Lost in London
by Lev Raphael
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Table of Contents parts: 1, 2, 3, 4 |
part 2
Well, I did my best to ignore the sinister painting but, whenever our eyes met I started to feel that its subject was the presiding spirit of the flat, and she truly wanted me gone. I tried not to look into her eyes too often, but the painting had a kind of dark magnetism, and sometimes I couldn’t help but stare at whoever she was. I felt judged in some way: inferior, an obnoxious American, when I spent too much time in front of the painting. Though I’m six feet tall and stocky, those eyes made me feel small.
The heat, meanwhile, didn’t let up. Even the traffic noise and the sound of people’s conversations as they passed along the street below seemed smothered. At least during the day, there was a spectral kind of calm in the flat. I heard no noise from adjoining flats. Maybe their owners were gone for the summer?
The black and red in the portrait made me think of Poe’s “Mask of the Red Death” and once the story entered my mind, I couldn’t entirely shake it loose.
* * *
Tormented by hotter weather than I was prepared for, that second day, I opened all the windows for cross-ventilation and the flat rebelled. It summoned fierce winds that blasted right through the place, front to back, sweeping all my papers off the heavy round table I was using as a desk, ripping a shade half off the kitchen window downstairs and almost completely unraveling the paper towels from their rack.
Friends back home didn’t believe my texts about that last bit, so I sent them photos of the towels pooled onto the floor as if yanked down by malicious hands. Her hands.
All those pretty rugs weren’t tacked down in any way, so the longed-for cross-ventilation turned them into woolen landmines. Each one was tossed about and twisted onto itself or rumpled in ways guaranteed to make me fall on the highly waxed floors if I wasn’t hypervigilant about straightening them perfectly. And their fringes grabbed at my feet as I scuttled around the flat, trying to restore a minimum of order.
Closing the windows, though, was a non-starter given the afternoon heat that lasted well into the evening, so restoring some kind of order was vital. If I tried weighing them down, I was afraid I might be making things worse. But I went ahead and moved some of the enormous art books onto corners of rugs “most likely to attack,” hoping I wouldn’t trip over the books themselves.
And I felt sure that wandering around partly undressed was not something the portrait approved of. I would have been happy to throw some sheet over it, but I was worried I might somehow damage the painting in the process and incur the wrath of the owners and my Department chair. After all, I was representing the University and all of Michigan, too, I supposed.
I had slept well my first evening in the bedroom that I guessed might be the coolest, though why I chose it, I can’t say now. Maybe because the tasseled curtains edged in gold braid, the wallpaper and duvet were all a soothing sky blue and it had the feel of some 18th-century boudoir. Cool or not, I slept deeply after my flight, waking up almost dazed.
The second evening, though, after that phone call, I was troubled by the heat and by street noise which seemed to come in from the windows like distorted, muffled voices you hear in a swimming pool as people walk along its edge. The sheets were silk and the bed as firm as mine at home, but sleep kept slipping away like something you chase in a dream, even though the room had light-blocking shades.
I’d had a few shots before bed of Aberfeldy scotch I’d purchased at a nearby Sainsbury food market, hoping it would knock me out. But, despite the familiar bright, cherry-cola taste, I was wide awake and felt as warm in bed as I had during the afternoon when the street below smelled of overheated stone and asphalt.
For some reason, I found myself remembering a puzzle posed by a philosophy professor in the required freshman course I’d taken at the University of Dayton: “If you turn away from a table, does it still exist when you can’t see it?” The question had infuriated me and the ensuing discussion had left me dizzy.
* * *
Rolling over and over, I found that the hypothetical table merged in my head with Granny’s portrait upstairs. I felt drawn by morbid curiosity to see if the painting was really there, really so ominous even while a voice inside me murmured, “Nonsense, stay where you are.”
This wasn’t a suggestion. This was a command. And I felt as if someone was squeezing my head between vicious, implacable hands. Just what I needed, a migraine, now, and I was pretty sure I’d left my medication in the bathroom upstairs.
Somebody hooted with laughter outside as a chattering group passed by. The derisive sound echoed in my room, which seemed oddly darker than when I’d gone to bed. I could barely make out the bedside clock in the obscurity of the room, but that didn’t make sense. Was something wrong with my eyes? I tried grabbing it to bring it closer.
That’s when I heard a low, threatening growl.
Was I dreaming? No. I heard it again. Percussive, the same low note repeated without a rise or fall. Like a warning. It was somewhere in the dark bedroom, somewhere very close. Under the bed? But how was that possible?
It stopped and the pain in my head mysteriously vanished, but before I could take a breath, the growling came again. My hands suddenly felt so cold I hugged myself and buried each hand in an armpit, wondering if I could be feverish. Then I felt embarrassed to be so afraid and forced my arms to my side.
I tried to think rationally: Nobody could have slipped a dog into the flat, a dog that had been hiding itself until now. I had to be hallucinating, or maybe there was a weird echo effect on the street below and the dog was outside somewhere? Could the morphine I’d been given months ago have lingered in my system somehow, or messed with my brain chemistry? Or was this some new twist on my migraines?
When I sat up and tried to slip out of bed to check the window, the growling was so intense it seemed to push me onto my back and pinion my arms and legs. And now it somehow emanated from the doorway and the sound was deeper, more vicious and I pictured a much larger dog than the one in the painting.
Surely this was no migraine, this was a nightmare, the classic kind where you’re trapped by some invisible force. I struggled but couldn’t free myself. The pressure I felt on my shoulders was so heavy I submitted, afraid of injury if I tried any harder to fight off whatever had taken hold of me. My skin felt as cold as if the room had magically become air-conditioned or summer had turned to winter.
In movies, people who are terrified often puke, but I couldn’t have brought anything up. My guts weren’t in turmoil, they were frozen. Something ugly washed over me like a dank, low-lying fog, and tears welled up in my eyes. I heard what might have been the noisy hum of the fridge upstairs, but it felt like the buzz of hornets swarming to sting me over and over again.
Trapped, desperate, I started to pray: “Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord...” And the growling faded. I waited, waited some more, and it seemed gone.
Thank God, I thought, starting to stretch and flex my aching hands.
Then I heard a malicious low chuckle. That’s when I passed out.
* * *
When I awoke the morning of my third day, I was reminded of a line from Fielding’s Tom Jones. The prior night’s “nocturnal riots” seemed so fantastical I couldn’t possibly have dreamt them given how dull my dream life usually was, and I don’t think morphine-induced hallucinations counted, either.
Was I a victim, then, of the scotch I drank before bed mixed with some lingering effects of jet lag? Or was I beginning to fall apart already, as I dreaded?
I tried to shake off my anxiety as best I could. So I did not look under the bed, I just grabbed my phone and padded upstairs to the kitchen, sleepily tripping on the stairs but managing not to fall or drop my phone. Then I inspected the spot where I almost fell and found there was nothing uneven in the stairs, and the carpeting covering them looked brand new. But I made a mental note to be careful at that spot.
The owners had left a canister of coffee beans with a note on creamy stationary headed WELCOME and filled with typed advice about where to shop for groceries and how to use the small washer and dryer tucked into a corner of the kitchen. There were also instructions for using the expensive-looking coffee bean grinder and the ordinary French press. Now I truly began to enjoy their hospitality, given the previous night.
I was once again sipping a strong brew at the tiny round wrought-iron table wedged under the window with its grim view of endless roofs, a table that would have looked more appropriate on a patio or terrace. The matching chairs were not very comfortable. The dishes and glassware I found were all very ordinary and not colored red, so I wasn’t assaulted by that color again.
As I ate a piece of buttered toast, I also chewed over the previous night as slowly as I could, trying to remember each and every detail in order, as if I were an eyewitness to a crime and being interviewed by the police.
So what had happened to me last night?
Could I really have imagined it all? Or was it a dream masquerading as reality? Because in the morning, the flat seemed to be bursting with normalcy. The sun was shining in and the air in the flat was redolent of that faint, ubiquitous fragrance of lavender that couldn’t be anything less ominous or weird. And even though some windows were opened — or “cracked,” as we say back home in Michigan — I wasn’t caught in a wind tunnel.
All was well, but I still felt that nagging sense of being an intruder, almost like the itch you get at the back of your neck when you suspect someone is staring at you, and you turn and find that someone is.
Then my phone rang and I was surprised to see Jocasta’s name appear on the screen again.
“How are you, my dear?” she trilled.
“Fine, I guess. Is something wrong?”
“Not a thing, not a thing. I just thought I’d check in on you and see if all was well. You know, new city, England’s so different, ‘culture shock and all that’.”
“Well, nobody’s set me on fire yet, so that’s a plus.”
“What? What on earth are you talking about? Fire?”
I haltingly told her what had happened to me on my previous stay in London, an experience I’d shared with very few people because it was so bizarre and humiliating.
Back in 2006 when smoking indoors was still legal, I’d been listening to a smooth jazz combo in a crowded Soho club where I’d tied my light-blue Polo summer jacket around my waist because it was so warm. All the tables were taken and I was standing in a crowd near the bar, having just finished a Sidecar. Everyone around me seemed to be smoking in a style that looked very European: When they weren’t taking a drag, they held their cigarettes down by their thighs.
Someone must have moved too close to me in the crowd because it suddenly got warmer. I looked down to see one trailing sleeve of my jacket flickering red and orange in the gloom of the club.
And getting redder fast.
I shouted “Holy crap!” and tore the jacket off, stomping on the wild flames.
Ah, British reserve. Not a single person around me asked if I was okay, and none even flinched, though they did make a bit of room for my tarantella. And the band kept playing.
“What is wrong with you people?!” I shouted as I stormed out of the club, my ruined, blackened jacket in hand, swearing to no one in particular that I’d never return to England.
“Jazz,” Jocasta sneered when I was done with my sorry tale, and somehow I heard in that one word the admonition: “You should have known better.” It was clearly my fault.
I asked her, “Do you call every professor staying here so often? At the beginning, I mean?”
Her pause was just long enough to be suspicious.
“Of course! One does like to be polite. By the way, you do know that Princess Diana once visited the owners of that flat? She was apparently some sort of very distant cousin. Of course she wasn’t a princess yet when it happened, but still, it’s a rather exciting place to stay. One might even call it historic.”
I wasn’t sure what to say and finally came up with, “I did not know that.”
“Hmm... you don’t sound very keen. I thought all you Americans were mad about the royals, and her most of all. Well, silly me. Sorry! By the way, do mind the Hepplewhite.”
“The what?”
“The furniture. You can’t miss it. Anything in the flat that’s rosewood, sycamore, or satinwood and is decorated with marquetry and has inlays that depict seashells? It’s unmistakable. Those chairs with delicate legs and open backs in the shape of shields? That lovely bow-fronted sideboard? The flat is simply bursting with the stuff.”
“I promise not to break anything,” I said. “I’m not a rock star who trashes hotel rooms.”
“Most amusing!” And that’s how Jocasta ended the call.
Had I insulted her by not raving about Princess Diana? Or was she being quietly sarcastic and I’d missed the joke?
* * *
Copyright © 2023 by Lev Raphael
