Conjure House

by Gary Fry

  Then he began adding the entity calling from within.

  He felt as if his friend Lisa had already described it, and that Paul, who no longer seemed as far away from Andy as he’d been earlier, was contributing a suitably majestic soundtrack…

  * * *

  The three of them continued to work, their combined skills elucidating life.

  Art was at last doing what it should.

  THIRTY-SIX

  “Why are you doing this?” Anthony asked as the hideous man in front of him shambled beyond his two young apprentices and then towards Paul, Lisa and Andy.

  There was little left of the person who’d claimed to be Peter Suman, and this was hardly surprising given that almost a century had passed since his natural death. That was impossible, of course, but Anthony couldn’t deny the evidence of his eyes, could he?

  After watching the disheveled figure stumble past him, however, he wondered if this was exactly what he should do. The man was crumbling into pieces, and surely couldn’t remain whole much longer. But maybe he needed only a little more time to achieve his terrible goal.

  Indeed, now he provided details of this nefarious intention.

  “I wouldn’t expect a fellow of your limited purview—that is to say, a scientist—to understand,” he explained, relying on a harsh croak his disintegrating frame was barely able to sustain. “Unlike your friends here, of course. Artists, each of them. And that’s who we need to seek the truth.”

  “You did something to them…to all of us…back then, didn’t you? Before Simon disappeared, when all that light fled this house? What…did you do?”

  Directly facing Suman, Anthony was unable to see his son being held by his little brother, but moments later, he heard both of them. Carl whimpered, a sound of innocence, while Simon giggled, a child’s behaviour performed by the jaded tones of a man. This sounded horrible.

  But Anthony mustn’t be deflected from his purpose. He now knew something that might defeat the mad sorcerer who’d just crossed to the three artists working behind the telescope. All the hairy children, still holding up hands without thumbs like Nazi salutes of obedience, stood around the room’s perimeter, a little like the cellar’s false wall Anthony had broken down earlier.

  Reaching the transfixed trio, Peter Suman added, “Unlike you, they were ripe for it. And I simply offered them a shunt, a hint of the race memories we all store of…Them.”

  Another of those mighty crashes rocked the building, sending the last of the carved statuettes thumping to the floor and breaking into lethal shards. Anthony watched as the globe across the room trembled on its metal stand, the movement putting him in mind of the devices attached to the chairs in the property’s subconscious lair. But it was in this upper room that the highest aspirations of humanity would be enacted…

  The madman went on: “Artists—composers, writers, painters—get inside life, while scientists merely consider it from afar. There’s no question about who has greater access to the truth…to the God’s-eye view.”

  The final phrase sent a shiver along Anthony’s spine, to such a degree that he turned to grab whichever of the boys had just run a bony finger up his back…But when he looked, the closely entwined pair remained at a dismaying distance, and surely it was only a trick of the gloom that made their flesh appear to merge, one’s left cheek smearing into the other’s right. This illusion must arise from their family resemblance, a disturbing observation that almost tore apart Anthony’s mind.

  He twisted back to confront the deranged man he’d been trying to ignore for most of his life.

  “None of us is God, or ever will be,” said Anthony, now craving a cigarette. His hands twitched in the way Larry Cole claimed everybody’s did at such times of duress. “All we can achieve is historically specific understandings of life. We can never understand other people, and perception is limited by our bodies.”

  While conveying this information—which existed at the heart of him, linked to his studies and everyday experience—Anthony noticed the old man’s terrible frame begin to wither. But this repulsive sight was much less unsettling than that of his friends, who appeared to have moved closer together, as if their creative activity was aligning them, like planets moving into terrible conjunction.

  Anthony looked away, refusing to allow another attack from whatever creatures crashed idiotically against the front of the building to prevent him from examining the huge telescope and the sky beyond the window above.

  It had gone out.

  An awful darkness, an utter blackness, a terrifying absence now reigned above The Conjurer’s House…over all of Deepvale.

  This was such a terrifying sight that Anthony wouldn’t be surprised if onlookers in the village had gone insane. Perhaps he already had. Surely only such an explanation could account for why the fur-covered children in his peripheral vision looked as if they were blearing into one another…the same way his son and younger brother slumped together, skin mixing with skin…and how Paul, Lisa and Andy, their work rate undiminished, coalesced into a single space: a solitary, multifaceted point of view, which was audible, linguistic, visual…

  Anthony shook his head, knowing he had to put an end to whatever had begun.

  “Music,” the parasitic time traveler was saying, and then added, “Write,” before finishing, “Paint.”

  His subjects obeyed, their skulls slowly combining, shoulders collapsing into one another, the way time and space must be folding elsewhere in the region.

  Anthony couldn’t deny what he witnessed. After glancing again at the huge instrument beside him, he wondered what he’d see if he looked through its lens again. But another question lay squarely in his mind, a simple, intuitive insight he must express, even though it might prove to be idle curiosity at such a late stage in—what he’d been told earlier—was an experiment.

  “I can appreciate your desire for knowledge,” he said, striving to suppress a tremble in his voice. It was a time for strength, and he wouldn’t let Carl down. “But what I can’t understand is why you want to bring back our planet’s past. If, as you argue…”—another assault on the building caused the walls to shimmer with debris—“…if our history as a species once involved such mighty foes, why bring Them back at all?”

  He knew he should be thinking about Melanie and everybody else vulnerable out on the moors. But Anthony believed he’d now hinted at something significant to Peter Suman; his academic enquiries hadn’t been as fruitless as this evil man had claimed.

  “Silence!” cried the old man, and then twisted round, his limbs breaking up like a cloud of flies before regrouping unconvincingly, as if a stiff wind might rip him into pieces at any moment. He appeared to be headed for the base of the telescope. Perhaps his triumph would be confirmed by a single magnified glance at the things he and his unwitting cohorts had summoned from God knew where.

  In the wake of the lunatic’s manoeuvre, Anthony saw the globe tottering on its stand. He recalled holding one of the unspeakable sculptures above Great Britain and then marvelling at the discrepancy between the model’s scale and this facsimile country. But had he been wrong all along? Was something similarly huge in relation to the British Isles now looming over all of them? Anthony remembered how his feet had slipped into the water after finding that box in the cellar. Was an incredible entity presently bestriding the United Kingdom, its own legs or whatever passed for these standing ankle-deep in the North and the Irish seas?

  Merely contemplating this image almost split apart his psyche, but how else could he account for the absence of light in the solitary window overhead? The world had also gone deathly silent. There were no more attacks from all those rampant beasts—little more than tics, an errant thought informed him—from the Yorkshire Dales.

  It was as if time had stopped still.

  Contrary to Anthony’s expectations, Peter Suman hadn’t slowed to look through the telescope at the heart of this crazy house-mind, but now clambered up its side, presumably intend
ing to smash the glass above, climb out onto the roof, and at last achieve what he’d always desired.

  The God’s-eye view.

  What was happening outside? Where were Melanie and all the residents of this accursed village? Anthony felt deeply troubled, but upheld his critical faculties. This was, after all, what his discipline demanded; it was how knowledge progressed.

  “Okay, we do need art,” he said, instinct guiding his words. He looked at Paul, Lisa and Andy, who’d almost completely merged into a single sentient mass, even while continuing to strum the guitar and produce beautiful music; type at the laptop to make language do more than it had ever done; and splash paint upon a palette depicting a garish entity it surely did nobody any good to examine…Anthony didn’t dare glance back at his son and his younger brother, but a simple truth arising from merely thinking about them persuaded him to go on. “But we need science, too. We need psychology. We need to understand people.”

  The lunatic from another era didn’t appreciate or even acknowledge this observation. He simply continued conveying his flailing body up the side of the telescope, his thumbs gripping many gaps and ledges on its solid metal framework.

  Suspecting that the old man’s failure to reply denoted uncertainty, Anthony pressed home his advantage.

  “You killed my parents, you bastard. Or your hoodwinked accomplices did. In my mum and dad’s way, they loved me—I know that now.” The hairy children around him hissed with a sound like glee, and then even Simon did, while Carl protested with a sob. But Anthony knew he must now deliver his final, potentially devastating intuition, one that came not from any textbook but from complicated life. He felt his eyes sting with tears as he added, “The truth is, Suman, that you loathe humanity, and I believe I know why. It’s because…your father was so cruel to you.”

  From the corner of one eye, Anthony noticed the two boys begin advancing towards his childhood friends. Were they seeking to merge with them, prior to joining up with many Deepvale residents who’d suffered an identical fate? Anthony could only picture a dreadful pack of combined individuals, melting into each other, becoming a single, collective, embodied consciousness, before spreading from here to the rest of the Yorkshire, and then the country, and then…then…

  The whole planet?

  Would there soon be a global God’s-eye view, informed by innumerable experiential backgrounds, impressions and insights?

  Anthony was unable to accept this possibility. For one thing, Peter Suman was seeking to interpret the dark history of Earth alone; and for another—

  He allowed ideas from his studies to dictate his next comments.

  “Did he fuck you up, good and proper?”

  “Enough!”

  “Did he beat you as an infant?”

  “No…”

  “Is that why you killed all those…all these poor children?”

  The pseudo-wall of hairy figures around the attic’s perimeter shimmered, fur rippling with what could be interpreted as unease. Even Simon lapsed a little in his headlong movement towards the artists, Carl squirming in his grasp.

  Peter Suman, illuminated by the glow his electrified shroud alone provided in the room, had nearly reached the head of the instrument. But his body protested violently. At one glance, his hips slipped from their regular spot, and the next his torso writhed, as if it was a cloud of flies constituting him wrestled to break free of their flimsy containment.

  He was dying. He was already dead, of course, but now total extinction beckoned. This was perhaps also true of whatever he’d summoned from beyond the stars; it was something every organic being must adhere to.

  Nobody was God.

  No body.

  As the old man brought up a hand, the fingers curling into a fist with a determination he could hardly sustain, Anthony drove home the only truth he or anyone else might ever know.

  “You might be able to play with time and space…”

  There was an explosion as the window above was smashed, followed by a cruel breeze scudding through the gap. Glass tumbled and broke around him, but Anthony refused to be put off. He possessed a clear, critical mind, unencumbered by extraneous variables; it had always been one of his strengths.

  “…but you can’t escape yourself. You can’t climb outside your mind and its ineradicable past. In short, you can’t evade your body where all this material is inscribed like code in the genes.”

  “Be q-quiet!” Peter Suman protested, his tone faltering along with the rest of him. He’d now climbed through the opening he’d fashioned with typical brutality, and was combating a savage wind up there, clearly trying to gaze around. And this was his ultimate goal: to see every moment of the world simultaneously, possibly even joining the gathering crowd beneath him, a heretical congregation of involuntary adherents.

  Anthony looked across at his friends and family members. Now that light had vanished from the spectral monster who’d stolen outside, he could see just an amorphous shape ahead. Anthony prayed he wasn’t too late, that Paul, Lisa and Andy, as well as Carl and Simon, and his beloved wife and all the other victims of this terrifying event weren’t lost to him.

  He snatched back his gaze to the ceiling. And then spoke again.

  “You could enlist a thousand of us…ten thousand…a million…nay, billions. But you’ll never exhaust the world. Don’t you understand that? Don’t…you…see?”

  “I see…oh…I…see!”

  And whatever Peter Suman at last witnessed threatened to tug him into frenzied pieces. Anthony watched as the old man stared over the range of land beyond the house, and for one second, blinking involuntarily, Anthony thought he also shared this view. Maybe his affinity with the five people converging only yards away had communicated this vision. It showed hundreds of unsightly creatures waiting in abeyance as an entity even more hideous loomed way above the Earth. These smaller beasts resembled elephants, robbed of their charm—quite trunkless, with drooping eyes and thickset limbs, each bearing the posture and colour of phenomena beyond the grasp of even the most disturbed imagination.

  Beyond them stood a sea of flesh, faces poking out of a calamitous combination of torsos and limbs. The whole shuffled with sentience, as if governed by an impromptu intelligence that had just one idiot aspiration. Although not everyone in the area had been subsumed by this human mass—a few people cowered nearby—it was surely only a question of time before they succumbed. The thing was spreading inexorably, its many eyes eager, and all looking up at…at…

  Then the sight was gone, and Anthony was again staring at just a plaintive old man bursting apart at his tenuous seams. Peter Suman gazed upwards at a vast, featureless sky…or was it featureless? And had this view driven him insane? If that was true, the experience possessed a bodily impact, because then his flesh fragmented as a silent scream of terror blew him apart from inside. His skin churned with either insects or atoms, each giving off a sickly hue, like malignant sparks. Wires of electricity skittered through this mass, and he soon disappeared in a cloud of buzzing intensity. The episode cast weird light below, cutting among the group ahead of Anthony, setting every member free in an orgy of putrid motion and mind-bending horror.

  Everything went dead…for a moment.

  But then a heartbeat later, time seemed to restart, and the world came back to life.

  Refocusing quickly, Anthony found himself looking at his friends—Paul, Lisa, and Andy—and most crucially at Carl. The three adults shook their heads, as if some dreadful spell had been lifted, while Anthony’s son threw off the rotted claws of a person behind him, crumbling into pitiful debris.

  “Ant,” said this figure with a heartbreakingly fragile tone, and once Anthony had smiled, nodding and feeling tears roll down his face, the violated body of his younger brother dissolved into ash, scattering to and fro on the wooden floorboards.

  This wasn’t all Suman’s demise had achieved. The twenty short figures standing around the room were stripped of their hirsute appearance by what
could only be their tormentor’s waning magic. Now they were just children again, dressed in Victorian garments, gazing at one another with simple, uncorrupted innocence. And then they were gone, too, and the last of Peter Suman’s weird spells departed with them—forever, Anthony hoped.

  But…why did the sky through the window above remain as black as a misanthrope’s soul?

  As much as Anthony wanted to hug his boy and childhood friends, he was unable to resist pacing across to the telescope. He was a scientist, after all, and needed to know things. Maybe some of the madman’s influence lingered in the room, because the temptation to look was now too powerful to resist.

  Despite an authoritative call from behind—“No, Daddy, no!”—Anthony stepped up to the instrument, the way he had during his first visit to this terrible house. What harm could it do to simply gaze through the lens? Why, no harm at all, surely.

  God’s-eye view, muttered a voice in his skull—deep down, where all the true stuff dwelt.

  Then he stooped to the eyepiece…and looked.

  “Anthony!” his three friends cried in unison, but it was too late.

  Or was it rather the case that he was too late?

  Before the stars and a sickly moon reappeared in a fathomless field of darkness, he thought he’d seen the surface of a giant something, glimmering and writhing. Had he just spotted another planet…or was that the underside of a figure so stupendously huge, it required a consciousness far larger than his own to assimilate? In his inadequate human way, he could only imagine the body of some diseased animal, standing imperiously over quarry, the way birds of prey loiter above fish plucked from a lake: with majestic indifference, fickle disdain, the sheer alien buzz of killing.

  Then, once the image had dissolved with frustrating haste, there were just the black heavens again, going about their mysterious business.

  And moments later, receiving physical contact from his childhood friends and his beloved son, Anthony realised it was over.