Siren of Depravity

by Gary Fry

  The single-story farmhouse stood at the center of the uneven plot, with a few barns running alongside it. This didn’t look like it had ever been a large business, but there were paddocks nearby for horses, and ground beyond that might once have penned cows or sheep. Pigs would have been kept in sties whose fencing was now rotten fragments, suggesting the whole place hadn’t been in operation for years—maybe as many back as the episode I’d come to investigate.

  Suppressing a mental image of trotter-like, human-sized footprints in my brother’s garden, I got out of my car and crossed to the main building’s front entrance. It was locked, but wood forming the frame didn’t look likely to resist a meaty shoulder, even from a fey academic. Realizing that nobody lived here and that no one else was likely to observe from the empty surroundings (the farm was at least a mile outside Norwood village), I forced a brutal entry. But I suspected this illegal act was minor compared to events once enacted here.

  The property’s hallway gave on to a sitting room to my left and a kitchen up ahead; both looked abandoned and putrid, their walls growing continents of mold and corners packed with wilted spiderwebs. I ventured into the first, and found nothing but stone floors supporting a few sticks of lopsided furniture, most looking as if it had been colonized by woodworm. Then I turned and headed down the hall passage to the kitchen, in which another doorway was situated to the left, presumably leading to rear-facing bedrooms. It was difficult to tell; the entrance had been secured with a metal padlock hanging on a short length of chain.

  Realizing that this surely confirmed I was in the right house, I was about to see whether I could force the rusty unit and explore some more when I noticed something move in one eye corner. I looked that way at once, and through the kitchen’s dirt-smeared window I spotted a figure lurking at a distance, between two trees that seemed to bend toward each other, as if inclement weather conditions, including crisscrossing winds, had caused this irregular growth.

  Was it a man out there? My anxiety levels stepping up several notches, I crept closer to the glass to get a better look across the several fields standing between this building and its present onlooker.

  Was my undesirable physical condition—heart pounding, hands shaking, forehead perspiring—leading to distortions of perception? All I knew with certainty was that although frost clung to corners of the pane through which I glared, the dark shape standing between those trees seemed to tremble, as if, rather than a seasonal chill, there was actually a heat-haze in that spot, the kind ordinarily observed in baking temperatures, like those experienced only in equatorial climates.

  I backed away, looking elsewhere while trying to thrust aside my recollection of a silent entity, as large as a man, but dark where he should surely be pale: the flesh of his face and hands mainly, the first of which appeared to be half-covered by the second. But then I’d reached one of those padlocked doors and was struggling to lever it open, my mind dismissing my latest experience as simply one involving a passerby walking an unseen dog and about to move on at any moment. As the chain finally broke free of the door frame, I took a quick look back across those fields and saw nothing standing between those trees, not even any more of that curiously wobbling air.

  Stress could do peculiar things to the human brain; I knew this well from my academic research. I was tired and unsettled from all my investigations and ought to get on with looking around here, before leaving for Morpeth as soon as possible. That was when I gave the now-freed door a mighty heave…which led the whole lot to drop upon me, stone lintel and wooden architrave alike.

  I staggered forward, reeling and lurching, my hearing profoundly affected, with shrieks and howls cutting through my skull. As my head slowly recovered from the shock of being struck by heavy objects, I thought I detected human voices and much worse within this audible melange, a high-pitched cry coupled with the oink-like braying of some animal. During one disoriented moment, I actually swivelled around, trying to spot the pig-like person who’d just stolen upon me.

  But when my vision finally cleared, along with that unsettling cacophony in my mind, I noticed only a pile of fallen masonry filling the doorway leading back into the kitchen, where nothing lurked except dust roused by the structural weaknesses of this aging, uncared-for house.

  I rubbed debris from my hair and clothing, easing the pain in my scalp. Luckily, I’d been hit more by wood than by stone, and it wasn’t long before I could function again, stepping farther into the building.

  As I’d suspected, here were several bedrooms, separated by a bathroom too squalid to even think about entering. Instead I passed into the first of the sleeping quarters, wondering why there was no direct route into this part of the accommodation other than through the hallway at the front, where a careful conspiracy of locks had been added to keep out intruders. It was as if the building had been designed to conceal these rooms from all but their owner. There wasn’t even a back door here, offering access to the property on its hidden side.

  Recalling the furtive figure I’d seen looking on at a distance, I was glad about this architectural quirk. Then, starting to believe the place’s structural layout had impelled a certain someone to use it as a base for nefarious pursuits, I examined the first bedroom.

  Nothing had been left that might have attracted hard-to-remove stains or even fingerprints. I’m not sure why this was my first thought while observing the single bed’s steel framework, but to deny it would be mendacious. Only metal remained, covered in more dirt-encrusted cobwebs. I stepped away from the room, noticing that this had also once been secured from the outside the chain of a missing padlock clung to the door’s jamb—and then entered the next, which was identical in terms of features, just a bedframe without a mattress standing at the center of the stone floor.

  I withdrew, feeling increasingly uncomfortable. While exploring the two bedrooms divided by that tawdry bathroom, had I actually experienced a recurrence of that bestial screaming, like perceptible residue of what had once happened here, involving former tenants of those rooms?

  Without lingering to ponder, I made my way back out of the building the same way I’d come in. I suffered a shock after reaching the hallway when I observed someone waiting at the property’s only exit, possibly seeking to perform similar acts upon me as had been done to whoever had once been forced to stay here. But then I realized what this dark shape was: the front door I’d kicked out of its greasy frame, moving back and forth in a late-morning breeze.

  Moments later, I was back outside and hurrying across to my car. There were still the few barns to explore, but by now I simply wanted to flee. The whole place had made me feel grubby, especially as it appeared to have been gutted and scrubbed, rendered innocent to anyone unfamiliar with its sordid history.

  With nobody in sight earlier, I’d forgotten to lock my car and it was easy to climb in, start the engine and drop the vehicle into gear. After glancing up for the first time since regaining my seat, I thought I saw something moving at one of the property’s windows, but once I’d got back in motion, I realized what this was: a reflection of one of my unlit headlights, mimicking the appearance of a ghosted face at the pane.

  Sweeping out of the drive, I adjusted my vision to closer quarters and let out an involuntary shriek, which had been building as I’d stolen through that spookily deserted home.

  Someone—or at least something—had been inside my vehicle, because here on the windshield, inscribed with an item so much thinner than a human finger that it could only have been the tip of a tree’s branch, was a message carved into condensation at the bottom:

  THE OLD ONES WILL RISE AGAIN.

  18

  By the time I reached Morpeth, fifteen miles beyond my father’s resting place of Newcastle, my brain had ceased whirling, letting me think straight enough to remind myself of what I’d come for. However much we try to convince ourselves otherwise, it was hard for the human mind, particularly a rationally trained one like mine, to hold dark material inside for
too long. This was maybe an evolutionary survival mechanism, preventing us all from losing grip on reality.

  By the time I’d switched off my sat-nav unit and parked in front of what I’d been told by email was Greg Church’s terraced home, I’d pushed aside all thoughts about ancient monsters (especially those like my brother had sketched as a child, which might even have been implied by whichever Norwood prankster had etched that creepy message onto my windshield) in an effort to focus on the most fundamental aspect of my case, the question with which this whole act of detection had begun: who Dex’s mother had been.

  My brother simply wanted to know what his ancestry was, didn’t he? This was a natural need, the way all of us orient ourselves in everyday life. And as I understood who my mother and father had been, it would be meanspirited to deny him equivalent information.

  The fact that something about this line of reasoning didn’t ring true failed to stop me from advancing up the property’s brick pathway to knock at the front door with knuckles like ice. It was getting later, well beyond noon, and the skies above this respectable-looking neighborhood gathered wintry white forces in advance of a full-scale attack on the fragile earth before long.

  But then I silenced my treacherous mind and waited for a response to my summons.

  A moment later a middle-aged man pulled open the door. He was dressed in casual garments and seriously balding, with gray tufts clustered above each ear; his eyes were a cerulean blue behind studious glasses. The guy looked keen and knowing, as if few things escaped his attention, and although he carried a bit of late-life weight, I had a feeling he could probably handle himself in fractious situations.

  “Hello there,” he said, stepping back from his threshold and waving an arm to draw me inside. “You must be Harry Keyes. Please, enter freely. I’ve been expecting you.”

  Something about his comment made me hesitate—almost certainly his use of that Count Dracula phrase “Enter freely,” which was identical to the way my brother had invited me into his home the day before—but I paced forward anyway, nodding and smiling.

  “Thanks, Mr. Church,” I said, stepping beyond him while holding his gaze. “It was good of you to agree to see me at short notice.”

  “Not at all, dear fellow. Company’s always welcome here. I get so little these days—since my retirement, you’ll understand. Now that there’s just me on my tod.”

  The man’s accent was regional, the unmistakeable growl of a Geordie, but also quite refined, as if travel and eminent companions had once been the mainstay of his career. I was steered into a smart lounge bearing functional rather than aesthetically pleasing furniture; this along with an absence of keepsakes in the room—no framed photographs, few ornamental trinkets—made me suspect he’d long been single, if not a confirmed bachelor. Maybe his irregular working life had made marriage and a family too complicated.

  Once we were settled in chairs, facing each other away from a large window overlooking the presently deserted street, I said, “As you know, Mr. Church, I’m interested in the case of Norwood Farm, because I’ve been led to believe that one of the people involved—the Sara Linton mentioned on your website—has a connection to my family…quite a strong connection, in fact.”

  The formerly active journalist leaned forward, clearly intrigued by what I might be able to tell him. “Well, how about we start with you telling me everything you know, and then me returning the favor?”

  This sounded like a sensible suggestion, even though I still felt uneasy about why the man had asked me to travel all the way up north when we might easily have chatted by telephone. Did he fear anything as melodramatic as a bugged line? But no, that was surely foolish. After all, this story related to events occurring over thirty years earlier, perhaps before even I was born. Who could be interested in that, and for what furtive reason?

  Glancing around the room and seeing a few certificates hanging on the walls (their headings appeared to belong to some media group, but the other text was too small to read from my location), I overruled my doubts by discussing my brother’s discovery of his adoption document and then the chat I’d had with my mother concerning my dad’s affair with a woman he’d apparently picked up in Norwood, someone called Sara Linton about whom I’d learned more later during an online search. It was this, I claimed, that had brought me here today, in the hope of acquiring further information about the events that had once occurred on the farm I’d visited only hours earlier (I failed to mention this final detail, however).

  Greg Church had listened to my story without interruption, nodding in response to comments about my family and raising his eyebrows at the most surprising news: the fact that Dexter had turned out to be my half-brother, the product of a tryst between one of his article’s subjects and our dad.

  “I had no idea that Sara had had a child,” he said, pinching his lower lip as if his mind was busy slotting this new information into the incomplete story he held in his head. “Could you tell me in what year your brother was born?”

  “1983,” I replied, realizing that, however much of a revelation news of Dex’s birth had proved, it was far from the most troubling knowledge I could impart. I’d mentioned nothing about his ensuing behavior: a moody infancy, unhealthily focused childhood years, and genuinely weird teens. “I’m his elder, born in ’81.”

  Greg nodded, clasping his hands together. “That fits with my understanding of the case. My first informant—the other woman held at the farm and subjected to…well, to such brutalities—suggested that it had all occurred between the years of 1979 and 1982.”

  I didn’t care for his use of the word “brutalities,” but realized if I wanted the truth, I might need to hear about many dark matters. Then, once I’d nodded in a way that signalled a desire to learn more, the man went on.

  “I first became acquainted with Louise Patterson, Sara Linton’s only companion at that farm, in 1984, when she arranged to speak to me about—and these are her words verbatim—a shocking local story. We met in Newcastle, where my office was based at the time and she’d apparently lived since her ordeal several years earlier. She looked a bit worse for wear, dressed in dirty clothing and seeming furtive in her movements. I wondered if she took drugs and was seeking to sell information to fund her habit. But when she told me what she’d suffered back in Norwood, North Yorkshire, I no longer questioned such a dependence on hard substances.

  “We’re both men of the world, Harry, and so I won’t hold back on details. Basically, while travelling home one summer after a trip down south to a pagan festival near Glastonbury, Louise—about twenty at the time—became acquainted with someone in Leeds where she was due to switch from a train to a bus. This man was Thomas Hartwell, whom I mention in my article, and believe me, he was quite a character.

  “Later research on my part revealed that Hartwell was associated with a range of occult activities right across the country. He originally hailed from Ireland and, according to Louise, had a strong Celtic accent. He was in his thirties when he met the girl, and my sources revealed that—consistent with his connection to the northeast—he’d once studied at Durham University, where he’d graduated in an astrophysics and cosmology degree, taking first-class honors before venturing out into the world.

  “But no records exist of him being affiliated to any organization in an employment capacity. He appeared to have been an independent scholar, though how he funded himself remains a mystery, perhaps suggesting he operated in an underground economic role.

  “Anyway, let me relate the events at Norwood Farm. I should start by outlining a brief history of the North York Moors, going back many years. Look, bear with me; I assure you it’s all relevant. Louise Patterson knew only some of this information, which she’d intuited from things Hartwell had either said or done once he’d taken her back to that farm. I learned more from inquiries with experts in geology, mythology and genetics at Newcastle University, all of whose input the tale I heard from Louise demanded.

  �
�Let me take you back, Harry, between fifty thousand and six hundred thousand years. I’m vague here because the boffins on campus were, but what I needed to know for my article required only approximations. Now, I don’t know if you understand much about the Ice Age, how certain periods of glaciation—berg-strewn landscapes—were divided by interglacial stages, where the ice melted and left deposits it had dragged from elsewhere across new terrain. Well, the north of England has been subject to at least four stages of this process during what’s known as its quaternary cycle, dating back over half a million years.

  “That was what I learned from the geologists. But to add vital context, I had to speak to academics specializing in mythological studies. From them, I learned about a race of…well, of creatures that were said to have occupied earth during an unknown period numbering in the hundreds of thousands of years ago. These things had apparently arrived from distant worlds, taking advantage of the planet’s availability—during its occupancy by reptiles, mammals, amphibians, birds, fish and insects, and certainly long before the preeminence of humans—to form a temporary new home, while engaged—I swear I’m not making this up—in interspecies warfare across the whole universe.”

  The man paused, as if to give me time to absorb this background information about a story I realized I knew little about. These scant details had squeezed triggers of recollection—cosmic entities existing on earth, perhaps like the ones my brother had once drawn in sketchpads and I’d dreamed about as a child—but I said nothing at this stage, knowing from my professional training how foolish it was to draw hasty conclusions. Then, simply nodding my head, I suggested my informant move on.

  And with a thinning of the smile with which he’d ended his previous passage of narration, he did.

  “No evidence has ever been discovered to support the unlikely occupation of such entities in any part of the world. Those who believe in them—and there’s quite a number of people, spread right across the globe—claim this is because during at least one cycle of glaciation, most of the beasts fled the earth, shifting to less inclement locations, other planets with similar life-supporting climates.