by Gary Fry
EPILOGUE
Rumours in Deepvale tend to take on a life of their own. But the community keeps itself to itself, and refuses to let city people violate its peace and seclusion.
In the wake of that terrible night last year, Anthony Mallinson, a specialist in such matters, was regularly summoned to make sense of what appears to have been a case of mass hysteria. Residents claimed to have been visited by people from the village’s past: ancestors and allegiants, folk they’d never known and those they’d only heard about in local stories. Additionally, a number of trees and several ancient standing stones had been crushed by what locals eventually ascribed to freak weather conditions.
This phenomenon hadn’t been widely reported, however. The world’s attention at the time had been claimed by a series of dramatic natural events. Huge tidal waves had assaulted the east and west coasts of Great Britain, around Bridlington on one side and Lancaster on the other. These immense bodies of water had also affected, to a lesser degree, seaside resorts in France and Northern Ireland. But the impact had been negligible, and after a few days of rhetoric from scientists, the media furor had died down. Only artists continued to speculate, the episodes forming the basis of much imaginative fiction, music and painting, which sold well to a population fascinated by inexplicable material.
Eventually life in the village had returned to its usual steady pace.
Paul Jenkins and Lisa Robinson, realising their present lives were untenable, fell into a close friendship that had their parents’ approval, and a few months after a stark winter that nigh on sealed them off from the outside world, they married and soon developed their respective artistic enterprises. On the strength of a major record deal and a large advance on a Hollywood movie, they purchased, renovated and moved into the property formerly known as The Conjurer’s House.
Andy Smith brought his family from Liverpool to live in his mum’s bungalow, after his dad died of a heart attack a week shy of the New Year. His distraught wife ascribed the older man’s death to a vicious temper and a poor diet, but she recalled him with sympathy, mainly because she knew his own father had been a dreadful man and such things were passed down from generation to generation.
Anthony Mallinson and his wife, Melanie, and son, Carl, kept much private knowledge to themselves. They refused to even speak about it to each other, because wisdom decreed that some things were best left that way.
“Let sleeping dogs lie,” the boy had put it, stroking Lucy on the bed that another youngster has once occupied, too long ago to trouble any of them now.
Anthony responded by hugging his wife and son.
“I love you both,” he said, and hesitated a moment—a significant fraction of time—before adding, “That’s all I need to know in life. In fact, it may be the only thing any of us can know.”
Nevertheless, on some dark nights, when the sky is awash with stars and the moon shines brightly like the bloated face of something unthinkable, Anthony meets his friend Andy, and strolls with him to The Conjurer’s House, to visit Paul and Lisa. There, they all argue about the relative merits of science and art, and only ever achieve a begrudging consensus: that both are necessary to understand the vicissitudes of a complicated cosmos.
But sometimes, when Anthony strays upstairs, he advances higher, to the fantastically preserved telescope in the property’s modernised attic. And then he gazes at the heavens with a single thought in his mind: God’s-eye view.
It’s his own notion, of course, and he tells himself that the muffled sounds he invariably hears below are just his friends working out how they might go about achieving domination in their fields. Anthony hopes one day to make a similar impact in his own discipline, and given time he believes he’ll succeed.
He steps away and reassures himself that such ambition isn’t driven by rivalry, but is for the good of the flawed species of which he is only a tiny part.
He smiles and understands that shadows twitching in his wake are merely tricks of cosmic illumination. Then he paces downstairs to adopt a less aspiring frame of mind.
He thinks his parents—his dad, especially—would have been proud.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Gary Fry has a PhD in psychology, but his first love is literature. He lives in Dracula’s Whitby, literally around the corner from where Bram Stoker was staying when he was thinking about that character. Gary has had many books published, including short story collections, several novellas and novels. Ramsey Campbell has described him as “a master.” The things Gary likes most in this crazy world are dogs, wine and curry. Feel free to visit him here: www.gary-fry.com.
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Table of Contents
Prologue: 1998
Part One: The Summoning
ONE
TWO
THREE
FOUR
FIVE
SIX
SEVEN
EIGHT
NINE
TEN
ELEVEN
TWELVE
THIRTEEN
FOURTEEN
FIFTEEN
PART TWO: THE GATHERING
SIXTEEN
SEVENTEEN
EIGHTEEN
NINETEEN
TWENTY
TWENTY-ONE
TWENTY-TWO
TWENTY-THREE
TWENTY-FOUR
TWENTY-FIVE
TWENTY-SIX
TWENTY-SEVEN
PART THREE: THE RECKONING
TWENTY-EIGHT
TWENTY-NINE
THIRTY
THIRTY-ONE
THIRTY-TWO
THIRTY-THREE
THIRTY-FOUR
THIRTY-FIVE
THIRTY-SIX
EPILOGUE
About the Author
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