Lost in London
by Lev Raphael
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Table of Contents parts: 1, 2, 3, 4 |
part 3
Armed with another cup of coffee, I stepped into the living room to study the portrait. Despite whatever had happened last night — or might have happened — the portrait didn’t scare me now, which seemed strange. As I viewed it from different angles, I didn’t get that sensation people often describe of portraits, of uncanny eyes following you, and the dog seemed like a harmless little beast in daylight, a lapdog, not remotely ghost material.
But there was something a bit uncanny about the building itself. Despite all the cars and pedestrians passing by outside, I had not seen anyone either entering or leaving it, hadn’t met other tenants in the tiny elevator, and had heard no sounds from any of the other flats on my floor.
Could everyone be gone for the summer? Or had Granny somehow subdued them all? Now that was ridiculous.
I mused about this in the shower, all the while struggling with the vague sense that I was being watched, as if Granny’s eyes could see through walls. Of course that was nonsense.
When I was done and turned off the water, I couldn’t get the shower door to open.
I pushed and pushed the handle, worried I might break the glass if I was too forceful, but I became more and more desperate to escape. Why wasn’t it opening? It was as immovable as if someone was on the other side of the door determined to keep me from getting out.
And what would happen if I couldn’t break the glass, which seemed pretty thick? Who would hear me shouting for help?
I took a deep breath in and out, I let go, stepped back a little, closed my eyes and told myself to relax, that the problem must be something about the fit of the door or the humidity from the powerful shower head or maybe my hand was too wet. But how was I supposed to dry it off if the towels were on the towel rack just outside? Then I realized I hadn’t washed my hair, so I rubbed both hands in my dry hair and — Bam! — the door opened just fine.
Something even more bizarre than feeling spied on popped into my head: Granny had wanted to trap me inside.
Well, that wasn’t going to happen.
Breathless now, I decided for the future I’d sling a towel over the top of the door just in case the problem was only wet hands. Because if I couldn’t get it open next time I showered, I would have to break the glass and who knows how badly injured that would leave me.
As if to undermine my resolve, I heard that chuckle again, and this time it was nastier, almost malevolent, and the room suddenly felt weirdly cold. I dried myself off hurriedly and pulled on my bathrobe, but that chill in the room had all the power of a tremendous storm moving through with high winds that tormented people, trees, cars and anything that wasn’t tied down. I’d lived through more than one in Michigan.
Now I was too agitated to eat lunch.
* * *
I worked on my class notes for the rest of the day, trying to stay cool, and rewarded myself with another dinner at The Queen’s Arms which already felt like a haven from the flat. I was there early, found a corner table for two and decided to take my time and order a drink while perusing the menu. The 30ish bartender, who looked professorial minus the tweed jacket, waved and so did some of the servers. I guess they all knew I was going to be in London for a while.
It was a square, cozy room with a mirrored wall behind the bar framed by olive green and white-streaked subway tiles that matched the olive of the paneling inside on the lower two panels of the walls. Plenty of the bottles glistening behind the bar had names I didn’t recognize like Sipsmith, The Kraken and Monkey Shoulder and so did the handles for what was on tap. One of those had a round blue and white logo with what looked like a three-masted galleon. It read: Ghost Ship.
Was that a message of some kind?
I asked the lean tanned server who looked like a runner what it was like.
“Quite citrusy, I’d say.” And she gave me a toothy, brisk smile that seemed even brighter given her deep black curly hair, black slacks and blouse. “How are you finding the city so far?”
“I’m settling in.”
“Lovely!”
The beer was as good as it sounded, and just the right note to counter the stifling heat outside and the torrent of texts on my phone that I waded through before ordering dinner.
Some of the twenty students I’d be teaching and taking on excursions wanted to know things they could easily have checked on Google like what the drinking age was, of course. And what currency the English used. Others asked if they needed to bring the assigned books, to which I responded, “Absolutely.”
There were questions about tipping, whether it was safe to ride the Tube, could they wear American flag apparel on July 4th, should they avoid drinking the water like in Mexico, how were you supposed to cross streets if everyone drove on the “wrong” side, should you avoid smiling at people when you passed them on the street, would they be able to understand the English spoken in England, and so much more.
I started on a second beer before I was through. The pub was beginning to fill up by then. Most people looked like they had come from work, and the chatter was uniformly convivial and high-spirited. I was fascinated watching one person after another manage to carry several glasses of beer back to a full table without spilling a drop. I guess that took practice.
When my honey-roasted cold ham with fried eggs and chips came, I surprised myself by asking the server if she believed in ghosts.
“Of course! London is full of ghosts. Stands to reason, yeah? A city this old wouldn’t be the same without them.”
* * *
That evening my sister called me to see how I was doing. We had been talking more now that she’d become an ER nurse after going back to school at thirty, had a new boyfriend, and was always in a quietly pleasant mood. My mother had once darkly confided in me, “I’ve always thought there was something missing in her, even when she was a toddler.” Mom hadn’t explained what she meant, and I was sorry she hadn’t lived to see Ruth dig herself out of debt, stop drinking, and establish a more stable life for herself. Maybe what my mother saw without being able to name it was that my sister was a seeker, someone who had to fail and fail again before she could find her way home.
That was a positive spin.
And after my mother’s sad judgment about Ruth, I was afraid to ask if she thought there was something missing in me even though I’d always been the high-achieving good boy compared to my sister.
When I told Ruth about what I thought had happened in the flat, she said, “I’m sorry, but I’m not surprised you had a weird night. It’s those awful books you brought with you. They’re creepy.”
“I picked them because students complain about having too much to read — even English majors — and I can’t see anyone not finishing them. Those novels are terrific. But what do the books have to do with anything?”
“Paul, I see two possibilities,” she said in a new crisp, no-nonsense voice that I still wasn’t quite used to. “Either they’ve stirred up your unconscious or they’ve stirred up something else, something in that apartment.”
“It’s called a flat.” I don’t know why I felt I had to make such an unimportant point.
“Whatever. You’re stressed out. This is your first time teaching abroad and, let’s be honest, London’s not your favorite city, right? It was brave of you to go back after what happened in that club.”
“Thanks. But I’m really prepared for this: I’m psyched about the classes, the money’s good, and I don’t feel stressed.” That last bit was only partly true.
“Okay, then it’s the flat and what you’ve brought into it.” I was surprised how totally reasonable she sounded.
Despite that, my hand started shaking. I put the phone down and switched to speaker. “Are you saying there’s something wrong with me?”
“Come on! Of course not!”
“Then what? You think that books can, like, summon spirits?”
“Well, aren’t you the one who always raves about the power of literature?”
“But not supernatural power!” I regretted being angry, I knew my tone was defensive. Deep down I suspected she might be right.
Ruth sighed. “It’s too late, sweetie. You’re there, the books are there, and it sounds like you have company. How’s your head, by the way?”
She meant the migraines. I tried not to make a big deal of them, but sometimes they left me so dizzy and weak, so sensitive to light that I had to lie down with an eye mask for hours on end, even after taking medication, because the world around me whirled and blinded me.
It was not something I enjoyed discussing, even with my doctor or my therapist, so I changed the subject and asked her about the new hospital where she was working, and we got into a long conversation about staffing problems that soothed me a little because it was so mundane. We talked about the pub I had so quickly grown fond of because Ruth was a real foodie and, even when she’d been deeply depressed, a lovely bottle of wine and a delicious meal could move the needle.
* * *
My jet lag was fading and I hoped I’d get a good night’s sleep despite the continuing heat wave, but I had a nightmare of being trapped in a desert and being blown to my knees by a sandstorm and then buried alive. I woke up sweaty, scared, and trembling and headed a bit unsteadily to the bathroom next door to my bedroom for a Xanax, which I’d moved there from upstairs. I knew it could work as quickly as fifteen minutes to knock me out, and it was guaranteed then to keep me asleep for hours.
The bathroom was all blue and white with elegant chrome fixtures and wallpaper sporting gigantic, writhing vines and roses which were pretty enough by day, I guess, but felt overpowering at night, oppressive. They made the room feel smaller, and fogged in like I was, they were almost alive.
Me, I looked gaunt in the mirror, my face splotchy, my curly black hair as wild as the flowers surrounding me. As I drank a second cup of water after downing my pill and turned off the light to go back to bed, I heard a feathery whisper: “You don’t belong here.”
It stopped me cold, and it infuriated me. What the hell was going on? Was this some weird English practical joke?
I stormed through the flat, angrily flicking on every single light switch and turning on every lamp on each floor, tripping on some loose carpeting on the stairs, and almost knocking over an urn-shaped malachite table lamp with gold trim that I had somehow not even noticed before. Each room I bathed in unexpected light seemed startled and resentful, but I didn’t care. I was looking for... Well, what, exactly?
I was surely alone. But I checked anyway, both upstairs and downstairs, and then back again, a second time. There was a dark, sullen feel to each room, as if I had disturbed someone’s deep sleep or stopped a criminal about to do something nefarious. As I tore around on my wild little search, I kept thinking, “You’re crazy” followed by “To hell with it.”
There was nobody hiding in a closet or under any of the beds or even behind any of the lush velvet curtains, and I couldn’t believe someone had installed hidden loudspeakers. As the Xanax started to take effect and all the blazing lights struck me as ridiculous, I felt exhaustion weighing me down. Stepping heavily around the flat, careful to keep my balance to avoid tripping over any of the fringed carpets and the art books holding them down, I slowly turned everything off and weaved my way back to bed.
I had not even glanced at the portrait because I was afraid it might somehow have changed for the worse during the night and I was ashamed of my fear. And I felt as if it had somehow orchestrated my hostile reception as I again turned lights on and off, on and off, momentarily obsessed.
* * *
Copyright © 2023 by Lev Raphael
