Seb looked about the bed. His room was dark but the silhouettes of the furniture were visible. Light didn’t so much shine beneath the door from the passage outside, as seep inside. A soft, grey light tinged a glacial blue.
When he opened his bedroom door he realized that the lights in the corridor were switched off. Despite that, he was seeing too much of the passage without the aid of electric light. This dull glow in his home suggested an overspill, one steady and unflickering, but from where did it shine?
Streetlights above the front drive were too distant to penetrate the building. Without interior light the house remained dark at night. The source confounded him.
The television upstairs? Was Ewan in the living room again?
As he tried to fathom out the luminosity in the corridor, his awareness of a peculiar discomfort grew. This was nothing physical, like being hot or cold. What he tried to dismiss as an after-effect of the nightmare persisted as apprehension. He suspected he was about to meet someone unpleasant. The very atmosphere of the building had altered and now swelled with the anticipation of a presence, or the arrival of something.
Taking shorter breaths, if he took them at all, Seb was reminded of how he’d felt when Ewan appeared to him outdoors. A static prickle passed through the fine hairs on the nape of his neck and needled his scalp.
Ewan. Ewan must have been projecting again.
Whether by shaking or punching the man awake, Seb would stop whatever was being initiated. But before he took a single step towards Ewan’s room, Seb turned in the direction of the staircase because of what he could now hear.
The sound was coming from above him. Though the noise was muted through the walls and ceiling, someone was in distress and weeping upstairs in the living area.
Ewan?
As quietly as he could manage, Seb walked barefoot to the stairs and went up. He’d only taken a few steps when the weeping ceased and was replaced by a voice, or voices, that stayed low and whispered together sibilantly.
The light on the staircase had now changed, and he would have been surprised if a television could transmit an illumination capable of making the walls and stairs appear so drab, if not neglected.
Seb continued up.
Within the strange light his own home now appeared much older. He peered about the landing and was made to think of shuttered and locked-away places, where dust and dross gathered behind boarded windows, and flat surfaces turned grey and powdery. Unrestored and lacking in human habitation for decades.
Before Seb made the landing, the distant murmur of voices was accompanied by the noise of dry paper shifting about the wooden floorboards. It could have been the riffling of a book’s pages by a breeze.
From where he stood, he could see that the doors of the study and utility rooms were closed. The television was mounted on a wall and was out of sight, but the set emitted no light. It wasn’t switched on, so the light wasn’t coming from there.
Just out of his sight, on the far side of the living room, the paper was soon being strewn about as if loose leaves were being subjected to a hurried investigation.
What he could see of the living area, which reached to the windows and balcony beyond, might have become a basement. One in which his furniture had been stored for years. The light was faint and grainy, with a hint of tarnished silver, as if it were passing through gaps in the walls. Picture frames were black holes. Bookcases were inky rectangles. The corners of the room and balcony doors were lost entirely to darkness.
The unnatural light aged whatever it fell upon. He suspected he’d re-entered his most recent dream and become engulfed by the ghastly illumination of the watery tunnel.
Where was the source?
The voices?
‘Ewan?’ he called out, but too quietly. ‘Ewan! God’s sake, what are you doing?’
His voice startled a fresh activity within the living room, and he was relieved that he could not see what had cast its shadow onto the far wall.
Those lengths of what might have been the impossible shadows of wavering tree branches soon took shape as peculiarly long arms held out before a wasted body, topped by a large head.
The murky suggestion of shadow then rose up higher and felt about, as if blind and unsteady when upright.
A heavy object struck the living-room floor and Seb’s heart may have stopped for several seconds. He assumed that a sighting of whatever was inside the room would be foolish. ‘Who’s there?’ he cried out, the force of his voice compelled by panic.
A soft thump.
Scratching.
The shadow on the living room wall grew within his sight.