“Are you alright, sir?” “Is there anyone else in the flat tonight, sir?” “What have you been doing tonight, sir?” “Do you mind if we look out of the window, please, sir?”
I led them into the bedroom, the door to which was open already. Inside, the curtains were drawn wide apart, the window open, stretched out as far as it could go without breaking. Through that open window I could hear the sound of a crowd outside. In my panicked and disturbed state I went straight to the window to look out. Down on the street below was a crowd of maybe 15 to 20 people. All of them were looking right up at my window. I recognised some of them, my neighbours, some students I would occasionally see passing by, some strangers I did not know.
As I looked down, as my head emerged from the window, they gave out a gasp of alarm. Down in the centre of the group the crowd scattered suddenly as though to avoid some falling object, though I could see nothing falling. A second later they crowded together again, panicked cries ringing out, only to be dispersed by the three or so other policemen who seemed to have been left with them. At the edge of the crowd a woman burst into tears, turned her head up towards me, her face twisted in shock and fear, then turned and ran away off down the street.
All this happened in only second or so, only in the flash of a moment it took me to stick my head out of the window. I had no time to do any more, to take any more in, because the very next second I had the force of two strong policemen pulling me back, gently but firmly, saying “that’s alight sir. Let’s get you back inside, sir.”
***
Here are the things I know about what happened next. I don’t remember much and what I do recall is confused and uncertain. I remember noise and loud voices. I think I may have been shouting, but what and to whom, I can’t imagine. I remember the worried faces of the policemen and strong arms trying to hold me steady. I remember a weariness that overcame me suddenly, and a wave of nausea that crashed through me. I remember falling to my knees and vomiting on the floor of the bedroom. I know my heart was racing, my arms trembling. I remember gasping for breath and weeping with fear. Fear of what, I don’t know. All I recall is the certainty that death was upon me, had its grip in me and would not let me go.
These are the things I remember from the moment the policemen pulled me back from the window. It can only have been a few minutes and whatever panic had a hold of me, the worst of it was soon passed. The next thing I remember clearly is sitting on the sofa back in the living room. A policewoman sat beside me, her arm around my shoulder. In my hand was a cup of tea, strong, packed with sugar and laced with a powerful dose of brandy or some other spirit I did not even know we owned.
Gradually, the warmth of the tea worked upon me until I felt again aware properly of my surroundings and the situation.
“What’s happening? What are they doing in there?” I asked, nodding towards the bedroom where police officers still talked and worked.
“Don’t worry about it,” she said. “We’ll make sense of it all soon enough. You’ve had a shock, though. Right now you need to rest. Will you do that for me?” I nodded my head. I was not in any condition to do anything else.
***
Sometime later, I don’t know how long exactly, officer sitting with me stepped away and the detective in charge of the scene came to join me. He was an older man, much older than the other officers. He wore a long raincoat that he wrapped around himself as he sat, even though the evening was mild. His hair was grey, and from his serious face peered two of the sharpest, bluest eyes I can ever remember seeing.
“Do you mind if I have a cup of coffee?” he asked. “Of course,” I replied and started to get up and fetch it for him, but he shook his head and waved me down. Over in our little galley kitchen another officer was already filling the kettle.
He had a weary look about him, as though he’d been doing this job too long, as though he’d had enough of having to deal with strange evenings like this over the years. He sat in the chair in front of me, leaning forward, his hands clasped together over his knees. He seemed uncertain what to say to me or, at least, where might be the best place to begin. As he waited for his coffee he glanced over to the carriage clock which sat on the mantel over the fireplace and grimaced.
“It certainly is getting late, isn’t it?” he said.
“Yes. It is.”
“And how are you feeling now? Do you think you can talk?”
“I think so.”
He nodded, but said nothing else for a moment. The other officer came over and handed over a hot mug of coffee, which he took gratefully and sipped at gently before holding it steady in his lap to cool.
“Alright,” he said. “Let me tell you what has been happening here. Or as much as we know of it, anyway.
“This is not the first time we’ve been called out to this address today. Late this afternoon we received a call from two of your neighbours. They were quite disturbed. They said a man was throwing things from a window on the top floor of these tenements. Throwing things – stones, books, rotten vegetables – and shouting obscenities. That is what they said.
“So we came out. But when we arrived, there was nothing to see. Everything was quiet. Your two neighbours were still quite shaken. We could tell something had happened to them, but whoever had been making the disturbance had disappeared. More than that, when we asked to see the objects that had been thrown down, they couldn’t find any. They were gone. They’d been there just a few moments ago, we were told, but now they were gone, just vanished into thin air.
“And it got stranger. When we asked which window the man had been at, they couldn’t tell us. When we asked what he looked like, they couldn’t tell us. We asked what he had shouted but, again, they couldn’t tell us, only that it had been horrible and obscene and, in their words, ‘very, very personal.’
“Now, we deal with situations like this all the time. Normally, we’d write it off as a hoax or, at best, a misunderstanding and treat it accordingly, but today was different. Something very serious had obviously happened to these women, it was just not at all clear what that something was. They had a strange look about them. They were confused and disoriented. The way their eyes darted around them, the way they stumbled over their words and struggled to explain themselves, it was as though they were drugged – and, remember, we are talking about two reasonably well to do, middle class housewives here – or, and I do know how odd it sounds to say this, hypnotised, perhaps.
“Whatever it was, we sent them off to hospital to be checked over and we started knocking on doors. We spoke to everyone we could. We knocked on your door, as it happens, but no-one answered. Nobody had anything to tell us. Nobody had seen anything. So be it. We packed up and headed back to the station.”
He stopped talking for a moment and took a long sip from his coffee.
“Does any of this mean anything to you?” he asked, his eyes fixed upon me in a long appraising stare.
“No,” I said. “Nothing at all.”
He nodded and carried on with his story.
“At half past eleven we had another call. Several of them actually, from more of your neighbours. They all told a similar story. Objects being thrown from a window into the street below. Loud noises, shouting and screaming. Sounds of a struggle or a fight. A violent argument.
“When we arrived there was quite a crowd outside, and quite a commotion. There was no doubt this time which window it was coming from. Your window was wide open. The light was on and we could see shadows of one, perhaps two people roaming around your room.
“I stepped out of my car and I saw it all for myself. It was extraordinary. I saw a cloud of dirt and pebbles fly out of your window and scatter down on the street beside us. One of them hit me here on the shoulder. I saw them and I felt them hit me, but when I looked down on the ground, there was nothing there. You go and look later on. You won’t find anything, but I can tell you
they were there. I saw them fall with my own eyes.
“Worse than that was the noise. Shouting and roaring. I wouldn’t call it screaming, this was harsher than that. Guttural and angry. Coarse. It was animal-like, as though some large animal was trapped up here and struggling to fight its way out. It was a terrible sound to hear in a place like this, I can tell you.
“So we pressed the buzzer and we came up here and then, if possible, that is when things began to really get strange.
“You let us in and showed us to the bedroom, do you remember? Only, when you opened the door, something, some urge seemed to take hold of you. You shoved aside my officer – and this is a big fellow, I’m talking about. No offence, sir, but he should be well able to take care of you - you shoved him aside as though he wasn’t there and ran for the window looking for all the world as though you were about to jump right through it. But you didn’t. You stopped. You stopped just short of falling. You grabbed hold of the windowsill and you leaned out. And as you did so, sir, you started laughing. You were laughing and giggling as though this was the funniest thing that ever happened. That’s when we reached you and pulled you in. Do you remember that?”
“I do,” I sighed. “Some of it. And not quite like that. But I do remember.”
“That is not all, though,” he continued. “Outside. The people outside saw more than we did. The way they tell it – and I should say these are eye witness accounts from my own officers – they heard a scream and saw a body leap from the window. It fell down on top of them. They heard it scream and saw and felt it fall hard on the ground beside them. It hit the pavement right where they were standing. They swear to this, all of them. Except, as I’m sure you can guess, there is no body there now, nor any sign of there ever having been one. Just as soon as it fell, they say, it disappeared. Vanished right in front of their eyes, so they tell me.”
He paused to consider what he was saying. “That is quite a thing to think about, isn’t it? I almost wish I’d been there to see it.” He frowned, then shook his head and carried on.
“I have one more thing to tell you,” he said. “I’ve been debating whether to tell you this part or not, but I can’t help feeling that its important you know everything about this evening, no matter how strange or upsetting it may be to you right now. You see, we took a description from the people downstairs of the body they saw leap from the window. They had quite a good look at him as he fell down on top of them. The descriptions are quite detailed and they all match very well. The man they describe falling was you, sir. There is no question about it. It was your face they saw, your body, right down to the clothes you are wearing right now.”
He said nothing more for a moment, then shrugged his shoulders and smiled at me.
“So what do you make of that?”
I shook my head and waved my arms in defeat.
“I do not know.” I said. “I just don’t know.”
We sat in silence for a minute together, the detective and I. The more we sat and looked at each other, the more difficult we found it not to laugh at the ridiculousness of the story he had just told, perfectly true though it no doubt had been. I nodded over to the policeman still standing in the galley kitchen.
“That bottle of brandy,” I said. “Do you mind bringing it over here?”
***
There was not much more to be said after that. We stood and we walked through the flat together, the detective and I. In the bedroom we stood side by side at the big bay window, looking down on the street below us where his colleagues were getting into their cars and beginning to drive away. Only one car was left. In the front seat sat a young officer, waiting patiently for the detective to finish up and close the evening off at last. Up in the bedroom with me, though, he seemed in not much of a hurry to leave. He lingered, taking his measure of the room around him. He had a hesitance about him, the air of a man with something on his mind, something he was determined to take his time to think around.
“You’re moving out, then?” he asked, pointing at the packed bags scattered around the floor beside us.
“That’s right. Tomorrow. Or rather, this morning, actually.”
He nodded. “Why put it off?” he said, all his doubt suddenly disappearing in one moment of decisiveness. “Why not get out tonight? I don’t think I should be recommending you stay here alone tonight. Come on. We’ll find you a hotel room somewhere.”
“What about all my stuff?” I asked.
“Don’t worry about that,” he shrugged. “My guys will sort it out for you.”
Half an hour later and I was in the back of his police car, leaving Erskine Street for the very last time. We drove off without so much as a word and I may be wrong but I don’t remember taking so much as a single glance back as we went.
The detective sat in the back with me. Once we’d left the street he turned towards me and smiled, his face more relaxed now than I had seen it before.
“If you still had to live in there, I wouldn’t tell you any of this, but since you’re leaving, I can’t imagine it’ll do any harm. You’re well out of that place, if you ask me. I’ve been working this area for more years than you’ve been alive, son, and this is not the first time I’ve been called out to strange things happening in that particular building. Not the first time by far. It’s a strange place, that is, and I’ve seen some strange things in it over the years. Horrible things I don’t want to have to tell you about. It does me good to see you leave it in one piece. Yes. It does me some good.”
Then he closed his eyes and said nothing more.
***
And that is my story. I hope you enjoyed it. Thank you for letting me tell it to you.
There really is nothing much more for me to say now, other than that I did not ever go back into the flat on Erskine Street. Years have passed since then. I have again, from time to time, had periods of insomnia, of anxiety, of strange nightmares even, but none of them have ever been even close to the things I suffered in that flat.
I never saw Paul again from the moment he moved away, but I did once bump into Iain in a bar in town, just a few months after I left the flat. I bought him a drink and we chatted for an hour or so. I asked him whether he’d moved into the bigger room. He said he had, but didn’t say much more about it and I didn’t ask. I wish I had now. He can’t have been there for much longer, though, because shortly after that meeting I received an email from him with a new address. It turned out the roof of our old flat had fallen in, one part of the stairwell collapsed and the building become subject to a compulsory repair order. Everyone had to move out while the old tenement was, more or less, pulled down and a new one put up in its place.
I left Aberdeen for good just a few years after that. Not until some time later, only a year or two ago now as it happens, did I have the opportunity to spend some time in the city again. I was visiting on business and, deciding to make good use of an evening to myself, I set aside an hour or two to walk through the areas I used to live in and see what they’d done to the old place. When I arrived in Erskine Street I had to double check my maps to be sure I was in the right part of town. The whole street was unrecognisable to me. They’d taken away all those grimy, old granite tenements and replaced them all with a clean new set of apartment blocks. It looked much tidier, much more attractive than the place I used to know. I stood and I stared up to where I thought my old window should have been, but it was difficult to even work out the position of things, so different was the whole area. I stood and I stared anyway, but I felt nothing. If there was ever anything in that place before, it was gone now, certainly for me. Everything was gone.
Missing Pages
His face, while he told his story, was fixed in a grim expression as dark and troubled as that of a man staring into his own grave. His eyes were bloodshot and strained, the dark hollows which circled them giving evidence of many nights spent in sleepless
excavation of some sorrowful corner of the soul. In all the time he spoke to me his eyes rarely met mine. For the most part they remained fixed on the café table in front of us, or darted nervously around the room, watching each new customer come and go, hoping, so he told me later, not to meet any acquaintances to whom he might have to explain his dishevelled appearance.
I have known Julian Campbell (Jules to all his friends) for more than 20 years and until that day I never once saw him in anything approaching the condition in which he sat before me across that table. It was as though another man had taken possession of his body altogether – a meek, anxious, beaten man at that, not the proud, funny, garrulous Jules of whom I was so fond. The man who sat before me and told me this tale had the appearance of one for whom every certainty he held about life, about himself had been stripped away, and he had neither the confidence nor faith in his own judgement he needed to know what to do about it. In short, he was a man shaken by some experience outside his ability to explain. He was a man crippled by fear.
He took a book from his briefcase and pushed it across the table towards me. “I want you to have this,” he said. “I can’t have it in the house anymore. I should probably burn it or shred it, but for some reason I suspect that might only go to make things worse. No. I’ve thought this through and the only way is to get it out of the house, to get it somewhere I can’t see it. Will you do that for me? Will you keep it safe for me? I don’t know for how long. Who knows, I may never want it back again. But it’s important to me that I know where it is, that I can have it back again if I need to.” He spoke quickly and in short bursts, as if every word was a struggle, as if he was uncertain even yet of the course of action he was embarked upon.