chapter FIFTEEN
WHEN VINCE ROSE unlocked and then opened the old, unpainted door to the first attic room, Marc expected to hear at least the whine of a rusty hinge, or the sound of boards shifting underfoot. But there was nothing; the door opened smoothly and without a sound.
“So you’ve never been up here before, I take it?” Rose spoke without turning around. He reached out and flicked a light switch. The room brightened. Marc wouldn’t call it light, not exactly: that would be too kind a description for the weak, watery illumination. The room beyond the threshold simply became less dark.
“No,” he said, following the old man inside. “To be honest, I didn’t even know these rooms existed.”
“Behold,” said Rose. “My brother’s library...”
The room was small but it seemed much more spacious because there was little furniture inside. Just a small tub chair pushed up against a bookcase. The walls were lined with books. Marc could not see an inch of wallpaper because there were so many ceiling-high bookshelves fitted along the walls, and volumes of differing sizes took up every inch of them. There were also books and dusty old box files lined up on the floor, along the skirting boards.
“Wow... this is quite a collection.” He walked around the room, examining the spines. There were books on religion and philosophy, aviation, birds and wildlife. Shakespeare rubbed shoulders with Orwell and Stephen King. Biographies were stacked next to fiction. There was no recognisable order – no apparent system – to any of it. The majority of the volumes seemed to focus on Fortean subjects – real life ghosts and hauntings, sightings of monsters in lakes, murders, abductions, disappearances, UFOs, cryptos and tulpas. “He was really into this stuff, wasn’t he?”
“So it seems.” Rose went to the roof-mounted Velux window and opened the tilted venetian blind, allowing a little natural light into the musty room. “He was always interested in strange stuff, and I remember he started collecting books on these subjects when he was a child. I didn’t realise he’d kept it up.”
Marc’s eyes roved over magazine collections: The Fortean Times, The Unexplained, I Want to Believe, National Geographic, The New Scientist... full sets, probably worth a small fortune on eBay.
One entire shelf differed from the rest in the fact that it was dedicated to a single subject. Marc had heard the name Roanoake before, but couldn’t quite remember where or when. He selected a book at random from that particular shelf – The Roanoake Colony: An American Mystery. He flicked through the pages, skimming a few lines here and there, not taking much of it in until something snagged in his memory.
“Ah, yes...” He remembered it now: an infamous case. He’d read an article about it, seen a documentary on TV. A bunch of 16th Century English settlers had vanished mysteriously from an island off the coast of North Carolina. Carved into the trunk of a nearby tree, not far from the deserted camp, was the word Croatoan. There were a lot of theories on why the one-hundred and eighteen people had apparently fallen off the edge of the world, leaving behind only this vague, slightly creepy message – local Indians, cannibalism, alien abduction – and the books on this shelf seemed to examine each and every one of them in great detail.
At the end of the row of books, tucked away slightly because it was so slender a volume, Marc spotted something potentially interesting. A school exercise book with a tattered blue cover, its edges dog-eared. He replaced the book he was looking at and selected this other one, sliding it out of its place on the shelf.
On the cover was handwritten the title Croatoan and Loculus: a Study in Vanishment.
“What is it?” Rose drew close, peering at the book in Marc’s hands.
“I’m not sure. But it looks like your brother was working on something here – writing a book of his own, maybe, or at least an essay. Maybe he wanted to be published in one of those magazines he seemed to like so much.”
He began to leaf through the exercise book. Written neatly on the pages was what appeared to be a series of rough notes, fractured jottings probably penned in great haste judging by the state of the handwriting. The text was unfinished; first draft material. This was clearly something Harry Rose had been planning to develop further but his demise had brought his plans to an abrupt end.
Marc read out a section at random:
“Carved into another tree nearby – an oak tree, which isn’t indigenous to that area – was the word ‘Loculus’. None of the books mention this. It has been expunged from history. Why?”
He turned the pages and read some more:
“The ruby-throated hummingbird is a native of North Carolina. Why have these birds been seen in the Grove throughout history, particularly around the area where the Needle was built? Did they come through from Roanoake?”
He looked up from the page. The room darkened incrementally and when he glanced up at the roof and out of the tiny window, he saw that dark clouds were massing, like harbingers of a storm.
He cleared his throat and read some more:
“The name Terryn Mowbray was recorded on the shipping manifest (but oddly not on the actual passenger list – was he classed as luggage? Stored in a coffin, perhaps, like Stoker’s Dracula on the Demeter?), but this information can be found nowhere in any written account of the case.”
He flicked through the text on the remaining pages. At the back of the book, a photocopied page had been stapled to the inside cover. He opened it and stared at the image. It was a child’s pencil drawing. The lines were ragged, uneven, and the shading didn’t stay inside the lines. The sketch matched the other one in his possession: it showed a man wearing a wide-brimmed black hat and a long black cape, holding a short, pointed stick. His face was white, with large black goggle-like eyeglasses perched above an oversized beak. It was a familiar image, of course – a medieval plague doctor. But the familiarity made it no less disturbing, especially as it had seemingly been sketched by a young child.
captain clikcety, said the words beneath the sketch, drawed by Jack Pollack aged 6
“Why the hell didn’t he ever tell me about this?” He closed the book again and held on to it, not wanting to put it down but afraid to touch the volume for too long in case something infected him. It was a crazy thought, but nevertheless it caught hold inside his mind, barbed and dangerous. This information was unclean, it was tainted. Exposure to it might cause him damage.
“What is it?” Rose placed a hand on his arm. “You look... shaken.”
“Whatever Harry was working on here, it has something to do with the case I was researching. The Northumberland Poltergeist. The Pollack twins. The ghost they called Captain Clickety. Even the Hummingbirds. These were all part of my own notes... Harry was keeping this stuff from me, deliberately it seems. For some reason, he was holding it back.”
“I see. Maybe he was planning to tell you, but didn’t get the chance?”
Marc licked his lips. “Or maybe there was something he didn’t want me to find out...” He sighed. “But you’re probably right. There’s no reason he would have kept this information from me. He was a great help – why would he do that and then keep something this important back? It doesn’t make sense.”
“None of this makes sense, son. I’m starting to believe that my brother had mental health problems – far bigger ones than I ever imagined. I mean, does any of this strike you as abnormal? I don’t mean to cast aspersions on the man’s interests, but all this... well, it’s slightly over the top, don’t you think?”
Marc turned to face Rose. The man’s face was pale in the gathering gloom. His eyes were moist, as if he were about to cry. Was he looking for denial or affirmation? “I suppose so, yes. It does come across as a bit obsessive.”
“Just wait till you see what’s in the room next door. That’s the kicker.” Rose turned and walked out of the room. He stood on the other side of the small landing and used another key to unlock the door opposite. “If you thought the library was weird, just wait until you get a load of this.” He pushed open the door, switched on the light, and went inside.
Standing in the doorway of the library, Marc once again began to have the intense feeling that somebody was standing behind him. He knew that it was impossible, that he was alone inside the room, but the sensation of someone standing there silently in the corner grew and grew, becoming something that he could not ignore. He thought that it might be Harry, either urging him on or warning him not to pursue this any further.
Then, softly at first, he heard a steady, repetitive clicking sound. The sound grew in volume, but remained at a level that ensured no one outside the room could have heard it. The clicking remained at an even tone, droning on and on. Then, like a Geiger counter picking up levels of radiation in the air, it began to wax and wane, creating a hideous song.
Air trapped in the radiator? Old water pipes under the floorboards, making a racket?
The clicking decreased in volume and by the time he was facing the part of the room where it was coming from, it had ceased. The corner was empty. There was nobody there, watching him. Yet he felt as if there was yet another figure hiding just out of sight, perhaps drawn into a fold of darkness.
Marc backed out of the room, taking the exercise book with him. When he finally shut the door, he struggled to let go of the handle. He wanted to keep his hand there, gripping it tightly, effectively trapping whatever was inside that room for as long as he could. Like the fabled little boy with his finger stuck in the dyke, he was holding back the flood – but this was not a flood of water, it was a surging wave of darkness and desolation, the terrible precursor to an ocean of nightmare that would drown all who stood in its path.
“Are you coming?”
He turned his head at Rose’s voice, which was coming from beyond the other open door. He pulled free his hand, backing away from the library, and allowed his body to turn around, too. He was beginning to feel hemmed in. Claustrophobia had never been something that had bothered Marc, but right now he felt trapped.
He stepped into the other room. The window blind was closed but Rose had turned on a small table lamp that was positioned on the floor in the far corner. It cast dim light across the room, creating a creepy atmosphere that wasn’t helped by what was waiting at the centre of the room.
On a large plinth or table, and taking up most of the room, there was a scale model of the Concrete Grove estate. Marc stood and stared at it, hardly able to believe what he saw. He remembered a boyhood friend whose father had been obsessed with model railways. The man had created a system of tracks and fields, and even a small village, in the basement of their house. As a boy, Marc had been fascinated by the sight; as he grew older, he began to think it was all a bit sad and obsessive.
This reminded him of that guy and his model railway. A similar level of detail was displayed here, but possibly to an even greater degree of ambition. He recalled Harry’s milk-bottle-top replica of the Needle. Had it been a practice model, a warm-up or a template he’d completed before tackling the real thing?
He moved towards the model, unsure of what to do in the presence of such a thing.
“Impressive, isn’t it?”
He glanced at Rose, nodded. “Yes... and it’s a bit scary, too. He must’ve spent hours in here, working away at this thing. It’s too lifelike... know what I mean?”
“Yes, I do. It’s creepy. Nothing like this should exist. It’s... It’s unhealthy.”
Marc leaned across the table and reached out towards the replica of the Needle, the ugly tower block that stood at the centre of the estate. This one was not constructed from foil bottle tops.
“I think it’s made out of cement, or maybe even proper concrete. He must’ve cast it himself, mixing the materials, constructing a little mould...”
Marc’s hand had paused in mid air. He moved it forward, brushing his fingertips against the side of the tower. It was hard and rough, unpleasant to the touch.
Rose sounded troubled. “Cardboard I could understand. Even balsa wood. Perhaps some MDF off-cuts from a DIY store. But cement? That’s going a bit too far.”
Marc remained silent as he inspected the model. He didn’t know what to say.
The estate was designed to form a series of concentric circles, each street wrapping around the one before. The plan view, looked at in this way, was weird. It looked like a magic circle, or a form of pentagram. Marc knew this was nonsense, but his gut instinct suggested otherwise. Why build the estate in such a specific layout? What was the purpose behind the circular pattern?
There was no furniture in the room; no shelves on the walls; no carpet on the floor. Just bare plaster and varnished boards. The model took centre stage. It was the reason this room existed. Nobody but Harry Rose had ever been in here until it had been discovered by his brother – Marc could sense it. The man had worked on his model every night, adding and subtracting tiny elements, making repairs and replicating alterations carried out in the real world by builders or council workmen. It was an ongoing project; his life’s work. He must not have told anyone about the model. It was his secret. He had kept it all for himself.
But now that Harry Rose was dead, the seal had been broken: eyes other than his had taken in this small-scale urban wonder.
Some of the houses were made from the salvaged parts of plastic model kits. The vehicles on the streets were almost certainly bastardised toys and model kits; the tiny people were plastic toy soldiers that had been moulded and altered by the application of heat and a sharp craft knife, then dressed in perfect little clothes that Harry had fashioned from scraps of material.
The grass, when he touched it, felt like pieces of Astroturf. White lines had been painted by hand onto the road surfaces; drainage gullies and gutters had been fitted into the kerbs. No detail had been missed. Marc had no doubt that Harry’s model matched the real thing down to the tiniest detail. He could tell by the painstaking work the man had put in that there was little margin for error. It was obvious how much love, dedication, and sheer hard work had been carried out in this room.
Then he noticed the flags.
They looked like minuscule versions of the kind of flags found on a golf course, the ones used to mark the holes. Or football corner flags. A cocktail stick topped off with a triangular cutting from a sheet of cotton had been used for each pole. As he looked closer, he saw that each of the flags had a name and a number written onto the material.
Connie 7
Alice 8
Fiona 9
Tessa 10
He knew what these were immediately. They were the names and ages of the Gone Away Girls, and each flag was positioned in the place from which they’d vanished. He made a mental note to look up the information, just to collaborate his hunch, but he knew he was correct.
Connie’s flag was stuck in the grass at the sorry excuse for a children’s playground the locals called Seer Green.
Alice’s flag was in the car park of the small supermarket to the east of Grove Lane.
Fiona’s flag had fallen over and lay flat inside the skateboarding park.
Tessa’s flag stood forlorn and lopsided on the pavement outside a sweet shop near Grove Corner.
“What does this mean?” Marc turned and looked at Rose.
“I’m not sure. I think I’m too scared to even think about it.”
“You noticed the names?”
Rose nodded.
“Do you know what they are? Do you know who those flags are meant to represent?”
“I do. It’s those poor little girls, the ones that went missing.”
Marc licked his lips. He didn’t even want to think about this too deeply, but he needed to ask the question. “Do you think... do you really think that Harry could have been involved in their disappearances? Is there any way that he could have been responsible, or at least that he might have known who was?”
Rose didn’t speak for a few seconds. He stared at Marc, then looked quickly away and examined the model. When he looked at Marc again, his eyes were moist. “In all honestly, I don’t really know.”
BACK DOWNSTAIRS, IN the small, neat kitchen, they drank coffee and stared at each other across the table.
“Here.” Rose reached into his jacket pocket and took out a key. He placed it on the table in front of him, alongside the keys to the attic rooms. “It’s for the front door. Use this place as you please. I have a feeling all that stuff upstairs might help you with your book, and if you can shine any light at all on Harry’s possible involvement with those kids, I’d be grateful. I can’t stay here – can’t even come here. It feels... wrong.”
Marc nodded and sipped his coffee. He reached out and took the keys, making a fist around them. “Thanks. I’m not sure what your brother was into, but I’ll be honest – my muse is sitting up and begging for more.”
“Just keep me posted. Let me know what you find out. I... I can’t stay here. It’s too much for me. I’m not a young man. I need to get out and breathe.”
Marc nodded. “I understand. And I appreciate this, I really do.” He opened his hand and looked at the keys. “I’ll find out what I can and keep in touch.”
Rose didn’t take his eyes off Marc’s face. “Let’s just hope you find out that Harry wasn’t involved.”
“What do we do if... well, if he was involved? How the hell do we tackle that situation?”
Rose set down his cup. He placed his hands, palms down, on either side and made them into fists. “I don’t know. Let’s just see what you dig up first, eh? We’ll face that problem if it is a problem.”
“Okay. We’ll see where the wind blows us on this. I’m pretty sure Harry wasn’t doing anything bad. I think I knew him well enough that I’d be able to recognise something... you know, if he was a bad man.” He paused. “And you were his brother: you’d at least have a slight inkling if he was some kind of child abductor. I doubt we’re going to find any bodies buried under the cellar floor.” He tried to smile but it was a struggle. “Worst case scenario: he knew a lot more than he ever let on, and something scared him enough that he kept quiet for all these years.”
“That’s what I’m hoping.”
Marc nodded. “Yeah. Me, too.”
LATER, BACK DOWNSTAIRS, Marc stood at the front window of Harry Rose’s lounge, watching the sky grow dull and leaden. Like time lapse photography, the clouds moved quickly across the heavens, darkening the area, cutting it off from the sun. It was an unusual effect; he had never seen anything quite like it before. When he’d been up in the attic rooms with Rose, he’d glimpsed similar dark clouds out of the attic window, but these were much more expansive. He’d thought of those earlier clouds as harbingers of a storm, and still the idea felt right. But the oncoming storm was not one caused by atmospheric conditions; it was more of a spiritual upheaval.
Marc was not a religious man. Depending on what day he was asked, he would tell people that he was either an atheist or agnostic. He certainly didn’t believe in the God his parents had prayed to. Look what that had achieved for them... nothing; nothing at all. Just a slow, painful, drawn-out death in front of their son.
He watched the darkening sky, his skin prickling as if tiny ghost fingers were pitter-pattering across every inch of his body. He felt cold. The hair on his arms and on the back of his neck was bristling. It was a sensation he’d only ever read about in books, but now that it was happening to him he realised that the physical experience – like most clichés – was based in reality.
“Jesus...” He reached out and closed the window blinds, then turned to face the room. He didn’t feel comfortable here. Not on the estate or in this house. Everything seemed vaguely hostile, as if his presence was unwelcome.
When Rose had left, Marc had gone straight back up to the attic. After studying the model of the estate for a little while, he’d crossed the landing to the library. Ignoring the sensation that there was still someone in there, standing in the corner and watching him, he’d browsed again through the volumes. On a shelf near the door, he found another notebook. He’d failed to notice it the first time, but this time it was as if his eyes had come to rest immediately upon it, deliberately seeking it out. He refused to believe that it had not been there the first time, and someone had placed it on the shelf for him to find when Rose wasn’t around.
The two notebooks were now on the coffee table. He crossed the room, sat down, and picked up the second one again. It was old, the cover creased and stained, yet unmarked by any kind of writing.
There wasn’t much content inside this one, but on the first page was stapled a faded copy of an old-fashioned print or woodcut of a plague doctor. The name Terryn Mowbray was written underneath in Harry’s neat, small script.
“Terryn Mowbray is Captain Clickety...” Even as he said the words, he appreciated their inevitability.
He turned the page and read the words over, trying to understand them more fully this time. There were scribbled footnotes at the bottom of the page, and Marc could at least see the shape and structure that Harry had been attempting to impose upon the writing.
In 1349, during the Black Death, a plague doctor was summoned to the village of Groven1 in the northeast of England. King Edward III himself was said to have given the man his orders. Groven, it was said, had managed to avoid all signs and marks of the Plague. The Black Death had not crossed its borders; the people who lived there were fit and healthy and oblivious to the darkness that had fallen over the rest of Europe.2
The plague doctor, Terryn Mowbray, was around thirty years old. There is no record of his existence prior to his mention here, and even this was difficult to piece together from various unreliable sources. He apparently arrived in Groven sometime in May. What he found there (here?) enraged him. The people of the village had embraced ancient rites and rituals and even created new ones of their own – normal pagan beliefs had been supplanted by something stranger, like a mutated, nameless religion. They prayed to unnamed deities and Mowbray claimed that they offered up children – twins were thought to be the most prized – as a sacrifice. The children were stabbed to death at the centre of a grove of oak trees, their blood left to soak into the earth. A path of black leaves is said to have led the way from the village to the grove.3
Mowbray apparently noted many strange sights:4 visions of a tall, grey structure at the centre of the grove of trees, birds that hummed and flew backwards, a young girl with multicoloured wings, and animals that he could not name – a horse with a single truncated horn, like a mutilated unicorn, dogs with the faces of humans, a large, bloated snake that smelled of offal and was drawn to the site of the bloodshed. He called this giant serpent the Underthing.5
Mowbray was enraged. He ordered the village cleansed. People were hung, burnt in bonfires, and quartered by his men. After the massacre,6 he and his men slept one more night in the village.
The rest is sketchy7 at best. Some say that a great number of ghostly twins appeared in the village, and others say that it was a pack of ravenous human-faced dogs. I was even told by one drunken old-timer that it was giant hummingbirds.
However it happened, Mowbray’s men were killed, their skinned bodies hung from the branches of the oaks. Only he was left alive. An envoy sent by the King arrived a few days later and found Mowbray, starving and filthy and jabbering, sitting at the centre of the grove of oaks, surrounded by the rotting, flyblown remains of his men’s bodies. He spoke about other worlds, and gateways, and secrets that should never have been disturbed. He whispered the words Croatoan and Loculus. Upon his face and body, beneath the mask and the cloak, were the buboes and postulant sores of the Plague. He had brought it here, to the place that had previously remained untouched. His spirit had polluted the sanctity of Groven, first with the sin of his banal evil, second with the blood of the villagers, and then finally with Black Death itself...
The only whisper I heard about what happened next makes little sense out of context. Apparently Terryn Mowbray stood, bowed, and started turning in a slow circle upon the ground. He disappeared as if he were sinking into the earth, corkscrewing away into infinity, chanting a single word over and over again: Loculus.8 All that was left in his place was a small mound of blackened leaves.9
The King’s envoy was imprisoned, a gibbering idiot after what he’d found. The King said he was a liar and a heretic. The man killed himself in his cell three years later.
1Groven – Grove – the Concrete Grove.
2Edward Plantagenet clearly hoped that some great and hidden knowledge would be revealed to him if he discovered why the village of Groven remained Plague free.
3Surely a metaphor?
4I could find no trace of these notes. I assume they went with him, wherever he vanished to.
5I have no idea what this means. Could it represent the nameless forces the villagers worshipped?
6There’s no record of how many victims there might have been.
7I got some of this story from obscure Fortean literature, and the rest has been told in the back rooms of certain pubs for decades, changing, like a game of Chinese Whispers, with each telling.
8Again, this word. This place. Where is it? Is it here, in the Concrete Grove? How does one find it, and how to gain access? Was this the secret knowledge King Edward, through Terryn Mowbray, was seeking?
9What’s with the black leaves again?
Marc set the notebook down next to him on the sofa. He leaned back and tilted his face up towards the ceiling, closed his eyes. It was madness. None of this could be true – it was all myth and hearsay, local legend given the kind of attention that it surely did not deserve. He opened his eyes and stared up at the ceiling. There was a large cobweb in one corner; he could see the fat black body of a spider, motionless against the white plaster ceiling. The spider seemed to be watching him. Or perhaps it was dead.
“Why the hell didn’t you get yourself a computer, Harry?”
Harry’s system was difficult to follow. The books in the library were kept in some kind of highly personal and esoteric order, and he had found no more of the slender notebooks on the shelves. There wasn’t much written down. It must all be in Harry’s head, burned to ashes along with his body.
“What else did you know?” The spider moved; it was alive after all. The web shuddered. The spider was no longer there. But something was... and not just in the corner of the ceiling. Marc became convinced that it was everywhere, inside and outside the house; all around him, trying to get inside him. Something was coming.
“What is it that you were keeping from me, and are you trying to tell me now that you’re dead?”
He thought about the Pollack twins, and the Northumberland Poltergeist. He’d always known there was more to the story than a simple urban haunting, but who the hell would believe any of this? His publisher would laugh at him; they’d send him away without an advance. It was fantastic, improbable... more than that: it was f*cking insane.
Other worlds, demonic plague doctors, links to a famous case of vanishing New World settlers, a monster called the Underthing... the more he dug, the more incredible all this seemed.
He closed his eyes and tried to pin down the facts. But facts were thin on the ground here; all he had to cling to was a bunch of ghosts and stories within stories.
Only one thing was certain. Doors were opening, or being opened.
Something was on its way.
Something was coming.
mummy went out to pub and daisy like a flower a sleep. sumbody else in the house wi me. i here him breething. captain clickety comign for me. he see me all the time even when he not here. he everwhear not just in the house. he all over the estate like grass and roads and houses. he lives in the needle but he can see through walls. he wants me and daisy like a flower because we look the same. two things the same make him stronga. two things the same fill him up like food. this time he bring others with him. they clothes are funny like old style in the museum or wot scarycrows have on. they smiling. some have blood on them clothes and faces. they hungry. I be food for them. me and daisy like a flower. a humingbird fly in the room. i go to play with it. keep it away from baby.
– From the diary of Jack Pollack, April 1974
PART THREE
Scarecrow Culture
“I heard its f*cking heart beating.”
– DS Craig Royle