Siren of Depravity Read online

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  SIREN OF DEPRAVITY

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  About the Author

  About the Publisher

  SIREN OF DEPRAVITY

  Gary Fry

  First Edition

  Siren of Depravity © 2016 by Gary Fry

  All Rights Reserved.

  A DarkFuse Release

  www.darkfuse.com

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either a product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

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  OTHER BOOKS BY AUTHOR

  Conjure House

  Emergence

  Lurker

  Menace

  Mutator

  Savage

  Severed

  The House of Canted Steps

  This one is for Mark Patrick Lynch, who’s been more helpful to me in a literary sense than he can ever appreciate. I raise a glass of something non-alcoholic to you, old friend.

  Acknowledgements

  I’d like to thank Chris Essen for another of our semi-serious, semi-daft e-conversations, which somehow generated this novel’s title; Stephen King for writing Revival and giving my subconscious a timely nudge; Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart for the final movement of his 41st symphony, whose flabbergasting structure my book attempts to mimic; and all the good folk at DarkFuse—staff and readers alike—for bringing life to such a grim beast.

  1

  The call that changed everything came during my daughter’s seventh birthday party.

  It was a small function at our home, attended by a few of Eva’s school friends, my wife Olivia (who’d organized food and games), and my mother. Olivia’s parents had been unable to make it, as they now lived in Scotland and were getting quite old. My dad had been dead several years.

  Olivia had just proposed a game involving the children imitating animals, with a prize awarded to the most convincing, when the landline telephone started ringing from the lounge. We were all in the dining room, near a table crammed with jelly and trifle and Lord knew what other threats to the cholesterol level of someone in his mid-thirties like me. As the phone continued shrilling like a rude alarm, Olivia glanced at me, clearly wondering (as I was) who’d be calling on a Sunday afternoon. My wife and I had only a modest social network, despite moving to the area fifteen years earlier.

  As Olivia got on with the children’s game, I ignored the implications of her lengthy stare, dry-swallowed a sense of guilt like a stubborn lump of bread, and pushed myself up from my seat.

  “Daddy, why are you moo-ving?” called Eva, taking clever advantage of the situation by imitating a cow at the end of her comment. But my lovely girl—blonde-haired, slender as her mother, cutely dressed today—looked like anything but an animal. She was radiant and pure, what nature had been driving at. At least that was how she appeared to me, but don’t all fathers feel similarly about their children?

  No, they do not, I reflected, flinching a little as I tried to keep my mind from venturing into territory it hadn’t visited in years. Then I said to my daughter, “I’m just going to answer the phone, pet.”

  “Eeyore-ways calls me that,” Eva declared to her friends, who were soon giggling at this allusion to a donkey’s bray. Having grown up in Leeds, none of the youthful gathering would be familiar with the northeast term of endearment I’d just used.

  My mum smiled awkwardly as I left the noisy room. Then I crossed the lounge to answer the call.

  2

  From where I was standing, at the big bay window, I could see down our fenced-in driveway and into the quiet street, where our two-story detached stood alongside a row of similar properties. Olivia and I had good academic posts at local universities and that had enabled us to replicate in an urban environment the kind of places we’d once occupied in the rural north. This was a private home where other people could be kept at a distance. But we weren’t misanthropic; we simply appreciated our own company, and had our studies (me in the human sciences, Olivia in music) and, most of all, Eva to focus on.

  It was accurate to say that we didn’t care for unsolicited interruptions, and we thought this was well known among our acquaintances. So who could this be, calling on a weekend afternoon?

  “Hello?” I said into the phone, barking the word brusquely, as if subconsciously attempting to communicate my displeasure at being contacted. I knew this couldn’t be anyone from my university, because there was a departmental rule about using only email during out-of-office hours. And as my mum was in the dining room (I’d picked her up hours ago from her home nearby) and Olivia’s parents had called that morning to wish their only grandchild a happy birthday, this was also unlikely to be a family member.

  But then I realized how wrong my assumption was.

  “Hello, Harry,” said the caller, and although the line was as clear as most modern forms of communication, his voice sounded broken, marred by static, like someone speaking from the past…which was of course how this intrusion struck me.

  Dexter, I thought with mounting anxiety, and was glad I’d closed the door separating the lounge from the dining room. Dear God, my younger brother.

  I hadn’t heard from him in a decade, since we’d fallen out over some family-related issue. Dex had wanted to blame our mother for the way Dad had treated us—she could at least have stood up to him, he’d claimed—but I, drawing on my psychological studies at the time, had decided to forgive her, bringing her closer into my life. It hadn’t been easy living with such a monster; she’d known that even better than us boys had.

  “Hello, Dex,” I said, mimicking his neutral introduction, uncertain about why he was calling. I’d wanted to come across as neither welcoming nor dismissive. As far as I was concerned, if he was seeking reconciliation, I’d happily listen to what he might propose. We went back over thirty years, after all—in fact, it was more than that: he shared half my genes. “Haven’t heard from you in a while.”

  “It wasn’t difficult finding your contact details, Harry. I called your university, explained who I was, and they gave me your number.”

  Nobody in my department’s office had a right to do that, and I’d speak to staff there the next time I was on campus. But I didn’t want my brother to think I was unhappy about this, and so remained silent.

  Perhaps interpreting my lack of response as disapproval all the same, he spoke again. “It’s not as if you were hard to find anyway. You’re plastered right across the Internet.”

  If he meant this comment catti
shly—to him, I’d always been the “best at school,” the “teacher’s pet,” the one who “craved attention” in what Dex considered a callous world—I’d have to rise above it. We weren’t bickering youths anymore; we were grown adults—well, I certainly was.

  “It’s all work-related,” I replied, alluding to the articles and books I’d published on the role of logic in everyday life. “That’s what I do to get by, Dex.”

  “Yes, the world was always going to hear about you, wasn’t it?”

  “What can I say? I like to keep myself busy. After all, doesn’t the devil make work for idle hands?”

  Dex started laughing, an unpleasant sound. It was like certain animals braying, the kind maybe the children were still impersonating in the next room. Then he began coughing, a harsh, bronchial noise that forced me to pull the phone away from my ear until his fit eventually settled down. I wondered if he was ill and even if this was why he’d called.

  “Hey, man, are you okay?”

  Dex laughed again, but this time just a feigned scoff of amusement. “How…very…touching,” he said, taking lengthy breaths between words to ensure their articulation. “If I didn’t hate…just about everybody…on earth, I could be…quite moved, you know.”

  My brother was a lifelong bachelor, and as far as I was aware (judging by the last time I’d been involved in his life) had few if any close friends. Part of this was due to the fact that—unlike me, with my fine blond hair and engaging blue eyes—he’d been quite an ugly child, an aspect made clear by other schoolkids…as well as our dad.

  But such an unsightly appearance needn’t result in a corrupted character—I understood this from my studies, along with many other things about people—unless a negative approach to life was chosen. And I’m sorry to report that this was the way Dex had turned, many more years ago than I cared to remember.

  “Look, whatever differences exist between us, you’re still my younger brother and I’ll always care for you. I’m sorry if that violates your feeling that the whole universe hates you, but that’s the truth.”

  “The universe doesn’t hate any of us, Harry.”

  This sounded like a positive development in Dex’s attitude—ever since he was a boy interested in many issues, he’d always been drawn to their darker aspects—but I knew better than to take it at face value.

  “It doesn’t?” I asked, actually knowing it didn’t. I had my beautiful wife and daughter to prove otherwise, didn’t I?

  “It doesn’t even know we’re here, let alone care one way or the other,” Dex went on, sniggering a little, having now got back his full breath.

  I sighed, keen to avoid the kind of abstract debate in which we’d engaged as younger men. He was self-tutored, whereas I’d been “workshopped” by a redbrick university. His interests were arcane and borderline obscure; mine were practical and unashamedly mainstream. I guess we both had our strengths and weaknesses, but for me, after a full week at work and now a tiring party full of energetic youngsters, it wasn’t the time to discuss these.

  Keen to return to the normality of my daughter’s birthday gathering, I said, “Let’s just get to the point, shall we? I’m glad you’ve called, Dex, and I mean that sincerely. It’s been too long. Family’s important, you know. I hope you’ll realize that one day. But in the meanwhile”—I hesitated, wondering if I’d said too much and if what I planned to add was even the slightest bit wise; but then I simply finished—“what can I do for you?”

  With no further digressions, he told me.

  3

  When I returned to the dining room, mulling over my brother’s unexpected request, the girls were still pretending to be farmyard animals, with many a baa, a neigh and much more mooing. This amused me until Olivia, with a glance free of suspicion thrown my way, declared Eva the winner, before proposing that, as a reward, she should sing us all a song.

  My mother applauded this suggestion (I recalled a similar occasion the previous month when she’d been moved to tears by our daughter’s rendition of some classic tune), and although Eva was initially shy and reluctant to join Olivia in one corner at the piano, all her friends persuaded her to move away from the dining table. But it was only after receiving a nod of encouragement from me that she made the final distance. Despite loving—and of course being loved by—her mother, she’d always been a bit of a daddy’s girl.

  “What shall I sing, Mummy?” she asked in an unfortunate stage-whisper, perhaps hoping her audience—all the other girls shuffling in chairs, as well as her nana looking on—wouldn’t hear.

  “How about the one you’re learning at school?” Olivia replied with suppressed volume, alluding to a production of The Wizard of Oz, which the private institution (to which my wife and I had decided to send Eva, after weighing up all options) would stage in spring.

  “ ‘Over the Rainbow’?”

  “Well, as I know the accompaniment, I think it’s a good one to try. So whenever you’re ready, darling.”

  Olivia was a professional violinist, but could play the piano, too—certainly better than I could, having lacked that kind of upbringing.

  As Olivia struck the introductory chords, Eva marshalled her breathing while the other children lapsed into silence, simply watching, eager to listen. My mum sat nearby, still smiling that survivor’s smile, the one I’d been keen to encourage once the complications of mine and Dexter’s youth had finally faded to tolerable memories.

  Eva began to sing.

  As the lyrics soared sweetly in the warmth of our dining room, I gazed through the patio doors, which looked onto our lengthy back garden. It was mid-January, the north of England still caught in the teeth of an icy winter. Ground frost on the lawn as the day tilted toward darkness made my daughter’s words—“Somewhere over the rainbow, way up high…there’s a land that I heard of, once in a lullaby,”—sound sinister, as if my brother’s call had lent them a previously absent quality. Staring at the West Yorkshire terrain outside my home, I found myself thinking of vastly different territory, but certainly none ever mentioned in a child’s song.

  This unsettled feeling was hardly allayed when Eva went on to sing, “And the dreams that you dare to dream, really do come true,” let alone, “Someday I’ll wish upon a star, and wake up where the clouds are far behind me.”

  Now my mind entertained images of night-borne entities fleeing out into space, or perhaps even emerging from there, before thunderously descending to earth.

  But then I pushed all this nonsense from my mind—it related to material I hadn’t considered in the last decade—and returned my gaze to my beautiful daughter about to bring the song to its bittersweet conclusion.

  “If happy little blue birds fly beyond the rainbow, why, oh why can’t…can’t…”

  As Eva struggled to hit her last notes, Olivia slowed the piano accompaniment, allowing the girl to adjust her posture.

  “Don’t push your head forward, darling,” my wife whispered, her back to the other girls, who still looked attentively on. “Try to keep your vocal cords loose.”

  “…why, oh why…” Eva tried again, and this time, having drawn a deep breath before reaching for those high-pitched final words, she managed them: two beautifully sweet, rising sounds, the second of which she held for at least five seconds, sending a shiver of appreciation down my backbone: “…can’t…I?”

  That was when the room erupted with clapping and hooting, mainly from the other children, but also from me, my wife and my mother. Eva smiled and gave a modest bow, before stepping off the imaginary stage to greet her adoring fans.

  “May I have your autograph, young lady?” I asked, snatching a paper napkin from the tabletop and producing a pen from a trouser pocket (I always carried one around in the event of academic inspiration).

  Eva obliged with good humor, signing the napkin with her neatest handwriting, and when my mother came across with a drink in her hand (this was wine, of course; after all the troubles in her past, she’d always been a drink
er), she raised her vessel high.

  “Not a broken glass in the place,” she said with a slight slur, which was her awkward way of issuing hearty congratulations. Her marriage had scarred her deeply, but we were all still working on that.

  Olivia stepped over, and I turned to take one of her hands. After waiting for a pause in all the animated chatter, I said, “And we shouldn’t forget our star’s beautiful companion. Let’s hear another round of applause, please.”

  If this was my method of throwing Olivia off the scent of what I imagined she remained interested in—who had called the house earlier—she appeared not to suspect it, simply giving a gracious bow as the cheering was renewed, before glancing at me with a pleasant smile. Although Eva had my hair and eyes, it wasn’t difficult to perceive the girl’s likeness to her mother: tall, slender, a heart-shaped face.

  They shared personality characteristics, too. For all of my daughter’s cleverness with words (a gift I believe she’d acquired from me), her outlook was similar to Olivia’s. Both possessed a purity of spirit that bordered on naïveté but was actually related to being fundamentally good.

  With all the corruption and deceit involved in my past, I believed I was qualified to make this assessment, and doubted it was merely the blind element of love that led to such an interpretation. My wife and daughter were smart without being artful, knowing without guile. They embraced life with an openness that simultaneously alarmed and made me experience awe.

  How can anyone be so trusting, I often asked myself? Didn’t they realize the world was full of badness? But the only way of communicating such concerns might compromise what I adored most about them, and this would be wrong on many levels.