Only last week, after I had just finished narrating an experience that left me weak and shaking, I received a sense that something was standing outside the study. It was in the corridor between here and the dining room, where I take my small meals.
I know he had been aware of me that time. Perhaps the faint tapping of the typewriter keys had carried to . . . but to where? I don’t really know.
I moved myself out of the chair and swiftly to the door of the study and I called out what I had wished to say for some time. I asked him for mercy. I cried out and said I could not continue for much longer, that the visions were becoming too much, that when they dispersed from my head they drew my mind out from my body.
You see, there are places on this earth that help us to get out of ourselves, that make us enlarge in spirit, and this is one of them.
But in that corridor outside the study, I caught sight of an iridescence that hindered. Rags of a soul-body, and those shreds fled as if Hazzard had been disturbed in his bathroom, and was gripped by a mortification at the sight of his own unclothed form.
Withered were the smears of the Master’s legs too. Outstretched were the bones upon which Hazzard’s sharp fingers trembled to a blur. But the fingernails were painted a dark colour, so I assumed that it was Diane that time. I could smell her too, and that day she smelled like the rank water left in a vase, once the roses have all died.
Quickly, she grew smaller in my sight, as if she were skittering down a slope that could not have existed inside that passage. And yet I perceived evidence of a black wig, one too static and clumsily propped upon a small skull, as if to re-enact some former period of glamour that was once enjoyed amidst a coterie of admirers.
At other times, Diane is better put together, and when I hear her tipped heels approaching, I make sure to get down upon the dusty floor and to avert my eyes.
At those times, Diane will wear a black wig, a hat and dark glasses and cover herself as much as she is able. To catch sight of her face in a reflection can produce a terrible shock that makes me fear for my heart. The sudden crushing pressure of the air through which she stares, the miasma of the scent, the horrible, queasy flopping inside my belly as if I am being turned upside down, but finding nothing below my feet, is too much to bear for more than moments. One can never get used to it.
Only during those rare appearances do I get a sense that she knows I am here, or at least has a sense that someone inhabits these rooms below her, like a rat. A rat that scratches its fingers upon the typewriter’s keys.
When Hazzard comes in his male form, he rises in rooms adjacent to those that I rest within. At these times, I imagine that the double is in a grim mood. I judge this by the sounds that come through the walls. I imagine him squinting too, as if near-sighted, as he pants with rage and utters those bitter, indecipherable exclamations and gropes about the empty rooms, feeling his way about the grimy walls, looking for his past, I think. Or maybe he even searches for another who is no longer around. Who can say what it is that the restless dead still seek?
Alas, the entire collaborative venture is futile, and I have done all that can be done. I have fashioned enough material for three experiences within my first month at the Tor. I have often said aloud, ‘These strange experiences have no commercial value. Not any more.’ I have tried repeatedly to tell him that his ghastly snatches of the numinous are destined for an even greater obscurity than he knew before.
I have called out, ‘There is no future for you! Not out there! Not now!’ But I don’t think he hears because the visions keep returning and forming, and I see again and again the sights that have made my hair whiten, and that have shrivelled me inside and left me trembling and sobbing against the hard floors of the Tor, or slumped upon the typewriter and unable to rouse unless others come and slap my cheeks hard.
Others.
There are others in his service beyond the two women who call themselves Wendy and Natalie, and who arrive at the end of each week to take my papers away.
As ‘Mark Fry’ said, local people do put boxes of food outside the gates, the food that sustains me. I’ve never seen anyone make the drop-offs, but I have heard distant car engines and the strident sound of a car horn. It blares three times in the distance to let me know that such basic food-stuffs, and often expired dry goods, have arrived. When I arrive at the gates the car has gone and the box of food is in the grass outside the wall. I think they spit onto the food.
This locally sourced food supply sustained the last of the API too. Their story is in the files. I have read over half of them now.