Jonathan Coe - Number 11

He hurried on towards the main door, Rachel padding along behind him, struggling yet again to keep up.

‘Nick, wait! Slow down, can’t you?’

The door of the vestibule was still open, but the main door, the door leading to the outside world, was now locked.

‘It’s shut!’ Nicholas said, unnecessarily, after twisting the handle a few times.

‘I know. I heard him close it. That man with the funny hair.’

‘Come on.’

He strode off again, back in the direction of the choir stalls, and she scurried after him.

‘Where are we going now? How are we going to get out?’

‘There’s another way. A little door down a passageway here. The lady told me.’

Even for Rachel, now, there was no mistaking the note of panic in her brother’s voice; and this was what scared her more than anything. She knew that if Nicholas was frightened, something must be very wrong.

‘Can’t you find her again? She could show us the way.’

‘I don’t know where she is.’

The candles had been snuffed out, and now with a click which itself echoed around the Minster walls, stretched and amplified a hundredfold, most of the lights were abruptly switched off. Darkness engulfed them. There was just one pinpoint, glimmering faintly, on the northern side of the nave.

‘Come on,’ said Nicholas. ‘That must be it.’

She tried to grab his hand again but he was already on his way. This time she broke into a sprint in order to catch up. In a matter of seconds they had reached a little arched doorway that led into a narrow, low-ceilinged corridor, at the end of which was a door marked ‘Exit only in emergency’.

‘Phew — this is it,’ said Nicholas. ‘We’re going to be OK.’

She followed him as he entered the tiny corridor, but instead of opening the door he leaned against the wall for a moment or two, breathing heavily to calm himself down.

‘What’s wrong?’ Rachel asked. Her brother didn’t answer and so, following a hunch, she made the question more specific. ‘It was something that lady said, wasn’t it? What did she say to you?’

Nicholas turned to her, and his voice sank to a conspiratorial whisper. ‘She asked me what I was doing here, and I told her Mr Henderson had let us in and said it was OK for us to have a look around. But she said that wasn’t possible. She said …’

He tailed off. Rachel herself was too petrified to speak, but her eyes, fixed unmovingly upon her brother, demanded that he finish the explanation.

At last Nicholas swallowed hard and concluded, in a whisper that was softer but more urgent than ever: ‘She said, “It can’t have been him. Teddy Henderson died more than ten years ago. ”’

He looked down at her, waiting for her reaction. She returned his gaze, her eyes steady and without expression. It was clear that she did not, at first, understand the full meaning of what he had just told her. It was too terrible for her to absorb. But slowly it began to happen. Her eyes widened and she put her hands to her mouth in horror.

‘You mean … You mean he …?’

Nicholas nodded slowly and then, without another word, he grabbed the handle of the exit door, pulled it open and was off: away, out into the freezing October air, down the path which led towards Minster Yard North and then back to the shops and safety. He outpaced Rachel easily and it wasn’t until he stopped to recover his breath in a sweetshop doorway that she was able to catch up with him. Her own sprint through the streets had been, up until that point, a thing of panic, confusion and heedlessness; already she could remember nothing about it. Now she stood and watched as Nicholas doubled over in the doorway, his shoulders heaving. As usual she wanted to hug him, to cling on to him, but this time something held her back. Some creeping element of suspicion. She looked at him more carefully. Her capacity for rational thought started to return as the pounding of her heart relaxed into something more measured and regular. And then the realization hit her. It wasn’t the fear, it wasn’t the exertion that was causing his shoulders to heave like this: it was laughter. Nicholas was laughing — silently, helplessly, unstoppably. Even then, she could not think what was making him laugh like this. It seemed an inexplicable reaction to the experience they had just been through.

‘What is it?’ she asked him. ‘What’s so funny?’

Nicholas straightened himself up and looked down at her. He was laughing so much that his eyes were running with tears, and coherent speech was almost impossible.

‘Your … Your face,’ he spluttered finally. ‘Your face when I told you that story.’

‘What story?’

‘Oh my God. God, that was priceless.’ His laughter subsided, and he became aware that his little sister was still staring at him in bewilderment. ‘The story,’ he repeated. ‘About that guy who let us into the church.’

‘You mean the ghost?’

At which Nicholas burst into laughter again. ‘No, you dumbo ,’ he said. ‘He wasn’t a ghost. I made that up.’

‘But that lady you spoke to said —’

‘She didn’t tell me anything except how to get out.’

‘So what about …?’

And then, finally, she understood. She understood, and she saw the full cruelty of the joke he had played on her. The boy she had trusted, the one person from whom she had thought she could seek comfort, had only wanted to upset and torment her. Of all today’s horrors, this was the worst.

She did not scream, though, or burst into tears or shout at him. Instead, a sudden numbness overcame her, and all she said was:

‘You’re horrible and I hate you.’

She turned and walked away, not having a clue where she was heading. To this day, she has never been entirely sure how she found her way back to her grandparents’ house.

The paradox is this: I have to assume, for the sake of my sanity, that I am going mad.

Because what’s the alternative? The alternative is to believe that the thing I saw the other night was real. And if I allowed myself to believe that, surely the horror of it would also make me lose my mind. In other words, I’m trapped. Trapped between two choices, two paths, both of which lead to insanity.

It’s the quiet. The silence, and the emptiness. That’s what has brought me to this point. I never would have imagined that, in the very midst of a city as big as this, there could be a house enfolded in such silence. For weeks, of course, I’ve been having to put up with the sound of the men working outside, underground, digging, digging, digging. But that has almost finished now, and at night, after they have gone home, the silence descends. And that’s when my imagination takes over (it is only my imagination, I have to cling to that thought), and in the darkness and the silence, I’m starting to think that I can hear things: other noises. Scratches, rustles. Movements in the bowels of the earth. As for what I saw the other night, it was a fleeting apparition, just a few seconds, some disturbance of the deep shadows at the very back of the garden, and then a clearer vision of the thing itself, the creature , but it cannot have been real. This vision cannot have been anything but a memory, come back to haunt me, and that’s why I’ve decided to revisit that memory now, to see what I can learn from it, to understand the message that it holds.

Also, I’m taking up my pen for another good reason, quite an ordinary reason, and that’s because I’m bored, and it is this boredom — surely, this boredom and nothing else — that has been driving me crazy, provoking these silly delusions. I need a task, an occupation (of course, I thought I would find that by working for this family, but it has been a strange job so far, quite different from my expectations). And I’ve decided that this task will be to write something. I’ve not tried to write anything serious since my first year at Oxford, even though Laura, just before she left, told me that I should carry on with my writing, that she liked it, that she thought I had talent. Which meant so much, coming from her. It meant everything.