House of Many Changes

by Van Reed, Denis Hughes

Genres: Science Fiction; Sci-fi Action & Adventure; Alien Contact; Space Opera

Synopsis

When creation which is contrary to all the accepted laws of Nature springs directly from Genius in the grip of Evil the results may well take a form so terrible as to be beyond human understanding. When Philip Grayling did what he did he turned his back on the beauty of Right, choosing instead the Paths of Darkness. He perished through the medium of his own foolhardiness, but even in death his genius survived, an ally of Evil. To his sister, Veronique, to his friend, McGrath, and to his partner, Harman, he left a heritage of such awful malignancy that all three were engulfed in a sea of unspeakable peril.

Release date: October 27, 2016

Publisher: Gateway

Print pages: 101

Sample

From a distance, glimpsed through the ragged line of sentinel poplars that bordered a sluggish stream, it was a house that echoed darkness and the things of darkness; a house whose very outline had something of the proportions of a great crouching toad, a misty, drooping, brooding toad in a fog of its own noisome vapour. The bleak surroundings, aided and abetted by the drabness of the autumn afternoon, intensified this vague but disturbing impression. Here, everything was grey; the huddled block of the house itself, with its eaves rubbing shoulders with one another for comfort, was oppressed. Even the silver of reed thatch and the slight lean of the chimneys had a guilty look; the low range of disused farm buildings that straggled away at right angles were shocked into turning their back on the incongruous hump of a Nissen hut that squatted by the house itself. All this was grey in tone and texture. Just as the sedge grass and the broadening estuary and the sky were grey. Grey and silent, or almost so. The colour tone was relieved only by bright patches of vivid green where treacherous areas of bogland bordered the saltings near the water; and the silence was broken by the cry of some plaintive bird call belonging to the mist. The mist rolled in more thickly now, coming off the sea with its own ruthlessness, stealthy tread, isolating the house completely till it might have been alone in another world.

The thickening mist turned to rain, gentle at first then a steady downpour, hissing on the already soaked grass, puddling the mud track that coursed serpentine between the fields from the two-mile-distant road. The rain was a blanket over all other sound, silencing the mournful cries of the birds.

Presently, as the thickness of the afternoon increased, a yellow light came to life in one of the ground floor windows of the house, spilling out in a broad swathe through the uncurtained lattice. From the direction of the mist-distorted Nissen hut a red glow played fitfully on the falling rain.

In the room where the light had been switched on a man sat sprawled behind a crowded desk. A half-smoked cigarette smouldered between his fingers as he cradled a telephone to his ear and dialled a number with a yellow stained index finger. Erect, he was a tall, stoop-shouldered, gangling man, not old, not young, but with an agelessness about his features which was oddly at variance with the alert tone of his voice when he spoke. Thin grey hair ran straight back from a high, intelligent brow. His eyebrows were sharply defined, thick and dark, the eyes beneath them keen with some unknown enthusiasm. And yet there was an overall stamp of bitterness that marked his whole face despite its sallow agelessness.

At the other end of the line the double burr of the phone ceased abruptly.

“Hello?” said a voice.

The man at the desk unwound his legs and straightened up a little, leaning forward quickly. “Harman?” he said. “Grayling here.”

“I didn’t expect you to ring for a couple of days yet. What is it, man?” There was a note of suppressed excitement in Harman’s voice. It was a nervous voice at the best of times; now it was jittery, keyed-up.

Grayling gave a thin little smile that barely marked his face. “I had to,” he said. “Listen, it’s worked! The infra-red combined with the Heptrone and Brangleet rays have done the trick. We’ve succeeded, don’t you understand!”

Harman was silent; he could hear the laboured breathing at the other end of the line, the breath of excitement, fear even.

Harman said: “You mean they’ve … hatched out? My God!”

“Some of them, yes. You’d better come over at once. McGrath’s not here at the moment; he doesn’t know yet. I’ve only just come in from the lab myself; had to call with the news. It couldn’t wait.” He smiled sardonically, but his voice remained level. “After all, it was your idea in the first place. This is really your brood we’ve hatched. Anyway, it’s you who foots the bills. You’d better come quickly—and keep off the bottle on the way.”

Harman started to say something angry, then stopped. Instead: “Very well. These … chicks, what are they like?”

“Oh, doing fine. Quite a variety, too. You’d be surprised. Naturally I haven’t been in close contact with them—yet. I’ll wait till you join me. Probably McGrath will be back by this evening. He’s keeping an eye on my sister; she’s been keen on moving in here and trying to reform me for some time now. Can’t have that, not just at the moment.”

“Damn your sister! The chicks——?”

“Yes, damn my sister.” He laughed a little, silently. “Don’t worry about the other things; everything’s under control this end. You just get weaving and make it fast. We share this thing, remember. The responsibilities of it, even the dangers—if there are any. I wouldn’t know yet. Only about half of them are hatched so far. God knows what the rest’ll be like when they incubate.”

Harman sounded more nervous than ever: “For heaven’s sake keep them safe. If they got out … I’ll be down as soon as I can. How do I get there? It’s been so long that I almost forget where that lane of yours is.”

Grayling sneered at the telephone. Harman just hated the idea of coming to the farm. He always had been a gutless swine. But he had the money, which was all that mattered.

” You’ll find the gateway half a mile beyond the ‘Peacock’ on the Bronton road,” he said. “There’ll be no need to stop at the pub. I’ll give you a drink when you get here.”

Harman swore. “Don’t try to tell me what to do!” he snapped uneasily. “I’ll be with you soon—an hour, say.” He paused. Then: “For God’s sake, Grayling, whatever you do make sure they’re safe! If——”

Grayling rung off in the middle of the sentence. The room was deathly quiet. His cigarette had burnt down to his fingers, unheeded. He dropped it in an ashtray and watched the steady spirals of blue smoke rising from the debris of dead crushed butts. McGrath did that; Grayling let them smoulder. Grayling didn’t entirely trust his assistant. McGrath was too forceful, too intelligent. And they didn’t agree when it came to Veronique, Grayling’s sister. Grayling had a queer idea they’d start some trouble. And now that the “chicks” were hatched … Some chicks! He sank into a reverie of mingled awe and triumph. It was good that Harman was coming. There were uses to which Harman could be put now that the period of waiting was over. Even McGrath didn’t guess his intentions in that direction. For once Grayling felt uncertain of himself. McGrath worried him; Veronique worried him. She’d never been to the farm, not even before Gilda died. He didn’t dare risk her coming there now. She never had been appreciative of the things in which he dabbled; this would appal her sensitivity. He knew it and shied from the truth in his thought. She must be kept away, even if only for a little while longer.

A strange disquiet entered his weary brain. These things he had done, they were frightening. He recognised that, yet he couldn’t stop now. No man had done what he had so recently achieved. The living entities that even now stirred and breathed life were no part of nature, rather were they children of his own brain, and of McGrath’s. Children financed by Harman. The thought made him smile cynically. But he shuddered when he remembered what they looked like, these children—or chicks as Harman had called them. Harman was right in one thing; they must never get free or be loosed. A new sense of his own dread responsibility weighed heavily on his shoulders. What a man began he must finish; and the task, the great experiment, was not yet done. Control of the new life would have to be established. His eyes were veiled as he stared unseeingly at the spirals of smoke from the ashtray. Suddenly they were no longer steady, but broke and writhed in a current of air. Grayling barely noticed it. His mind was too full with complex things to react as it might have done otherwise. Only dimly did he hear the slow hiss of falling rain beyond the uncurtained window. It was dark outside now, dark with a gloom that came close and shut off the world from his own isolation. The wind soughed faintly in the chimney. He shivered and stirred, stretching his legs out straight again, brooding on matters so strange that no one save Harman or McGrath would have understood them.

The door, open behind him, gave onto darkness and a long stone-flagged passage. Something stirred near the doorway, dark upon dark, movement on a background of stillness. Grayling shivered again, touched by some unseen tentacle of disquiet. He knew there were evil things living now; he himself had given them life. Did their influence reach him even here? He thought of Harman, of how nervous and jittery the man always was. A smile touched his otherwise expressionless face. It would be good to see Harman suffer fear in the correct proportions when he arrived. Harman with his well-fed body, his smug round face and glasses, and the anxiety and fear that always travelled with him. What a fool the man was!

The thing in the doorway stirred again, moving from the dark to the light. It crouched there, motionless, watching the man’s back with its great red faceted eyes. A weird, almost tangible aura seemed to surround its being, making the gross bulk of its insubstantial, yet terrifyingly real. The eyes glowed with a light of their own, the faintest of noises, like dry rustling leaves on a dying tree, came softly as it moved further into the room.

Grayling suddenly stiffened in his chair, sensing perhaps the evil presence that had entered the room. Roused from his reverie, he sought in his mind for some solid fact at which to grasp.

Again the thing at his back made a very slight sound.

Grayling turned his head, half-rising as he did so. All the colour drained from his cheeks, sucked out by terror at what he saw. His mouth opened weakly, then hardened in the rasping start of a scream that was torn from his very soul by a fear such as no mortal man could overcome.

Almost before it began the scream was cut short. The yellow light remained unchanged. Outside, the rain fell remorselessly. The door of the Nissen hut swung creaking in the rising wind, acting like a shutter against the dull red glow from within. Something scuttled in the bushes, a rat, driven to flight by fear beyond its understanding. Vague, half-seen shadows moved here and there. The “chicks” had broken loose from their incubatory cells, living entities conjured into being from the deep wells of metaphysical transmutation.

‘The Peacock’ was warm and snug, comfortably crowded, softly lit with oil lamps and pleasantly hazy with tobacco smoke. In the one and only bar the gleam of brass and copper seemed to echo the drawl and burr of country voices, the clink of pots and the rising or falling mutter of conversation and laughter. In one corner a game of darts was in progress; in another the shove-ha ’penny board was occupied. It didn’t matter that outs. . .