In recent years, the industrial landscape has changed, has declined and Scale Hall has changed with it, becoming a commuter town serving Lancaster as well as the larger towns of the northwest. The biggest employers in Scale Hall now are the health service and Lancaster University, and it experiences the same problems with alcohol and anti-social behaviour as any other satellite suburb of an English town. It is anonymous, bordered by other anonymously identical conurbations, a place of boredom and domesticity, and its population rarely gets above two thousand people.
Since the 1960s, 14 young children have disappeared from Scale Hall.
I have only been in the Merry House once.
Although the police didn’t call for volunteers in the search, I don’t imagine that anyone in Scale Hall didn’t look for Sandra Cahill. On that first day, with the helicopter swooping overhead and its repeated announcement about the missing little girl wearing a Torrisholme School uniform drifting down from above us like spring blossom, I suspect all of us checked the verges as we walked, looked at unaccompanied children with suspicion in our eyes, looked at accompanied children suspiciously, and the adults with them warily, and hoped to find her; I know I did. By lunchtime, ranks of black-clad police officers were walking the extended mudflats that the river exposed at low tide, whilst more of their number searched the college grounds and the Broadoak Garden Centre. By the second day, Scale Hall and the surrounding areas had been invaded by a silent, sombre army, methodically sweeping its way through the gardens and checking the outbuildings.
When she hadn’t been found after a week, it was assumed that Sandra had been kidnapped; early hopes that she had wandered off and become trapped in one of the Broadoak Garden Centre’s many sheds, or fallen and injured herself, would be found weak but alive, were fading. The police checked the entire length of the stream that runs down from the hills, sending remote cameras through the sections where it passes under roads before emptying to the Lune, and dragged the Lune estuary itself. Platoons of searchers crawled over the Salt Ayre landfill, opening bags and sending sniffer dogs across the mounds of detritus, but they found nothing.
Scale Hall doesn’t have much CCTV, but one camera in the Lancaster and Morecambe College grounds was found to have caught, in the far distance, a blurry image of a small child who might have been Sandra walking along the Torrisholme Road. She was unaccompanied, although at the edge of the image, ahead of her, a dark shape bobbed and jigged. No one who watched the film on the news seemed to be able to agree what the shape was; it was only visible for a few moments as the camera panned around, shifting and dark. Some people said it was a person dressed as a clown or a teddy bear, yet others that it didn’t resemble a person at all but a balloon on a string, or a kite. If the police had ideas about the shape, they kept them to themselves. You probably remember it, it wasn;t that long ago. What did you see, Dad? What did anyone see?
Sandra’s parents made tearful appearances on the nightly news, begging for the return of the daughter that the police were convinced had been enticed away somehow, groomed into leaving the safety of her home. They revealed that, over the days prior to her disappearance, Sandra’s parents had found her on a number of occasions staring out through the slatted bars of her garden gate, an expression of rapt attention on her face, looking along the alleyway. What, or who, she was looking at wasn’t known.
I knew Sandra, if only vaguely. She attended the same school as Ben, although she was three years older than him. Her mother was one of the women I would say hello to in the playground, her daughter a little blond thing whose hair tended to be tied in pigtails and who carried a Hello Kitty lunchbox and who always said hello to Ben and me if she was stood near us. She seemed a sweet kid, one who apparently fell off the face of the world and left few traces of her passage behind. She had simply gone into the back garden of her home after her breakfast, where her mother watched her playing before going to get organised for the day ahead. Five minutes later, when she came back, Sandra was gone and the garden gate was swinging open. Those five minutes are, I imagine, terrible and endless in her mother’s mind.
I don’t know about everyone else, but it didn’t take long before I stopped looking for Sandra as I walked Ben to school, or walked the dogs, and began to think of her as dead, rotting somewhere out of sight and smell. If I thought about her at all, it was as a poster, a flat, smiling image, and of two distraught adults who looked lost and hopeless even as they cried and said their child’s name over and over. Scale Hall and all the places around had been searched thoroughly, and she was not here; she was somewhere else, dead or as good as, in the possession of someone whose damaged personality and desires had turned them to evil, and if she was ever found it would be because that person had finished with her and discarded her. I wish I had been right; I wish that it had been a man, or death alone, that had found her.
I can’t remember who told me it was called the Merry House, or when; possibly Andy or Lynda, our neighbours, during one of our Saturday barbeques that first summer after Wendy and I moved here. I don’t suppose it matters, really. It was simply the Merry House, an abandoned bungalow I passed every time I took the dogs down the ginnel that passed between the college and a row of houses and which connected the Morecambe and Torrisholme Roads. If it stood out all, it was only because of its abandonment; the bungalows around it were neatly tended and brightly lit homes, but from behind a warping wooden panel fence, the rear of the Merry House peered out at the alleyway in solitary decay.
The Merry House stands alone, the narrow gaps between it and the homes either side shadowed and thick. There are tiles missing from the roof, although not many; just enough to create an irregular patchwork of blackness against the slate angularity. Its windows and door are covered with perforated metal sheets, bolted to the brickwork to prevent entry, and the garden, long and thin, is overgrown. A narrow path stretches between the garden gate and the rear door, the concrete slabs discoloured and stained. There are three steps up from the garden to the door, their paintwork chipped and fading. An old greenhouse sits at the bottom of the garden, most of the panes broken and the plants inside it growing wild and furious, erupting out of the gaps where missing panes should be in a riot of green and brown and stems and thorns and leaves. The dogs don’t like the Merry House, and will not walk close to its bowing fence.
The night I saw the light from inside the Merry House, Sandra Cahill had been missing just over a week.
It was only a flickering glimmer, something pale behind the punctured metal cataracts of one of the two windows. It was late, almost midnight, and I was taking the dogs on their pre-sleep walk when I saw the light, and my first instinct was to think that someone had broken into the house. As I watched, the light passed behind one window and vanished, appearing a moment later in the other, and then vanished again. I tried to go closer to the fence but the dogs resisted, pulling back and digging their feet into the muddy ground. The light reappeared behind the sheet covering the first window and seemed paler, almost translucent. I could hear nothing.
All the bungalows whose rears that look out into the alley belong to Norwood Drive, and at that time of night, the road was dark apart from the street lights. The council had recently replaced the old orange sodium lights with new LED lamps, and as I tried to find the front of the Merry House, I passed through patches of light that were like the moon’s glow made hard, but the strangest thing was, I couldn’t find what I was looking for. When I got to the point on Norwood where I judged the building’s front should be, I couldn’t see it. Instead, I saw set after set of paired bungalows, partnered and content; nowhere could I find a lone building, and none looked abandoned. Every one I passed was neat, well-tended, loved. Inhabited.
Back in the alley, I found the abandoned house easily. The light was still flickering behind the screened windows, as though a cluster of fireflies was drifting around inside the old property. I wondered about calling the police, but to tell them what? That I had seen a light? Not
even a light, but a glow? No. After everything that had happened this last week, I needed more than that, proof before calling down that army of patient, searching men and women. I tied the dogs to the college fence and walked over to the rotting gate, which was sagging out into the alley, the top hinge still holding it to the frame but the bottom long rusted away to nothing. I pulled at it, the wood damp and old against my skin, and it came open with a noise like teeth pulling from rotting gums. I managed to drag it open far enough so that I could squeeze through the gap and then I was, unknowing, stepping into a place where the skin of the world was torn, was raw and exposed and throbbing.
Light from the road and the college’s security lamps seemed distant, lay across the garden in irregular patterns. The building was larger than it looked from outside, as though peering over the fence at it had induced some odd foreshortening effect, and it was quiet, quieter even than the Scale Hall night. What sounds did reach me were muffled, as though I was hearing them through layers of cloth or from underwater. I peered back over the fence, calling a word to the dogs to calm them, and then started towards the house.
Hunched to my left, the greenhouse was a skeletal thing given tendon and muscle by the whorls and twists of plant growth within it. Green stems, fibrous and inky dark in the half light, twisted around the rusting metal struts and curled up towards the night sky. Deep inside the greenhouse itself, lost in the tangle of plants, unrecognisable shapes hung like the stilled hearts of long-dead creatures. The grass around my feet hadn’t been cut in years and was creeping in from the scabbed lawn to lie over the concrete flags that formed a path from gate to door. It was up to my knees, twisted around itself and dotted with the bobbing heads of dandelions. Here and there, taller weeds emerged from the mess, raising themselves on leaves that were large and veiny. The lawn whispered to itself as I went along the path, secretive, moving in a breeze I could not feel.
Behind the greenhouse, leaning against the side fence, were four or five old bicycles and what looked like a child’s scooter, dirty and rusting; it was impossible to tell exactly how many bikes there were, as plants and grass had grown up through the spokes and around the frames and seats, tying each of the machines to the others in a chaos of tubular metal and peeling stickers and corroding rubber. None of the bikes were large.
When I came close enough to the building to see it clearly, I realised that someone had tried to burn it in the past. Along the base of the wall there were a series of misshapen black flowers growing, smears of soot and scorch marks stretching up the brickwork. There was a bundle of partly incinerated twigs and branches against one of the marks, the pale bones of unburned wood showing though the charcoal darkness.
The light was still hovering behind the window, but closer too, it was less regular and I wondered if someone had broken in and was searching the place using a candle for illumination. Even candle-light wouldn’t account for the way the light wavered, though, not flickering so much as fading to almost nothing before struggling back up to a pale, anaemic yellow. I tried to stand on tiptoe to look through the holes in the sheet covering the window, but it was too high for me to reach, so I had to mount the steps to the door. The metal barrier was, I saw, not as solidly attached to the stonework as it appeared, and it took very little pressure to shift it along, tilting it at the bottom so that a space into the house opened up. More of the smell emerged, like opening an oven door on fish that has baked too long and yet, underneath, was something else, a smell of marshmallows; my favourite scent, and my mouth watered slightly as it tickled at my nose. The space filled briefly with the waning light, and I peered in, hoping to see something. All I needed was something concrete, I told myself, something I could ring the police about, and I could leave the Merry House and never enter its grounds again. I could go back to my dogs, my Wendy, to Ben and to my life.
There was nothing there.
Without putting my head into the hole, I could see only part of the hallway, a section of the kitchen and a little of the room that opened off the hallway opposite the kitchen. The floors were uncarpeted, the boards bare and uneven, and the far end of the hallway lost to thick shadows. The kitchen was unfurnished, the cupboards lining the walls stained with splashes of something dark, and its stylings were older, dated. From overhead, a wooden clothes airing rail hung down unevenly, the ropes that held it frayed and knotted. Cobwebs hung from the walls and dust lay across the floors, although there were streaks through it that exposed the knotholed wood below. In the corner of the kitchen, I saw another small burned patch; one cupboard door was charred across its bottom edge and warped so that it hung awkwardly, not quite fitting in the frame. In the further room, I could see a sliver of something that looked like an old sofa, brown and mottled with mould. I wondered just how long it was since someone had lived in the bungalow.
There was no light, and no noise. If the building was empty, what had I seen? Water, somewhere in one of the rooms and reflecting the light from the streetlamps? My imagination? With a last look into the house, at the sagging and grimy interior, I stood and made to leave. There was nothing here, I told myself, save darkness and night and I should go home. I began to manhandle the metal sheet back over the doorway, wincing as it cried out, the anguished wail of metal kissing stone, and then realised that under the shriek I could hear singing.
At first I thought it was a distant drunk, but it wasn’t; the voice was coming from within the house. I yanked the sheet back from the doorway, dropping to my knees in front of the gap and listening. Whoever was singing, they were crying as they sang, making the words incomprehensible. The glow increased, filling the air with that diseased yellow glimmer. I leaned my head into the hole slightly, hoping to see something, to hear more clearly, and jumped back, startled.
There was a little girl standing in the doorway of the room opposite the kitchen.
The light was coming from somewhere behind her, was surrounding her in a corona of muzzy yellow that distorted her edges, making her seem not quite there. That it was a girl was obvious; silhouette pigtails with bows tied at their ends were visible and she was singing and crying, her voice high and sweet and brittle.
“Hello,” I said, keeping my voice calm, “are you okay?” Such a stupid question, so infantile, but what else could I say? What else was there to ask? She didn’t respond except for to carry on singing, a song I knew from Ben and from my own childhood: the wheels on the bus, going round and round and round. You used to sing it to me, making those stupid swishing noises when we did the verse about the wipers, do you remember?
“Sandra?” I asked. “Sandra Cahill? Is that you? Come here, sweetie, and we’ll get you home.”
At the sound of her name, Sandra took a step forward, moving into the hallway. She was only two or three feet from the back door, from me, but I still couldn’t see her properly; the light was swallowing her, distorting her. She was singing on, crying.
“Sandra,” I said again. “Come here, and we’ll get you back to your mum and dad.” I started to squeeze in through the narrow gap, pushing against the edges of the metal sheet with my shoulders, widening the hole as best I could. The smell in the house was terrible, a kind of overheated, baking sourness, the smell of feverish sweat and sex and dampness and old saliva. I reached out a hand to Sandra, the edge of the metal digging into my side and catching on my belt, and said again, “Come here, sweetie, and we’ll get you home.” She took another step, finally moving out of the grasp of the light that came from behind her, and her face emerged into the pale shadows, and I screamed.
Sandra’s mouth was almost sealed, strings of peeling skin that looked like parchment stretching between her lips, and her eyes were milky and wide, blind. Something had spilled from her nose and dried to a crusted, cracking black and her hair was matted and limp across her forehead. More blackness spilled from her mouth as she sang, rivulets dribbling down her chin and onto her chest and folded arms; it stank, and I realised that the smell in the house was coming, at lea
st in part, from her. She was bathed in the odour, as though she had rolled in loose and watery bowel movements and then let it dry against her skin. “Sandra,” I managed to say, reaching out with one hand to her, encouraging her to keep moving. Whatever had happened to her, whoever had done it, we had to get away from this place now.
She took another step, stumbled, looked towards me with pallid, dried-milk eyes, and then stopped singing. “It was such a pretty thing, and I just wanted to see it,” she whispered, “and now it won’t let me go. Why won’t it let me go?” Her voice was thick, gluey with barely repressed pain and misery. “I want my mummy,” she said and took another step, was almost within reach, and then she jerked violently. I lunged, grasped at her and missed as she jerked again, fell and was dragged backwards across the hallways and through the door. The glow brightened, drew her in, and from behind me I heard my dogs bark frenziedly. I think I may have screamed again then; I’m not sure. Somewhere nearby, as if in descant to the dogs, a cat began to howl.
Sandra cried out, shrieked, and then began singing again, the wheels on the bus still going round and round and round like a mantra set against an awfulness I could only imagine. I thrashed, dragging my belt loose from the metal sheet and pulling myself into the Merry House, scrambling across the floor. The dust felt greasy on my hands, the boards rough under it, and splinters worked their way into my palms and fingers. I pulled out my mobile phone, but there was no signal and I cursed it and tried dialling the police anyway, cursing again when it didn’t work. I wanted to stop, to go back and call from outside, but I couldn’t. The memory of Sandra’s face, of the black liquid spattering from her mouth amid the stink of corruption, and the miserable singing from somewhere in the house drew me on.
Lovecraft eZine Megapack - 2012 - Issues 10 through 20 Page 19