by Gary Fry
I glanced up at my brother—no, my half-brother now—shock clearly showing on my face. He simply held that sinister smile, glaring fiercely my way.
“Now tell me, dear Harry,” he began, his voice full of world-weary cynicism, “how much sense does that make of those bastards’ attitudes toward me?”
He presumably referred to the way he’d been treated more savagely than I, our dad directing most of his scorn his way. But what he’d said was grossly unfair. After all, whatever he thought about my mother now, it wasn’t her who’d been at fault back then, was it? If Dad had had an affair and Dexter had been a product of that, a presently absent woman was his other parent—and surely she deserved scorn, too.
Snatching away my gaze from Dex, I glanced farther down the sheet. True enough, here was our dad’s name—Frank Keyes—registered as the father, and there, alongside him, our mum—Glenda Keyes—was recorded as the adopter. The other woman’s name, I saw on the next line, was Sara Linton, with no “h” at the end of her Christian name to form the more conventional spelling.
As I continued experiencing pressure from my brother’s persistent stare, that was the only thing I could focus on at that moment: Sara without an “h.”
“Where did you find this, Dex?” I asked, shaking the damning page. “And when did you find it?”
“In the attic a few days ago,” he said, groaning as his injury or illness caused a painful twinge. “While looking up there for some old pieces of equipment I’d used during my youth.”
How had he accessed that place in his current condition? This latest information suggested that he’d recently sustained a wound, rather than suffered a lengthy illness. And now that was decided, I thought I heard a recurrence of that shambling, creaking noise, so muffled that it must come from either upstairs or down below, in Dex’s once familiar habitat, the place he’d occupied so often when young: the cellar.
Deciding not to pursue that line of reasoning, I quickly spoke again.
“I’m really shocked, man. I had no idea. And you’re right—it does make sense of a lot of…well, of a lot of things.”
“You mean that old cunt’s behavior toward me? And his bitch of a wife’s indifference?”
Having established at least a functional relationship with our dad toward the end of his life—if only for my daughter’s sake, so that she’d know who her granddad had been—I wouldn’t have put it so bluntly, but I could certainly understand why my brother had. As for what he’d said about my mother, I didn’t share that view at all.
“He acted that way toward all of us, man. Including…”—I felt raw emotion well inside me—“…including our mum.”
“Your mum, you mean.”
“She was the woman who brought us both up, Dex. She did as much for you as she did for me.”
Surely even he must now understand what our mother had sacrificed to treat him as her own boy. How difficult would it have been for her to adopt the product of her husband’s lust, a child arising from a sordid tryst with a lover called Sara Linton?
Was I making too many assumptions here, acting according to stereotypical scenarios without full knowledge of the facts? Whatever the truth was, it made no difference to Dexter. He scoffed brief laughter.
“But she never stood up to him, did she? She should have chucked him out the day he started hitting us, the day he began mocking us and questioning our sexualities and all the other twisted torments he brought home from his travels.”
How could I disagree when I knew he was right? I realised that such situations were never as transparent at the time as they were in hindsight, but even so, I realized that Mum had had the opportunity to separate from our father, maybe when she’d first heard about this ostensible affair with Sara Linton, perhaps even leaving the other woman to bring up Dex.
But that was a dangerous thought, and one perhaps my brother perceived in my eyes. I glanced away, putting the sheet of paper back on the coffee table, thinking hard.
“I can’t understand why they’d leave this certificate here in the house. I mean, if they’d never wanted us to know—well, you most of all—why leave an audit trail of evidence?”
“I suspect the document had been misplaced,” said Dex, his voice sounding rough when his diaphragm expanded, as if the wound he’d suffered was under all the sheets he’d wrapped around his upper body.
“I found it muddled up with household papers in a box,” my brother went on, his face assuming a distasteful expression. “The box was behind several others I’d explored a few years ago, each with quite hideous material inside.”
“Hideous? What do you mean hideous, Dex?”
“It obviously once belonged to Dad, let’s put it that way.”
“Yes, but what was it?”
“Hardcore pornography. Really sick stuff. The kind of images that involve pain.”
I’d always found it odd that, after all the weird acts my brother had performed in that secretive cellar, he was so prudish when it came to matters of sex. I believed he was still celibate, with either no interest in the act or such a suppressed desire that it had been relocated to other spheres. Frankly, the whole issue had always caused me discomfort and I tried avoiding it whenever possible. My wife had also detected this seething undercurrent in Dexter, and for that reason didn’t much care for him. She’d told me that she found him furtive and maybe even dangerous, like a compressed spring about to be released. However cruel it sounded, Olivia was glad my brother had never had occasion to meet our beautiful girl Eva. To be honest, I think I was, too.
It was time to change the subject. I thrust my hands back into my trouser pockets, holding my wallet in one and my car keys in the other. Giving the latter an audible rattle, I asked, “Okay, so what do you want me to do about this? I assume that’s why you asked me to come here—to help you find out more about this matter?”
“Such a minor matter as my maternal origin? Is that what you mean, Harry?” Dex hesitated, his smile troubled. He looked at me again, his gaze unforgivingly severe. “Oh yes, I’m sure you’re feeling very smug now—the only pure one in the family.”
“That’s not true, man. As far as I’m concerned, you’re still my brother and I…I…”
“I…?”
“…well, I love you no less.”
I’d hoped my words, which I’d found difficult to express (we’d always been that kind of family), might soften his attitude. But I should have known better. He merely gave me a withering look in return, his eyes like chips of ice. Then his dog started barking again.
“There, there, Crafty,” he said, either announcing the pet’s name or describing its behavior, neither of which reassured me. At any rate, once he twisted round to lay one hand upon it—maybe the only affection he was capable of expressing, directed at a dumb, obedient animal—that odd-looking terrier, whose fur now appeared too silky for its species, eventually fell silent. Then Dex turned back to face me. “I want you to go visit that spineless bitch and ask her to explain what the hell went on in our family before I was born.”
I had to admit that the issue also intrigued me, even though I flinched at his use of such harsh terms. Nevertheless, despite realizing how much hurt this might cause our sensitive mother, I agreed with a single nod.
In Dex’s position I’d want to know about my real mother, too. That was only natural, wasn’t it? Even one as troubled as he had to sense this deep in his bones. It was what being human was about, after all: feelings of love and belonging.
10
After some further small talk, to which my brother hardly contributed with enthusiasm, I decided to leave. I’d wanted to catch up on events during the last decade—telling him about my career and Olivia and even our daughter: the kind of stuff anyone should be able to relate to a sibling (even one of mixed parentage)—but it was clear that Dex wasn’t interested. I’d also wanted to know what the nature of his ailment was, but it didn’t feel right for me to inquire.
After being asked t
o leave, I returned to the hallway, listening at the foot of the staircase and hearing more intermittent creaks and shuffling from some part of the house. The entrance lobby was so echoic that these might have emerged from any other room, but my impression that they’d come from beneath the building might simply have arisen from residual memories of this property: its kitchen outback, alongside a sizable dining room; its bedrooms and bathroom upstairs; the large rear garden walled in just as the front one was.
A newly detected aroma in the place didn’t help—a fainter scent than unbinned canine feces, but no less unpleasant; it actually smelled like aging meat—and this soon sent me back outside, where I stood for a moment on the front step, turning over in my mind all I’d learned within the space of fifteen mind-blowing minutes.
Was the truth as straightforward as my brother’s adoption certificate suggested? As a researcher, I knew better than to take information at face value, realizing that the whole story in context could often be counterintuitive, surprising in its completeness in a way it hadn’t been in fragments. My feelings about the case challenged my limited knowledge of it. Could I really believe that my mother had agreed to love and nurture another woman’s child, even if her husband had sired it?
It was troubling to speculate, and so I moved on, down the garden path toward my car visible beyond the gate. As I went, however, something stopped me, a sight I hadn’t noticed upon entry into the property’s grounds.
The piebald, muddy lawn was a mass of unruly footprints, none of them suggestive of a human dweller.
These had scraped off tufts of grass, creating scoops of upturned earth amid all the weed-strewn greenery. Some had strayed into the borders, where countless footprints—or rather, shapes reminiscent of an animal’s paws or hooves—were noticeable between winter-barren plant stalks and emaciated foliage.
I thought at first of Dex’s dog. But how could such a small terrier, however odd in appearance, have caused such deep divots? If I’d been challenged to name the creature I considered capable of making such impressions, I’d suggest a cow or a large pig. But what sense did that make?
Feeling uncomfortable, I followed these hoof markings around the front of the house, reaching the side after passing my brother’s curtained lounge window. As I’d walked on the lawn, I doubted he’d have detected me snooping from inside, and when I reached the rear, still observing those prints underfoot, I scrutinized the back garden, where grass was similarly trodden down and torn up by more traces of animal limbs. But here there was a significant difference.
Where the muddy markings eventually left the lawn, they were observable on the stone pathway leading around the house, but in only one area: in front of the rear entrance. That was when I realized my mistake.
They were human footprints, after all—at least every bit as long and wide as them—but the front parts didn’t end as they should, with nary a toe in sight, rather a cloven division. The dirt that formed each shape was uncertain, crumbling away in places, while the heels were heavy wedges, as if whatever had left behind these markings (quite recently, to judge by their moistness) had run upright in the garden and then settled after reaching here, ready to return back into the house.
Shivering in the day’s gathering cold, I hurried back to the front of the property and passed through that gate to reach my car. I glanced back once, and it was surely only imagination that made me believe that the lounge curtains had just twitched, as if someone had stood inside to peek out of the window.
I was certain that my brother wasn’t well enough to tackle even this simple task, but reluctant to entertain the possibility that someone else lived with him. Those sounds I’d detected inside had merely been the property at its usual work, housing demons I was now determined to thoroughly investigate.
11
When he was about ten years old, Dexter got interested in magic. He’d spend many hours in private, perfecting sleight-of-hand tricks, making things disappear in hats, moving items impossibly from one place to another, and even transforming objects into something quite different.
He rarely performed for anyone other than me, and then only because I’d hassled him to do so. He was my younger brother, and if he was trying to master some craft that might make him friends and admirers, I was keen to encourage him. The truth was that even back then—when I didn’t know what I knew now, while driving back to my mother’s Leeds home to ask some serious questions—I felt guilty about why Dex had received the worst excesses of our dad’s unpredictable rages.
As my car cut across the North York Moors, heading for that turning onto the A-road south, I felt nauseated while recalling my brother’s revelation earlier. I guess this was why I’d allowed myself to reflect on other aspects of Dexter’s behavior since he’d found that claw in the Dwelham woods, an item that seemed to have served as a watershed moment in his life, marking a transition from relatively positive preoccupations—such as exploring and magic—to far darker concerns, which had perturbed even modestly adventurous me.
First there were the drawings. Despite Dex’s difficulties at school—suffering regular teasing by other children, often resulting in playground squabbles and even fights—he’d shown ability in science and art, an unusual combination given the intellectual rigor involved in the first and flights of fancy in the second.
As a younger child, Dex had liked to sketch landscapes and wildlife, capturing their raw elements. This was hardly unusual for children, but unlike with most others, people never appeared in his work, as if the boy had wished them absent in all aspects of his existence. Later, after he’d discovered that claw, the things he’d drawn had become even more misanthropic—in fact, almost entirely otherworldly.
All this occurred before he took up almost permanent residence in the cellar. He’d execute most of his sketches in his bedroom, where he slept with that treasured claw under his pillow. Maybe he no longer believed it had once belonged to a dinosaur, because from that period onward, he produced lots of pencilled images of great monsters on the prowl, some occupying alien-looking landscapes, others falling from skies disturbed by strange arrangements of clouds.
The nature of these things—they certainly hadn’t belonged to any category of living creature ever discovered on earth—was imaginatively bizarre and yet strangely plausible in terms of their structures. At school I’d been studying aspects of nature and knew that entities evolving in ecological niches needed appropriate organic attributes with which to enact certain genetic imperatives. And these beasts surely possessed enough anatomical abilities to survive in even the most brutal environments.
Some boasted multiple limbs, like octopi rendered land-going but with claws instead of tentacles’ tips. Others possessed heads loaded with sensory organs, always a single mouth (however jam-packed with razor-edged teeth), but commonly more than the necessary number of eyes, as if vision cast in all directions was essential to fend off predators or—what was more likely given their huge forms—track unfortunate quarry.
Sometimes, to suggest the monsters’ sizes, Dex included features familiar to humans, maybe a great tree, a domed hillock or, in rarer cases, a residential property. Most of his beasts towered above these humdrum items, especially the houses, which looked particularly vulnerable in the presence of such awesome animals. Some nights I found myself dreaming about such entities, but eventually, after waking on the verge of a shriek, I convinced myself that Dex’s inclusion of buildings was only for illustrative purposes and that he didn’t believe anything similarly vast had ever occupied our humble planet.
But once his fad for drawing had run its obsessive course, he’d moved on to other matters, based on earlier skills he’d taught himself, all that amateur prestidigitation.
One afternoon he’d arrived in the kitchen wearing an unusual expression for him: a smile. My mum and I had been cooking, me peeling potatoes and she preparing a chicken for roasting. Dad would be home in a matter of hours, and by that stage, I think we’d all resigned ours
elves to a situation of damage limitation, lacking energy to contest his indomitable ways. Dexter had more stubbornness about him, and would often argue (for the hell of it, or so I imagined), getting Dad angry enough to whack him again with a length of rolled-up newspaper, as if masochism derived from this act actually did the boy some good.
At that early age, I had no way of understanding such a troubled mindset, but maybe now that I knew his real mother hadn’t been mine, I was finally in possession of a reason for it. Whatever the truth was, when Dex produced that item he’d almost certainly fashioned downstairs in his laboratory now masquerading as the house’s cellar, I could only imagine that he was trying to freak out the family again.
It was a hybrid vegetable, half carrot, half parsnip. Both were familiar on our dining table, since we bought most produce from the center of Dwelham, where a greengrocer kept shop near a park. But as for this orangey-white object, with a carroty tuft of greenery on one end and sharply tapering toward a pale snout, we’d never seen anything like it.
Keen to encourage my brother, Mum took the weird vegetable and boiled it in a pan after chopping. And when we all ate—including Dad—it tasted like a combination of a carrot and a parsnip, with all the sharpness of the first and the mellow texture of the second. Dad said nothing, merely wolfing down the food after a long day at work (and who knew what other activities afterward). I suspect that the strange item my brother had conjured in his underground lair had been masked by potatoes and slices of meat in succulent gravy.
But had Dexter practiced such magic? Or had he simply bamboozled me again, the way he’d performed tricks in our bedrooms, whenever I’d badgered him into revealing his new skills?
I couldn’t tell, and even felt fearful about trying to figure it out. I wondered about his motivation for such games, and found myself coming to only a single conclusion: he was fond of devilment; as the cliché ran at that time, this really floated his boat.