The Fearman

by Gwyneth Jones, Ann Halam

Genres: Ghost; Horror

Synopsis

WINNER OF THE DRACULA SOCIETY'S CHILDREN OF THE NIGHT AWARD

There's a deserted house on Roman Road.

They say it has a dreadful secret.

Is that why Andrei can't stay away from it?

Something stalks his family at night, and the threat looms of the father he has never known. Andrei wants to be ordinary, but he's living a nightmare.

Writing as Ann Halam, award-winning author Gwyneth Jones delivers a story of the creatures that haunt the darkness, and the monsters that don't stay there . . .


You can find out more about Gwyneth's writing as Ann Halam here: http://www.gwynethjones.uk/HALAM.htm

Release date: August 9, 2022

Publisher: Orion

Print pages: 240

Sample

It began on a dull, cold day at the end of winter. It was a Saturday. We’d been shopping: me, my Mum, my sister Elsa and my brother Max. Mum needed some office supplies for her phone sales job, so we went looking for a proper stationery shop. We ended up streets away from our usual beat, way out on Roman Road. We’d lived in the area for months, far the longest that we’d stayed in one place since Dad died, (I thought of him as Dad, though he was Elsa and Max’s father, not mine). But I didn’t remember having been on this road before. I knew the name because I’d seen a shabby old black and white sign, up on the side of a building. It was one of those big, dirty city rat-tracks where nobody wants to live anymore. There were no pubs, the few shops you could see were metal-grilled or boarded up: the traffic roared by, never pausing. The houses were grimy and battered; some of them seemed half-derelict. The one beside us looked as if it had been empty for years.

Mum had stopped suddenly, from sheer tiredness I supposed. We’d been trudging around for ages. The buggy was loaded up with shopping. I was in charge of it. Mum was holding Max by the hand: he was grizzling because he was cold. Elsa and I were used to situations like this, but he’d just turned three, and he wasn’t much of a tough. He was whimpering I want to go home, over and over again. I could tell it was getting to Mum. She stood staring at the empty house, biting her lip: and then glanced up and down the road, anxiously. I knew she was thinking that people were watching us, though there was no one in sight. I also knew, from experience, that there was nothing I could do or say. If I let on that I’d noticed she was feeling bad, I’d make things worse.

“Is there something wrong, Mummy?” asked Elsa.

“Nothing …” said Mum. “Nothing’s wrong. Look. There’s a bus stop. Let’s go home.”

“What about the shop you were looking for?” I didn’t want to hassle her, but it would be worse if we got home and she suddenly remembered she was short of something.

“It’ll wait. Come on, let’s go. Give me the pushchair.”

She grabbed the buggy handles from me, managed to stow the whinging Max in among our bulging carrier bags, and set off back the way we’d come. I was about to follow her when I noticed that Elsa was still staring at the empty house. The stop was only fifty metres away and there wasn’t a bus in sight. I thought it wouldn’t do any harm to let Mum have a couple of minutes on her own. The house stood back from the pavement, behind a low wall with an iron railing on top of it. There was a wrought-iron gate between brick pillars. Behind it steps led down to a basement entrance that was out of sight from the road; and up to the front door. A tree had taken root in a sloping patch of earth in the basement area, and grown up past the ground floor windows. Its bare twigs reached and tapped on the dark glass. At the base of the wall a thick mulch of rubbish had gathered: sweet wrappers, squashed cans, old take-away cartons, scraps of newspaper, all mingled in a dusty stew. Elsa was standing in this gunk, gazing intently through the railings.

“What are you looking at?”

“The house,” said my sister calmly.

I stared at it with her. I thought I’d rarely seen a house that looked so dead. It was like a road-killed rabbit that someone had kicked into the verge, lying there unburied and slowly sinking into the dirt. I could imagine how damp and dark it would be, in those rooms behind the tree branches. In the front hall there’d be a pile of mouldy junk mail. When you shoved the door open, a chill smell of murk and decay would waft out to meet you. I knew about houses like this. Since Dad died and we’d been on the move, we’d had to take whatever accommodation we could find: hard-to-rent flats with fungus on the kitchen walls, places that were barely habitable. But an empty house always has a kind of promise. I knew that Elsa was thinking the same as me—that we’d like to get inside and spook around the empty rooms, poke in the cupboards; maybe find some treasure or mystery there. However, the house might not even be empty. There was a rag of yellow lace curtain in one upstairs window, and someone had been using the gate recently. You could see the mark it had grooved in the rubbish on the path inside.

“Maybe it’s haunted,” I suggested.

“I know it is, Andrei,” answered Elsa, “This is definitely a haunted house.”

Elsa was seven and a half that winter, and I was fourteen, but she wasn’t exactly a normal seven year old. The life we’d led had made her into a strange mixture, believing in childish things like ghosts and magic, but somehow not in a childish way. I was never sure how to take it: was she serious or not?

I didn’t want to encourage her, so I moved over to examine the pillars on either side of the gate. They had been faced with something to make them look like stone, but the stuff had flaked away in raggedy scales like cement dandruff. I picked up a sharp-edged piece and started to scrape at the capstone on the left-hand pillar. The way the crust of dirt came off, like a scab from a cut, made me feel slightly sick. But it was something to do.

“What are you poking at?”

“There’s some lettering here, I want to find out what it says.”

I scraped out an ‘R’, and part of an ‘E’—or maybe an ‘L’; and then an ‘F’. The rest was gone beyond recall. I moved over to the other post, and had better luck. “N,” I said, digging out the grooves. “O … C …” “I suddenly had a feeling that someone in the house was watching me. I looked up. I could have sworn I saw that old lace curtain twitch.

“You shouldn’t do that. You might activate something.”

The curtain didn’t move again. I gave up my excavation, because I’d spotted a rather weird object lying in the grunge. It was a lump about the size of a hen’s egg, but fleshy dark pink and slightly nubbly, like a human tongue. It looked like a piece of some animal’s insides. Maybe somebody had dropped a raw kidney or a chicken heart here, on the way back from the butcher’s. But it looked stranger than that, and even more disgusting.

Elsa came to look. “Don’t touch it,” she said. “I think that’s a guarding device.”

“What?”

“A magic burglar alarm,” she explained, as if she knew all about it. “A guarding device is when you make something that keeps watch when you’re not there. You shouldn’t even look at it for long, or you’ll set off the alarm.”

Sometimes I felt I had to make a stand against Elsa’s weirdness. So I deliberately poked the chicken-heart egg with the toe of my shoe. It rolled a little, and came to rest against a decayed fragment of hamburger carton. Nothing happened. But I’d leaned against the gate, and it swung open. Elsa and I looked at each other: with the same thought.

“Well, you’ve done it now,” she whispered. “We might as well go in.”

I glanced down the road. Mum and Max were sitting on the bench inside the bus shelter. I couldn’t hear but I could see that Max was talking to her. They looked all right. It was getting late. There was a shadow in the daylight: a still, cold, waiting-for-darkness feel in the air. There was nobody in sight, except for Mum and Max. And no sign of a bus looming over the horizon. I shrugged.

“Okay, just for a minute.”

It was almost as if the house had invited us.

The dirt on the front steps was caked hard, it didn’t give underfoot. I was glad we wouldn’t leave footprints. I tried to peer through the windows, but it was too dark in there. I could only see the branches of the tree, reflected in the glass. Elsa inspected the front door. There was a blackened metal number: 2121; a letterbox, and a brass knocker that had become congealed to the doorframe. There was a door knob too. I thought of trying it, to see if the door was locked. But of course it must be.

“Shall we knock?” I said, joking. The house was surely empty. Close up, it was more dead than ever, and creepy as an abandoned graveyard. The impulse that had brought me through the gate had vanished. But since we were here, I had to do something. I pushed the flap of the letterbox. It gave crustily: I bent down and peered in.

“What can you see?” demanded Elsa.

There was the gloomy, narrow hall. A pile of junk mail and old newspapers lay festering on the floor, just as I’d imagined it. There was another of those chicken-heart egg things, lying on the damp envelopes. At first I thought I might be mistaken, the hall was pretty gloomy. But I’ve always had good night vision. I could see the pinkish lump clearly. Then I thought I saw it move … I jumped back. The flap snapped shut.

“What did you see? What did you see?”

“Nothing. This is stupid. “I couldn’t believe I’d really seen what I thought I saw. “Come on, out of it, Else. We’re trespassing.”

She gave me one of her looks—the eye-rolling, disgusted-old-lady expression—and shoved the letterbox open.

“What did you see that scared you, Andrei? You’d better tell me.”

“I wasn’t scared,” “I protested.

By now I wanted to look again, to find out if the chicken-heart thing actually was there. I wanted to know if it really had moved: jerking and shifting as if something was hatching out of it. I tried to push Elsa out of the way. She hung on. For a moment we were fighting over the narrow viewpoint. Then Elsa screamed. She screamed again, and shot backwards from the door. I grabbed her. We belted down the rubbish strewn steps and leapt through the gate as if hordes of monsters were chasing us. It was fun, to tell you the truth. My heart was actually pounding as I dragged the gate shut behind me. I didn’t really believe that Else and I had disturbed the bogeyman, so I wasn’t afraid. It was just a thrill. The next moment, I wished I’d kept my head. Mum was there at the gate, clinging to Max and looking horrified.

“What have you done?” she cried. “Andrei! What have you done?”

I knew how her mind would be working. She wasn’t afraid of spooks. She was afraid of attracting attention, as she called it. She could never forget that she didn’t belong in this country. She was convinced that if any of us got into any tiny kind of trouble, we’d be thrown out.

“It’s okay,” I told her quickly. “We didn’t do anything wrong. We weren’t trying to break in. We were only fooling around. The place is empty.”

Mum stared at the house in a panic. I was afraid some decrepit old codger would appear after all, and dodder out, indignant, to demand who was making all the row. Luckily nothing happened.

“Let’s go,” she muttered. “We can’t wait for the bus. It’s not safe.”

So we walked, all the way home. We managed to get lost twice. Max refused to walk and the buggy couldn’t hold him and our bags for any distance: mostly we had to carry all the shopping. Elsa kept trying to catch my eye; I knew she wanted to persuade me that we’d genuinely seen a ghost. I wasn’t having any of it. As soon as I could get her alone, I planned to tell her off for screaming like that. She knew as well as I did what Mum was like.

We were living in a quiet little street fairly near the Common, our local park. We had a whole house, with three bedrooms and a garden at the back. It was by far the nicest place we’d lived in for years. We’d never have got hold of it, except that it had been a short let to start with, too short for people with settled lives. Then it had turned out that the owners didn’t want to sell the place after all; or to move into it themselves. So they’d gone on renting it to us. I didn’t have a chance to get hold of Elsa until after tea, when Mum was putting Max to bed. It was dark by then and our living room was cosy, with the curtains drawn and the TV chattering to itself in the corner. Els. . .