Conjure House

by Gary Fry

  The kitchen, lounge and sitting room were similarly dispiriting, full of sticks of decaying furniture and litter accumulated over decades. This latest observation offered Anthony little confidence as he considered advancing to the next floor. He passed that sealed-up entrance, which must give on to a cellar (…the dank subconscious…), and then tested the staircase’s first riser. It creaked but bore his weight. Then, without conceding a glance backwards—the shape moving in his peripheral vision was just a bush in the breezy garden—he started advancing up the steps, striving not to touch the grotty banister with his free hand.

  While ascending the flight, he kept telling himself: rational explanation, sensible reasons…He could hardly believe that, after eighteen years of living in this area and then another fifteen away, he’d finally entered the building. After reaching the top, aspects of what he’d learned yesterday came back with powerful impact: Peter Suman…collapsing time…seeking a God’s-eye view…

  “Ridiculous,” he muttered, and it must have been the landing’s hollowness that returned his words distorted, as if someone had converted them into another language or maybe unpleasant laughter…He moved on, kicking through piles of splintered wood and other ragged materials. At the head of a corridor, along which three doorways were stationed, stood a broken grandfather clock; its smashed and canted dial read twelve o’clock—either noon or midnight. Anthony hoped the first wasn’t true, because it would mean he’d been in the house far longer than he believed. Using his thumb to prise back his sleeve, he consulted his wristwatch: it was 9:30. Time was behaving normally this morning.

  Now reassured, temporarily at least, he selected the nearest of the several beckoning rooms.

  He found himself in what had surely once been an art studio. Mildew and spores covered small tables to each side, and a palette was askew on an easel leant against the window. After approaching the glass, Anthony observed the sprawling Yorkshire Dales, a glorious sight. But then a movement captured his attention and he glanced down. The lake below shimmered, as if something had just dived beneath its deceptively tranquil surface. A fish, perhaps? Or a bird trawling for food, before hastily taking wing? These thoughts compromised the calm attitude Anthony struggled to uphold, and he turned to head for the next room.

  His vision now felt acutely alert. This must be an aftereffect of staring into the daylight. He hadn’t just spotted an arm reaching around the corner up ahead; this had been a loose flap of plaster blown flat by the breeze inside the property. Nevertheless, after stepping across the threshold of what must once have been a music chamber, he felt his mind wandering, as if someone else was pressing at its limits, the way Melanie sometimes did when he felt guilty about something. He shook his head, trying to suppress this sensation, but soon felt beguiled when he thought he heard music deep in his mind, a sweet melody he believed he was familiar with…He moved on to examine a grand piano in a terminal state of disrepair. Otherwise, only detritus too lurid to touch could be found in here, and so he paced back out.

  The final room (other than a lavatory that looked even more putrid than the rest of the property) had clearly been a library. Grotty books sat on shelves attached to each wall. Anthony trod across bare floorboards, his shoes producing echoes resounding everywhere. Now his hearing seemed infected, but his sharp sight had settled. Examining the collection of damaged tomes, he tugged out one whose cracked spine boasted the start of a word: NECRO…He wasn’t a student of language, but understood what the prefix denoted. He shoved the volume back, watching its covers crumble like a cloud of flies fussing over a corpse. Then returning to the corridor, whose emptiness multiplied the sound of his footsteps, he was unable to prevent a torrent of enquiry from racing through his mind.

  What do you think you’re doing here, my lad? I understand you’ve contacted my real assistants. Oh, I aim to show how wrong you are! Both of us do, me and your younger brother…Hark, how he screamed! We visited places his biological father could never conceive of. ’Tis a pity your mother had to die, too. Women try so hard—my own did, but it’s never enough with boys, is it? They need guidance, a sense of identity. But I wasn’t so fussy when I carried out the experiment. The girls and boys alike—how they sang the world! Of course that attempt was a failure, but now…NOW! Yes, we’ll turn our backs on science and use art to bring Them onto our loathsome planet. Then there’ll be only mass destruction…You hear? Do you? Oh, you’d better, dear Ant!

  “No!”

  Anthony flinched along the corridor, the bag jerking in his clenched fist. The dreadful words he’d imagined, as well as their disturbing import, were surely just residue of his dreams lately. But if that was true, how had he rendered their diction convincingly dated? He rarely read anything published since the turn of the twentieth century. What was the point? Advances in knowledge never regressed. Modern science regarded its intellectual antecedents only with glib affection. The past was dead and gone.

  He’d staggered around a bend in the corridor, noticing a flight of steps at the end, obviously leading up to an attic. Anthony’s physical symptoms had returned, his pulse drumming and blood thumping his ears. But he’d come this far and had yet to find a likely place from which the boy who’d befriended his son might have removed the travesty he carried in the bag. Anthony held the plastic-wrapped model in both hands. It hadn’t squirmed in his grip, as if the clay had changed to flesh and sought freedom to enact unspeakable deeds. This impression was a combination of all the unsettling thoughts he’d suppressed coupled with his sweating palms. He didn’t even know whether the thing was connected to The Conjurer’s House, but nonetheless realised there was only one way to discover.

  He began advancing for the building’s top level.

  Humanity’s higher goals—the aspiration to know the source and nature of the universe… Wasn’t this the way Larry Cole had described these upper quarters? There was supposedly a telescope here, and after rounding the newel of a metal banister, Anthony was simultaneously awed and disturbed to spot the instrument stationed at its centre.

  Surely Deepvale kids across the years had violated the house to smash up its artefacts. And hadn’t experts been interested in exploring the property and its dubious reputation? But the fact that nobody appeared to have interfered in its steady decline was surely all the more unsettling.

  Anthony strode across the stone floor, refusing to look at the huge telescope pointed towards domed glass in the ceiling. He’d just noticed something that had solicited his attention as only a bizarre curio might.

  It was a map—a globe to be precise, chiselled out of stone and mounted on an iron frame. It was around three feet in diameter, and filled the area at the head of the stairs. Anthony removed the model from the carrier bag, and settled it over a spot smothered in grime, where the United Kingdom lay. The little he could see of each continent was also caked in dirt, but he could make out a basic outline of Europe, as well as a rudimentary impression of the Americas. The Orient would be around the other side, but he didn’t wish to touch the sphere and turn it. His attention had now been drawn by a comparison between the figure he held above the British Isles and this tiny replica of the planet. He was struck by the lack of accurate scale. In the context of this model of Earth, was the creature a facsimile of a much smaller being? Or should he—a terrifying thought—take this spatial relationship literally?

  …we’ll turn our backs on science and use art to bring Them onto our loathsome planet…

  Suppressing this recollection, Anthony turned to examine the huge instrument that was clearly the room’s main attraction…or rather he would have done if he hadn’t spotted other clay-sculpted models on a desk behind the telescope.

  These were every bit as dreadful as the one he’d brought, all rough flesh and asymmetrical bodies. If the one he clutched resembled a mutated elephant, he was less certain what the others looked like. Here was one six times the height, with legs stretching like angular spider’s limbs; its disproportionate face was a
pig’s cross-fertilised with a python’s. Another was just as plump, but its massive paws bore no thumbs. A third had no fingers at all, just lumpy appendages like bundles of hefty sinew.

  Anthony glanced away, returning their fellow at arm’s length and dropping the bag with a whisper that sounded like someone speaking elsewhere in the house. He was about to hurry back downstairs, intending never to return, when curiosity got the better of him.

  Just a single glance through the telescope’s lens wouldn’t hurt, would it?

  The gadget probably didn’t even work anymore. Ignoring more sounds of movement inside or outside the property, Anthony stooped under the eyepiece. The contraption was old-fashioned—Victorian text embellished its greasy framework—but they built things to last in those days, didn’t they? His dad and mum had always used this phrase, and Anthony was still clinging to this fond remembrance when he gazed into the glass.

  All he could see was blue. He tried to rid himself of a feeling that someone or something was creeping up the stairs—the trickster boy who called himself Suman seeking more disquieting evidence, perhaps? But the imaginary footfalls sounded muffled and incomplete. Whatever the truth was, Anthony pushed aside such intrusive thoughts and adjusted the stiff wheel beside the lens to focus on a sweep of pale sky and wisps of cloud. He hadn’t expected to observe stars or other astral bodies, and had been surprised to see anything at all through the lens. Had the instrument been cleaned recently?

  At that moment, the sky went out.

  The only thing now visible through the telescope was darkness. He rotated the viewfinder, drawing back the image in the hope of refining what resembled only a mass of blackness. The image assumed more definition, and then Anthony felt like jerking away from the contraption.

  The creature he examined—it possessed four legs, each boasting a fuzziness that might result from the imperfect zoom—stole from right to left, across his range of vision. It could be an insect trapped on the top of the instrument…or something much larger, shambling over the glass ceiling. Whatever the truth was, as Anthony observed more carefully, the figure scuttled horribly out of sight.

  He pulled away from the telescope. Those incomplete sounds reverberated inside the building, as if making their way up for him…He decided to leave immediately. Nevertheless, before he could do so, he glanced at the domed glass in the roof.

  Wet handprints streamed down the glass, as if something had just padded across the curve of the panes. There must be something wrong with its hands, however, because each print leaked just four streaks of moisture.

  Had a child been playing on the roof, holding his thumbs off the glass as he or she moved? But Anthony refused to think about this, fleeing while also suppressing the idea that many figures—each lacking a full complement of digits, like the thing he’d spotted through the lens—lurked on every floor below. When he reached the ground level, insidious noises appeared to be rising from behind the cellar door.

  Moments later, he was outside and racing up the grove. He had more practical matters to concern him: his family, shopping, a party this evening…Nevertheless, he knew that all he’d experienced inside The Conjurer’s House would unsettle him for the rest of the day. He couldn’t wait for his old friends to arrive. There was clearly much to understand and he thought he’d never manage this alone.

  FIFTEEN

  Mummy had said they could make some gingerbread men later, but Carl knew what she’d really meant: that he wasn’t allowed out of the house because Daddy had said so.

  Carl was slumped on the bed in the little room at the back of the bungalow, trying to think of something to do. He didn’t feel like reading; the children in Narnia were having too many amazing adventures, despite their parents abandoning them. Carl knew his mummy and daddy weren’t being cruel, but he couldn’t stop himself from thinking bad thoughts about them, particularly Daddy, who’d left this morning without even telling Carl where he was going. All he knew was that the gift he’d brought yesterday had disappeared from the lounge.

  That wasn’t very nice, was it?

  Even Lucy had failed to amuse Carl for long. He’d grown sick of tossing a soft toy across the room her to retrieve, and in a fit of anger had sent her away to pester Mummy as she tried studying for a university course in Leeds. Carl had taken pleasure in doing this, but wasn’t like that really. He could be just a bit moody. He supposed—an idea a teacher had put in his head recently—this ran in the family.

  He wished Grandma and Granddad were still alive; they’d surely think of something to do. Despite feeling affection for the old people he’d never known well, Carl wondered what had killed them. He spent the next five minutes entertaining bizarre fantasies. Maybe a monster had swooped down from the moors to strangle them. He tried hard to picture what this creature might look like, imagining a large grey beast with fat hands and no thumbs, just like the things from the lake beside that creepy old house…But he hesitated and thought seriously for a moment. What could have emerged from all that water?

  Bigger boys, like the ones police were saying had killed his grandparents, didn’t have only fingers, did they? And girls were too feeble to swim in such a dark, horrid-looking lake. Carl knew he shouldn’t try and answer these questions, because recently he’d suffered nightmares after reading an old book from his parents’ shelves in their apartment. Mummy had told him these had been Victorian ghost stories, and one involving a nasty thing that had come from inside a tree had scared him badly.

  His boredom undiminished, Carl climbed off the bed and moved to the window to stare outside. The grove was dead, deader than the hills wrapped around it like a blanket over some innocent child. There was no sign of Suman, even though it was the school holidays. Perhaps the boy had also been grounded by his parents, but in his case for being naugh–

  “Hello, nephew.”

  At first the words confused Carl. They hadn’t come from the other side of the window and had been too loud anyway. Then, with a jolt of panic, he realised they hadn’t come from outside at all. Although he’d recognised the voice, he was shocked to discover the speaker was behind him—inside the bedroom.

  Carl turned around.

  And saw his new friend, standing a yard in front of the wardrobe, one of whose doors was hanging open, as if the boy had just emerged from there.

  Carl didn’t know what to say; any appropriate words had been robbed from his mouth. He knew that magical things sometimes happened in the world—he’d seen many similar events on TV or read about them in books—but to have one happen here, when he was supposed to be bored…

  His voice compromised by nervousness, he eventually asked, “How d-did you get in?”

  “An uncle never needs to be invited to visit his family, does he?” Suman replied, touching the black spot on his upper lip, as if his hand concealed lies. “I came through a tunnel of light. It’s how we all get here…from so far away.”

  This sounded unconvincing, but something else about the boy’s words troubled Carl. “Who do you mean by all?”

  “Hey, what time is it?” Suman snapped back, issuing a question in response to a question, which Daddy had always said was rude.

  But Carl consulted his Harry Potter watch anyway. “Half past nine.”

  “No, it isn’t.”

  “Yes, it is. Here, look at my…” Carl began to protest, brandishing the dial for inspection. But that was when Suman paced his way, a quick, scary manoeuvre.

  “It isn’t that time at all,” he said, but then hesitated, brushing from his clothes a few crumbs of whatever he’d crawled through to reach this room. Moments later, with an empathic voice, he finished, “In fact, it’s time for revelations.”

  Carl was unable to understand the last word, because Mummy had never taught it to him. But as his new friend retreated a pace, his shoes whispering on the carpet, Carl realised something momentous was about to occur.

  Light had begun creeping out from behind the wardrobe door.

  Maybe
he should call for help. The strange flashes were soon joined by crackles of noise, like static on a computer screen or electric sockets he’d always been told not to touch.

  And Suman continued to speak.

  “This is where you get to meet my daddy,” he explained, as a huge sucking sound of wind or possibly a plague of airborne insects started churning inside the wardrobe.

  Surely Mummy could hear this noise…but from the rest of the bungalow came only silence. She must be lost in work, in the same way Daddy had better things to do than play with Carl. He looked again at the light-flanked wardrobe doors. Perhaps it wouldn’t be so bad meeting a man who spent time with his son, after all.

  Carl stepped up to the doorway.

  Pacing to join him, Suman began talking in a funny language. Carl recognised none of it, and failed to understand the boy’s words even when he reverted to English.

  “Time and space are not quantities,” he explained, his voice a notch lower and more adultlike, “but they can be altered. They’re conjured by our minds from a realm of brute plenitude. Bring together enough people with a single focus in the same location and then watch the district—its glorious and not-so-honourable past—come charging back. Of course there’ll be no future, but who cares about that? To see all of history simultaneously will drive onlookers mad…and besides, what other dark beings might we drag from the void?”

  It sounded like the kind of thing Daddy said to Mummy when Carl had gone to bed and listened to them talking in the lounge. But then a chant started up inside the wardrobe.