seth. It could take that long to win his confidence, his trust. Her drinking would be measured. Tonight was going to be about Seth. What he had to say. And she was not accustomed to having her attempts to impress men rebuffed.

Nerves skittered about her stomach and she would rely on them being calmed by the first glass of wine, which Seth promptly went to buy at the bar. It had been hard to settle since she met Seth. She had tried to distract herself with meeting the estate agents and by conducting some aimless shopping during the day, followed by a meeting with Miles, where he struggled again to accept her gush of conspiracy theories about the vanishing of Felix Hessen, right from his own living room, followed by the incineration of his work. And as for her assertion of his lingering influence at Barrington House, and her intention to interrogate Seth, Miles had become both pale with concern for her and terribly disappointed in her ability to believe such things.

But Seth had been, she was certain, in the presence of Felix Hessen’s work inside Barrington House. Tom Shafer must have been wrong: some of the paintings had survived and were still in existence, somewhere in that building. Maybe in number sixteen itself. Seth had discovered them. And she intended to find out how. It was preposterous: Miles was wrong and the Friends of Felix Hessen were right.

There was no mistaking the signature Hessen thematics and style in Seth’s drawings, but they also contained an anticipation of what Hessen might have achieved as a painter. Seth was a capable artist. A man able to emulate the vision in what he must have seen in Hessen’s actual work – oil paintings that took the horror of Hessen’s surviving sketches one long step further. Miles would believe her when he saw Seth’s work and confirmed the comparison.

And if she was careful, she might even be able to show Miles the unthinkable: a surviving original. Something the strange, lonely night porter had discovered in that wretched building. Or been shown by Hessen’s presence. But something that had guided his own hand as an artist and, perhaps, even his role as an accomplice in the murder of the most senior residents. She found it hard to associate the lanky, introverted figure with violence. But someone was helping the residue of Hessen in that building. Someone was in collusion with the indistinct but palpable evil that had haunted the building for fifty years. Right now, with Stephen avoiding her, Seth was the number one suspect. He was involved somehow; he gave himself away last night. But how and why he was involved, she had no idea, and needed a lot more to go on than hearsay and guesswork. In that respect, Miles was right.

Seth returned from the bar holding a large glass of white wine. She forced herself to hold back from deluging him with questions, reminding herself to work him carefully for the information required. Like she had done with Betty Roth and the Shafers. It took coaxing. They had nothing to gain from telling her anything and much to lose when they did. Or so it seemed. She let Seth start the conversation.

‘So tell me, please, about this Felix Hessen,’ he said, in between nervous sips of his pint.

‘Well, I’m no expert, and from what I have seen of your work I suspect you could tell me a lot more than I can tell you. About his style anyway.’

Seth looked down at his hands on the table as they fumbled with a cigarette paper. She’d made him nervous again and she quickly changed tack. ‘You can borrow this book. I know the author, Miles. It’s the only book in print about Hessen’s work.’ She withdrew Miles’s book from her bag and passed it across the table. ‘I know Miles would be impressed by your drawings too. He works at the Tate.’

Seth blushed and nodded quickly. He seized the book and held it in his lap. ‘You said some really kind things. I don’t get much encouragement these days.’ He laughed nervously. ‘But things are changing. I’m working on something quite ambitious. At home. In my room. More of a studio really.’ His eyes were suddenly alive with an intensity she found startling. ‘Maybe I could show this Miles guy before I move it to canvas.’

Slowly, she crossed her legs and moved them out from under the table so he could see them. And she asked him more about himself, his background, where he studied, his family, to which he became immediately awkward and evasive. Or possibly none of these things held any interest for him. He seemed uninterested in anything but his most recent work, of which he talked enthusiastically, but gave little away. Or, she even suspected, was unable to articulate what it was he was producing.

After she returned to the table with the third round of drinks, having switched to Coke for her second, he seemed more loquacious. ‘I’ve stopped trying to analyse everything that comes out, Apryl. It gets me nowhere. But I feel like I’m in touch with something right at the bottom of myself. And it has some relevance with what’s out there. And maybe what comes after all this. You know, life. But it is only relevant in images. There isn’t language for it. I can’t explain it.’

She carefully studied his quick eyes and perpetual smoking and fidgeting, but didn’t suspect him of trying to cultivate a mystique by being evasive about his work. It was something else. She had a hunch that Seth was deeply anxious, if not even afraid, of what he was doing, despite his compulsion to do it.

He spoke at length about London, about the people, and had nothing good to say about either. ‘It’s a terrible place, Apryl. Everything here is difficult. It’s falling to pieces. It changes people. Anyone who stays here. The energy is all wrong. It doesn’t work. I’ve been trying to work it out ever since I arrived.’ He tapped the cover of Miles’s book on Hessen. ‘I think he was on to the same thing.’

At times it was hard to follow the thread and meaning of what Seth said. His head was a storm of ideas and thoughts all struggling to find their way out at the same time. It was like he was trying to make sense of his own manic temperament by speaking out loud to her. She found him exhausting, and after his third pint had been drained, she suggested they go and eat, wary that he might otherwise become irreparably drunk and a hindrance to what she needed to learn.

Over dinner she would find the right moment to ask about Barrington House and apartment sixteen. He was becoming garrulous and wanted to impress her, desperately. It was nearing the right time to seek from him a disclosure about what he’d seen, what he knew, and what he’d done.

It must have been a long time since he’d been in the company of a woman. She caught him staring at her with an intensity that made her uncomfortable. It was no longer only a question of seducing herself into his confidence, but also one of regulating the consequences. But in the small Indian restaurant he led her to, Seth’s mood changed. After they’d ordered, it was as if something caught his eye outside the window. She turned her head to follow his gaze, but saw nothing out of the ordinary except for the usual diverse mix of humanity and fashion that filled every sidewalk in a city that seemed unable to stay still.

‘What is it? Someone you know?’ she asked.

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.’

THIRTY-SIX

And at last the hour had been reached when he could walk down the final flight of stairs to his flat in the basement. So weary in mind, back and legs, like his whole being was bruised with fatigue, Stephen headed down. Back to his wife. He would usually go to her for thirty minutes during his lunch break at one, and then again at six thirty once the night man was in.

Stephen was the only company Janet had these days. The only real voice she ever heard, though he wasn’t so talkative any more. The residents liked to do the talking and they liked him because he listened and never troubled their space or time with his own personality. Such a tactic had advantages. The less you said, the easier life was.

In the only part of the basement that was carpeted, he reached the front door of their staff flat. Around him he heard the clank and grind and shudder of the lift motor room, its harder sounds rising above the distant thrum of the boiler. Sounds that could be heard all of the time down here if you concentrated. When he took the job and they moved in, he and Janet doubted they would be able to tolerate the constant noise. But if he had learned anything as head porter of Barrington House, it was that you soon get used to all kinds of things, and you accept what cannot be changed.

As he slipped his key into the lock, he wondered if Janet was always aware of the labouring of the building’s utilities, or the passing vehicles on the road one floor above their subterranean-level flat. These days, she never left the apartment unless he took her somewhere. Which was never much further than a mile in any direction.

Inside the flat, in the little hallway where it was too cramped to bend right over, he slipped his shoes off. The warmth and the smell of Janet’s patient exhalations hit him immediately. The flat wasn’t big enough for one person, let alone two. But Janet didn’t move much, so they managed as best they could.

Reaching out, he felt for the light switch where the hall opened into the living room. The old curtains and cheap carpet made the flat look orange, the colour somehow shrinking the dimensions too. He didn’t like spending too much time in here and tried to get off to sleep pretty quickly in the evenings. To put every day out of its misery.

He’d not been down at dinner time to turn the television on for Janet. Not today; there had been too much to do upstairs. So Janet had sat down here all day and into the early evening in the dark.

Silent and still, she was sitting in her chair in exactly the same position as this morning when he left her, dressed in the pink housecoat, with the tartan blanket over her lap and legs.

He could smell piss.

She must be thirsty too; the glass with the straw inside, on the little side table beside her arm, was empty.

But no shit. Yes, she’d been that morning before he’d gone upstairs for the day.

He would have liked to open a window to air the tiny room. Being so close to the boiler the heat became insufferable. But the window was right behind Janet’s chair and he didn’t want her caught in a draught.

In the kitchen that always made him think of the caravans they used to rent in Devon, he opened the fridge. All Formica surfaces in the kitchen and everything built in miniature like it had been made for a child’s Wendy house. What a way to live.

The fridge began to hum and vibrate. There were three microwave dinners left. He’d have the Lancashire hotpot. Didn’t feel like curry tonight after smelling Piotr’s armpits all day. Once he’d finished, Janet could have the macaroni cheese, after he’d let her meal cool down properly. She couldn’t tell him if it was too hot; he had to watch her eyes instead.

While the microwave purred and tinged and lit itself up, he went through to the lounge and turned the television on with the remote. Immediately, he lowered the sound. Slowly, he undid his silver tie. Then unbuttoned his cuffs and rolled his sleeves up his forearms. Janet watched him.

From the little cabinet built over the fireplace, he retrieved the single malt Mr Alfrezi gave him last Christmas. The last bottle, but the residents were very generous at Christmas. You look after them and they’ll look after you, he told his staff. And would tell Seth the same thing when he handed the staff apartment over to him. Pass on the simple instructions and advice – that he had longed to do for ten years. The moment was almost upon him.

Stephen drank two big gulps from the mouth of the bottle. And winced as it burned down his gullet. Yes, it should be a good Christmas.

Last Christmas he made three grand in tips and received four bottles of champagne, two good reds and eight single malts. This year should be even better. His wife was very ill, they all knew that; and he had dealt with the sudden deaths of Mrs Roth and old Tom Shafer too, with ‘considerable sensitivity’ Mr Glock had said. Betty Roth’s daughter had even held both of his hands and said as much with tears in her eyes. Apparently, her mother was very fond of him. Not that he’d noticed.

He went and sat down heavily with a big sigh, on the sofa next to Janet’s chair. Then placed his feet on the little cushioned stool. He removed his glasses and rubbed at his eyes.

Janet looked at the floor in front of her chair. No real expression on her face. She didn’t seem to react to much these days. Beside one thing: now that always got a rise out of her.

Stephen took another gulp from the neck of the bottle and sighed appreciatively. ‘You know, dear, I’m very glad that I have never actually seen whatever it is that you saw up there. Inside that flat. I mean Seth is going in there tonight to do the kid’s bidding. And it’ll be that gorgeous little thing he takes up there with him. The one who inherited Lil’s old place. You know, the niece? And then I’m out of here, my dear. Long gone. Vamoosh.’

Janet continued to stare at the floor. He was really getting fed up with her now. If he were honest, she’d never been good company. But what did he know back then when they got married? You never had as many choices and opportunities as the young people did today. With hindsight, he’d certainly have done things differently. But there was still time. A little time left to get out there and enjoy himself a bit. Instead of living in these demoralizing shoeboxes at the beck and call of rich tossers like Glock and Betty Roth.

He nodded in her direction, raising his eyebrows to emphasize his point. ‘And we both know only too well what can happen if you go messing around with things in there, don’t we dear? I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, what’s dead should stay dead. Bring it back and there’ll only be trouble. But you wouldn’t listen, would you. Eh?’

From the kitchen the microwave pinged its little bell. Stephen rose from his seat and went through. As he peeled the steaming wet lid off the hotpot, he spoke distractedly over his shoulder. ‘You had to go up there with old Lill, messing around in that place looking for our son. If you’d not gone up there to find him, none of this would have happened. So I reckon this is all your fault. I mean it. Had you not brought our proud son back from wherever he was causing havoc, old Roth and the Shafers would still be breaking everyone’s balls at Barrington House. And we wouldn’t have been stuck here until they died. Did you know that? Eh? Well you do now, dear.’

He turned away from the counter with his meal on a tray. ‘Hard to believe that such a vicious little sod was ever our flesh and blood.’ He shook his head. ‘Jesus, I still can’t believe he’s had Seth do those old Shafers as well as Betty. Though I don’t know why I am surprised. All those years ago when I was serving my country in Ireland, you let that little shit run wild, until he ran into borstal. Eh? Loved trouble he did, and then got himself all burned up. Christ almighty. But he’s far more dangerous dead.’

He emptied the slurry of vegetables and cubes of stewing beef onto a Pyrex plate and retrieved a fork from the side of the tray.

Blowing on the surface and then forking it quickly into his mouth, he spoke around mouthfuls. ‘I’d have to guess that Seth has pretty much done his job. As have I. Though I take pride in the fact that I did my share a little more thoroughly than he has. He’s always leaving doors open. Never thought it through. Too jumpy for the job. But I cleaned up thoroughly after him. Got it sorted. Like I have always done in this bloody place. Making sure the symbols stayed behind the pictures, in all the right places, like our kid showed me, no matter how many times the directors messed around with the decor. I had a right job with the stairs in the west block when they bought all those new prints. I had to work fast outside the flats the kid had an interest in too, to keep things as they were and to keep certain people here until they died. Which Seth is making happen with an efficiency I honestly did not believe he was capable of when I hired him. So I’d like to think our lad, and those others he knocks about with now, are satisfied with my work. Though the little shit is coy, dear. Very coy. Takes after his mum, he does.’

He sat back and smacked his lips. Moved a tongue over his gums. ‘But I’ll guess Seth has been shown things up there in much the same way as you were. The night you spent up there.’ He pointed his fork for emphasis. ‘For Seth, being a painter, it was exactly what he wanted to see. You know, for inspiration. Painters need this. That’s pretty much what the kid said last time I saw him. And Seth’s got more stomach for it. In there, with those things. Fancy that. Not like the rest of us. Or you, for that matter. Now look at you, eh? That’s what comes from meddling. Makes you wonder though, doesn’t it, what’s in store for that girl, Apryl, dear. I never asked the kid about what he’s got Seth to agree to up there, but I can’t help thinking it’ll be something she isn’t expecting.’

He finished the last of his hotpot in silent concentration. He was hungry and chased every pea to the edge of his plate. ‘Mmm. I’m going to give you macaroni cheese, dear. You used to like it, but I think it tastes and looks and smells like shit.’

Back in the kitchen he tossed the hotpot carton into the bin and then settled his plate into the blue washing-up bowl inside the sink.

When Janet’s meal was ready, he knelt on the floor before her chair and scooped a forkful from the side of her plate where it was cooler, and blew on it too to make sure. ‘There, that should be just right.’

Without meeting his eyes, Janet accepted the fork into her mouth, chewed a little and then swallowed.

‘The girl though,’ he said. ‘It’s still upsetting. It’s why I need a drink. And I’ll see that bottle off tonight, you mark my words. So I’ll thank you in advance for keeping a low profile this evening.’

As she looked at her husband, Janet’s eyes widened.

‘She’s very pretty, Janet. I’ve told you before. Lovely-looking girl, with good manners too. Even though she has all of those tattoos, she’s every bit as courteous as Lillian. She reminds me of old Lil. She really does.’ He shook his head with a sigh and fed Janet another three heaped forks. His knees were hurting and he wanted to get this over with.

‘It was bad enough seeing Betty’s face and old Tom Shafer, but I really don’t want to see what they’ll do to a young and pretty thing like Apryl. The girl is an unfortunate accident, I reckon. She’s just been in the wrong place at the wrong time. Poking her nose in. Like you did. Fatal. Fucking fatal, dear. And like you, after that first time in there, dear, I doubt she’ll ever be the same again. No one is once they’ve been up there with them. You know, up close. She’ll be lucky not to have a stroke as well. I hope it’s her heart that goes. I really do. So she doesn’t end up like you.’

He dropped the fork onto the plate. ‘That’s enough. We don’t want you losing your figure again. You can’t exercise and this shit is full of fat.’ With a groan, he slowly rose to his feet, using the arm of Janet’s chair as support. ‘I’ll get a cloth, it’s all over your ruddy chin.’

When he came back with the damp cloth he used for wiping down the kitchen surfaces, Janet was crying. He dabbed at her chin.

‘Now if you’re going to make a fuss, I’ll put you in the bedroom again, and close the bloody door. I’ve had a very trying day. Let’s just get through the next few weeks and stay out of each other’s way. Then it’ll be all over and done with. I expect Mrs Roth’s daughter will sell both flats. And you know as well as I do that properties don’t hang around in this building. So after that I can finish up here. I don’t think I can risk waiting any longer than a month at most. Because when someone moves into sixteen, then what? Eh? I could get stuck. Mixed up in it all again. Thanks to you. It’s already a little risky. Two deaths, Mrs Shafer all crazy, and the girl soon to get hurt. So I’ll do the handover to old Seth as quick as I can, and then I’m off, me dear. Like they promised. They’ll let me out then. I haven’t been able to walk further than Bond Street in a fucking decade.’

He sucked his teeth for a moment and looked up at the ceiling. ‘And it could also work in my favour too. It’ll look good, if you think about it. And I do. I think it through, dear. Not like you bleeding hearts. You see, the strain of recent events and all these years enduring the incapacitation of my wife, then getting widowed. Who could blame me for handing my notice in? Just packing in and heading for the sun? I think I’ll be all right.’

Janet began to make a moaning sound. A hard keening that came from deep within her chest. Her eyes flitted around as if she were looking for a way out.

Stephen took no notice. He’d talk to himself if she wasn’t going to hear him out. Set it all down inside his own head. Talking out loud helped. They all did a lot of that here. ‘They’ve no problem with me. I’ve done my bit and can go now. Our kid will show me how to remove whatever the fuck it is that keeps me inside a square mile I now know every single inch of. Seth’s turn now. They wanted a painter and I gave them one. Though he has a different agreement with them, I’d say. I stood me ground and wouldn’t kill those old bastards. Though God knows I’ve thought about it often enough, just to get out of here. But Seth stepped up. Right off. Christ, he’s cold.

‘So I’ll give it another fortnight and I’ll take you back up too. For the last time. One more trip will be sufficient. I’ll give you plenty of notice, though. That’s only fair. But I don’t know the exact date yet. I’ll have to play it by ear for a while, so do be patient. Then you and the kid can spend all the time you want together.’

Janet tried to move forward in her chair. Her eyes bulged from the effort, and without even looking at her, Stephen gently put his hand between her breasts and pushed her back. She gasped and sat still again.

‘After that, your guess is as good as mine. It’s only a theory, mind, because different rules apply up there, but Seth won’t ever be going far from this place. Life sentence for old Seth. He’ll live in this flat till he croaks. Nor will you, dear. Your body might, when it’s over, when they’ve had their way up there. But you won’t. You’ll go where our kid and old Roth and Shafer went. So maybe you can all be chums again. In that other place with the rest of them. And I don’t want to be around when you are. Spending so much time together in here has been bad enough, so I don’t want to keep seeing you in mirrors or popping up in the pictures on the stairwells. No good for the nerves, dear. I think you of all people will appreciate that.’

Stephen took a seat beside her and took another swig from the neck of the bottle. Janet began a constant rhythmic sobbing sound.

‘There’s no point in making a fuss. This had nothing to do with us until you made it our business.’

He stood up again and approached her chair. Janet flinched. He took the brakes off the grey rubber wheels and moved her away from the wall and pointed her feet in the direction of the bedroom door. ‘I don’t know what gets into you women, I really don’t. Got to poke your beaks where they’re not wanted. And then you start fussing and moaning when it all goes tits-up.’

He wheeled her chair into the tiny bedroom and parked her in the corner beside the bed. ‘I want some time to myself now. I’ve been on my feet all day. I’ll change you in the morning. I don’t have the patience now.’

The head porter closed the door and left his wife in the dark. As he resumed his seat on the couch, he guessed, and it was just a guess, that the residents would be very generous at Christmas when he announced his retirement as head porter of Barrington House.

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.

FORTY

Seth had been gone for over five minutes. And she had stood, nervously, outside the front door of apartment sixteen, fingering a cigarette lighter inside the womb of a deep coat pocket, while listening for any sign of him inside the apartment.

Once she thought she heard him approach the door on swift feet, almost as if he was running back to the front door. But the door hadn’t opened. And the feet had sounded tiny, like a child’s.

When she called out, ‘Seth? Seth?’ the footsteps stopped and her memory of them became vague, making her believe they had occurred somewhere else in the building, in another apartment, on another hard floor. Maybe they had.

And then she thought she heard a door close deep inside the flat. Far off, far behind masonry and wood. But again, the sound might have been generated from another place somewhere inside the building. It was hard to tell.

But she couldn’t stand outside for much longer. And what was he doing in there anyway? She wondered if Miles was right. That it was a setup, an ambush. This couldn’t go on any longer. She took her hands out of her pockets.

‘Hello. It’s me.’

‘Apryl. You all right?’

‘Yes.’

‘What’s going on?’

‘Beats me.’

‘Are you inside?’

‘No, I’m still waiting outside. He’s been in there ages. I don’t know what he’s doing. He told me to wait here. Do I wait all night?’

‘I don’t like this. I’m coming in.’

‘No. Don’t. You’ll ruin everything. I promised him.’

‘It could be a trap.’

‘No. I told you . . . I think he’s harmless,’ she said to calm Miles, but wasn’t sure she believed it any more.

‘You think he’s harmless! Jesus, Apryl.’

‘I just don’t know what’s taking him so long. So I’m going in. The door’s on the latch. I just wanted to tell you I’m leaving the line open. You know, just in case.’

‘Apryl, don’t go inside. I don’t want you to. This is all wrong. You’re trespassing. I don’t like the sound of this at all.’

‘It’ll be fine. Trust me. Just listen out. To be on the safe side. I won’t stay long. I just want to see what’s in there. I’ll see you in a few minutes.’

‘I’m getting fed up with this. It’s so damn foolish. Don’t you feel absurd?’

Apryl pushed the front door open.

The hinge squeaked and then whined as the heavy door swung inwards. To reveal an unlit hallway. From the light of the landing she could just make out its shadowy far end in a derelict penthouse apartment. ‘Seth,’ she whispered into the gloom. ‘Seth. Seth.’

Taking a step inside, she looked for a light switch. And found an ancient ceramic device that looked like her grandmother’s butter dish turned upside down. She flicked the switch down but it clunked, emptily, and there was no response from the elaborate glass lights attached to the walls.

Guided only by the light from the landing, she moved further down the deserted hallway, her feet creaking the floorboards. The place smelled of dust and stale air.

‘Seth’, she said again, louder this time. ‘Seth. Where are you?’

Passing another two light switches, she flicked them up and down. They were useless. Dead.

She was running out of light from the landing. The darkness in the apartment swallowed the yellowish glow before it could spread fully from the mouth of the front door. Then it suddenly went even darker, right around her.

Looking over her shoulder, she saw that the front door had silently swung half shut, its weight pulling it back to the frame. She retreated, anxious with every step that her heels didn’t make too loud a sound on the floorboards, and propped the door open by wedging her compact underneath. Then returned to the middle of the hallway.

This time she took more notice of the doors she was passing. The smaller ones painted white she assumed had cupboards behind them; the others must open to rooms like they did in Lillian’s apartment. ‘Seth,’ she said. A note of command mixed with irritation sharpened the word to cut the silence.

Taking out her lighter, she sparked it into life and raised it to see better.

The walls were skinned with an ugly paper. It was browned with age and had a rough texture against her fingertips. Every other thing had been taken down from the walls as in the other apartments she had seen. Like they were not to be trusted. There was no sign of the paintings Seth promised to show her, or any sign of him either.

‘Seth? Seth? You’re freaking me out now. Where are you?’

A few steps further and she ran out of all but the thinnest electric light and the pale flicker from her disposable lighter. Its bright but short flare scattered into the cold, heavy atmosphere, showing little beyond a small radius. But it managed to reveal a closed door on the left-hand side of the passageway. In her great-aunt’s flat this would have been the living room. And inside it, she heard a distant voice. ‘Seth? Is that you?’

As if from a great distance he cried out, ‘Apryl, no! Don’t come in. Stop!’

A draught seeped out of the gap between the door and the floor and cooled across her hands. The flame of her lighter flickered blue, then flattened itself against the metal cuff before going out. Impossibly, it was as if he had been calling from a great distance. She stayed still, her body tense, the nerves down her spine prickling. She listened.

Someone else was speaking again inside the room. Yes, she could hear a voice. No, voices. Was that a television? A radio? Moving closer to the door, she pressed her ear to the wood. The sound seemed distant, like she was passing Yankee Stadium during a home game. It must have been coming from beyond the building.

Her mind suddenly filled with what Mrs Roth and Mr Shafer had told her about the noises they heard inside this apartment. She pressed the phone to her ear and stood away from the door. ‘Miles?’

‘Yes, I’m here. What is it?’

‘I don’t know. There are no lights in here. I can’t see much. But I can hear something. Or is it outside? Can you hear anything down there?’

‘Like what?’

‘Like a crowd.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Is it windy out there?’

‘What?’

‘Windy? Is there wind outside?’

‘No. It’s bloody cold and wet, but there’s no wind for once. What are you talking about?’

‘I can hear something.’ And she could. Either it was getting louder by the second or her hearing was improving. It was like a storm. Or like something really loud and far away but not tuned in properly. From beneath the door the cold air increased its force and made her take another step away.

‘Apryl? Apryl?’ She heard Miles’s little voice chirping from the phone.

‘Seth? What are you doing?’ she said at the door and repositioned the lighter before her face. It sparked but wouldn’t ignite in the draught.

‘Down here,’ a voice called from inside that room, from right behind the door. At least that’s what it sounded like. Was that Seth?

‘What?’ Quickly, desperately, her fingers scraped at the metal wheel of the lighter. She raised her phone. ‘I think I can hear someone. In this room.’

‘Apryl, you’re worrying me. What the hell is going on?’

Apryl held the lighter up. It sparked, then died. Then lit up again on the next attempt. She took a hesitant step right to the threshold of the room, the flame held up near her face. Choked by the thump of her own heart, she squinted over the lighter and decided to take a peek into the room to see what Seth was doing. It must be him in there. With someone else. Or he was talking to himself? She touched the door handle.

And the door swung open.

It had been pulled open from the other side. She sucked her breath back inside her mouth. The little flame of the lighter was extinguished, instantly, by the sudden darkness and cold that rushed out of that room. That came roaring out like a tremendous pressure forcing itself from a confined but volatile space. Yes, it was all alive in there. The air was alive and full of so many screams she lost her balance before the force of it all.

The thin light from the landing was doused and all definition from everything in her line of vision – the dirty wallpaper, the vague suggestion of a ceiling, the cornice – vanished. All gone. Eclipsed by something so dense and black only her sense of temperature remained.

As Seth came out of there, fleeing right out of forever, her hair plastered itself against her skull and her eyelids trembled in the sudden punch of an arctic wind. And with him came a slipstream of howls so wretched and frantic she was forced to add her own long scream. But at the very least, hers came from a living mouth.

FORTY-ONE

Seth collapsed in the hallway, on the other side of the door, panting, sobbing. Then looked up and saw the hooded boy a few feet to his left, agitated, the hooded head whipping from Seth to the traumatized figure of Apryl. She leant against the wall a few feet to his right, one boot turned at an awkward angle and no longer supporting her weight. Further down the hallway, the front door gaped.

‘Seth! Seth!’ the delinquent voice shrieked from out of the trembling hood. ‘Get that fuckin’ tart in there. Bang her in there. Do it now or you’ll be sorry. He’ll take you down there wiv ’em instead. You or her, like. Fuckin’ do what I says!’

Apryl stared at Seth in shock, unable to speak.

‘He wants to meet you,’ he said, his voice sounding pathetic and wheedling to his own ears. ‘In there.’

Apryl shook her head, then turned to run.

‘Seth!’ the boy screeched, and rushed after her. ‘Get her inside. In there I can help you wiv the bitch. Just fuckin’ get her in and we’ll do the rest. Come on!’

As Seth got to his feet and began the pursuit, he realized he was crying.

‘Apryl. Apryl.’ He seized the collar of her coat and yanked backwards. In one long motion she came back at him, her feet airborne. Before clashing hard against the floorboards. Her face screwed up to cry. She was hurt, had banged her tailbone against the floor. Immediately, he wanted to apologize.

‘That’s it. That’s it. You got her,’ the boy shrieked from between the pointy toes of her boots that kicked out and scraped for purchase on the marble tiles.

‘Seth. No,’ she said, in between the moans and sobs she made from the pain that prevented her from struggling, that shut her down.

Walking backwards with long strides, clutching her collar, he slid her along the floor after him. Slapping her hands against the hard smooth surface she tried to slow her inevitable passage towards that door, which rattled from the force of the storm that hammered it from the inside, as if eager with excitement. The collar of her coat passed up the back of her head as she tried to wriggle out of the jacket. He twisted the collar tight in his fists and pulled her shoulders towards each other so the movement of her arms was lessened. He heard his own breath, loud about his ears. ‘I’m sorry. I’m sorry,’ he sobbed at her.

As the hooded boy followed them down the hallway, its short arms swished in the air. ‘In. In. In. In.’ Its voice had begun to squeal.

‘Oh, God no. Please, Seth,’ she wept at him, her pretty face all red and smeared with eyeliner as she turned her head to the side to watch the door she was being hauled closer to. The terrible icy air belched around the frame, giving her a taste of the black infinite void that waited to claim her

Seth quickly reached one hand behind his back and seized the door handle. Apryl’s struggles became frantic when his grip loosened on her collar, and she almost got to her feet. But he kicked one of her legs and she went down and onto her side, whimpering, with her leather jacket all twisted around her face and neck. It had become an effective sling and he could just yank her through there with it.

The hooded boy skipped and panted with eagerness beside their struggles, like a weasel at the sight of a small hole with a rabbit inside. Its legs started a stamping motion and a strange little whinny came out of the dark hood as it readied itself to follow her into the darkness, to finish up.

The door swung itself open wide and a colossal blast of freezing turbulence swept over them, like a wave across the deck of some floundering ship. Just beyond the door a tremendous number of voices gathered, emitted from mouths Seth did not want to see. They screamed from above, and howled from below; they screeched from the sides and hurtled upwards towards the door, as if another chance at life were presenting itself in this unexpected pinpoint of light.

With all his strength, Seth took a step backwards into the darkness and wind. And then took another, and pulled the screaming girl in there with him.

FORTY-TWO

‘Apryl! Apryl! Fuck it!’ Miles tore the phone from his ear and began to run towards the front entrance of Barrington House. Up the steps he went, taking all three in one long stride, landing on the polished marble before the wide glass doors. Skittering sideways on leather-soled shoes, he was unable to breathe for the fear and shock and panic that scream had brought into him: the terror in her voice, lost inside a battering wind that made the signal crackle, break and then end. He reached for the keypad and punched at the stainless steel buttons. One. Nine. Four. Nine.

Inside the heavy brass clasp that held the two glass doors together he heard a loud thunk as the lock mechanism disengaged. And through the doors he banged, then hurled himself down the long carpeted hallway. Only as he neared the wide circle of the reception desk and the silent conservatory with its chairs and coffee table and magazines and dried rushes in vases did he manage to breathe again. To suck a great draught of warm air into lungs unused to vigorous exercise.

Through the fire doors, she’d said. These fire doors. To the staircase and elevator. He could hear her street-smart voice with its apartments and elevators and movie dialogue words, all swirling inside his thoughts that he couldn’t slow down.

He launched himself up the stairs. Then stopped. And stood uselessly with all of his limbs shaking and his reason trying to douse enough of the fire of panic to tell him that the flat was eight floors up and he was almost broken from just running through the reception area. There was the lift. Take that. It was on the ground floor. Yes, he could see inside the carriage: the mirror at the back and the wooden panels and yellowish light filling the space.

By the time he got inside the lift his hands were shaking. His index finger depressed the wrong button, the button for the fifth floor. Then hit number nine. Five stayed lit. So did nine. ‘Fucking hell!’ he shouted at himself, then steadied the finger and pressed eight, the floor with the numbers 16 and 17 stencilled next to the button.

What was he doing, that crazy bastard Seth? Attacking her? Or worse?

How long did this thing take? It seemed like a full minute dragged by while the lift carriage clunked and wheezed before it even began to ascend, up there, towards Apryl.

What would he do? Only now that he’d stopped running and stabbing his fingers at the buttons and was forced to stand still and wait did he have time to consider what would be required of him. He wondered if he could even fight if it came to it. He simply wasn’t sure. The last time had been at school, decades ago.

‘Oh Jesus,’ he said, at the preposterousness of the whole night. What had Apryl been thinking? As the lift stopped, uselessly, at the fifth floor, his trepidation turned into anger at her. The crazy stories, the wild speculations about murder, and now this, going undercover with an unhinged security guard as if she were some amateur sleuth. He swore at himself for allowing himself to become involved. He’d never really stopped to consider that she could be just as batshit crazy as her aunt.

The lift finally reached the eighth floor. But now he was this close he didn’t want to get out. Peering through the little latticed observation window in the door of the lift, he checked the landing outside. No one there, but the front door of an apartment was open. Must be sixteen.

‘Fuck it.’ Trying to be as careful as possible, he opened the outer door and peered to the side to make sure no one was waiting out of sight. ‘Apryl!’ he hiss-whispered. ‘Apryl.’ Then waited, halfway out of the lift, for a response.

Nothing.

He moved out of the lift and walked forward to peer into sixteen, at an unlit shabby and empty hallway.

Standing in the doorway, he called her name twice more. Screwing up his eyes, he peered at the far end of the passageway, but it was too dark to see anything clearly. He’d have to go inside.

Which he did, slowly, hardly able to believe that he was actually doing this: trespassing inside a private flat in a private building. And he’d taken no more than two steps inside when he tensed into a squat and said ‘Jesus!’ out loud.

He could hear it too now. The crowd. The storm. The voices. What she had been asking him about. And it was sweeping and circling beyond the middle door on the left side of the hallway. The one through which Apryl’s great-uncle had hurled Hessen.

Outside the room, he doubted whether he’d have the strength to even touch the door handle. But then he heard her. In the distance, in there, over there. Crying. In all of that roaring and excited screaming as if a tribe of apes had gathered in thrashing trees above a leopard, he heard her. In tiny broken snippets. Wailing and calling out for mercy, as if she were being murdered.

‘Christ!’ Miles threw himself at the door.

And fell into nothingness. Into absence.

A place where only the freezing temperature and the din of thousands of screaming voices registered. But he fell against a solid floor that he could not see, with his hands clamped about his ears. And when he twisted his body about to look for the screaming girl, he felt his feet and lower legs vanish over an edge, in which an even colder and faster wind belched upwards, as if it was striking the side of a great sheer mountain face and had nowhere else to go but upward, into forever.

Scrabbling backwards, he managed to crawl away from the lip of whatever he had fallen onto, when a collection of things like fingers, as thin as pencils and as hard as bones, snatched at his ankle as if it were an unexpected handhold presenting itself in some terrible climb up through oblivion.

He scrambled to his knees, his arms held out to prevent being blown into the precipice he sensed was gaping all around him in the pitch black violence. His shirt ballooned outwards and his tie slapped his face like a dog’s tail. ‘Apryl!’

He saw her, thrashing from side to side, her fingers raking upwards at the two stooped figures busy about her. Her booted feet kicked out and she threw her hips in a desperate struggle. He could see the silver tips of her heels flashing in what little light struggled to get through the open doorway he had fallen through.

On his hands and knees he crawled closer to the struggle. And saw a child. In a coat. Impossibly, a child in a hooded coat was whipping its little arm in and out, in and out against her face, that thrashed from side to side to evade the blows. It then started to kick at her body in order to move her. To shuffle her towards . . . Miles thought of what his own leg had just been hanging over. The other man, barely able to stand in the typhoon, snatched at her arms, trying to gain a purchase.

On his feet, Miles took two steps, steps that were more like the staggers of a drunkard, towards them. He had to wrap his arms about his ribs in a desperate attempt to stay the terrible racking shivers that threatened to topple his freezing body over the edge. But then pulled up short at the sight of what flashed in and out of the lightless void around the struggling figures.

He saw faces without flesh, and raw meat on bones twisting horribly in and out of the thinnest light, and hind legs kicking out at the other blind grasping things. And before this moving tapestry of disfigurement and whipping bone-things with jaws too far separated from skulls, a reddish face with long, brownish arms extended from impossibly small shoulders seemed to be rushing forward at the struggling trio. And then flashing backward as if pulled on some invisible harness, away from the light, before repeating the motion, in which it came closer each time to Apryl and the wind-blasted silhouettes that would not be coming back if they went over the side.

The hooded child looked up at Miles at the last possible moment, when Miles’s foot connected with the middle of its torso. Helped by the wind, it surged backward like a kite in an updraught, and was immediately swallowed up by moving, sinewy limbs too thin to be of much use apart from clawing at the darkness. But against the sole of his shoe the hooded thing had been palpable, as heavy and solid as an actual child. And practically sucked off the ledge upon which they all clung.

In his dimming senses and great upheaving struggle to breathe, Miles knew that the man in the white shirt, with frost bearding his face and eyebrows, was Seth. And with the last of his strength in this terrible exposure, the deranged nightwatchman tried with all of his might to haul Apryl over the edge, and into the abyss, by the one arm he had managed to seize by the elbow.

She flopped onto her belly and her head and shoulders disappeared over the edge and into a cluster of writhing white things with snatching hands. The swooping thing with the reddish head was almost upon them again.

Miles fired himself off his front foot and hit Seth in the centre of the chest with his shoulder.

Before he landed, half on and half off the invisible platform, the only thing supporting them in the maelstrom, Miles heard Seth issue a high-pitched scream. And at the edge of his upturned eyes as Miles fell, he was sure he saw the thin reddish thing embrace Seth’s flailing shape in a horrible motion that reminded him of a crab using its pincers to stuff matter into its jaws.

And then Miles’s head was plunged for an instant into what felt like bracken and sharp sticks, and then thrust against cold dead meat the next. Until he hauled himself backwards, away from the edge and onto the ledge.

Only to see Apryl from the waist down. The rest of her was lost as if decapitated, and hung over the edge of the platform. She was being clawed into the void by whatever was thrashing in a place that was mercifully only partially lit. On his knees, screaming for several seconds before he realized he was screaming, he snatched at her ankles. Seized one, then another, with numb fingers, and hauled her backwards. And onto the solid surface he still could not see. Where Apryl rocked from side to side, clutching her face, blind and concussed by the terrible cold.

With the last of his strength, shouting until his vocal cords threatened to snap, he maintained his grip on each booted ankle. And on his backside, he shuffled like he was rowing a skiff, and pulled her after him. Back towards the open door and the light.

She moved. On the floor, beside him, where she was all huddled against the wall across from the door he had slammed behind them as they came out of there on their backs, frozen and gibbering. On the other side, in what disguised itself as a room, the last murmurs of the wind and the highest screams of the damned finally hushed away into silence.

Then came another movement and a sound from Apryl. A whimper. Miles rolled to where she lay crumpled inside her own coat and the shadows. ‘Apryl. Apryl. Apryl,’ he muttered, as much to himself as to her, to add something real and familiar to this sinister place. ‘It’s me. I’m here, sweetheart.’ He reached out to touch what he thought was an arm, but she pulled herself quickly against the wall, withdrawing every limb inside the coat, keeping her face covered, while making those little crying noises.

‘It hurts.’ Her voice came out of the sobs.

‘Apryl, it’s me. Miles. It’s all right sweetheart. I’m here.’

But she didn’t respond and just shivered underneath her coat against the wall.

Looking about himself in the darkness he made sure all of the doors were closed. From somewhere inside himself a red spark of anger lit up and spread. He got to his knees. ‘The police are on their way,’ he called into the echoing apartment. ‘Do you hear?’

Apryl began to cry softly now and rock back and forth as if she were in great pain. As his sight adjusted just enough to see more of her down there on the floor, Miles could tell she was holding her arms tightly to her body with her head dipped down. She was really hurt. He had to get her out. Right now.

She came away from the floor without resistance. Up and onto her feet as if she were used to being led. But she didn’t unwrap her arms from about her chest, and she kept her body bent over and her face angled towards the floor until they were outside the apartment and on the landing in the yellow light before the lift doors. Where he coaxed her and said, ‘Show me, Apryl. Show me where it hurts.’ Only then did she reveal her injuries.

He saw the black flesh about her wrists and all over her hands, as if they had been injured as they reached out to fend something off. Those beautiful white hands were black with something that shone dully like hard leather, or frostbite. And not all of the fingers were there any more.

Her frail arms wavered in front of her as she raised her face at last, showing him the beautiful parts that were pale and tear-stained, and the place where the hair was missing from one side of her head.

He clutched her to his chest and swallowed. Clamped his eyelids shut on that final sight of the thing that had followed them right up to the threshold of that space. Something on all fours, snatching at her within the doorway. Until she kicked at it. Stabbed her boot heels into it with what was left of her mind and strength. Stamped it away like a bundle of sticks. And he knew that what had vanished, still clutching as it was propelled back into the seething absence, had been all that was left of Felix Hessen. And Miles had been close enough to the painter to be seeing him again, and perhaps every night for the rest of his life, as Hessen reached for the girl with arms so long and thin they must have been bone.

FORTY-THREE

Stephen paced the cramped living room, the hems of his uniform trousers whisking past Janet’s inert toes where they protruded from beneath the tartan blanket draped over her lap.

‘And now there’s no sign of Seth at all. I’d guess they took all of him. Amazing, isn’t it? That things like that can actually happen. I mean, I checked the tapes this morning before I erased them and did a switch. He never left the building. You can see him going out of reception to the lift on camera three, with that girl, Apryl, and then nothing. He never came back down. Imagine that, dear. He never came back down.

‘But he’s not in flat sixteen either. I checked every inch of it. Empty. What must have come in folded itself all away again. Took what it wanted and then just melted away without a trace. The police want to see Seth. But they’ll have a bloody job finding him.’ Stephen laughed, but there was no humour in the sound that came out of him.

He sat down on the sofa, the material worn shiny by the anxious occupation of his buttocks over the last ten years. ‘The girl left here in an ambulance. And she wasn’t a pretty sight.’ He took a swig from the whisky bottle in his large hand and winced through the after-burn in his throat, before pointing the sloshing bottle at his silent, motionless wife, who merely watched him with her quick eyes. ‘Now I’d guess that things didn’t go to plan, dear. I knew the moment her boyfriend, or whoever that chap was, got me up in the middle of the night. No, dear. I’d hazard a guess things didn’t go to plan up there last night.’

And then he was just about to ask his mute wife if she could smell that . . . that terrible stench of something both burned and rotten. But stopped himself when he saw the little figure appear just beyond the radius of the standing lamp’s glow, in the tiny hallway before the front door.

It stood still, and made no sign that it would fully enter the living room, for which they were both grateful. Considering the miasma that preceded its appearance, the head porter expected the uncovered head to still be steaming.

Stephen stood up and swallowed. Janet started a frantic keening sound from behind her sternum. She began to rock back and forth in her wheelchair parked by the window, using what few muscles in her abdomen still functioned after the last of the three strokes she had suffered in succession, shutting down ninety per cent of her nervous system the night she’d ventured into apartment sixteen and encountered her dead son for the first time.

‘Jesus.’ Stephen took a step back from the grinning apparition. ‘Jesus Christ.’

‘You wish,’ the blackened head said.

There was no hood encasing its face any more. It looked like the hood had been completely torn away from the coat. As had one sleeve, along with the arm that had been inside it. From within the socket, something dark glistened. The rest of the parka was blackened and smeared with long, ugly stains, as if wet hands had wiped their palms down the outside of the garment while seeking purchase. But the worst part, the feature that made Stephen whimper out loud and drop the bottle of whisky, was the head from which the voice issued.

The whites of its eyes and the gleaming little teeth in its pained grin made the tar-black ruin of the surrounding flesh all the worse for the contrast. ‘I’s come with some news, like.’

‘We don’t want any. Not any more. Nothing from you.’ Stephen swallowed and wanted desperately to remove his stare from the tottering mess in the doorway. ‘It’s over. Finished, you hear? I’ve done what was asked of me.’

‘Nah-ah. Fings have changed, like.’

‘Not for me. We had a deal.’

‘Is all fucked up, innit. Unless you can get that tart back here, and put her in that room with them fings, you’s going nowhere. But I don’t fink she’ll be wanting to see that place again. Do you?’

Stephen shook his head slowly, as the full impact of his dead son’s words sank in.

‘You’s gonna be all right, like. No one knows you have anyfing to do wiv it. But someone’s got to keep all them markin’s on the walls, like. And under the floorboards. Else, who is gonna do it for us?’

‘No. No more. You have Seth. We had a deal.’

The crispy dark skull grinned. ‘Seth’s outta the picture now. All’s we got is you.’

Stephen dropped to his knees, his hands clenched together in entreaty. ‘Tell him. Tell that thing . . . No more.’

‘Go and tell him yourself. In the darkness. Where I just been, like.’ The child looked at where its arm had once been, and then down its stained coat, and chuckled. ‘You’s going nowhere, Dad. You’s gonna stay here and look after Mum. Happy families, like.’

EPILOGUE

‘Jesus. Jesus fuckin’ Christ,’ Archie said, looking up at the walls. ‘I just never get used to it.’

Beside him, Quin didn’t speak. Just blinked a couple of times as if staring into the glare of the sun.

‘What ya think it is?’ Archie asked, his hands on his hips, standing at the foot of the unmade bed in the abandoned room.

Quin didn’t or couldn’t answer. It had been four weeks since rent had been paid on the room, and about as long since anyone could remember seeing Seth leaving or entering the building, or using the kitchen. And they had told the police as much when they came looking for him.

He should have taken more of an interest in Seth, but hadn’t wanted to pry. Everyone had their reasons for living at the Green Man. Reasons that were their own. There was never much choice involved in residency here. And Seth had always been a good tenant. Paid up on time and never bothered a soul. So he didn’t mind him falling behind on the rent for a while. But four weeks was taking the piss, and he didn’t want the Old Bill looking round the pub again either.

There had been no one in the room when Archie let the police in a month back, or at any other time since whenever he had tried to raise a response or peered inside the room from around the door. People had done it before; lived here, sometimes even for years, and then vanished without a word. The cellar was full of stuff left behind by previous tenants. There were no records kept at the Green Man or questions asked. That was the beauty of the place. You could take time out here. As long as you paid your seventy quid every week and didn’t bother anyone, then no one was going to be your keeper.

But now he came to think of it, hadn’t Seth said something about being a painter? Once, a long time ago. Maybe. He couldn’t remember. But he’d definitely been painting something up here. On the walls, and even the ceiling.

‘What should I do wi’ his stuff? Archie said, and pointed at the jumble of clothes in one corner, and at the dried-out paints, the stiff brushes, the mess of sketches strewn across the spattered dust sheets, the white saucer piled high with gnarled cigarette butts, and the rucksack beside the fridge. ‘Quin?’

‘What?’

‘I said, what should I do wi’ it?’

Quin broke his stare from the reddish colours on the chimney breast. It was like looking at an autopsy. ‘Put it in the cellar. In case he comes back to fetch it.’

Archie nodded, then looked at the wall across from the door. ‘Poor bastard was twisted. Don’t think we’re gonna be seeing him agin.’

Quin looked at the side of Archie’s face, wanting him either to elaborate or to exchange a look of mutual understanding. But then he wasn’t really sure what he wanted. Not at all sure of what was on these walls, or in his own mind as he looked at them. The pictures made him feel uncomfortable and unwell at the same time, like he was suddenly worried sick about something. And yet, he wasn’t entirely sure what he was actually looking at.

Archie shook his head. ‘What is that, a face or summat? Maybe a dog. Looks like it’s got teeth in it.’

He was talking now to ease the shock that had accompanied their turning on of the lights and opening of the thin curtains. They should have been angry at the way these walls had been defaced, or full of mirth at the preposterousness of what Seth had done. Even full of admiration at the skill involved in the way he’d got these things up there to hit you so hard when you looked at them. Took your breath away they did. But Quin couldn’t feel much now beside a deep discomfort he had no words for, and a desire to shut his eyes tight. He didn’t want to see any more. ‘Leave the dust sheets where they are and get this covered up today. You’ll have to use two coats of the white emulsion left over from the kitchen.’

‘It’ll take a roller.’

‘I don’t fuckin’ care what it takes, just get rid of it. I want this place let by Friday. Kenny’s cousin has left his missus and is looking for a place. He can have it.’

Archie nodded, still staring at the walls. Quin left the room.

‘Christ,’ Archie said to himself, and shook his head one final time before removing his glasses. He’d paint the room without his specs on. At least then he wouldn’t have to see too closely the things that climbed these walls and crawled across the ceiling. But even when they’d been covered over, he wondered if he’d ever forget them.

APARTMENT 16

Adam L. G. Nevill was born in Birmingham, England, in 1969 and grew up in England and New Zealand. He is also the author of Banquet for the Damned, an original novel of supernatural horror inspired by M. R. James and the great tradition of the British weird tale.

In his working life he has endured a variety of occupations, including from 2000 to 2004 both nightwatchman and day porter in the exclusive apartment buildings of west London.

He still lives in the capital and can be contacted through www.adamlgnevill.com

For Ramsey Campbell,
Peter Crowther and John Jarrold

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

The following books provided much inspiration for the interior design of Apartment 16 and the life of Felix Hessen: Wyndham Lewis, by Richard Humphries; The Bone Beneath the Pulp: Drawings by Wyndham Lewis, edited by Jacky Klein; Francis Bacon and the Loss of Self, by Ernst van Alphen; Francis Bacon: Taking Reality by Surprise, by Christophe Domino; Interviews with Francis Bacon, by David Sylvester; Grosz, by Ivo Kranzfelder; Diana Mosley, by Anne de Courcy; The Occult Roots of Nazism, by Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke.

Special thanks to Julie Crisp for the faith, careful readings and notes, and to my agent John Jarrold for getting me a shot at the next level. Much gratitude and affection also goes out to Ramsey Campbell, and to Peter Crowther at PS Publishing, who first brought me into print.

For my readers, Anne Parry, James Marriott and Clive Nevill, I have again incurred a debt by exploiting your precious time and critical skills. I thank you.

Finally, a very special thanks to the grand old apartment buildings of Knightsbridge, Mayfair and Marylebone that funded my ‘old school’ writing residency from 2000 to 2004. I thought I’d never ever escape.

I would like my pictures to look as if a human being had passed between them, like a snail, leaving a trail of the human presence and memory of the past events as the snail leaves its slime.

Francis Bacon, 1909–1992

First published 2010 by Pan Books

This electronic edition published 2010 by Pan Books
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ISBN 978-0-330-52572-5 PDF
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Copyright © Adam Nevill 2010

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