The Spectral Book of Horror Stories Page 25

  I use the toilet, then move to the sink. I lean on the edge of the washbasin, staring at the spotless white porcelain beneath my hands.

  How many mornings have I done what I’m about to do? How many mornings have I raised my head to see the same reflection looking back at me? How many mornings have I thought that I am looking old, that I may be closer to the end of my life than its beginning?

  This morning, however, is different.

  This morning I do not look older, but I do look as if the end of my life is upon me.

  The man in the mirror is wearing the same crumpled T-shirt that I am wearing, although the writing across the chest is back to front, as you would expect. The arms are the same—lightly tanned, freckled. The neck is the same slightly scrawny neck that makes me look my age in photographs. But above the neck—nothing. No tired eyes, lined forehead, stubbly cheeks. No vertical frown line above the bridge of the nose. Nothing.

  I look at my neck, but I can’t see the end of it. There is no stump. Neither a flat, cartoonish disc like the end of a ham, nor the scraggy, gory mess of a victim in a splatter movie. Instead, it is like a tall building, its top lost in the clouds. I just can’t see it.

  I raise my hands—I see them rise in the mirror—but there is nothing for them to alight on. No puffy skin beneath my eyes, no incipient jowls. I cannot feel the stubble on the top of my head, which I shaved only two days ago. The top of my head is not there. My head is not there.

  The man in the mirror has no head.

  I turn from the washbasin and look out of the window. The sky remains grey. I look back in the mirror. I still have no head. I step away, turn around, walk towards the door, then come back to the washbasin and look in the mirror again. No change. With my fingers I try to feel where my neck ends, but I can’t seem to gain purchase. Any sensation in my fingertips is weak. I don’t know where or how my neck ends, but I know that it ends and that there is nothing above it.

  I pause in the bathroom doorway. My wife is waiting for her tea. She will not wake fully until I bring it to her. I step out on to the carpeted landing. I can walk normally. I can see, even though I have no eyes to see with. I can hear birds singing in the trees at the front of the house. A slightly sour smell of bedding rises from my T-shirt as I head towards the stairs. I walk downstairs, my sense of balance unaffected. I enter the kitchen, fill the kettle and switch it on.

  Every morning I start emptying the dishwasher while the kettle is boiling and complete the job while the tea is brewing. As I bend down to remove the cutlery basket, I ask myself if bending down feels any different. Sometimes I bend down too quickly and once I have straightened up again I feel light headed. This time, that doesn’t happen.

  I carry two cups of tea upstairs. I stand in front of the bedroom door as I remember approaching a road junction on my bike a day or two ago and not seeing a car that was coming towards me, because I was so intent on looking left and right. I saw it in time, but I had, for a few moments, been blind to it. I wonder if what I am experiencing now is a form of hysterical or selective blindness. I ask myself if I should place the cups of tea down on top of the bookcase on the landing and return to the mirror in the bathroom and have another look. But as I think this, I hear my wife getting out of bed and suddenly the bedroom door is open and she is standing in front of me.

  “Oh,” she says, giving a little jump. “You frightened me.”

  “Really?” I say.

  “Yes, I didn’t know you were there. Thank you,” she says, taking one of the cups and moving past me to go to the bathroom. Did she actually look at me? I can’t be sure.

  I enter the bedroom and check in the full-length mirror my wife uses when she is getting dressed. There is no change. If I were more detached from the situation I would find it interesting. It would thrill me on a number of levels—aesthetic, visceral, intellectual. But it’s hard to be detached.

  My wife re-enters the bedroom and starts to get things out of her chest of drawers. She glances at me standing in front of the mirror and makes a humorous remark.

  I ignore it and ask her, “Do I look tired to you?”

  “Did you go to bed late?”

  “Just look at me! Do I look tired to you?”

  She turns and looks at me for a moment.

  “There’s no need to snap,” she says. “You look neither tired nor not tired.”

  “Thanks,” I say. “That’s very helpful.”

  “Are you going to drink that?” she asks, lowering her eyes to the cup of tea I am still holding in my hand.

  “Yes,” I say. “No… I don’t know.”

  I leave the bedroom with the cup of tea and pour it away down the sink in the bathroom.

  “I’m going to have a shower,” I shout.

  “I’ll be gone when you’re done,” my wife shouts back. “So I’ll see you later.”

  “Okay. See you later.”

  I lock the bathroom door and look at myself in the mirror. No change.

  I run the shower and wait until I hear the front door before switching it off. I return to the bedroom and start getting dressed, leaving my top half until last. I open my wardrobe and consider the separate piles of neatly folded T-shirts sorted by colour. I pick out a black one.

  Downstairs I pull on my fluorescent jacket and zip it up. I open the cupboard where the rest of my cycling paraphernalia is kept and look at my helmet. I reach out and touch the cool plastic with a fingertip, but then withdraw my hand and close the cupboard door.

  Cycling down our road I feel the wind on my face like pain in a phantom limb. I cut through the park, where dog-walkers take hold of their animals’ collars at my approach and joggers carry water bottles shaped like bagels. Everything as normal, in other words. Exiting the park, I notice a woman waiting to cross the road; I nod to indicate she can go and she does, raising a hand in thanks.

  I reach the university and find that someone has saved me the trouble of opening the door to the bike shelter. A colleague whose name I can never remember is struggling to get his bike past those nearest the door.

  One of us comments on the inadequacy of the bike shelter’s design and the other agrees. We lock up our bikes and leave and so enter the building at the same time. He presses the button for the lift and when it arrives and the doors slide open he gestures for me to go first. In the mirrored walls of the elevator I see an endless series of reflections of a headless man in a fluorescent jacket.

  “Departmental meeting in half an hour,” says my colleague.

  “Yeah,” I say. “I’m counting the minutes.”

  In the meeting, I sit next to Andy. Like me, Andy teaches film. I can see us reflected in the windows across the room.

  “Andy,” I say, “you’d tell me if I had, like, egg on my chin or something, right?”

  Andy turns to look at me, leaning back as he does so. “What are you trying to say?”

  “Do I look normal to you?”

  “Define normal.”

  “Right,” I say.

  “I hope this doesn’t go on for four hours like last time,” he says. “I’m going to that London tomorrow and I’ve got a ton of marking to get done before then.”

  “Tell me about it. What you going to that London for?”

  “Externals meeting at Birkbeck.”

  “Lucky you.”

  “Birkbeck?”

  “London,” I say. “I mean, Birkbeck as well, but, you know, just London.”

  The meeting proceeds along the usual lines. Every time we seem to have reached, if not a decision, then at least the end of the latest pointless discussion on a particular topic, one person, always the same person, will raise her hand and make a point that invariably starts with the words “I’m sorry, but…” and prompts further inconclusive debate, meaning that the end of the meeting is delayed by another ten or fifteen minutes. We are on the last item on the agenda—safety and environment—and a heated discussion about evacuation procedures for wheelchair users has just reached
a sort of conclusion when a colleague—the same colleague—sticks her hand up and starts, “I’m sorry, but…”, and I turn to Andy, who is already turning to me and drawing the blade of his right hand across his throat. The gesture makes me widen my eyes, but, if Andy notices, he fails to react.

  After the meeting I sit in my office with a pile of dissertations on the desk in front of me. I open the top one and turn to the first page, read the opening paragraph and see that the writer has failed to make correct use of the semi-colon. I close the dissertation. There’s a knock on the door. I look around, sit up straight in my chair, aware of a slight increase in my heart rate.

  “Come in,” I hear myself say.

  The door opens to reveal a third-year undergraduate, Rebecca, whose dissertation I remember supervising.

  “Hiya,” she says. “I wanted to see you to talk about doing an MA.”

  “Come in,” I say. “Sit down.” I move the dissertations to one side of my desk. “I imagine yours is in this lot somewhere,” I tell her.

  She smiles.

  “So you want to do an MA? That’s great news.”

  “In London,” she says.

  “Oh.”

  “At Goldsmiths’ or UCL or somewhere. I wanted to see if you thought that would be a good idea.”

  I look at her. She is one of those students my wife thought I would be tempted to have an affair with, or tempted to try to have an affair with: bright, attractive, a good critic, potentially susceptible to flattery from a widely published academic. She raises her eyebrows; the corners of her mouth turn up.

  “No, I think it’s a terrible idea,” I say, watching her face fall, then leave it a couple of moments before adding: “I think you should do it here.”

  She laughs. “I really want to live in London,” she says.

  I look away at a line of DVDs standing between bookends on my desk. Apocalypse Now, The Tenant, Eraserhead, Se7en.

  “Actually, I think it’s a great idea,” I say, turning back towards Rebecca. “I’ll write you a reference. I did the same thing myself twenty-five years ago.” As I say it I realise the figure is actually closer to thirty. “It was when I saw all these for the first time,” I add, indicating the films on my desk. “Well, apart from Se7en.”

  “That’s great. Thanks,” she says, looking straight into my eyes.

  “You’re welcome.”

  There is a pause. I often fill such pauses, feeling it is unfair to expect students to do so, but on this occasion I say nothing.

  “So,” she says, finally, “do you think I’ll get on?”

  “To one of those courses? Oh yes. You can punctuate a sentence.”

  She laughs uncertainly, pauses and then says, “Is that it? I can punctuate a sentence?”

  “You’d be surprised how unusual that makes you these days,” I say. “But luckily that’s not all. You’re one of the good ones. You’re one of the ones I come in for. One of the ones I get up in the morning for.”

  “Thank you,” she says, “I think.”

  “Rebecca?” I say.

  “Yes?”

  “Do I look any different to you today?”

  “Er.”

  “It’s all right. You don’t have to answer that.” I lift my hand, instinct or habit making me want to run it over my shaved head. Instead, it hovers in mid-air.

  Rebecca gets up. “Thanks again,” she says.

  “You’re welcome. Good luck. Put me down for those references,” I say as she opens the door and leaves my office.

  I watch the corridor through the doorway, since she has left the door open. A couple of first-year students pass by. I turn again to the pile of dissertations on my desk and look through them for Rebecca’s. I pull it out, turn to the first page and read the opening paragraph, then close it and write on the marksheet: 80%.

  I get my stuff together, thread my arms into my fluorescent jacket and pause with my hand on the door handle. I look back. I return to my desk and go through the dissertations until I find the first one I’d been looking at, the one with the faulty punctuation. I write on the marksheet: 50%.

  I cycle home, where I go straight upstairs and stand in front of the bathroom mirror. I try to focus on my neck. I want to examine the extremity. But every time I get close to doing so, I find my mind drifting from the specific task in hand to my more general preoccupation with the overall problem—or absence. I get a hand mirror and hold it behind me, picturing as I do so a well-known Magritte painting of a man viewed from behind looking into a mirror, not at the reflection of his face, but at the back of his own head. This is what I should see in the reflected hand mirror, the back of my head, but I don’t. If anything, this confirmation that my head is missing when viewed from behind—as well as from in front—is even more dismaying than the original sight in the mirror that morning, perhaps because I am mimicking the view that others have of me from behind, without my knowledge, without my ability to be aware, without any self-consciousness. But, instead, I wonder if it should encourage me that other people—my wife, strangers in the street, my colleagues and students—see nothing wrong.

  Or nothing different from normal.

  I have wandered out of the bathroom and now find myself in the bedroom, standing at the window looking down into the street. A neighbour from a few doors down walks past with her dogs and looks up and waves. I wave back. She sees nothing amiss. Can she not see? Is it that she is not looking at me properly?

  I realise that I ought to be reminded of a different Magritte painting, in which a dead woman lies on a red couch, her head and neck at an unnatural angle to her body, a white scarf obscuring the conjunction of neck and torso.

  I take my phone out of my pocket and open the address book. I find the number for the local GP surgery and my finger hovers over the call button for a moment. I look out of the window, see my neighbour turning the corner at the end of the street with her dogs. I press the button. A couple of rings and then the recorded voice of the practice manager. I know the spiel: I press the appropriate key to get through to make an appointment.

  The receptionist offers me an appointment in a week’s time. I tell her I don’t necessarily have to see my own doctor. I’ll see one of the others. She says I can see one of the other doctors in three days’ time. I tell her I need to see someone today. She asks if it is an urgent matter. I pause for a moment, then tell her, yes, it is. She asks if I can explain what the problem is. I remain silent for a few seconds, thinking. She says my name, asks if I am still there. I tell her I can’t tell her what the problem is. It’s personal. She says she understands and that I should come down to the surgery and they will fit me in as soon as they can.

  I walk down the road and enter the surgery. I see the receptionist and then sit in the waiting room and watch a procession of people with heads on their shoulders getting called to see the doctor before I do. Finally, I hear my name. I get up and leave the waiting room. As I turn into the corridor that leads to the consulting rooms I catch sight of my reflection in a pane of reinforced glass in the door that leads to the stairs. There’s the same empty space where my head should be and, I presume, used to be. Is it possible I never had a head, but only hallucinated it? What kind of question is that to be asking yourself as you knock on your GP’s door and hear her invite you to enter?

  “Good morning, doctor,” I say. “How are you?”

  “Very well, thank you,” she says, meeting my gaze. “How are you?”

  I think carefully about my response. “I’m not sure,” I say finally. “I suppose I want you to tell me.”

  “Well,” she says, “you requested an emergency appointment.”

  “Yes,” I say.

  The doctor looks at me. Her face betrays neither surprise nor dismay, nor the slightly indecent excitement a doctor might feel when presented with an unusual case.

  “I feel,” I say, “like something is missing.”

  The doctor smiles and frowns at the same time.

  “F
rom your… life?”

  “Something is missing and I feel as if I can’t carry on without it, and yet it’s very hard to say what it is… what it is that’s missing. Do you see?”

  “Have you been feeling depressed?” she asks.

  “More alarmed than depressed,” I say.

  “Have you been feeling anxious?”

  I look at her, unsure how to respond.

  “Panic attacks, uncontrollable distress?”

  I look away from her towards the frosted glass of the window.

  “Do you feel as if you are losing your grip?” she asks.

  “I think I need to go,” I say.

  The smile has disappeared and now there is only a concerned frown.

  “If you’d like to see someone… a referral?”

  “I’m okay,” I say, getting to my feet. “I’ll be okay.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “I’m fine.”

  “Make an appointment to see me in a week or two.”

  I thank her and leave. I walk back home without delay.

  I stand in the hall. The house is silent. I’m thinking. I go into the kitchen and open the drawer where we keep the larger saucepans and the rice cooker. Then I close it again. I try the tall cupboards. I open all the eye-level cupboards and look quickly inside each one before closing them again. I open the fridge. Milk, wine, butter, cheese, salad stuff, yoghurts, a bowl containing leftover chilli that will inevitably be thrown away.

  In the cellar I open the doors to all the cupboards. I look in the old plastic dustbin I store firewood in. The shelves—nothing that shouldn’t be there, just jam jars containing screws and curtain hooks and Allen keys and brass hooks bought to go on the backs of doors that have never been fitted.

  I climb the steps back to the hall. There are cupboards in the lounge containing LPs that have not been played in twenty years. The cushions on the settee conceal only biscuit crumbs, loose change and the TV remote control that has been missing for two days.