by Gary Fry
But James put a stop to these thoughts, unwilling to speculate too soon. He stood again, his aging back protesting, and then glanced back at his new home, trying to fit together the new facts he’d accrued. The building was about twenty feet away, implying that if, as he’d begun to suspect, the property possessed a subterranean chamber, it could be only accessed via the cellar, a room into which James had ventured just a few times since moving in.
Feeling uncomfortable, he tugged the flashlight from its impromptu grave, untied it, and then dropped the rope to the floor. His heart rate felt more volatile now, pushing blood through his veins at speed, making his head spin. He tried slowing himself down, drawing deep breaths, letting oxygen fill his brain and steady everything rushing inside. With his pulse slower but still heavy, thumping his ears like giant hailstones falling from a leaden sky, he hurried back into the house and continued his investigations.
5
Damian had ventured downstairs with James, sniffing at the unsightly mess in which the previous owner had left the underground room. The agency dealing with the sale had made sure all the immediately visible aspects of the property looked passable, leaving other parts—the places prospective buyers tended not to scrutinize in detail—dirty and untidy. There were sticks of old furniture, along with bags of gunk and other discarded household items. But James wasn’t interested in this stuff, nor in chastising the sellers for leaving him to dispose of it. He simply began searching the poorly lit room, keen to spot an opening leading to the new area he believed must exist. Despite a fetid stench and chokingly dusty air, he wasted no time in approaching the wall facing the front of the house and the garden in which he’d detected the violation.
And that was when he noticed the door.
It wasn’t covert, but neither was it clearly on display. As James put one hand to the greasy brass knob, he expected the door to be locked and was surprised when it came open with hardly a creak from hinges. Then he found himself facing a darker area, which the shade-less bulb on a wire behind him was inadequate to illuminate. But anticipating this problem, he’d brought the flashlight he’d used to identify this new place beyond his property boundaries.
It was cold here, the air increasingly hostile to his lungs. He paced forward, along a narrow passageway, wondering all the while why the estate agent hadn’t mentioned an extra room during the sale. Perhaps this flighty man in his silver Mercedes had been unaware of it; people in his profession were hardly surveyors, just masters of spin and gab. Other people had been involved in the sale, but as James’s solicitor had securely stored the deeds (James had needed no mortgage, his trust fund hardly flinching from a rare cash raid), she’d either failed to review them properly or seen nothing of unusual import in their covenants. While continuing to move along the makeshift tunnel, James grew uneasy. He’d begun to suspect that only the previous owner had known about the room’s existence…and that made him concerned about the purpose to which it had been put.
James now felt afraid, which was hardly surprising given his present location. His flashlight slashed back and forth, illuminating walls formed by wooden planks nailed crookedly together. These put him in mind of military bunkers, solid and serviceable. The place looked homemade, conforming to no formal safety regulations. And when the corridor broadened to form a wider chamber about six feet wide and high, James knew for certain that, except for the man who’d previously occupied the building, only he had ever ventured here.
Other than his sloshing flashlight, just a single disc of light fell from a hole in the room’s ceiling, surely the far end of the tunnel that began in his lawn. It picked out a few items in its pale fan, lending each jagged shape an unstable luminescence. Here at the heart of the room was a dark writing desk covered in chunky, moth-eaten documents. A darker bookcase stood against the wall behind it, all five of its shelves packed with thick, serious-looking tomes. To the left and right, a number of astronomical charts were pinned to the walls, most revealing planetary activity or the vast distances between ringed globes, gas giants and rocky satellites. Elsewhere in the room, lots of assorted technical instruments were laid about with haphazard profusion, some telescopes or similar visual apparatus, others intricate measuring devices, their solid shafts violated by flaking rust. Using his flashlight, James spent a while reviewing these and less obvious items, wondering what they’d originally been used for. They were all clearly scientific gadgets, which made him suspect that the previous homeowner had been an independent scholar, unaffiliated to any respectable institution.
As James continued observing the room’s detritus, his shaking hands caused the light to tremble, lending the shadow in his vicinity a nervous animation, as if a prowler was about to leap out and reduce him to the bone. There was an unpleasant smell, like rotting animal flesh mixed with pungent ozone, an unlikely combination in an underground location. The silence was unforgiving, redolent of a grave untouched for centuries. Even the dog made no sound, clinging to James’s heels with uncharacteristic obedience. But then, just as James reached the desk and let his flashlight play upon various items scattered across it, Damian took sudden fright, backpedaling on rapidly slip-sliding paws. Moments later, the beagle began growling, exactly as he had in the garden yesterday.
“Quiet, boy,” James instructed, continuing to investigate what the desktop held. There wasn’t much, really—just a number of faded documents and several plump notebooks. James’s mind worked quickly, taking in this new evidence. Perhaps, he surmised, this was where the man who’d once lived here had recorded evidence of his activities. James turned and looked again at the many artifacts filling the room. Exactly what had the guy been up to? What did all the cosmic maps pinned to the walls imply? As James directed his light in the dark bookcase’s direction, he also wondered how so many portentous-looking tomes had been involved.
He retreated a few yards, feeling deeply uncomfortable. And he was just about to hurry back down the tunnel leading from the cellar when he spotted something glinting on the floor.
He stooped at once, his heart racing again. The flash of metal he believed he’d seen was on the far side of the room, just beneath that hole in the ceiling, but half-concealed by a pile of unidentifiable instruments, each of which bore pipes, lenses and adjustable screws. He pushed aside some of these items, clearing a space on the cluttered floor, and then found himself looking at something that resembled a large silver ball, about six inches in diameter. Lying beside it, like cemetery dirt, was a scattering of earth, which at last explained where the missing soil from under his grass had gone. But it was the weird spherical object that interested James most of all.
Feeling apprehensive about touching the thing—amid all this grime-smeared gunk, it appeared incongruously modern and clean—he reached out his spare hand and took hold of it. Having come so far, he now felt courageous, and moments later, such self-assurance was vindicated when he suffered no adverse effect from lifting the hand-sized object towards him. It was relatively heavy for its size and felt smooth, like a polished crystal ball. In the cloying gloom, he was unable to see his reflection in its sides, but the glow from his flashlight suggested that, once he’d transferred it into lucid daylight, its surface would yield such imagery.
After gathering all the things he thought he might need to complete his investigations—including some journals from the tabletop, if none of the heavy books on the shelves (especially one whose title started with the letters NECRO- but whose remaining letters were lost under dust)—he went back upstairs and started reviewing all these forbidden items.
6
The silver ball was disturbingly similar in size to the hole in his lawn, about six inches from side to side. With natural light falling through his lounge window onto the couch where he sat, he noticed that the thing was flawlessly round, as if fashioned by a machine capable of perfect symmetry. He held it again in one palm and was reminded how heavy it was. Its hardness suggested solidity throughout, and James could only compare i
t to a small cannonball…except for the hieroglyphic markings all over its mirrored surface.
While examining the ball, James spotted his reflection behind the many indecipherable figures, but his face never appeared the way he thought it should. It was as if the strange metal from which it was constructed—neither cold like steel, nor warm like copper—possessed a distorting quality, like trick mirrors at fairgrounds, pushing his image in all directions. But that wasn’t all that happened to James’s face. His common features—eyes, nose and mouth—remained similar, but something had changed in his expression. He looked…fiercer somehow, less civilized, as if the mask of social decorum he’d always worn in public had been torn away to reveal his animal core, the limbic monster that existed inside all human beings.
He quickly put down the ball, feeling troubled in a way he hadn’t in years, ever since his childhood in rundown Leeds, before he’d escaped to college and achieved all that had followed. He held out his hands and noticed he was shaking, not a good sign. But now he had further investigations to make, if only to steady his riotous body. Drawing a deep breath that had little impact on his fluttering pulse, he selected one of the notebooks he’d retrieved from the room downstairs.
The cover was eroded at its corners, as if vermin had been at it. When James lifted it, a cloud of dust leapt up, like something inside awaiting his attention. But that was all he found of any interest in the opening section. James turned the thick white sheets and began to read, finding the content erratic to say the least. Each page was untidy, stained by grubby fingerprints and the markings of a pencil surely wielded with impatient or excitement…or perhaps with fear? But James refused to think about that and continued reviewing the journal’s material.
The author—a man, James assumed; almost certainly the previous owner of his home—had preferred expressing his ideas, observations or facts by drawings that had no other merit than the simple communication of information. And most, James quickly discovered, had a cosmic dimension. Here on the first page were sketches of a number of planets coming into conjunction in a primitively rendered sky. A few scribbled words like “orbit,” “dwarf yellow,” and “solar system” had been scribbled among them, like aide-mémoires. On the next few pages, James found similar sketches of the restless heavens and its many astral bodies, but then he spotted something much more familiar: the Earth, with all its continents haphazardly delineated, floating in a darkly penciled void. James recognized clumsy attempts to outline Europe, the Americas, the bloated bulk of Asia, and the solitary territories of Australia and Antarctica. But what, on a page near the end of the book, was this heading towards the whole planet? Surely not the silver ball rested on the couch beside James?
James glanced up, at the clear sky through his lounge window, hoping to reassure himself that the universe was benevolent, that the storm overnight had been just a brief aberration in a world that supported people like himself, offering enough air to breathe and food to eat. But then his gaze returned to the journals. He plucked another at random from the stack he’d retrieved from downstairs and rapidly flicked through it, trying to combine meanings derived from many sketches with brief words scrawled in the margins. One drawing that drew his attention was of some bizarre machine—little more than a box, with many buttons, levers and lights—which had presumably been created to summon entities across great distances. Its energetic output, possibly based on radio waves or a powerful magnetism, was depicted in wavy lines, floating off into a darkness that James refused to observe. Flipping the page with trembling fingers, he located another sketch of that silver ball, this time with no astral background, only rudimentary shapes like plants and rocks nearby. And if, as the doodle suggested, the thing had landed on Earth after a long journey through space, what had just emerged from it? This tiny creature—it resembled a worm with intricate wings and angular limbs, its segmented torso trailing a streak of slime as it wriggled along the ground—had somehow escaped the ball’s spherical form.
James had grown even more uneasy about sitting beside the object from downstairs, which had almost certainly punched a hole through his lawn overnight to enter that subterranean chamber, like an extradimensional bullet. He felt his heart hammering hard and his head pulsing with unhealthy intensity. But curiosity held him in its imperious grasp. He glanced back at the notebooks and realized he had much more material to address.
That was when a knock came at his front door.
7
James’s mind was in flux as he headed for his front entrance. He couldn’t imagine who might be calling; he’d been cautious about who he’d given his address to, just a handful of colleagues and old friends who respected his need for privacy. As he reached for the door, he felt out of mental focus, as if what he’d read in those strange books had shunted him into a mind-set characterized by a detachment from everyday life. He didn’t want distractions; the truth was—and this was disturbing—he wanted to get back to his new discovery as soon as possible.
But whatever faults his underprivileged upbringing had left him with, he’d also been brought up to be polite and could no sooner ignore a visitor than overrule his kindhearted nature. In the past, this had often been students at his office, desperate for support during examination periods or before essay deadlines. The academic world had been good to James, and he’d tried returning this good favor, helping younger people get along in life, the way he might have done with children if he’d ever had any.
But he no longer taught on university modules, and which undergraduate could find him out here anyway? In which case, the new arrival must be someone else, and there was only one way to find out who. James drew a deep breath and snatched open his door.
Bright daylight striking his eyes momentarily made the figure on his front step resemble little more than a shadow. But once he’d blinked, James saw who it was: his new neighbor—Barnes, had he called himself?
“Hello, there,” James said at once, more of the natural friendliness he found difficult to suppress. Deep down, he wondered what the man wanted. They’d met for the first time yesterday, when he’d approached James in an informal way. Why was the guy visiting a second time? The rules of social engagement decreed that the next move must come from James. “How’s it going?”
The man—his pale face burdened by that thin mustache, which made his serious expression appear more rigid and hostile—never let his gaze slip from James’s, as if observing him carefully was imperative…and for what reason? James thought of his discovery underground, the silver ball he’d found in the room and the books he’d been reviewing. But what could Barnes know about any of them?
At that moment, James recalled the man’s words yesterday: Nice to see the old place occupied again after…well, you know.
What had he meant by this? Maybe James was about to discover.
As the newcomer shuffled on his feet, James heard a sound behind him. At first, he assumed some aspect of that subterranean room had come to renewed life, creeping about like…yes, like that terrible thing illustrated in one of the journals, whose wormlike body, intricate wings and spiderish legs had resembled an amalgamated travesty of several earthly creatures. But then James recognized the sound for what it was: Damian barking in the kitchen. To avoid difficulties with the new arrival, James had somehow managed to pen the mutt in there while heading for the front door. And now the dog was frantic about escaping his confines.
James returned his attention to his neighbor, who’d just begun speaking.
“I’m sorry to bother you,” he said, though his stiff tone and staring eyes implied anything but an apologetic attitude. “I just wanted to ask you a question.”
“Feel free,” James replied, wondering where this was heading. Now he felt even more uncomfortable than he had before opening the door.
But then, as Damian continued to bark from deeper inside the house, the man appeared to take mercy on James. “I just wondered where your dog sleeps overnight.”
“I’m…s
orry?” James snapped back, surprised by his neighbor’s question. It hadn’t been what he’d anticipated, even though he was unable to figure out what that was. “I’m afraid I don’t understand.”
“It’s not complicated. I mean, does he stay in your kitchen? Or…maybe a kennel outside?”
James didn’t care for the man’s tone, let alone his invasive inquiry. What had his private arrangements to do with Barnes, and why did the man need to know about them? But rather than become difficult, James replied, “Well, since you asked, Damian sleeps with me in bed. It’s a habit he acquired at my previous home, living in a top-story apartment.”
“Ah, I see,” Barnes said, his expression losing a little of its fierceness. Maybe the way James had just held his gaze, refusing to look away, had persuaded the man of his honesty. The truth was that the beagle did sleep with James overnight and always had. But then the man, now less taut around the shoulders, went on. “I’m sorry to have troubled you. It’s just that I’ve had quite a traumatic morning. We all have—me and the wife and kids.”
“Oh…yes?” James couldn’t imagine what the guy was referring to, let alone what it might have to do with his dog. “Would you like to tell me about it?”
“It’s our rabbit,” Barnes said, clearly expecting James to recall him mentioning this animal yesterday. James did indeed remember the pet being alluded to, the Angora species that had caused him mild amusement. But such a response, to judge by the man’s distress, was misplaced now. Indeed, that was when Barnes added, “It was ripped apart overnight. The hutch was destroyed, its door ripped off and hinges twisted up. There was…there was blood everywhere, and its…innards were draped…all over the lawn nearby.”