by Gary Fry
But he refused to consider that possibility. Such a twist in the house’s plans would involve his girlfriend acting with similar malignant intention, and that was not something Mark wished to entertain.
Nevertheless, after looking at Nina holding his son close to the doorway, could he detect her hands straying for the boy’s throat?
At that moment, his ex-wife screamed again, and then Mark shouted, “Lewis, go up to your bedroom and fetch your mobile phone. I need to call for help. Nina, will you comfort Gayle until an ambulance arrives?”
His girlfriend’s face, which had glazed over the same way Justin’s had earlier, snapped out of its trance. Her hands fell away from Lewis’s neck, allowing the boy to obey his daddy’s instruction, fleeing the lounge and reentering the hallway…where he’d have to climb those canted steps. Mark felt uncomfortable about this, but was unable to consider its consequences, because that was when Justin lurched at him again.
Nina edged alongside the two struggling men to attend to Gayle. Mark had just stopped Justin from plunging the knife into his neck. He and the man stood together, their similar height and body strength rendering the bout evenly balanced. The homeowner had the house on his side, but Mark drew on determination arising from all he’d recently learned. And then…their struggle ended.
Mark pushed away his possessed attacker, and the man tripped again on the rug. After falling over, he caught his forehead on the cabinet bearing the dead telephone and then slumped to the ground, either unconscious or worse. Blood leaked from a fresh wound; a circle of redness pooled on the carpet, threatening more retaliation from the house in which they were all penned up.
Just then, Lewis came back into the room. He looked white-faced, vacant, shocked. And he wasn’t carrying the mobile Mark had bought him for his birthday.
While stepping across to the boy, Mark observed Nina scuttle spiderlike towards Justin and take his pulse. “He’s still alive. But we need that ambulance. Head injuries can be serious.”
As Mark’s ex-wife released another wail of discomfort, Mark glanced down at his son. “Why didn’t you get your phone, Lewis?”
The boy stared back, tears moistening his eyes. He sounded embarrassed when he replied: “I couldn’t, Daddy.”
“Why? What do you mean?”
Lewis looked away, blinking wetness from his vision, but refused to say more.
Mark tried not losing his temper; such a lapse might suggest that, as Justin was now surplus to the property’s desires, it was trying to penetrate someone else’s mind: his own. He looked at his girlfriend and saw her attending to Gayle. All seemed well…for the moment. But could the building be preparing another psychic assault on any one of them?
He must work fast. Turning back to his son, he said, “Lewis. Tell me what’s wrong. Why didn’t you go to your bedroom like I asked?”
At last the boy relented, his voice unmistakeably edgy as he replied. “Because Nana and Granddad were waiting for me at the top of the steps.”
All the air seemed to escape the room. The light on the wall flickered, guttered, bloomed. Mark sensed his stomach squirm with something more dreadful than fear, but that was when his ex-wife’s moaning pressed him into renewed action.
“The baby’s coming now,” Nina shouted, presumably to mobilize Mark. “I’ll have to deliver it. Even with a phone that worked, there’s not enough time for the ambulance to arrive. But I think I know what to do. Mark, get me some towels from the kitchen. Also a pair of scissors and some string. Wash the scissors first with very hot water and make sure the string is new.”
Once Mark, incapable of little more than obedience, had hurried through to the hallway, dragging his son along with him, he asked the boy, “What do you mean, your…nana and granddad?”
“They were both peering down at me from above the steps,” the boy explained, his tone no less frightened. “I haven’t seen them in ages, except in pictures. But I know it was them.”
Mark stood with his son alongside the canted steps, out of view of the landing. But even if he could see upstairs, the dark was too dense to observe anything other than dimness. Perhaps the boy had simply hallucinated his late grandparents or maybe projected their images from the photos he’d referred to earlier. Mark knew what that felt like, and he was still attempting to convince himself of these explanations, which he’d never truly believed in the first place, when a bulb started glowing on the landing…and then twin shadows, thin and contorted, stretched across the risers, towards the hallway in which he and Lewis now loitered.
If there’d been only one residual presence, Mark might have told himself his own mother was in the house, but then he realized that his son had never called her “Nana.” She’d always been “Grandma” to Lewis. It was Gayle’s late mom who’d being addressed by the other term, and this realisation sent a shudder along Mark’s spine. Indeed, the prospect of either of the boy’s granddads being here was far too disturbing to contemplate.
At that moment, the light from upstairs winked out, eliminating the shadowy evidence of anybody else in the building.
That was enough to get Mark moving again, and after entering the kitchen, he flicked on its light. This also stuttered, but eventually dramatized the room’s single window, whose curtains had yet to be pulled on. Alongside it, the cellar door sat flush in its frame. In his peripheral vision, Mark noticed his son still waiting in the hallway, but then another anguished cry from the lounge forced him to rifle through drawers and cupboards to locate the items his girlfriend had requested.
After grabbing a handful of towels, a ball of string from under the sink, and a pair of scissors that he quickly ran under a steaming hot tap, he fancied he heard noises coming from behind him and then turned to look. Now that his eyes had adjusted to the gloom beyond the window, he noticed that the light above the dining table cast pale illumination out into the garden, across the piebald lawn, and towards the greenhouse at the foot of the property’s grounds.
And was there a figure moving inside this exterior dwelling?
Moving slowly towards the kitchen window, Mark thought he heard more of the sounds that had first drawn his attention. Just then, everyone else—Lewis, Gayle and Nina—were forgotten to him. He simply had to see what had just exited the greenhouse and was advancing with unnatural movement for the property. But Mark soon realized it wasn’t this entity making the noises he’d detected moments ago. Those were coming from his right: from behind the cellar door.
Some sounded like a child choking underground, but this catarrhal whine was accompanied by a thick squelching that put Mark in mind of something wading through treacle with an unsteady gait. Whatever that implied, it was a fitting accompaniment to the dishevelled shape forging an uncertain path across the lawn towards the house.
It would be too generous to call this figure human. Flesh hung off its bones in beguiling tatters; it had surely once been an old man, but there were few unambiguous clues about its identity. It might be how Mark’s father appeared after years in his grave, but could just as easily be the previous owner of this house—George Hughes—following as many in his. The light behind Mark failed and revived, failed and revived, and by the time it came on for a longer spell, the walking corpse had grown closer and was continuing to head Mark’s way.
That was when the cellar door started opening.
Those wet slaps and thick gurgles grew much louder, as did the throaty exhalations; it was like a symphony of moisture being performed down there…But that was when Mark’s ex-wife screamed again and he was snapped out of his transfixion. Without looking back, he returned to the hall passage, where his son still stood almost catatonically disabled. Mark snatched the boy’s gaze away from the canted steps and maneuvered him back into the lounge.
The sight of Justin lying facedown in a widening pool of blood was less troubling than Gayle weeping perspiration. She had her legs wide apart, and Nina was crouched between them, gripping her unwitting patient’s hands as the woman stru
ggled to push.
Without preventing Lewis from witnessing the scene, Mark rushed towards the two women and squatted beside them. After passing the scissors and the ball of string to his girlfriend, he used one of the towels to mop his ex-wife’s brow as her baby’s head appeared in her lap. Denied the painkillers involved in a normal birth, Gayle cried out with agony. But after several minutes of gasping exertion, the infant was free and was soon followed by its afterbirth. The child’s wailing matched that of its mother. Before Nina wrapped the infant in another of the towels, Mark noticed it was a girl.
A natural birth, this was called, but Mark couldn’t quite see it that way. Watching his girlfriend cut two lengths of string from the ball he’d brought from the kitchen, he waved one arm to persuade Lewis to approach. Mark’s girlfriend tied one piece of string around the umbilical cord, close to the baby’s stomach, and the other farther up. Then with the scissors she severed the moist tissue between these knots.
All the while, Mark couldn’t help feeling that something was wrong about what had happened here. As Nina collected the baby and stood to say, “I’ll go and clean her up in the kitchen,” he didn’t protest, despite noticing that his girlfriend’s face had developed a similarly vague look to one she’d boasted earlier, when her hands had moved towards his son’s throat.
But despite these misgivings, Mark wished only to remain here, holding Lewis in the company of the woman he’d once loved and perhaps still could: Gayle.
Mark glanced at his ex-wife’s new partner, unmoving on the floor. Police would surely conclude that his death was accidental. Mark had acted in self-defence and had many witnesses to prove that. The man and Gayle had surely registered the house in both their names, and it would now belong to her. It would be easy for Mark to write himself into the deeds as joint owner. He was certain Gayle would consent, because at last she understood that she’d done him wrong; her recent sympathetic talk had proved that. Yes, they could be happy here, in this grand old house. And it was such a big place. As Mark’s mom grew older and more infirm, she could come to live with them. Mark might even ask Simon Hughes if he also wished to be cared for in his fragile condition.
They would be a family, a real family. Indeed, that was all this wonderful house wanted…what it had always wanted.
But there were two hindrances to this coming true: Nina and the newborn child.
Mark looked up, and then leaned forward to kiss his ex-wife on the forehead. “I’ll go see to them. I won’t be long. And don’t worry: it needn’t hurt.”
Despite the trauma of the birth, Gayle looked surprised in response to his affectionate gestures, but Mark ascribed this to her exhaustion.
Then, as a loving husband and father should, he said to Lewis, “Look after your mommy. There’s something I need to do. It will make everything right again, but I’d rather you stayed here while I dealt with it.”
“No, Daddy, don’t. It’s not ri—”
“Ssshhh, my boy. Ssshhh.”
After silencing his son with a fierce gaze that also possibly frightened him, Mark stood and paced across the lounge for the hallway.
Two people were descending those canted steps. Of course: Gayle’s parents would wish to be reunited with their daughter and grandson. It had been a long time. Mark left them all to it, barely even glancing at four rickety legs bearing tatters of rotted clothing and cemetery soil clumping down the flight in his peripheral vision. He had more important business to attend to in the kitchen.
He found the woman with whom he’d been living in such wicked sin seated at the dining table, cuddling the newborn infant in a tangle of towels. But she wasn’t alone.
The cellar door was wide open, and at the head of more canted stairs, The Blood Boy waited, surrounded by a corona of redness that soaked the walls, saturated the floor, and dripped from the ceiling. And then in a voice no less damaged than the one Mark had heard recently on the telephone, this vile entity whispered instruction to his cohort.
“Kill…her…”
The person The Blood Boy addressed—if it was a person—coughed a few times before directing Nina’s hands towards the baby’s throat. There wasn’t much to the appendages that tried to fulfil this deed, just as there was little substance to the body operating them. The rotted cadaver of the girl who’d once died in the house’s garden was in an even worse state than the figure glancing through the window beyond the kitchen table. That might be Mark’s surrogate dad, but Mark doubted it. More likely it was George Hughes. Its face was too far gone to decide with certainty, but it had nonetheless sustained its eyeballs in a way the child manhandling Mark’s girlfriend had failed. Her own orbs dangled on emaciated optic nerves alongside a rotten slit of her lips.
Those unsteady footsteps back in the hall had finally reached the ground floor, but Mark’s attention was focused on the terrible spectacle unfolding before him.
“…unnatural…” said The Blood Boy, swimming in its tide of red, “…there will be…no impure…steps here…”
The fragmenting head beyond the glass—bone showed through its flesh, like evil disguised by an unconvincing mask—nodded with grisly endorsement.
And then the grotesque parody of a little girl—still coughing as she obeyed her elders’ commands—stepped up her malevolent campaign against the transfixed Nina.
When the police arrived, Mark reflected, they’d find impressions from the woman’s fingers on the infant’s neck. It would surely be concluded that, as Mark had decided to return to Gayle and Lewis and live in this fine house with his biological parents, Nina had grown irrational with envy. Psychiatrists would look into her past and discover a history of abuse; a diagnosis of unstable behavior would be highly plausible. Indeed, that would be cited as the reason why she’d killed this child. And even though she was pregnant—even though she was having Mark’s baby—she’d surely receive a long prison sentence.
She was having Mark’s baby, he reflected from deep in his mind, where his better self had been pushed by a hideous force. Then he thought: She was having Mark Cookson’s baby. This helped clarify his concerns, and moments later, he grew even more coherent: Yes, I’m a Cookson and not a Hughes. And finally he decided: This house is not mine and never was.
And Nina Porter is having my baby.
By a sequence of mental processes moving from someone he failed to recognize to someone he’d come to respect lately, Mark tugged himself free of the building’s perverse influence.
“No!” he shouted, bolting forwards to thrust aside the disintegrating appendages the girl-thing standing beside his girlfriend brandished by way of hands. Then the coughing entity crumbled to ruin, like a stack of ash. In response to this activity, Nina grew alert, and as the previously silent infant squalled in her arms, Mark saw the rotten face at the window burst apart in a cloud of odious putrefaction. The Blood Boy also withered on the spot, that huge red pool around him drying up like a puddle in some baking desert. And finally, the long-dead entities entering the lounge to greet Mark’s ex-wife and son lost their motivation with a species of insidious quiet.
Was it over? Yes, it was surely over. They were two families again.
And then as quickly as possible, Mark got every member of each out of The House of Canted Steps.
25
A week after the birth of Gayle’s daughter—whom she and Justin had called Kennedy—Mark visited the family at his former home, the small semi Addisons had yet to find tenants for. It was good that it remained vacant, because his ex-wife had refused to return to the place in which she’d suffered such a frightening ordeal.
While her new partner recovered from a concussion in the hospital, Mark had told her everything he knew about the house, but she’d preferred to believe that Justin had been overcome by the pressure of impending fatherhood and lapsed into some kind of fugue. Similarly, Lewis’s testimony had been assigned to bad dreams; according to Gayle, Mark shouldn’t have allowed the boy to eat so much junk food while visiting the sea
side that day.
But Mark hadn’t pushed these issues. He was simply glad his ex-wife, their son and Justin had agreed to leave the house. What they planned to do next with it was another problem for a later date. For the time being, Mark had decided to take each day as it came.
After parking up at the curb, he climbed out of his car and rushed around the front to let Nina out.
“Why, thank you, kind sir,” she said, clambering upright. She was yet to display her pregnancy, but Mark was determined to behave as he meant to go on.
“You’re welcome, milady,” he replied, smiling with genuine delight while considering all the fine times ahead, for them and their child.
Soon after the events of that evening (Nina mercifully couldn’t remember much about it), he’d told his girlfriend the full story about his paternity and she’d understood with all the compassion he’d come to expect from her. Now that they’d shared their family secrets, their relationship had deepened, and Mark had realized, for perhaps the first time in his life, how wonderful this could be.
Inside the house, Lewis was eager to show off Kennedy while Gayle and Justin had surprises for them both. Mark’s ex-wife asked Nina to become the girl’s godmother, which brought a tear to the younger woman’s eye. Nina said she’d be honored. And then the restaurateur shook Mark’s hand and apologized for all that had happened since he’d come into contact with his family.
“That’s okay, mate,” Mark told him, and knew he spoke the truth. “I won’t deny that in the early stages I was cut up about it, but…well, that was about a lot of things other than you. And now I’ve resolved these issues. I’ve moved on.”
Later, after more fun with Lewis and the new baby, Mark and his girlfriend departed. Then he drove Nina to her childhood home, which, she’d recently told him, she hadn’t visited for nearly a decade.
A little covert research on his part had revealed that his girlfriend’s mother had separated from her husband of twenty-eight years following one beating too many. Mark had insisted that, with her dishonorable father out of the way, Nina should make up with her mom, that family was family and should never be taken for granted. Eventually his girlfriend had agreed, but only if he promised to marry her before their child was born. That was a deal, he’d replied, uncomfortable with the businesslike phrase but employing it anyway.
