Dark Terrors 5: The Gollancz Book of Horror

ERIC BROWN Beauregard

He came back into my life on the evening of the first snowfall of winter. In retrospect, the advent of bad weather might have been seen as something of a harbinger. The phone call that interrupted my work — I have never been able to consider the shrill ring of a phone as a summons, only an alarm — was unwelcome, as I was beginning the final chapter of a novelisation that had to be finished by the end of the week. More unwelcome still were the words that greeted me.

‘Simon Charrington?’ It was my name, spoken in a voice marinated over the years in a fatal combination of whisky and tobacco smoke. ‘Simon? Are you there?’

‘Beauregard? Christ, is it really you?’

‘I’m in the village,’ he said by way of a reply. ‘How do I find you?’

Numbed, I gave him directions.

He was as laconic as ever. ‘See you soon.’

I sat in the armchair in the darkened study, illuminated only by the aqueous glow of the computer screen, and contemplated what I had done. I told myself that I should have lied, said that Simon Charrington had moved away from the village years ago — but then I recalled that you could not lie to Beauregard: he saw through dissimulation and deceit. Such was the acuity of his mind that I fancied, back then, he could read my every thought.

Back then. Was it really twenty years since we had shared a room at Cambridge? In my memory the events of that last term were at once paradoxically clear and maddeningly vague: that is, I have impressions of what happened, but I am unsure, to this day, as to quite how they happened.

I cannot recall how I first met Beauregard, which, considering his singular character and appearance, I consider a strange failing. He seemed to be around our group, hovering on the periphery, for about a term before he introduced himself.

He was a mature student in his late twenties, though he struck me as being even older: he wore a soiled greatcoat, always buttoned, and his aquiline face was emphasised by the recession of his hairline.

He gave the girls the creeps, and even Paul and Dave found his company repellent. He had about him an aura of mystery and dissolute pathos that I considered intriguing. I had recently decided that I wanted to devote my life to the writing of great novels, and I made the beginner’s mistake of assuming that I had to actively seek my subject matter, rather than allow it to come to me.

I soon became obsessed with Beauregard. He was that which I had never before happened upon: a true original in a world populated by jejune copies. Although he never said as much in conversation, he disdained the modern world and all its meretricious and commercial trappings: while we were reading Fowles and Pirsig, he would immerse himself for days at a time in crumbling and dusty tomes he brought back from forays to antiquarian bookshops in London and Edinburgh. He was studying mediaeval history, and laboriously compiling a thesis on mysticism of the twelfth century, and in consequence he seemed to inhabit the world in body only: in mind, he was forever elsewhere.

Long into the early hours he would regale me with the results of his studies: he would tell me of worlds within the world we know, of realms that existed in the minds of philosophers, an onion skin series of realities that for him existed because they had been granted brief if incandescent life in the dreams of obscure thinkers and persecuted mystics.

I cannot recall my exact reaction to his hushed, late-night monologues describing the lore of alchemy and abstruse magic. In the company of my other friends I played the sardonic sceptic; with Beauregard I came fleetingly to perceive the disturbing possibility of a truth that existed independently of my quotidian perceptions.

Then he met Sabine, a German girl as strange in her own way as Beauregard: a slim, introverted Classics student, almost pathologically shy. They were seen together setting out on, or returning from, long walks, though they never frequented the usual student haunts. I cannot recall ever saying above a dozen words to Sabine — perhaps I was resentful of her having taken my friend — and I cannot claim to have known her. The others of my group were secretly gratified that his liaison with the German student, as they called her, meant that he had less time for us.

I could not claim to have been griefstricken when Sabine was found hanging from an oak tree in the ancient forest beyond the college buildings, though naturally I was shocked. I tried to talk to Beauregard, but he was even more withdrawn than usual. He left Cambridge not long after, and it was ten years before I saw him again. He called at my flat in London, having obtained the address from a mutual university acquaintance, drank all the alcohol I had in the house and said little: it seemed that the years had built between us an insurmountable barrier. I tried to talk of our time at university, but he had gestured with his hand-rolled cigarette, as if to say the memories were too painful; I questioned him about what he was doing, but elicited little response. He spoke drunkenly of a book he was writing, though his description of its subject made little sense to me. I felt that he despised my materialism, and the shallow books I wrote at the behest of publishers eager for competent prose from someone who could meet a deadline.

That was ten years ago, and I had never seen him since: I had thought of him, though, often wondered what a man so unsuited to the modern world might be doing to get by. It seemed, now, that I might at last find out.

If I considered a phone call more of an alarm than a summons, then a knock at the door was tantamount to an intrusion. I jumped as the hollow thumps echoed through the house. I must have been daydreaming for longer than I thought. It seemed only a matter of a minute or two since I had spoken to him on the phone.

Taking a breath, I moved to the hall and opened the door. The first thing I noticed was not Beauregard, but the fact that a rapid snowfall had lain down a thick sparkling mantle beneath the light of the stars.

Then he stepped from where he had been trying to peer in through the window, and against the effulgent snowfield he bulked taller than I recalled, more stooped; his hair had receded further and his face seemed even more attenuated.

‘Simon,’ he greeted. He held out a hand, and I shook it. It was icy. I ushered him inside, only then noticing that he was wearing a greatcoat — though surely not the greatcoat of twenty years ago?

He stepped past me and paused on the threshold of my untidy study. His gaze seemed to take in everything with a silent though censorious regard, and I was transported back twenty years, to the time when I could not help but feel unworthy in his presence. He seemed to look upon those about him with silent disdain that antagonised many people. Perhaps it was a measure of my own lack of confidence that I felt his censure, then as now, was not wholly unwarranted.

I gestured to an armchair and turned on a nearby lamp. Beauregard winced at the sudden illumination, dumped his battered rucksack into the chair and sat upon the arm, where he proceeded to roll himself an impossibly thin cigarette.

I made some ill-judged comment, along the lines that he reminded me of a dissolute Withnail, though of course the popular cultural reference was lost on him. A line from Horace he might have acknowledged; of film lore he was ignorant.

I babbled smalltalk, asking him how he had travelled here, how he was keeping. As was his wont he made no reply, merely fixed me with an occasional sardonic half-smile.

In the light of the lamp I could see that the passage of years had not left him unscathed. His eyes were rheumy and the skin around them had the thin blue translucence often seen in alcoholics and the ill. His fingers, as they painstakingly manufactured the roll-up, trembled as if afflicted by more than just the cold he had escaped.

‘Can I get you something? Tea? Coffee?’

He looked up, fixed me briefly. ‘Tea. Black. Don’t you remember?’

‘Of course. Black tea. I’ll be back in a second…’

It was with relief that I took refuge in the kitchen. The reality of Beauregard was coming back to me, the essence of the man that was impossible to recreate fully when considering him at a remove of years: he was so unlike anyone else I had ever met, so impossible to locate in terms of where he stood as regards culture and values, that I had the eerie sensation of being in the presence of an alien; that is, of someone not of this world. It was a feeling I had forgotten over the years, but as it returned now I began to sympathise with my friends at university, Dave and Paul, Cathy and Sue, who detested Beauregard and could not abide his presence.

I returned with the tea-tray. He had slipped down into the armchair, his long legs, encased in baggy brown cords, stretched out towards the open fire.

He accepted the mug without a word, took a mouthful, and topped it up with alcohol from a silver hip flask.

I fetched an ashtray as his roving eye sought a place to deposit the foul-smelling ash of his cigarette.

‘So…’ I said, ‘it’s been a long time — ten years?’

He ignored me. His eye had alighted on the glass-fronted bookcase in which I kept copies of my published work. ‘Still writing, Simon?’ he asked, as if it had been a passing phase out of which I might have grown.

I nodded. ‘Keeps the wolf from the door,’ I said, and immediately regretted it. I recalled the disdain with which he regarded those who compromised in order to get by.

He was rapidly thawing out before the dancing flames, and the process brought back another aspect of the man I had conveniently forgotten over the years: Beauregard had a body odour as distinctive as it was strong. I recalled debating with Dave and Sue as to the exact essence of the perfume: I think I described it at the time as something like the reek of an old jungle temple, leaf mould and guano. Now this compost odour filled the room.

‘I must say, this is a surprise,’ I waffled. ‘What have you been up to lately?’

It was some time before he replied. He took a mouthful of his charged tea, then a sharp inhalation of his cigarette.

‘Travelling,’ he said.

‘Anywhere interesting?’ I winced as I said this. What was it about Beauregard that made my every comment crass and ignorant? Wasn’t everywhere interesting, if one approached it with curiosity?

He nodded, his liquid eyes seeing far away places. ‘Patna, Kathmandu, Lhasa..’

I nodded, as if I were familiar with these cities.

‘Working?’

He shook his head. Silly question. ‘Studying. Thinking. Reading.’

He always had been a voracious reader of obscure texts. He spoke at least six languages, read six more.

He swung his long head and stared at me. ‘I’ve seen things, Simon. I’ve seen things you wouldn’t believe.’

I nodded again, prepared to believe him, but was aware as I did so that I did not want him to tell me of these things.

Thankfully he seemed disinclined to go on.

‘So you’ve been away for ten years?’ I asked, feeling compelled to stoke the conversation.

He nipped the tab of his cigarette and inhaled with miserly economy, and looked at me though the smoke. ‘Almost ten years. Walked across Europe, through Greece, Turkey.’

‘Walked all the way?’

‘All the way, though in eastern Turkey I bought a horse. Rode through Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan and into India.’

I wondered whether to believe him. He rode through Iran and Afghanistan at the height of the troubles there?

I wanted to ask him how he had paid his way — but there were some things that I had never enquired of Beauregard. I did not know his first name; nor his place of birth; I had no idea if he had brothers or sisters, or if his parents were still alive: it seemed as if the answers to these mundane questions might diminish in stature the man I regarded as something of a myth.

‘Years ago I decided never to stop,’ he said. ‘To settle down, to establish roots — that would be death, Simon. Possessions…’ He gestured dismissively at my book-crammed study. ‘It isn’t what my life is about. I have nothing.’

‘And you’ve been travelling ever since?’

He nodded. ‘I have to, Simon. I wish I could explain — I know that if I ever stop, then that’ll be the end.’

I nodded myself, at a loss for words.

When I next looked up from my tea, Beauregard had lodged himself further into the armchair and seemed to be asleep. I experienced an immediate relief.

I was washing the cups in the kitchen when I heard him cry out. I rushed back into the front room. He was talking to himself in his sleep, his head turning back and forth. I hovered, considering whether to wake him, when a decision was made redundant. He cried out a name and sat upright, eyes open wide and staring into the flames.

I sat down, embarrassed as he noticed my presence. The name he had shouted aloud had been Sabine’s.

‘It was a terrible shock,’ I said.

He knew what I meant.

I looked at him. ‘What happened?’

We had not spoken of it at the time. Beauregard had quit university not long after, without so much as a farewell. One day his rucksack had been on the chair in the lounge we shared, and the next it was gone.

‘I showed her something,’ he said, and those four words, almost inaudible in his tobacco-wrecked voice, sent a cold shiver down my spine.

‘Showed her something…?’ My tone communicated my incomprehension.

He nodded. ‘You know in any relationship, if it means anything, there has to be a trading of truths.’ He looked up at me.

I felt myself colouring. He asked, ‘Do you have anyone, Simon?’

I shook my head. ‘No… Not at the moment.’

He nodded again. Something in his eyes told me that he understood.

‘Well… Sabine meant a lot to me. We were one person. I had to show her what I understood… I showed her that, my reality, and she couldn’t take it. She ran. I searched the city. I was worried about what she might do — I knew it had been too much. I think I knew, before the police arrived, what had happened. I woke at midnight with a terrible sense of presentiment. I knew what she had done.’ He shrugged, almost casually, and lit another emaciated cigarette with shaking fingers.

I tried to say something, but my throat was too dry. At last I managed, ‘What did you show her?’

He looked at me for a long time. ‘I don’t think I could explain now, and anyway you wouldn’t understand.’

I was about to press him, accuse him of patronising me, and ask him again what he had done to drive Sabine to kill herself — but at that second the phone rang, startling me.

It was a friend from the village, asking if I fancied a pint at the Fleece. The thought of a change of venue, of the chance to escape from Beauregard, was a life-belt thrown to a drowning man.

I replaced the receiver and explained that I had arranged to meet someone. ‘You could always come along,’ I said, knowing full well that he would excuse himself and remain in the house.

‘Then I’ll show you to your room,’ I said, but he gestured to the sofa.

‘Simon, I’ll be fine here. I’ll see you in the morning.’

I nodded, feeling obscurely guilty as I pulled on my coat and said goodbye. The look in his eyes, as he watched me go, told me that he understood my need to get away.

Only as I pushed into the glowing, welcome fug of the tap room did I recall something Beauregard had told me, over twenty years ago: in a rash moment of drunken bonhomie he had said that all his life people had wanted to get away from him, though what had struck me as tragic about this revelation was his admission that he understood their reasons.

For the next couple of hours, with the help of the Tuesday night crowd and five pints of Taylor’s, I tried to forget Beauregard, and the fact that he was resident in my study for an indefinite period. The effort was too much: from time to time my thoughts would stray. I attempted to recall how long he had stayed the last time, ten years ago. It might only have been a day, though in retrospect it seemed longer.

It was midnight when I made my way back through the snow and let myself into the fire-lit warmth of the house. I looked in on Beauregard in the study.

He was sleeping soundly on the sofa, still wrapped in his greatcoat, illuminated by the orange light of the standard lamp.

I was about to close the door when I noticed the paperback, open and lying face down on the carpet before the sofa. It was a copy of my second book, published almost fifteen years ago — a collection of crime stories which I considered my best work. Something made me cross the room and pick it up, gratified that Beauregard should have chosen this volume from the hundreds of others.

As I flicked through the pages, I became aware of marginalia scribbled in Biro on each page. I carried the book towards the lamp, sat down and studied the tiny handwriting. It seemed that Beauregard had closely read almost a hundred pages, and every one of them was crammed with questions, exclamation marks and bold underlinings.

Simplistic rationale, read one note, and another: This simply doesn’t work — why would she react like this, when on the previous page she agrees to accompany him? I turned a few pages and read: The characters of this story are manipulated by the author to propel the improbable plot.

At the end of each story was a neat summation. In one quick reading Beauregard had seen through the artifice of plot to the tale’s fundamental weakness. It was a humbling experience to have the faults of one’s hard labour so expertly dissected. At the end of one story, on the remaining blank half page, he had written: Why the compulsion to achieve such artificial completeness? If art is to reflect life, then in literature a story should not be wholly resolved; there should be threads left which beguile the reader’s intelligence and imagination with tantalising and inexplicable possibilities. Charrington‘s work is yet another reflection of his crass, obsessive-compulsive materialism…

I returned the book to the floor, my face hot with a strange mix of emotions. Beyond rage at the desecration was the beginnings of a shame I found difficult at first to admit to, for while Beauregard’s marginalia might have been cruel, not to say callous, it also approached an unpalatable truth.

I retired to my room. It was a long time before I felt myself drifting into sleep, my mind considering Beauregard’s words. I hoped that he would not bring up the subject of my literary failings in the morning. I had survived for years with the knowledge of my inadequacy: I told myself that my work was not literature, but entertainment, and that it was popular. For a long time I had salved my conscience, and excused my laziness with the fact that my work sold, and I enjoyed writing it: I would leave literature to minds finer than my own.

I was awakened in the early hours by a sound emanating from the study. I regained consciousness slowly, wondering if I had indeed been woken by a scream, or if I had been dreaming. As I listened, I made out the occasional raised voice. I climbed from bed and pulled on my dressing-gown. As I left the room and descended the stairs, I saw a pulsating blue light leaking from beneath the door to the study.

Still half asleep, I moved towards the door. I paused and listened. I had not been mistaken: I made out two voices. One was a woman’s, the other a man’s — Beauregard’s, I guessed, though he was speaking in so low a tone I found it hard to make out.

I could only recognise the occasional word.

‘Then… here… impossible!’ said the woman. I could not discern the reply.

I reached for the handle and turned, meaning to open the door a fraction and peer inside. However, though the handle turned, the door would not open: it appeared to be prevented from doing so by something placed against it on the other side. Frustrated, I considered knocking and enquiring what was going on. However, something stopped me — some inchoate fear that I would not like what might be revealed if he answered my summons.

Presently the voices ceased, the blue light diminished. I stood for a time, undecided as to what to do next, and finally retraced my steps to bed and soon fell into a deep sleep.

I awoke at eight, as usual, and it was some seconds before I recollected the events of the night before. I recalled finding my book covered with Beauregard’s caustic comments, and then I remembered getting up in the early hours… But had I? In the cold light of day it came to me that the voices, the blue light, had been nothing more than the products of my dreaming mind. For the life of me I could not decide if I really had overheard voices in the front room.

I dressed and made my way downstairs. I reached out to the handle of the study door, and it turned and opened without hindrance. I stepped into the room, expecting to find Beauregard and perhaps his lady friend — but he was not there, and nor was there any sign of a woman.

Then I saw his rucksack on the chair before the dead fire, and stuffed inside it the copy of my desecrated book. At least, then, he planned to steal it rather than have me read his criticism — and this evidence of his dubious charity made me feel irrationally pleased.

I moved to the window and opened the curtains. The snow had continued to fall during the night and my homebound footprints had been all but obliterated. However, leading from the front step, a fresh trail of prints showed darkly in the thick covering. They moved down the garden path, up the hillside and off towards the horizon.

I sat at my desk and for the rest of the day worked on the final chapter of the novelisation, pleased that I was free to finish the work without Beauregard around to distract me.

I took a break at midday, made myself a sandwich and ate it at my desk. More than once I contemplated his rucksack: it had worn well in twenty years, considering the extent of his travels. I recalled how possessive of it he had been in his student days; it was as if because it was his only possession, he therefore had to guard its contents all the more.

I finished my lunch and looked through the window. There was no sign of Beauregard. I moved to the armchair and picked up the rucksack, guilt already pricking my conscience.

I sat on the sofa and, the rucksack on the carpet at my feet, I went through its contents. A baggy jumper, a foetid pair of socks; three books, ancient, leatherbound volumes in Latin. My hand came upon something else, a small pair of Tibetan cymbals which produced, as I lifted them out, a high clear chime. In the bottom of the bag was a folded map on old and jaundiced parchment.

The map was covered in a script strange to me; I thought I recognised the shape of one of the countries, the rectangle of Nepal. To the north was drawn a series of triangles to represent the Himalayas, and beyond that the plain of Tibet. This expanse was covered in Beauregard’s small, precise hand, and threaded with a winding route in the same blue Biro.

The route seemed to have taken him from monastery to monastery, the length and breadth of the ancient land. At each monastery, represented on the map by a high-sided, blocky building, Beauregard had written his comments.

Rimpoche Udang v. informative. He suggests I try the phrontistery at Manchang Bazaar. He says my suffering is common, but that Rimpoche Thangan is practised in the ways of relief. He gave me a simple mantra which should provide me with brief respite.

Intrigued, I read on. Beside the northernmost monastery, Beauregard had written: Rimpoche Thangan listened to my story. He performed a ceremony, with many bells, much incense and chanting. The ceremony involved his cutting my chest, the letting of bad blood requisite if the rite was to be successful. Only time will tell.

I read the other notes on the map, but learned nothing new. I thought of Beauregard in his ridiculous greatcoat, trekking across the face of Tibet, petitioning lamas and monks, to what end I could not tell. I wondered what ailment he had been suffering from, and if the ceremony ministered by Rimpoche Thangan had proved successful.

I returned the contents to the rucksack, afraid that he should return and catch me going through his possessions. For the rest of the afternoon I worked at the computer, my mind only half on the job of novelising the appalling TV script.

It was dark by the time Beauregard returned.

I had cooked a hot chilli to warm him after his long walk, and at eight he knocked on the door.

His face was blue with cold and his eyes, as they stared into mine, seemed haunted. He brushed past me and moved to the study, where he bent before the open fire and massaged his outstretched hands as if washing them in the heat of the flames.

‘I’ve prepared a meal,’ I said. ‘You must be hungry.’ I hesitated. ‘Where did you get to?’

He looked up, as if only then registering my presence. He shrugged. ‘I don’t know, Simon. Walked for miles. You’re certainly isolated out here… Yes, I’m ravenous.’ He hesitated, then said: ‘I hope I didn’t disturb you last night?’

‘What? Oh, I did hear voices…’

He smiled and pointed to the television in the corner, buried beneath piles of books and papers. ‘I’m sorry. It was a long time since I last tuned in… I hope it wasn’t too loud.’

I smiled, shrugged. ‘Not at all,’ I said. Of course, the blue light, the murmuring voices…

But why, I asked myself, had he found it necessary to blockade the door and prevent my entry?

Uncomfortable, I said: ‘We’ll eat, shall we?’

He looked at me. ‘Simon, it’s good of you to put me up like this.’

I shrugged, embarrassed, and retreated to the kitchen.

We ate in silence on the coffee table before the fire, Beauregard’s hand shaking as he ferried the fork from the plate to his mouth. He emptied a liberal measure of whisky into a mug of black tea and sat back with it clenched in his fist, staring into the dancing flames.

At one point his hand strayed to his rucksack, on the floor beside his chair. His eyes found mine and he said: ‘I was telling you about my travels last night. I suppose I was always really heading for Tibet… At least, when I arrived there it seemed that way — I knew that this was the place.’ He lapsed into silence, cradling his mug, regarding the flames with bloodshot eyes.

‘Have you ever heard of the Bar do Thadol, Simon?’

‘Isn’t it some kind of Tibetan religious book?’

‘The Tibetan Book of the Dead.’ He nodded. ‘I’m translating it.’

I looked up, surprised. ‘I thought it had already been translated.’

He smiled, a minimalist, sardonic twist of his thin lips. ‘It has. Badly. There were things missed out. Things that the translator didn’t or couldn’t understand… I’m attempting to correct that. My version will be definitive.’ He said this with such fierce conviction that I could only nod my head in passive agreement.

He looked at me, and his gaze seemed to peer into my very soul, summing me up and finding me worthless. ‘I feel sorry for those of you who apprehend only…’ he gestured with a long, thin hand, ‘only this. Oh, there are realities out there so strange and bizarre, if only you could allow your mind to see them.’ He shook his head bitterly. ‘But you’ve all been conditioned by the modern world, the crass information media which doesn’t allow for any historical perspective other than the immediate. The difficult thing is to decondition oneself, to see beyond what is only superficially apparent.’ He paused, then shot me a glance. ‘But it’s frightening, Simon… Believe me, when you begin to see these other realms, at first you are lost, with nothing to guide you, no prior experience to make sense of things… Sometimes I am terrified.’

I was aware of my heartbeat. I poured a stiff measure of whisky into my mug and drank. Beauregard seemed on the edge of a revelation. I felt that now he would tell me something that might explain the enigma of himself, but as the silence stretched it came to me that he had said all that he was able: that it was my very lack of ability to comprehend anything other than the here and now that would render his explanations futile.

I opened my mouth to speak. What I had to ask him seemed relevant and yet profane.

‘Is that. ’ I began. ‘Last night, you were about to tell me what happened… I mean, you told Sabine, you showed her something. ’

He turned his head from the flames, his expression devastated. ‘I showed her, Simon, and I tried to help her cope with her new understanding, but she wasn’t strong enough. She could not bear the knowledge.’

The silence stretched. I took another swallow of whisky, my head swimming. I had a vision of the superficiality of my life, my relationships and my work. It seemed then that I was granted a terrible insight into the fact that what I had known all along amounted to nothing — and that I was equipped to apprehend only this reality. It came to me that what drove Sabine to kill herself might be preferable, however difficult to accept, to an existence of continued ignorance.

I found my voice, at last. ‘Can you show me?’ I whispered.

His gaze seemed pained and full of compassion. It seemed to me that he wanted to share his burden then, but at the same time could not bring himself to be so cruel. ‘Simon, I’m sorry. I know you, and I know that you wouldn’t be able to accept. ’ He smiled, and reached out a hand to touch mine in a gesture of intimacy I had always thought beyond him.

We sat in silence, drinking, for what seemed like hours. I roused myself from sleep, sat up and yawned. Beauregard was still awake, staring into the dying embers with an ironic, unamused smile playing on his lips.

‘I’m turning in,’ I said.

He looked at me. ‘Good night, Simon,’ he said, and there was something of a farewell in his tone.

I slept soundly, anaesthetised by the drink, until the early hours. As I lay awake, I thought I heard again the sound of voices from down below — and something told me that they did not issue from the television.

A part of me shied away from investigating, afraid of what I might find. Another part knew that I could not ignore my curiosity. I found my dressing-gown and hurried down the stairs.

The same blue light leaked from the gap beneath the door, for all the world like the fluctuating glow of a TV set. I leaned my head close to the door, heard the rapid exchange of voices that might very well have been the charged dialogue of a drama series. I reached for the handle, knowing full well that the door would not open.

I turned the handle and leaned forward with all my weight. Slowly the door gave, opened perhaps six inches. The strange thing was that I felt no scraping resistance, as I would if a piece of furniture had been wedged beneath the handle. Instead, it was as if I was pushing against a constant, forceful pressure from within. I lodged my slippered foot in the opening and peered through.

The light had intensified, bathing my face with a dazzling blue radiance. As I screwed my eyes shut to filter the glare, I heard a woman’s voice: ‘You didn’t think for a minute that you could get away? Even here, in this Godforsaken wilderness?’

Then Beauregard’s: ‘I hoped, of course. I should have known…’

The woman laughed. ‘Even they couldn’t help you!’

‘They did, for a while.’

‘For a while, yes. It was only a matter of time before I overcame their resistance.’

I choked. I had an awful premonition. I had heard the woman’s high, stilted accent before, long before — twenty years ago, to be exact.

My eyes became accustomed to the light, and I stared, and saw at the source of the lapis lazuli radiation the figure of a woman: she was thin, dressed like a hippy, with a cheesecloth shirt and flared denims; she had her hair coiled in familiar braids and wore fastidious, John Lennon glasses.

Sabine…

Beauregard was kneeling before her, like a supplicant before some vision. On his face was an expression of such tortured anguish that the features of the Beauregard I knew were almost indistinguishable.

‘What do you want from me?’ he cried.

Sabine laughed. ‘I want to show you what it is like,’ she said.

I could take no more. Whether in fright, or an inability to hold open the door against the pressure from within the room, I staggered backwards with a cry. The door snapped shut, and I was pitched into relative darkness. Sobbing, I clawed my way to the banister and staggered up the stairs. I made it to my room, switched on the light and curled myself into a protective ball, shaking with delayed and paralysing shock at what I had witnessed.

I must have slept, against all odds, though fitfully. I came awake often, and always the first vision that greeted me was that of the blue light with Sabine at its centre.

I awoke finally with a bright winter sunlight slanting into the room. It was late. Hurriedly I dressed, fingers fumbling with my clothes. I made my way down the stairs, and as I approached the study I relived the events of the early hours. I knew that this time I had to confront Beauregard with what I had seen.

He was no longer in the study. Not even his rucksack remained. I hurried to the door and flung it open. He had taken his leave, perhaps hours ago. A line of footprints, almost filled in by the new fall of morning snow, led away from the house and up the hillside to the far horizon.

If this were a work of fiction, one of my stories Beauregard so despised, I would take pains to craft a satisfying denouement; I would explain everything and tie up all the loose ends, in the manner that Beauregard disdained in his marginalia. It would be a ghost story, and I would show the reader what horror he had made manifest to Sabine all those years ago. The apparition of Sabine would be a Tulpa, a spectre from Tibetan lore, returned to haunt Beauregard for showing her what should have remained his own, private secret.

But life is not fiction; there are no neat resolutions and answers, no cosy denouements to satisfy and entertain. I have presented the incidents as they occurred, and for the sake of my sanity I prefer to think that what I saw last night was no more than the product of my drunken imagination, fuelled by lack of sleep, Beauregard’s recollections, and my own confused thoughts of the poor German girl who was driven, for reasons that will remain forever unknown, to end her life.

I often think of Beauregard as I sit here and type my safe, satisfying little stories. I consider the torture of inhabiting a world that ordinary people are unable to perceive, and I see him walking, always walking, through freezing winter landscapes, pursued by the spectre of the young girl who forever haunts his guilty conscience.