The Galston House

by Marc Layton

  The Galston House

  Marc Layton

  Copyright © 2020 by Marc Layton

  * * *

  All rights reserved.

  * * *

  No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  * * *

  This book is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to persons, living or dead, or places, events or location is purely coincidental. The characters are all productions of the author’s imagination.

  Contents

  The Galston House

  Also by Marc Layton

  The Galston House

  As he hung up the phone, he already knew. If he had to go up to Old Galston House, and it seemed like he did, he didn't want to go there in the dark.

  Across the desk from him, the insufferably pompous Mrs. Potter was still droning on. Something about the Peterson boy's dog barking and keeping her awake, preventing her from doing her work. She was clutching her purse tightly in her lap and, as she did every week without fail, was letting rip with a string of complaints and bugbears of the kind that keep the old busybodies in any small town occupied in their twilight years. Clarence wasn’t listening. He had heard it all before.

  Instead, he was glancing over Mrs. Potter's shoulder at the office clock. A quarter after four, he read. Then, he glanced out of the big office window. For now, the sun was still high and the sky blue, with only a few patchy clouds streaked across it like smudges, for now.

  Soon though, he knew, the edges of the view would begin to darken. The blue, fading to a pink and peach blush as the sun started to sink below the hills. Then, night, crawling out from its den, like some lithe, sinewed predator would creep across the land and chase the light away. Then it would be dark, and there was no way in hell he was going up there in the dark.

  Clarence Lamb had been the Sheriff in Moreton for seven years and a sworn officer for over twenty. Although his current posting was in many ways a routine and sleepy one, the odd bar fight, boisterous kids committing small scale vandalism, he had served in harder times and harsher places.

  In his early years on the force, he had seen his share of dark things, in particular the wicked things that some men are prepared to do to other men. Yet somehow, that darkness was different. He understood that kind of evil, had fought it and, in many cases, subdued and slapped the cuffs onto it. That kind of dark didn't scare him, but the other sort of dark, the dark that lived in The Galston House, that kind of darkness did.

  There was just something. Something hanging on the edge of explanation and memory, like a name one can’t recollect but which is on the tip of the tongue, just beyond reach, something on the outskirts of reason that was palpably off about the place. It just felt wrong.

  He would drive past the grounds sometimes, on some errand, or answering some call. He'd see it squatting there, hunched like an incubus on the chest of a maiden in a way that reminded of that painting he'd seen as a kid and which still gave him the creeps to this day. He looked again at the clock—twenty past four.

  "Okay, Mrs. Potter," he said, rising to his feet and extending a hand in a way that signified that her weekly bitching session was over and which made him feel like one of those high paid shrinks the city folks went to visit. “Same time next week?” he felt like saying to her.

  Instead, he smiled and assured her that he’d get right on to it and that he was sure the situation could be resolved without the need for her to 'press charges' a threat she regularly wheeled out but never followed through with. Mrs. Potter rose from her chair, clearly flustered and unimpressed at having had her tales of woe curtailed by the Sheriff. Nonetheless, she allowed him to usher her courteously toward the door, all the while promising to 'bring the law down on these hooligans' and frowning as he nodded noncommittally.

  Clarence glanced again through the window. The first shades of red were washing into the sky. He’d have to floor it to make it there before sundown.

  Fifteen minutes later, Clarence was making the slow trudge up the gravel path towards the Old Galston Place. The house itself was set back from the road, enclosed in several acres of ‘grounds'. On either side of the building itself, a small spattering of trees huddled conspiratorially. The main walk toward the house, which may in years gone by have been the drive or carriageway, was covered in a fine gravel, that gave a satisfyingly yielding crunch underfoot.

  The house itself did indeed seem to hunch or squat. The rounded slope of the roof, looked like the shoulders of some giant or troll that had been frozen to the spot. Behind the tiled roof that stood almost in silhouette against the sky, the sun, now reddening, was beginning to sink. Clarence was losing the light.

  He had left his car on the roadside outside of the grounds, worried that the tires might have trouble on the gravel. The last thing he wanted was to become stuck here. So he had resolved to walk the final quarter-mile toward the house, though he had only paced around two hundred yards when he saw the reason for the complaints.

  The Galston Place was about 20 minutes outside of Moreton town center, and while the main house was set back from the road, the entrance to the grounds led straight onto the main road out of town. Two residents passing close to the house on their way to some other business had seen something shimmering and reflecting in the trees. When they had approached the grounds, careful not to enter (Clarence wasn't the only one with strange notions about the place), they had seen the cause of the effect and had dialed it into the station.

  Standing before it now, Clarence could only shake his head in a mixture of disbelief and disgust.

  Hanging from the branches of a tree close by to the entrance of the grounds, were birds. Several dozen, ranging in size, species, and shape. They hung, each from one branch, like Christmas baubles, their heads and beaks facing downward from lengths of fishing wire. What was more, each tiny carcass had been pierced through multiple times, skewered with small needles, such as those an acupuncturist might use. The effect was to make the little fowl look like small silver pine cones, or steel sea urchins, that glittered and swayed gently in the fading light.

  Clarence counted. Thirty-six.

  While he may have hoped to put this kind of mutilation down to attention-seeking kids, and would probably write it up that way in his report, the meticulous nature of the insertions made him doubt it. To do this, to skewer each bird fifty or sixty times, each time with a new steel needle would have taken quite some time and dedication. As would the hanging of them like this, not to mention the actual acquisition of so many small birds. It would also have been difficult to hang them in the daytime unnoticed. Unlike him, someone clearly had no problem being here at night. Clarence glanced back at the house.

  He took photographs on his phone and, considering that he should be cautious around so many needle points, elected to send one of his deputies with gloves, a pair of pliers, and a sharps kit to dispose of the bodies. He would send them tomorrow. In the daytime.

  Clarence briefly glanced around at the ground under the tree, hoping to find a footprint or an indentation that might give a clue as to who had been there. There was nothing to be seen and, he reasoned, nothing to be done.

  Again he looked at the house, at the shadow that was now falling from it onto the gravel, ebbing ever forward, spreading its own dark wave over the ground. Clarence felt this approaching tide and decided it was time to leave. He would send a deputy to deal with this tomorrow.

  He turned and began the walk back to the road and his car, but as he did, he couldn’t help feeling the intangible weight of a gaze upon his back. That strange crackle of
electric sense that makes you turn when someone enters unheard into a room. The sense that knows when there's someone else there. He turned once more toward the house, looking momentarily at the windows, the boards covering them darkened with years of mildew and dust and up at the roof, behind which the sun was beginning to sink. He snorted dismissively through his nostrils, marking for himself a rejection of the creeping sense of fear that was clambering up within him. He tried to convince himself he wasn't feeling it, to tell himself he wasn’t scared. It was unconvincing.

  He turned his back to the house and again felt that awkward tingle, that notion that somehow he was being watched. He began the trudge back toward his car, putting a little more haste into his stride. He thought back to the times as a child when, after flipping the light switch at the bottom of the stairs, he would sprint through the dark to the light of the den where his family was sitting. He was fearful that even in those few moments exposed in the dark, might leave him vulnerable to some preying thing, waiting in the shadows to snatch him up and devour him. He hadn't felt that feeling in years.

  He felt it now.

  Reluctant to break into a run and thereby being forced to admit to himself that he was retreating and running away, he nevertheless, increased his speed.

  Yet, somehow, the steps seemed to become more difficult. The gravel clung heavily to his feet, and his steps labored. At first, Clarence thought he imagined it, but as he continued to walk, he felt it, unmistakably. His feet were heavy as if fighting through snow or sand, each step forward accumulating more weight as the very ground beneath stuck to him, adding weight and dragging with longing, grasping pulls, downward.

  He increased his effort. "It's in your head," he told himself, although, when he looked down, it seemed, yes, it was the case, that the gravel was higher, rising like water seeping into a closed space. Where earlier it had been underfoot, now he was kicking it with each stride as it pooled over his boot, rising at times almost to the lace. He looked once more, back at the house, as the sun disappeared.

  Suddenly, the steps, already unfeasibly laborious, became even more difficult. For a second, Clarence wondered if he was coming down with some illness or close to a heart attack or stroke. His legs seemed leaden, each step like wading through treacle, tar sticking to his boots as the gravel surface beneath him seemed to lose its integrity, its solid resistance giving way like quicksand sucking him downward to sink and drown. Clarence began to panic.

  It wasn't possible, he thought, and yet the loose pebbles seemed to give way, rising to his shins now. He fixed his gaze on the road, his breath catching frantically in his throat as he found that the more he struggled the further he seemed to sink, with an effort he turned his hip each time, twinging his bad knee with each step as, from below, he felt the hand.

  Looking down, he saw only gravel swimming around his shins, and yet his sense of touch said otherwise. Somewhere at his calf, just below his knees, the cushioned pressure of a grip, unmistakably fingers, clasped at this leg, trying from somewhere beneath the stones to hold him, pin him in place and drag him beneath, below, with them.

  He felt another hand, the unmistakable sensation of fingertips and thumb ridge closing around his ankle. Clarence kicked backward, almost, for a second, overbalancing, an icy wave of panic rising up as he imagined falling here, into the grasping, clutching hands that somehow, invisibly, clutched at his feet, his ankles, his legs.

  Another hand. As one loosened, shaken by his kicking, another clasped, pulling on the fabric of his jeans so that now he could see them flare out, see where something was pulling, dragging him down. Clarence screamed and taking his baton from its holster, swiped blindly downward, swinging in swift arcing motions towards his shins. There was a wet slap as the baton connected with bone, and though he yelped in pain, he felt the grip slacken. Kicking as best he could he dispersed the gravel and taking a long, powerful stride, freed himself and ran. Ran headlong, ran unashamed and terrified, toward the road.

  Within seconds he was in the car and speeding recklessly back toward town, the house, the grounds, and the whole horrible event shrinking into the distance. Panting heavily, he tugged at this collar, loosening the grip to give himself air and glanced momentarily into the rearview mirror. What he saw made him break hard enough to throw him forward. There, leaning against the outer wall of the grounds, half-hidden so that he hadn't seen it on the way in, was a small red real estate sign. The single word emblazoned across it read "SOLD."

  Clarence considered never going back.

  Never again setting foot on those grounds or sending any other poor sap to them either. He considered cordoning the place off with a barrier or police tape, declaring that it was unsafe. He could make up some excuse. Chemical spill? Subsidence? But, he reflected, the place had been sold. There would be hell to pay and reasons to give if he tried to stop the sale and close the place up. Not to mention that the men in white coats would be coming for him if he told the truth.

  When his deputy asked about his visit the following day, Clarence told him there had been nothing there, reluctant to send anyone toward that house.

  But, he considered, the sign had read 'sold.' Someone had bought the place; someone was moving in. In the week that followed, driven by a gnawing twinge of conscience, Clarence made inquiries about the house, who would be moving in, and when. He had attempted in the days after his last visit to dismiss his experience as a flight of fancy, a delusion or a panic attack brought on by some foolish paranoia. It didn't work. His shower that first evening destroyed that theory, one glance at his ankles and shins. Delusions, he knew, didn't leave bruises, and paranoia didn't leave fingerprints.

  When Clive Done and his wife Adrien pulled up to the driveway of Galston House a week later, they were surprised to find two uniformed officers standing, rigidly by the entrance gates.

  "What the hell's this, the welcome party?" muttered Clive. Adrien didn't reply. She was already looking past the two men into the grounds and at the huge Victorian house behind, seeing in her mind's eye, not the dilapidated husk that chilled Clarence, but instead the remarkable living space that this shell would become.

  Adrien’s ability to see not the house that lay in front of her, but the house as it could be, as it indeed would be, with the help of builders, decorators, and her own liberal application of elbow grease, baffled Clive. While searching for a new home, they had walked around dozens of houses, and in every one of them, he had seen only the walls, the brick, and mortar that existed before him. If there was a wall, he saw a wall. Adrien saw potential.

  She would skip gaily through cramped looking rooms talking about all of the space there 'would be' once she had knocked through walls. Mimed with a long sweep of her hands where the breakfast bar would be in a room that to Clive was just a square with bare floorboards.

  In one house, she had gone into raptures about the bay windows and window seat from which she would enjoy a view of the garden while gesturing toward a bare wall. Clive didn’t understand it. But he trusted it, because, in all things, he trusted her.

  She had, in every instance, and in every aspect of his life, led with her vision, her ability to see things as they could be. Clive was happy to follow. In this case, her foresight had gone a step further. They hadn't even visited this place.

  After months of searching for the perfect home and after having two sales fall through at the last second, Adrien had been encouraged by her property developer friend Ariel to attend a housing auction. In the week before, she had shown Clive floor plans of a large Victorian building that hadn't been opened up for nearly 30 years.

  To him, the boxes, drawn up in blue with intersecting lines, might as well have been maps of the surrounding fields. He could no more see from these plans what the real world structure would look like than he could decipher a page full of hieroglyphics. Yet, for Adrien, tracing her fingers along those lines was like touring the place. She saw in her mind two simultaneous maps, one of how the house as it looked now
and the other, how it was going to be. Breakfast bar, window seat, the whole lot.

  The asking price had been left out of the auction catalog, and they had both assumed this was a mistake. Hearing the starting bid for the property was the closest he had ever seen Adrien come to fainting. Her jaw slackened, and her eyes seemed to dilate. So inactive was she from the shock of the price, that he had been forced to step in and make the bid for both of them.

  There had only been one other bidder, and he had folded after one exchange. He had turned back to Adrien to see her standing, fingers interlaced and clasped to her chest, a beaming smile across her face, shaking her head and tears in her eyes. It seemed too good to be true, but by the end of the day, they had deeds and keys. It was the truth, and that truth was good.

  Clive rolled the van up alongside the wall before the opening to the grounds opposite the two officers.

  "I think they want to talk to us," he said, unfastening his seatbelt. "It must be you they're after, you dirty criminal. Finally, the manhunt comes to an end…"

  “Hmmn…” nodded Adrien, her eyes fixed on the house and her mind far from the conversation. Clive paused and sighed heavily, realizing that she was miles away in her own world. "I'm also thinking of having a sex change and joining the circus as a trapeze artist." He added, deadpan.

  "Uh huh" she replied. She was still fixed on the house. Clive rolled up the map he had rested on the dashboard and bonked her on the head with it.

  "Earth to Adrien. Come in," Adrien turned, snapped back to the present and, realizing she had been absent, gave him a knowing smirk.

  Clive returned the grin and gestured to the two men with a nod, taking a second as he stepped out of the car to admire the sprinkling of freckles over her nose and cheeks. She had a similar pattern, he knew, on the base of her back just above the tailbone, and a flickering thought of them made his smile broaden cheekily.