by Gary Fry
“Who are you trying to convince, Harry—me or you?” Olivia glanced away, clearly not finished. “People are complex, you know. Well, of course you do, you’re a psychologist. And what I mean is that bad people often do good things in life, and…well, good people sometimes do bad.”
Now it was my turn to look elsewhere, at one wall as I tugged on pajamas—the one behind which our daughter slept safe and secure. The truth was that I felt embarrassed, because I knew, or at least suspected, what my wife had alluded to: my affair several years ago, the one which might be blinding me to my dad’s most corrosive faults.
I considered mentioning the mining accident again, which had possibly resulted in what my mum had described as her husband’s “brain damage.” But it didn’t seem worth the risk. Olivia perhaps imagined that my effort to excuse my dad’s marital lapse was a simultaneous attempt to account for my own, even though I hadn’t been aware of such a sly motivation. But who knew how the subconscious mind truly worked?
I decided to end the debate by crossing the room to kiss my wife and thank her for listening. When she asked what I planned to do next, I said I’d think about it in my office tomorrow and send her a text message once I’d settled on what I considered the best course of action. Maybe I’d drive north to Dexter’s after work, I suggested—we’d have to see about that.
Leaning back to read, Olivia gave me a trusting look, obviously believing she’d made her feelings clear about any other reason for my absence the following evening. I returned her brief stare with an earnestness that would have served any family well.
Later, once we’d watched some lousy TV together and snuggled down for sleep, I dreamed about pigs changed into human form and pouring out of a colliery’s entrance, from all its deeply carved pits and shafts. One of them made a sound like a person speaking, however much it resembled the grumble of some filthy animal. And it was surely only my imagination that made me believe it was trying to tell me its name…and its name was Sara Linton.
Sara without an “h.”
16
The day after, once my wife had left for work and I’d prepared Eva for school (she’d again been hard to awaken, but I’d managed eventually), I checked my emails and discovered a message in reply to my own about the website story I’d found last night.
Dear Harry Keyes,
Thanks for your email. I’m naturally interested in the fact that you may have information relating to the case of Norwood Farm and one of the people involved in it—namely, Sara Linton.
Norwood is a cold case of mine, with little further evidence turning up in many years. I’m afraid I tend to leave on my website only bare-bone accounts of older stories, but if new materials arise, I’m always willing to review them.
Might I suggest that we meet face-to-face (communication by telephone seems inappropriate for such discussion)? If so, my address can be found below. My availability is flexible these days, after reaching my dotage and taking a less active role in my former profession.
Do let me know at your earliest convenience, and I look forward to exchanging information. I can perhaps tell you more about the events involved in that episode, and you could relate the additional knowledge you mention in your email.
Let me know.
Best wishes,
Greg Church
I didn’t care for how the man had suggested that we talk only in person, as if he had reason to believe someone might become aware if we engaged in any other way. I wasn’t encouraged by his geographical location either—the town of Morpeth north of Newcastle, which was a lengthy drive from West Yorkshire.
Nevertheless, as Eva ate her breakfast while singing a song about a fantasy land (not “Over the Rainbow” this time, with all its high notes and wistful yearning, but possibly something else from a children’s film), I emailed back to ask—on a whim compared to my usual cautious standards—whether the journalist was available today for a meeting. I realized I could skip a second day on campus and travel to Northumberland; I’d drop my head of department, Gordon Reynolds, another message, claiming I needed more time to deal with my private difficulty.
When I shut down the Internet connection, Eva noticed me using my phone. “Daddy, take my picture!”
I obeyed at once, knowing she’d never let me rest until I’d captured her image (as if there weren’t already hundreds in the phone’s memory and I didn’t use a photo of the girl and Olivia as my homepage). Then—after rejecting her next request for me to make an iPhone video of her singing, explaining that her mum wasn’t home to accompany her on piano—I hurried her out to the car, where she climbed into the backseat after negotiating morning frost. This allowed me to access the driver’s seat and start the chilly engine.
Once I’d reached the school, I turned and kissed her, before watching her climb out and stroll into the playground to meet her usual friends. Then I plucked out my phone again, accessing my email server within seconds. I was both excited and apprehensive to learn that Greg Church had already replied.
Dear Harry,
As it happens, I’m at home all day. Feel free to visit anytime that suits you.
Best wishes,
Greg
I had the man’s address from his previous message and quickly tapped his postcode into my windshield-mounted sat-nav unit. I saw no reason to bother my wife about my change of plans—frankly, I could do without the potential complications—but knew I’d have to inform my boss that I’d be delayed today. During rush-hour traffic and with no winding country lanes to navigate, it was maybe a three-hour drive up the A-roads to Morpeth. With luck, if the snow held off (the forecast I’d checked that morning suggested I could rely on at least another day of unhindered travel), I might be back in Leeds by late afternoon, possibly even calling into my office for a few hours to start catching up on missed duties.
Before departing, I gave Gordon Reynolds a call (he’d always been an early starter in the office), explaining about my family problem and how I had no choice but to address it immediately. The man thrust away my apologies and said yes, I must take time to tackle the issue, and then I hung up. I was surrounded by good people, and for that I was genuinely grateful. After all, that hadn’t always been the case.
By the time I’d battled through the morning traffic and reached the fast road north (one I’d rarely used in the past, as my brother’s house lay along another farther east), my mind had switched back to all I’d learned recently, including that unlikely tale about ancient entities existing underground in the North York Moors. I had of course connected this with that claw my brother had found one day while exploring woodland close to Dwelham, the one which had seemed to have triggered his descent into even stranger behavior than he’d exhibited earlier in life.
I’d once had little doubt that those weird transformations of vegetables he’d demonstrated had been little more than that: sleight-of-hand tricks offering the illusion of combination, carrots fused with parsnips and cauliflowers with cabbages. I had no idea how Dex managed this, but wasn’t that the nature of magic—the way its practitioners keep such secrets to themselves?
But what occurred about a year after those strange events was even harder to explain. I guess it began one day during the school summer holidays, when he and I, on a rare excursion together to the village center for chocolate and cola, found a dead hedgehog on the curbside, the kind of roadkill often left to rot in Dwelham. Although the place was remote and had few residents, it was also a rural hotline to bigger locations, and all the flat land in the area, along with a lack of speed enforcement equipment or police lurking in patrol cars, led motorists to hit their accelerators, racing through the half-mile-wide venue. I had no recollection of any people getting mowed down, but dead animals—squirrels, rabbits, foxes—had been plentiful. Some days it was like a pet cemetery there.
Rather than poke at this splattered hedgehog with sticks, as we’d surely have done on previous occasions, Dex grew keenly interested in it, stooping to its side a
nd even stretching out a hand to touch it. I told him not to do that, suggesting it might have germs, but as usual since he’d reached about thirteen years old, he ignored me and continued to do what intuitive impulse and morbid curiosity bade him.
Watching him use one finger to toy with the thing’s guts-ensnared spikes, I eventually persuaded my brother to leave it alone and then led him on to the stores, where we used our reasonable sum of pocket money (whatever else we thought about him, Dad was a decent provider and, through Mum, offered us the means to enjoy our spare time) to buy sweets and fizzy drinks in such quantities that they had to go in a bag.
By the time we’d returned to that death scene, however, the plastic carrier was almost empty, the pair of us belching and holding our guts (mine slender, his rotund) as all the carb-infused junk we’d just imbibed began to be processed.
That was when Dex stopped again at the hedgehog and insisted that he took it home.
I protested, pointing out how annoyed our mum would be if he carried such a dripping mess into the house (she liked to keep the place impeccably clean, maybe the one thing in life she felt she could control). But Dex paid no attention, merely scooped out what little remained of the indulgences we’d bought, and then fed in the new cargo, which was wet, limp, spiky, dripping.
Minutes later we were home, and once my brother had encouraged me to divert Mum’s attention as he slipped back into his beloved cellar (in exchange for this favor, I’d traded being told later what he was up to, which he reluctantly agreed to), I don’t think I heard from him in days.
Well, that’s not strictly true: the fact was that I, my mother, and even Dad when he was at home, heard plenty.
There was much banging and hissing, with occasional escapes of steam from the closed cellar doorway. One night all the electricity in the building went off, but was soon reinstated when my father threatened to enter the underground room with another rolled-up newspaper as he banged on the door, which was now commonly locked from the inside. In all my confused exasperation (Dex had welshed on our deal and told me nothing about his latest exploits), I could only imagine he was playing with later childhood things: a train set, perhaps, which ran on fossil fuels, or maybe a radio-controlled model car requiring a similar source of power.
I was unable to check because Dex kept most of what he used there—all his tools and materials—in a padlocked cupboard in one corner, and if I ever snuck down in his occasional absence (before he awoke on a morning or had nipped out alone to spend his pocket money without me), I found nothing of any telltale import, just liquids on the stone floor, which might be any color at all, but often struck me as dismayingly red.
Dex—still friendless and showing no interest in girls—spent a lot of time on the Internet in his bedroom, but whenever I entered, he’d close down the page he’d been browsing, telling me that he was busy and all would be revealed before long. I rarely believed this; he’d been intense and preoccupied for months now, and toward the end of that summer away from our usual teenage duties—no interfering school, which I enjoyed and he pretty much hated—I heard him sneaking outside at night, when he clearly believed the rest of the household was asleep in bed.
I could only guess at the reason for this, but then, in the autumn, he finally called me into his subterranean pit wearing a scarily uncharacteristic grin. That was when he showed me what he truly believed he’d done.
There was a rabbit on the desk he used, an animal as fully alive and curious as any of its species, but with a savage red wound along one side of its belly.
I reached out to touch this fluffy creature, the way cute bunnies had always made me want to do. I felt sad about its obvious injury, and wondered if my brother had helped it to recover, a transformation perhaps of his former meanspiritedness, involving a shift toward more positive aspects of youthful investigation.
But then he told me his hideous truth: “It was dead this morning,” he said, with a passionate zeal in his dark-dark eyes. “And I brought it back to life.”
Horrified by this notion, while simultaneously trying to reject it, I recalled the hedgehog we’d found earlier in the year, which I’d heard nothing more about since. Was that creature, I wondered with panic, Dex’s first attempt to resurrect something that had already expired, leading him to refine his methods until he’d achieved…this?
I recall backing away, my heart rate running like a fox through a forest, and when I reached the stone staircase leading up to the rest of the house, I looked at the rabbit’s wound again—a great slash down one side, stitched across a bald panel of flesh with black thread—and tried telling myself the creature had merely been attacked by a larger predator and all my brother had done was save the thing from death by nursing it back to septum-twitching health.
Dex didn’t look troubled by my response, just kept grinning that grin. Perhaps he knew, from the wideness of my eyes and the way I rapidly clambered up those steps, that I believed what he’d claimed to have done—truly believed it in my frightened heart. But then I was away, back to my reassuring bedroom, where all my science textbooks lay, telling me about what was actually possible in life and nothing about the borderline crazy activities of an almost certainly deluded boy.
I arose from my troubled reverie still barrelling up the A-road north. By this time—maybe ten o’clock—traffic had thinned, leaving me with plenty of space in which to maneuver. More importantly, there were no residential properties within sight, making it less likely that I’d accidentally run over a dog or a…a cat.
Oh God, the cat, I thought, remembering a further aspect of my brother’s creepy teenage preoccupations, one I didn’t think I’d revisited in memory since the event had occurred. But I certainly didn’t want to think about that right now, and when I glanced up again, through my frost-freckled windshield, I saw the perfect thing to help to bolster my resolve, a signpost indicating local venues and the mileage involved in reaching them:
THIRSK 9
NORWOOD 12
HELMSLEY 17
Norwood, I thought at once; Norwood in the North York Moors. It was only twelve miles from my present location and accessible through the next turning to the right.
17
I redirected the car immediately, instinct rather than reason informing my actions. I had no idea what I hoped to discover during this brief detour or even whether I’d locate that surely disused farm, but as I rapidly drove through the familiar town of Thirsk (I’d visited the place several times in the past) and then headed toward equally well-known Helmsley (famous for its castle and a high street market), I refused to question my motivations, simply kept my accelerator depressed, hoping nothing would make my resolve lapsed.
Before my mother had mentioned it yesterday, I’d never heard of Norwood. This suggested a relatively small location, the kind of place with which the North York Moors were littered, often little more than a crossroad of shops surrounded by scatterings of residential properties. And farms, of course; such rural areas rarely lacked them.
As I drew closer to the venue, with road signs announcing fewer and fewer miles, I sensed my discomfort rise, mainly because of what had once allegedly happened in the area, a multiple kidnapping and then activities that had surely amounted to torture.
Until I visited the journalist Greg Church later today (this impromptu turnoff would delay me, but I hoped not by much), I had only hints about events involved in this case, and thought that might be as bad as being in full possession of the details. After all, it was a well-documented fact that what the mind doesn’t understand, it supplements on the basis of imagined likelihoods, seeking the kind of complete knowledge that allows us to cope with life in all its variety.
But then I was upon the village, which was indeed a tiny place, no more than a narrow high street flanked by only a few outlets—a general purpose store with built-in post office, a fish-and-chip shop, and a pub among them—and twin rows of stone cottages huddled low under slate roofs.
No sooner
had I registered these details than I was through the tiny village and moving on toward Helmsley. But the place had to offer more than this, hadn’t it? I had evidence from two sources, first my mum suggesting this was where my dad had picked up a hitchhiker, presumably while prowling the area when he’d claimed to be working in York; and then from the journalist’s website, which had mentioned the location in reference to terrible acts committed during a similar period by a man called Thomas Hartwell, who’d been involved in occult practices and had sought to summon ancient creatures from belowground.
This chimed sinisterly with what I knew of my brother’s state of mind: Dexter Keyes, who hadn’t been wholly a Keyes, but the errant offspring of one of two survivors of the Norwood Farm saga—the mysterious Sara Linton, a woman who’d been treated like an animal there for a reason I’d yet to discover.
Just then, I glanced up. And simply saw it: a building and several barns in the middle of an otherwise deserted patchwork of fields. That was when the whole world gave a savage shudder.
It was just my body, of course, reacting in a violent way to the motionless property at the end of a muddy country lane. I’d drawn my car to a halt at this passageway’s opening, and it took a lot of courage to ease the vehicle into its throat, the suspension challenged by many dips and ruts.
By now, I think compulsion pressed me forward, and the thought of my dad once lurking hereabouts did little to reassure me. Had the young woman fleeing the farm emerged from this lane before being met by him parked in the roadside? If this was so, why had he taken only one of the victims—Sara Linton and not Louise Patterson—and what had he done next with her?
All these questions heightened my anxieties as, about a minute from the village street, I finally reached the farmyard. I now had little doubt this was the place once owned or at least inhabited by the occult practitioner Thomas Hartwell.
