by Gary Fry
“You’re wrong,” I told her, keeping my voice firm. “I have evidence about what Thomas Hartwell was attempting to achieve at that farm in Norwood.”
But Sara shook her head. “Oh Christ, he still doesn’t get it.”
“Get what?” I snapped back, matching her mockery with determination. “That you and Louise Patterson—who incidentally is now dead—weren’t abducted by a deluded lunatic? That he didn’t hold you there for several years, treating you like farmyard animals? That Louise didn’t kill him—burn him to ash and bones, dear God—while you fled the area, getting picked up by…by my dad, who took you away and made you…” I hesitated, no longer sure I was on safe territory in terms of factual accuracy, but then choosing to risk it, knowing even getting it wrong might prompt the alternative: “…and made you pregnant, which eventually led to the birth of my brother, your furtive blackmail and that financial transaction, and everything that has happened since?”
Sara’s smile never faded. “Oh, clever boy! You have done your homework, haven’t you? And you’re absolutely correct—your dad was the father.”
I exhaled the sigh of relief I hadn’t realized had been building inside me while reeling off all these unpalatable details. I’d been right, after all; I could at least put my mind at rest about Dex’s paternity. He wasn’t the son of Hartwell, merely that of a less threatening monster. My dad had had a lot of weaknesses, but he’d never have gone as far as abduction and torture. I thought if I’d discovered otherwise, the universe would have needed reconstructing for me: taken apart and put back together in a different order.
Gazing back at the still-grinning Sara, I also found myself smiling, all the bite removed from our exchange, which was upheld when she spoke in a much calmer voice.
“Tell me, I’m curious. How did you find out about that episode?”
I replied immediately, buoyed by this merciful development. “I watched films Thomas Hartwell had made of all those events. After dealing with the man once she’d escaped, Louise had stolen his camcorder and sold it locally, presumably not realizing there was a tape inside. She was desperate for cash, having a serious drug problem induced by the bastard she’d killed.” I’d provided detail to show that maybe I knew things she didn’t, but now returned to the main issue. “Anyway, it was unpleasant to observe what happened in Norwood, but I managed it in the end. I watched all the footage.”
“All of it?”
I thought for a moment, wondering what she meant. But then I admitted the truth. “Well, as much as I could take.” After another pause, during which I considered the wisdom of adding more, I simply said, “I didn’t witness the rapes, Sara. I believe that that would have been unendurable, and disrespectful to you and Louise.”
“The boy has manners,” Sara replied, smoking some more of her cigarette. “Such a shame it’s him suffering delusions and not Hartwell who had.”
I was astonished. How could she snipe at me while defending the man who’d done such terrible things to her? But this thought evoked another matter I’d hoped to explore while visiting the troubled woman. After ignoring her attempt to antagonize me, I gave voice to this at once.
“Can you tell me about…about…”
“…about what, little boy?”
Overlooking the patronizing retort, I finished: “…about the siren of depravity? That was a phrase my informant—a journalist from Newcastle—said Louise had used about Hartwell’s intentions. I believe this was what he was trying to achieve with you and her: turn you into bestial beings capable of raising old monsters, creatures of sex and death, the most powerful forces that govern life in the cosmos.”
I was improvising, the heightened sensations derived from my rancorous debate with Sara drawing thoughts from the depths of me, pulling together previously disparate elements.
“Well, the clue’s in the name, but it wasn’t us he ultimately needed,” Sara replied with haste, her unfailing smile precluding any coherent explanation. She was toying with me, much like a sadistic mother might with a child.
But then I started thinking: hadn’t her response confirmed something that had troubled me earlier, relating to further comments that, according to Peter Marsh, Thomas Hartwell had made? Louise had suggested their torturer had said neither Sara nor she was the one who’d raise those undead entities. And yet as “siren” implied, along with the journalist’s speculation that women were closer to nature, this person had to be female—maybe the child of either of his abductees. Perhaps he’d captured two people to impregnate both and maximize the chances of having a daughter to fulfill his ambition.
But this hadn’t happened, had it? According to Sara, Hartwell hadn’t even fathered a child, let alone a female; my dad had done that later, even if the infant had been a boy.
Gathering my thoughts, I glanced around the room, spotting a folded newspaper on the coffee table standing between Sara and me. From this angle, I could make out only a center-page headline that alluded to a young woman missing in the northeast. This was obviously a regional publication, and its text—what little I could read at this modest distance—mentioned a mild disability in the form of a clubfoot.
I looked away, back at my host, trying to push aside any connection between what Peter Marsh had mentioned earlier—a woman who hadn’t returned home recently from shopping—and what I’d noticed in this local newspaper. Then, realizing I was unlikely to acquire much more information from the survivor of a similar horror, I said, “Let me ask a final question.”
“Go ahead, my child,” Sara replied, leaning forward to stub out her butt in an ashtray beside that folded rag.
Not caring for her taunting use of a term of endearment—I wasn’t her son, but Dexter certainly was; she shared an identical goading nature—I asked, “If my brother expressed a desire to do so, would you agree to meet with him?”
“Oh, how cute,” Sara replied, her voice openly mocking. “Isn’t he adorable?”
“I’d appreciate it if you’d answer my question.”
“And yet he’s so much like his father,” she said, still addressing an imaginary audience while her smile verged on another outburst of laughter. “If only he knew what his father was really like.”
I shook my head, ready to rise and leave. “Look, never mind that. I know he was no angel—”
“A demon, more like.”
Realizing how serious she’d grown, all her sadistic amusement sliding away, I asked again, “Will you agree to see my brother? I think it might help him. It was he who asked me to look into what happened back then. Surely everyone deserves a chance at knowing both their parents. Tell me that isn’t the truth.”
“Truth?” Sara barked back, shooting forward in her seat. “Don’t come here and lecture me about truth. You’re no more than the devil’s spawn and so is he.”
What did she mean by this, and why wouldn’t she explain? Perhaps because she derived perverse pleasure from the episode? Or maybe because she was no longer in her right mind? As she rose from her chair, I heard that plastic rattle again, the blister pack in her pocket that might even contain an antipsychotic drug. Then her face straightened once more, a brief resurrection of that grin laid permanently to rest.
“I’m sorry, I’m being terribly facetious,” she said, and then became quite conversational, making a specific inquiry. “Tell me, do you own a mobile phone—perhaps with a video-recording facility?”
Of course I did: it had access to footage of a younger version of my host, in various stages of being tortured. But I said nothing about that, merely produced the handset from my pocket through nervous habit, hoping she wouldn’t ask me to show her any of this disturbing material.
She didn’t.
“I have no wish to ever meet the boy I gave birth to,” she explained, edging slowly toward me, around that newspaper- and ashtray-loaded coffee table. “It’s been such a long time since all those things occurred, and if you’ve reviewed evidence recorded there, I’m sure you’ll understand
I’m reluctant to revisit them.”
“Of course. Of course I understand th—”
She clearly took pleasure in interrupting: “But as you’ve eloquently argued the case that your brother might like to know about me—the modern me, how it all turned out for his dear, old mother—I’m willing to offer something.”
I was uncertain about how I should respond, and so waited for her to reveal more.
Seconds later, she did.
“If you’d care to prepare your phone, I’ll pop into another room for a few moments and, after returning, will speak to him on camera, revealing why it’s for the best if we never meet.”
Her proposal made me nervous, not least because of all her unpredictable behavior during my visit. But if this was all I could hope to acquire, I’d have to agree to it. In the event of more crude mockery, I could simply delete the video.
“Okay,” I said, watching her retreat, having come almost within touching distance of me, which had heightened my mounting unease. It was only now that I noticed a pair of sliding doors in one corner, almost certainly leading to another room in this tasteful property. Although Sara’s attitude had left me feeling unsteady, I realized she might have dealt with her earlier trauma; how else was it possible to run a household alone so efficiently?
Once she’d disappeared through those sliding doors, presumably to decide what she intended to say on camera, I activated my phone’s video function and then, to pass the time until Sara returned, switched my gaze to the fire hearth again and the framed photos displayed there.
Sara’s husband, an older man named Harrison, looked as happy with her as she did with him. This had been a pleasing ending to a dreadful story, and although further tragedy had struck later in their married lives—the man’s death at a relatively young age—they’d at least had time together, perhaps helping Sara to realize that life wasn’t all sickness and horror, offering her enough strength to survive. I couldn’t help smiling a little at these obvious facts.
But that was when the woman came back into the room, nudging those sliding doors farther open while entering.
I twisted round, pressing Record on my hoisted phone. But at first I was confused. Although the doors had parted wider, I was unable to see anyone advancing through them. There was another couch in that part of the lounge, concealing a low portion of the wall behind, and then I realized what was going on: Sara had come back into the room, but she wasn’t walking upright like any normal person would.
She finally emerged from the end of this couch, scuttling on all fours with her head cocked up. In the short minute she’d been absent, she’d taken off all her clothes and now moved naked across the carpet, flaccid breasts hanging like limp sacks and slender waist bearing the stretch marks of childbirth. I could see bones through waxy flesh, dark patches of hair growing under her armpits and at her intermittently visible groin, especially when she hitched one leg in a mimicked act of bestial urination. This all looked like the fur the animal she depicted might bear all over its body.
“Watch that last video,” she said, before braying like a horse and snorting like a pig: Neigh! Oink! Oink! “He fucked us both like dogs.”— Woof! Woof! Woof!—“And although neither of us was pure enough, the one intended to summon them also needed a pussy.”—Meow! Meow!— “Because the Gods of sex and death still await deep below…but will rise again!”
That was when Sara Harrison née Linton, who’d once endured such relentless depravity, started screaming like some hideous human siren.
24
As the crazy woman tried to bite my legs through my trousers, I left her home, retreated back down her path to the roadside, where I got inside my car, started it up, and then fled the area, my wipers flipping thickening snow from my windshield.
By the time I reached the fringes of Scarborough, my heart still beating hard, I pulled into the curb where no properties were located and, leaving my engine idling, tried to stop the shaking besieging my body. I refused to drive on while suffering such ill coordination. I certainly didn’t want this case to result in any more victims, perhaps involving me running over someone while reflecting on the horror I’d just experienced.
After about three minutes, during which I regained full control of my hands, I marshalled my ragged breathing, which had threatened to become hyperventilation. My shock passing and leaving only a mild trembling inside, which I could just about cope with, I slipped a hand into one jacket pocket, removing the phone with which I’d not only recorded part of Sara’s descent into relapsed madness, but also through which I had access to that video footage—more specifically the third, unwatched file, which surely documented the worst of Thomas Hartwell’s sick excesses. Even the dogged Peter Marsh had refused to watch these final recordings; I wondered what crucial detail he might have missed out on.
I logged in to my email account to reaccess the link I’d activated earlier, which took me to the encrypted website where this furtive material was stored. Once I’d gained entry, I hesitated a moment, looking at my moonlit surroundings, so much brooding landscape hoarding Lord knew what dreadful entities. But then I plunged ahead, activating the final recording—“nf3”—before bracing myself to observe what my phone’s media player might reveal next.
“Watch that last video,” Sara had insisted. “He fucked us both like dogs.” As the footage started up, I asked myself whether I wanted to witness these events. But then I realized that I had no choice. To acquire the full facts in this case, I had to review all the evidence. I had to go beyond what the journalist had considered appropriate and identify what Sara had meant when she’d claimed that she and Louise weren’t “pure enough” to raise the Gods of sex and death.
At first, there was more of that previous footage, the women being subjected to various forms of physical control. On this occasion, I noticed the time and date in the screen’s bottom corner, which indicated when these events had taken place. By this stage, it was 1982, toward the end of the victims’ confinement, when their conditioning was reaching its conclusion. The cameraman continued muttering those foreign words, while slapping and kicking them like animals.
But it soon got much worse.
For the first time in these recordings, Thomas Hartwell appeared onscreen. The camcorder’s lens remained steady as he approached one of the women—Sara it looked like, though the dimness in the room in which she was chained to a bed made even such detail difficult to determine—and then squatted close to her. Perhaps the recording device had been left on a nearby table, pointed directly at the violation about to unfold.
Whatever the truth was, that Latin-sounding incantation continued in a thick Irish accent, despite sounding louder than it should with its chanter farther away from the camcorder’s microphone. Maybe Hartwell had raised his voice because he now wore the black balaclava I’d heard about from Peter Marsh.
The man was of average height and build, far from the monster I’d tacitly anticipated. When he dropped his dark pants and started thrusting against the listless woman on the bed, he looked genuinely pathetic, a deluded person with no more power than sadistic desire and taking advantage of people through enforced use of drugs.
Once he’d finished with Sara, he rolled her aside, and then stepped away to draw the other—Louise—from offscreen. She was similarly sluggish in movement, half-conscious and perhaps unaware of the true extent of this experience—even less so than her companion had been, who’d at least vocalized a few protests. As the chain attached to one of her ankles jangled, the occult ritual continued, as if repetition was essential to imbue any imminent pregnancy with the force required to result in a true “siren of depravity” so perfectly primed in nefarious conditions that its primal scream could awaken the Old Ones, like a cosmic alarm clock going off.
As I watched the despicable abuse, I was simply glad that it had never happened in this location, that Hartwell’s attempt to bring into the world a power that might even put an end to it had failed. Maybe illicit substanc
es and constant physical assault had rendered both women infertile during their period of abduction.
Once the hideous man had finished with Louise, he pulled away, still loudly chanting those creepy words beneath that woolen mask. He paced out of the camera’s visual range, presumably about to switch off the recording device.
That wasn’t what happened, however.
The incantation continued at a similar volume and yet this didn’t seem possible; surely the famous Doppler effect should have come into play as Hartwell moved closer to the lens, making his voice sound even louder through the dark headgear he wore.
But it didn’t. And moments later, I realized why not.
That was when the masked man returned onscreen, this time holding a short baton of sorts. What with the gloom, it was difficult to figure out what this solid rod was made from, but then my attention was distracted by another sight.
The camera had started moving, no longer as steady as it had been up until that point. But how could this be unless there was…unless there was someone else in that room with Hartwell, someone filming his sordid activities?
Seconds later, that occult ritual came to an end, as if the man in the balaclava believed he’d done enough to achieve his goal. He looked triumphant while performing his next act, to such a degree that, while hitting both incapacitated women with that short, firm item, he began vocalizing a new sequence of words and in an entirely different voice I recognized at once.
“I dig all day and sometimes at night / To make enough money to limit my plight / But when I chanced upon a jewel like you / The darkness lifted and my efforts felt true.”
The sentiment expressed in this once-earnest poem was ironic, mocking and cruel, and yet when combined with further slaps on naked flesh from that rolled-up newspaper—the same way the man had once treated Dexter and me—it drew the delight of his onlooker, who stood laughing behind his camera and speaking random words in a thick Irish accent as the recording went on and on.
