Siren of Depravity

by Gary Fry

  “But you added her name to your website report, didn’t you?”

  Peter nodded, almost apologetically. “Yes, you’re right, I did do that. But as I said earlier, Sara now lives under another surname—Harrison—and there’s only a small chance she could ever be associated with the case. In fact, after asking contacts in local authorities to run some checks for me, I know a little about her background. She grew up in a children’s home, Harry, and had no immediate family. Short of folk she’d known in earlier adult life, she’s remained incognito—a drifter without connections, except for a husband who came later, and almost certainly no more kids.”

  “Okay. All that makes sense,” I said, grateful for the information but now keen to move on to more urgent matters. Swallowing with reticence, I eventually added, “So, could I have a copy of that tape?”

  Peter, still looking concerned about sharing this evidence, said, “I guess I can trust you, a responsible academic, to act ethically here.”

  “You certainly can. That’s the first rule of the research I deal with, actually.”

  “That’s good, Harry.” The man hesitated, before hurrying on. “Despite all that, however, I’m afraid I have no immediate way of providing you with the recordings. The tape has since been destroyed, and although I have digitized copies, they’re only on CD-ROMs.”

  I wasted no time in asking, “So what are you suggesting? That I can…that I can take the discs, maybe post them back to you later?”

  “No. Forgive me, but there’s no way I could allow that.” Peter paused again, clearly thinking fast. “What I’m going to do, my friend, is upload them all to an ultra-secure website, which requires a password to access and is encrypted and programmed with Lord knows what other security measures to keep information stored there inviolable. I used this during my career at the Newcastle Gazette.

  “I propose to do this immediately and give you until the end of the day to view them. Then I’m going to delete them from the site. Do you understand?”

  “I understand,” I said, and wondered when I’d get time to watch the recordings. I didn’t think I could go home and view them in the same house as Olivia and Eva, nor do this in my office when I must catch up with my university work. But that problem could wait until I’d left this house and had drawn all my thoughts together about everything—and there’d been such a lot—I’d just learned.

  As Peter rose from his chair and told me to expect an email offering a link in a few hours, I lifted those pictures from my chair’s arm and passed them across to him. It had struck me as peculiar that the man hadn’t mentioned these after returning from making us both a drink, but that was when I realized why.

  “Oh, those,” he said, as if he’d deliberately pushed them to the back of his mind while discussing all the human elements in his garish tale. “They’re just bunkum, aren’t they? I mean, the delusions of mad folk.”

  I thought about Thomas Hartwell, and then about my brother, two troublingly free spirits. Mad folk, I reflected, my head whirling. But then I decided that, as Sara Linton was clearly Dex’s mother and the black magician might even be his father, this summation mightn’t be far from the truth.

  Just as I was about to offer something unconvincing in response, my host led me to his front door, clutching those foolish sketches and paintings in both hands. Then he finished.

  “After all, it’s not as if there isn’t enough horror here, is it? You’ll certainly see that once you view those recordings.”

  And after perfunctory farewells, he left me outside on his path. Moments later, I walked away, realizing I still had much more work to do.

  21

  By the time I’d driven away from the pretty northeast town—as if my concerns could be outdistanced by speed—it was two o’clock and there were a few snowflakes in the air. These weren’t prevalent enough to settle anywhere, but I knew it wouldn’t be long before the whole area—maybe even the entire country—would suffer a heavy downfall. This seemed like a reflection of my mood just then, my mounting fears and freezing horror.

  Once I’d reached the outskirts of Newcastle, I hit a jam caused by roadwork traffic lights, which left me with little choice but to reflect on all I’d heard in Morpeth. Despite everything I knew about my brother, as I sat staring at the smoking exhaust pipe of the motorist ahead, I realized that the monsters I’d been shown more images of were probably the least of my worries. Yes, the North York Moors might have attracted a macabre otherworldly myth, but which regions didn’t? That was all explicable. But there were other issues yet to resolve.

  The story about those two missing young women had left a sickened feeling in my belly, the way all such events did. I recalled an episode the previous year when my wife and daughter had failed to return home one day from a shopping trip, and Olivia was unavailable on her mobile phone. I’d spent an hour pacing back and forth, hands clenching, breathing heavily, with that familiar acidic sensation in my gut. It was deeply unpleasant, and when they’d finally arrived back safely (they’d been caught in a traffic jam and Olivia hadn’t realized her phone was switched off), I was almost incandescent with relief.

  That tale had had a happy ending, with no loose threads…but in this one, there was much more to discover. I knew I’d have to get in touch with Dex before long. He’d be wondering what I’d managed to find out, and I certainly didn’t want him to call my home again and speak to Olivia, let alone—God forbid—my daughter. The thought of the man getting in touch with Eva, his corruption bleeding into her tender innocence, was enough to switch me back to the task at hand, figuring out what Peter Marsh’s additional information meant in the context of all I knew about my family.

  The journalist had promised to send a link to those awful recordings, and while waiting to get beyond the traffic lights, I checked my email about five times without success. Uploading the files would take a while, even in this modern age, and I had to be patient. And yet if I travelled back to my office or home, when would I get chance to watch them? A fellow academic with whom I shared a room might be working at her desk; Olivia would return with Eva in less than a few hours, making it difficult to have any privacy. Watching on my iPhone was one option, but the screen was small and the speakers tinny, and I felt as if I needed to maximize the impact of a first and possibly only viewing. Hadn’t Peter claimed he’d remove the short films from the encrypted website by the end of the day?

  “What the hell went on back there?” I asked myself, trying to prompt my swirling brain into useful action. But when I was finally set free from that seething row of traffic, no easy answer occurred, my thoughts remaining jumbled, so many intuited truths lying frustratingly out of grasp.

  But while heading toward Newcastle, I simply saw it, like a mysterious response to my inquiry, conveniently placed by some sleight-of-hand God: a road sign for Crawcrook, a village outside the city center.

  It was the place in which my dad had lived until his death two years ago, and where he was also buried.

  I don’t know why I turned off at the next exit, but I did. I wondered what purpose visiting his grave could have, and yet kept on driving anyway, drawing on sketchy recollections of visits toward the end of his life, when I—and on a few occasions, my wife and daughter—had travelled up north. The village was about six miles off the A-road and close to an inland stretch of the River Tyne.

  As I arrived, I recalled it being a half-grand, half-run-down area, with many large houses but also a number typical of such a low-employment, ex-mining district: council houses and cheap flats. My dad had spent his last years in one of the latter, which was close to pubs and bookies, making him as content as a pig in hog heaven. But it wasn’t his former home I was keen to visit.

  Minutes later I reached the church in which his funeral had been held. Following that long delay by roadworks, it was nearing three o’clock, and the cold when I climbed out of my car to enter the graveyard was fit to freeze. There were few people in the area, most locals remaining se
nsibly indoors, and so I stole among the mass of headstones, eventually locating my dad’s: Frank Keyes, 1958–2013, and with no further engravings.

  Other than Olivia, Eva and me, only a few drinking cronies had attended his service, as well as a plump, gaudy woman who’d almost certainly been a girlfriend. My immediate family and I hadn’t stayed for the wake held in a nearby club; it wouldn’t have felt right, and I’d been sure that anyone who’d known my dad—his mean attitude and unsavory preoccupations—would have understood.

  Although the church was possibly one of the most neglected in the area, the grounds were well-kept, with fresh turf set upon my dad’s grave, which looked to have been weeded recently. I stooped to this silent wedge of earth and then started talking like a madman at large who commonly communed with the dead.

  “What happened after you picked up Sara Linton, Dad?” I asked, almost expecting an arm to come jerking through that immaculate grass like in some clichéd horror film.

  But there was nothing, only transport passing in the street where I’d parked, completely out of sight to me. Then, my mind unknotted by the relative silence here—a strict peace enforced by a God I’d never believed in—more practical inquiries occurred to me.

  I didn’t give voice to these, but certainly offered them headspace. What I really wanted to know was whether my dad had also been Dexter’s. If, over a long period, the twisted Thomas Hartwell had raped both Louise Patterson (who’d later been declared infertile) and Sara Linton (who’d been anything but) without contraception (I had no evidence for this, but given all the other horrors he’d committed, any alternative seemed unlikely), was it convincing to suggest that a subsequent relationship with my dad, however brief, had led to her pregnancy?

  I seriously doubted that, but this gave rise to another question: if Sara had been with child when she met my dad (while fleeing that tiny village, where so many terrible things had occurred), how had she persuaded him that the infant was his? I suspected they must have had a brief fling first, Sara targeting him for financial gain, maybe claiming later that her contraception had failed.

  But that didn’t make sense either. After all, despite our decent family home, my dad was a mere printing engineer and drove an aging car. And if blackmail (Sara threatening to tell my mum about the affair and then to have the child terminated) had eventually persuaded him to find the £10,000 involved in an illicit adoption, how did that square with my mum’s admission that her husband had confessed to infidelity and that an unborn infant was involved?

  This led, in my mind, to another problem: if my dad disliked children so much—as evidenced by his treatment of both myself and Dex—why had he agreed to take on another baby? Yes, like poor Louise Patterson, my mum had been declared infertile, but even though I’d had a soft spot for my dad’s attempt to take an interest in my child (it had struck me that he’d been attempting to make up for neglect during my early life), the idea that he’d arranged to pay out a large sum to adopt my brother through altruism, let alone for love of his wife, was laughably unconvincing.

  “What did you do, you old devil?” I asked, feeling more vulnerable and bewildered than I had since this bizarre case had begun.

  And that was when I received a response. It made me jerk on the spot, almost falling forward onto that well-groomed plot of turf. But then I recognized the sound that had disturbed me.

  It was my phone beeping: I had a new message.

  22

  It wasn’t an incoming email (how could it be? I had to log in to my university account to receive them) but a text. And it had been sent by my wife.

  Back inside my car, I panicked a little, but after unfurling the message, its content put me at ease.

  Hi darling. How’s your first day back at work? Have you decided what to do about your brother yet? I’m just thinking about preparing dinner, but I guess if you plan to visit him later, you’ll eat out? That’s fine; just let me know. Love, O xxx

  I liked the way she’d opened with a term of endearment—“darling”—while also offering me carte blanche concerning what I meant to do this evening. The truth was that I’d begun to feel guilty about not telling Olivia where I’d been today, which wasn’t lying exactly but wasn’t wholly honest either. And I now felt as if I was in too deep to back out. I’d confess the lot later, but could do without having to tackle it at the moment. Lingering tensions related to issues of my fidelity always made such negotiations difficult and it was easier to tell a few harmless fibs.

  Wishing to leave my father’s resting place as soon as possible, I sent Olivia back a strategically worded message that committed me to my deceit at the same time as giving her little reason to suspect me of anything other than carrying out my usual daily duties.

  Hello, pet. Work is okay, thanks—just catching up on stuff in my office. And yes, I’ve decided to pay Dexter a visit later today; after everything I told you the other night, I think he’ll be expecting me. I’ll probably get to his place by 7 p.m. and stay for an hour or so. I plan to be home by about 10. Hope that’s OK. Love to you and Eva—Harry

  Except of course that I didn’t plan to drive to Dwelham this evening—or rather, not immediately. I’d simply wanted to buy some time in which to watch those recordings, currently being uploaded to the ultra-secure site Peter Marsh had mentioned.

  After checking again for email and dealing with the usual departmental circulars, I was disappointed to realize Marsh had yet to fulfill his promise. It was now after three o’clock, about an hour since I’d left his home, and I wondered what had caused the delay. But after putting away my phone and starting up the car, I headed back for the A-road south, along which I planned to keep driving until my head felt clearer.

  There were other aspects of the case I still didn’t understand. One related to a phrase the ex-journalist had used. Hadn’t Peter said that while raping those two women, Thomas Hartwell had employed the phrase “the siren of depravity”? If so, what did this mean?

  I recalled that the black magician had been trying to reduce Sara Linton and Louise Patterson to bestial status, leaving them able to summon a monster from underground, but hadn’t there been an aspect here that hadn’t rung true in my mind? Peter had quoted Hartwell as adding, “That’s the way, my dear—louder and louder, but never loud enough to waken them,” along with, “What follows will be the true siren of depravity.”

  It was as if the magician had realized that neither Sara nor Louise would be up to the goal he hoped to achieve, but the child of whoever he impregnated might be.

  This line of reasoning made me shiver and not because it had started to snow a little heavier outside. Christ, I thought with gathering unease, if a child conceived by Hartwell with either of the women he’d abused was how he’d planned to raise ancient entities from beneath the North York Moors, this left only one likely candidate: Dex.

  I’d grown so uncomfortable that, nearing Sunderland, I turned off the A-road into the grounds of a service station. Once I’d parked in a slot in front of a glass-fronted shopping plaza, I drew lengthy breaths, turning up my dashboard heater to combat shivers running through me.

  My brother, I reflected: the heir to such a nefarious pursuit… Perhaps Thomas Hartwell had realized his ambition involved a lengthy process, requiring local women (both Sara and Louise had grown up in the area) to be conditioned for the task but not fulfilling it themselves. One or the other would eventually give birth to a child who’d complete the project, capable of awakening with its primal cry at least one undead monster. This would be the true siren of depravity.

  But something about even this conclusion failed to convince me, to such a degree that I removed my phone again and checked my email, hoping further evidence was now available that would help me to make sense of everything.

  It was. Oh God, it was.

  Peter’s message had arrived.

  My heart hammered like some manic creature deep inside me seeking to escape.

  23

  I acc
essed the email while remaining seated as snowflakes tumbled upon my windshield, preventing anyone prying from outside. Peter had included a website link and some accompanying text.

  Harry,

  I’m still uneasy about sharing these with you, but what the hell. I’m sure you’re a man of the world. Remember: I’ll remove them all by midnight tonight, so take advantage while you can. I’ve included a few more documents relating to the case, which may prove helpful in your ongoing inquiries. Good luck.

  Best,

  Peter Marsh

  Once I’d typed in a password embedded in the message, I was transferred to a plain-looking website bearing three movie files and a couple of PDFs, both of which I bypassed to access the video footage.

  The first file, simply called “nf1,” opened at once on my phone’s media player, and I increased the volume to dramatize events unfolding onscreen. For a short while, I wondered what all the fuss was about, why Peter had built up these recordings when they offered such innocuous scenes. It began with a woman visiting the farmhouse in Norwood, but looking quite happy. The quality of the footage was static-infused, so I couldn’t be sure whether this was Sara or Louise, but as her hair was light and body slender in casual garments, I’d have bet it was Louise, the woman the journalist had acquired all his information from later.

  She certainly didn’t share my brother’s stocky characteristics, nor his dark-as-sable eyes. Louise looked as if she’d come to the property of her own free will, and kept smiling infectiously, appearing pretty in all the barren terrain around the building, while saying cheerful things like, “Oh, shut that thing off, Thomas. I haven’t even put on any makeup today.”