He’d spent the day and half the night writing, drinking tea until he hardly knew what he was doing. He’d invented character after character, building them like Frankenstein out of fragments of people, only to subject them to gloatingly prolonged atrocities, both the victims and the perpetrators.
When he’d finished, his head felt like an empty rusty can. He might have vomited if he had been able to stand. His gaze had fallen on a paragraph he’d written, and he’d swept the pages onto the floor, snarling with disgust. “Next morning he couldn’t remember what he’d done—but when he reached in his pocket and touched the soft object his hand came out covered with blood…”
He’d stumbled across the landing to his bedroom, desperate to forget his ravings. When he’d awakened next morning he had been astonished to find that he’d fallen asleep as soon as he had gone to bed. As he’d lain there, feeling purged, an insight so powerful it was impossible to doubt had seized him. If he hadn’t written out these things they would have happened in reality.
But he had written them out: they were no longer part of him. In fact they had never been so, however they had felt. That made him feel cleaner, absolved him of responsibility. He stuffed the sloganeering newspapers into the wastebasket and arranged his desk for work.
By God, there was nothing so enjoyable as feeling ready to write. While a pot of tea brewed he strolled about the house and reveled in the sunlight, his release from the nightmares, his surge of energy. Next door a man with a beard of shaving foam dodged out of sight, like a timid Santa Claus.
Miles had composed the first paragraph before he sat down to write, a trick that always helped him write more fluently—but a week later he was still struggling to get the chapter into publishable shape. All that he found crucial about his research—the idea that by staying in the West Derby house he had tapped a source of utter madness, which had probably caused the original murder—he’d had to suppress. Why, if he said any of that in print they would think he was mad himself. Indeed, once he’d thought of writing it, it no longer seemed convincing.
When he could no longer bear the sight of the article, he typed a fresh copy and sent it to Susie. She called the following day, which seemed encouragingly quick. Had he been so aware of what he was failing to write that he hadn’t noticed what he’d achieved?
“Well, Jonathan, I have to say this,” she said as soon as she’d greeted him. “It isn’t up to your standard. Frankly, I think you ought to scrap it and start again.”
“Oh.” After a considerable pause he could think of nothing to say except, “All right.”
“You sound exhausted. Perhaps that’s the trouble.” When he didn’t answer he said, “You listen to your Auntie Susie. Forget the whole thing for a fortnight and go away on holiday. You’re been driving yourself too hard—you looked tired the last time I saw you. I’ll explain to Hugo, and I’ll see if I can’t talk up the article you’re going to write when you come back.”
She chatted reassuringly for a while, then left him staring at the phone. He was realizing how much he’d counted on selling the article. Apart from royalties, which never amounted to as much as he expected, when had he last had the reassurance of a check? He couldn’t go on holiday, for he would feel he hadn’t earned it; if he spent the time worrying about the extravagance, that would be no holiday at all.
But wasn’t he being unfair to himself? Weren’t there stories he could sell?
He turned the idea over gingerly in his mind, as though something might crawl out from beneath—but really, he could see no arguments against it. Writing out the nightmares had drained them of power; they were just stories now. As he dialed Hugo’s number, to ask him for the address of the magazine, he was already thinking up a pseudonym for himself.
For a fortnight he walked around Anglesey. Everything was hallucinatorily intense: beyond cracks in the island’s grassy coastline, the sea glittered as though crystallizing and shattering; across the sea, Welsh hills and mist appeared to be creating each other. Beaches were composed of rocks like brown crusty loaves decorated with shells. Anemones unfurled deep in glassy pools. When night fell he lay on a slab of rock and watched the stars begin to swarm.
As he strolled he was improving the chapters in his mind, now that the first version had clarified his themes. He wrote the article in three days, and was sure it was publishable. Not only was it the fullest description yet of the murder, but he’d managed to explain the way the neighbors had behaved: they’d needed to dramatize their repudiation of all that had been done in the house, they’d used him as a scapegoat to cast out, to proclaim that it had nothing to do with them.
When he’d sent the manuscript to Susie he felt pleasantly tired. The houses of Neston grew silver in the evening, the horizon was turning to ash. Once the room was so dark that he couldn’t read, he went to bed. As he drifted toward sleep he heard next door’s drain bubbling to itself.
But what was causing bubbles to form in the grayish substance that resembled fluid less than flesh? They were slower and thicker than tar, and took longer to form. Their source was rushing upward to confront him face to face. The surface was quivering, ready to erupt, when he awoke.
He felt hot and grimy, and somehow ashamed. The dream had been a distortion of the last thing he’d heard, that was all; surely it wouldn’t prevent him from sleeping. A moment later he was clinging to it desperately; its dreaminess was comforting, and it was preferable by far to the ideas that were crowding into his mind. He knew now why he felt grimy.
He couldn’t lose himself in sleep; the nightmares were embedded there, minute, precise, and appalling. When he switched on the light it seemed to isolate him. Night had bricked up all the windows. He couldn’t bear to be alone with the nightmares—but there was only one way to be rid of them.
The following night he woke, having fallen asleep at his desk. His last line met his eyes: “Hours later he sat back on his haunches, still chewing doggedly…” When he gulped the lukewarm tea it tasted rusty as blood. His surroundings seemed remote, and he could regain them only by purging his mind. His task wasn’t even half finished. His eyes felt like dusty pebbles. The pen jerked in his hand, spattering the page.
Next morning Susie rang, wrenching him awake at his desk. “Your article is tremendous. I’m sure we’ll do well with it. Now I wonder if you can let me have a chapter breakdown of the rest of the book to show Hugo?”
Miles was fully awake now, and appalled by what had happened in his mind while he had been sleeping. “No,” he muttered.
“Are there any problems you’d like to tell me about?”
If only he could! But he couldn’t tell her that while he had been asleep, having nearly discharged his task, a new crowd of nightmares had gathered in his mind and were clamoring to be written. Perhaps now they would never end.
“Come and see me if it would help,” Susie said.
How could he, when his mind was screaming to be purged? But if he didn’t force himself to leave his desk, perhaps he never would. “All right,” he said dully. “I’ll come down tomorrow.”
When tomorrow came it meant only that he could switch off his desk lamp; he was nowhere near finishing. He barely managed to find a seat on the train, which was crowded with football fans. Opened beer cans spat; the air grew heady with the smell of beer. The train emerged roaring from a tunnel, but Miles was still in his own, which was far darker and more oppressive. Around him they were chanting football songs, which sounded distant as a waveband buried in static. He wrote under cover of his briefcase, so that nobody would glimpse what he was writing.