Free The Immaculate by Mark Morris Page A

emotion seemed almost welcome. He waited whilst the figure approached. It was so vague as to be sexless and faceless. When it was no more than a few yards away it reached out a hand, which Jack automatically took. The hand was neither warm nor cold; it was simply a pressure enclosing his fingers, offering to lead him. And Jack was quite prepared to let himself be led. It felt liberating to transfer the responsibility for his actions on to this shade, this phantom. The figure turned away, tugging at him gently. Jack tottered after it, feeling like a small child, his legs unsteady, his mind struggling with a situation too confusing to assimilate.
    Obliquely, almost covertly, the tunnel first broadened and then changed into something else. He was unaware of this process; all he knew was that suddenly the ground was strewn thinly with undergrowth and stones and twigs, and that the black confining walls had become a wood or a forest, various perspectives of trees crammed into a dense wall of bark.
    It was lighter than it had been, though the sky was still murky, as if the prelude to a storm was pressing itself on the land. Despite this the figure was no more detailed than in the tunnel. Jack found it almost impossible to focus upon, as if somehow it deflected his vision.
    The woods were eerily still, depressingly colourless: leaves were more grey than green, trees more black than brown. Though Jack was beginning to feel he had a bond with this figure, that somehow he and it were the same thing, he nevertheless felt his dread mounting.
    There was another strange spatial shift, and all at once Jack and the grey figure were standing in front of a house. As soon as Jack saw the building he tried to pull away, but he felt feeble and dumb; it was as if only his soul writhed, as if his body which contained it was mute, acquiescent. He felt himself walking through the gate and up the path towards the front door. The figure glided ahead of him, its hand clasped in his. The sky was yellow as curdled milk, the house enclosed within a watery haze, like a painting blurred in the rain. Jack knew this house, though why he knew it escaped his flinching mind. Though he did not know who or what waited inside, the thought of opening that front door and entering was so terrifying that he felt fragile as a glass that the sustained screech of his fear threatened to shatter.
    And then he was inside the house, the dark blur of its walls, its thick smell, enveloping him. He had not opened the front door; it was as if the house had oozed around him, sucked him into its darkness. He was alone. The grey figure was gone. Though Jack’s mind felt brittle, his flesh vague, there was a deep terrible sickness at the core of him. It felt like a shifting, dark tumour composed of all the badness—all the pain and fear and anguish—in his life. And this place, this house, was its home. This was the place where all the badness had originated.
    Jack felt himself moving forward, though he had a strong compulsion to flee. Perhaps it was the house that was moving, sliding over and around him, like some vast slow creature dragging him towards its ever-working, ever-hungry mouth. The smell was pungent and stomach-turning. It was ostensibly the smell of bad food and stale air, of grime and old sweat, though to Jack it smelled of cruelty and violence, of tears and dread. A staircase slid up and away on his right, doors passed by his shoulders. And then another doorway rose and gobbled him, and he was standing in a room.
    It was a room he knew, though again the outlines were vague, sketchy, the details washed with a brown dingy murk that was like dust and shadow and muddy water. There were suggestions of furniture in the room, two small windows, a fireplace, perhaps even pictures on the walls. Jack’s attention, however, was focused on a dining table and four chairs, two of which were occupied. For the moment, the occupants were blurred; Jack could not, or would