The House On Nazareth Hill Read online

  The slam of the car door sounded flattened, boxed in. The harsh light drained the facade of colour and coated the windows, turning them blank and dead. His gravelly tread in the midst of so much stillness made him feel conspicuous, as though he was being watched through the opaque panes. ‘Hardly,’ he mumbled, and tried singing ‘It came upon a midnight clear’, but could remember no more words. He pulled out his keys with a jangle keener than the clash of gravel and let himself into Nazarill.

  The external glare stopped short of the corridor. As the glass doors tolled behind him, the glow of the interior set about becoming visible. The close stagnant warmth revived his sweating, and he unbuttoned his coat as he twisted the key in his lock. The door fell away from him, pulling him into its hall, and he slapped the light-switch. ‘What are you lot up to in the dark?’ he said.

  None of those addressed answered him. Being taken unawares was their constant state. Here was a bridegroom stumbling over his wife’s train as he lunged in pursuit of his windblown top hat, and next to them a mother poised to strangle her five-year-old who wouldn’t sit still for the camera. Opposite these framed photographs were a flautist whose musicality was summed up by the grimace of the pianist behind her, and a hotelier who’d insisted on rearranging himself and his Great Danes so often that one of the dogs was cocking its leg against his seventeenth-century chair. Usually talking to these and their kind in the various rooms relaxed Dominic in proportion to the trouble the sitters had given him, but tonight it didn’t quite work, perhaps because even once he’d tugged the chains of the tubular lights above the frames, the hall seemed unduly dark. ‘Too much to drink, that’s what it is. Anybody going to tell me off? Thought not,’ he said, and stumbled to the bathroom.

  A young woman who’d fidgeted so much during her coming-of-age portrait session that she had almost come out of her strapless dress was waiting for him. ‘I should avert your eyes if I were you,’ Dominic advised her. ‘Not that there’s much to see.’ He took out the little he had and emptied the great deal for which it was the solitary egress, then sent himself to the kitchen for the blackest coffee he could make. While the percolator accumulated its bubbling he peered over a swelling and dwindling patch of his breath on the window at the tree, from which he had to persuade himself broken branches were dangling, not ropes. When the percolator uttered a peremptory click he half drained a mug of coffee before refilling it to take to the darkroom. He’d known he was for Nazarill the moment he’d seen he would have a windowless room.

  The amber glow of the safe light seemed not so much to illuminate the room as to stick like honey to its contents: the single eye of the enlarger poring over the base board, the plastic tray lining up opaque jars of chemicals beside the tray which isolated the developing tank. He stood the mug in the space between the tanks on the bench and leaned into the hall to switch off the light. ‘Don’t get up to anything while I can’t see,’ he murmured at the photographs, only to find that the joke hovered in the dimness of the room, so that he had to remind himself the appeal of living alone was that there was nobody to let unwanted light in. ‘Here comes the dark,’ he said loudly, and punched the switch and closed the door hard, rustling the long envelopes which protected negatives. ‘On with the job,’ he said.

  His voice sounded unnaturally close to him, as though it had very little space to move. He gulped a mouthful of the orange medicine into which the safe light had transformed the coffee—it even tasted of the trace of chemicals in the air—and went to the smaller of the benches to fetch the negatives of the Nazarill session. He’d slipped them out of the envelope and into the negative carrier, and was holding them under the enlarger lamp to examine them for dust, before he realised he was holding a school photograph.

  Nobody could have moved the negatives. He’d selected the wrong envelope, that was all. Sheathing the strip, he inserted Nazarill in the carrier and held it at an angle beneath the enlarger lamp. The line of tiny black-faced figures stretched along the front of the building, their eyes and their hair albino white. Behind them the windows and glass doors were black as granite slabs embedded in the bony facade. One window wasn’t quite so black; it contained a paler mark. It was his bedroom window.

  He might have thought the mark was the reflection of someone’s head, except none of the other windows showed anything similar. Perhaps it was simply, though annoyingly, a flaw in the negative. He wouldn’t know until he made a print how bad it was going to look. ‘Let’s be seeing you,’ he murmured, and switched off the enlarger lamp while he set up the easel on the baseboard and arranged a sheet of printing paper in it. Having minutely adjusted the lens, he switched on the lamp.

  Often he would expose the first print in sections to judge how much time it required, but he gave this one the full twenty-five seconds before extinguishing the lamp and preparing the trays—developer in one, stop bath in its neighbour. ‘Now we’ll see who you were,’ he said, feeding himself a gulp of coffee to stave off a chill which had invaded the apartment. He raised the frame of the easel and picked up the exposed sheet by a corner of its border to float it in the developer.

  He always enjoyed these seconds of seeing the picture at last, yet as he stooped over the tray he felt as though the thick dimness was weighing on him, helping the drowned image to draw his head down. He held onto the corner of the print with the tongs and agitated the sheet gently in the fluid, and had never been so conscious of performing a ritual. The lined-up faces paled against the front of Nazarill, and wisps of cloud sprang up like unkempt hair above the roof. For a moment the window at which he was peering appeared to swallow the presence it was framing, and then the pane crystallised around the shape. ‘Dear God, look at that,’ he blurted, and crouched forward in case a closer scrutiny might refute the evidence of his eyes.

  There was a face in his bedroom, not the reflection of the back of anybody’s head. It was nobody he’d ever seen or would have wished to see. Though the head was bald, he couldn’t tell if it was male or female, or its age. It had been wrenched into a grimace that could hardly be called an expression, the jaw gaping wider than any mouth should go. The neck was as thin as a child’s wrist, and the head was thrown back on it. Dominic gripped the edge of the bench with his free hand so hard the fingers trembled, and just as the print started to disappear, having lain too long in the developer, he saw from the position of the head and neck that their owner was being dragged back into his bedroom. He groped wildly for the stop bath tongs to transfer the print into that tray before the image could darken further. At that moment he heard the door open behind him.

  He was twisting his head and upper body around when the whole of his spine seemed to lock. The door had opened about a foot, and all the darkness of his flat appeared to have massed beyond it, but that wasn’t why he felt unable to move; he was hearing the words he’d last spoken. He’d meant ‘Look at that’ only for himself, just a turn of phrase which shock had driven out of his mouth. He hadn’t meant it as an invitation, and surely it could have brought no response.

  He didn’t realise he was holding his breath until his chest began to throb. If he didn’t move, he thought he might collapse, but he was terrified that moving could draw some attention to him. Then the darkness beyond the room, or something in it, inched the door open further, and he saw in the gap a dim round object hovering some inches above the floor.

  The plastic tongs fell out of his hands and clattered on the bench. His fingernails dug into the wood, and the jabs of pain released him. He straightened up so violently that at first he was afraid he had damaged his spine, and then he saw how helpless he was. The nearest light-switch was beside the darkness, not even separated from it by the door.

  He sucked in a breath which seemed to fill his head with fumes, and took hold of the enlarger. Snatching out the negative carrier, he wrenched at the lamp housing until its top clanged against the column of the stand. He scrabbled at the switch for the lamp and seized the column with both hands to tilt the heavy
enlarger and direct the beam across the room.

  At once he thought it wouldn’t work. By the time it reached the doorway, the light was so diffused that its glow was scarcely visible. Yet it did work, altogether too well. As though the latent contents of the darkness had been enabled to develop, the round object wavered upward, and he saw its face—the face from the photograph. Its jaw gaped as the body scuttled on all fours into the room.

  It halted just inside and raised itself on arms like dead branches, twisted and scrawny and peeling, as though to locate him. It cocked its yawning almost noseless head and turned it back and forth, and he thought that whatever was left in the puckered eye-sockets was unable to see. The spectacle would have paralysed him, except that the prospect of waiting to be found was even worse. The crawling figure wasn’t really there, he managed to think; it was like a photograph which the building had somehow taken, an image which the fabric of the place was projecting. The thought allowed him to lower the enlarger onto the bench, although his pulse made his fingers feel swollen and unstable. The base met the wood with a faint thud, barely audible through the pounding of his heart but loud enough to send a surge of panic through him. He launched himself at the hall, flinging out an arm which felt as though it was wrapped in thick rubber to grab the door and throw it wide.

  The gaping head turned away from him, and the heel of his hand thumped the edge of the door. He’d grasped the wood and realised how it could help him vault into the hall, from which he would dash into the corridor and out of Nazarill before he let himself remember how unfit he was, when something caught his feet. The feel of it suggested he’d trodden in a mass of cobwebs, but a glance showed him the hands that had closed on his ankles. As he kicked out frantically and tried to find breath for a scream, the figure swarmed up the front of him, growing more substantial as it came, though it still felt even thinner than it looked. The dead face rose level with his, a tattered stump of tongue jerking deep within the hole of a jaw, and the shrivelled eyes found him.

  7 - The absent guest

  At twenty-five to midnight on Christmas Eve, Oswald put his coat on and left the Roscommons’ get-together to determine why Amy hadn’t come back. The building was as silent as the night was meant to be, and he didn’t meet her on the stairs or in the top corridor. He pressed the bellpush on their door and fitted his eye to the spyhole, but could see nothing through it. He fished out his keys and unlocked the door. As it swung away from his push, a song hit him in the face.

  ‘I’m as old as anyone I know,’ a man was singing at the top of his ravaged voice, if singing was the word, and in the midst of the uproar which seemed to be doing its best to drown him out, Amy was using the phone in the hall. Oswald shut himself in to give himself a chance to speak—shout, rather. ‘What in hell’s name do you think you’re doing?’

  ‘I’ve got to go, Rob. See you tomorrow.’ She repeated most of this in fragments before hooking up the receiver and fixing Oswald with a wide-eyed gaze. ‘What does it look like?’

  ‘Turn off that evil row for heaven’s sake. Tonight of all nights people don’t want to hear that kind of heathen racket.’

  ‘Which people? Everyone’s downstairs.’

  ‘I’m surprised it isn’t giving them a headache there, and you as well. You’re supposed to suffer from headaches, aren’t you? Isn’t that why your friend across the corridor gives you pills a proper doctor wouldn’t countenance?’

  ‘Could you hear my music before you came in?’

  ‘I’m hearing it now. Watch out you don’t want to be heard sometime and find out nobody can,’ he said, lowering his voice and sharpening it so that it was just audible through the squirming squeals of instruments that had once been guitars. ‘You still haven’t done as I asked.’

  Amy had met his warning with an incredulous stare, which she took with her on the way to stopping the tape. ‘Back in your box, Useful Bacteria. Old people don’t like you.’

  ‘Thank you, Amy,’ Oswald said, attempting not to sound sarcastic. ‘Do try acting a bit less of the mad thing while you’re off school.’

  She stalked out of the main room and pushed up the baggy sleeves of her sweater, which was the black of most of her clothes, as a preamble to folding her arms. ‘Mad like how?’

  ‘Oh, Amy, don’t pick at everything I say. You’d think you were the adult and I was the child,’ said Oswald, and felt her gaze drawing words out of him. ‘Deafening yourself whenever you’re meant to be concentrating on your homework, that can’t be good for your mind, can it? And just explain to me if you can what you thought you were doing when I came up. Couldn’t you be bothered to turn it down while you were talking, or did you put it on to do his ears more mischief than they’ve already been done?’

  ‘I think you’re the one who sounds mad.’

  ‘Come along,’ Oswald said with all the authority he could summon, ‘or we’ll be late for mass.’

  Without her decision being in any way predictable she marched into her bedroom and emerged shrugging on her long black coat, which emitted a whiff of incense. ‘Don’t forget you’re to clear out that room during the holidays,’ he said.

  God only knew what her room was like. He hadn’t ventured to look in it since he couldn’t quite remember when. If a spider had managed to invade his window, what might her untidiness have bred? At least the spider had died between the panes; he made himself look at its clenched withered form every morning and night. ‘Shake a leg, Amy. Or if you’re feeling energetic, shake both,’ he said, as much to move her stare as her.

  He’d locked their apartment and had succeeded in hastening her down to the ground floor when Harold Roscommon leaned out of his doorway and beckoned him with the hand that wasn’t gripping the frame. ‘Any sign?’

  George turned from murmuring to Ursula. ‘Father, Mr Priestley didn’t—’

  ‘Don’t be so sure you can say what he did. What about it, Mr Priestley? Did you hunt down the lost one?’

  ‘She’s behind me.’

  ‘Better watch out, then. Don’t they still say that at the panto when the witch or the demon comes on? It’s behind you. I didn’t mean you, lass. I was asking your pa if he found the feller who made us all line up like inmates.’

  ‘Mr Metcalf,’ Oswald realised at last. ‘I can’t say I saw him, not that I was looking.’

  ‘I thought you were meant to be in charge of the place and the rest of us.’

  ‘No, father, you remember, I told you. The idea was for us all to keep our eyes open.’

  ‘All except for me, since I’m never taken any notice of.’

  ‘I’m sure Mr Metcalf just forgot he was invited,’ Ursula said.

  ‘I didn’t see him to remind him,’ George admitted.

  Several of the guests appeared behind him. ‘I’d have thought he was the last of us to pass up the chance of a spread,’ Alistair Doughty said, inspecting his fingernails while he waited to sidle by.

  ‘Must have had a better offer,’ said Paul Kenilworth, and waved his long fingers at the Roscommons as though he was practising to take up the piano. ‘No discredit to your evening. He does rather seem to live to stuff himself.’

  ‘I’d lay a bet he’ll stuff himself into an early grave,’ Ralph Shrift declared.

  ‘He hasn’t yet. He’s in there watching.’

  ‘I don’t think so, father. I don’t think you could have seen—’

  ‘I see a damn sight more than I’m given credit for. I saw his eye just now at that prison peephole over there. If it wasn’t him, you tell me what it was.’

  George hunched his shoulders and let them drop, and Oswald crossed to Metcalf’s door. Having rung the bell, he peered through the bulging lens. An eye stared back at him—his own, backed by darkness. When the bell brought no response he moved away. ‘It must have been a reflection of one of us, Mr Roscommon.’

  Harold Roscommon uttered a disgusted grunt and limped into the hall, where Max Greenberg flashed his Rolex at him, saying ‘Nearly C
hristmas.’

  It would be in less than fourteen minutes, Oswald saw from his own watch. He’d dawdled as though Nazarill needed him to oversee it—as though he’d elected himself to the role the old man had suggested. ‘We’ll have to run, Amy, or we’ll be late.’

  The air beyond the glass doors doused him like a cold bath, pure and invigorating. ‘Feel that,’ he said to her, but she was striding away from Nazarill so fast that the toes of her long black boots flung gravel across the lawn to clatter against the oak. As he ran after her into Nazareth Row he couldn’t help wishing that just for once the market gates had been left unlocked. Surely the closing of the short cut to the church was a small price to pay for security, and besides, his was by no means the only family hurrying downhill. Amy betrayed no interest in all the windows planted with trees, so that he needn’t regret having assumed she was too old for a tree this year—could admit to himself he would have felt it was more heathen than the celebration ought to be.

  Ten minutes’ jog in Amy’s wake brought him to the upper edge of Partington, where the gate of the small steep churchyard squeaked to welcome each newcomer and many of the headstones sparkling with frost appeared to have stooped to greet them. ‘Good girl,’ he gasped, not that she seemed to take this for praise, as they hurried through the stone porch into the aisle. They’d just found space in the right-hand rear pew when the congregation rose to its feet, and Oswald felt as though it had waited for him.

  The organ blared, the song-sheets rustled, the voices rose with the incense. ‘O come all ye faithful…’ Oswald felt uplifted, by his sense of a community at worship and by the presence of so many of his clients in the church. He’d helped make them safe, and now they were helping him in return—helping him worship here so that he would be able to pray at home. It occurred to him that the thick unyielding walls of the church were by no means unlike those of Nazarill, and perhaps Harold Roscommon was right to believe it was somehow Oswald’s duty to keep that building peaceful. When he rose to join in the final carol he felt renewed, transformed by the season.