Conjure House

by Gary Fry

  “You mean because there’s no longer any motive. That it was…a random slaying or whatever term the police use.”

  “Just so.” The man stared at Anthony. “I must say you’re taking all this rather well, son. I suppose that…well, I suppose that what happened with Simon toughened you up.”

  Surely Derek wasn’t suspicious of him. No, Anthony was just being paranoid. Okay, he and his brother had argued a lot as children, but which siblings didn’t? That might be the reason Anthony didn’t want any more after Carl. He stood to face the policeman.

  At that moment, he noticed a short figure through the kitchen window, moving amid conifer trees in the back garden. That couldn’t be his son, because Carl had gone out the front way. Maybe it was just a play of wind or an article of litter caught up in the hedge…Might this have been what the dog had been scared of earlier?

  Anthony looked back at Derek Gardiner. It was time to draw the discussion to a close.

  “You were about to tell me something else. Please do. I’ve a lot to deal with today.”

  “Yeah, okay. Sorry, Ant.” Derek had always truncated his name years ago, and doing so now made time feel short indeed. “Okay, this is the weird bit. Autopsy confirmed what us plods had suspected, but went one pace further, if you follow. Your parents were strangled, but the hands that did the deed were…apparently as small as children’s.”

  Anthony shivered, feeling for the cigarettes he’d put in a pocket after dressing. He thought he must have misheard. “What do you mean?”

  “Just that. Your parents were almost certainly murdered at the same time, and this implies more than one assailant, whatever their age.” The policeman began heading for the hallway, putting on his hat after stooping under the kitchen’s architrave. “But that’s not the strangest thing,” he added with another infuriating hesitation. “This is.”

  After reaching the front door, Derek opened it. If he was employing an offhand police strategy to unsettle a suspect—departing casually while simultaneously getting to the gist of his problem—it was certainly working. Anthony felt even more uncomfortable as the man finished.

  “The hands that ended their lives had no thumbs…or rather, the pressure on the victims’ necks was exerted only by fingers. There were no indentations where thumbs would be following such an act. Now…what do you make of that?”

  Not a great deal, to judge by Anthony’s silence. As he saw the man out, the world had seemed to cease turning. He couldn’t spot his wife or son on the moors. Only The Conjurer’s House captured his attention, sitting at the foot of the grove like a spider in its web. Finally Anthony was roused to reply.

  “I have no idea,” he said, his grip on reason slackening as the policeman’s gaze lingered on him. But then Derek glanced away.

  “Okay, son. I’ll leave you to it. Just thought you should know, that’s all.”

  He strode to his car, rifled a pocket for keys, and then unlocked his vehicle. “Let me know if you find that wallet or purse. Your dad and mum might have had a hidey-hole we couldn’t locate. And if anything else occurs that you think might be relevant, you know where to find me. Same old place, Ant: the station beside the library. Just like old times, eh?”

  “Yeah, sure,” Anthony replied, hoping this would end the interrogation. Then a savage breeze cut off two doors slamming, the police car’s and the bungalow’s. The vehicle roared away, and Anthony thought it unlikely that many of the neighbours had failed to notice its arrival and departure. But this no longer concerned him. He simply stood in the hallway, thinking hard.

  What had Derek been suggesting—that Anthony had something to do with the crime he was investigating? Worse, that he’d been complicit in his brother’s disappearance all those years ago?

  Anthony advanced into the lounge, clenching his hands, trying to calm down. After a few minutes, however, he began to see the issue from the policeman’s points of view. He supposed the law had to consider every possibility. He could even acknowledge that it looked a tad convenient for his parents to die when he’d been struggling with money and coping with a family, particularly as he’d had little time for them. But it was surely suffering two tragedies in one lifetime that aroused the most suspicion. Anthony was the only surviving offspring, the one who’d benefit from his mum and dad’s will…Okay, so he could understand the police’s approach, and even—now he’d thought it over—appreciate it. He hadn’t abandoned reason.

  He returned to his laptop and connected to the Internet. After accessing his parents’ WiFi service, he typed into his search engine: “THE CONJURER’S HOUSE, DEEPVALE, YORKSHIRE.”

  His heart raced while awaiting the results. As usual, lots of irrelevant material was produced, but after scrolling down, he found a website that looked promising: “LARRY COLE, LOCAL HISTORIAN.”

  Anthony clicked on the link, and as wind gusted at the lounge window, a new page clipped into view. It showcased the work of an amateur enthusiast of matters relating to the village, and in the bottom-right corner was a small icon reading: “THE CONJURER’S HOUSE.”

  Anthony activated this and was transferred to another page displaying a photo of the property at the end of his parents’ grove. Again he was struck by its resemblance to a face. One upper window bore a similar whitish shape to the one he’d observed the previous evening. Anthony realised how tense his moonlit stroll had rendered him. This might also have induced his paranoia while being questioned by Derek Gardiner. Now he appreciated that the policeman hadn’t suggested anything untoward on Anthony’s part…but what had all that stuff about missing thumbs meant?

  Perhaps he’d find an answer in the text beneath the picture on this website. After skim-reading it, however, he learnt nothing he didn’t already know. The building had been constructed in the 1400s and had been home to a series of eccentric characters until the late nineteenth century when its last owner (unnamed) had fled under “dubious circumstances.”

  And what did that mean?

  Anthony flicked back to the homepage, seeking the owner’s contact details. He located an email address at the foot of the page and summoned Outlook Express to type a hurried message:

  Dear Larry Cole,

  Forgive my intrusion. You probably don’t know me. My name is Anthony Mallinson. I was born and grew up in Deepvale back in the 1980s and am now a postgraduate student at Leeds University.

  I’m back in the village after my parents were murdered (you’ve no doubt heard about this) and wonder whether I could meet with you ASAP. This might amount to nothing, but there are a few things I need to get straight and you may well be able to assist.

  With best wishes—

  Ant

  What did he plan to ask the man? Anthony had no idea. But when the historian replied only minutes later and invited him to his house on the other side of Deepvale, Anthony thought he ought to figure out his motives pretty damned quickly.

  He took the house’s main set of keys from the kitchen table and locked the back door, making a mental note to search for his parents’ money when he returned. Then he scribbled a brief message for his wife on a writing pad and left the torn-off page on the hallway table. Melanie had the spare key he’d been wise enough to hand her before leaving with their son.

  Anthony could now visit Larry Cole. He must walk past The Conjurer’s House on his way. Maybe the property’s proximity would offer him inspiration.

  EIGHT

  Melanie had brought along the book Carl was reading at the moment: The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe. If they could find somewhere suitable to sit in the countryside, she’d read to him. There were few places in the city to do this, and they were unable to own a dog in their apartment, too—another good reason to move to Deepvale.

  She watched her son walking Lucy along an alley to the moors surrounding the village like a cradle. Not far from here was where the Brontë sisters had composed their immortal fiction, and Melanie could understand the inspiration they must have derived from such rugged
landscape.

  After crossing a stile, they crested a slope, beyond which stood miles of barren terrain. Most buildings had vanished, but to her left, beside a small glistening lake, stood the big old house at the foot of the grove. The property was the only dark spot in the arresting landscape, but Melanie realised her perception was tainted by knowing that this was where her late in-laws had been found dead. She glanced away, readdressing the sweeping hills.

  Carl and the dog were heading for some large stones whose background was a curve of heathery fields and clustered trees. Melanie pursued, trying to consider her future academic work.

  She must come up with a suitable PhD topic. Her English Literature degree had put her in a strong position to attract funding, but the project needed to be weighty enough to justify an institute’s investment. She had a vague idea about the way fictional representations of history fed into public consciousness: how factually accurate were, say, the descriptions of Dickens or Shakespeare or Chaucer about life, fashion and events in previous centuries? Her thesis would incorporate contemporary concerns about the difficulties of interpreting the past, rendering the thesis a significant contribution to knowledge.

  Drawing nearer the boy and the dog, Melanie felt as if she had the whole proposal in mind. She doubted she’d have got anywhere near this in Leeds, where constant noise and fractious crowds served as distractions. Maybe the new environment was already working its magic.

  She quickened her pace, approaching Carl and Lucy near the standing stones. Her son was weaving among these heavy, head-high slabs, trying to evade the dog, which appeared excited and eager to play, even though her bark sometimes sounded closer to anger.

  Melanie savoured this moment, feeling unnaturally calm. Then Carl stopped running around, captured by something on one of the stones she was unable to see from where she stood. A breeze gusted, bringing sounds of unseen creatures in the area: birds squawking, tiny mammals scurrying in hedges…Melanie looked again at her son; she knew he wasn’t usually this quiet unless he was reading.

  “What’s up, Carl?” she called, feeling apprehensive. “Has the cat got your tongue?”

  “We don’t have a cat!” he snapped back, but his voice seemed odd, its volume thinned by the wind or perhaps even wilfully restrained. Lucy had also fallen silent.

  Melanie was about to ask, “What’s the problem, then?” when, for some reason she simply knew what it was.

  Cthulhu, she thought, visualising this strange word in her mind’s eye.

  And what on earth did that mean?

  She’d always felt close to her son, and could read him well. She knew when he feigned illness to avoid going to that awful city centre school, when he coveted chocolate in a shop, or when he tried to stay up beyond his usual bedtime. This episode seemed different, however, and she was unable to say why.

  “It’s vandalistic,” Carl replied at last, but Melanie had begun edging his way, reluctant to laugh on this occasion at his misuse of a word. Then she ceased her headlong march and looked at the stone he still scrutinised.

  On its base, where moss grew in an unsightly knot, was red spray-painted graffiti: CTHULHU.

  Melanie shivered as a wind raced in from the moors. She grabbed her son’s hand and instructed him to reattach Lucy’s lead. Once he’d done so, she led him away, back down the slope. What concerned her was that she’d realised what he’d seen before witnessing it herself; this had never happened before.

  She and Anthony had enjoyed many good-humoured debates about issues such as clairvoyance and other psychic phenomena, he reducing them to rational explanations while she’d always been less certain, more willing to remain open to new experiences. She supposed this was the difference between their academic disciplines: his hardnosed empirical agenda and her exotic if sometimes woolly literary perspective. In short, it was the difference between science and art.

  And which of them was right?

  The moors seemed to have an answer…but who or what was Cthulhu?

  This name was even more peculiar than that of the boy her son had met yesterday—Suman, had he been called? Perhaps she should ask Carl about his new friend now.

  “Hey, did that lad you spoke to last night tell you about any pals he has around here?”

  If kids in the area committed vandalism, she might think again about proposing to move from Leeds. Perhaps this was just the way the world had turned lately; maybe everywhere was rotten. That was a dismaying possibility.

  “No, nobody,” Carl replied after a moment’s thought, but then recalled something that must have slipped his mind while his dad interrogated him the previous evening. “But…he kept calling me his nephew.”

  “Huh?” Melanie was disturbed by this comment. Carl’s only uncle was her own brother in Manchester who rarely got in touch…or Simon, of course, the boy she’d never known and whom her husband hardly mentioned. “What do you mean, uncle?”

  “Yeah, he kept saying he was my new uncle and other stupid stuff. It was weird. Can we go to the lake now?”

  Melanie envied her son’s ability to throw off such a creepy episode. She supposed all children possessed this capacity, but also realised how soon they lost the knack.

  She was reluctant to agree to Carl’s request, but then he and the dog raced forwards, headed for the glittering body of water near that dilapidated house. She followed, wondering what Anthony would make of their son’s account of the places they’d explored. Melanie thought it was rather tactless visiting the place in which his parents had been found dead. Nevertheless, she was intrigued by the area, not only because of what had just happened beside the standing stones, but also because of what her son had revealed: Suman calling Carl his nephew? This was surely too bizarre to ignore.

  Lucy was growling. Carl had let her off the lead again, and the dog had charged for a clump of bushes to the lake’s right. Melanie followed as her son gave chase. When they arrived, Carl ducked beneath the scrawny tendrils of a prickly bush and tried summoning the dog back out.

  But Lucy wouldn’t budge. Had something scared her? Melanie gazed quickly around. Only a few blackish plants loitered along the lake’s clay banking. She glanced away, suppressing a skirmish in her stomach, and then turned to assist Carl.

  “What’s wrong with her?” she asked, stooping to see the dog shaking at the heart of the bush.

  “I don’t know.”

  “Perhaps she’s…oh, it doesn’t matter.”

  “Mummy, you and Daddy always don’t tell me things. What were you going to say?”

  Melanie had been about to suggest that maybe Lucy was frightened because this was where her beloved owners had been killed, but had remembered that she and Anthony hadn’t told their son about this yet.

  That was why she was shocked by Carl’s next remark.

  “You mean because this was where Grandma and Granddad were murdered, don’t you?”

  She’d tried to be a modern parent, understanding that kids needed to know what kind of a world they lived in, preparing them for making their own way in life. Nevertheless, she believed there were some words—and “murder” was certainly among them—that should be left for later, when a little of children’s innocence had been eliminated by inevitably tough experience.

  She’d also vowed to be honest with her son, however, and so she replied, “Yes, I did mean that. Sorry.”

  Carl finally got hold of the dog. They both came free, but not before a shower of insects—tiny spiders—tumbled from the bushes’ foliage. Some got caught in her son’s hair, and Melanie brushed them off, watching them fall onto the grass and then scamper away on tiny legs. She loathed the creatures, but Carl didn’t seem bothered by them, perhaps a genetic immunity inherited from his dad.

  Just then, their attentions were distracted by a sound of movement from the lake.

  They turned together, and the dog started barking every bit as ferociously as she had minutes earlier. A large bird with long legs had just swooped to grab a fish from
the far side of the water. The bird stood on a reedy patch of land alongside the banking, looming over its quarry with aloof indifference. The fish appeared miniscule by comparison, a pitiful victim of higher forces; it wriggled uselessly in the bird’s claws. Then the tormentor’s head lashed down to take the fish in its beak. Taking wing, the bird didn’t even look as if it intended to eat; it was as if the kill had been enough to satisfy it, as if the fish had simply got in the way of its daily business.

  Nature was cruel; that was something else Carl would soon learn…But then the boy said, “Are there any crocodiles in this lake, Mummy?”

  Melanie let out tension-releasing laughter. “I don’t think so!” she replied, and thought it would be a good time to head back for some lunch. But her son spoke again before she could steer him away.

  “I just saw something long and horrid slide across the top of the water and then duck back in.”

  She was proud of his growing vocabulary but frightened by this latest observation. He must have been looking at the lake while she’d been observing the bird. She glanced at the water, seeing only ripples stirring close to that dark house. She also noticed that the stunted black shapes she’d spotted earlier had disappeared from the property’s garden.

  Her voice was shaking when she said, “Don’t be s-silly, Carl. Hey, come on, let’s go down to take a closer look.”

  As they descended to the lakeside, Lucy continued to growl either nervously or angrily. Carl spoke tenderly to her, but also sounded a little unsettled.

  “It’s okay, doggie. There’s…nothing to fear.”

  He’d convinced Melanie as much as she’d convinced herself moments ago. She thought it might be best if they went home…or rather, to the house in which they’d stay while her husband sorted things out. She wondered again why police had visited, but knew she’d find out soon. Then her feet sunk into mud and she stooped to the edge of the lake, just as her son already had.