by Gary Fry
George looked away and snatched up the newspaper his wife had been reading earlier, addressing articles about the state of the world.
“Do you know what really surprises me, Christine?” he said, his voice shaken by what he’d witnessed but also firmed with steely resolve.
“Tell me,” she replied, putting the phone back into her handbag. She clearly believed that her point had been made
He indicated an article discussing some violent conflict in the Middle East which was entering a new phase but with similar consequences. “I’m just surprised,” he said, struggling not to wonder whether Dr. Kilroy’s recommendation that his wife document George’s developing condition violated privacy laws, “that some terminally ill dictator somewhere in the world, with access to nuclear weapons and nothing left to live for, has never nuked the lot of us.”
His wife, with all her legal training, would know about medical ethics. Still, why speculate about this? What was he ever likely to do – sue his wife? Have the doctor disciplined? George laughed savagely, his robust upbringing hard-wired in his brain, making it hard for him to look at Christine while adjusting to this new perspective on his changing identity. He knew from experience that in such circumstances it was better to focus on an alternative issue, on something relatively safe.
That was when he recalled the foghorn station with its battered frontage, as if something immense had clattered against it, thrusting lengthy objects through its windows and breaking plaster from the opposite walls. What had happened to that building? The damage it had sustained made little sense at all.
If there was a failsafe way to learn about local events, it was asking someone who lived in the area about them. George turned to the bald guy in the corner, whose flesh looked weathered and whose clothing hinted at a career in the fishing industry.
“Greetings, sir,” said George, adopting the voice he’d used in lectures, a half-hectoring, half-amused yell that had disarmed even his smuggest students. “I wonder if you might be of assistance.”
The man had difficulty in responding, grunting a few non-syllables before taking another slurp from his almost empty pint.
“Charmed, I’m sure,” George added, and then cut to the heart of his enquiry. He mentioned the foghorn building and the impact it had once suffered. Did the man, George wondered, possess any knowledge about this episode and, if so, would he be good enough to impart it?
It might have been the eccentricity of George’s enquiry that caused the guy to look away, shaking his head almost imperceptibly. Or it might not. All George could be certain about was that as soon as he’d mentioned the property, the local had shown brief alarm in his eyes. This might have been George’s heightened perception at work, a residual impact of his weird experience a few hours earlier. But it might have been something else, too.
Whatever the truth was, after learning what he just had about himself from his well-meaning wife, George was in no mood to pursue the issue, and so he promptly got up to visit the lavatory. “Suit yourself,” he murmured while rising, and, as he paced away, he didn’t even look back at Christine, let alone the man in the corner.
What was happening to him? He rested his forehead against the bathroom wall, while emptying himself into the urinal, urging the intruder deep inside his skull to yield all its terrors. Come on, let’s have you. Just show me how bad it’s going to get.
He’d come to think of the tumour in this way: as an invader, an insurgent, a thing lurking at his core. It compromised every shred of honour he’d ever upheld, let alone advocated among others. What Christine had revealed on her iPhone cut against everything he’d once believed about how people exercised moral restraint, making rational choices in circumstances not of their choosing. He was a passionate proponent of self-directed civility, a firm believer in agency and responsibility. But now all this was being stripped away from him. It was truly horrifying, the worst thing that could have happened to him. And yet he had to fight on. It was all anyone could do.
A few minutes later he returned to the lounge bar, feeling more level-headed and even ashamed of himself. He shouldn’t have been cranky with his wife; this was all difficult for her, too. As he retook his seat, he opened his mouth to apologise…but then he noticed two things at the same time.
First, the older man in the corner had finished his drink and left the pub. Second, a piece of paper with notes scribbled upon it lay on the table in front of Christine.
“What’s that?” George asked, reaching forward to pick up the sheet. There was a man’s name on the page, as well as a telephone number and an address in nearby Malton, a small town on the route back to Leeds. All the text was in his wife’s handwriting.
George glanced up at Christine, who now looked as apologetic as he still felt.
“You seemed so interested in that place,” she said, clearly alluding to the foghorn building she hadn’t wanted him to enter earlier. “I pressed the miserable bugger in the corner and got this information out of him. The guy named on that sheet once worked there, apparently. Our shy friend and he used to drink here together years ago, until the latter moved inland. They still keep in touch from time to time. Anyway, the local reckons that if you want to know more about that property, you can get the full story from…what’s the fella’s name again?”
“Henry Gamble,” George replied, reading it from the paper. But then he looked up, eyes full of fear and admiration. “You…told him about my illness, didn’t you?”
To her credit, Christine held his stare. “I had no choice, George. Even after I explained how much it would mean to you, he still seemed reluctant to tell me anything. In fact, as soon as I’d written all that down, he left – in quite a hurry, actually.”
CHAPTER THREE
The holiday cottage overlooked the port and had a balcony at the front, where George had spent plenty of time over the weekend, catching up with correspondence on his laptop. By the time he and Christine returned from the pub, it was nine o’clock, the night dark, crisp and cool. Stars shone down with single-minded intensity and the moon was a lopsided grin above the North Sea. Now out of the tourist season, it was quiet here, just the constant hiss of water fondling rocks out of view, where shadows coalesced beyond the concrete plateau leading to this isolated property.
When his wife removed the key from her handbag and poked it into the lock, George held back, thinking about time and progress, how the heavens turned and the earth hurtled through imponderable space. Admittedly, he’d enjoyed a few glasses of wine this evening, but that was something else which now had no consequence.
“You know what, Christine?” he said, once his wife had unlocked the door. “I’m going to have another drink out here – maybe one of those beers we brought along. Fancy joining me?”
Christine, nearing sixty herself, struggled to suppress a yawn. “I’m tired from our walk today, George. But you go ahead. In fact,” she added, possibly mindful of what she’d shown him in the pub on her phone, “I’ll fetch you one out with your tablets. How about that?”
“I’d say that was very kind,” he replied, smiling just as she had. Friction rarely lasted long between them, and that always made him feel grateful. But as Christine entered the building, he gave voice to what he told himself had been an afterthought, despite knowing privately that it wasn’t. “Can you bring out my laptop, too? I want to check my email.”
His wife had encouraged him to maintain friendships with colleagues still working in academia. What with the children living at a distance – David, thirty-three, in London, where he practised as a solicitor; Vanessa only a year younger, over in Paris working in the fashion industry – she was possibly eager to share out the supervisory duties proposed by Dr. Kilroy.
But he was being suspicious again. By the time his wife had brought out the beer – frothy and cloudy in a pint glass – and his travel-sized laptop, George felt rather mellow, the wine he’d consumed performing its usual magic and ready for a new influx of toxins. The med
ication he had to take would have no impact on this unusually fine mood.
“I won’t be long, darling,” he said as Christine retreated, but the glance she turned to offer looked so forlorn that he considered what he’d just said: I won’t be long. This had been too true for comfort, and so he smiled again as his wife shut herself inside. Then he was free for mischief.
Except that he wasn’t up to anything she’d disapprove of, was he? Indeed, she’d provided the first clue in his quest to find out what had happened to that foghorn building. He’d pushed the piece of paper bearing the man’s name, address and telephone number into his trouser pocket, but didn’t think he would need it yet. He also ignored a lingering impression that the guy who’d provided this information had looked disturbed at the mention of the property. Like the rigorous scientist he’d been for many years, George should make no assumptions about the case before assessing all available evidence. And what better way to start than trawling the Internet, a great leviathan with tentacles sunk in every port around the world?
Taking a long drink of beer, he switched on his laptop, which took only seconds to boot up. He recalled how similar machines in the past had needed several minutes to load, and that youthful period, with so many vivid memories connected to it, felt frighteningly close, even though decades had passed. But none of this thinking would help him to acquire facts. He needed to go online and lose himself in research.
The nearby sea, whose tide squirmed like something furtive, swam in his skull, reminding him of the episode he’d experienced inside that foghorn building. Had this been just another symptom of his brain tumour, rendering experience unreal? But deep down he knew it had been different, as if the problem had occurred outside of him. That made as little sense as the damage the building had sustained, but there the sensation stood anyway, unwilling to be dismissed. It was why he’d decided not to tell Christine about it.
As soon as his browser opened, he typed “Whitby foghorn” into the search engine. He knew from experience that the complex algorithms involved in calculating results worked best when straightforward terms were used. That held true on this occasion. At the head of a list of links, all delivered in lightning-quick time, was a site whose strap-line read:
“Whitby’s old Lighthouse, Fog Horn and their history“.
Taking another drink of beer, the sound mimicking the sea’s sinuous noises, George clicked on this link and was transported to a webpage boasting several photos in both colour and black-and-white. Some were of the lighthouse he and Christine had passed today, the others of that foghorn building. The second bunch included the latter property in operation, with two burly young men standing outside it, one with blond hair and the other ginger. Judging by their flared trousers and wide-collared shirts, the photo had been taken in the 1970s, each man appearing serious and committed to their responsible work. Scrolling down the page, George noticed another shot of the foghorn building, this time looking neglected, as he’d observed it today, its stonework growing islands of moss.
He quickly learnt about the lighthouse, understanding that, after being built in the nineteenth century, it was still in commission and staffed by a small number of staff. But despite this useful background information, he was less interested in that place.
Next he turned to the written material about that out-of-action foghorn property.
Slurping more from his pint, he heard the sky grumble, as if his act of knowledge acquisition had upset the interests of some irascible God. Reminded that he and deities were on far from good terms right now, he moved rapidly on, reading the entry in seconds.
In 1856, two one-acre coastal plots were purchased on the northeast coastline and a lighthouse was built on both. But the larger was soon demolished and replaced by a foghorn station, which began operating in 1902. This was officially called the Whitby Fog Signal and Dwelling, and unofficially “the Bull”. It was a single-storey stone building, the foghorn sharing the flat roof with chimneypots. Its sound travelled at such a low velocity that just as people in Whitby, two miles away, heard the first blast of the horn, it was issuing its third back on the site. Further afield, residents of a village nearby heard the first blast when the siren had completed its fourth. It must have made a tremendous noise, living up to its informal name (the Bull). Sadly, the Whitby foghorn was decommissioned in 1975 after severe subsidence on the cliff-top where it is located led to irreparable structural damage.
Severe subsidence leading to structural damage – who was the author trying to fool? The problems suffered by the building hadn’t come from beneath it, from the ground close to the cliff-edge; they’d been inflicted from the front, as if something immense had crashed into the place.
George closed this amateur website and started searching for more information. But after fifteen more minutes, he was forced to admit that little else was available, just a few references by holidaymakers, each saying how charming the place was and what a shame that it was no longer operational. Clearly none had gone inside and seen what he’d observed. If any had, they’d surely have shared his suspicions.
Recalling the way that the guy in the pub had responded when he’d mentioned the property, George wondered what had gone on there. A brief search relating to newsworthy events near Whitby in 1975 – the year in which the place had been closed – proved inconclusive. There’d been a flood in late March, but that had occurred several miles along the coast. It was unlikely that seawater, whipped into a frenzy by even the wildest winds, could cause so much damage high on the cliff-side.
Taking his drink again and closing his laptop, George felt tiredness wash over him. He looked up into a cloying darkness illuminated by the moon and stars. Something scrabbled among rocks out of view, but he knew this was just the tide mimicking the sound of restless limbs clawing for the land.
He stood, left his pint unfinished on the table, and then collected his computer. Before entering the holiday cottage, he imagined that once functioning foghorn, crying along the coastline like some vicious animal – a bull perhaps – which soon charged powerfully for its destination. Its call was so thunderous that even time had been affected, with residents hearing its assault only once it had done its considerable worst to the area.
CHAPTER FOUR
That night his dreams were full of troubling imagery, just as they had been so often lately. The landscapes felt like sensory illusions induced by clever technicians or by the world wriggling out of his mental grasp. At first, there were towers, stacked as high as great trees, sides oozing greenish liquids. These were followed by immense blocks laid out in such complex profusion that portals had formed between them, each stuffed with twitching shadow. George heard water splashing in every direction, which only dramatized the visual aspects of the territory up ahead, an ever-changing mass of non-compatible objects. He reached for a hole in the ground, but it shifted at once, eluding the spatial calculations of his intuitive body. Now this opening lay to his left, as if compass directions in such a remote place had been rearranged by some nefarious inhabitant. At that moment, at the peak of what appeared to be a feisty volcano, immense sounds arose, coupled with a powerful scent of cattle crammed into too small a space. Huge rocks, each lacking the amorphous shapes of nature, were soon cast out of the elevated pit, describing impossible trajectories across a sky full of storm clouds, and landing yards away from where gravity might prompt observers to predict. These were more of the symmetrical objects that constituted the environment, as if similar eruptions were common and the thing triggering them full of bullish rage. Seconds later, as George stepped forwards, or rather at an undesired diagonal, he saw something emerge up ahead…something hideously organic amid so much sculpted terrain…something vast and green and monstrous…
CHAPTER FIVE
He awoke feeling terrified. This sensation was enhanced when he turned over in bed and found nobody lying beside him. The experience felt like death, an event almost always confronted alone. The sheer force of his nightmare, w
ith all its weird events, left him reeling with bleak impressions. He was thankful that his wife wasn’t here, in this unfamiliar bedroom. He might have just acted out his anxieties again, thrashing around in the sheets and leaving them in a maelstrom of disorder.
His panic soon passed, allowing him to get up to wash and dress. He found Christine in the cottage’s kitchen, poaching eggs in a pan and toasting bread under the grill. He wished her good morning, feeling reluctant to tell her about what he’d experienced overnight. Sitting at the dining table, he noticed that his wife had packed the case in which they’d brought along clothing and foodstuff.
After eating and discussing neutral matters, they washed up together. Then it was time to leave. George exited first, carrying the case to the car parked in front of the balcony he’d occupied last night. It was now that he spotted the pint glass he’d left outside. It had a fat slug clinging to its side, hanging just over the rim, as if it had laboured hard to reach this far.
George didn’t like the look of the thing – its bloated body bulged and squirmed, oozing an opaque substance that reminded him of things he’d rather not contemplate – and so, after placing the case in the car’s boot, he returned to grab the glass by its bottom before shoving it in a dustbin near the garden gate. When Christine appeared moments later, he acted innocent and distracted; she abhorred cruelty to living creatures and would have rebuked him if she’d witnessed what he’d just done.
By the time they’d reached the A-road back to Leeds, he tackled the issue which had been gnawing at him all morning. Once a sign announcing Malton appeared up ahead, he turned to glance at his wife.
“You don’t mind if we stop off somewhere on the way back, do you? I…want to follow up on that contact you acquired for me – you know, from that evasive guy in the pub.”
