by Gary Fry
He wasn’t sure why he felt edgy about having an interest in the foghorn building, but the fact was that he did. Maybe he was aware of a subconscious connection between what he’d experienced inside the property and his dreams last night. Whatever the truth was, he knew there was only one way of resolving his concerns: gather together as much knowledge as possible.
Christine had just removed her iPhone from her handbag, and although George blanched at the sight (imagining that she meant to use its camera again), he quickly noticed that she had its screen switched to a novel she’d been reading, the kind of dense literary work she relished and he lacked patience for.
“I’m already prepared for that,” she explained. “I’ll wait in the car while you go inside and have a chat.”
On reaching a roundabout, George took an earlier turning than one leading back to Leeds and steered through a quiet, residential area.
“I wouldn’t get too settled,” he said, braking at traffic lights near the heart of the town. “Henry Gamble might not even be home today.”
“Oh, he’ll be there.”
“How do you know?”
“Because I called him this morning, while you were sleeping,” his wife replied, smiling and winking with typical knowingness. “In fact, he’s expecting you.”
She rarely ceased to surprise him and he loved her for that. But right now, he had a more pressing matter to attend to. Obeying his satnav’s instructions, he soon pulled up in front of a semi-detached property in a street full of them. Smartly decorated facades and neatly tended gardens suggested their residents’ respectable natures, and as George exited the vehicle, promising Christine that he wouldn’t be long, he felt confident enough to advance up the path and deliver a firm knock at the door.
Moments later his summons were answered by a man slightly older than himself. Once George had introduced himself, the guy smiled in a strained way and then let him inside. George was led through to a lounge in which, clearly prompted by Christine’s call that morning, the man had prepared juice in glasses. He was invited to sit in an armchair near the window, while Henry (as the man had insisted on being called) claimed another directly opposite, where daylight fell onto his face like some interrogatory lamp.
After brief pleasantries concerning the weather and some toothless politics, George got down to business. He told Henry about chancing upon the foghorn building and his amateur investigations. He mentioned the man in the pub the previous evening, especially how George had found him evasive. He said nothing about his experiences inside the property, let alone anything about his illness and the symptoms in which it could manifest. He doubted that was relevant anyway.
Once this brief account was over, the homeowner took a long drink, prompting George to do the same. The juice was freshly squeezed orange, full of stringy pulp. But that was when George’s attention was drawn to Henry’s words.
“Malcolm Harp is an old friend of mine. We used to drink together, me and him, when I lived over in Whitby.”
So this – Malcolm Harp – was George’s first informant, the man Christine had probed for Henry’s contact details. Everything was falling into place, key subjects being named; surely now the full story would unfold.
“Most of what I have to tell you happened years ago, and although it greatly troubled me at the time, I doubt I’ve thought about it for over a decade. In fact, your wife’s call this morning came as a surprise. I agreed to you visiting before I’d had chance to think about it. But that’s okay, I suppose. Now that you’re here, you might as well hear what I have to say. It’s been such a long time since it all happened. I’m…I’m sure it can’t lead to any more problems.”
Greatly troubled – what had the man meant by this? And what “problems” had he referred to? George began to feel uneasy and hoped he wasn’t about to experience another of his episodes, especially not in a stranger’s home. But then he leaned back in his chair and prepared to listen to more.
“It all started with the bottle me and my colleague found embedded in the cliff-side,” Henry explained, running one hand across his balding scalp. Almost white at the temples, he’d probably once been blond, and that certainly fitted with the photograph George had spotted on the website devoted to the Whitby lighthouse and that foghorn building. And by “colleague”, had Henry just referred to the other guy – the one with ginger hair? George thought that must be the case.
“What was this bottle?” he said, hoping he wouldn’t need to keep Henry talking. “And who was the other person you mentioned?”
His informant eyed him for a moment, as if trying to work out whether he could be trusted, but then, after a brief exhalation, he said, “His name was Jens Amundsen, a Norwegian working in the UK. He was a bit of a poet and a dreamer, but cheerful enough and always likeable. It was also fortunate that he was from Norway, because that was the language the message was written in.”
“What message?” asked George, and gulped more from his juice, wishing it was something stronger.
“Well, it was more than a message. In fact, what we found inside that corked bottle buried in mud just below the cliff-top where the foghorn building stands – the place we both called home at the time – was a whole manuscript.”
George thought for several seconds, but then said, “I don’t get it. What has a manuscript to do with that property, let alone the damage it sustained?”
“I’ll get to that,” Henry replied, eyes failing to meet George’s. “Believe me, I’ll get to that soon enough. But first you should know some background information.”
If George had the impression that the man now regretted agreeing to speak about the past, he hoped he’d come too far to back out. Indeed, Henry soon started speaking again.
“When we both got jobs operating that foghorn back in the early ‘70s, I was twenty and Jens just a bit older. We were young and stupid, as most men are at that age, but we got on well enough, sharing an interest in beer, girls and books. Lord knows what the appeal of the place was, with little to stimulate us for miles around, but it was a paid job in a lovely place, so we didn’t complain too much.
“Jens had come over to England as a kid with his family, and had lived in the northeast ever since. I grew up in York, but had fled as soon as I could, because I hadn’t got on with my parents, nor my snotty siblings. I was a bit of a black sheep, and I guess this – what with Jens being a foreigner in a country just getting used to migrants – was another connection between us. So yeah, we became fast friends, operating that rowdy foghorn, sharing the shifts, attending to the engines – Jens was a gifted mechanic, me a quick learner – and generally mucking around together.
“But after a few months – this was in 1975 – I learnt something new about the man. And I wasn’t sure I liked it.”
Henry paused, ostensibly seeking lubrication from his orange juice, even though George suspected that he felt uncomfortable about what he planned to add, as if simply telling the story had evoked troubling memories he’d long considered dormant. When he went on, Henry’s voice developed a tremulous quality.
“It was about the time when we found the bottle, the one carrying the manuscript written in Norwegian. You’ll remember that Jens and I liked books. These were one of the few things that kept us sane in such coastal seclusion. But while I was fond of predictable stuff for a young man – pulp novels, sports magazines, car manuals – Jens preferred…well, how can I best describe it? Esoteric literature – is that the right word? I’m talking weird books. And I mean seriously weird.
“I have no idea what the manuscript we found was concerned with, because Jens never told me. All I do know is that he read it from front to back and then all over again, until it must have become lodged word-for-word in his brain. One night, while he slept, I crept into his room to take a look at the document, finding just a bundle of yellowed pages with messy handwriting on them. But other than a date – 1926, presumably when it was written – I recognised only a name at the end. Gustaf
Johansen, its author appeared to be called.
“From that period onwards, Jens spent a lot of time travelling, without saying where he went. One day I found bus tickets in his pockets and worked out that he was journeying back to Newcastle, probably because it had better resources than local places. Sometimes he’d mutter comments about libraries and information stored there, but that was all he’d say – nothing about what he’d been searching for.
“When he was out, inquisitiveness sometimes got the better of me and I’d snoop around his room, looking at the books he’d acquired since developing his obsession with the manuscript. But all I found among scribbled notes and underlined passages seemed like gibberish to me, just mad material about ancient creatures that were supposed to have occupied earth long before humans had. This was the stuff of cheap science fiction even I wouldn’t bother reading.”
Henry paused again, this time draining his glass in a single swallow and with such a needy expression that George imagined the man also now wished the drink contained alcohol. George heard a clock ticking on the mantelpiece above an unlit fire, a perception that affected him more than he felt comfortable with. Mindful of his failing health, as well as his wife waiting in the car, he wished the homeowner would get to the heart of his tale, revealing the information that George, for a reason he’d yet to work out, wanted to know. What had happened to that foghorn building?
It wasn’t long before the man recommenced his narrative.
“Whenever I was out in the area – maybe drinking in pubs with Malcolm Harp, a fisherman I’d got to know and the reason you’re here today, my friend – it turned out that Jens had been back in the foghorn building conducting terrible spells.
“I caught him once, having come back early from a heavy session. He’d peeled back one of the carpets and drawn a giant five-pointed star on the floorboards – what do you call them? A pentagram, isn’t it? Anyway, he had all these candles burning and a heavy book open in front of him. And he was saying weird stuff I couldn’t even pronounce. I’m sure one of the words – which I often heard him repeat – was something like cuff-who-loo. But I was in no mood to join in. The truth was that I was scared. I asked him what the hell he was doing. He didn’t dignify me with even a reply, let alone an explanation.
“From that day onwards – this was late-winter, early 1975 – we didn’t mention that episode again. But before long, sometimes when we’d invited girls back from Whitby and got drunk while off-duty, Jens drew us into his bizarre schemes. One night – just for fun, he said – he persuaded us all to participate in a kind of chant, which involved repeating more crazy words while he did stuff on the floor with candles and powders. Don’t ask me why I took part, especially after what I’d learnt about his preoccupations. Perhaps I was just interested in the girls, who seemed keen and amused enough to dabble in such nonsense.
“I’m not going to tell you that I saw or heard anything unusual that evening, because I was very drunk. I might have imagined anything – I mean, stuff in my head could have become confused with reality. But even so, I have the impression of sensing something nearby, maybe through the windows of the room we occupied, one looking on to the North Sea.
“I really can’t explain it, man. It might have been just a scent I detected. Or it could have been a belief that an object – something soft and long – was attempting to clutch at the glass, like a snake’s head or a creature much slimier than that. But that was impossible, because we were so far up from the beach below. Surely nothing so big could have stood on the small lip between the building and that great drop.
“And then there was the foghorn’s noise. On several misty nights after the one I’ve just mentioned, whenever we set it off every ninety seconds – four clear blasts across the moonlit waters – it sounded like a…well, like a monster out there, assaulting the coasts with a tremendous roar. I don’t know if you’re aware that the thing had a nickname…”
“The Bull?” said George, cutting into this narrative to reassure himself of his presence, as if doing otherwise would result in him becoming lost in the tale, getting sucked into a fantasy. His dreams sometimes felt similar, as if he was merely imagining his existence. But surely this was just another symptom of his medical condition.
“That’s right, the Bull,” Henry said, raising his glass to drink but then realising it was empty and putting it back down. “It gave off a brutal noise, pal. We got used to it after a while, but we were far from popular with people living nearby, especially during times of the year when poor weather led to regular use. Late-winter was one of them…and it was just after this period that it happened.”
George lifted his own glass but didn’t drink from it. “What did?” he asked, transfixed by the tale, despite its unremarkable origin, just an abandoned building on a distant English coastline.
“I’m sorry to build to such an anti-climax,” Henry went on, shaking his once blond head, “but the truth is that I’m not sure. All I do know is that one day I went for a short break inland to Leeds, enjoying the nightspots there, and the next I returned…to find Jens Amundsen gone.”
“Gone?”
“Yes. But that’s not all.”
“Please continue.”
“I do mean to, my friend.” Henry drew a sharp breath and soon added in a quavering voice, “All the windows at the front of the building had been smashed and the walls appeared to have been bent inwards, as if…well, as if something had struck the building from the other side. A load of plaster was missing from the wall opposite, too. But Lord, what sense does any of that make?”
George nodded with irrepressible haste. “That’s just what I saw, after I’d accessed that property. I looked it all up online later and the official view is that the place had been closed because of severe subsidence.”
“Ha!” Henry responded with an incredulous scoff. “What nonsense!”
“I quite agree,” said George, laying aside his sloshing glass. “So what did happen there, Henry?”
The man’s eyes again evaded George’s, staring beyond him out of his front window, where Christine patiently waited. “I don’t know, mate. But I’ll tell you this much. When I got back that day – this was late March, a period of heavy storms that year – I found another of those chalk pentagrams on the front room’s floor, and all Jens’s books scattered at the centre of it, and various powders and guttered candles and Christ knows what other weird stuff. And yet…Jens Amunsen was gone. Do I need to say more?”
It was certainly an unsettling story, but George was unwilling to jump to conclusions. “What did you do next? I mean, you presumably informed the authorities?”
“I did. And soon – as the foghorn no longer functioned in such a compromised state – I had no choice but to move away, seeking alternative work. I got a job in printing here in Malton and just tried to get on with life. I followed events relating to the case in the local news for weeks afterwards, and the police interviewed me. But then it all went hush-hush. Whitby is hardly a focus of national media, and a missing person – especially a foreigner – failed to hold even residents’ attention for long.
“I should also tell you that I, shall we say, tidied that property after discovering whatever Jens had been up to. I mean, I scrubbed away that five-pointed star and got rid of all the other crazy gear. What can I say? I still had my reputation to uphold. I needed work. I couldn’t be seen to have been involved in anything so…well, weird.
“And so the mystery eventually subsided. Besides, everyone was busy at that time dealing with the floods. Did you read about them, too? How the town was badly affected?”
Before George could reply with even a nod, Henry added more.
“That happened the same night my good friend disappeared.”
The room went silent, allowing George time to absorb this latest information. What was his informant trying to tell him without explicitly setting out the facts? Maybe that his old friend, an enigmatic Norwegian with an interest in the dark arts, h
ad summoned some thing to the UK’s coastland and had been snatched away by it? That this entity had been big enough not only to cause damage to a cliff-top building but also to flood a port miles from its destination? And that this hideous intruder boasted a name that sounded something like “cuff-who-loo”?
Possessing no answers to these questions, George felt his mind whirling with so much new knowledge. He watched as Henry got up from his chair and crossed the room. The homeowner stooped to open a cupboard in one corner, reached inside, and pulled out a small item made of glass. Within lay something composed of off-colour paper with handwriting upon it: an old manuscript.
“As soon as I talked to your wife this morning, I realised it was time to get rid of this thing,” said Henry, carrying the bottle to George and handing it over. “It was the only item I preserved back then. I’ve kept it in my attic ever since and retrieved it only about an hour ago. As I want nothing more to do with this matter, this is yours if you want it: the words that led my colleague Jens Amundsen to some kind of damnation.”
CHAPTER SIX
George and Christine had arranged a world tour taking in every continent. They would begin in Europe, with the quiet elegance of Stockholm; move on to Africa and the tribal complexities of Ghana; take in the Middle East and the exotic chasteness of Saudi Arabia; endure a long flight to New Zealand to sample the city of Auckland; venture into Chile and its majestic Andes; and finally travel to New Orleans and its jazz-enlivened quarters. Then they’d come home, a month after departure.
But first George had a mystery to solve.
He sat at his dining table with two items in front of him: his laptop logged onto the Internet; and the manuscript two men had found in a bottle back in 1975, which had, to judge by the date of composition in one upper corner, been cast across the North Sea from Norway approximately fifty years earlier.
The document began with a brief paragraph in Norwegian:
