A Report on a Haunting and Other Stories Read online

  ***

  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. r />
  ***

  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, whoe
ver 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.