The House of Canted Steps

by Gary Fry

  “It’s certainly full of many coincidences,” Mark replied, but had no idea where any of this was heading. “And…what else have you found out?”

  “Well, I won’t bore you with technical stuff about what the houses are made of—other than to say that all the stone was relatively local material, mined in the northeast.” Nina flipped back in the book she was holding and stopped where she’d placed a yellow Post-it note. Then she appeared to remind herself of something. “Anyway, the construction period was unhindered by problems, and even when all the properties were marketed, there were no tales of difficulties—well, none that has been documented in this, and it’s pretty thorough.”

  Mark looked again at the book’s cover; it evoked a bygone age, the streets uncluttered by vehicles, people walking around the market square and looking sinister in appearance, dressed as they were in funereal black. But this was because it was a monochrome photo. Mark was put in mind of the color ones he’d taken of his ex-wife’s new home, and then said to his girlfriend, “I’m not looking for trouble, you know. I’d much sooner you told me that the house is the most boring place in the world.”

  Turning back to where she’d been in the book earlier, she glanced at him, and the awkward pause that followed demanded a further comment on his part.

  “But you’re not going to tell me that, are you?”

  Nina didn’t reply directly, but soon went on with similar enthusiasm to the way she’d started.

  “The first owners of the house in which Gayle and Lewis now live were a middle-aged couple who’d moved here from London. Their children were grown up and had fled the nest, and they’d been looking for somewhere to enjoy early retirement, after getting tired of fast-paced life down south. Hantley in those days wasn’t as industrial as it since became, and with the Yorkshire Dales on its doorstep, you can imagine how attractive it would be for peace-loving people.”

  “But they didn’t find peace, did they?” asked Mark, his eyes widening. “What happened?”

  His girlfriend had clearly decided not to keep him in suspense.“A grandchild died while visiting.”

  “And was this…a boy?”

  “Your ghostly Blood Boy?”

  “The thought had crossed my mind, naturally.”

  Nina shook her head. “No, I’m sorry. I suppose that’s why I’ve been looking a bit smug. I don’t mean to be. It’s just that I know you’re still not convinced that everything you’ve witnessed has a rational explanation.” She paused and smiled. “The dead child was a girl, alas. And she died outside the house, in the garden. She choked on a confection—at any rate, those are the words the author of this book uses. It happens all the time: tragic, but true.”

  Mark wasn’t sure the death of a child could be dismissed in such an offhand manner, but he’d nonetheless been relieved to hear that the youngster had been female. He also realized that Nina had no children, and as a consequence would suffer less squeamishness about their vulnerability than a parent. Still, the worst was surely now over and he could begin to relax, just as a man should after a long day at his desk. When he was about to get up to fetch food and drinks, however, his girlfriend stopped him dead.

  “There’s more,” she said, and that was when Mark’s hands began sweating along with his furrowed brow.

  “More?” he asked, with palpable unease.

  But then Nina relented in the dramatic way she’d delivered her account. “Oh, I don’t mean anything of similar grisly import. Just more about the house. Do you want to hear?”

  If further material proved as palatable as what he’d already heard, there was no harm in listening again. He nodded and perched himself on the edge of his seat, ready to make a beeline for the kitchen once his girlfriend was finished.

  “Now where was I? Oh yes. The earliest owners.” Nina reconsulted another page, read a few lines, and then continued. “The grandparents of the poor girl who died remained in the house until they passed away in old age. This would be in the late 1940s. And then another couple moved in, this one with two kids—both of them boys.”

  “Oh yes?” Mark replied, slightly distracted. He wondered whether he should phone his son to see how he’d slept last night. And he was paying only half-attention when his girlfriend finished.

  “The father’s name was George Hughes.”

  Mark looked up, now all attentiveness, perspiration and taut muscle. “George…Hughes?”

  “Yeah. Do you know the name?”

  He forced a shrug. The webpage he’d summoned on his office computer flashed briefly in his mind. Now he was very interested, but trying not to show it. “I’m…not sure,” he said, settling back again on the couch and trying to look calm, despite his breath being reduced to subaudible pants. “And what do we know about him, then?”

  Nina appeared confused by his ambiguous gestures; he must be coming across as both captivated and indifferent. She’d almost certainly realized that one attitude was authentic, the other feigned, but perhaps hadn’t figured out which was which. In any case, she quickly went on with a matter-of-fact tone.

  “I haven’t read a great deal about him yet—you came home just as I was starting. I think most of the information will be in this other book.” She picked up the second tome she’d borrowed from her library, the guide to the northern British wool industry. “Still, I do know that by the mid twentieth century, George Hughes had become a leading figure in the wool trade. Other than saying—hold on, let me quote directly…” She glanced again at the page at which she held open the book. “Other than saying, ‘He was quite a controversial character, but this need not concern us here,’ the author doesn’t say much about his personal qualities, or lack of them. But he was very successful, by all accounts. And his decision to move into the house in Nester Street—the one Justin has just bought—was because…and here I’ll quote verbatim again…was because ‘He loved his family dearly and wanted to provide a safe place for them all to live.’ ”

  Mark sat up a little. “He doesn’t sound like a controversial character at all. He sounds thoroughly decent.”

  “Well, maybe I’ll discover more when I get to the other book.”

  “And when…do you think you’ll have done that?”

  “Oh, tomorrow now, I think. I’m tired. I’ve been working, too, you know.”

  “Yes, of course. Of course you have.”

  He hesitated, glancing at the second book Nina had brought back from the library. He wondered if she’d mind if he flipped through it, but then realized how ungrateful this would appear…and worse, irrational. He wanted his girlfriend to believe that he’d accepted her interpretation of his recent experiences. In truth, there was more to it than that: he wanted to convince himself that he had. He wouldn’t even call Lewis this evening, he decided. Everything was fine at the place Mark must stop thinking of as The House of Canted Steps. If there’d been problems, the boy would have used his mobile to contact him. Mark had been fretting over nothing.

  Nevertheless, looking again at Nina, he added, “Just one more question before we eat.”

  “Go on.”

  “Does it say anything about…about George Hughes’ sons? About his two lads?”

  He’d been almost too embarrassed to ask, such was the transparent motive behind the enquiry. But Nina answered anyway; she was certainly a merciful soul.

  “Not much. Only that one of them grew up to work in the family business.”

  “And the other?”

  “There’s been no mention of him so far.”

  Mark’s next question was governed by instinct, hardly calculated at all. “By the way, what was the name of this company?”

  Before closing the book for a final time today, his girlfriend glanced at its text, read a little more, and then said, “By the 1960s, George Hughes owned several. He’d branched out into all kinds of local industry, each involving the use of wool. But most of these divisions went under the collective title Kinder—pronounced kin-der, as in kith ’n’ k
in.”

  Mark visibly blanched.

  “What’s wrong?” What’s the matter?”

  He swallowed awkwardly. “Was one of his businesses Kinder Carpets?”

  Nina dredged her memory, her eyes rolling momentarily. “Yes, I think so. Why?”

  And it was only after several long seconds that Mark replied, “That’s where my dad worked all his life. That was what killed him.”

  11

  After eating the sandwiches Nina had prepared earlier, they both decided that consulting the second book from the library couldn’t wait till the following day. But this one turned out to be disappointing. It contained just one brief passage about George Hughes and only in the context of a tedious discussion about Trade Unions and resistance to them in the early days; the man had been fiercely in opposition.

  By the time all this had been absorbed, it was after eight o’clock. On a weekday, they were usually in bed by ten or half-past at the latest. But this evening Mark didn’t feel like winding down, and when his girlfriend poured herself a gin and tonic from a makeshift drinks trolley (actually a computer desk bearing a scuffed laptop), she asked if he also fancied something to take the edge off his restlessness.

  “No, I’d better not,” he replied, and didn’t know why he’d refused, just as he’d grown confused about why she’d taken to drink. Might she be growing less sceptical about the suspicions he’d voiced the previous evening and in need of support to deal with them? For him, it was difficult enough while sober to figure out how his dad fitted into the case—if indeed he was involved—let alone under the influence of alcohol.

  But he wouldn’t push Nina on this issue. After her early experiences in life, she might need to believe that the only horrors in this world were physical or psychological torments. Adding the supernatural to this list might easily be mistaken as an attempt to diminish her trauma at the hands of an all-too-real monster.

  There was an obvious way of marshalling his anxieties, at least until tomorrow when Nina had promised to look at more material related to George Hughes: call Lewis. During the party the previous evening, Gayle had given Mark the house’s telephone number, but Mark thought it might be more reassuring to phone the boy on his mobile.

  He stood from the couch on which he and his girlfriend had been sitting, huddled together like refugees from a dangerous world. “You don’t mind if I give my son a quick call, do you?” he asked with a sheepish, almost apologetic tone.

  “Won’t he be in bed?”

  “I doubt it. Gayle was never very strict about that. I don’t think her mom and dad were firm enough with her when she was a kid.”

  If Nina was growing tired of hearing about his family, she had every right to feel that way, but on this occasion she merely smiled and nodded. He thanked her with a smile of his own and then paced across to the small table to hitch up the telephone.

  Having memorized Lewis’s number, he dialled without delay. The line crackled, as if something interfered with reception, but then gave way to a series of beeps. And that was when someone answered.

  But it wasn’t Mark’s son.

  “Hello?”

  The voice sounded older and rougher than the boy’s. Mark was initially confused. It was always the same when his expectations were scotched; he experienced a brief moment of cognitive dissonance. For a moment, he thought he’d misdialled, but then the truth struck him…and it was no less unsettling for that.

  It was Justin who’d spoken.

  Why was Gayle’s new lover answering Lewis’s phone? Didn’t the boy keep the handset about his person, private from everybody else, even his mother? But here was his future step-dad, the father of his imminent brother or sister…Despite having recently warmed to the man, Mark couldn’t help but find this situation disturbing, particularly after hearing all he had from his house’s cellar.

  But he’d been quiet for too long. He said, “Oh, hello. Is that…Justin?”

  “Yes.”

  “Ah, right. It’s Mark here.”

  “Mark?” There was an uneasy pause, but then Justin’s voice grew brighter. “God yes, sorry. Mark. Hey, I was miles away.”

  Or was he feeling guilty about something?

  But Mark pushed aside this treacherous thought, along with a savage return of all the foolish suspicions he’d entertained at the party. Then he asked, “Is Lewis there?”

  “He’s just eating burger ’n’ chips, Mark. He’s got tomato sauce all over his hands. That’s why I answered his phone. It was on the table.”

  Nina was staring at him, just as she had the previous evening after telling him about her troubled past. Her eyes were wide, coated in a fragile sheen of moisture. Then she whispered, “Is everything okay?”

  Mark offered her an uncertain upturned thumb before saying to the man on the line, “Ah, okay. And where’s Gayle this evening?”

  “She’s upstairs getting ready for bed. We have to be up early tomorrow for a final scan at the hospital. Just to make sure everything’s all right.” Then his voice became quieter, more distant. “Have you washed it all off, Lewis? Come on, hurry up—your dad’s on the phone.”

  What had this meant? Yes, of course: the boy had been running ketchup-smeared hands under the kitchen tap. Mark was familiar with the routine, and it made him sad to focus on the little things about Lewis he missed daily. But then Mark heard footsteps scamper across a tiled floor, and moments later, his son came onto the line with a burst of life.

  “Hiya, Daddy!”

  Mark felt a wave of anxiety sweep out of him, like the exorcised passage of some malignant spirit.

  “Hiya, mate! How are you?”

  “I’m all right. Justin bought me McDonald’s.”

  What, the whole company? Mark thought with acerbic speed, but then tried to be more dignified than his ex-wife often was. “That’s great. Did you save me some fries?”

  “You’re too far away!” And wasn’t that the truth, Mark reflected. Even his son’s plaintive tone appeared to acknowledge this unhappy fact. “They’d be all cold when I got them to you.”

  “Or I got them from you,” Mark reassured him, as if in code, a subtle reminder of what he’d told the boy the previous evening: that he’d come over whenever he was needed. But feeling more comfortable than he had when Justin answered the call, Mark added, “Anyway, I just thought I’d wish you a good sleep later. Did you have a good one last night, tiger?”

  “Yeah, it was okay. I didn’t have a bad dream or nothing.”

  “…or anything,” Mark heard Justin say in the background, but Mark wasn’t annoyed about that. This grammatical correction had been spoken with obvious care, and Mark realized that if he couldn’t be around to overrule some of the sloppy influence of Lewis’s school friends, he was glad someone else was.

  His son sounded edgy when he added, “ ’Night, Daddy.”

  “Yes, good night, champ.”

  What else could Mark say or do? He was here; the boy was there. The truth was dismayingly simple.

  But after hanging up, he felt less uppity, and as he and Nina turned in for bed at ten-thirty (after his girlfriend had drunk several gin-and-tonics in less than an hour), Mark believed, for the first time today, that he might get a good night’s sleep.

  “Rest well, my love,” he said as exhaustion took charge of his body.

  “Don’t wake till the sun rises,” Nina replied with a slurred tone.

  But in the event, a telephone call woke him at one a.m.

  Mark had been dreaming about happier times with a much younger Lewis, but after turning around in a park in which they played, Mark saw Nina standing beside some swings and watching them. A silent shape had lurked beside her; this had looked like a child, but then the sky had grown dark, and Mark had been unable to see it properly. But after moving towards his girlfriend for a better look, he’d heard a shriek nearby…and had then opened his eyes.

  He found himself in the bedroom of his new home. The woman beside him wasn’t G
ayle. And the telephone was ringing from the other room in the flat.

  He got up and swung his thin legs out of bed. Nina muttered something unintelligible, but he couldn’t deal with that now. He became alert. His digital clock / radio brandished red figures at his smarting eyes. It was late, early, whatever. He rushed along the hall passage, beyond the entrance to the bathroom, and then into the lounge / kitchen, where shadows clustered in every nook and hidey-hole and moonlight rendered the window a coolly indifferent observer. He snatched up the telephone and then, his mind rousing fully, realized what this disturbance might denote.

  “H-Hello?” he said, his voice disintegrated as much by half-wakefulness as fear.

  “…father…” The other voice, unmarred by static at this late hour, was little more than a raddled husk…but certainly that of a child.

  A boy.

  “Hello? Lewis? Son?”

  “…step…hurt me…touched me…”

  Then the line went dead, as if in metaphoric collusion with the person Mark had just been listening to. But that was stupid, wasn’t it? Stupid.

  He terminated the connection, rubbed his eyes. He was now properly awake. A crank caller—it had to be. He dialled 1-4-7-1 to identify the incoming phone. Waited.

  And didn’t need to hear the whole number before slinging aside the phone, retreating to the bedroom to change into clothing, ignoring his girlfriend’s drowsy request for an explanation, and then rushing out for his car.

  It had been Lewis’s mobile from which the terrified youth had contacted.

  And what ghost could ever manage that?

  12

  He was in his car and driving before realizing that he’d put on an old pair of jeans and not the suit trousers he’d worn at work that day. That meant he wasn’t carrying the spare key for his ex-wife’s house. But that wouldn’t matter. After arriving, he’d make sure the occupants knew about it and no mistake—especially him: Justin, the sick man who’d “touched” his son.