by Gary Fry
At the foot of the stairs, he looked around for a telephone. But there was none. Another passageway ran off to his right, and to the left stood a large, stone-floored kitchen whose heavy wooden door was wide open. Daryl paced that way at once, his mind still lurching back and forth, making his vision stir and sounds grow distorted. But as he entered the new room, he saw nothing untoward, nor heard anything at all. The big stone house stood motionless and silent, like some creepy old church.
In the kitchen, he noticed all the usual conveniences: a sink unit, fridge, oven, washing machine. This reassuringly domestic scene tempered the low-grade anxiety lurking inside him. Indeed, while observing a rack of butcher’s knives screwed to one wall—one of these blades was missing, he noticed with only semiconscious attention—he began to wonder what had happened to that village from which he’d recently fled. As the large woman had hauled Daryl back to her lair, just where had that attractive girl and her bizarre fellow residents gone?
A renewed sliver of unease prising underneath his rigorously organized psyche, Daryl turned to look back the way he’d come, out into the hallway.
And that was when he noticed the door beneath the building’s staircase.
The deathly silence now grew even more ruthless, turning every inch of Daryl’s flesh to goose-pimples. Nevertheless, as he approached the new entrance and reached for the handle to access what was surely a cellar, he tried to suppress the implications of what, at some level, he knew awaited him beneath this house.
Still dizzy and disoriented, he yanked open the door.
Inside was pitch-dark, multiple shadows squirming in the corners of his vision. His hands grappled against the walls—each was stone-cold and layered with delicate spiderwebs—until his fingers chanced on something hard and square: a switch.
Daryl, his face moist with perspiration, drew a deep breath before flicking on the cellar’s light. He was in terrible trouble here, he realized with a vague sense of foresight, and then pictured, deep in his mind, the creature he’d seen lurching across that field earlier, whose outrageously large limbs and hideous travesty of a face had denoted something far worse than what was merely bestial.
Then he switched on the light.
The bodies of the two young men—exactly what he’d expected to find in such an undisciplined home as this—lay on the stone floor of the cellar, each a mass of bright red liquid. Their throats had been torn open by some tool that surely boasted a lethally straight edge, but that was far from the worst of their injuries. The girl in the village had revealed so much about the other victim, the third young man who’d gone missing from there, but not the most horrifying fact.
Daryl looked down at the corpses beneath him, scarcely believing what he could see in the cold, naked light from the cellar’s solitary bulb on a wire. The boys’ killer had severed their penises and pushed them deep into their mouths, the bloodied stems parting their lips as if this were a snuff movie scene too strong even for the most undisciplined viewer to watch.
He backed away, his stomach retching on emptiness. He now knew—if indeed he hadn’t known all along—that the drunk locked up back in that prison cell was innocent, despite all the treacherous flesh he’d displayed upon Daryl’s first viewing. The man had been angry, that was all; his deluded fellow village residents had locked him up for no greater reason than fear about what damage he might cause to their chaste community. And did that mean that anyone appearing monstrous inside the village’s boundaries was guilty of nothing more than just being fallibly human?
Daryl hoped this was the case, but in truth, he thought it unlikely. After all, he’d just turned around to struggle back up the cellar stairs, in the hope of heading for the exit…and had spotted someone already occupying it.
It was the woman he’d only half-seen after being left in the bed upstairs to recover. She was wearing the same garments—a baggy blouse and long dress made of thick material; heavy stockings and big boots: the very image of a domestic worker, ordinarily such an admirable citizen in such a vast, orderly world.
The one exception was of course the butcher’s knife she held, the one surely missing from her kitchen and with which she’d almost certainly performed unspeakable acts on the two corpses slumped behind Daryl.
“No!” he cried, every rational resolution he’d ever reached crumbling in his mind like trampled chunks of coal.
“Yes, yes, yes!” came the chilling reply, and then the real killer of young men in this deceptively charming locality began charging monstrously his way.
Epilogue
Frederique Palmer received the call the following day on her mobile telephone, and half an hour later, she was at the city center police station, where detectives in charge of the case were located.
She hadn’t heard from her boyfriend Daryl since he’d called her at home the previous day, after delivering a presentation up at Durham University. This was why she was so confused when the police explained what they believed had occurred following that conversation.
After listening to their account, Frederique first wondered why her lover of over half a decade had lied to her. Daryl was certainly a private person, but she’d never suspected him of such obvious duplicity. Once she’d heard about the woman who lived alone in the Yorkshire farmhouse, Frederique’s suspicions had only deepened. Then she’d told herself that the chaste self-discipline her boyfriend had always demonstrated was just a front for a far less respectable self, a deviant cheat with a penchant for illicit activities…
But something about this simply hadn’t rung true; it just wasn’t like Daryl at all. She’d struggled for years to get him to engage with her in a more intimate way, mainly because she craved many things ordinary women desired: attention, compassionate, even a little excitement…all of which Daryl had always struggled to deliver. And despite loving him dearly—he was handsome, intelligent, thoughtful and supportive—she sometimes wished he’d just…well, lighten up a little…play a bit more…become less disciplined.
Nobody was perfect, of course. Indeed, Frederique often suspected that she herself had many irksome flaws, possibly even traits that Daryl, ever the gentleman, had failed to mention.
And was it now too late?
Visiting her lover in the city hospital was enough to allay her concerns, however. After entering his room, where he lay dressed in pajamas and nursing a bandaged head, she was relieved to find him conscious and alert, talking to a policeman seated in a chair beside his bed, and then smiling radiantly—in a way he’d rarely done spontaneously, during all their years together—as he spotted her approaching.
Once the policeman had departed, leaving them both to embrace for long minutes, Daryl told Frederique his story.
She was unsure whether to believe him at first; the tale involved such bizarre events, after all. Allusions to angular trees and plant life…geometrical figures in human form…undisciplined people escaping the confines of flesh and bones…and a final showdown with a ruthless killer, a middle-aged woman with a sadistic need to murder young men… Well, how could anyone believe him? She began to suspect that he’d suffered a breakdown in more than one sense lately.
Nevertheless, Daryl had rarely looked more convinced by anything—not even his research, which Frederique knew all too well obsessed his every wakeful moment. Indeed, when she asked about his latest project, he didn’t seem particularly interested, merely hugged her tight with palpable relief, until all the doubt drained from her body and she hugged him back.
He was alive, that was the main thing. And whatever he’d learned during his recent travails, regardless of what could only be anxiety-induced delusions, had clearly changed him for good.
* * *
A few months later, during the case of a killer charged with murdering two young men, Daryl felt sufficiently recovered from his trauma to visit the court in which prosecution and defense were being conducted.
He could still recall the final confrontation with that middle-aged woman, how she�
�d lurched his way with a large knife. He’d responded intuitively, with none of the ponderous, rational hesitancy that characterised his professional life, rather in a quick-witted, unthinking way that he might, in the past, have considered undisciplined. But that was certainly no longer true. The woman had thrust down the hand in which she held that knife, but Daryl had managed to shunt it aside, using his advantageous position beneath the woman to gain physical advantage. They’d tussled for several seconds, their body strengths evenly matched, but eventually Daryl’s fearful determination had held him in good stead. With one firm push, he’d shoved her to one side and she’d spilled off the edge of the steps, hitting her head on the concrete floor and knocking herself unconscious. After binding the woman to an old chair with thick rope, he’d locked her in the cellar and then exited the building, walking several miles until he reached another house, where he’d called the police at once.
Days after being discharged from the hospital, he’d driven back to the site of this traumatic experience, and despite strolling around the killer’s home, he’d been more interested in locating that strange village, where his life had truly been transformed, whether for the better remained to be seen.
But he’d found nothing.
He’d followed crooked lines of woodland, and located none of those angular trees or that unnaturally symmetrical vegetation. Then he’d crossed countless fields, permanently bracing his body for that familiar disorienting seesaw motion; but he’d suffered nothing other than tired legs and damp feet. He’d even called out for the girl—the one whose name, he now recalled to his shame, he hadn’t even acquired—and had heard only mating songbirds in response, eager for sensations Daryl had never previously understood, despite all his studious learning about the human condition.
He’d attended the court case with his radiant fiancé beside him. Frederique, who’d charitably accepted everything he’d told her, had expressed concern about him confronting the woman who’d once threatened his life in such a violent manner. But then Daryl had told her in a matter-of-fact voice, “I have to see how…the undisciplined look in everyday life.”
“The…undisciplined?” she’d asked, but had quickly ignored the name her lover had given the irrecoverable psychopath. Frederique had found the use of this word in such a context troubling in a way she couldn’t quite understand. “You need to know how she works, do you mean? You have to understand what made her do all she did?”
But Daryl had failed to reply, simply led her inside the courtrooms where they found seats at the rear, way out of sight of the accused.
When the woman was brought to the stand and the formal proceedings began—prosecution and defense engaged in a rally, displaying erudite dexterity and subterfuge—Daryl merely looked on, his eyes fixed firmly on the plump woman’s emotionless face.
And even after a week of cross-examination, interrogation, blank-faced testimony, reliable witnesses and, at last, unanimity among jury members—“Guilty,” its leader announced on the final day—Daryl felt no nearer the truth.
“Did you get what you came for?” Frederique asked, once the woman had been sentenced to a lifelong stay in a high-security prison.
While watching the killer being led out of the court, Daryl thought he’d spotted a momentary twitch of flesh on her face, the merest hint of the monstrous acts he knew she was capable of committing. But then this impression faded, and he looked slowly down, at his hands that retained their fleshy curves and unregimented appearance.
“I don’t know,” he replied, perhaps for the first time ever in his adult life. “I simply don’t know.”
About the Author
Gary Fry lives in Dracula’s Whitby, literally around the corner from where Bram Stoker was staying when he was thinking about that legendary character. Gary has a PhD is psychology, but his first love is literature. He is the author of many short story collections; several novellas, including DarkFuse titles Menace, Lurker and Emergence; and three novels, among them The House of Canted Steps (PS Publishing), Severed (DarkFuse) and Conjure House (DarkFuse). He was the first author in PS Publishing’s Showcase series, and none other than Ramsey Campbell has described him as “a master.” His latest book is the short story collection Shades of Nothingness (PS Publishing). Gary warmly welcomes folk to his Web presence: www.gary-fry.com.
About the Publisher
DarkFuse is a leading independent publisher of modern fiction in the horror, suspense and thriller genres. As an independent company, it is focused on bringing to the masses the highest quality dark fiction, published as collectible limited hardcover, paperback and eBook editions.
To discover more titles published by DarkFuse, please visit its official site at www.darkfuse.com.