Figures of Fear: An anthology (26 page)

‘I am working toward the stimulation of one sense through the stimulation of another. My first experiments are with hearing. I have successfully used sound recordings to evoke smells, visions and various physical sensations, such as the feeling of being stroked, touched, prickled, and even burned.

‘I am firmly convinced that there is almost no limit to what the human mind can be persuaded to perceive through the manipulation of the various senses. We are already aware that music can dramatically sway our emotions. Sad songs can make us cry. Martial music can make us feel aggressive. But this is only scratching the surface. I believe that we can create an alternative “reality” through sensory stimulation – a “reality” so convincing that a subject will not be able to distinguish between “real” and actuality.

‘In the same way that a pilot can feel in a flight simulator that he is actually flying, we can allow people to experience “real” events, such as walking through a scenic garden and smelling the flowers, or swimming in the ocean, or making love, or even meeting relatives or loved ones who have died.’

Vincent Grayling’s explanation of how he had managed to conjure up ‘real’ sensations by the use of sound recordings went on for page after page. Martin sat at his desk, fascinated. It was hard to believe that nobody at MIT had made any effort to find out what had happened to Vincent Grayling’s notebooks and records after he had died. Martin had read that he had been a difficult man to get on with, and that his arrogance and overwhelming self-belief had antagonized many of his associate professors. Even today, though, his work on synaesthesia was cutting-edge, and had limitless potential for psychiatric therapy and who knew what other possibilities. Maybe troops could be trained by thinking that they were fighting in Afghanistan, when they were simply sitting in a laboratory with earphones on. Maybe surgeons could separate conjoined twins before they actually made an incision. Maybe widows could meet their dead husbands again, and talk to them as if they were still alive.

He turned the next page and found a black-and-white photograph had been tucked into the margin. It showed a stocky man in a wide-shouldered grey suit, standing in the back yard, with the cherry trees behind him, although it must have been winter or early spring, because their branches were bare. He had black, slicked-back hair and a large, pale face, with near-together eyes and a heavy chin. Martin recognized him immediately as Vincent Grayling.

When he looked at the photograph more closely, he saw that there was a blurry white figure between the trees. It looked as if a child had been running past, just as the shutter was opened. It was impossible to tell if it was a boy or a girl, but Vincent Grayling didn’t appear to be aware of it. He was staring straight at the camera as if he resented having his photograph taken at all.

Martin turned the photograph over. On the back was written, ‘
Vera, 01/16/55
.’ Not ‘
Vincent
’ or ‘
Me
’ as he would have expected, but ‘
Vera
’. Maybe that blurry figure between the trees was Vera, whoever Vera might have been.

Martin took the record player out of the closet and placed it on his desk. He plugged it in and turned the knob and it immediately came to life. Its auto-change arm dropped a non-existent record on to the turntable with a complicated clicking noise.

‘Martin!’ called Emma, from downstairs. ‘Your lunch is ready! Hot dogs!’

‘Thanks, Emma!’ he called back. ‘Just give me a couple of minutes, OK?’

‘Don’t be long! You don’t want cold dogs!’

Martin took out the first record, ‘
Lavender
’, and laid it on the turntable. He carefully lowered the stylus on to it, and then turned up the volume. There were a few moments of hissing, and then he heard a very soft whispering sound, almost inaudible. The whispering went on and on, like somebody trying to say something confidentially in his ear, yet too close and too breathy for him to be able to make out what it was.

After about twenty seconds, the whispering was punctuated by an intermittent buzzing, which reminded him of the noise that a faulty fluorescent light makes just before it flickers off for good. These two noises went on and on, with the whispering rising and falling from time to time, and the intervals between the buzzing noises varying in duration, but that was all.

‘Martin? Are you coming or not?’ called Emma.

‘OK, sure!’ said Martin, and reached across his desk to switch off the record player. As he did so, however, he was suddenly aware of a strong smell of lavender, as aromatic as if he had found himself standing right in the middle of a lavender field.

He breathed out, and then breathed in again, deeply, just to make sure that he wasn’t mistaken, or that he was deluding himself. But there was no question about it – he could smell lavender. Not only that, everything in the study seemed to have a lavender-coloured tinge to it, as if he were wearing sunglasses with purple lenses.

‘
Vincent
,’ he said, under his breath. ‘
I don’t know how you found out how to do this, but you were a genius.’

He lifted the ‘
Lavender
’ record off the turntable and took out the next record, ‘
Moving Shadows
.’

‘Martin!’ shouted Serena. ‘If you don’t come down now I’m going to give your wieners to the cat!’

He placed the record carefully on his desk and went downstairs, swinging himself on the banisters to avoid the rotten risers.

‘We don’t
have
a cat,’ he said, as he came into the kitchen. Serena and Emma were already sitting at the table, eating their hot dogs with coleslaw and curly fries.

‘I know. But we will one day, and I was going to freeze your wieners until we do.’

‘You women,’ he complained. ‘You’re such sadists.’ But before he sat down, he leaned over Serena and waved his hand under her nose. ‘Here,’ he said. ‘Can you smell anything?’

She breathed in deeply. ‘I smell
something
, yes … but I’m not sure what.’ She breathed in again, and then she said, ‘It’s not your aftershave, is it? At least I hope not. Why? What have you been doing?’

‘I’ll tell you later,’ he told her. ‘I managed to open one of the closets in the study, and there was a whole lot of Vincent Grayling’s notebooks and records in it. I should take them all in to the department, I guess. Well, I probably will, but I want to go through them first.’

Serena breathed in yet again, closing her eyes for a moment. Then she said, ‘That smell … I think I know what it is.’

‘Go on, then,’ said Martin. ‘Have a guess.’

‘It’s like when you first open a pack of ground beef from the supermarket.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘It’s like blood.’

That night, after Emma had gone home to Watertown and Serena had retired to bed early, Martin went back to the study. He propped up the photograph of Vincent Grayling against the side of the record player, so that he could look at it while he opened his laptop and checked him out on Wikipedia.

Vincent Grayling, born October 17, 1908; died December 12, 1957. Assistant professor at the Department of Brain and Cognitive Science at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 1934–1957.

Grayling was a neuroscientist specializing in various forms of synaesthesia, a condition in which senses are linked together, so that the stimulation of one sensory or cognitive pathway automatic-ally stimulates a second or even a third pathway.

He married Joan Bannerman, the youngest daughter of Professor Humphrey Bannerman, in 1928. They had one daughter, Vera Joan, born 1931, who was fatally injured in a traffic accident at the age of six, while Vincent Grayling was driving.

Martin looked across at the photograph. Vincent Grayling had written ‘
Vera, 01/16/55
’ on the back of it, and yet the blurred image between the trees couldn’t be Vera – at least not the same Vera. If she had died when she was six, his daughter had been killed in 1937, which was eighteen years earlier.

Martin read on:
Joan Grayling died in 1952 of ovarian cancer. After her death, Professor Grayling became extremely reclusive, although he published several papers on synaesthesia, notably
Cognitive and Perceptual Processes in Congenital And Adventitious Synaesthetes.
None of these papers was very well received, because research into synaesthesia had been more or less abandoned by the scientific community, and after 1955 he submitted no more.

He was found in his study, having bled to death from a fatal wound to his carotid artery. There was some bruising to his body, and one of his shirt sleeves was torn, but because the study was locked from the inside, with the key still in the door, the Middlesex county medical examiner decided that he had taken his own life.

Martin closed his laptop and sat back. He wondered if he ought to try listening to the ‘
Lavender
’ record again. He couldn’t understand why Serena had said that he had smelled of blood after he had come downstairs, when he was quite sure that he had still been carrying the lingering scent of lavender. Maybe – with Sylvia’s birth so imminent – her sense of smell had been thrown out of whack by her raging hormones. He was much more keen to put on the second record, ‘
Moving Shadows
’, and find out what happened when he listened to that.

He was just about to put the record on when he heard Serena calling him. He went along the landing to the master bedroom and opened the door.

‘Are you going to be long?’ she asked him.

He crossed the bedroom and bent over to give her a kiss on the forehead. ‘Only a half-hour or so. I’d like to listen to one more record, that’s all.’

‘It’s just that I feel strange in this house.’

‘Strange – like how?’

‘I feel like we’re not alone. That there’s other people here.’

‘Of course there’s other people here. There’s Sylvia.’

Serena slapped the pillow. ‘I don’t mean Sylvia, stupid. I feel like there’s other people walking around the house.’

‘Really? Have you seen them? Have you heard them? Have any of them left their dirty coffee mugs in the sink?’

‘No, of course not. It’s a feeling, that’s all. I’m probably letting my imagination run away with me. I’ve never lived in an old house like this before. I’ll get used to it.’

‘OK, darling,’ he told her, and kissed her again. ‘Why don’t you try to get some sleep? You’ve done a lot today, cleaning up the kitchen and everything. I don’t want you going into labour before you’re due.’

‘I don’t think there’s any chance of that, Martin. I feel like I’m going to be pregnant for ever.’

Martin left the bedroom door ajar in case she wanted to call out to him again, and he left the study door open, too. He sat down at his desk, lowered the ‘
Moving Shadows
’ record on to the turntable, and started to play it.

After the initial hiss of the stylus, he heard a rustling sound, like a breeze, blowing through trees. It went on and on for almost a minute before it was joined by some awkward, sporadic tinkling. It could have been a wind chime, or somebody stirring a glass of Russian tea. Then both rustling and tinkling were punctuated by deep, distant, reverberating groans. The groans didn’t necessarily sound human. They could have been caused by anything, like pit-props under tremendous strain, or dying animals calling out to each other across a swamp.

After the fourth or fifth groan, Martin glimpsed something out of the corner of his eye – a dark shadow that flickered across the open doorway, so quickly that he couldn’t be sure that he had seen it at all. He stared at the doorway intently, waiting for it to reappear, but even though the rustling and the tinkling and the groaning continued, it seemed as if one fleeting shadow was the only illusion that this record was going to evoke.

He thought of playing the record over again, and he was just about to lift up the tone arm when he saw another shadow, halfway along the landing this time, as if it had just come up the stairs. It was very dim and indistinct, and it rippled like the shadow of somebody walking past a picket fence. But it was definitely the shadow of a person, and it was making its way toward the half-open bedroom door.

‘Hey!’ shouted Martin. ‘Hey, you!
Stop!
’

He pushed back his chair and hurried along the landing. All the same, the shadow reached the bedroom door a split-second before he did, and stepped into it, without any hesitation at all. It was only a shadow, though. The door was still only half-ajar, and no human being could have walked through it without pushing it open wider.

Martin burst into the bedroom. Serena had already switched on her bedside lamp and was sitting up, wide-eyed.

‘What?’ she said. ‘Who were you shouting at?’

Martin looked around. There was nobody else in the room.

‘
Martin
,’ Serena repeated. ‘Who were you shouting at?’

Martin circled around the room and even looked behind the drapes. All he could see was the sparkling lights of the neighbouring streets of Belmont and, less then a half-mile away, the red and white river of traffic on the Concord Turnpike.

He opened the doors of the built-in closets but all he found in there were their clothes, hanging up, and their neatly folded sweaters and socks.

‘Martin, you’re scaring me now! What are you looking for?’

‘Nothing,’ he said. ‘It’s OK. It was just like an optical illusion, that’s all.’

‘What kind of optical illusion? Jesus, you haven’t been smoking any of that skunk again, have you?’

‘Of course not. I only tried that under laboratory conditions, for that neuropsychology program.’

‘Well, it made you all jumpy, like you are now.’

‘I haven’t been smoking skunk, Serena, OK? Even if I wanted to, I don’t have any. It was a visual aberration, that’s all. Like a mirage.’

‘A
mirage
? This isn’t the Sahara, Martin, in the middle of the day. This is nine o’clock at night. Indoors. In Massachusetts.’

‘I’m fine. I’m OK. I promise you.’