Black Ink - Part 2

It wasn’t just the silence, there was something in the air that was stale, off somehow. I got up and tried the garden doors, they were locked, and no keys to be seen. Being outside at the front with the strange statue didn’t appeal, so I ran up to the living room, found keys on a side table, shoved them into the lock, they jammed, tried again, there was a click, a release, a turn, and the doors slid open. On the balcony I breathed in deeply. The wide stretch of blue-grey water rippled and shone in the sun. On this side of the house, the sounds of the city surrounded me; shrieks of children from the school playground at home-time, the hum of chatter from riverside pavements, the constant rumble of slow moving vehicles. I could hear life, I could hear people, I could hear that I wasn’t alone. 

Back in the kitchen, I made another coffee and checked the drawing. The house captured the contemporary grandeur I’d been aiming for, as well as aloof hostility created by the black ink. I sat back and sipped. I picked up the pad again, held it up to the light, changed the angle, and held it closer. Something was wrong. One of the trees at the front of the house stood out; it was the pattern on the trunk. Prickles rippled over the back of my head. Embedded in the trunk were two oblong knots, revealing a pair of staring eyes, and below them was a black hole that formed a mouth saying ‘O’.  A tormented face was looking out from the picture, directly at me. I dropped the sketchpad. 

Forcing myself to look again, it was still there - a face with knot-eyes and black-hole mouth. I reasoned that it was an illusion. but like a Rorschach test, I was unable to un-see it. Sitting back down, I picked up the nib and a fine brush and added more lines and dots to the trunk, and expanded the canopy. I worked in a focused fury until my fingers were sore, my wrists ached, my fingertips blackened with ink. My eyes searched for other sinister shapes lurking within the shading, but there were none. 

The sun was exiting, dimming the sky to a pinky mauve. I turned on pendant lamps over the island and spotlights that sprinkled across the kitchen ceiling, then moved throughout the house turning on all the lights and closing the doors of the rooms I wouldn’t be going into, not wanting to walk past the empty spaces when darkness fell. 

When I reached my room, I stopped at the doorway watching the tree outside the window. It was the tree that I’d copied and where the face had appeared. And just like in the drawing, my bedroom was on the first floor behind the tree. Moving further inside I peered down at the trunk; there were knots, burls and divots in its trunk, but no face. I placed healing crystals on the bedside table, just in case, switched on the light and shut the door behind me. Heading straight to the living room and onto the balcony, I absorbed comfort from the city. There was music - from a pub maybe, the traffic continued, as did lively chatter from surrounding restaurants. The world was carrying on as normal.

In the kitchen I checked my phone, there was a missed call from my aunt, and a text message. 

“Hope you’re settling in okay and getting on with the drawing. Plenty of food in the fridge and cupboards. Make sure you eat!” 

I called but she didn’t pick up.  

I wrote: “Yes! I LOVE the house. It's incredible. Not sure about your sculpture in the front though -  creepy!”

There was no reply and I elongated the long shadows so that they crept across the lawn and driveway. I avoided the tree where the face had emerged, completing its shadow as soon as I could. By the time I stopped, sky was dark and several string lights popped on outside. The glowing white dots threaded through branches, crisscrossing the back garden. Pressing my head against the cool glass, I wished I had the keys to be out there. Further down the garden, I noticed that the lights didn’t quite reach all the way to the back, leaving a recess of darkened space. There were two trees in the shadows, distant and inscrutable from their unlit section. What looked like another one of the sculptures was standing between the trees, facing me. I pulled down the blinds. 

There was little point in going to bed. Sleep wouldn’t come and I anticipated being plagued by images of faces in trees, ancient gravestones and sinister sculptures. I was alert, so decided to work into the night and finish the drawing, fuelled by coffee. Sleep could wait until the morning.

Midnight came and went. Going back upstairs, I sought the balcony to gather the soothing sounds of the city, but the traffic had become infrequent, speeding along vacant roads; there was no music, no talking, no laughter, no footsteps - all things had seemingly shut off one by one in the hollowed-out hours of early morning.

I looked out at the river, but it looked back at me, deep, dark, and silent. I drew back inside, locked the door, and tugged the curtains shut.

It was too late to call anyone, so I switched on rolling news on the kitchen TV to keep me company and remind myself that there were others awake in the world with me.  

The next layer of ink was drying. I’d completed most of reflections of the large square window panes successfully. My satisfaction was short-lived. In one of the windows I could see what looked like a blot of black ink. I was frustrated - I’d been so careful, but I knew I shouldn’t have worked so late.  Taking a thin brush I began to rectify it. Looking closer, it wasn’t a smudge. It was something else. The shape of a person, an inked-in figure, was standing in the window on the upper left-hand side of the house. It was in the window above the face-tree; my window. The bedroom where I was supposed to be asleep. I slammed the sketchpad shut and pushed it away from me.

There was a click.  It was coming from upstairs. It sounded like a metal latch in a door.  Click, click, click. Someone or something was trying to open the bedroom door. 

The loud thumping I felt in my chest was now in my ears. I put my arms across my head covering my eyes like a child not wanting to see.  I covered my mouth to stop the scream. I needed to move, I needed to leave the house.

Running to the hallway, I pushed my feet into my trainers but my bag and phone were in the kitchen. I didn’t want to go back in there and see the drawing, nor could I go out in the dead of night without them. I hovered at the kitchen entrance looking for my things.  On the central island was the sketchpad. But it wasn’t shut anymore - it lay open, displaying the drawing again. My bag and phone were beyond it, on the table by the garden doors. I ran to them them, past it the drawing. The figure was no longer in the upstairs window, but I needed to get out. Grabbing my things, I passed the drawing again and stopped to check it. The figure had reappeared, but was not in the bedroom. It had moved, and was at one of the ground floor windows. In my drawing, the window was to the right of the main door. In my aunt's house, it was the kitchen window facing the front. That was just a few feet behind me.  Standing at the counter looking at the drawing, I knew is must be in the room with me. My body began trembling, my head swayed and I almost swooned. I clutched the edge of the counter and somehow regained the strength to launch and flee from the kitchen. I looked straight ahead of me, not turning to see what was there. The main door opened easily and I ran out into the middle of the square. 

It was 3am. The office buildings were dark and silent, as was the school; the house next door was empty. The church was to my left and beside it a house - a vicarage? The lights were on. I walked quickly that way, uncertain what I was even going to do or say at that time. I took out my phone and saw there was an earlier message from my aunt that I’d missed.

“I don’t have a sculpture of a man!?”

There were lights along the front of Fescue House, in the planters and beneath the trees. There was no sculpture. My eyes moved to the kitchen window - nothing. I dragged them up to the bedroom window. It was now black. The light I had turned on had been switched off.  My eyes flickered back downwards to movement, and I watched as the front door began opening slowly inwards. I turned and ran towards the grey house. 

In the following days, I confided in a couple of friends. They said that it was probably too much coffee, too little sleep, that I’d been anxious and overwhelmed. So I stopped talking about it, and besides, I wanted to forget. I didn’t even tell my aunt the whole story. I threw away the drawing and hired a freelancer to finish the illustration. Shortly after that I left my job, moved out of the flat and went to live with my grandparents for a while. Everyone said it was stress, some kind of mental breakdown. In time, there were people who I could talk to, who understood and I began to recover; I threw away the crystals and beads. 

In my last few weeks at my grandparents’, my grandfather asked if I had any photos of Fescue House he could look at. I still had the photos I’d taken for the drawing and I let him scroll through. 

“Oh”, he said after a couple of minutes.“Who’s that?”

I looked over. The photo was of the lower section of the house. In it, was a reflection of me in the kitchen window, taking a picture with my phone.  My grandfather was pointing at the tall thin figure behind me.