by Gary Fry
The woman hesitated a moment while either tapping the inkless end of a pen against her teeth or rattling her PC’s plastic keyboard. But then she said, “I’m sorry, sir. Mr. Jackson is out conducting property evaluations. Was your call about anything in particular? Could I take a message and ask him to call you back? Or perhaps I could help?”
Perhaps she could. The agency’s office was situated in the nearest town, a place with only a limited number of conveniences: an obligatory supermarket, a single-engine fire service, a police station, a sneaky solicitor’s chambers, and several other organizations, all forming the skeleton of a small society, pared cleanly to the bone. The key issue was that Parkers Estate Agency was likely to be the only one in the area and would surely have the pick of local custom. More importantly, if the young woman to whom James was speaking lived in the district, she might know something about his property.
Drawing a long breath that turned quavers in his voice to minims, he introduced himself, telling the receptionist about his recent move and how helpful Parkers had been while brokering the exchange of deeds. To his delight, the woman—whose name, she’d announced, was Melanie—recalled the deal and even referred to several key aspects of the house.
“That’s a fine building, Mr. Parry. Right in the middle of nowhere. I’d love the peace, myself. Me and my boyfriend can’t afford anywhere like that, not at our ages, but who knows…maybe one day…”
James felt compassion for her—she couldn’t be much older than twenty—the same way he had for many university students, most of whom, in a positive sense, had long lives ahead of them, but in another had serious financial restrictions to overcome. He wasn’t sure he’d wished to do it all again, working through years of study and hard work to become as affluent as he was now. But again he was growing distracted.
“Yes, I’m very pleased with it,” he said, his mind ticking over with its usual haste. Now he must act convincingly, because the only way he could think of extracting information from this young woman was to tell a lie. He drew another deep breath—transforming the minims to semibreves—and then said, “But you know, I was wondering if you could tell me anything about…well, about the man who lived here before me? My problem is that while clearing out the place in advance of decorators visiting next week, I’ve located a number of written documents…”—this much was true, but what followed wasn’t—“…and I have no idea whether they belonged to him or perhaps to someone who owned the property prior to him. They’re quite old, you see. They’re…mainly diaries and notes, but I imagine the author’s family might like them returned, especially if they have sentimental value.”
“I doubt his family would be interested,” Melanie replied, her voice quick and quiet, as if her comment was “off the record.”
“I beg your pardon,” James replied, eager to sustain the connection he’d established with the agency’s receptionist. The truth was that he did know a little about the previous owner’s family—a noncommunicative, cranky bunch called the Listers—but had never spoken to them directly. When he’d put in an offer of £10,000 below the £250,000 asking price, he’d received a blunt response: no. He’d had to take his price up to £246,000 before they’d accepted, but even then, there’d been no friendly communication between the two sides, as was often the case during amicable negotiations: they’d wanted to sell; James had wanted to buy. Why had it been so unpleasant? Pushing aside such regrettable memories, he said, “I’m sorry, Melanie. I don’t understand. What do you mean about the man’s family?”
“I shouldn’t say anything, really,” the woman replied, still keeping her voice low, as if other people were in the office or might arrive at any moment. But what could be so bad for her to feel awkward about discussing? Was she planning on passing on a rumor, some contentious nugget of local gossip she’d heard only from an unreliable source, with no firm evidence? But then she added, “He wasn’t a nice man, I mean.”
“Please, go on.”
“Hey, don’t quote me on this. It’s just what I’ve been told…what we were all told, me and lots of other kids who grew up in the area. There’s only one school here, and you know how children like to tittle-tattle. Some of us—the boys, mainly—used to go up there, to the house you now own, and try frightening the old man. But it was them—the boys, I mean—who came back frightened. Not that I ever knew why.”
James was relieved that his small lie had worked, prompting all this new information. He realized that the journals he’d found in the underground room could belong to nobody other than a recent occupant. The equipment down there, all related to the notebooks’ contents, was eccentric, but also quite modern, with electric bulbs and sophisticated lenses. James was no expert on this stuff, but in terms of technology, he knew the difference between past and present, and these items definitely bore hallmarks of a latter-day maverick invention. But now he must listen to what the woman had to add.
“We heard stories about what he was trying to do up there. Some people—our parents or maybe people they knew—used to see him in the library, reading weird books. He also bought lots of meat from Ben Masters, the only butcher around here—I do mean, lots of it. More than any man who lived alone could ever eat, even after freezing most. And yes, he certainly lived alone. I’m sure nobody else would ever put up with him. He was…hideously disfigured, I guess you’d call it. He had a scar running across one cheek. Kids at school said he got it after being attacked by one of the animals he often summoned from God knew where, but I never understood what they meant. What could be so awful to rip open his face like that? And if he did keep wild animals, how come authorities never got involved? It didn’t make any sense.
“I suppose, having told you this much, I ought to give you his name,” Melanie said, clearly enjoying this opportunity to offload recollections she’d perhaps harbored for years. “He was called Arnold Lister and he didn’t have a friend in town.”
James flinched, realizing that this observation also applied to himself. But that wouldn’t last forever. Despite his fondness for privacy, he wasn’t above engaging with communities, joining worthy groups like debating societies or maybe even an amateur theatre.
“Do you have anything else to tell me?” he asked the young woman, feeling as if the last comment she’d made—offering James the previous homeowner’s name—had marked an end to her comments.
“Only this,” Melanie went on, and now her own voice was full of musical notes, crotchets and then quavers and even smaller units than that. “I met him once, in a side street, on my way to work. This was about three years ago, just before he died of old age and—some said—utter madness.”
She hesitated, as if adjusting her posture in her chair and trying to remain professional in a company outfit, her hair combed and set in place with spray. James had little doubt she’d do well in her career, but right now, he needed to know what she’d experienced at the start of her working life, while heading for the office in her late teens.
Finally, she spoke again.
“There was something wrong with his body,” she explained, clearly eager to get off the phone. “He smelled like a zoo, as if he’d…as if he’d visited places where no people existed at all: only him. But you know what,” Melanie went on, before hanging up without even saying goodbye, “I’m not even sure he was a person, not anymore…not after what he’d done in your otherwise lovely house.”
12
And now he knew the man’s name: Arnold Lister.
James realized that the people who’d sold his home shared this surname (presumably a sibling and his or her family), but the addition of a Christian moniker made the man feel realer in James’s mind, as if his former occupancy had left behind residue of all the unpleasant activities he was rumored to have practiced.
But now James had evidence that went beyond gossip. Not that this should make him think his house had been infected by any of these acts. Even the woman at the estate agency had said that the property was desirable, cle
arly ruling out any connection between Arnold Lister’s nefarious pursuits and the building’s physical structure. This was a place like any other, which just happened to have been subjected to gross violations. But the important point was that James—now hurrying from door to door, window to window, and locking every one—was safe here…safe from whatever prowled the night outside, as he, perhaps still in a state of mild shock, took to bed with more of those cursed notebooks.
13
James had been brought up on a council estate by unambitious parents. His father had been a mechanic, his mother—in her own words—“just a housewife.” Both were dead now, having lived long enough to see their only child get a chair at a university, but not really understanding its import. They’d been straightforward people, preferring the common soporifics of television and socializing to anything more demanding. This had made them quite happy, even though James’s mother had always clung too fondly to him, perhaps because his father had been cold, capable of few emotions other than anger in the wake of alcohol and bitterness after another of his “long days at work.”
James had found pleasure in solitary pursuits, developing a fondness for reading at an early age, helping his imagination flee his humdrum environment. He’d enjoyed fiction most as a child, particularly fantasy novels like Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings and the work of Alan Garner. Later, as an eager young man, he’d switched to factual material, having decided that make-believe was little more than escapism, and that the pilot of life was knowledge. This was a decision he’d never regretted, and the compensations of his career—enough money to escape his past; respect from peers to replace the lack of lovers in his life—had fueled his commitment to reason, knowledge, and the scientific project.
He’d published extensively on the issue of perception, how human beings—and animals—made sense of the world. His work was influential, inspiring cognitive theories about how experience, with all its goals and plans, led to meaning. On the basis of his lifelong work, he believed that thought emerged from engagement in everyday life, from events encountered via the senses. The organic apparatus with which everybody was equipped was the interface between the mind and the world. To perceive was to believe, and consciousness was a sense-making tool, guiding future action in an advantageous way.
Such a system of acting and learning conferred adaptive advantages on living creatures, most of all humans with their capacity to develop and shape new behavior. Once evidence grew too pervasive to dismiss, new information was added to a reservoir of facts, resulting in new habits that freed up the mind for further mental activity. The body remained an autonomous shell, but the psyche adjusted according to daily challenges.
James considered himself successful in this process, having achieved so much from lowly beginnings; he was a council estate boy who’d become an emeritus professor. A greater contrast between early and late positions in life he was unable to imagine. And even though now, fifty years after his humble childhood, aspects of his body had begun to fail, his mind remained as sharp as ever, a well-honed primal device.
But just imagine, James thought in bed while perusing all the journals he’d found in the room under his lawn, a creature that could modify its physical frame on the basis of perceived difficulties. Its brain might be little more than a tool programmed to maximize chances of survival, but its body was adaptive, possessing a capacity to shift in size unknown in any earthbound animal.
These were James’s conclusions after reviewing more of the note-taker’s sketches and few erratically penned notes. There were about nine books in total, each bound in a leatherlike cover that smelled bestial. James preferred not to speculate on what animal this material might have come from and simply leafed through each, flipping thick pages that had a feeling of ancient parchment, but seemed too recently inscribed for that to be true.
One drawing showed the beast whose activities the books chronicled creeping up to its quarry—some sort of bovine creature, a cow or a bullock—and taking it down with mighty limbs, all layered muscle and ripping claws. In the next, this poor animal had been stripped to its carcass, only the ribcage hinting at its original shape, and dripping quantities of gore. In another illustration, the same winged creature appeared to have shrunk and was ripping apart a common bird like a thrush or crow; few bones were left over from this assault, just a scattering of feathers glued to the floor by dark puddles. In a further sketch, the wormlike figure with a face full of eyes and terrible mandibles had swelled to the size of the elephant it stalked, lurking behind it with incongruous stealth, before tugging off the trunk and sinking its vast jaw into the torso. This beast proved a match for its appetite: although the elephant had died at once, a large amount of meat was left over from its skeleton, as if there was a limit in what the hideous thing with the swollen body could consume.
James cowered from these drawings, despite their crudeness. What struck him most powerfully was the varying size of the creature; this led him to speculate that more than one of the things might exist, each a different size, maybe even a family of them: children, a mother, and a monstrous father. But then he began to doubt this conclusion, because it didn’t sit well with other facts he’d accrued. His psyche was sharp, trained to make sense of observations with imperious logic. He knew that the machine he’d observed downstairs, the one with many levers, buttons and weirdly flashing bulbs, was unique, the work of a pioneering scientist. If evidence from the notebooks could be taken seriously, the machine’s purpose was to summon impossible creatures from another void. But that invited a difficult question, sending James back to what remained of the journals: how had the guy known about such beings, let alone figured out their mode of travel?
During the next hour, James reviewed more of the books, deciphering further combinations of drawings and irascibly scribbled comments. A page towards the end of one hinted at more silver balls, like that on his bedside table, falling from space many millennia ago and landing in far-off places, where pyramids and palaces occupied the backgrounds, all rendered in roughly defined pencil. Sticklike figures swarmed around each, their postures awed and wary; words were written in the margins, such as “Africa,” “South America” and “Asia.” Perhaps these events had been recorded in abstruse documents from previous civilizations. Most of the accounts might have been discredited as improbable by Western commentators, never entering the catalogue of canonical archaeology. But as James knew well from his own academic discipline, culturally decreed dismissals were far from rigorous falsifications. Indeed, people had once scoffed at Copernicus, berated Darwin, and considered Freud a vulgar charlatan. And each was now regarded as a towering radical, a far-sighted genius.
For James, however, the most convincing fact—the one that made him grow fearful in bed, alongside a freshly showered Damian huddled under the covers—related to the Barneses’ rabbit, an animal so small it could never have satisfied the appetite of something as large as the thing from that huge woodland hole. Drawing on information derived from the journals, James imagined the creature adapting to whatever sustenance lay in its vicinity. When food was limited, it made itself small; when more was available, it grew much larger. Some complex interplay of fuel and energy must sustain its existence. But as troubling as this notion was, it was far from the worst of James’s sudden insights.
Laying back in bed, setting aside the notebooks and switching off his light, he berated himself for not raising an alarm about the creature; he hadn’t called the authorities to let people in the area—or even farther afield—know they might be in danger. That was unsettling enough and would probably trouble his sleep tonight—he might be still in shock, the impact of all he’d learned taking time to assimilate—but he’d just reached a more disturbing realization.
He’d realized that the entity was, in a physical sense, a dreadful inversion of his own mental life, the way he’d advanced from poverty to prosperity in a short lifetime. It was a predatory chameleon to counter his psychological benevolence: the
wild to his tame, brawn to his brilliance, savage beast to his social-mindedness.
14
The disturbance awoke him in the early hours, tearing through the night like a neurotic mother’s scream. James jerked up, listening hard. His dog also emerged from under the sheets, shivering and whimpering with ears pricked firmly back. Then the sound came again, but this time with less insistence, as if the shock of an attack had been diminished by serious injury. It was difficult to tell whether this noise came from a human or an animal, and moments later, it ceased altogether. Now there was only the night with all its creaks and whispers, the woodland stirring as creatures moved around in hedges.
Unnerved by the relative quiet, James refused to let confusion overrule his impulses again. This latest event had made him wonder for a second time why he hadn’t called someone about everything he’d discovered. He’d known the creature must feed again, but had perhaps hoped it had fled the area. But how responsible to other people did that make him? Had he suffered a form of denial induced by terror, a rational dismissal of the case as improbable? He thought this must be true, and was aware that such behavior characterized more human acts than people would like to admit. The mind functioned strangely during periods of stress; even when it was disengaged, protecting itself from injury, the body remained reactive, responding according to instincts focused on survival, on fight or flight. And that certainly seemed true now. James got quickly out of bed, dressed in casual clothing, and hurried downstairs to exit his property.
On this occasion, he locked Damian inside—the dog, scampering back and forth, protested, but James wouldn’t be swayed from his decision—and then rushed back into the lane. Back in his bedroom, he’d thought the shrieks he’d heard earlier had come from the Barneses’ home, that large country house only five hundred yards from his own. Indeed, the closer James drew to the property, the more he grew convinced of this. The night was mostly silent, but the aural trauma it had suffered lately seemed to fill the air with an aftershock, as if its traces might be detected in its molecules. But he was being fanciful, his heightened arousal rendering him uncommonly perceptive. In truth, he was just a man pacing along a country lane, with all the physical frailty of his species. He kept his hands tightly in his jacket pockets, but not to combat the moonlit chill. In one of them, he held that silver ball, which he’d snatched from his lounge before exiting his property, because he intuitively believed he might need it soon.