Siren of Depravity

by Gary Fry

  My dad—still masked in black, his lower half undressed—turned to the lens and gave a little bow to his companion and accomplice Thomas Hartwell.

  25

  I shut down the recording in renewed tears, feeling that if there was anything more to be observed in this footage, I didn’t want to see it. Wasn’t what I’d just discovered bad enough, telling me exactly what I hadn’t wanted to know? This had also put an end to any naïve belief I’d harbored about my dad not being a bad man, only someone with weaknesses arising from an unfortunate head injury sustained while mining in the northeast, prior to which he’d written his wife—my mother—heartfelt poems.

  But I could never have anticipated this level of despicable activity, which amounted to little more than the predilections of a pervert, just like that black magician, a man who’d tried to raise monsters from underground and had failed when one of his victims had escaped and murdered him.

  And what had happened that day to my dad? Had he arrived on his way to work while Louise had been setting light to his demon associate? Had he found Sara inside the house half-drugged and incapable of resistance, before taking her quickly away? Had he realized that the other woman, spotted at a distance burning a corpse, would have no way of implicating him, not only because she’d just committed murder and wouldn’t wish to draw attention to that, but also because she’d been unaware of his involvement during the rapes?

  This was quite unlike Sara, of course, who’d clearly known about my dad’s furtive role and must have made him mindful of that fact. Incapable of murdering her (as well as Louise back at the farm), had he, aware that Sara was pregnant, offered the woman money in exchange for silence? Had she given birth to the child—my dad’s son, no matter what circumstances were involved in his creation—who’d been adopted by my parents, an infant they’d called Dexter, even though Dad had secretly bewailed the fact that it was a boy?

  To achieve their sick ambition, he and Hartwell had needed a girl: a true siren of depravity. But that had been the nature of my gambling dad: £10,000, a considerable sum back in the 1980s, would have been a small price to pay to evoke creatures infused by sex and death, his two reasons for living at that time, a wish to corrupt the whole world with his personal poison.

  Again, my state of mind sharpened by terror, I’d begun speculating, my subconscious pulling together disparate pieces of knowledge to fit a narrative that made convincing sense of all. There was certainly one thing I did understand: Sara Harrison née Linton, despite all her psychological problems, hadn’t lied to me—my brother was my half-brother and had been born to her and my dad. And although I’d dreaded something else being true—that Dex was Hartwell’s son, bent on continuing that monster’s work—this news wasn’t much more reassuring. In short, if Dexter, on the basis of his paternity, possessed an innate interest in such dark matters, shouldn’t I suffer the same?

  But no, I was born earlier than Dex, almost certainly before Dad had become involved with the black magician. I was unable to imagine where these two had met or how they’d revealed their shared interests to each other, but I could feel confident that it hadn’t preceded my conception. Dad hadn’t played any part in the early stages, had he? He’d come in later, when those sexual acts had been required. As evidence revealed by Peter Marsh had suggested, Hartwell had had difficulties with that kind of thing.

  At that moment, however, I found myself reopening the first recording, determined to check out something I’d overlooked while focusing on its filmed events. As I’d yet to log out of the secure website, the file started running on my phone almost immediately, revealing those early stages again, the only time the women had looked happy, when Hartwell, having picked them up separately while travelling by car, had brought them back to his Norwood farm. But it wasn’t this I was eager to observe: it was the date in the bottom-right corner.

  22 June, 1979, it read, and I was alarmed to realize that this was a few years before I was born. But that needn’t mean anything, need it? As the recording continued to unfold, showing interior events shot in the dark and involving those priming occult rituals, weeks and months passed on the digital clock in one corner, and yet still nothing held any significance for me. Dad wasn’t even taking part in these early episodes; it was only Hartwell feverishly preparing the ground, years before those attempts at enforced conception.

  But that was when I noticed something I hadn’t observed during my first review of this horrifying material: a figure in the background, mainly when no light stood at the curtained windows, implying early mornings or late nights, time periods (according to my mum) that Dad had often been away from home, ostensibly working lengthy shifts at a printing company in York. This person was hardly discernible in shadow, because its whole body was black, including its head.

  It was a man looking on from a modest distance…and wearing a dark balaclava.

  He’d been there from the start, absorbing all those incantations, conditioning himself for fatherhood, too. Then he’d presumably returned home and got my mother pregnant, before complications during the birth had led to her infertility. Dad had wanted a girl, but he and Mum had got me. And with more children no longer possible with her, what choice had he had but to push further with the other two women, hoping conception this time would result in a female child?

  When another boy had arrived, after Dad had taken such a gamble in buying Sara’s infant, he’d felt bitter and cheated, no longer able to carry on the late Hartwell’s work. Then he’d taken out his frustrations on me and Dexter, but my brother most of all, because he’d been the one, primed both maternally and paternally, most likely to fulfill the purpose assigned to a child created in such a sordid way. And yet he’d been the wrong gender.

  It all fit, making more sense of everything I’d learned lately than I could have hoped for. But there were still several loose ends that needed tying up. And so, dropping my car back into gear while still holding my phone and shedding more tears of horror, I knew what I had to do next: speak to my brother while heading across to his North York Moors house.

  If I was late home this evening, my wife would have to deal with it. With Dex almost certainly engaged in something as dangerous as our dad and his companion had once been (I vividly recalled those animal-like prints all over his unkempt garden), this seemed more important now than even my marriage and child.

  26

  By the time I hit a fast road across the country to Dwelham, I finally got through to my brother, having called on the landline number I’d programmed into my phone after speaking to him a few days earlier. I remembered my visit the following morning, especially Dexter’s immobilizing injury, and wondered whether this was why he’d taken so long (at least two minutes) to answer.

  But then—in a brighter voice than he’d used yesterday, suggesting his pain had subsided and he’d been elsewhere in his home, engaged in other practices—he said, “Hello, Harry. I’ve been expecting to hear from you.”

  How had he known it was me calling? I was put in mind of mysterious alchemy, the kind that could allow people to predict events or even read minds. But that was when I realized what his humdrum trick had involved: he possessed a digital phone whose readout displayed the caller’s number. Who else in his life was likely to own a mobile phone?

  Having paused to process these thoughts, I wasted no more time in informal banter, which my brother wasn’t fond of anyway. “I’ve worked it all out, Dex. Everything. Where we come from. Who your mother is. And how much…how much danger we might all be in.”

  While travelling the next twenty miles of the hour-long journey back to my native village, I told my brother everything I knew: from my meeting with Mum and all her revelations—her infertility after giving birth to me, and Dad’s alleged affair. To the information I’d acquired online—the outlandish story published by the pseudonymous Greg Church. And then all the knowledge imparted by his alter ego Peter Marsh—the goal Thomas Hartwell had been trying to achieve and the way he�
��d gone about it, abusing two women at Norwood Farm, including his real mother Sara Linton. And finally my visit to this woman’s coastal home and what she’d forced me to learn about our father.

  At the end of the fifteen-minute account (during which I’d skillfully negotiated the quiet country lanes, despite so much snow settling now), Dex remained silent, clearly mulling over this fresh material. Then he started laughing, the way he had during our previous telephone conversation, but this time without sounding in such poor health.

  Had he made the rapid recovery he’d mentioned, after being mauled by whatever had left so many inhuman footprints outside our childhood property? That seemed likely, but I realized that as little as a day ago, he’d looked in serious need of medical attention and now sounded more chipper, as if he’d never been ill at all. What had happened since, leading to this recovery? Was he still performing the kind of acts I knew plenty about, having witnessed enough during our youths together? Did he continue to possess a capacity to meddle with the processes of nature?

  Those bastardized vegetables… That allegedly revived rabbit… And oh God, the neighbor’s cat he’d once indisputably brought back to life…

  But I pushed these errant thoughts out of my mind, especially the last one, as Dex’s stuttering laughter eventually came to an end. That was when he spoke at last.

  “No wonder he hated us both,” he said, feverish amusement deep in his tone. “Well, me most of all.”

  How could I question his conclusion when it was one I’d reached myself? But then I was saved from the burden of responding when my brother went on with less acerbic menace.

  “Now I have my own confession to make, Harry.” He hesitated only a moment before adding, “I’ve always known a female was needed to raise them from underground. Why else do you think I sent you out looking for my mother?”

  I felt astonished and frightened, nearly steering my car off the road. But when I got the vehicle settled on its route to Dexter’s home, I said, “How? How did you know? And…and what purpose are you going to put the knowledge to?”

  He hissed sinister laughter. “That hardcore pornography—the stuff involving pain, which makes unsurprising sense in light of what our dad was up to elsewhere—wasn’t the only thing I found in the attic, long before I chanced upon my adoption certificate. There were other items, Harry—documents offering me a sense of purpose in life, a much needed direction.

  “One talked about monsters that could incite sex and death—the two fundamental processes of biological existence, creation and destruction—in all other proximate beings, and how these things had existed on earth many hundreds of thousands of years ago. This had an intuitive impact on me, because as you surely know, I believe I’ve been in communion with such elemental forces all my life.”

  I was about to reply, explaining how this also fit in with what I’d learned since leaving him yesterday—the way those creatures were supposed to communicate with sensitive types, like radios broadcasting—but then Dexter continued.

  “Another suggested that women, closer to nature by virtue of their DNA, were more likely to function as so-called ‘sirens,’ cosmic alarm systems to rouse these beasts from their eons-long slumbers. A scream, a cry, a song—whatever works best to hit the purest note. They alone could communicate with such buried entities, bringing them thundering out of their premature graves, to which a period of tremendous glaciation in the northern hemisphere had once consigned them.”

  Some aspect of this information, which squared with what I already knew, troubled me deeply, but I was unable to focus on it as Dex never ceased delivering his confession.

  “As in the case of that man called Hartwell, my experimentation lately has met with failure. I even kidnapped a young woman, just as he did two of them, and have tried to find another way of turning her into such a…such a siren of depravity. As you know, Harry, I’ve never been intimately drawn to women. But as I’ve been unable to make alternative methods work, I recently decided to revert to his strategy, but with a major modification.”

  “Which is, Dex?” My voice had sounded nervous even to myself, let alone to anyone hearing it—especially somebody clearly relishing my unease. Had my brother really just said that he’d abducted a woman? “What are you planning?”

  “Terror,” my brother said with utter simplicity, as if the word should mean more to me than it proved to.

  “Terror?”

  “Oh yes, Harry. Utterly corrupting fear and horror—the kind even those two women wouldn’t have experienced while kept in that place of torture. I have new methods, you see—methods way beyond anything even Hartwell imagined, let alone was capable of putting into practice.”

  I struggled to imagine what Dex might have invented that hadn’t occurred to that sick black magician, but before I could speculate, my brother added more.

  “Will my mother come and see me? Will she have anything to do with me?”

  I thought of the video I’d captured in Sara Harrison’s seaside home, of the behavior that proved how profoundly affected she remained by all she’d experienced over thirty years ago.

  “No, Dex, I’m sorry but she won’t,” I said, relieved to relate such news without having to lie. “I did ask her about that, but…well, she’s trying to live a new life now, which I’m sure you can understand.”

  “Ah, that’s a shame,” he replied, his rapid exhalations sounding frustrated. “I’d hoped she’d at least pay a visit, giving me an opportunity to do such a terrible thing to her, deep in my cellar.”

  He came across as being as sick as our father, but what had I expected? I think I’d instinctively known that Dex was engaged in the kind of work my dad had been found to practice, mainly because I’d witnessed so much of it when we were children.

  But what had he planned to do to Sara if he’d ever attracted her to his home? He’d mentioned causing “terror,” clearly continuing where our dad and his perverted companion had left off. Perhaps this was because his mother was already conditioned for the role and needed only a final shunt. But what could be so awful that my brother, possibly even darker in purpose than his predecessor Hartwell had been, might successfully achieve what had failed to happen many years earlier?

  “I don’t know what you were intending to do, Dex,” I said, seeing a sign through my windshield for Middlesbrough, which meant I was closing in on my destination, “but if it didn’t work once, why try again?”

  “I’m far more skilled in the dark arts,” he replied, but then lapsed into quiet, as if some issue had just occurred to him that required careful consideration.

  At that moment, I heard my phone give a sudden beep, indicating that someone was trying to get in touch with me. As Dexter remained silent, simply breathing into the mouthpiece, I removed my handset from one ear and took a look at my screen.

  The LCD readout revealed who was calling, and I was mildly alarmed to realise it was my wife. Now nearing six o’clock, the time I said I planned to visit my brother, Olivia would perhaps want to wish me luck or make sure I was okay, before passing on her phone to our daughter, beautiful Eva with her amazing voice.

  Before I had a chance to decide what action to take, Dex spoke again.

  “When did Dad start working with Hartwell, Harry? You’ve mentioned the early eighties, but was that actually when it began?”

  I replied without hesitation, still thinking about my family and how much I missed them and wanted all this horror to be over. I’d call Olivia later, just as soon as I reached my brother’s house and tried to talk sense into him.

  “1979,” I said, picturing Eva in my mind’s eye, a girl I’d always considered so good, a perfect fragment of nature.

  “Before even you were born?” asked Dex, his voice like the hiss of a snake.

  “Yes,” I replied, and then found myself seizing on what might have already occurred to my brother. My thoughts raced back several minutes, recalling a phrase Dex had used to describe the true siren of depravity: A s
cream, a cry, a song—whatever works best to hit the purest note.

  A song.

  “Oh no, Dex, no.”

  “Oh yes,” my brother said with relish, and as another beep sounded on my phone, suggesting Olivia was now trying to get through with urgency, Dex added, “And hell, would you just look at this.”

  “Look at what?” I snapped, hearing noises in the background at my brother’s property, a low grumble that sounded like a car idling.

  “It seems that my magic is even more miraculous than I thought.”

  A cessation of that low rumbling; things arcing open; two quick slams.

  And then Dexter speaking again.

  “Well, fancy both coming round to pay their brother-in-law and uncle a visit—how touchingly sweet. I’ll certainly have to offer them a warm welcome, won’t I, Harry? A very warm welcome indeed.”

  What was he talking about? Had someone just arrived at his house, and was he viewing them through that lounge window, which looked beyond the garden gate into the roadside, where anyone visiting would park?

  Brother-in-law and uncle, I thought, my heart hammering hard. Who fit those descriptions in relation to Dexter?

  And then my half-bemused brain figured it out: it could only be my wife and daughter, having travelled north to check out how faithful I was, how honest and trustworthy I remained since my unforgiveable lapse a few years earlier.

  My brother, his mind clearly racing with typical recklessness, spoke again: “The siren has to be female, the offspring of someone who was at that farm. But perhaps skipping a generation will work just as well…”

  Only miles short of my destination, I hung up on Dex, hoping to dial Olivia’s mobile. Before I could manage that, however, my phone made another sound: a sharp bleep that always put me in mind of Eva’s voice, the way that, with help from others, it could hit the highest, purist notes.