Jack Corman swore as he seized the window shutter and forced it to stop flapping. It had been striking the frame when he arrived at his father’s house, making a sound like gunshots that echoed across the street, and he was surprised the neighbours hadn’t come out to complain. Then again, Kettu House wasn’t just any house. People tended to approach it with caution.
Gritting his teeth, he wrestled the shutter back. Like everything to do with his father, it resisted, and Jack’s knuckles ached with the cold as the wind bit into them. His suit jacket squeezed his torso, making it difficult for him to move, and the shutter bucked and jerked as if attempting to throw him off.
Jack gave it one last shove, then swore again and gave up.
Wiping perspiration from his top lip, he stepped back to appraise the building. It was craggier than he remembered, its face weathered and beaten by time. From outside, Kettu House looked like two red-brick Georgian semis with their front doors side by side. In reality, one of the doors was a fake. His dad had been a joker—before it all went wrong.
Over thirty years ago, Bob Corman knocked through both properties to create one scowling super-house, and it only got weirder inside.
The thought of the labyrinthine interior caused Jack’s stomach to clench.
He’d grown up in there, spent most of his adolescence desperate to escape it, and it was only when he went off to university that he was finally free of it. That was over a decade ago and he dreaded to think what he’d find. In the intervening years, the place had grown larger and more confused in his mind, evolving into a house of mirrors. He fought the urge to get the hell out of there.
Instead, he swiped his unruly fringe from his eyes, suppressing the panic.
It’s just a house, he told himself. Just a house.
His hand slipped into his breast pocket, his fingers brushing the envelope nestled there. Through the paper, he felt the modest brass key, and his mind calmed. It had turned up at his flat a week ago, his father’s writing on the front. Bob must have sent it before he died and, even though Jack couldn’t understand why Bob wanted him to go into the attic, he recalled what was stored up there and his plan took shape. He just had to find the courage to go through with it, then everything would be peachy keen.
Scene change. Fresh take. Action, cut, print: Welcome to your new life.
His gaze moved up to a window sticking out of the roof like an eyelid.
He frowned, certain he’d seen movement behind the pane.
No, it was just clouds being buffeted by the wind.
The shutter started banging again.
‘Christ’s sake,’ Jack muttered, regarding it with a mixture of anguish and disdain. It could wait. If he didn’t go into the house now, he never would. His hands shook as he took out his keys, preparing to mount the steps to the front doors.
‘Um, hi! Hello?’
Jack stiffened as a voice called out behind him. A skinny teenager stood just inside the front garden, hovering by the oak tree. The kid’s eyes were too large for his oval face, and his teeth flashed white against his brown skin, a nervous grin that made his age difficult to guess. Seventeen, Jack thought, maybe younger.
‘Sorry, I didn’t mean to scare you.’ The kid winced. ‘It’s just, I mean, you’re him, aren’t you?’
‘Who?’
‘Jack Corman.’
Jack’s eyes narrowed. ‘Never heard of him.’
‘You are! You’re Jack Corman! Man, I can’t believe it. I mean… Gurchin! You’re really here! I heard you’d moved away or… I don’t know… there are crazy theories, like you became a botanist. Even I had trouble believing that one.’
The kid’s bony shoulders jerked with amusement and Jack squinted at him. Daylight had all but bled from the garden, ushering in a blustery autumn evening, but Jack saw that underneath the boy’s blue raincoat he wore a T-shirt that read I LUB YOU. Jack groaned aloud.
‘Look, mate, I don’t have time for—’
‘Toby.’
‘What?’
The teenager stuck out his hand. ‘Toby. It’s an honour to meet you.’
This. Wasn’t. Happening.
Usually Shadow Glass fanboys stuck to the internet. That’s where they felt most at home, poring over the film, dissecting it frame by frame, exchanging first-viewing stories and creation myths and trying to figure out if you really could see a crew member in the final battle sequence.
Jack hadn’t encountered one of them in years and that was just the way he liked it.
He ignored the hand, filled with the need to get away. ‘Sorry, Toby, it’s been a shitty day. You’ll have to excuse me.’
He started up the steps, but Toby’s voice followed over his shoulder. He was hot on Jack’s heels.
‘Sorry, it’s just… You have no idea what The Shadow Glass means to me. I know it’s for kids, but it’s not just a kid’s movie. It’s real and scary and it’s not safe. Like, it feels so real, even though it’s over thirty years old. I always tell Huw—he’s my boyfriend—I always tell him that’s the sign of a true classic. It only gets better with age.’
‘Mhmm.’
Jack had heard it all before. It was just his luck that the first time in years that he visited Kettu House, he was ambushed by an Iri nut.
‘Sorry, Toby, I’ve got to go.’ He jiggled the door lock, relieved when it clicked.
‘But I—’
Jack hurried inside, shutting the door harder than he had intended.
Silence settled around him.
He took a moment to catch his breath, squinting in the dim light of the hall.
Any relief he felt at escaping the teenager vanished as the musky air filled his nostrils. He sneezed, doubling over and sneezing again.
‘This place,’ he muttered as he straightened to survey his surroundings.
The hall was even more cluttered than he remembered.
Knick-knacks and keepsakes crowded the passage, giving the impression of a pokey antique shop. A grandfather clock stood surrounded by bone-dry potted plants, while Japanese Shadow Glass posters were mounted on the walls. A shelving unit groaned with VHS tapes, DVDs, a Walkman and a cassette tape library, and there were books everywhere. Feathered with age and heaped amid swirling dust motes.
Jack’s neck creaked as he turned his head to take it all in.
The curios were familiar but also different to how he remembered them, as if he were viewing them through mottled glass. They looked decayed. Relics from another time. A life he had almost forgotten he’d lived. And this was just the hall. From where he stood, he glimpsed the rooms and passages beyond, wending in a disordered muddle, combining to form a house of riddles. A place in which to get lost.
He stilled, frowning at the distant point where the back hall turned into the kitchen. He was sure he’d seen movement there. He pictured his father still roaming Kettu House, tall and narrow as a telegraph pole, shuffling in slippers and a moth-eaten cardigan, fingers scratching his beard. He could still hear the whispers of a man who had long since relinquished his grip on reality.
‘In a forgotten time, in a forgotten world, deep within a forgotten chamber few have ever seen, the Shadow Glass sees all.’
Jack gritted his teeth and shook off the image. That was years ago. Bob was dead and the house was empty—of anything living, at least. He couldn’t get distracted.
Aiming for the rickety staircase, he went further inside, his fingers tapping one of the bottles in a drinks cabinet. He recalled being fourteen and smashing bottles in the street, furious at his father for his latest drunken tirade.
The memory stung, and even though Jack wasn’t a drinker, his mouth felt parched. He uncapped the bottle, taking a defiant swig as he started up the stairs. The whisky seared the back of his throat.
‘Jesu—’ he coughed, then froze as a shadow crossed the wall.
He didn’t move.
He’d only caught it out of the corner of his eye, but he was certain it had reared up from the skirting board and flashed across the wallpaper.
Stiffly, he listened, sensing eyes on him.
Ch-ch-ch-ch…
Jack’s arm hair bristled and his gaze snapped to the ceiling. He had heard something above him. A skittering of claws on floorboards.
‘Hello?’ he called.
The house swallowed his voice. He wasn’t sure he had even spoken.
Ch-ch-ch-ch…
Apprehension pinched Jack’s chest. He’d definitely heard it that time. A scratching above his head.
Somebody was up there.
More fanboys, maybe, come to pick over the remains of his father’s empire.
Maybe they were already in the attic, claiming the thing he’d pinned his entire future on.
Adrenaline flooded his veins and Jack battled his way down a landing cluttered with Shadow Glass props, framed movie cells and fake, otherworldly plants that tangled between his feet. He stumbled against a door, knocking it open to reveal his teenage bedroom. It hadn’t been touched since he moved out. Band posters on the walls, single bed beneath the window, headphones plugged into a hi-fi system that he would crank up to eleven to drown out his life.
Above his head the scratching continued, and Jack left the bedroom, clambering up another, even narrower set of stairs that shrieked as he climbed.
He came to a stop outside the attic door.
Of course the sound was coming from there.
Above the rasp of his own wheezing, he heard it louder than before: a scraping like nails on the inside of a coffin. His throat thickened with fear.
For a second, he was fifteen again, crouched in the stairwell while his father told him to go back to bed. Jack had woken in the night and followed voices up to the attic. He’d listened through the door as they echoed in the dark, and he couldn’t tell if Bob was in there watching a movie, or if Bob was making the voices himself. Maybe the newspapers and magazines had been right. ‘Bonkers Bob’ really had lost his mind.
Crouched outside the attic now, twenty years later, Jack felt darkness grasping at his neck.
Was his father still in there?
He should run. Get out of there before it was too late.
No. He shook off the memory. This wasn’t some teenage fantasy. Somebody had broken in. They could be making off with the very thing he was there to claim for himself.
He took the envelope from his pocket, removed the key, and ground it into the lock. Throwing open the door, he charged inside and—
Tripped.
His toe caught something in the dark and he lost his footing. He crashed forwards, striking the floor painfully as he crumpled onto his front. Somehow, he managed to prevent his head cracking against the floorboards, and found himself staring at a pair of knobbly claws resting on the floor in front of him.
He clutched the miraculously intact whisky bottle and craned his neck up at the thing looming over him.
An amphibian creature with boil-pocked green skin leered in the gloom. It was squat and slimy-looking, its too-wide mouth hanging open to reveal glimmering rows of needle-sharp teeth. Its bulbous eyes were heavy-lidded, vacant and staring, and while it looked like something that had slithered out of a swamp, it wore mechanised armour, the kind of sci-fi tech that seemed purpose-built for deep space.
Jack’s heart slammed the floorboards as he recognised the character.
A skalion.
Just a puppet, he told himself as he eased into a kneeling position. It’s just a puppet.
They’d given Jack nightmares as a kid. The skalions were villains by design, created for the sole purpose of terrorising the heroes of The Shadow Glass, and the sight of one now made his skin itch. Not just one. A whole battalion crowded together in a sneering pack, each around four feet tall and bigger than any puppet had a right to be.
Now that quiet had settled over the house, Jack felt stupid. He was letting his imagination get away from him. Nothing was moving in here. How could it?
They were just puppets.
He got to his feet and fumbled for the light switch. As a bare bulb blinked on, he felt the burn of a hundred eyes.
More puppets.
Too many to count were dotted all over the attic, their smiles fixed, their frowns unmoving. Not just skalions but wugs, too. Wizened little gnome-like creatures in woolly hats that snuggled together amid the spider-webbed furniture.
Jack surveyed it all with an uneasy familiarity. When he was a child, these characters meant everything to him. They were his friends. His family. His playmates. Now, though, they stirred only distaste and, somewhere beneath that, a distant sense of longing.
For a brief window before Bob retreated into himself, before the TV interviews and ‘Crackers Corman!’, before the delirium and the drinking and the blackouts, before Bob’s inability to show up to a single important event in Jack’s life… Jack had been happy.
He felt the weight of the bottle in his hand, and was about to take another swig when he spotted a glass cabinet in the corner. It towered over the surrounding furniture like a monument. The sight of it caused a shiver to travel through him.
‘Dune,’ he murmured.
There it was. In the dark of the cabinet’s interior stood another puppet. The reason Jack had fought his way through this haunted funfair ride of a house.
The fox-like figure almost looked alive, as if it had been waiting for this very moment, and as he approached, Jack discerned the adoring detail that had been lavished upon Dune’s creation. The eyes held galaxies of feeling and Dune’s lips were parted as if preparing to speak, his fur-tipped ears alert.
He was crafted out of foam prosthetics threaded with dense black and rust-coloured fur, and he wore hardy kettu attire that protected him from desert storms. A mud-stained breast plate, brown leggings and a pair of lightweight leather boots. The very best a movie budget could buy.
As a kid, Jack had wished more than anything that Dune would talk. He would hold staring contests with him across the breakfast table, or he’d lie in bed at night and whisper in his ear, ‘I know you can, I promise I won’t tell.’
But Dune was stubborn. Most kettu were. It was the quality that separated them from just about everything else in the world of Iri. The hero-making quality.
‘Hi, Dune,’ Jack said quietly.
He already felt like a traitor for what he had planned. Jack raised the bottle and took another hit of whisky. Before he could lose his nerve, he dug out his phone and dialled.
‘Jack?’ The man who answered sounded older than Jack remembered, his voice nasal and hard.
‘Hello, Mr Smithee.’
‘Alden. Please, call me Alden.’
‘Sorry, Alden, hi.’ He took a breath. ‘I thought you might like to know who I’m looking at right now.’
‘Oh?’ An expectant breath came down the line.
‘Dune is in the original cabinet. Hasn’t been touched in years. He looks just the same as he did in the movie.’
A pause, then Alden Smithee sighed. ‘Marvellous. You understand my apprehension, I’m sure. We aren’t discussing a used car, here.’
‘No, I understand. It’s a lot of money.’
‘Oh, don’t worry about that. I’m more concerned about the puppet himself. He’s an important cultural artefact and I want you to rest assured that I intend to give him a good home.’
Jack shook his head. Alden Smithee sounded just like the teenager who had jumped him outside. Just like the bloggers and YouTubers who praised Bob and all he had created. He swallowed his irritation, remembering that fifty thousand pounds was sitting on Alden’s table.
Beggars really couldn’t be choosers.
‘Would this weekend be convenient to complete the sale?’ Jack asked. ‘Tomorrow? Around six?’
‘Oh! Yes. Yes indeed.’
Jack turned away from Dune, ignoring the constellation of eyes seeking him out in the attic. His tongue felt swollen with booze.
‘It’s Kettu House on Knight Street, New Cross. Drop me a text when you’re on your way. Goodbye, Mr Smithee.’
‘Goodbye, Jac—’
He hung up.
His hand ached around the phone.
Tomorrow his bank account would be in the black for the first time in a year. He could pay off his debts and start again. The ship hadn’t sunk yet. He could still turn it around.
Forget about the unfinished business degree and the dead-end jobs and interviews, the fact that he was on the wrong side of thirty and hadn’t paid his rent in two months. Not to mention that he’d burned his way through five brief relationships and a dozen incendiary flings.
Jack’s mouth pinched at the corners, a smile devoid of amusement.
Things were going to be all right.
He could do this.
He forced himself to look at Dune, and was unnerved by the sensation that he was in the presence of an old friend. He raised the bottle again, his eyelids heavy, and fought the onslaught of memories the puppet conjured, but they assaulted him in waves.
When he was seven, he would race home from school every Friday to watch The Shadow Glass with Dune and his dad. They would sit in his study and Bob would hum as he fed the VHS into the machine—
No.
Jack struggled free from the memory. There was no point going back there.
He looked down at the phone digging into his palm, and was about to pocket it when he noticed the call list on the screen. Every call he had received in the past few weeks. Towards the bottom, a name stood out in red. A missed call from a month ago. The day Bob died.
Dad.
‘What happens next, Dad?’
It was the question Jack always asked when the credits rolled on The Shadow Glass. Because when he was seven, before he hated the film and everything it stood for, he couldn’t bear the story to be over.
‘Well, there’s no such thing as a happily-ever-after.’
‘What does that mean?’
‘It means there’s always another story.’
‘Does Dune go on another adventure?’ Jack would ask, even though he knew the answer.
‘Oh yes, many adventures, some even more dangerous than the fight to reclaim Iri from Kunin Yillda.’
‘When can I see Dune’s other adventures?’
His father took a moment to reply. He brushed crumbs from his beard with a large hand. ‘One day, my boy. One day.’
Staring at the call log, Jack felt unsteady on his feet.
He found himself flicking through to voicemail and his thumb hovered over the most recent message. It was only fifteen seconds long and he had only listened to it once.
He hit play.
A whispering voice crackled through on speaker.
‘Jack? Boy-o? Are you there?’
His father’s voice was hoarse, short of breath, and there was no power to it. None of the resonance he had possessed as a younger man. He sounded lucid, though. Sober.
Jack glanced at Dune, searching the puppet’s face for any sign he recognised the voice of his creator. Feeling stupid, he looked back down at his phone, but his vision blurred as his eyes grew wet, and all he saw was a rectangle of light from which his father’s voice croaked.
‘I need you, Jack. Will you come? Please?’
He hadn’t.
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