Naomi's Room (11 page)

Laura’s feet sounded in the corridor. There was a sound of crockery tinkling. Quickly, I gathered together the photographs and passed them back to Lewis, who slipped them into his briefcase. Laura called. I got up to open the door. As I reached it, a wave of the purest nausea swept over me. I did not make it to the bathroom. Instead, I threw up my breakfast halfway up the stairs.

When I returned, I pretended to Laura that my stomach had been reacting to the strains of the night before. She did not believe me, of course. She glanced at me and Lewis as though she suspected us of some gross infidelity. I took a cup of coffee and forced it down, sip by bitter sip, unsugared, as black as my mood. Lewis had the courage I lacked.

‘Mrs Hillenbrand,’ he said, ‘I have just been showing your husband some more photographs. They were taken yesterday in your attic. They contain . . .’ He hesitated. ‘Let us say that they are deeply disturbing. I have not shown Charles the worst of them, not by any means. But you have witnessed the effect of those he has seen.’

Laura said nothing. He went on:

‘I think you have two choices. The first is that you leave this house now, today, as soon as you have packed. Find an agent, put the house on the market, get it off your hands. Start a new life for yourselves somewhere else.’ He paused.

‘That is your first option. Unfortunately, it may leave the situation unresolved. Whoever comes here after you may very well find what you have encountered.’

‘It has not been so very terrible,’ Laura said. ‘I see no reason to leave home on account of it.’

‘No,’ Lewis answered. He was very calm. He had thought this through. ‘You are perfectly right. So far, nothing very bad has happened. It is more a question of nerves than anything. But now something has happened to disturb the equilibrium. That something was, I suspect, your daughter’s death. Before that, you were not troubled. These – what shall we call them? – images, phantoms, whatever, were present, not just here, but wherever you and your husband went. Venice, for example. And other places too, I am sure.

‘But after Naomi’s death, they seem to have become more visible in and around the house. Charles tells me you have actually met and spoken with the little girls.’

Laura nodded. I’m not sure, but I think she shivered. More fear in the memory than in the act. Lewis went on.

‘In the photographs from Egypt and those taken here, they are beginning to shift.’

‘To shift?’ Laura’s eyebrows went up a fraction. Was she humouring him even then?

‘To move between different states. To show themselves in more than one guise. The little girls especially, but also the woman in grey and your daughter. They change form, I will not describe how. But if you were to see them in their . . . altered states, you might raise your eyebrows less.’

So, he had noticed after all. Well, he was no slouch, our Mr Lewis. An unreformed Welshman and a former alcoholic, but sharp enough for all that.

‘The man is different,’ he continued, ‘though he too shifts after his fashion. The rooms are also capable of transformation.’

‘The rooms? How do you mean?’

‘I have photographs of this room,’ he said. ‘It is the same room, but as it might have been around the middle of the last century. Perhaps a little earlier. That, at least, is my guess. In one of the photographs, the woman is sitting in a chair. Just over there, by the window.’

He pointed and our eyes followed his finger. I shivered, thinking that she might be there now, watching us. Lewis continued. He still addressed himself mainly to Laura.

‘There have been . . . manifestations,’ he said. ‘Both of you have heard sounds. Yesterday, your husband and I visited the attic. We sensed . . .’ He stopped, grasping for a way to express what it was we had experienced.

‘A flux in our emotions,’ I said. It was an attempt to distance myself from the enormity of what I had felt.

‘Yes,’ Lewis said. ‘Anger displacing . . . whatever had been there previously.’

‘Well, what’s the point of all this?’ Laura interjected impatiently. Lack of sleep had not improved her temper.

‘The point?’ It was Lewis’s turn to raise his eyebrows. ‘The point is this, Mrs Hillenbrand.’ I remember that he always preserved a polite formality with her. ‘If these changes become more . . . violent. If the . . . creatures that are haunting this house become more physical, you will not wish to be here. I do not exaggerate.

‘More than that, I am afraid for you, though I cannot explain why. I feel . . . Let me say that I have felt a terrible sense of menace here. Perhaps you have not, but I assure you, it is here.’

‘I don’t understand,’ said Laura, voicing my own doubt from before, ‘how it is possible for a camera to record images that are invisible to the naked eye. A camera is not – how shall I put this? – is not a spiritual instrument. It is not an item in the medium’s armamentarium.’ She was being deliberately affected. She could be, of course, it was in her nature. Affectation and disdain.

Lewis set down the coffee-cup from which he had been drinking. I noticed that his hand had stopped shaking. He seemed very calm.

‘I have been giving that little matter a great deal of thought over the past few days. Great thought. It has been a source of infinite trouble to me. As you say, photographic film is sensitive to light, not spiritual emanations. It now seems to me, however, that we have been looking at the entire matter back to front, as it were.’

He paused, less for effect, I think, than to gather thoughts that were only as yet half-formed. Laura was silent. Something in Lewis’s manner had taken hold of her.

‘The point is,’ he went on, ‘that, as you so rightly say, the camera is an instrument of limited dimensions. It can only be adjusted so’ – he made a gesture with his fingers, as though holding a camera – ‘or so. The focal length may be altered, or the shutter speed, or the angle of the lens. But it will, provided it has not been set badly out of focus or at entirely the wrong speed, make a fair enough record of anything you point it at.’

He ran a hand over his hair, smoothing it.

‘Now,’ he continued, ‘that is not altogether true of the human eye. The eye itself is, perhaps, quite inflexible. We can’t make it infrared-sensitive or capable of acting like a microscope. A camera would be more flexible. But it is not the eye that does the real seeing, it is the brain. It is the brain that records impressions sent to it by the eye. Our brains are unreliable. Our perception varies from one of us to the next.’

He paused again to drink and, I think, to steady his nerves.

‘I’m sorry,’ he muttered. ‘I’m not explaining this well. Look, what I’m trying to say is this: I think that what my camera has seen, what it has photographed is . . . how things really are. Sometimes normal, as you might say, like this room at this moment. Sometimes the same room as it would have been in the past. And . . . sometimes the same room, still in the past, but changed. It’s as though the room is moving through time, and the camera is just photographing what it sees. I think . . . I think the people are actually there much of the time, and that they show up on film as a result. It’s just that we don’t see them, can’t see them, for whatever reasons. We are not . . . attuned. Do you see? The fault lies with us, with our perception, not with the camera.’

I looked round the room and shivered. ‘How things really are . . .’ We were living in a state of unreality, in a dream of our own making. This room might be full of ghosts, might be packed with all the house’s dead, but we could not see them.

‘I think,’ the Welshman continued in a voice that had fallen to little more than a whisper, ‘I think that, bit by bit, their reality may be taking control here, that before long we will start to see them and hear them more and more often.’

‘You said two choices,’ Laura broke in. ‘What was the second?’

He did not answer at once. Perhaps he realized that he had gone too far, that she might after all prefer the second option.

‘We go back up to the attic,’ he said finally. ‘That’s the heart of this thing, that’s where it resides. We find out what it is. And we put a stop to it.’

For a long time, nobody spoke. Lewis had shot his bolt, he was waiting for a sign that it had struck home. It was in the middle of that silence that the clock stopped ticking for the first time. It struck me then as queer, though I said nothing. I was thinking about what had happened the day before.

Laura, surprisingly, was the first to speak.

‘I can’t conceive of leaving here,’ she said. ‘It’s my home. It was Naomi’s home.’ She hesitated. ‘Her only home. If she’s here, I can’t leave.’

Lewis looked at her for at least half a minute before speaking.

‘You will come with me to the attic, then?’

‘I’m not afraid,’ she said.

‘You should be.’

I cut in.

‘After what happened yesterday . . . Do you think it’s safe to go back there?’

Lewis shrugged.

‘Safe?’ he asked. ‘How should I know? I’m not even sure if any of my theories are correct. But I think that, if we choose our moment, it’s possible to go up there and come out again without seeing or hearing or feeling anything. The problem is telling when it’s safe to do so. It would help if we knew whether there was some sort of periodicity. Perhaps there is, but it would take time to work out.’

‘What do you expect to find?’

‘If I knew, I wouldn’t have to go up. But I have a feeling there’s more to your attic than meets the eye.’

He stood.

‘Let’s go outside first,’ he said. ‘I want to check something.’

We followed him out. The first signs of spring had touched the garden. Its trees bore an air of determined normality. I could not imagine them slipping to reveal another reality. They were rooted, fast, secure, their only changes were inward and seasonal: the dropping of dried leaves and the brightening of buds.

Lewis headed straight for the side of the house. He looked up, getting his bearings on the attic, then strode purposefully down the flank of the building, counting off the paces.

‘Fifty-three,’ he said, turning to face us. ‘Now, let’s see what we find upstairs.’

We climbed the stairs, subdued and silent. I had already begun to suspect what Lewis was looking for. Laura was tense and still angry, as though the Welshman’s presence threatened her in some way. I found myself listening carefully, as though I expected some protest from the beings whose secrets we were trying to uncover. But the only sounds were those of our own footsteps and the occasional creaking of a stair.

I unlocked the attic door. When I look back, I am astonished by my own courage – my stupidity, I now consider it – in turning the handle and pulling the door open. The photographs had prepared me for any horror; alone, I would never have plucked up the courage. But my torch picked out the staircase and nothing else. There was only darkness and a sense of expectation. In their old, fusty clothes and their tangled hair, they were there, unseen, waiting for us to ascend.

I hesitated on the threshold. It was there, I could sense it, tugging at me like a spider pulling on the ragged edges of its web. I looked at Lewis.

‘Is there no way of knowing?’ I asked.

He shook his head.

‘We have to chance it,’ he said.

‘Oh, for God’s sake!’ Laura snapped. ‘You’re both behaving like children.’

Without warning, she snatched the torch from my hand and pushed past me through the doorway. Her feet sounded loudly on the bare wooden treads, then her voice came back to us, muffled, as though far away.

‘It seems perfectly all right to me.’

‘It isn’t how it seems, Mrs Hillenbrand,’ Lewis called up. ‘It’s how it really is that matters. We’ll come up, but be ready to clear out if there’s the least sign of anything out of place.’

He passed his torch to me and took another from his bag. I went up ahead of him, my heart racing wildly, a step at a time, watching, listening for the slightest change.

Laura was waiting by the window. The attic seemed as it had always been. I could not relate the photographs Lewis had showed me to what lay around us. Daylight came through the unshuttered window, dulling the light of our torches. I switched mine off. Laura had already extinguished hers.

Lewis went to the window, ignoring Laura, and did a quick turn, putting his back to it. Now he paced forward, as he had done outside, taking moderate, even steps, counting them out beneath his breath. He reached the far wall.

‘Thirty-seven,’ he said, quite without emotion.

No one said anything. I think we all understood what it meant. My hands grew cold with sweat. I wanted to leave that room at once, leave it and never return. Laura stayed where she had been from the beginning, near the window.

‘What we’re looking for is behind this wall,’ Lewis said. He spoke calmly, without haste; but I could tell that his self-control was a means of protecting himself against the panic that might, if unchecked, destroy him.

He struck the wall hard with his fist. It seemed solid enough, fashioned from brick. Perhaps we were mistaken after all.

‘We’ll need something heavy. A large hammer or an axe might do.’

‘You want to break it down?’ I knew it was a stupid question when I asked it.

‘I’d rather not,’ Lewis said. ‘But if we want to find out what’s causing all this . . .’

‘I’ll get something,’ I said. ‘Wait here.’

When I returned five minutes later carrying an axe and a heavy spade from the garden shed, there was an uneasy tension in the room. Lewis looked up as I entered.

‘It’s been quiet,’ he said.

Laura snorted.

‘He’s having you on, Charles. Don’t you see? He’s set this whole thing up in his fucking studio.’

‘Shut up, Laura.’ I had never spoken to her like that before. She fell silent as though I had slapped her. In a way, I had.

Lewis took the spade, I used the axe. There were chips of wood on the blade, old wood from the autumn, when I had been cutting logs for the fire. It was an exhilaration, chasing away the silence and the fear with hard blows. The plaster came away in slabs, crashing dully to the floor, sending up clouds of dust. The brickwork was more stubborn. We worked together on a small area near the centre of the wall, banging and hammering with all our strength but without much success, until, suddenly, one brick cracked and fell out. We worked hard at the hole, enlarging it with sharp blows from the axe, then breaking it up in chunks with wild swings from the spade.