Invaders From Beyond

by Colin Sinclair

  Hal assured her he could.

  HAL ONLY HAD a name and a date to work with: Jenkinson and 1938, the year Quarry Hill was opened. He wound up the microfilm Rose had found and took it back to its shelf, returning with boxes covering 1938. He loaded the most recent of the films into the machine and started working back.

  It was slow going. Hal wasn’t sure if the opening of the estate would make front page news, so tried to scan every page as it went by. He could feel himself getting hot and sweating under the coat, but his skin was clammy; his fever was coming back. But he wasn’t sure when he’d get another chance to steal into the archive, so he carried on.

  After an hour, the pages started to blur, but Hal was sure he was getting close. The letters pages in the July papers made mention of the estate, some people calling it a concrete monstrosity, others that it was modern and elegant. As he moved into June he found it: First Residents Move into Quarry Hill Estate.

  The image heading the article was of a long queue of people carrying bundles and boxes, presumably waiting in line to be assigned their flats. Another image showed a group of people framed under the Oastler arch. Everyone in the group was dressed smartly; the man in the centre wore robes and a large ceremonial chain about his neck. To his left was a man in a black clerical gown and dog collar. Hal read their names in the caption: Rev. Charles Jenkinson, Rowland Winn (Lord Mayor of Leeds), R. A. H. Livett (Architect).

  That must be him, Hal thought, recognising the name Mr Foster couldn’t remember: Livett. He was a lean man with a thin moustache, dressed in a sharp wool suit. Hal read through the article, but didn’t find much that he didn’t already know. One thing that stood out was a brief note about Livett, saying he ‘often graced the Yorkshire Evening Post’s letter pages.’

  Hal unwound the microfilm and returned it to its shelf in the archive. It was getting late; he had to get home before his mum missed him. On the way out, he knocked on the window of the study room where Rose was working and waved goodbye.

  HAL GOT HOME an hour before his mum and went straight to bed. He could feel his fever returning, but he was set on going back to the archive the next day. He was close, he knew it. Somewhere in those newspapers, he’d learn where the Farreter came from.

  THE NEXT DAY, Hal got up after his mum left for work and again made his way to the University. He worked back through the newspaper archive, picking through the years of the estate’s construction, for stories about Quarry Hill’s development and in the hope of finding one of Livett’s letters. He read of delays to the project, the hopes of Leeds Housing Council; he found a letter of Jenkinson’s talking about the poor conditions in the slums and the need for modern social housing. But nothing that answered his questions.

  He returned the day after, and the day after that, sneaking past the watchful receptionists and keen-eyed librarians each time. Sometimes he’d run into Rose, who took to calling Hal her ‘little historian.’ If he was entirely truthful with himself, he’d be getting through the archive faster if he spent less time talking to her.

  In the second week of his search, as he was giving up hope of finding anything, he came across a letter of Livett’s in 1933. Livett had recently been appointed Housing Director of Leeds (with the help of Rev. Jenkinson, according to other articles in the paper) and he talked about his plans to design estates to rehome thousands of Leeds’ poorest people, taking them out of slum living and into the modern age. That wasn’t what caught Hal’s attention, though: according to the letter, Livett and Jenkinson had recently returned from a visit to the Karl-Marx-Hof housing estate in Vienna. This was it, Hal realised.

  “Found anything interesting, little historian?” Rose asked from the door of the study room. He hadn’t even heard her come in.

  “I have,” Hal began. Over the weeks he had told her a little about what he was up to. He’d left out the Farreter, of course, saying he was interested in his home and its history. “Quarry Hill’s architect...”

  “Livett?”

  “Yeah, him. He travelled to Vienna. Apparently, the estate’s inspired by something called the Karl-Marx-Hof.”

  “That’s good?”

  “It is, but I don’t know. I want to know more about it, and I won’t find that in these papers.”

  “Why don’t you talk to someone who lived there?”

  “How would I even begin to do that?” Hal asked.

  “Hal, you’re in a university. There are thousands of people above you, who between them have links to every major city in the world. One link to start you off, though: my boyfriend. Steve studies architecture here. He can ask a lecturer, if you want?”

  Hal wasn’t keen to include more people, but he agreed. He wrote a letter Steve could forward on, wording it carefully, saying he had met a member of the Farreter family here in Leeds and believed they had once lived in Vienna. He asked for any information about how they came to move to England. Hopefully it would mean nothing to the wrong recipient and everything to the right one. He folded the letter and left it with Rose.

  11

  HAL WAS WRETCHED. Since coming home from the archive, he’d been lying in bed with a fever. He didn’t want his mum to come down on him—she already knew he’d been leaving the house—so he did his best to hide his illness from her.

  He was woken on Sunday morning by a knock at his door. His mum stuck her head in, telling him to dress smartly, they were going to Eli’s parents’ home for lunch. Hal washed and dressed in his best shirt and trousers and come out of his room to find the flat smelled of baking; his mum had been up early to make a lemon drizzle cake to take with them. The sweet smell made Hal nauseous.

  They took the bus north, out to Leylands, leaving the concrete city behind them as they travelled deep into the red brick terrace rows Hal had looked out over all those weeks ago. The terrace houses were all virtually identical in design, but didn’t have the uniformity of the flats at the estate: the gardens were tended differently, with colourful flowerbeds or high hedges, and many were cleared altogether so families could hang out washing or sit out in sun loungers. Being a Sunday, many families were outdoors, gardening, relaxing, or talking to their neighbours over the thin fences.

  Hal was mesmerised by the lively streets, only coming out of his stupor when his mum tugged at his arm to get off the bus. They walked up the road, his mum counting off the numbers. There was a nervous excitement to her that morning; she had straightened his collar twice already on the bus, and she kept readjusting her pastel green dress.

  At length, she led Hal up to a house with a blue door. She knocked, turning to check Hal’s shirt a third time.

  Eli opened the door and greeted Hal’s mum with a warm embrace. “Patricia, you’re right on time.” Turning to Hal, he said, “Let me take that,” and took the cake from Hal’s hands. He ushered them both to go inside, a hand on Hal’s back.

  The doorway led into a narrow hallway, where Eli’s parents were waiting to be introduced. “Patricia, Hal, these are my mum and dad, Ruth and Daniel,” Eli said. Ruth and Daniel embraced Hal’s mum, Daniel kissing her on each cheek.

  “So wonderful to meet you,” Daniel said and, to Hal, “My son tells me you’ve been up to all sorts of mischief.” A great smile broke over his face. “I heartily approve.”

  Hal and his mum were led into the living room, where the adults quickly got into small talk about how Hal’s mum was finding Leeds, the new flat, and her job at the university. Hal listened to the conversation, but his mind drifted off to thoughts of the Karl-Marx-Hof and hopes for his letter. No one seemed to notice; the focus was all on his mum.

  Over lunch, Hal continued to turn over plans for his next steps. He was close to learning the origins of the Farreter, but he still wanted to talk to Goan and find out what he had done wrong in saving his life—why the leader had called Goan a ‘radical.’

  “My son tells me you like his stories. I read them to him when he was a boy.”

  Hal looked up at Eli’s father, Daniel.
>
  “Which is your favourite?”

  Hal was surprised at the direct question, but didn’t hesitate. “The Golem.”

  “Ah, I think that may be the favourite of every Jewish boy across the world. I know it was mine, and I remember Eli pretending to be a golem when he was younger than you.”

  “Is it… is it real?” Hal asked.

  “No one can say for sure; no one living, at least,” Daniel replied. “I’ll tell you this, though. It is said that after the Golem in Prague had done its duty and protected the Jews from the blood libel, Rabbi Liva ordered the creature to climb the ladder into the attic of the Old New Synagogue. He then ordered the creature to lay down and sleep while he, his son, and his student undid the spell they had cast to animate its clay body. Since that day, no one has been allowed up there. Some believe that the Golem is still there, waiting to wake and protect the Jews when it is needed again.”

  “And no one has been up since?”

  “Well, there are stories that during the war a Nazi agent climbed up the ladder to the attic. Nobody knows why; maybe they were looking for valuables, or they had heard the legend of the Golem and wanted to see if it existed. The story goes that his body was found in the street before the temple with its skull bashed in.”

  “The Golem?”

  “No one knows. What I do know is that the Old New Synagogue is still there today and people are still not allowed to go into the attic.”

  Sitting on his mind was what the leader of the Farreter had called him in the room under Quarry Hill.

  “Are all golems made out of clay?”

  “An interesting question.” He turned to look up the table. “Eli, we may have a khokem in our midst.” Turning back to Hal, he continued, “In all the stories I have read, a golem is made of mud or clay. But there are also writings that suggest Adam was a golem, before God breathed life into him. Either this is because he was formed of clay and changed into flesh, or that any man without a soul is a golem. The word itself simply means ‘raw’ or ‘unfinished.’ Though now, it has become something of a cruel term—meaning someone is stupid or doesn’t think for themselves.”

  Hal and Daniel spent all of the lunch talking about Jewish myths, even Eli joined in to point out Jewish creatures in modern books and films. “Frankenstein’s monster is like a golem,” he said. “Though it’s a perversion of the story: the raw creature Frankenstein creates becomes murderous and self-commanding.” He claimed also that The Wolf Man, a horror film released in the ’40s, was in part based on the werewolf story he had read Hal when he was ill. “In that, the victims of the creature are marked with a star,” he added.

  When Hal wasn’t lost in conversation, he sat back in his chair and looked around the table. Ruth would keep adding food to their plates; Eli would try and stop her, but she would always find a moment when he wasn’t looking to sneak him another potato. Daniel had clearly learned it was a futile fight and would offer up his plate whenever she caught his eye.

  It was his mum he watched most intently. Here, with Eli, she looked relaxed; Hal tried to think of a better word for it, but he realised that for months—longer even, years, since before his father died—there had been a tension to his mum that he hadn’t seen until now, when it was gone. It filled him with troubled joy; he was happy to see her like this, but it also made him recognise the same tension within himself.

  12

  HAL AND HIS mum were walking back to their flat. They had talked the whole bus journey home, recounting conversations from lunch, and she pointed out all the nice things about Eli’s family home. Now, conversation spent, they walked in happy silence. Hal recognised that in this short month his feelings towards the new man in his mum’s life had reversed.

  They climbed the stairs to their floor and stepped into the hallway to their flat.

  “Have you seen Shahid?”

  Shahid’s mum stood outside their door, tugging nervously at her dress.

  “Please, tell me you were with him,” she said desperately.

  Hal’s mum explained they hadn’t.

  “He’s not come home. No one’s seen him since he went out this morning.” The panic rang in her words. “Is there anywhere the two of you go?”

  “Have you been back on the roof?” Hal’s mum asked him.

  “I… I haven’t, not since… he had been, I think.”

  The three of them went back to Shahid’s flat. His father pulled the door open as soon as he heard the key in the lock. “Shahid?”

  Hal’s mum offered to wait in their house while they went out looking, and Hal and Shahid’s parents started searching the estate. They knocked on doors as they went, and other parents joined them in the search. It was dark now; many of them brought out flashlights. Hal woke up Mr Foster and got the keys to the roof from his kitchen; he and Shahid’s father went to check, but he wasn’t there.

  From the top of Jackson House, they could see the different search parties sweeping the grounds by torchlight. Someone must have called the police; a pair of cars with blue lights flashing drove through the arch and through the estate towards them. The searchers cast long monstrous shadows in the chaotic light.

  “They’ll find him,” Shahid’s father was saying to himself. “They’ll find him.”

  When Hal returned to the flat, a policeman was asking Shahid’s mum questions.

  “This is his friend, Hal. He may know,” Shahid’s mum said when Hal came in.

  “Hal, is it?” The officer turned to him. “I’ve some questions for you. Don’t worry, you won’t be in trouble, but I need you to answer honestly. Is there anywhere the two of you go that you shouldn’t? Your mum told us about the roof already.”

  Hal tried to think of everywhere the two of them had hung out over the summer. He told them Shahid knew how to get into unoccupied flats, and about the flat they’d climbed through to get to the room—their parents still thought they jimmied the roof access door. The only place he didn’t dare mention was the boiler room, Shahid wouldn’t go there, and he didn’t know if the Farreter would be able to hide from a search.

  “And is there anyone, anyone Shahid has mentioned that was suspicious?” the officer asked.

  “Yes!” Shahid’s mother exclaimed. “The rag and bone man.”

  “You bothered him,” Hal’s mum added. “You two followed him and he complained about you to Mr Foster.”

  Hal’s heart sank as he saw the direction of the investigation turn.

  “No,” he said loudly. “No, we apologised to him.” Then he remembered: “There was someone. On the first day we met, Shahid mentioned someone used to watch him from their flat in Moynihan house. I never saw them, but... maybe that’s—”

  “Which flat?” the officer asked, calling his partner over from the kitchen, where he had been talking to Shahid’s father.

  Hal didn’t know the number, but Shahid had pointed out the window.

  “Show us.” Hal led the officers through the estate. As they neared Moynihan, he pointed to one of the ground floor windows overlooking the playground. They told him to stay where he was. Hal’s mother stood behind him, her hands on his shoulders protectively.

  The police sprinted over the courtyard and one of them beat on the door with his fist while the other flashed his light through the living room window. They shouted through the letterbox. No one answered.

  It took an hour for the warrant to be signed and delivered. The police kicked in the door the moment it arrived. Hal later learned the flat was a squat. No furniture, and not much of anything else, although it seemed as though someone had packed in a hurry. Shahid wasn’t in the flat, but they found his camera, the film missing.

  When the officers told Shahid’s parents, Hal could hear it across the courtyard. He listened to them wailing into the night, his room bathed in cold blue light from the police cars below, flashing with the regularity of a pulse.

  At first, they hoped the man who lived at No. 12—Charles Taylor—had taken Shahid with him
. A vile hope, but the alternative was worse.

  But in the morning, police found Shahid’s drowned body in Meanwood Beck, about a mile north of the estate.

  THE DAYS FOLLOWING Shahid’s murder were a confusion of activity and stillness. Hal was questioned and re-questioned by the police, who’d become a constant presence on the estate, but all other life in Quarry Hill seemed frozen. Parents kept their children inside and peeked out through the curtains to watch the officers. Hal’s mum sat in the living room listening to the radio, and he stayed in his room trying to make sense of what had happened.

  Hal tried to visit Shahid’s parents. He didn’t know what he wanted to say, but he felt he had to say something to them, explain he had no part in what had happened, even though it was clear already he hadn’t. They never opened their door to him, though. Maybe they were out, but he hadn’t seen them leave the flat in days and police officers would often go in.

  The newspapers led with stories of the manhunt for Charles Taylor. Hal read them all, thinking about how they’d soon be printed on microfilm and stored down in the cold archive, the world’s only recollection of his friend.

  On the fifth day, the papers revealed that the police had finally found him, sleeping under an overpass outside Birmingham. Taylor—who the papers described as ‘troubled,’—confessed to the murder, but the same article that pronounced his guilt convinced Hal it wasn’t the right man.

  It was a double-spread, charting the progress of the investigation. The papers had been using the same images for days, but there was one in this piece that Hal hadn’t seen before. A policeman stood up to his thighs in the stream where they found Shahid’s body. The photo was taken at night, the man framed by lights downstream of the crime scene. Hal stared at the image. He knew he had seen the place before. For months he’d been trying to picture this place, and now it finally fell into place: when Goan saved him from the fall. He had seen this stream, seen Goan’s long white arms holding Shahid under the dark water.