Conjure House Read online

  “If you like,” Dawn replied, knowing her husband’s exhaustion was as much to do with withholding misery as working full-time. “I fancy a nip of scotch before bed. But let’s get Lucy sleepy first.”

  They strayed over the crest of a slope, eliminating the village behind them. Huge shadows stretched beneath intense starlight, thrown by rocks and ridges of earth that formed the territory up here. Beyond were the Yorkshire Dales, vast and imperious. Vague entities moved up ahead, but this was only the wind forcing shrubs and heather to comment on their passing. Lucy scampered, kicking back scraps of turf, and when Dawn let the dog off the lead, she charged forwards, barking maniacally and heading for the standing stones whose bulk had just shifted into view, dramatised by the moon’s pale glow.

  “Lucy! Be quiet!” Mick hissed, putting Dawn in mind of the way he’d spoken to their sons, arguably too often. “What’s the matter with her? She isn’t usually this giddy.”

  “Perhaps she smells…a rat or something.”

  Dawn’s words forced her to reflect on some of her most unpleasant suspicions following Simon’s disappearance. Like all residents of Deepvale, she’d heard rumours of what The Conjurer had once attempted in that dire house: something to do with children, using them to channel spirits…That was nonsense, of course, but it was surprising what grief made you believe. A year after the “episode,” she’d persuaded Mick to visit the property and search every room, while she’d stayed at home with Anthony. But the only sign of life her husband had located amid rotting sticks of furniture and damaged walls was vermin on both floors and also in the cellar, because he’d heard noises from there, too.

  That had put an end to their hope, and only a therapist they’d consulted had helped them cope as a family. This had been a positive experience for Anthony, because he’d later done well in psychology at school and university. Dawn and Mick had worked hard to ensure a prosperous future for their remaining son, using any spare money to help him through his studies. That was why they’d been unable to afford to move away, however tempting that had been.

  Lucy continued to bark, weaving among the ancient stones like a creature possessed by more than excitement. Mick grabbed the lead from Dawn and stumped forwards, calling the dog to heel. Eventually he got the latch fastened to her collar, but not without the animal protesting. Lucy seemed intent on fleeing the area and nearly pulled Mick over while trying to bolt towards the small lake at a distance.

  “Bloody hell! She almost ripped my sodding thumb off!” Mick complained, yanking on the lead to get the dog under control.

  “She must be thirsty,” said Dawn, mediating in this issue of discipline, much as she had when the boys had been young and they’d upset their father in some trivial way. “Let’s hurry. It’s getting colder.”

  Nothing followed them from the standing stones, and any impressions to the contrary were just echoes of their footfalls, amplified in this barren sprawl. They struck on, Dawn trying to lessen her anxieties by reflecting on how successful all the children from the grove had become. Wasn’t lovely Lisa a writer? And comical Paul and rough Andy—hadn’t they done well respectively in music and art? Life didn’t always have to be horrible, then.

  They’d reached the lake alongside The Conjurer’s House. Lucy usually liked paddling in there, but it was too late to get her dry before bed; Mick kept her secure on the lead. The dog had calmed down, standing obediently at her owner’s side like a well-behaved child. Mick gazed across the small body of water as illuminated waves rippled across its surface, denoting something astir in its deepest part.

  “Nothing has changed out here, has it?” he said with uncharacteristically intimate disclosure. “It’s as if no time has passed. Only our memories linger, but to look at this landscape, it’s as if they don’t matter at all. Do you…do you know what I mean?”

  Dawn paced forwards to clutch her husband’s arm with one shaking hand, using the thumb to pinch his bicep, a gesture of support she couldn’t imagine him accepting verbally. He responded with a gesture of his own, the fingers of his free hand stroking hers.

  And that was when something emerged from the water.

  Except it wasn’t only one thing.

  There were several.

  Dawn had just been about to say, “It’s as if Simon is back with us, isn’t it?”

  And then he was.

  The boy was marshalling several other creatures from the lake. Something was wrong with the hands they used to draw themselves up the muddy banking. They were short, covered in hair, and about five or six or more in number. Dawn and Mick could only stare at their younger son, who looked identical to the way he’d appeared on the day of the “episode.” Emerging from a place near The Conjurer’s House, he used his arms to direct the movement of his dripping acolytes. They bore a pungent odour of rot and spoiled innocence. The things had no faces, just drapes of greasy hair, which also covered their childlike bodies.

  Lucy started whimpering. She’d never known Simon, and cowered from the boy. And as he staggered forwards to instruct his hideous cohort to move in for the kill, the dog fled the scene as if knowing how alone it was about to become in the world.

  TWO

  Anthony needed a cigarette.

  Which was surprising, because his lecture—the most demanding on the module—was going uncommonly well. Few of the students in the room fiddled with their mobile phones or chatted to peers. Most stared with intrigued expressions as he brought his talk to its close.

  “In conclusion, I’m suggesting it’s never possible to know the world. We have only innumerable points of view from different perspectives, none of which exhausts the things we observe.”

  He paused to lift the largish box he’d brought from home onto the desk in front of him. Melanie had asked why he cluttered up the apartment with such stuff, especially now Carl was getting older, but he’d been unable to reply. Perhaps his wife had ascribed his silence to his preoccupied attitude, and if that was true, he was happy to leave it that way.

  He now had the practical component of his lecture to present. Maybe that was what the students liked about his classes: these exercises made time move quicker, enabling them to depart for the Student Union and lose themselves in drink. The lucky sods. Anthony remembered those days well.

  “I need three volunteers,” he announced, setting the box with the holes he’d punched in the sides on his desk. He glanced up at a sea of waving arms, and selected students who struck him as the most academically promising. He didn’t do much teaching—he had his PhD to work on—but he’d recently got to know several undergraduates. They were a decent bunch, all so young and vulnerable…Raising an arm to point, he said, “How about you, David…and you, Marie…and finally, you, Sally.”

  The trio of psychology students rose from their seats and paced towards Anthony, reminding him of another threesome in the past. But he wouldn’t let this memory interfere with his task. His need of a smoke had also returned, connected to what he’d smuggled inside the box. As the volunteers clustered around him, he gazed through the lecture room’s window at green hills encircling Leeds, bearing shadows of amassing clouds. The university faced onto the north of England, his native Deepvale lost amid it…

  Anthony shifted his attention back to his job.

  “To reiterate, events in the world are always complicated and to understand them, we need to achieve an adequate mental grip. But this is difficult. All we have are our senses, and just a single point of view: that of our bodies.” He hesitated, trying to control his mind, but then stooped to the box. “Each side of this container has a hole in it. I can see through one on my side, and now I want you three to crouch and look through those in the others.”

  David, Marie and Sally mimicked his posture, as if slipping down the evolutionary ladder, dragging their knuckles on the floor while securing good positions to look through slots in the cardboard. Anthony sensed the rest of the class watching like critical commentators. Then he said, “Okay…tel
l me what you see.”

  A pause followed, during which inclement weather outside stepped up its assault. Rain pattered against the window, and only an act of will allowed Anthony to avoid thinking this had come from a windswept lake…

  He was saved from brooding by Sally’s voice from the far side of the box.

  “It’s a big stone, isn’t it?” she asked, her tone as delicate as a child’s. “Or possibly a rock.”

  She was gazing at the object’s right, just as Anthony looked at the left. He said nothing, however, because he was intrigued to hear what the other two might make of it.

  “Nah,” said David, glancing through the front slot. “It’s some kind of finger…or a…a model of a snake.”

  “I agree that’s it’s a model,” added Marie from the box’s rear, “but I’d say it was a rhinoceros. It’s made out of clay, I think. I can see its two back legs and a squiggly tail.”

  Anthony stood, struggling to keep a self-satisfied grin off his face. “Okay, gang, you may retreat.”

  He watched the threesome return to their seats, the way he’d watched Paul, Lisa and Andy step into their homes after police had arrived that awful night…Suppressing these treacherous thoughts, Anthony lifted the box’s lid and took hold of the clay model of an elephant inside. After producing it, a murmur of amusement rippled through the room.

  “This is what my assistants observed, but each from only one point of view. Consequently, none guessed its identity.”

  The beast was about a foot long and six inches wide. It bore only a tenuous resemblance to the animal that had inspired it; the body was too thin, the head plump, and the ears hardly formed at all. Its legs were solid, however, and the trunk delicately constructed. It was, in short, a child’s idea of an elephant. And Anthony recalled its creator with such affection he felt his heart stir; but his tears were prevented when someone spoke.

  He glanced the way of the voice, half-expecting to see a small boy emerge from a dark doorway, the event he’d dreamed about far too often…But there were only puzzled youths in front of him, gazing with concern. Wasn’t he supposed to be a psychologist? Surely nothing like this should get the better of him. But the truth was that it had.

  “I’m sorry,” he said, his voice unsteady. “Did…did someone ask something?”

  David, who’d taken part in the demonstration, put up his hand. “I did, Anthony. I just wanted to make the point that, if I’d looked into every hole, I might have realised, on the basis of accumulating knowledge, that the thing inside was an elephant.”

  Anthony had already anticipated the statement. “Remember, this is just a simple example by way of illustration. Events in everyday life are often more complicated.” At that moment, he noticed a figure moving beyond a frosted panel of glass in the lecture room’s door. That couldn’t be a child, Anthony’s son perhaps, because Carl was at home with his mum, enjoying half-term school holidays…Anthony went on, “In any case, we can only achieve multiple points of view over time, and although memory strings together these perceptions, we can never be sure that what we recall from one moment to the next remains accurate. The past is subject to subtle distortion.”

  It wasn’t a person outside the room, thinner that anyone had a right to be. One of the cleaners, making an early start today, had simply propped a mop against the staircase in the hallway. Once this blurred woman moved on to her duties, Anthony returned to his.

  “Do you understand what I’m saying? There is no God’s-eye view. We can never perceive every aspect of an object at the same time, because doing so requires us to break free of our bodies. And without our senses, how could we perceive anything at all?”

  Now Marie, another of Anthony’s assistants, was roused to comment. “I get what you’re saying. But how about if all three of us had shared information about what we’d seen and then tried to reach a consensus about what was inside the box? Couldn’t we have decided between us that it was an elephant?”

  How like a woman, Anthony thought, knowing this was the kind of thing his wife might have said, her position informed by the many works of English literature she’d studied. He owed their marriage to her interest in his own academic discipline, however. She’d attended a talk on campus back in 2004 called “The Role of Text in Contemporary Thought,” some tedious rant by a fashionable academic. He and Melanie had stolen away later to the Union bar, after which they’d dated regularly. Following graduation, she’d told him she was pregnant and the news had both delighted him and made him feel apprehensive, especially as the child had turned out to be a boy. Carl, they’d called him. He’d turned seven this year. The same age as—

  “Look,” said Anthony, struggling to ignore the darkening sky through the window. The shape among the clouds wasn’t a face; it was far too large and ragged…Gripping the clay model with uncommon strength, he began speaking again. “How can we ever know that what we experience is what anyone else does? We might ask them, of course, but can we ever be sure their interpretations are identical to our own? And anyway, they might lie. People are…are often wicked…”

  Just then, a peal of laughter swept across the room. At first, Anthony believed this was in response to his observation, but after looking down, he realised that, with tension in his hands, he’d broken off the elephant’s trunk. Now the animal looked odd, and he pictured it rearing up on its hind legs, like a vicious dog or something unspeakably large and volatile…

  As the laughter faded, he felt furious, on the brink of losing his temper, but somehow maintained a professional attitude. Breathing deeply, he gripped the detached length of dried clay—the trunk felt like an old man’s gnarled finger—before resuming his narrative.

  “My point is this: whether we try to perceive every aspect of an object alone or as part of a group, we will never exhaust it. There is no God’s-eye view. Time prevents us from combining our own many perceptions, and the problem of understanding other people makes reaching a combined consensus impossible.” He placed the model back in the box, laying the trunk to one side. He’d find some glue to fix it after returning home. Then he finished, “Okay, I think that’s enough for one session. I’ll see you all after the study week.”

  But that was when the third student who’d taken part in his demonstration—Sally—asked a final question. “Anthony, may I ask what role art plays in this?”

  “How do you mean?” He’d inexplicably begun to tremble, perhaps as a result of a chill creeping in through the window. “I’m talking about knowledge—quantification, certainty, falsifiability. I don’t follow.”

  “I just wondered whether the eternal verities we find in, say, the work of Leonardo, Shakespeare and Beethoven get at truth in a way that transcends time. I mean, they’re still relevant, aren’t they? And lots of people agree on their worth. They speak to the soul.”

  “If you believe in the soul, there really is no hope,” Anthony replied, expecting more laughter, but on this occasion none was forthcoming. The students presumably thought Sally had made a fair point; he ought to offer a less flippant response.

  “All understandings are subject to the cultural mores in which they arise, and that includes art. Yesterday’s verities are today’s curios. Thought continues to evolve, and it’s unlikely that we’ll ever fully know the world.”

  “So what use is science?” David asked from the front of the room. He’d just shut a book he’d been holding open with both thumbs. “Why are we bothering to learn anything at all?”

  Anthony was upon him with surprising haste. “Because, my friend,” he said, prising apart the young man’s book, “that’s what we do: fight on when all seems lost, even though we know that extermination is inevitable. Do you understand?”

  These words forced David to glance down at his book, whose pages were now fanned open. He nodded, his face illuminated by the moon beyond the window, which had just appeared in a sky twinkling with stars.

  Anthony’s craving for a cigarette had resurfaced. It was time to dis
miss the group. Before he could do so, however, the room’s door opened and a familiar face was thrust around its frame.

  “Ant,” said Gloria, one of the departmental secretaries, “could you phone your wife? She just called. It sounded urgent.”

  Melanie knew he had a lecture this afternoon; there must be a serious reason for her call. Now trembling, he said to his students, “Everyone dismissed. Thanks for attending. I’ll see you all next time.”

  Movement followed like a herd of huge charging creatures, but when the room was eventually empty, the silence sounded like the end of life. Gloria had also vanished, leaving Anthony alone. He crossed to the window and glanced north through the glass, at the sprawling Yorkshire Dales. A light danced at a distance, roughly in the direction of Deepvale, as if mocking him…

  He turned to exit the lecture room and hurried along a corridor to the presently empty school office. He stooped for one of the secretaries’ phones and dialled his familiar home number.

  After what seemed like a geological age, someone answered—a woman or a child to judge by its soft voice. “Hello?”

  “Hello—Mel?”

  “Yes, it’s me, love.”

  “Hey, are you okay?” Anthony’s words had blurred into one another. “Or is it…is it something to do with Carl?”

  The line went quiet for a long time before his wife replied. “Oh, Ant,” she said, her tone full of the sort of grief he thought he’d left behind years ago. “Oh, Ant, I’m so sorry.”

  THREE

  Melanie felt as if she’d been shut up inside their city apartment for too long, but the drive today into the Yorkshire Dales was like a release. This was a selfish attitude, of course, because she and her family were headed for her late in-laws’ funeral. Nevertheless, she was glad to put the cramped place in Leeds behind her for one day and get out into the countryside.