The House of Canted Steps

by Gary Fry

  It was a cross denoting a gravestone, and the two adults were lowering a dead baby towards it.

  Mark brought up his hands, but not to shield his eyes from this disturbing sight. He’d just noticed that his fingers still bore streaks of red from the phone in his son’s room. Then, intuition guiding the action, he licked this.

  It wasn’t sweet like ketchup. It tasted coppery, sulphurous.

  It was blood.

  13

  Mark took a long route home to clear his mind of so many bewildering concerns.

  It was two a.m. and the streets were almost deserted. The only exceptions were a number of drunks staggering along pavements, dressed in disordered clothing and carrying half-empty bottles of bronze-colored liquid. Mark wondered where these men had come from. Had they once been guys like him—worthily employed, married with kids—who’d reached a point in their lives at which they could no longer cope? He wondered whether mental health issues had played a part in their respective downfalls.

  Surely nothing was wrong with his mind, however. He’d been brought up in a secure family and had enjoyed a stable childhood. Okay, so he hadn’t always got along with his dad, but there’d never been any serious familial rancor to endure. His mom loved him dearly, despite her natural possessiveness. But none of this was a reason to worry about his psychological well-being, was it?

  Steering his car into an unfamiliar lane, however, Mark realized what his subconscious was up to. He’d come the way of his parents’ bungalow, the place still occupied by his mother and where his father had enjoyed a precious few months after early retirement, before a lung disease had mercilessly claimed him.

  His dead dad…who’d worked for George Hughes…who’d once owned The House of Canted Steps…where Mark’s son now lived and experienced supernatural episodes…just as Mark had last night when he’d seen his dead dad in its garden.

  Everything was perversely interconnected. He recalled a phrase he’d once heard about all roads leading to Rome. But in this case, that wasn’t true: they led to Nester Street, to that crazy property that, no matter how much Nina contested the fact, Mark could no longer deny was haunted by something. He was unsure about its ghosts’ nature, or even whether what inhabited it were ghosts. But he knew with intuitive certainty—as he’d always known, since first visiting Eric Johnson—that the place was bad…and that it wanted something from either him or his innocent son.

  But was that true? Lewis had been troubled by someone he’d called The Blood Boy, and so had the boy who’d previously occupied the building—Eric’s son, who was a similar age. But what about the image Mark had erased from his windshield tonight? That had involved a dead child, certainly not the first to suffer in that house. Mark’s girlfriend had told him about another youngster, who’d “choked on a confection” nearly a hundred years ago. Nina had claimed the property couldn’t be involved in this episode, because it had happened outside…but did the building’s influence extend to its grounds? Indeed, something had got inside Mark’s car parked out in the street. And so was the house’s power spreading? Like George Hughes’ multiple businesses, might it one day reach the whole of Hantley?

  But Mark knew he was getting carried away. Better to stick to the facts, such as they were. By now, he’d reached his mom’s street, and without fear of being spotted, he pulled up in front of her bungalow, let his engine idle, and started thinking again.

  Who was The Blood Boy?

  It was clear that this spook had contacted him by phone tonight, trying to make him to believe something terrible about his ex-wife’s new lover. But why? Despite the insane context in which he was asking this question, Mark realized it was the one he needed answering most.

  He mustn’t forget the stories Eric Johnson had told him, either. The disturbances experienced by the previous owner’s family had initially seemed pernicious, but hadn’t they culminated in a benevolent act by at least one ghost? Yes, Mrs. Johnson’s late mother had returned to warn of an impending accident: the boy falling from the window in what was now Lewis’s room.

  And so here was Mark’s problem: why would the house or whatever it harbored kill one child and yet save another? Indeed, was there a connection between the dead grandmother who’d visited its previous occupants and the faces Mark had spotted in the photo he’d taken of the property—those of Gayle’s parents?

  Just what was going on in The House of Canted Steps?

  Something stirred at the back of Mark’s mind: an insight, a link, a suspicion—call it what he would, it simultaneously appeared meaningful and failed to coalesce. Then all he could do was gaze at his mother’s bungalow, at the curtains hanging in each window, and think: Why did I come here? Was my mind trying to communicate something? Am I supposed to go inside and ask what my dad’s connection was to George Hughes?

  But Mark didn’t dare pursue this line of enquiry. He felt that by doing so, he’d be opening a can of worms so rancid that each tenant would look as if it had feasted hard upon his father’s long-buried corpse…

  This image disturbed him, and he quickly put the car back in gear, let out the clutch, and accelerated for home. Even the necessity of protecting his son failed to lend him enough courage to confront a secret that might render his posthumous relationship with his father unthinkably terrifying.

  14

  When he got back home, Nina was awake and waiting in the lounge. She’d poured herself another alcoholic beverage and was sitting in front of the computer desk on which she’d stationed her laptop after first moving into the flat. Once he entered, she glanced up, clearly troubled, if not angry.

  “Where the hell have you been?” she asked, and Mark felt as if he deserved every bit of the chilly rebuke.

  After dropping his car keys on the couch and moving towards his girlfriend, all he could say was, “I’m sorry about that, love. I didn’t expect you to be up when I got back.”

  “Well, I am. Now where’ve you been?”

  He tried lending the interrogation a little humor. “It’s okay. The only other woman you need to worry about is Gayle.” But as that didn’t go down well—his girlfriend’s expression remained firm and unblinking—he went on more seriously. “That’s where I was: at her house. I got a call earlier from Lewis. He…sounded distressed.”

  Nina’s taut body language settled, but she sipped from her drink before replying. “Ah, I see. Another bad dream? Is he okay?”

  “Something of the sort. And yes, he’s fine now.” To evade further enquiry, Mark glanced at the screen his girlfriend had summoned on the PC, which looked like a catalogue page from the library’s website. “Anyway, what are you up to? Still revising for your exam? It’s a bit late for that, isn’t it?”

  “I couldn’t get back to sleep after you left. I’m feeling a bit…unwell, to be honest. I must have picked up something in the town—a bug or some such.” She sniffed and consumed more alcohol. “Anyway, I think you’ll agree that I’ve used the time well. I’ve made some more progress on your mystery.”

  Despite his exhaustion, Mark was intrigued. Even concern about whatever ailment Nina might be suffering was set aside in his mind. If she had more information to relate about the house in Nester Street, he must know what it was. He sat on one arm of the couch and clamped his hands to his knees. “I won’t deny that I’m intrigued. Please go on.”

  She mustn’t have detected the tremor in his voice. Perhaps the pain she now experienced in her stomach compromised her usual keen perception. But after rubbing a spot above her waist, she was back to her former sharp self.

  “You were right in a sense, Mark. This is the kind of stuff I’ll have to tackle in my librarianship exam: accessing online archives, searching electronically configured microfiches, and other similar tricks. Actually, it’s all a doddle, you know.”

  She looked sheepish, as if she’d just lapsed into pride or some other shameful emotion. But in light of all she’d revealed last night, Mark was pleased to witness such self-respect and he
encouraged her to continue with a smile.

  She consented at once.

  “Okay, the first thing I discovered is an amendment to what I told you earlier.”

  “Oh yes?”

  “You remember I mentioned that older couple—the one whose granddaughter had died?”

  “Of course I do.”

  “Well,” Nina told him, her eyes glistening in low light from her screen, “that wasn’t their granddaughter.”

  Mark sat forward, almost slipping off the couch’s arm. He didn’t need to speak to prompt his girlfriend to continue.

  “Not strictly speaking, anyway,” she continued, her voice keenly animated. “In fact, you might call her their pseudo-granddaughter, if such a term exists. Everyone thought she’d been fathered by one of the couple’s sons, who’d grown up in London and left home before his parents’ move north. This was what the man in question also believed, but after his wife confessed to an affair early in their marriage, he realized he wasn’t the girl’s biological dad. But by then, the child had grown attached to the couple who later lived in the house in Nester Street and they didn’t stop seeing her. Indeed, she was visiting them when…well, when it happened.”

  “Choked on a confection,” Mark said, trying to figure out how this latest twist related to the unfolding story of The House of Canted Steps. Had the girl’s illegitimate status been known to the property? Mark could hardly believe he was asking such a ridiculous question, but the issue demanded such enquiry. He shouldn’t doubt his intuition any more. He looked back at his girlfriend. “How did you find out about this?”

  She smiled, again with a sense of personal worthiness. “Oh, from old newspaper reports, mainly. The library has digitized copies of the Hantley Gazette going back to the late nineteenth century. I just used a powerful search engine—it’s all pretty straightforward, really.”

  Mark was impressed by her ability to root out such information. Becoming excited, he asked, “Did you discover anything more about the house prior to this episode? What about the guy who constructed it and all the others in Nester Street—Miller, wasn’t he called? Something Miller?”

  “That would be Edward Miller, the man who went on to become the local MP in the twenties.” Nina paused to consult a few notes she’d jotted in a spiral-bound pad. “Ah yes, I did learn that he’d been known for authoritarian attitudes. Sign of the times, I guess. He was elected after a campaign focusing on Britishness, on tradition, on Empire—you know, the usual right-wing claptrap.” She glanced back at Mark. “Still, that’s irrelevant, isn’t it? After all, there were no children involved in his story. And what we…er, I mean, what you really want to know is what happened afterwards, with George Hughes and his family.”

  Mark nodded, but wondered whether facts about the house’s builder were indeed negligible. If he was also involved, however, Mark was unable to figure out how. In any case, he was too busy reflecting on his girlfriend’s linguistic error a moment earlier: she’d said “we” and had then changed that to “you.” The slip had definitely been Freudian, even if nothing else in this case was. Perhaps Nina was finally admitting there was more to this story than mere aberrant psychology. Was that why she was still awake, drinking liquor and searching for more clues? Was she starting to believe what he believed—that the property in Nester Street was haunted?

  Mark couldn’t decide if this conclusion made more sense than Nina feeling awkward about all she’d revealed last night and trying to focus on other problems. Realizing it would be unwise to pursue the issue, he listened carefully as his girlfriend revealed more new findings.

  “Now,” she said, flipping the pages on her laptop’s screen, “now we get to the juicy stuff.”

  Mark said nothing, his heart racing at an almost intolerable speed.

  “It relates to when George Hughes, his wife, and two sons moved into the house.” Nina hesitated, drank again from her glass, and then began unpacking her opening statement. “I’ve reviewed countless editions of the newspaper from the 1940s through to the turn of the century. That was how long the family stayed there. And it makes for interesting reading, I can tell you.”

  “I’m all ears.”

  “Oh, I wouldn’t say that,” she replied, smiling widely, despite the late hour and the situation’s seriousness. “Your nose is pretty conspicuous, too.”

  He laughed, much-needed comedy relief. And when his girlfriend responded with a tipsy gesture, he wiggled his fingers behind his earlobes, making them flap like antennae. The hair behind one felt a bit wet; it was probably just perspiration from all his frantic activities tonight.

  “Right.” Clearing the air of playfulness, Nina got back to business. “George Hughes was fiercely devoted to his family, as I think I mentioned earlier. He rarely turned up for public events without his wife and kids, and he was in frequent demand, many of which were documented in the newspaper. He sounds wonderful, doesn’t he? But it’s only when you consider other material that you realize this surface virtue was compromised by hypocrisy.”

  “How do you mean?”

  “Well, for one thing, he didn’t extend such inclusive principles to staff working for him.”

  “Hey, tell me about it,” Mark replied, thinking about the way his dad had died, his lungs full of carpet fibers. But his acerbic tone didn’t distract his girlfriend from her narration.

  “He held no truck, for instance, with the Trade Unions, which grew strong in the north of England after the Second World War. In fact, he was violently opposed to them. There was a public debate in the sixties about how he could care so much for his children while so many workers struggled in his factories. And here was his typically blunt riposte…”—Nina turned and read from the screen—“ ‘Money comes and goes; blood is permanent.’ ”

  Blood…The Blood Boy…George Hughes had had two sons. One had grown up to work for the company…but what had happened to the other?

  Mark realized that if the businessman had had a negative attitude towards staff, his own dad would have suffered. What was the connection between this tyrant and Mark’s family? Maybe he’d learn more after listening to what his girlfriend had to add, possibly about the man’s family life. Indeed, she quickly continued.

  “A journalist with the Hantley Gazette at the time was politically left-leaning and began speculating about the Hughes house. You know that old link between one’s home and one’s family, how a person can belong to both a physical house and a metaphorical house in the form of a family. For example, you, Mark, are son of the house of Cookson. And I’m…well, I’m daughter of the house of…Porter.”

  Although he’d known Nina’s surname, he’d rarely heard her use it in conversation. He now understood such reticence, of course, as well as the awkwardness with which she’d just expressed it. As Mark looked at her sympathetically, she experienced another twinge in her belly and took a large slurp from her drink. Then she went on with renewed haste.

  “This journalist dubbed the Hughes residence ‘The House of Blood.’ I imagine what he meant was that it had come to symbolically represent the man’s familial favoritism. His factories and mills were regarded as houses of blood in quite another sense—in a literal way, I guess, as many workers suffered accidents with no compensation. Another dubious episode occurred in the early ’70s, when a vacancy arose on the board of directors and went to the elder son without interview. The Unions were outraged, and the case made front-page headlines for a week. But what could anyone do? It was George Hughes’ enterprise. He could do what he liked, and the truth was that he did.”

  Mark was beginning to understand what a monster the man had been, but another issue troubled him, one unrelated to any newspaper report. “You keep mentioning just one of the children. What happened to his brother, the younger son? Do your sources say anything about him?”

  He’s The Blood Boy, I simply know it, thought Mark. Lewis had said that the ghostly entity had drawn redness from the house, and not from himself; it all fit the evid
ence relating to The House of Blood…

  But Mark only listened again as his girlfriend went on.

  “I’m just getting to him.” She paused and switched pages on her laptop again. “I think I’ve discovered the identity of whatever was troubling the boy who lived in the property before Gayle and Justin moved in…and the source of your son’s nightmares.”

  “Go on.” He spoke urgently, his eyes unblinking.

  Nina nodded and then said in a matter-of-fact voice, “The second Hughes child died. And he was inside the building when it happened.”

  “How did he die?”

  “He fell out of his bedroom window one night.”

  “Fell out of a window? And was it…murder?”

  “An official enquiry declared it to be an accident.”

  “But you see the connection, don’t you? Between the dream that Eric Johnson’s wife suffered and…this episode?”

  Mark hesitated, thinking fast. He recalled Eric’s tale about his wife waking in the middle of the night and imagining her long-dead mother standing at the foot of her bed, the older woman revealing that her son was about to fall from his bedroom window. And this had turned out to be true, hadn’t it? But why had the house saved that boy and killed another years earlier in an identical scenario? That was provided of course that the building had committed this previous deed…

  Mark began speaking in a rhetorical manner. “What’s the property trying to do? This should all make sense, but…I’m damned if I can figure out how.”

  His girlfriend certainly appeared less willing to rule out a supernatural explanation, but nonetheless clung to her former scepticism. “Hold on, Mark. I don’t think we should rush to sloppy conclusions.”

  As she took up her drink again—this time gulping from the glass—Mark raised his hands to his head to facilitate concentration. But it was no good: the facts refused to coalesce into a meaningful whole. Then he dropped his arms…and noticed that his fingers bore more of the blood from his son’s mobile.