by Gary Fry
“No, I think that’s enough for one day, don’t you?” she replied with a strained attempt at humor. But then she grew serious again. “Well, I should perhaps add that even your dad was disappointed when the child turned out to be a boy. But by that time, we’d already paid his mother the money and there was nothing we could do about that.
“Not that I wanted to protest. I was pleased. Even though I’d have preferred a girl—to even up the numbers in the household, giving me a fellow female to relate to—I bonded immediately with Dex, despite the fact that your dad never did or even made much effort to.”
“Might he have realized what a terrible thing he’d done?” I asked, possibly with naïvety. But my mum failed to answer, keeping her gaze averted.
As the silence lingered, I decided it was time to end all this. I got up to cross the room, stooping to hold my mother before kissing her graying blonde hair. She looked up at me, a moist sheen in her eyes.
“I’m so sorry, Mum. I’m sorry that you—well, that we—had to go through all this.”
“You’re a good boy, Harry. I’m proud of how you’ve turned out.” She hesitated, wiping freshly flowing tears from her cheeks. “And when you see Dexter, tell him I’m sorry for him, too. Your dad was just the way he was—he’d suffered that terrible accident, which must have caused some kind of…of brain damage.”
I nodded, allowing her to finish with a smile.
“Despite what happened when you and Dexter were children, and although I couldn’t endure marriage once you’d become adults, I’ve never held your dad wholly responsible. I think some…some darkness got inside him, but I don’t know how. As you know, having an affair was only part of it. I can even forgive him this. But not what he did to you two boys—never that.”
I understood entirely; it had been terrible to witness my brother’s decline at the hands of a man who’d turned out to hate him. But as for the illicit tryst that had led to the boy’s creation, well, what right had I to criticize? After all, hadn’t I enjoyed a similar relationship recently, one my amazing wife had since chosen to overlook?
I might be more like my dad than even Dex was.
14
One thing I’d done the previous day after Dexter had called me at home was dial 1471, acquiring his telephone number and programming it into my mobile phone. But after I arrived home early that evening, I decided it was too soon to call my brother. I first needed to put my thoughts in order, getting to grips with all the life-changing revelations I’d learned earlier.
I found my wife and daughter in the dining room after entering and rubbing my hands to combat the chill from outside, which continued to threaten (without yet delivering) snow. Eva was again trying to reach those high notes at the end of “Over the Rainbow,” with Olivia at the piano beside her, issuing encouraging instructions.
Hell, it was good to get back to normality, to that feeling of happy family life I’d never known before. Lord knows why I’d put this in jeopardy, but I knew it would never happen again. I didn’t require any of the day’s frightful new information to keep me focused on what mattered most in life, though I couldn’t deny it had probably been a useful reminder.
“Hi, Daddy!” Eva cried as I stepped into the dining room. She’d hit high notes on this occasion, no doubt about that.
“Hello, sweetheart,” I said, stooping to hug her once she’d hurried my way. Then, gazing through her family-affirming blonde hair, I saw Olivia rise from the piano stool. “Hello, both my sweethearts.”
“Have you eaten?” my wife asked, collecting two empty bowls from the dining table from which she and our daughter appeared to have consumed pasta in red sauce.
I’d grabbed a sandwich from a convenience store before visiting my mother, needing something in my belly to steel myself against such potentially disturbing truths. But I was quite hungry now, and after kissing Olivia as well as Eva, I agreed to a helping of the Italian dish and then sat at the dining table.
We kept a laptop in this room, and as Eva slumped beside me and told me about her day at school—she’d drawn pictures of wild animals—I switched on this device and accessed the Internet.
When Olivia returned about five minutes later, carrying a bowl that steamed in the room’s centrally heated air, she handed me the food and then grabbed Eva’s shoulders, raising her from the chair she’d taken before guiding her out through the open doorway.
“Come on, monster,” Olivia said, propelling Eva audibly toward the stairs. “You need to get ready for bed because there’s more school in the morning.”
“I’m not a monster—you are,” Eva replied, the smile with which she’d left the room becoming laughter in the unseen hallway. As her feet hit the flight in a sequence of light thumps, she added, “No, Daddy is.”
I said nothing, merely ate my pasta, until the girl had reached the landing and then crossed the floor upstairs with many creaks and shuffles.
Too much of what I’d just witnessed preyed on my tired mind, and when I glanced up, observing Olivia (who’d quickly returned) gazing back at me, I felt guilty, as if I’d been at fault during the last few days and not significant others in the last thirty years.
“Well, darling?” she said, touching the back of my laptop. “Is that true?”
“Is…what true, pet?”
“Are you a fearful monster, like Eva said?”
I felt trapped in a situation I wasn’t ready to deal with, and after swallowing another mouthful of food, I imagined redness frothing at my lips—the Italian sauce, of course—as I floundered in response.
“Can we talk later, love?” I averted my eyes, looking at the laptop screen. My email account awaited consultation, as well as many angels and demons on the Internet. “I need an hour or so to get my head straight, and to be honest”—I deliberately lowered my voice, even though it was unlikely that anyone other than Olivia could hear what I was about to add—“I’d rather talk when Eva is asleep.”
“Okay,” she replied, but the stiffness of her tone put me in mind of the note she’d left that morning, pinned down by one windshield wiper: DON’T LET US DOWN AGAIN. Although my marital lapse a few years ago had been forgiven, it certainly hadn’t been forgotten, and nor should it be. “I look forward to hearing about your day.”
Olivia smiled, a trusting yet cautious expression, and when she left to follow our daughter upstairs, presumably to put the girl to bed by her usual seven o’clock, I had a moment to finish my meal and reflect on what I’d just observed.
My wife would want to know all about my visit to Dexter’s, along with whatever I’d got up to since. I’d told her I hadn’t planned to go to the office, but I’d been gone all day, and as she knew where my brother lived, she’d have figured out that being absent for nearly ten hours needed some explaining.
But then I pushed this aside in my head, along with the bowl on the dining table, before readdressing the brooding laptop. It occurred to me that what with all the snooping I’d done today, I’d forgotten to check for email, and so that was the first place I visited: my ever-active inbox.
Other than the usual departmental circulars and several spam messages that had been smuggled through the university’s filters, there was only a single item of import: a response from my boss, granting me an official day of leave, with the proviso that I pick up unaddressed work later in the week.
I was happy with that, thinking I’d probably visit my brother again to reveal my news the following evening, provided the snow held off. I quickly checked the weather forecast—for the North York Moors and Leeds—and found that wintry conditions were due to strike any day, but that tomorrow should involve just another freeze.
That was risky enough, but this was important, and the thought of speaking to Dexter over the phone felt impersonal, particularly in light of the knowledge I had to impart. I’d mention my proposed after-work trip to Olivia later, but first there was something else I was keen to explore—something that didn’t make me feel comfortable, i
f I was being honest, but which I was compelled to tackle all the same.
Once I’d accessed my favored search engine, I drew a deep breath, wiggled my fingers in preparation for transgressing a dark boundary, and then hacked in the name that had burdened me all afternoon: “Sara Linton.”
As suspected, the Web came back with a variety of suggestions, none of them particularly useful to my investigation. Here were social media profiles and assorted news stories concerning others sharing this moniker. Some included an “h” at the end of the Christian name and others didn’t. After clicking on a few links at random, I found nobody who met the profile of my dad’s errant lover, now surely in her forties or fifties, and living in or near the North York Moors.
But that was when I remembered something significant: hadn’t my mum given me a specific place name—those two suggestive syllables of “Norwood”? Yes, I was sure that was the location she’d mentioned, and as I typed this word into my search engine after the woman’s name, I realized this additional information was something denied to my brother. He was no fool, had always used computers (to access his stock market trading platform, among other things), and would have carried out the unsuccessful search I just had.
But what would a specific geographical area add to the mix?
I clicked Return at once, and as my laptop went to work, I heard more sounds from our house, which was a relatively modern property and less likely to suffer the whispers and groans of an older building.
Olivia and Eva, of course, going about their usual early evening rituals, the girl changing into pajamas before her mum settled her into bed. I remembered the way my mother had done the same for Dex and me—providing inadequate balm in a house of pain—but then switched my attention back to the screen, where a list of new links had appeared, drawing on all the Internet’s technical necromancy.
At the top of the pile, complete with hyperlink and a teasing extract, was the following text:
The Horrors of Norwood Farm, North Yorkshire
http://www.greg-church.com/norwood_mystery
One of many unacknowledged, unexplained crimes…connections to occult practices…Louise Patterson and Sara Linton were kidnapped and held prisoner at the farm for weeks…
I clicked the heading, and moments later found myself on the darkly designed website of what appeared to be an amateur chronicler of, or even journalist concerned with, a variety of outré material. Here were many pages relating to unpleasant events—spooky phenomena seemed uppermost among them—but I was presently interested in only one: the case of Norwood Farm in North Yorkshire.
There were no photographs (which disappointed me, because if Sara Linton shared my brother’s short, dark-haired, stocky appearance, it might convince me that I’d identified the right person), only a compact passage of text, which looked as if it had been truncated from a longer piece. Nevertheless, I immediately started reading, sensing my hands twitching alongside my keyboard.
One of many unacknowledged, unexplained crimes in the northeast of England is believed to have occurred on a farm located at the heart of the North York Moors. Here, Thomas Hartwell, a man with well-documented connections to occult practices, is rumored to have practiced certain rituals, each relating to ancient entities believed to have been buried in the area for hundreds of thousands of years. What is known with certainty is that in the late 1970s, two young women named Louise Patterson and Sara Linton were kidnapped and held prisoner at the farm for several years, during which they experienced a variety of degrading treatments, the most disturbing of which involved their reduction to particular animal states. The intention was that they’d assist Thomas Hartwell in summoning undead creatures from deep beneath the northeast terrain. As the women escaped their ordeal, it is apparent that this ritual proved unsuccessful. For a variety of reasons, the case never attracted the attention of authorities and remains only a collection of unreliable facts.
Was this all there was? I looked for a continuation of the narrative, maybe a hidden link taking me elsewhere on the site, but I was out of luck. I did locate a contact email address for the text’s author, however—a guy called Greg Church, whose biography page listed him as a journalist active in the nonmainstream field of outlandish issues, but included no photograph.
As I opened the blank slate of an email to request more information, I tried hard to suppress several worrying thoughts about how this story fitted in with the one my mum had told me earlier, the way my dad had picked up a hitchhiker in or near a place called Norwood, where such terrible things had allegedly occurred.
Had this happened after the ordeal suffered by Sara Linton (along with another woman called Louise Patterson), and had that ultimately resulted in the conception of my brother Dexter Keyes?
All I could picture in my mind, as I clicked Send on that brief message, was certain semi-human footprints making their way around Dexter’s garden, in a house located not much farther north than where that farm could be found, the one in which an occult practitioner had once tried raising monsters from the planet’s distant past.
15
But I didn’t believe any of this, did I? Yes, it made some sense of the past and the many things my brother had got up to during later childhood—acts much worse than creation of unusual foodstuff, and many of which I hadn’t even begun to revisit yet—but the notion of occult practices, of creatures living under the earth in North Yorkshire, and of attempts to resummon such entities through dark practices was ridiculous, wasn’t it?
Yes, of course it was.
After shutting down my laptop, making sure all the doors and windows were locked against the prowling night, I ventured upstairs, where I quickly said good night to my daughter (I explained that I was tired after returning to work and there’d be no story this evening) and then went to seek comfort from my wife in our bedroom.
Mindful of what she’d fished for earlier, I told her all about what I’d learned that day, from my visit to Dexter’s house up north (which Olivia had visited no more than ten times in the past, mainly when we’d started dating at university and I’d taken her home at Christmas and during other holidays) and then at my mum’s later, where the whole sinister story had unfolded.
Not all of it, of course; I’d just discovered new aspects that even Mum (who’d never been a computer user, despite my best efforts to get her online) might be unfamiliar with. But I decided to keep that to myself at the moment, probably to prevent my wife from worrying about my mental state.
“Wow, that’s quite a history,” said Olivia, having listened in silence to the ten-minute account. She hesitated, as if mulling over some sensitive issue, but then gave tentative voice to it. “Knowing what little I know about Dexter, I can now appreciate some of the tensions that made him what he is. But the hardest thing for me to get my head around is your dad.”
“What about him?”
Was having an illicit affair with a woman he’d picked up in his car so surprising? But that was when, with a merciful change of subject (after all, the issue of infidelity would always be tricky between us), my wife focused on another matter.
“I mean, him writing poetry—love poetry at that. I’m sorry, but I find that very difficult to believe.”
“Do you think…do you think that my mum might be lying about that?”
“Oh no, not for a moment. It’s just so hard to take in. To be honest, Harry, the only person I ever found less likely to be romantic than your dad was…was…”
“Was who, Olivia?”
“Isn’t it obvious?”
“Not immediately, no,” I replied, clearly being dense tonight. “Tell me.”
“Well, Dex, of course,” said my wife, and gave a sudden shudder, even though the room was still warm.
Having learned what I had about my brother’s maternity, I felt defensive on this point. But after alluding to such furtive family issues as troubled relationships and extramarital activities, I thought it was best not to pursue the matter now. I’d de
cided to be honest with Olivia, largely because I knew the consequences of holding things back—solid silences that could unsettle me for weeks—and so I turned to face her in bed.
“Do you want me to tell you what the poem said?” I asked, switching the focus of our discussion to more positive aspects.
“Can you remember? Did you jot it down or something?”
“No, I think it got lodged in my head—in psychology, we call it a flashbulb effect, the way the mind tends to work when in mild shock, soaking up everything it might need later. I’ve been rehearsing it in my mind ever since. I’ve had no choice in the matter—like you, I find it so hard to believe.”
Olivia smiled, charmed as ever by my cute theoretical babble, while her discipline—music—involved unfathomable sounds, which I had to admit, as a fan of Beethoven and the rest, went much deeper. Weren’t words simply crude indices of so many profound enigmas?
Nevertheless, if anything with a linguistic basis could get close to truth, it was poetry, and so then, drawing a quick breath while standing to change into pajamas, I began narrating from memory.
“I dig all day and sometimes at night / To…to… Hold on, I have it here somewhere. Ah yes: to make enough money to limit my…plight / But…But… Come on, old mind, you can do this: …But when I chanced upon a jewel like you / The darkness lifted and my…my… I’m reaching the end now. Yes, this is it: …my efforts felt true.”
My wife stared at me, which was disconcerting because I was now self-consciously naked—as naked as the day I’d been born, as the saying goes. But that was when I went on.
“So my dad can’t have been all bad, can he? I mean, however crude the poem’s execution, surely no dyed-in-the-wool rotten man has ever expressed such a…such a loving sentiment.”
