‘I need a piss. I’m going in there. Shift,’ Dan said. ‘But let’s get this wrapped up quick when I’m done syphoning off this wheat beer,’ he said over his shoulder as he urinated.
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Kyle nodded. ‘No problem. Let’s redo the nursery segment.
Then do a piece in night mode up in Sister Katherine’s penthouse. Get some shots of the place in night mode on our way back up. We can do audio over them later and cut them into Susan’s piece.’
Dan nodded, zipped up, reclaimed the camera and headed for the stairs. He paused at the bottom and turned his head to Kyle. ‘You don’t think someone got in and hid?’
‘No chance. Come on, big man, shift your arse.’
‘For one year, Sister Katherine spent most of her time in these four rooms. Glimpsed infrequently, she would venture out dripping with jewellery, and clad in the designer clothes she became so fond of, to shop on Bond Street, or to visit the exclusive clubs of Mayfair and Knightsbridge and Chelsea, from which a few photos of her still exist. Palatial accom-modation compared to the rest of the building, where the adepts slept crammed against each other, the cries of the infants in the basement nursery perhaps rising up to disturb sleep already hampered by snoring and a total lack of priv -
acy. This separation had a powerful impact upon the minds of her followers. It was the clearest indication of Sister Katherine’s authority over them, and her elevation to the status of absolute spiritual leader. Which would become all too evident at the next two locations where she exiled her loyal, but dwindling band of adepts. Ending in what one writer called—’
‘Dude! We have
definitely
got company. Shit!’
Kyle jumped, caught his breath. He stared at the side of Dan’s head; his temples were wired with white hair. Dan’s getting old, he thought, stupidly.
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And the sound was repeated; a pattern of footsteps outside the street-facing room on the penthouse floor. What appeared to be unsteady steps; the sounds suggested the feet were dry and bare, scuffing at the wooden floorboards in the central corridor. But the entire second storey had been devoid of life besides the two of them; they had even checked again to put Dan’s mind at rest.
‘What is it?’ Dan’s face was stiff with fright. He quickly removed his beloved Canon XHA from the tripod.
Kyle hurriedly untaped the tie mics from inside his shirt.
‘How the fuck do I know?’
Dan slowly lowered the camera to the floor, untangled himself. ‘This is not funny. Just not funny. I’m going to—’ A door, somewhere outside the room, was slammed with such force he never finished the sentence.
Kyle finished it for him. ‘Get the fuck out.’
Dan headed for the door. Kyle hurried after him; the camera’s spotlight lit the room to where they paused in the doorway, but not much further beyond the threshold.
‘Who’s there?’ Kyle shouted. His voice carried deep into the building.
Silence. They looked at each other. Then peered to their right, down the hallway and into the darkness that had taken possession of the remainder of the floor. Beyond the beat of his heart inside his ears, Kyle heard a faint whistle.
A whistle?
He couldn’t be sure. Must have come from outside. No, it was a dog. One of the neighbours’ dogs. Because he then heard a squeal like a paw had been stepped upon. But in the distance. Far away. But up above them.
Impossible
. ‘You hearing that? Outside?’
Dan’s eyes blinked rapidly. ‘Let’s take off.’ He turned his 72
LAST DAYS
body to head back inside the room to collect the camera, then paused. Kyle held his hand up for silence, and squinted, on account of the cold draught seeping through the hallway from the rear of the building. A subtle wind pregnant with the odour of decomposition. Which immediately brought to his mind the memory of a bird he found as a child: tar-gluey with its own black blood, jumping with white tics, dusty and dead-stinky. He placed a finger under his nose. ‘Ugh.’
Dan coughed. ‘I’m—’
But there it was again, a distant burst of whistles interspersed with a sound reminiscent of a gargle heard through a wall. Followed a few seconds later by a dog whining. They stood mute and immobile until the sudden thump of feet raced through the unlit hallway of the penthouse and broke them from paralysis.
For a moment, they became trapped against each other within the door frame. Dan’s elbow knocked against Kyle’s shoulder.
He’s pushing me behind him!
Panic surged to fill Kyle’s head with a jostle of thoughtless thoughts, and an image of Susan White’s lined and lipless mouth saying, ‘Presences’.
He followed Dan down the darkened stairs from the second floor to the first; the soles of his Converse landed on the smooth edges of the stairs and shot forward; the sound of his breath was smothered by the
bang bang bang
of Dan’s feet in front of him.
Kyle couldn’t swallow. He looked at Dan’s eyes as Dan rounded the stairwell and headed to the first floor, half running, half scrabbling, and wished he hadn’t; they were wide and bright with fear in a beam of street light that washed across his pale unshaven face. Hysteria electrified Kyle’s 73
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gut, spread to his legs and arms, was barely contained and wanted to break out, and to force a thrashing acceleration over Dan and his cumbersome staircase-blocking body. He had no idea who, or what, he was running from, but his instincts screamed: get out!
Kyle’s feet dropped into the ambient street light that bounced off the laminate floors. The light squeezed into the building from the small square windows of the stairwell, but was never more than vague. Between these jump-cuts of half-darkness, he thrust his feet into nothingness and jarred his back as if he walked on legs that refused to bend.
Kyle looked behind him. Saw the front door to the penthouse floor. It gaped. Was black, smudgy and vibrated in his half-sight. Nothing moved within it. But if anything did, he knew he would freeze and wait on the stairs, incapable of movement.
Wait for what?
He kept running downwards behind Dan’s noisy lurches, then across the tiny first-floor landing to the next set of stairs.
The world shook in Kyle’s wide-eyed grasp for luminance, for clarity, for the world to reform in light and to return to visibility and to safety. Dan’s breath panted ahead of him, adding an urgency to his own.
A door slammed shut, behind them, upstairs. Maybe in the penthouse. Through the maelstrom of their panting, their banging feet and beating hearts, Kyle also heard a skitter, like a dog’s frantic claws upon a wooden floor as it tried to get up. He became too afraid to look back again, in case something now moved behind them.
A sudden rush of air from above dropped through the middle of the stairwell they rounded like frightened children.
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Fell like a long hiss and preceded what Kyle thought was the grunt of a pig.
‘Oh fuck. Oh fuck,’ Dan gasped, and slipped and thumped his broad shoulder off a stairwell wall. Kyle passed him on the inside and took the last flight of stairs three at a time, and didn’t break his stride until he was at the front door.
Dan pressed himself into his friend’s back. He wheezed in a high-pitched nasal rhythm of terror. ‘Open it!’
‘I’m trying!’ In Kyle’s hands, the bunch of keys jumped and rattled and shone silvery like tiny fish in a fisherman’s net. He jabbed, stabbed and he scraped one, two, three of the wrong size keys at the lock, before dropping the entire bunch. He thought he might cry with rage and fear and frustration.
Behind them, the building returned to silence.
Hands on knees, they gulped at the night air. Hunched over, side by side, on the pavement, across the road from the dark, silent house, the red door closed behind their flight, Dan sounded like he was having a heart attack.
Gotta lay off the
kebabs, big man
, Kyle thought in the idiotic ordinariness of flimsy thinking that wafted into a mind recently traumatized by abject terror.
He put a hand on Dan’s big ham of a shoulder, and pushed himself upright. Dan’s T-shirt was soaked with sweat. It smelled of beef crisps on a horse blanket. Kyle wiped his hand against the thighs of his Levis. ‘You believe this shit?’
Dan couldn’t speak.
‘Man. I mean, Jesus.’ He raised two hands in the air, beseeching the night to provide an answer.
Dan rose like an old man from a wheelchair. ‘See anything?’
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Kyle thought hard on the question; quickly ran through the jumble of his jumping vision that he could recall. ‘No.
But did you hear that sound?’
‘Which one?’
Kyle heard himself giggle nervously before he realized he was doing it.
‘That was some freaky shit, right there.’ Dan’s face was ashen, his top lip moist with pebbles of sweat between the salt-and-pepper whiskers. ‘What was it?’
Kyle shook his head. Shrugged. ‘I heard feet. That . . . that
. . . zooey sound.’
Dan’s anxious face broke into a feeble grin. ‘Zooey?’
‘Birds. Animals. You know, like in a zoo. In the distance.
You get that?’
Dan’s wet brow creased in puzzlement. ‘I heard a voice.’
‘No.’
‘Like wailing. This kind of trying to sing. I think. No words in it. Then maybe a dog too. And, like a flute, or something.’
‘Flute? Like a whistle?’
‘Maybe. Dunno.’ He paused and clutched both hands to his mouth. ‘Oh shit.’
‘What? What?’ Kyle’s repetition went up an octave.
‘Cameras. Dude, the frickin’ cameras are still in there.’
Kyle laughed, more with relief than at the absurdity of the situation. ‘You think I’m going back in there without a priest, you’re kidding yourself.’
‘The christening. I gotta be there at nine in the morning.
I promised Jared. Shit.’
During a silence that lasted for seconds, but one that felt like minutes, Kyle stared at the house. He shook his head. ‘I can’t believe it. A big part of me is now seriously wondering 76
LAST DAYS
if that was the first, the very first, I tell you, the first experience, the first encounter with . . . whatever . . . I’ve ever had.’
Dan tried to smile. ‘Could have been a rat, a pigeon stuck inside. A dog. Some kind of draught. We’re half-cut. Old buildings have weird acoustics. And we didn’t see anything.
We just got spooked.’
Kyle turned his head to Dan. Held both of his hands out with the palms open. ‘Go and fetch your camera then.’
77
FOUR
west hampstead, london.
12 june 2011. 1 p.m.
By Sunday the whole episode felt imagined. They’d pulled off a successful dawn raid and got out of the building with all the equipment intact.
An animal had crept inside the Clarendon Road house. A dog. A fox. A bird. Pigeons. They were everywhere. And the smallest movements and sounds of an avian or animal intrusion were amplified enough to frighten them witless. Or maybe, like Dan said, a trespasser had followed them inside.
But then why hadn’t the gear been tampered with, or
worse?
He’d ruled out a TV or radio because the house was detached and its windows were closed, but reminded himself that darkness attuned any imagination to suggestion. It was natural. And unsurprising after Susan White’s stories about visions and presences in a vast empty building. A couple of beers and the creak of a floorboard were the only require-ments to set them off. Though the fewer people who knew about the incident the better. He was embarrassed now he felt more secure after a day at home in his desperate studio flat; in his joggers, at work on the script, cigarette smoke per-78
LAST DAYS
manently adrift from the gargoyle ashtray, another cafetière on his desk.
Inside his little scruffy sanctuary, he’d gradually let his senses feel about and settle on the fusty anchors of his life: the ancient leather sofa that gave him backache; wall-racks filled with hundreds of DVD spines; the stereo; the smoothie -
maker that had been a present, but was a dog with fleas to clean; hundreds of books shelved as if by a monkey over three units; black-and-white movie stills; the framed poster of Herzog’s
Aguirre: The Wrath of God
; the desk from Ikea that had been in the flat when he moved in, now cluttered with folders, more books and DVDs.
Not much to cling to: a worn-out retreat with a perpetually empty fridge, a vague smell of cat piss near the front door, two sash windows that never closed fully, and storage heaters that didn’t work. He couldn’t even read his own gas and electricity meters because they were sealed in the basement flat two floors down, whose occupant he’d never seen.
The flat appeared even more ramshackle than he remembered after the space and grace of the Holland Park town house. Same deal after an overnight in a hotel when you lived like a bum. But it was home. Secure and real. And even if the previous night’s experience left him uneasy enough to suffer a late night, followed by dreams he couldn’t recall in the morning, as the new day’s light filled the world, the edge to his fear had dimmed.
Kyle removed the fourth flash drive from the back of his laptop; it was marked
London, June 11, Clarendon Road,
Penthouse Interview: Susan White aka Sister Isis
. Some great footage was already visible in the first four drives. Susan White’s interview segments all ascended to critical points 79
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when her agitation became visible; usually close to the end of each segment.
Neat.
Her scenes couldn’t have been better if they’d used a well-rehearsed actor. She was
for real
. It all looked good too. The natural light dimmed as the day progressed; faded from a white sterility and vacancy in which Susan looked withered and reduced, to evolve into an amber hue at dusk, full of shadows as the walls came in around her.
It was a marvel to see a story find its own pace and tone so quickly. And the eerie sounds he’d picked up in the boom mic provided the London section with a soundtrack it was never meant to have.