They must have seen Ewan as an opportunity and snatched at him to placate that restless presence on the top floor. He imagined Ewan’s bragging about his literary prowess after being caught trespassing. The fool had got in way over his head, had scarpered and lasted two weeks on the run. His last bad scene. Too much defiance from Seb too would fatally stretch the patience of Veronica and Joyce. Seb imagined they made reports to whatever existed higher up the food chain.
When a suspicion that he was being watched from the top windows of the Tor became uncomfortable, Seb went back inside. Indoors, he clung to a wall until an episode of panic passed. He then looked about himself in the musty darkness.
So how was it done? How was a night endured here? Mark Fry had managed it. Ewan too. But when Seb thought of those figures on the train, and of what he’d dreamed into life inside his hotel room in Manchester, he bent double and closed his eyes.
‘Oh, dear God.’
They were coming tonight.
Seb collected three blankets from the SPR bedrooms and took them downstairs to beat as much dust from them as he could using his bare hands. He unshuttered the windows in one of the large rooms and spread the blankets on the dirty sofa. One would go beneath him and two on top. Though he didn’t expect to sleep.
The light that passed through the grimy glass was welcome and would last until around nine p.m. He even wondered if spending the night outside would be safer, until he recalled a dream of being chased across the golf links in Churston by something with its head covered by a dirty sack.
Thin Len. The strangler. Child-killer.
Indoors it is.
He had most of one bottle of water left, and that would have to last until morning. The apple and banana he’d put inside his rucksack, and the flapjack that he’d bought while stopping for petrol early that morning would have to sustain him, though the mere idea of anything inside his stomach made him nauseous.
Seb also wondered if he should take the opportunity to look at the files in the basement. Maybe he could learn something useful. But his desire to get out of the building became greater. Until the dying of the light he would stay in the open.
Half a mile from the Tor, he came across an ivy-choked cottage, the home of Joyce and Veronica. They’d made no effort to maintain the small gardens. Two greening sheets of polythene had been untidily weighted down with bricks upon one part of the roof.
He suffered a quick and hideous vision of the two creatures being a part of his life from now on, his existence much reduced and compromised while he remained within their orbit. It would be like having two of Ewan around, only it would be much worse. Even worse than that. When does this end?
And what came next? A co-written book with all proceeds going to the SPR? Or did they have something more evangelical in mind, so that he would be required to put his name and reputation behind their cause?
Maybe they would accept a cheque now and leave him alone.
No, because he wanted to be in print again. That’s what they claimed. Hazzard wasn’t giving up on the earthbound prison.
How was this material to be narrated, even dictated to him? Inside there? Seb looked in the direction of Hunter’s Tor Hall and needed to sit down to stop the shaking that came to his legs.
He couldn’t have made up a situation as outlandish for one of his own books, but here he was, trying to peer through the windows of a hovel and the home of M. L. Hazzard’s two surviving curators.
Through an open window at the side of the building, Seb spied the interior of a scruffy and overcrowded living room. Two large blue Calor Gas tanks and a twin-plate camping stove were visible. He briefly pondered why they had not made part of the Tor habitable and then he remembered Joyce’s reference to ‘the alumni’. That alone satisfied his curiosity about the living arrangements.
He moved off and walked the grounds for a few hours more, using what paths he could find in the woods and overgrown meadows. In places, he caught glimpses of the distant boundary walls.
Eventually, at dusk, the effects of exhaustion upon his nerves encouraged him to return to the Tor, to wait it out.
He heard the first one just after nine p.m.
26
A Vast Blackness, Infinity
The sun had all but disappeared. The evening chill was moist upon the grass. And from the grounds at the rear of the building there came a voice. No words that he could make out, but a woman’s voice that carried through the otherwise silent and still dusk.
Seb stirred from where he was sitting with his back against the front doors, his thoughts momentarily adrift.
He found no one at the rear of the building where he’d hoped to come across Joyce, perhaps on a scouting mission to make sure that he’d stayed put. Maybe they knew where he was anyway, at any time.
How they communicated with what existed within the Hall, and if that was aware of him too, he had to establish before any attempt could be made to severe the connection. The process of projection had taken a great deal out of Ewan. It wasn’t easy, and maybe that could be used in his favour too.
When he was nearer to the rose garden, Seb heard the woman’s voice again, though it came from much closer to where he stood.
They buried me over there.