Siren of Depravity

by Gary Fry

  But how about what it had taken from me? Standing upright, shaking more confusion from my skull, I turned to address the area I’d been avoiding until this moment, when I felt readier to deal with the issue: my missing family; my wife and daughter buried under tumbled stone and plasterboard, dust and debris.

  I moved quickly toward the cell. Large chunks of masonry had crashed against the metal, buckling some parts and allowing access beyond it. But the harder I tried shifting this newly stacked obstacle, the more my body protested, as if the impact on my skull from other fallen materials had left me unable to function effectively. Whatever the truth was, I eventually abandoned this desperate attempt to find Olivia and Eva, feeling tears running down my cheeks.

  It was obvious that I had to seek help; if hours had passed since this house had partially collapsed, someone from the village must have noticed, calling in police or the fire rescue service. Pacing back in a fretful daze, I glanced up again, my eyes focusing on those several holes in the building’s side, each letting in winter daylight and restless snowfall.

  I chose an exit without reflection, clambering upon that slope made of tumbled stone, some of which bore more portraits of the hideous creature I’d seen merely a part of. I felt simultaneously sick and disturbed, especially as I knew that the corpses of my brother and father must lie somewhere beneath me now. I could only hope—pray—that my wife and daughter hadn’t suffered the same fate, that they were simply wedged in by chunks of broken walls and ceiling that had knocked them unconscious.

  Once I’d squeezed through the largest opening—where the property’s foundations had capitulated, threatening to render the whole place unstable—I thought I’d need to hurry all the way into Dwelham to find men to help shift the great stones in the cellar. This mightn’t even be possible, because the village was, as it had been during my childhood, mainly occupied by older people.

  As I hurried along the high street crying, “Help! Help!” I heard sounds of activity up ahead, presumably made by men going about urgent business—shouting loudly, shuffling in heavy footwear—and with grumbling vehicles nearby, as if parked directly behind them.

  Were people heading out this ice-cold morning, perhaps taking what few children lived in the village to schools farther north? As my panic increased, shifting from the shock I’d experienced in my brother’s house to an ineffectual numbness, I looked around, seeing heavy snow tumbling in fat flakes, blocking my view of anything more than fifty yards away. There was a thick ground mist, too, which rendered things even closer difficult to make out.

  Once I eventually reached Dwelham’s commercial heart, however, I spotted something impossible to ignore: a giant red vehicle with lights twirling at its stern brow. It was a fire engine, surrounded by uniformed men wearing hard hats. The authorities had been called, but if they’d been summoned only here, I failed to see how anyone could know about the damage caused to my childhood home.

  Nearly slipping on a foot-deep stack of snow off the high street, I hurried across to the firemen, yelling with concussion-driven urgency, “Come quickly! Please. You…must. It’s m-my family—my wife and daughter. They n-need help and…and…”

  But when my gaze roamed around the area, trying to figure out why the rescue service occupied this place among others, that was when I saw it: the devastation caused to a row of shops and houses.

  Most of the buildings appeared to have been uprooted from the previously even lots in which they’d been constructed. Farther along the lane, in a plot of parkland, stood a number of the village’s residents, some still dressed in nightwear, as if what had happened overnight since Dexter Keyes had performed his final trick had caught them all unaware. Some were crying and others appeared frightened, possibly due to the fact that, beneath their stores and homes, huge amorphous shapes were prominent, each mercifully covered by blankets of snow.

  The many firemen (now the fog had thinned a little, I noticed another of their red vehicles parked beyond the small crowd) had clearly spent time helping this group of villagers to safety, instructing them to remain at a distance while they figured out what had happened. But as I continued making noises of desperation, one of these men broke away from his colleagues and paced across to me.

  “Calm down, sir. Please breathe deeply.”

  I did as I’d been bidden, my eyes still locked on all those uncertain shapes that had pushed the building’s foundations out of the earth, like half-performed dental surgery involving old teeth removed from bleeding gums. Plumbing hissed and leaked; there was a threatening scent of gas; bits of each property continued to creak and grind, as if the lot might tumble at any moment. But along with everyone else looking on, I was unable to perceive what had caused this damage.

  “Tell us where we can find your family,” the fireman went on, his stable voice making me focus again. “As I’m sure you can see, we’re still trying to work out what’s happened here and await further assistance, but if there’s a threat of injury, we’ll certainly intervene.”

  I told the man where my brother’s house was and asked if I could accompany them in one of their fire engines. I’d figured out that if uniformed staff could be transferred from here now, few people in other places could be in similar danger to Olivia and Eva.

  “You can’t travel with us, sir,” the man replied, strapping on his helmet. “It’s best if you wait here while we carry out our work. I know that will be hard for you, but we have an obligation to ensure your safety, too.”

  “But…but…”

  “We’re wasting time, which could be spent rescuing your family. Please let us get to work.”

  I resisted, my brain behaving with involuntary protest. But I eventually nodded and, as the fireman retreated to his colleagues, I switched my attention back to uprooted shops and houses nearby. What had happened here was undoubtedly connected to the events that had occurred in my brother’s home, but I didn’t want to think about that too soon. I was worried by what injuries my wife and child might have suffered…if not in fact worse, including the unthinkable, the event I scarcely dared entertain in my bewildered mind.

  A single fire engine swept away, its elevated cab occupied by four uniformed men. I hesitated, wondering what I might do next. Snow continued to fall and I began to shiver with a feeling of horror I’d just become fully aware of. When the vehicle’s siren faded, I heard another sound close by and was disturbed to realize this was children playing, their bright shouts incongruous in such a savage scene.

  By this time, some of that ground mist had lifted and I could see much farther across the village. This familiar place, standing at the foot of a valley and once as flat as a chessboard, looked different now, as if parts of its landscape had been lifted and others sunken. I paced forward, away from those newly homeless people, and the farther I ventured, the more I saw of the area, its resculpted contours uneven and in some places dramatically so.

  Local children, taking this snowy morning as an opportunity to have fun, clambered up the sides of several freshly formed hillocks. Some held sledges, others nothing at all; perhaps they’d emerged from properties just beyond, which now showed through the fading fog. Their owners were fortunate, because these houses appeared unaffected by the emergence of—yes, there was no use denying this—various sections of that huge creature’s frame.

  Despite wanting to return to Dex’s home and observe how those experts were progressing with their recovery procedures, I now found myself with little choice but to leap over the roadside wall and hurtle across the nearest field, where the first hint of a fresh bulge in the ground could be seen through a flurry of snowflakes. Perhaps the cold today had prevented that monster from fully awakening, just as geological activities so many thousands of years ago had consigned its undead body to a process of glaciation, before shifting it across the world, and then, after melting, burying it deep underground.

  Falling to my knees in front of this newly elevated patch of the planet, I drew a quick breath, glanced ar
ound again (those children continued playing, oblivious to what might exist underfoot), and then swept aside a layer of fallen snow to learn what lay beneath.

  The surface I revealed wasn’t grass or soil but a solid stretch of greenish flesh, whose feel to my touch gave an impression of frozen meat, only partially defrosted and lacking any impetus from its bearer to rise farther. The body of the thing was cold and breathless, covered in fine hairs several inches long, all as inert as the rest of it appeared.

  There was at least no sign of any of those hideous eyeballs, a thought that removed only some of my mounting terror. I stood, pulling away from the sight that had greeted me under the snow, but as I backed off, I heard a child at a distance—a young boy, much like Dex and me had been while exploring this area with eagerness for life—scream with horror.

  When I turned to look, I saw this lad standing on top of another mound, trying to remove a leg from a section of the faux land that had yielded to his modest weight. His foot had plunged deeper than the thick layer of snow should allow, and as a few friends hurried forward to help, I observed a brief tussle, after which the leg emerged from the ground, his Wellington boot covered in greenish black liquid that dripped off it like caustic acid.

  Although I hadn’t located one of the monster’s many eyeballs, I reflected, that poor boy certainly had.

  Trembling harder, I kept moving, back toward the high street and then to the village’s fringes where my brother’s property was located, now little more than a stack of crippled masonry. That fire engine was parked outside, in front of one of the garden’s collapsed exterior walls, and now accompanied by another vehicle. Perhaps this one had travelled from the nearest hospital, to the north where towns above the national park were located. It was an ambulance with its lights twirling and whose siren shrieked like a primitive, bestial cry.

  Switch it off! I thought while approaching the scene, in which firemen had already descended into the exposed cellar and now removed something with a tenderness that belied their bulky bodies.

  But this wasn’t something at all; it was someone. And upon sight of her, I felt my heart swell half with relief and the other half joy. Presumably roused from unconsciousness only moments earlier, she even walked upright, her gait unsteady but nonetheless capable of orienting her.

  I hurried forward, outracing paramedics seeking to assume her care, while letting the firemen return to the capsized basement. The NHS staff would be keen to check her basic functions—mobility skills, perceptual competence, mental awareness—but allowed me a moment to hold her tight.

  “Thank God,” I said, delivering a firm kiss to her forehead. “Thank God, thank God, thank God.”

  After dusting debris from her clothing, I let go of her, allowing her to respond to my inarticulate expression of love.

  “I’m so sorry,” she said, which made me feel relieved until my tearful wife, pulling away a little farther as the paramedics sought to intervene, added, “But…but where’s Eva? Where’s our daughter?”

  I had no answer to that. No answer at all.

  32

  Once the furor had died away in Dwelham, experts began analyzing what had occurred in the village. The story gained plentiful airspace in the national media, and after authorities had revealed carefully prepared information about the events, journalists started appearing in our previously quiet Leeds neighborhood, seeking more details as my wife and I came and went at home.

  But Olivia and I had our own problem to deal with.

  The consensus was that the thing discovered underground in the North York Moors had transformed established scientific understandings of the planet’s natural history. The entity, which a leading investigator (drawing on data about ancient mythologies acquired from cave paintings and manuscripts all over the world) had called an “Old One,” was said to be composed of a nonterrestrial, semiorganic, semigaseous material, which allowed it to lapse into hibernation periods far outlasting any creature that had ever occupied this planet.

  One evening in February, while browsing the Internet and looking for a solution to Olivia’s and my dilemma (perhaps a method unknown to conventional medical practice, which had already failed us), I found a grainy mobile phone recording uploaded to YouTube, presumably captured by someone who’d slipped beyond official barriers designed to keep members of the public from Dwelham’s quarantined boundaries.

  During this two-minute footage (soon removed by the website after government intervention), scientists digging in the evacuated village struck upon a disturbing phenomenon. Although light was poor, it was possible to perceive, among all the new contours of previously flat land, a great upsurge of what appeared to be toxic gas, filled with sharp glints like ragged teeth, each as large as the many diggers’ torsos. Then this illusion of an immense snout, protesting in sleep the way a dog’s might while suffering a troubling dream, faded to nothing, leaving all bystanders perplexed, their bodies staggering back and forth with intoxicated fright.

  Olivia refused to watch the short film, even though she’d understood everything I’d told her about the case, how I’d investigated its sordid background, taking back information in the hope of preventing my late brother from furthering activities derived from his ancestral legacy. I could hardly blame Olivia for not wanting to know more; it all remained outrageous enough for me.

  Dexter was discovered under rubble created in his home that terrible night, but authorities also discovered two other bodies in the cellar, including the young woman who’d gone missing in the area over a month earlier. She’d been crushed beneath another section of broken wall, but that wasn’t the most disturbing aspect of her remains. Analysis of her flesh and bones had revealed unprecedented abnormalities—her frame had appeared to include certain porcine characteristics—which certainly hadn’t been described to the general public.

  The other corpse was found in one corner of that subterranean room, perched squarely on top of my brother. It was decided that this partially decayed person had been dead for a long time. While interviewed by police, I suggested this body had belonged to my dad and that Dexter must have exhumed hm. But I kept what I’d witnessed—that hideous resurrection—to myself. I certainly didn’t wish to disabuse the world of its assumption that dead was dead. And when detectives suggested this figure’s arms had been wrapped around Dexter, I explained that such an embrace had simply been a chance event caused by falling stone pulling the two of them together.

  My mum was clearly upset by all these revelations, and Lord knew what Sara Harrison née Linton had felt over in Scarborough. At any rate, when that carefully tailored story was revealed, their identities and residential locations were kept private, which I hoped might limit press intrusion. I couldn’t begin to imagine how my mother would respond to news identifying her ex-husband as a serial rapist, however much he—after a period of afterlife hell, clearly harrowing enough to make him repent his former malevolence—had mellowed at the end, offering love to his younger son in a way he should have when alive.

  It was discovered that Thomas Hartwell, the nefarious man at the heart of these matters, had been an independently wealthy scholar, whose disappearance from that Yorkshire-based farm in the early 1980s had proved consistent with behavior in his earlier life. This had failed to raise suspicions among local police, because it was assumed he’d fled the area, moving on to new occult-based activities in another part of the country, perhaps under a pseudonym. Mindful of the vision I’d seen during my one visit to his former home—that figure at a distance standing in nonexistent heat—I remained silent about this, too.

  Louise Patterson’s death verdict retained the status it had been assigned years ago: a drug overdose arising from involvement in dubious social circles near Newcastle, to which she’d moved after leaving home in Malton with no money to her name. After consultation with my informant Peter Marsh (AKA Greg Church), I saw no reason to tell authorities about why this might have occurred, let alone suggest she’d murdered that dreadfu
l man. I wished to remain respectful to her family’s memory of her, but was privately glad about what she’d done to such a monster.

  I tried keeping Olivia informed about all these developments, but she was too preoccupied with our personal concern. I held her each evening, but nothing seemed to help. And so, as news about our experience died away and the media moved on to some equally sensational (if less world-transforming) story, I found myself doing what I’d done many times before: stepping into our daughter’s bedroom and speaking to the girl as she continued doing what she commonly did lately: sat at her window waiting for the night to arrive, with all its ancient stars.

  Eva had hardly spoken since the episode in Dwelham, when she’d observed her previously unknown grandfather return from death. I’d also witnessed such horror, but I was an adult and educated, governed by logic and reason; she was a mere child, with all her imaginative fancies and irrepressible nightmares.

  When I tried embracing Eva, she’d flinch away, now uneasy with physical contact, despite previously being so intimate. That freezing morning, firemen had pulled her unconscious from the rubble-strewn tomb, and she’d spent several days in a Middlesbrough hospital being monitored for incipient medical issues. Once discharged after nothing had manifested, my wife and I had felt grateful and relieved, as if little else mattered but Eva’s good health. But weeks later, as our daughter resumed her normal life at home, we’d begun noticing little things, each possibly denoting short- or even long-term psychological issues.

  It was too early to declare such problems permanent—I’m writing only a few months since all these dreadful events occurred—but after everything I’ve experienced lately, I’m not sure how I can remain hopeful.

  Whenever I move close to Eva, she shrinks away with defensive haste. And sometimes, still glaring through her bedroom window at night, she’ll speak, but only in a whisper, which is something even her mum can rarely get her to do. She’s on my side of the family, all right; the Keyes blood flows strongly in her.