

A Report on a Haunting and Other Stories

Three weird tales by

Rufus Woodward

Olgada Press

Chapbook no. 4

2015

www.shorecliffhorror.com

First published in the United Kingdom in 2015 by The Olgada Press, Edinburgh, UK.

All rights reserved

Copyright Olgada 2015

The right of Olgada to be identified as the authors of this book has been asserted by them under the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

Apart from any use permitted under UK copyright law, this publication may only be reproduced, stored or transmitted, in any form, by any means, with prior permission of the publishers or, in the case of reprographic production, in accordance with the terms of licences issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency.

All characters in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

Contents

A Report on a Haunting at Number 11 Erskine Street, Aberdeen

Missing Pages

A Crescent-shaped Scar

# A report on a haunting at number 11 Erskine Street, Aberdeen

It has been a long night, I know, and we're all tired now. We've all taken a glass or two, maybe some of us a little more, and I'm sure I can't be the only one who is beginning to think of the journey home ahead of me, to dream of a warm bed and a soft pillow into which I might sink my head. But be still a while, wont you? Wait a little longer before you go. Let's find time for one last strange tale to send us out into the night. We've had a good few stories tonight already – weird tales, horrible tales of odd happenings and peculiar people. How about one last true story to round off the evening? A true story to wind the night down while the fire still burns and the candles still glow. Does anyone have one for us? Does anyone have a story to share? You do? Yes, thank you. Come up here beside me. Take the armchair by the fire. Make yourself comfortable, and tell us your tale.

***

This is my story. It is a ghost story and a true story – always a promising combination, I know you'll agree. A ghost story, I say, although I fear that description will raise some expectations my little narrative will struggle to meet. There are few bloodthirsty visions here, no messages from the dead, few heart-stopping terrors. In fact, and I want to be as truthful about this as I can, let me say at the outset that whatever ghosts or spirits appeared on the night I am about to describe to you, I myself did not see any of them. That may disappoint you. It certainly disappointed me. I have had a long life so far, but this story is the closest I have ever come to a real taste of the supernatural and it aches in me that I did not actually set eyes on any of the things that others claimed to see.

If disappointment were all this story had to offer, though, it would make for a rather dull end to this evening. No. There is a little more to it than that. I may not have seen the ghost that appeared that night, but plenty of other people did. And here is the rub – when they saw it, the face they were staring at was mine.

***

I was eighteen years old when I first moved into the flat at number 11 Erskine Street. Eighteen years old and about as naïve and guileless as any man could ever claim to be. I see young people around today and I startle at how confident they seem, how sure of themselves, how safe in their own skins. I was nothing like that. I was a thin, pale, under-nourished, under-exercised, social incompetent; a clumsy, clueless wreck of a boy, only one step, one cruel word, one disappointment, one humiliation away from tears, more or less, for most hours of the day. At least, that's the way I remember it now.

This was my second year as an undergraduate and Erskine Street was my first effort at finding a place of my own to live. My first place away from home, away from the safety net of halls of residence and I cannot emphasise too strongly just exactly how ill-prepared I was for the move. I do sometimes think back upon that time with a fond affection for the poor gangling fool I remember being, but it is impossible also to avoid cringing at the memory of those early days struggling with even the most basic requirements of adult life. Washing and cleaning, paying bills, shopping, cooking, there is no challenge you could name so simple that I could not have failed it.

The summer before moving in had been a difficult one. I'd spent weeks trawling through classified ads and accommodation listings, trying to find a room before the start of the autumn term. I must have looked at dozens of flats in that time, spoken to dozens of potential flatmates, but nothing worked out. Rooms I thought were available turned out to be taken. Arrangements I thought had been made turned out to be broken. It was a frustrating time and by the end of August I was becoming quite anxious about my chances of ever finding a place at all.

It was with some relief, then, that I seized upon the advertised room at the flat at Erskine Street. It was perfectly suited to me in practically every way, so much so that even if I'd had the opportunity I could hardly have handpicked anything better. It was on the top floor of a four storey granite tenement. Not too far from college, but within walking distance of town, it was a single room in a small flat shared with one other male student. Not only that, the advert when I saw it was posted not in the usual classified spaces or even through the University's accommodation service. Rather, it was posted on a noticeboard in the University Library - one small A5 sheet printed in black and white and stuck on a board underneath notices about library fines and short loan regulations. A strange way and strange place to advertise anything, one might think, particularly in the middle of the academic off season when the library was sparsely populated and passing trade at a minimum. For me, though, this was a major advantage, since it reduced the likelihood the flat had been visited or taken already, unlike the scores of other properties I'd seen through other means.

That was one advantage. Even greater than that, though, was the rent. It was cheap. Staggeringly cheap, in fact. As quoted on the notice I saw in the library that day, the rent came in at almost a third less than most other flats I'd looked at, so low, indeed, that at first I assumed it to be an error. It was the sort of rent you'd expect from a flat with some sort of major structural defect, a flat barely fit for human habitation perhaps. For some people, I suspect that low rent alone might have been enough for them to discount the room as too good to be true, as not worth the time of a second look. Perhaps I did not have the sense to be so suspicious, or maybe I was too desperate to think so deeply, I don't know. Whichever it was, I wasted no time. I called the number from a payphone in the library itself, arranged to visit it that very afternoon, and by the time the day was out I'd agreed to move in on the following Saturday. My summer of frustration was over. The relief was tremendous.

***

The flat itself was nothing remarkable. It fitted perfectly the stereotype of standard issue student accommodation of the period. It had two bedrooms, one much larger than the other, a living room with galley kitchen, threadbare carpets, condensation on the windows and something that looked very much like mould growing on the arm of the sofa. It was one flat among a block of other, identical apartments all sharing the one dark, dingy stairwell. In that part of the city at that time, these blocks were full of transient populations of one sort or another, mostly students and offshore workers, and this one was no different. Of all the properties in the building only one, perhaps two, seemed to be occupied by owners who lived there on a more or less permanent basis. The rest of us were ephemera, there and gone, little more than passers by.

It was, in all, the type of place that most people would not look twice at, but that I and all the other undergraduates in town, swimming away at the bottom of the property food chain, snapped up as a matter of course. More than that, these flats were, for some of my classmates, almost a kind of perverse lifestyle choice. There may well have been better places available, but most of the people I knew seemed to gravitate towards these more squalid, sordid offerings. There was almost a kind of competition about it, to see who could claim to live in the worst, the most decrepit, disreputable hole in the city. We shared stories, sometimes even true stories, of fleas and maggots, of stains and rising damp and of life-threatening, coughing, spluttering gas boilers always on the verge of explosion. Compared to some of these tales, 11 Erskine Street really wasn't all that bad and, to be honest, I was glad to have it. I would have accepted a lot worse.

When I arrived that weekend my new flatmate had already moved in ahead of me. Paul was older than me by a good few years, a Post-grad student with dark spiky hair and a broad North East accent. He struck me as an odd sort of guy right from the start. God only knows what he made of me. I'd only spoken to him briefly on the phone before moving in so I didn't know quite what to expect. In my head a part of me was still naïve enough to imagine we'd hit it off right away and be best friends for ever, but it didn't work out like that at all.

We just never got along, Paul and I. Perhaps I did something to offend him. Maybe there was some kind of youthful obnoxiousness about me that put him off - this is actually very likely – but he seemed to take an instant dislike to me right from the start. I remember clearly his first words to me as we stood together in the dim, dark hallway of the flat, me dropping my heavy holdall of clothes and books on the floor at my feet, holding out my arm for a handshake that did not materialise.

"I got here first," he said. "So I took the bigger room." He pointed towards a door beside us in the hall. "That one there is yours."

I opened the door and stepped inside. There was a bed and a desk, a chest of drawers and a bookcase. There was just enough space on the floor for me to set down my holdall again in front of me, just about enough space, in fact, for me to fit in all my belongings, so long as I didn't accumulate anything new or, heaven forbid, want to have any company over. "Compact and cosy," I said with an attempt at a smile and turned around, but Paul had gone already. I opened my mouth to call after him, but thought better of it. Instead, I went to the door and closed it in front of me. I sat on the bed and began to unpack.

***

If things with Paul were uncomfortable on that first day, they did not get any better the more time we spent together. We spoke only rarely, as little as we could, to be honest, and every time we did there seemed to be some misunderstanding, an odd failure of communication that set one or other of us in a bad mood, seething over some petty irritation or other. Right from the start he made no attempt to hide his contempt for me. Any time our paths crossed he would make some comment or other, some slight or needling joke at my expense, some mocking of the subject I was studying, the books I read, the way I spoke, even the clothes I wore and the food I bought.

Whatever the situation, he was the sort of person who would seek out any opportunity to knock me down and, I suppose, in doing so, demonstrate his own unimpeachable superiority. I'd like to be able to tell how I rose above all this schoolboy taunting and turned a noble, dignified other cheek to it all, but I can't. In truth, I was no better than he was. I bit on every hook he dangled for me. I rose to every jibe. Every day there was an exchange between us, a snapping, posturing bout of point scoring. It was pathetic, I know, even then I knew, but I couldn't help it. That was just the way things were.

Thinking back now I don't imagine he was really a bad person. In fact, I suspect he was probably going through some problems of his own at the time that made him difficult to live with. He was working through a research masters as I recall and, although I can't pretend to know anything for sure, I had the impression that it was not going well. There was a girl he was seeing at the time as well. Again, its possible that things there were not all he hoped they'd be.

Whatever his problems, I was the last person he would talk to about them. I was the last person he'd want to even know about them, most likely. But the thing was, there was no-one else in the world better placed to see it all, and know what it was doing to him. Our bedrooms shared a connecting wall, after all, one too thin for either one of us to hold many secrets from the other. At night, I could hear him struggle in the grip of his nightmares. I could hear him call out in his sleep, let out great, gasping bellows that woke me in the middle of the night. Who he was shouting to, or at, I have no idea. If it was words he spoke, I could never make them out. All that came through the wall to me were those bellowing gasps of fear and of confusion.

Occasionally, I think, he would walk in his sleep. I would wake at 2 or 3 in the morning and hear him banging and thumping around next door. This was quite disturbing for me and I'd lie awake listening, wondering if was doing himself any harm, wondering I ought to go next door and help him. Usually, of course, I did no such thing. Only once did the noise grow so loud and his shouting so fierce that I put aside my apprehensions, ignored any petty disagreements we might have between us, to step in and offer some help.

It was not only the volume of his cries that set that night apart from all the others, it was the duration of the attack. At 2.30 am I woke to hear a crash coming from Paul's room. By 3.15 he still had not settled back to sleep. I heard shouts, strange guttural roars coming through the wall beside me. I heard his footsteps stomp across the room from one side to another, his fists thump against the wall. I heard him gasping for breath, panting and sighing and a strange scratching noise as though of fingernails against plaster. After 45 minutes of this, more than twice as long as any other attack I could remember, I decided I'd waited long enough. I climbed out of my bed, put my dressing gown on and left my room.

I opened his door and switched on the light. Here is what I saw. Paul was standing in his pyjamas by the big bay window that stretched right across the far wall of his room. He had wrapped himself up in the great thick curtain that hung by the window and was thrashing and flapping his arms around as though wrestling with someone, shouting and roaring as he did so. When the light came on he stopped suddenly. He let the curtains drop and turned to look around him. The expression on his face was quite unlike anything I'd ever seen on him before. He seemed like a child, scared and lost. He looked over towards me. For a moment I though he was about to turn angry, to snap at me for coming into his room uninvited, but he never did.

"Did you see someone in here just now?" he said, his voice small and wobbling.

I shook my head. "No, Paul. There's no-one here."

"No. Of course not." He said. "Of course not."

"Are you alright, Paul?" I asked. "Can I do anything?"

"No," he said. "I'm fine. I'll be fine."

***

As it turned out, Paul and I didn't have to put up with one another for very long. Come Christmas he'd been offered a job somewhere in another town. He left and I had the whole flat to myself for a while.

The landlady called me up the day after Paul moved out and asked if I wouldn't mind taking care of finding a replacement for her. She was a lovely, if peculiar old lady. She lived on a caravan park right at the edge of the city and only popped in to see us a couple of times a year to apologise for the rent being so high (which it obviously wasn't) and to make sure we hadn't destroyed the place (which we hadn't quite). She was a nervous, lady who spoke quickly and, on leaving us, always gave the impression of being glad to be out of the flat. Paul used to say she was involved in some weird religious organisations, some commune or other. He called her an 'occult-terrorist' for some reason, but coming from him that could have meant anything. Whatever her situation was, she was clearly either too busy or too disinterested to want to have anything to do with finding new tenants. This was fine by me and left me with a free reign to choose whoever I wished.

I wrote up a few notices and posted them around the campus that next week. The response was underwhelming to say the least. Maybe it was the time of year, maybe my advertising copy left a lot to be desired, but I managed to drum up the grand total of three replies. One was from a guy who wanted to move in with his girlfriend – which seemed a crazy idea given how tiny our living space was.

One was from an art student who wanted to use the living room as a studio space – which again, was less attractive to me than he seemed to imagine. And one guy, Iain, who was an information science PhD candidate who was happy to take the small room off my hands and let me move into the bigger room, didn't seem to notice that I'd forgotten to wash the dishes for the couple of days before he came over and, most importantly of all, had his own TV. that he didn't mind sharing. It wasn't a difficult choice. Three weeks later, the first weeks of the new year and the new semester, Iain moved in.

In the meantime, in those three or four weeks I had the place to myself, I took the opportunity to move all my belongings into my new home in the bigger room next door. The rent on that room was a little higher (a whopping £10 a month extra), but it was so obviously the better choice. It had the big bay window that looked out over the city and out to sea. It had an armchair and a built in wardrobe. It had a bigger bookshelf, a proper desk. Most of all, it had actual floor space. It wasn't the grandest room in the world, but compared to my old room it was like a palace – you could actually take two steps at a time without cracking your shins on something.

***

After the discomfort of sharing with Paul, Iain's arrival was a huge relief. He was just a nice guy. We didn't talk all that much, but we got along fine. He read science fiction and played Stranglers songs on his electric guitar and he didn't get too hung up about unimportant things – like cleaning the bathroom or doing dishes – the way Paul used to. He did have some weird friends around from time to time, but even that was ok. The few friends I had at the time were probably kind of weird too, I suppose. We all were. It was the natural way to be in that flat.

***

Now listen, the whole time I lived at 11 Erskine Street, I don't think I slept a single night all the way through. That's an exaggeration, I'm sure, but it's the way it felt at the time, certainly after I moved rooms, and it's the way I remember it now. I'd had this sort of problem before and have done since, but never anywhere near so severely as I did back then. Night after night, no matter how tired I was, I'd lie awake for hours, turning from one side to the other, watching the clock spin its way around until the sun rose and it was time to get up and go to classes again.

Every night it seemed there was something new to distract me and keep me from sleeping. Some nights it would be Iain coming home late from the union and playing his guitar at an inappropriate volume. Some nights it would be our next door neighbours with their banging doors and nocturnal arguments. But most of the time I didn't need anyone else to disturb me enough to keep me awake. I was a nervous, anxious young man at the best of times, and those long insomniac nights were there perfect environment for all my worst fears to grab a hold of my mind and tug away at it until I could think of nothing else.

I stared at the dark ceiling above me the whole night through, torturing myself with random fragments of thoughts, of anxious scenarios and worries. I found it difficult to breathe. My chest would grow tight and compressed, as though there was a weight pushing upon it. My hands, my arms grew numb and trembled so that I had to shake them, to pinch them back to life. So muddled and tangled were my thoughts that even if I did manage to drowse my way into sleep I would be troubled by the strangest dreams I can ever remember having. These were odd, nerve jangling dreams, not nightmares as such, but disturbing and unsettling. I remember faces drifting out of the blackness towards me. I remember feeling for certain that there were men standing beside me in the room, even though I could see no one. I remember unseen hands tugging at my bedclothes, pulling at my throat and my hair. I remember separating from my body for a while, floating up to the ceiling and looking back at myself lying in bed. Only there was nothing of me left there to see. Nothing but a twisted, desiccated, moth-eaten bundle of rags where my body ought to have been.

I can't be sure, but sometimes during these dreams I think I may, just as Paul did, have sleepwalked my way around the room. This disturbs me now to think of, even more than it did at the time. I recall waking up on the armchair not quite remembering how I had got there. I remember objects being moved around the room in ways and for reasons I couldn't fathom. Most worryingly of all, I remember waking up on more than one occasion with curtains pulled apart and the bedroom window wide open and having no recollection at all of how or when I had done it.

Given my experience with Paul, I should have known there was something odd about this, about the two of us having such similar experiences in the same room. The thing is, thinking back, I can't recall whether the co-incidence even occurred to me at the time. I just never thought about it. Neither did I ever discuss any of this with Iain, though he must have been aware of it. He must have heard me. He must have known.

Everyone, in fact, must have known something was going on with me. Anyone who was paying attention, that is. I was still, somehow, managing to make it through classes during the day, but my grades were plummeting. I simply could not concentrate for long enough to get through the work in the way I was used to doing. It's embarrassing to think of now, but I remember mumbling my way through tutorials, falling asleep in lectures. I remember the looks my classmates gave me when I stumbled late into seminar rooms. I remember catching a glimpse of myself in a mirror and being shocked at the state I'd fallen into. My eyes red and black rimmed, my face thin and pale and unshaven. I had the look of an addict or a cancer ward about me. God only knows what my tutors thought of me, but again they never mentioned anything and I certainly never invited them to. The more this went on, I think, the more I fell into myself. I stopped meeting my friends, stopped anything even remotely sociable. I just didn't want to see anyone or to have them see what I was turning into. I didn't want to have to explain or apologise for myself. I just wanted to avoid the aggravation that other people represented. I avoided the campus as much as possible, only dropping in for lectures and leaving straight afterwards. I started going to the library in the evenings when there were fewer people around, only leaving the flat after dark if I possibly could. I melted my world down into as small a space as I could manage, just me, my room and whichever strange dream anxiety I was wrestling with at the time.

For months this went on. In the beginning I tried anything I could think of to snap out of it, but nothing seemed to work. I took pills, I ate bananas, I drank horrible, foul tasting herbal remedies, I burned oils and incense and I read every book I could find on the subject of sleep disorders, sleepwalking, and night terrors.

Nothing helped, or at least not obviously so. In the end I gave up trying. The nights passed in haze of nightmare and insomnia so confused that I could barely tell the difference between one and the other. I saw things, I heard things I couldn't explain even now. I don't know now and I didn't know then which parts were dream and which the invention of my poor waking mind.

Sometimes I sat up reading all night or watching TV. Sometimes I got up and I went out walking, trudging my way slowly through the strange, sodium lit city streets, trying anything to avoid another hour spent staring at that bedroom ceiling. But most nights I wiled away the long nocturnal hours surfing my way through the AM channels on my portable radio, trying to find some distraction.

There were the French and German pop music channels whose reception faded in and out at odd intervals out of time with the music they played. There were the American sports commentaries broadcast for nearby military bases who barked out baseball and basketball games in a flood of words so fast, so arcane they seemed to be speaking in a different language altogether. Most of all, there was the strange, the very strange late night Christian agony uncle show that broadcast from a local community channel between 1 and 3 o'clock each Thursday morning and which seemed to drag out every loon, every lonely, crazy soul in the city to call in to have their problems soothed away with a kind word and a patient ear. I listened to them all, my bedside lamp switched off, bedclothes wrapped around me, waiting for a nightmare to come, hoping for an hour of sleep to wipe over me before the morning came and another day had to be faced.

***

You are being very patient with me here as I reminisce about myself as a young man. They seem like pretty grim times, don't they? They probably were. What is strange, though, is that I don't really remember them that way.

Everything I tell you here is true, but when I think of those times I remember them mostly fondly, not as any kind of trial or trauma. What I really remember are the good times I had in that flat. I remember the films I watched there for the first time, the books I read. I remember being young and open and, even if I didn't recognise it enough at the time, I remember being free in a way I have rarely ever felt since. It is a strange trick the mind works sometimes. Memories are odd things indeed with which to play. Perhaps I romanticise those times now without even knowing it. What was the truth of that period? Was I happy without really knowing it? Or was I miserable, and tortured in a way that I now refuse to recognise, in a way that I have never really recovered from? I don't know. I really don't know.

***

When this all started out, I promised you a ghost story. Well, I don't want to let you down or lead you on any longer. To tell the story of the ghost, if such there was, I have to tell about the last night I ever spent at number 11 Erskine Street.

It was June when I closed the door and left that flat for the last time. The end of June, right at the dead end of the academic year when all our final exams were in, the results posted and graduations held. The end of the road, in fact, of all my student days.

I'd been living in the flat for three years by this point, but in those last few months, I realise now, I had gone through something of a change in character. Perhaps I was growing up a little, perhaps it was the pressure of upcoming finals, of the slow realisation that in a few short months I would have to step out in the world and try to earn a living for the first time. I don't know exactly, but whatever the cause a change indeed did come over me. I found a focus in my work, studying harder and longer. I concentrated better, expressed myself more clearly and persuasively in seminars. My grades improved, my confidence grew. I found myself applying for jobs and, in a very strange turn of events, had to wrestle with the pleasant problem of which of the two or three offers that came my way I should take up. So ruthlessly efficient had I become in the period, that even before my final exams were sat I had already secured not only a new employer, but also a new flat in a new part of town. This seems, now I reflect upon it, so far beyond the cowed, nervous version of myself I'd been just a few months before that it is difficult even for me to be recognise these as two iterations of the same personality. Of me, in fact.

During all this time of new found maturity, my insomnia too seemed to fall away. For the first time in months I could go to bed at night without fear, with nothing in my mind but the need and expectation of a good nights sleep. Whether these two facts are related or not, I will leave for others to say, but it is true that at just the time that my attention moved to more pressing matters than my own small, existential anxieties, so too did my sleeping habits improve and all the bad dreams, night walks and related oddities fade away to nothing.

Those problems, indeed, seemed to disappear so quickly and so completely during that time that I might have thought them forgotten altogether had it not been for the events of the last few days I spent in the flat. At this point in the year, all my friends had already abandoned town for the summer. Even Iain had left for a month on a study trip to some overseas university. So it was that my last three days of student life were spent entirely alone in that flat. Alone and, for the first time in as long as I could remember, without anything in particular I needed to be doing.

It had been an exciting and busy time for me, those last few months. A time of endings and goodbyes, but also a time of new beginnings and looking forward. An emotional and thrilling time the likes of which I have never, I must say, experienced since. But now, in the last few days before leaving, I found myself in a pause, a breathing space with nothing expected of me and nothing to occupy myself. Into this sudden vacuum, so it felt, all the anxieties I had been pushing away came flooding back in a great wave more powerful and more overwhelming than ever. Suddenly I doubted everything. I knew with a fresh and absolute certainty that the decisions I'd made were those of an overconfident idiot. I knew that I was about to make the most appalling fool of myself, that everything I thought I had built was about to be pulled away from me. I was in a state of panic for those few days, unable to sit still, unable to think straight for more than a moment at a time. And, of course, I was unable to sleep. Two nights came and passed with my eyes barely even closing. The very idea of sleep, once again, seemed absurd.

So it was that on my final day in the flat I was in something of a poor physical state. I was exhausted, over caffeinated and underfed, nauseated and breathless and on the edge of a complete collapse. Not so very different, you might say, from the state I entered the flat in just three years previously. So much for personal development.

I spent the day packing my belongings into boxes and bags. Books were piled and slotted into cardboard crates. Clothes were folded and stuffed into holdalls, into my one blue suitcase and, when there was no room left anywhere else, into black plastic bin liners. Every last item in my possession was crushed and crammed and tied up into the tiniest possible space I could get it into. This should not have been a difficult job. I should have done it slowly over a long period, but I didn't. I had left the whole thing to the last possible minute so that here, my hands shaking, my eyes red with weariness, I had to pack and tidy everything away in the space of only a few hours. Even so, it should not have been difficult work. This was not any kind of an epic task. I did not own enough for the whole thing to take more than an hour or so at any sort of normal pace. And yet it took me the entire day and so diminished was my state while doing it that by the time I had finished I was close to complete collapse.

At the zipping of the last holdall I left the bedroom, closing the door firmly and deliberately behind me, so grateful was I to get out of sight of the mountain of bags and boxes I had spent the afternoon building. I stumbled, literally stumbled I remember, towards the kitchen to grab a drink and fix something to eat. Before I could get there, though, I stopped for a moment to switch on the TV. and slumped down to rest on the armchair by the fire. Within minutes, it must have been, I was asleep. My eyes drooped, my head rocked forward and consciousness left me.

I do not know how long I slept for. However long it lasted, it was a strange sort of sleep. It felt less like a slipping away of consciousness, more as though I had been pulled out of myself for a while. As though my mind had been vacated and left empty, ready to be filled by something else, some other thing. That sounds melodramatic, I know, but I can explain it no better. My sense of myself remained, in some way, throughout the whole time I slept, but was not necessarily connected any longer to my physical self, to the body that slept so deeply in that musty old armchair.

Within this void I again had the experience of looking down on myself as though from a position floating high near the ceiling of the room. I saw myself slumped, chin down on my chest, hands on my knees. I saw myself empty and desiccated, my skin pale and bloodless, my clothes thin and torn, my hair filthy and long. Even in my strange dream-state, this sight of myself appalled me and I knew I had to force a way back down to my body. Again, I cannot explain how, but I recall a certainty, a profound understanding of the importance of not allowing myself to drift any further away. Whatever energy I had I concentrated on forcing myself down and down, drifting imperceptibly down from my position high in the room, down, down towards the crumpled body in the chair below.

As I grew closer, moving so slowly that I could barely sense any movement at all, the vision in front of me shifted. With no particular sense of change or transition, I seemed to slip back into my body so that the next thing I was aware of, I found myself sitting in my armchair in that living room, eyes closed, listening, even through the strange fog of this strange dream, to the soft chatter of the television set. In that moment I heard a noise nearby me. Before I could react, before I could even sit up I felt two hands grip me firmly around the throat.

My eyes open now, I saw a figure in front of me, pressing his weight onto my chest so that I could not breath, forcing me back in the chair and crushing his fingers into my windpipe. I struggled against him as best I was able, but I could barely move. This figure bore down on me so powerfully and so forcefully, the weight of his chest bearing down on my head so that no matter how I twisted, no matter how I tried, I could not see his face, could not force myself away.

Again the scene shifted. The next moment we were no longer in the armchair, but had moved to the bedroom, swiftly and sharply like a cut in movie. I was being pushed forward, arms locked behind me, toward the big bay window. The curtains were open, the window open and the realisation came upon me in sudden rush that, whoever this figure was, he was about to throw me out into the night air. Struggling hard, I grabbed a tight hold on the windowsill and, pushing back with all my remaining strength, refused to give the figure behind me enough leverage to tip me out of the room. This was the struggle of my life. Dream or no dream, I know now, just as I knew then that this was real. I truly believe that if I had not fought that night, if I had not held tight to that window sill, then I would not be here now to tell you all about it.

As it was, there was no end to the struggle. The next thing I knew I was waking up, truly waking this time, gasping to a dark room, the TV. on, but quiet, and the intercom buzzer of the flat's door entry system sounding out loud and insistent in the hallway.

I stumbled to my feet, rubbing my eyes and breathing deeply. I answered the intercom phone, breathless and croaking, still feeling the effects of the fingers my dream attacker had dug firmly into my throat.

"Can you let us in, please," said a voice, deep and authoritative at the other end. "this is the Police."

Thirty seconds later I was standing at the door with three, large policemen standing around, barking questions at me.

"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.

"Of course, Jules," I said. "I'll do whatever you need. But you must tell me what's happening here. Whatever it is, you have to let me help."

"I will do. I will. Just please take the book and put it away. Then I'll tell you everything. As best I can make sense of it all anyway."

I nodded my assent and did as he asked, picking up the book and slotting it into the rucksack I had resting under my chair. As I did so I took a quick glance over it. It was a paperback anthology of short horror stories. A dusty artefact of some old second hand bookstore or charity sale. The cover had a gaudy, colourful illustration of a screaming girl in a loose-fitting blouse. The corners were bashed, there was a thick fold cutting across the front and white crease lines ran up the spine so deeply that a handful of the yellowing, grimy pages from the middle of the book were in danger of coming loose and falling away.

At that first look, it seemed no different from any one of a hundred other books I'd seen cluttering up Jules house over the years. He was a collector of sorts, in a minor way at least, fond of trailing through second-hand bookshops or charity stalls for some forgotten, long out of print curiosity or other. Horror stories, science fiction stories were his thing, the older, the stranger, the more obscure the better. The rest of us, by which I mean all his friends, you can be sure mocked him horribly it, but Jules didn't care. Give him a few drinks and he'd talk for hours, or at least as long as we'd allow him, about his latest discovery. Oliver Onions, Robert Bloch, Robert Chambers, Arthur Machen – these names he whispered to us like a liturgy, like a prayer. He was passionate about these stories, certainly, but nothing he'd spoken of before had ever affected him in the way this particular book had. And yet, to all appearances, there was nothing at all remarkable about it, so far as I could see. I slipped it away quickly out of sight, eager to hear the story he had to tell.

***

"I don't remember when I bought it," he began. "You know what I'm like. I pick these things up all over the place. I couldn't tell you precisely where or when I found half of them. Sometimes they can lie in a pile for years before I get around to actually reading them, so that in itself is not unusual. Neither is it entirely unusual that, since reading it, I haven't been able to find any other copies available for sale among any of the dealers I know of. A lot of these books are old and fragile. They were always ephemeral. They weren't made to last and there may never have been all that many sold in the first place, so it's not surprising that having found one copy it's hard to locate another one.

"These things are not so unusual in themselves and I want to be clear about that from the start. There have been plenty of strange things happen to me in the past few days, so it's important not to dwell on matters which may be far simpler to explain. And yet, at the same time, it is true to say that this book which has troubled me so much is one which I do not recall ever seeing until five days ago and for which I cannot find another copy anywhere in the world.

"It was Sunday afternoon when I started reading it. I'd had a quiet day, nursing a bad head left over from a dinner party I'd been at the previous evening. I sat down late in the afternoon with a coffee and an urge to lose myself in a book for while and this book, the one I just gave you, was the first upon which I laid my hand. There was nothing mysterious about the choice; it was simply the first book I picked up.

"It is an anthology, as you saw, but, I have to say, not a particularly good one. It has a few stories by authors I am fond of, but mostly it is full of second-rate pieces. Hackwork and filler items of the sort that bulked out most magazines back in the days these things were being published. Not a very distinguished collection all round and, I have to say, I wasn't paying a great deal of close attention to it as I read. What with my aching head, the warmth of my living room and the slowly darkening afternoon sky I was, in truth, struggling to keep my eyes open after a while. Eventually I gave into the urge and did fall asleep, the last story I was reading remaining unfinished in my lap. Most of the collection left not much of an impression on me at all, but that last story I remember clearly. Not because it was particularly good, if anything it was precisely the opposite reaction that made it stick in my head.

"It was by a writer I'd never heard of before (and whose name I am now irritatingly unable to recall) who seemed obsessed with describing, in minute and painstaking detail every single thing his main character, a dull nonentity, did or saw or felt or touched. The entire story was a nothing but description of his every action, his every movement – getting out of bed, getting dressed, eating breakfast, cleaning a spot off his trousers, putting his tie on, going to work – on and on it went, a seemingly plotless, pointless description of a character going though a mundane, daily routine. Only at one point in the story did this narrative give way to anything approaching an injection of action or interest. Here's how it happened:

"The character is walking through town, approaching a pedestrian crossing. As he waits to cross, he sees a friend over on the other side of the road. Again, all this is set out in vivid, meticulous detail – the colour of the dress the friend is wearing, the shop she is standing in front of, the way she pulls her hair to one side, the sound of a newspaper seller calling out to passers by, the sight of a small boy crying and being scolded by his mother as he drops his ice cream cone. When the crossing light shows, the man steps out into the road. At that moment there is a loud screech of brakes. He turns his and sees a bus, its driver having not noticed the signals change, race towards him. The driver brakes hard but too late. The bus crashes into the man as he stands helpless in the middle of the road, killing him stone dead. Or, at least, I presume he is dead. It is hard to think otherwise, but I cannot say for sure since that scene is the last thing I remember reading before I fell asleep. Crucially I remember it was not the end of the story. There were another ten pages or so still to go at the point at which I dropped the book. I could not read any longer though, my eyes were drooping too heavily, so I put it aside in favour of a nap with no particular intention to ever pick it up again.

"For the next day or so I can't say I gave the story or the book a single moment's thought. The book returned to a pile on a shelf and I went to work and got on with things just exactly as normal. Everything about the week began perfectly as I would have expected it to right up until Tuesday afternoon. That was the point at which things began to take a turn for the strange.

"I'd arranged to meet my friend Sophie for lunch and, after a fairly low key morning in the office, went out at around twelve-thirty. As I came close to the pub I arranged to meet her in, I spotted Sophie across on the other side of the road. She spotted me too and as I waited to cross the road towards her, she stopped and smiled. It was a windy day and her dress billowed slightly in the breeze, her free hand brushing the hair from out of her eyes as she waved to me with the other. Watching her, waiting for the crossing lights to change, I was overcome by a powerful sense of déjà vu on a scale far, far more profound than anything I've ever experienced before. I felt a shiver pass through me, my legs buckling as though the ground itself were shaking. For a moment I thought I might actually faint, so powerful and disorienting was this sensation. Everything around me, everything I could see and hear, I knew I had already seen before. At that very moment I realised where it was this remembrance came from. Everything described in the story was happening to me here. Sophie and her dress and her hair, the newspaper seller, the small boy and his ice cream - they were all here around me, just and exactly as they had been described in the story I'd read a few days before.

"This realisation came over me suddenly, and I was still shaken by it when the traffic lights changed and the crossing indicator came up. Just as I was about to cross however, I remembered the story again. I stopped and looked to my right just in time to see the bus slamming on its brakes, screeching past me, missing me by no more than a foot.

"How I got through the rest of that afternoon, I cannot say. Goodness only knows what Sophie thought of me, since I can't have said more than two words at a time all the way through lunch. I left work early and ran home. All I could think about was getting to that story again. I wanted to find it, to make sure that what I thought I'd read was actually there, to make sure that I had not dreamt the whole thing. More than that, though, I had a horrible cold dread in my stomach at the thought of those last ten pages, the ending to the story which I had never read. What happened in those pages? Did the character – whom by now I could not help but think of as myself – die or did he survive somehow as I had? Either way I was sure that whatever happened in those pages was in some way also fated to happen to me. Either those pages held my future, or they held a version of my future which I had managed, perhaps only temporarily, to escape. Whatever was in them, I had to read it.

"I got home, straight away picked up the book and rifled through its pages. The story was not there. I double-checked to make sure it was the same book. It was. The other stories I'd read were all in place as I remembered them, the cover, the title page, these things were all as they should be, only the story I was looking for was missing. I checked the contents page, I checked to see if any pages could have fallen out, I even went through the whole book page by page to see if there were any inexplicable gaps in the numbering or ordering, but nothing helped. The story I was looking for, the story I knew I had read only a few days before, was no longer in the book.

"At this point, my friend, I'm not ashamed to say that I think I lost control of my mind for a while. Perhaps you think that an overreaction? Perhaps you might think that a grown man like myself should be able to shrug off an event like this, strange though it was, and carry on with the day nonetheless. You may be right. All I can say is that I could not. This thing, whatever it meant, affected me deeply in a way I find hard to explain. If I had not read that story, if I had not remembered it again at that precise moment, I know I would be a dead man now. That bus would have hit me. This much is certain. What is less explicable is the sense I had that night that somehow, somewhere I was a dead man. The bus had hit me. And what I was living now was nothing more than a dream, nothing more than the last flickering thoughts of a dying brain. Without the pages being there to give some sense of reality to this situation, I did not know what to do. I could not be sure of anything anymore.

"I do not remember much of what happened for the next day or so. I remember the nights passing and the mornings coming, but what I did with that time, I truly do not know. When my senses returned to me this morning I was sitting the in the middle of my living room. Every book on every shelf in my house had been pulled off and ripped apart. There were pages and covers strewn everywhere around me. The only book that remained untouched was the one I gave to you just now. I sat with it cradled in my arms like a child. At some point I had been crying. There were tears drying on my clothes and on my cheeks.

"Since that moment I have not wanted to open that book or to look inside it. If I opened it right now I do not know whether I would find the story I was looking for or not, but I think it best I do not find out. I have, as I say, made some inquiries as to the availability of other copies of the book or other printings of the story (the title of which I would rather not reveal to you, for fear you feel motivated to look into the matter yourself), but none have been forthcoming. So be it. I think the best way forward for me is to put the book aside, to try to forget it exists. This is what I need you for, old friend. Keep it away from me, but keep it safe. It's hard to explain, but I don't like the thought of it coming to any harm. I will be in your debt more than I can ever repay."

***

All of this happened a little more than five weeks ago. Telling the story put a strain on Jules and it took almost all the energy he had left just to get through it. I promised to look after the book as he asked and this seemed to reassure him to some degree. We left each other's company, promising to meet again soon, but as it turns out we have not. I was concerned for Jules and called him several times in the week following that meeting, but he never returned my messages. I didn't exactly blame him. He had bared his heart to me that afternoon in a way that I could imagine would be uncomfortable for a proud, strong man like Jules to cope with. It would be difficult to keep up our friendship without referring directly to the story he'd told me, and yet to discuss it might well be the last thing he wanted at this time. Best to leave it for a while, I decided and waited for Jules to turn up on my doorstep again or for our paths to cross as they invariably did every few weeks.

As to his tale and the missing story he told me about, I confess I paid it no credence whatsoever. Even while Jules was telling it I had decided that he was suffering from a mental collapse of some sort. The book, I was sure, was no more than a yellowing, dusty bundle of paper and ink. There was nothing mysterious or magical about it and to think otherwise seemed ridiculous.

At least so I thought until yesterday evening.

I came home late from work and, finding nothing on television and nothing that grabbed my attention online, I searched around my flat for something to read that would take my mind off what had been an irritating day. Unlike Jules, I am not a great reader myself. I do not keep a great deal of books around the house and those I did have I had already read, all that is except for the book Jules had given me to look after. As I say, I did not accept that there was anything strange about the book so I did not think there anything wrong with me opening it and reading it. The idea that this might be dangerous in any way, reckless even, simply did not cross my mind.

So it was that I began reading. I don't particularly share Jules' tastes in literature and the stories I read in this collection did not do much, if anything, to change my opinion. As Jules had said, they seemed dull and obvious, their plots clumsy and stale, their shocks all too well telegraphed to have any impact at all and I read through them quickly and with half an eye on an early night. Only when I began reading the story Jules had described to me did my interest rise.

I didn't realise what was happening at first. I was several pages into it when it suddenly struck me that this was the missing story, the one Jules had been so desperate to find again. A grim shiver passed through me, but I continued reading. I know I should have stopped. I should have stopped as soon as I realised, but I didn't. Something about the strangeness of the story and the things Jules had told me about it made it impossible for me to put down. It was exactly as Jules had described – a detailed depiction of everyday mundanities in the life of a single character. Rather than being dull, though, rather than the character being a nonentity, there was a strange richness in the telling of the story. There was, to my mind, something almost hallucinatory about the level of detail the author had put in to his tale. More than that, the character at the centre of the story was clearly Jules himself. The resemblance was unmistakable and impossible to avoid, so much so that it seemed bizarre that Jules could have failed to notice it at his first reading.

As I read on, I came to the part of the story that Jules had described to me. Standing by the crossing. The girl across the street. The newspaper seller. The small boy. They were all there just as he described them. And just as he'd said, the scene ended with a bus running through the lights, ploughing into the main character, knocking him to the ground, killing him dead.

There was no ambiguity to the story as I read it. The character was dead, there was no way he could have survived an impact like that. When I turned the page, though, to see what happened next, I found there was not, as Jules had said, another ten pages of story to go. Rather, the next page in the book brought the beginning of the next story in the collection. I checked again, looking back at the contents page, at the sequence of page numbering, but there were no pages missing. The impact with the bus was the way Jules' story ended. There were no missing pages, no mysterious ending for him to find.

I did not know quite what to think about this story – the very fact of its existence, the way Jules could not find it a second time, those missing pages that were not missing at all – but having read it, I felt I had to speak with Jules as soon as possible, for us to try and figure out together what to make of it all. But it was late by this point, well into the early hours of the morning and I thought it best to leave it till a more sociable hour.

I called his number this afternoon. The phone rang for a long time and when it was answered it was not Jules at the other end but his father. His voice was faint and cracked with a deep weariness that chilled me just to hear it. He told me what had happened as best he knew it. Jules took his own life yesterday evening. Just around the time, so far as I can figure it, that I first picked up the book he'd given me. He had not recovered, it seemed, from the shock of what happened to him that day. He'd been withdrawn and uncommunicative for weeks. He had been absent from work. He hadn't been seeing anyone. He had been suffering quietly on his own and, eventually, decided to bring it all to an end.

I will not say for certain that my reading of the story and what he did were directly connected – I carry enough guilt with me, as do all his friends, for what I did and did not do for Jules without also taking that weight on board. All I know is that I have not opened the book again. I do not want to know whether his story is still in there or not. And I do not want to know how many pages it has.

#  A Crescent-shaped Scar

I'm standing in front of a broken mirror with a sharp, dagger of glass held firm in my hand and I am as happy, right now, as I can ever remember being in my life.

***

A few days ago, I had an accident in my garden and ended up cutting myself quite badly on the cheek just under my right eye. It was, as it turned out, a perfectly appropriate way to round off what had already been a frustrating and exasperating week, a week sent to test my patience and push at the edges of my resilience, a week which, standing in the middle of my garden with my hands quickly covered in the sticky warmth of my own blood, I had cause to curse with even more vehemence than usual.

It was a week that began with a brick tossed purposefully and maliciously through my drawing room window early one evening. I was, by some good fortune, not at home when it happened but the effects were all there for me to see when I returned later that day. Small shards of sharp glass lay scattered all across the floor, there was a gaping gash in the window frame through which the rain had blown in and the carpets and furniture had a sodden, dishevelled look to them, the curtains sucking outwards and billowing roughly in the open air. Inside, landed neatly right in the middle of the floor was a red house brick with a scribbled note wrapped untidily around it.

"Why aren't you dead yet?"

Sometimes they have notes, sometimes they don't. I've had more than my share of bricks thrown through this window over the years and I've seen all possible variations on the theme. This one was a note carrier. "Why aren't you dead yet?" in red marker pen written on A4 lined note paper. I flattened it out on the kitchen table for the Police to take away with them. This time they were quick to respond, polite and professional in their actions in a way I've grown to appreciate over the years, rather than expect as a matter of course. They took their pictures and they made their calls but they didn't tell me anything I didn't already know and they didn't make any promises they won't be able to keep.

Outside when they were leaving, while the joiner they'd called was busy putting up boards over my broken window, a group of the neighbours gathered together across the road. They didn't call over, didn't say or gesture anything to me, they only stood and watched and talked amongst themselves, a grim assembly of sullen whispers and nasty smiles. They are like crows perched on a clifftop these people who live around me. They spend their days forever staring twitchily in my direction, watching and waiting on the off-chance they might one day have a corpse to pick over. There were no words exchanged at all, but if I were paranoid – and of course I'm paranoid, it would be crazy for me to be anything else – I could swear that one of them, the fat, bald headed man from two doors down, swapped a nod and a smile (of recognition? Of understanding?) with the younger of the two policemen getting into his car. I saw this, but I didn't say anything. I know what goes on and I try not to let it bother me.

That was the way the week began and by the morning of my accident in the garden, my window was still boarded up, the tradesmen who'd agreed to replace the frame still not having arrived to do the job. Four times they'd arranged a time to come to me now. Four times they'd failed to show, the most recent occasion being the previous day and I spent that morning on the phone to them, trying to get hold of the manager, trying to arrange a new time for them to come and complete their job. Whenever I call them I have to struggle hard to remain civil, have to fight down those urges toward combat that rise up in the face of their boorish behaviour. I know what they're doing. I know that they test me. I know the only way to get through it is to not let them think that it upsets me. I have to block it all out. I have to pretend that nothing unusual is happening. I have to wait for them to get bored first. If I had some choice in the matter, I know, I could try to take my money elsewhere, were it not for the fact that every other company in town has already refused to take my business. There is a poison attached to my name and address in this town. It is unmistakable and impossible to avoid. "We're too busy," they say, voices tight and spiteful, when I say who I am. "I'm afraid we just don't have anyone available." I know these are excuses. I know the real reason they won't help me, just as I know why the neighbours stare and why the bricks get thrown and why the policemen do nothing about any of it. I know what they all want. I just refuse to give it to them. I will not do it.

***

It's never the tidiest of places at the best of times, my garden, but on morning of the accident it was in more of a mess than even I could put up with any longer. It has been a stormy autumn here with winds as bad as anything as I can remember in any of the twenty odd years I've been living in this house. There have been trees blowing over in the parks, slates and chimneys brought down from rooftops and the sand from the shore has been picked up and whipped across every inch of the town so that just walking out has been like taking a bath in salty grit, like having the skin blasted and burnt off you with every gust. That morning things seemed to have calmed a little, the wind dropping and the sky clearing and I took my morning coffee outside to inspect the damage left by the latest storm. There were no tiles down, thank goodness, and all the neighbour's trees seemed to have survived more or less intact, and yet the place was still an appalling mess. The cul-de-sac in which my house is situated acts, at times like this, as a long tunnel for the wind to blow down and that morning it looked as though my poor little garden had become like a sieve for all the rubbish of the town, a last resting place for every newspaper, every plastic bag, every leaf from every tree in the whole town to get blown through and caught up in. I stood in the midst of this clutter and set my mind to putting it to rights before the day was out.

What with the business with the tradesmen and the window, it was early afternoon before I managed to get started and it soon became apparent that what I thought would be a relatively short task ended up being a much more serious undertaking than I had imagined. By the time the accident intervened to put a stop to my progress, I'd been working away for a few hours already. Behind me on the square lawn lay the fruits of my labour, four tightly packed black refuse bags full of leaves and litter and another two piles of rubbish beside them, waiting to be similarly bagged up. All this work, all that litter and I still hadn't managed quite to make my way more than half way around the perimeter of my small garden. It was a cold afternoon, the sky a bright frozen blue, but I was sweating heavily and beginning to tire from all the awkward exertion I was putting myself through. My body felt sore and heavy, every movement becoming somehow so much more uncomfortable and difficult than it had been a few hours earlier. My back ached from bending over for so long, my arms hurt from all the stretching and lifting I was doing and every inch of my skin was covered in a thin sheen of wet sweaty dirt that clung to me and soaked through my clothes. I had dirt on my face, dirt in my hair, in my ears, in my eyes, dirt under my fingernails even, on more than one occasion, dirt in my mouth, grinding moist and gritty between my back teeth. I could feel myself sinking, steadily into the wet earth as I worked, the cold, rotten stillness of autumn filling my lungs, piles of mulch and leaves growing around me, swallowing me up amongst them.

If I were a more sensible man I would have taken a rest at this point, stopped for the day, even, because by this point the sun was beginning to dip and the light to fade and at the rate I was going it was looking extremely unlikely that the job would be finished before darkness flooded over me. I would not allow myself to entertain such any such thoughts. I don't know what it says about the state of my mind that day – dogged and obstinate, you might say. Delusional, perhaps – but I was determined to finish the job I'd started, even if it meant carrying on to work in the dark, even if it meant a week of recuperation and hot baths to recover from it. It's a kind of mood that comes over me every now and then. I can put a job off for months at a time, but when I do settle down to do it, it becomes important to me that I finish it as quickly as possible, not leave things undone and untidy. I know myself too well, perhaps. Well enough to know, at least, that a job left half done will probably never be completed.

So it was that I carried on working, my mind wandering, letting my body get on with the task in hand. I cannot say what it was I was thinking about when the accident happened. Perhaps I was lost in the recollection of some old conversation, perhaps I was running over again some event of the previous day, I do not know. All I know is that whatever day-dream I was lost in at the time, I was sharply tugged out of it by a sudden prod in my shoulder, just like a long sharp finger tapping impatiently at me to attract my attention, and just at that precise moment I was filled with the odd, cold sensation that there was someone standing right behind me.

I turned quickly and carelessly and as I did so caught my cheek on the sharp thorns of the rose bush under which I was half crouched. I felt the thorn catch on me and tear across my face, fast and sharp like crack of a whip or the swipe of a cat's claw. As I twisted, the branch twisted with me, the thorn breaking away from the bush, one last fragment of spiky barb left hanging from my cheek as I scrambled backwards, away from the bushes, backwards towards the middle of the lawn.

What had caused me to be so startled, again, I cannot say, because when I turned to look around me, there was nobody there. I was as alone in the garden as I had been all afternoon. The sky was clear, the air was still and there was nothing moving in the garden at all, not even a bird. When I think back now, it does seem peculiar how certain I had been of a figure standing behind me, of a finger prodding into me. Even though I had not seen anyone nor heard anyone speak a word the sensation was very strong. If I thought hard enough about it, I could almost picture the figure, put a face to it even, so powerful was the image formed in my mind at that moment, and yet the fact of the matter was when I turned to look there was nobody there.

All of this seems peculiar and difficult to explain now, but at the time, truth is I had other matters to concern myself with. The thorn had ripped a long gash through the fleshy part of my face and there was already a surprising amount of blood spilling from it. I tore off my gardening gloves, all muddy and wet, and, still in the process of stumbling backwards from the bushes, brought my hands up to my face. When I brought them away again they were slick with blood, my whole face stinging wet and warm. Delicately, my hands trembling slightly, my head tilted forward, I ran my fingers along the length of the wound, feeling out its beginning and its end, from which found and, wincing at the pain of it, tugged out the last remaining barb of rose thorn. There was blood everywhere by this point. My fingers, hands were slick with it. I could feel it drip constantly from the edges of the wound, a thick rivulet running its way heavily down my face and my neck. My sweater was covered too by now, large smears where I'd rubbed my hands clean lying alongside deeper, thicker spots where the blood had fallen directly from my face. I tore it off me and pressed it to my face to stop the flow, climbed to my feet and stumbled towards the safety of the house.

Once in the bathroom, I pulled the sweater away from my face and stared wide eyed into the mirror over the sink to examine the damage. My face looked a car wreck, barely like my own face at all, the combination of blood and dirt and sweat covering me like a mask from a horror movie. Again, it was the sheer quantity of blood that shocked me most. Even in just a few minutes since the accident, a tiny thing by itself, just one small swipe from rose thorn, I had somehow contrived, it seemed to smear this red, viscous liquid all over myself. My cheeks and my forehead were red streaked; there was blood in my hair, more blood smeared in thick, finger-painted streaks all over my neck and my ears. And still it kept coming, beading out of the wound in a steady flow, constant and insistent so that no matter how I pressed my fingers, my palm against the wound, it made no obvious difference to the flow and only helped further to spread the redness around my face, my hands and, by extension everything I touched or brushed against in the room. It dripped onto the floor at my feet, into the sink, around the taps so that already the room had the look of a butchers' counter or an operating room about it.

There is a quality, I have always felt, about the red colour of blood that makes it almost entirely unlike any substance I can think of. Even in small quantities - a tiny drop, a small smear - it is obvious and unmistakeable. It stands out from whichever surrounding it is found in, sharp and vicious. Something in that colour contains a depth of reality that is shocking and uncomfortable to look at. In truth, the amount of liquid that poured out of me that day was probably not all that great in itself, it was after all only a small cut, and yet smeared , oily and slick, around my hands and the room I stood in, it seemed like a shocking amount to my eyes, achieving a surreal, dreamlike effect which was only heightened by my shortness of breath and the racing of my heart.

I have never, you might have guessed by now, much liked the sight of blood, least of all my own. As a boy I avoided butchers' shops, I ran screaming at the slightest scrape of my knee or nick of a finger. Even now I shave with an electric razor, I have a distrust of blades that verges on mania. It took, therefore, considerable effort for me to pull myself together and take hold of the situation that afternoon. Pull myself together I did, though. I took towels and wet them through with cold water to press against my face. My cheeks so numbed with cold that my eyes ached and my teeth throbbed, I took more cloths and, so far as I was able to with only one free hand, began the task of wiping up the bloody red mess I'd spread all over the room. This business of cleaning helped to focus my mind somewhat, I felt, and by the time I was finished, or as finished as I possibly could be, I had regained a little composure and was ready to pull the towel away from my face again, peeling it away slowly and carefully to inspect the damage underneath.

The whole right side of my face was pink and numb from the cold icy water I'd pressed against it. The left side, as though compensating in some way, was pale like a sheet of blank paper so that my whole head had the peculiar appearance of having been split in two, or dipped sideways in a vat of die. Underneath my eye the scar stood out starkly, still, though with less enthusiasm than before, beading out droplets of blood along its length. The thorn had ripped into my skin just under my right eye, missing the eyelid by no more than a centimetre or two. Starting beside my nose, the cut ran rightwards, rising in a slow arc across my cheek some two inches or slightly more in length. It had a crescent shaped appearance to it, like the thin shaving of a new moon turned on its back or a cat's grin gaping peculiarly from the side of my face.

I wet a clean towel again and dabbed gently away at the wound, cleaning away the droplets of blood which emerged from it every few seconds. For an age I carried on doing this, the towel growing progressively redder and redder, the time it took for the droplets to seep out from the edge of the wound growing steadily longer and longer – first only a second or so, then ten seconds, then thirty, then eventually, slowly a minute perhaps. I don't know how long I stood there, mechanically dabbing way at the wound in my face. The room grew darker as the time went by and at some point I turned to switch a light on, but other than that short shift, I do not think I moved my feet once in all the time I stood there. My eyes stayed fixed on the image of my face in the mirror and my mind wandered, aimlessly, thoughtlessly. At one point I think I heard a phone ring, but I didn't move to answer it. Outside, next doors' dog started barking as its owner came home from work. Inside my house it was quiet. There was nobody here but me and the strange, multicoloured face which stared blankly back at me.

All that evening, even after the flow of blood had stopped, I found myself going back to inspect my face in the mirror, running my fingers delicately along the edge of the thin, pink scar that was forming on my cheek. The more I looked at it, the more I felt there something troubling about the shape of the scar, some strange sense of déjà vu that ran though me every time I looked at it. This had not occurred to me earlier in the afternoon, but now, with the blood dried along it and my brain recovered from the initial shock of the incident, the strange familiarity of the shape impressed itself on me each time I stood in front of the mirror. It was not a pleasant sensation, a kind of maddening half memory that teased away the back of my mind, just out of reach no matter how hard I searched for it. I tried to brush it off, to ignore the feeling and settle down to the rest of my evening, but still the urge to look again at the scar came back so strongly that I dropped, over and again, whatever I was doing to go back to the mirror again, stare at the wound again and run my fingers delicately along its bright pink surface.

Even as I slept, this feeling would not leave me. I spent an unsettled night drifting between odd, disturbing dreams that clung urgently to me in unconsciousness but then slipped way imperceptibly upon waking. Only one image remained with me from this long night of odd thoughts and surreal exchanges, that of a long finger pointing at me, just in front of my eyes, so close that it was impossible to focus on anything else, impossible even to see who the finger belonged to. One image and one thought – that the scar now on my face had always been there, deep below the surface of me all my life, and that if only I'd known how to look I would have seen it all along.

***

The next morning the postman came around with a large pack of letters for me. I have an arrangement with the Royal Mail and the police these days. Only the most innocuous, most obviously innocent mail – bills, circulars and the like – are delivered to me directly. Everything else - any letters or packages or parcels, anything handwritten – is held and filtered first by the Police before forwarding on to me only when it is deemed safe to do so. It all gathers together in some special unit in Police headquarters, I think, and comes to me in batches every week or so. It seems like a lot of bother to go to, but it's probably sensible. Back in the early days after the court case - when my story was still in all newspapers, still on every bulletin – I did have a few nasty deliveries come my way. Razorblades in envelopes (lots of those), bags of white powder that popped on opening, even an attempt at a bomb or two (far too amateurish to succeed, to actually explode, I'm relieved to say), not to mention the more unpleasant parcels, the ones whose contents meant to disgust rather than hurt, to sicken my mind rather than my body.

So it is that I receive the bulk of my mail in chunks like this, mostly weekly or fortnightly parcels depending on how large the backlog has grown, how suspicious the items. Mostly it is all legitimate mail - parcels I've ordered, correspondence between me and my solicitor – but there's still a steady stream of what you'd probably call hate mail in there too. The occasional death threat. Even after all this time they still keep coming. It amazes me how much stamina some people have, what capacity for hate they must hold, these strangers I've never met, nor seen, to be able to summon up such commitment to carrying this on for so long. The police don't want me to see these. They want to hold them back, to protect me from them, but I insist. I want to see them. I want to know what people are saying and thinking about me – even the deranged, even the obsessed and the fixated. And besides, they're my property these letters, no-one has any right to withhold them from me.

I open them all and read them all, then put them away in an old box I have set aside for the purpose. For a certain type of person there might be a strange, dark glamour in the idea of this box full of hate. I can understand that. I can understand someone wanting to open it, to look inside, to see for themselves just how spiteful, how hateful it is possible for one person to be to another. They would be disappointed though. For the most part, though, there's nothing remarkable or imaginative in the nonsense people send to me. Rarely running to more than one page, scrawled in red, in green, in purple ink, using the most hateful thoughts, the most vicious words the writer can summon. Not normally very inspired, as I say, and not usually very upsetting either – the words themselves, more often than not, proving markedly less distressing than the grammar with which they are deployed. These are sad artefacts from the minds of sad people mostly.

During the court case – those interminable months I spent in the dock listening to the horrors ascribed to me be repeated and repeated, my words twisted, my history misconstrued – there was a flood of them, hundreds and hundreds of letters come in a great, red torrent of all the spite and fury of the nation all concentrated, it seemed, for a short but distressing period, right upon me. They came from all over the country, all parts of the world, even, from every type, every class of person you can think of. Nowadays that flood has thinned to a trickle, no more than one or two per month and those mostly, so far as I can tell from the handwriting and the ink and the repetitive curses they contain, from the same small group of regular writers. Mostly women, I think. Mostly, or so I suspect given the spidery, shaky quality of the handwriting, fairly elderly, lonely old women.

As I say, there is not usually much to these letters nowadays, certainly nothing very upsetting for a hardened campaigner like myself to face up to. It is all pretty humdrum stuff for the most part. Only one of my regular correspondents stands out from the field in any way, only one writer has the capacity to get under my skin and unsettle me. She, I presume it is a she, was one of the first to begin to write to me, just after my arrest, before my name was even in the press as I recall it, and she has continued to write regularly, rarely missing a month ever since. So many letters I have received from her, all of them tucked away in the bottom of my box file. Her letters stand out from the rest in two very particular, very specific ways.

First of all, she writes always in the same ink – a deep reddish brown shade that is, and I feel ridiculous even saying it, far too close to the colour of old, dried blood for my liking. Second, her letters consist always of only one phrase, scribbled neatly in the middle of a single, otherwise blank page of white paper, and written in some language, some collection of symbols that make no sense to anyone who has ever read them. The Police have specialists in this sort of thing, but even they are at a loss to decipher them, even to identify what language it is they are written in. To my uneducated eye there is something Eastern European, gypsy-like even, about these odd symbols, but the experts tell me otherwise. It means nothing, they say. Just the mad, made up scribblings of someone who wants to scare me. They're probably right. But the truth is they do scare me, these letters, more so than any of the other, more intelligible notes which for all their violence and fury amount to little more than playground taunts. These letters carry a real threat about them. A promise of something to come, something I have no hope of understanding never mind any chance of stopping.

I have never told anyone just how these letters make me feel. I'm afraid they would find it all too interesting. The Police psychologists, back in the early days, were fascinated by my reaction to the hate poured at me, by how calmly I took it. If I confessed now that this one set of letters had quite the opposite effect, how would that look? They'd say it suggested a feeling of guilt hidden away inside me. And since I was acquitted so clearly of the crimes I was accused of, what could I possibly have to feel so guilty about?

So it was, then, sifting through the parcel of letters that morning that I came across a familiar, though in retrospect not altogether unexpected, shiver of dread pass over me as I pulled out and saw in my hand a small white envelope neatly addressed to me in that very same reddish brown ink. Given the already anxious and agitated state I was in that morning, still suffering from a poor night's sleep, I hesitated for a time before opening the envelope. When I did, I pulled out, as usual, just one single page of white paper. Rather than the usual single enigmatic phrase, however, this time the page was blank, entirely blank with not a single visible mark on either side of it. I peered closely at it, held it up to the light to see anything would emerge, but nothing did. There was nothing on the page at all.

I placed it down on my kitchen table and walked away from it, trying hard not to imagine what kind of message my correspondent was trying to send this time, returning back to my by now well worn spot in front of the bathroom mirror. I stood and I stared back at myself, delicately feeling out again the shape of the bright red scar that marked my face. Receiving the letter had left me oddly shaken and I calmed myself by methodically pressing and stroking at the edges of my wound. After a time I began to feel more like myself again and decided, in a snap moment of clarity, that I should not leave the wound open to the air like this but should put a dressing on it to keep it clean and avoid infection. I opened the bathroom cabinet and found some clean white gauze which I cut and fixed against my face with four short strips of tape beside my nose and under my eye. This done I decided I would shake off the strangeness of the past few days and settle down to my usual routine.

Saying the words is one thing, however. Actually carrying them out is quite another challenge altogether and when it came down to it I found myself unable to put either the letter or the scar on my face entirely out of my mind. Putting the dressing in place, in fact, had a strange effect on me altogether, that morning. Rather than hide the wound, it seemed to make it almost more conspicuous. Rather than one thin line on my face, now I had several layers of foreign material to deal with, which tugged awkwardly against my nose and my cheek as I ate and which always, no matter how hard I tried to ignore them, just creeping into the edge of my field of vision. It was as though, too, that covering up the wound made the shape of it even more maddening to me. Hidden as it was under the gauze, I could not see the crescent shape curve of it any more, but I could still imagine it. I could feel out the shape of it with the tip of my finger over the top of the dressing, could sketch it absent mindedly with my pen on the corner of my newspaper as I did the morning crossword, could trace it through the air, even, with the tip of my toe as I sat watching tv. I could even, if you asked me to, sing it for you, if that makes any sense at all, so familiar, so well did I know this shape which grabbed at my mind so strangely.

***

The next two days I spent almost entirely indoors. The storm had risen again after its brief respite and even in the middle of the day the sky was black and the rain whipped constantly against the windows at the front of the house. These days spent indoors were not, in themselves, an entirely unusual event for me. I have no job to go to these days, not many friends to visit, no family, very few commitments to take me out of the house when I don't feel like it, and it's not unusual at all for me to go days at a time not venturing any further than the edge of my little garden. Even so, those two days felt different somehow. Even though I had no particular place I could say I would rather be, no particular thing I wanted to do, the fact of the storm and the self consciousness I felt over the state of my face, left me feeling trapped somehow, imprisoned within the four walls of my home in a way that I reacted and struggled against like a teenager confined to his room for bad behaviour. The time weighed heavily on me indeed. I paced the floors all day, unable to settle to do anything, the peculiar state of anxiety and agitation clinging to me no matter what I tried to do to shake it off. My mind wandered as I paced, jumping awkwardly and without logic from one topic to another, one troubling memory to another half forgotten worry to another.

At night I could not sleep. Rather than lie unsettled, tossing and turning in an uncomfortable bed, I continued to pace around the house all night. Maybe it is a sign of just how uneasy I'd become in those few days, how uncertain of myself I had grown but I felt like a small boy again, wandering the halls of my house day and night, listening to the gale rage outside, waiting for the weather to clear. As I wandered, I fingered the dressing on my face, absent-mindedly tracing over and again the crescent shape of the scar that was hidden under it. This repetitive act was somehow soothing to me, yet somehow simultaneously stoking up an anxiety that I could not, no matter what I did, clear myself of.

For two days this pattern repeated itself, like a fever, this agitated, endless pacing. Only this morning did the fever break. Not until this morning did I wake from this strange dream I've been wandering through. I can't explain it, but I feel so much clearer now, stronger in my mind than I have been for some time.

I had a dream last night, during the short period in which I was able to sleep. More than one dream actually, but only one which has stuck with me. I was at home, a small boy again in my parent's house. There was a meeting going on in the front room. The place was full of people coming and going, buzzing around. Something important was going on, some judgement was being made. I knew it was important and that the decision to be made would effect me in a very direct way, but I could not follow the arguments, could not understand what it was that was under debate. There were raised voices, angry people shouting over one another and, in the middle of it all, my father, still a youngish man at this point, no older than I am now, trying to keep the peace, fighting a hopeless cause. All of the noise was upsetting to me and I was staying as far away from it as I could get. I sat in the kitchen where it was warm, beside the stove with my back to the rest of the room, trying to ignore the goings-on elsewhere in the house.

All of a sudden I was startled by a finger prodding my in my shoulder. I span around quickly and there in front of me was a red haired lady with wild eyes and a wild manner. She was a friend of my father, someone who had been to our house many times before but whom I had always felt uncomfortable around. There was something unpredictable about her, something unruly that was upsetting for me as a small boy to see in an adult. At this moment her cheeks were flushed and her eyes wide, her pupils large and black so that they seemed to dominate her face. Her breathing was heavy and smelled of something strongly spiced and sweet and alcoholic. The smell was overpowering, so much so that I squirmed to get away from her. She stopped me though with two strong, bony hands on my shoulders, pinning me in place.

"I have something to tell you," she said to me. "I've been waiting to tell you this for longer than you can know." She stared at me so deeply when she said these words that I could not tell whether they were spoken to the young boy in my dream or to the grown man who was dreaming them. "I see you better than you see yourself. I know you better than anyone else ever will," she said, kneeling in front of me and placing a finger on my cheek just under my right eye. "There is something inside you, you know. You put it there yourself with the things you did. It won't come out till it's ready to. It might not come out for a very long time, but when it's ready you'll know all about it. When it's ready you won't be able to hide it anymore."

She was smiling as she said this, a strange smile that was part amusement, part nervous twitch and not in the slightest reassuring to look upon. As she spoke she ran her finger along my cheek under my eye, left and right, left and right, sketching out a slow, crescent shaped arc across my face.

I woke in a sweat to a house still shrouded in darkness. I didn't know what to think. I was still trembling in fright as I walked downstairs to where I saw the blank white page from the other day's mail still lying where I left it on the kitchen table. Except it wasn't blank anymore, not quite. There in the middle of the page, where usually there would be a strange phrase written in a strange language, where previously there had be no mark at all to be seen, there was sketched, in a reddish brown ink not dissimilar to the colour of old dried blood, a single line drawing of a smooth crescent shape.

I saw the shape and a change came over me. Just then I understood what was happening to me. I went straight to the bathroom and stood before the mirror. I pulled the gauze and the dressing off my face to reveal the pink shape of the wound underneath. Whether the red haired woman in my dream was giving me a blessing or a curse, I could not tell. All I knew was that it felt real, more real to me than anything that has happened to me these past few years.

I put my fingers to my wound and pressed against it, tearing it apart again so that the skin tore and the blood once more began to drip, warm and bright over my hands. Rather than fear, rather than dread, the sight of that red flow this time washed me with a bright feeling of clarity, the likes of which I cannot remember ever feeling. I looked down at my arms and I could feel them glow from within. Everywhere I looked, all over my body, my legs, my face, my hands, I could see small crescent shapes repeat and repeat. There were hundreds of them all over me, all waiting to come out. I took my fist and crashed it into the mirror in front of me.

Now I have a sharp dagger of glass in my hand and I understand what those letters have been telling me to do all these years. I can see the scars inside me and I'm ready, at last, to bring them out.
