squirrel on a sycamore, a sparrow on an elm, a deer on an oak. It was as if Uncle Peter were a game hunter, but he had run out of room for trophies inside his house.
And the house… this was fairly unusual as well.
“Holy shit,” Doug muttered under his breath as they rounded the final bend in the drive. It was a huge old monolith, stonework sills crumbling with age, windows distorted out of shape by the deadly subsidence plaguing the property and promising to drag it, eventually, back into the stony ground. From plinth to eaves the house looked quite normal, if dishevelled.
Above that, the gargoyles took over.
They were all huge, fashioned from plastic and fibreglass instead of stone, and more gruesome because of that. Garish colours and unsettling designs shouted across at them as they coasted to a halt. Bloody teeth, split throats, dragon-eyes, sabre toothed monstrosities that would surely be more than able to fulfil their duties… if, indeed, these things had the same employ as their more traditional greystone cousins. Stark artificial light gave them an added sense of the grotesque. They looked like a kid’s book made real.
“Mad as a hatter,” Doug said. “Uncle Peter has gone AWOL I think, Lucy.”
“He always was a bit offbeat,” she whispered, aghast.
“Wow,” was all Gemma could say. “Wow.”
The car stank. All three of them had urinated — Doug had refused to stop, even when Lucy-Anne had begged him and cried and cursed as she tried to miss her seat as she pissed — and they had not opened the windows for eleven hours. The fuel gauge had been kissing red for fifty miles, and for the last twenty Doug had been silently blessing Volkswagen’s caution. The food they had managed to bring with them had gone bad in the heat, a pint of milk had spilled, the oxygen cylinders had run out hundreds of miles back… the engine was making a sickly grinding noise… basically, they were on their last legs.
The car rattled and sighed as he turned off the ignition. He was certain it would never start again, not without a great deal of pampering and cajoling. He was equally certain that he would never need to do either.
They sat staring at the house. Doug was expecting mad Uncle Peter to come running out at any moment, a shotgun in one hand and a bottle of Scotch in the other, pumping a hail of lead at the car as he toasted his own questionable health. But the door remained closed, all was calm. Several crows flitted to and fro across the roof, confused by the light, avoiding the gargoyles wherever they could.
“Crows,” Gemma said. “Family Corvidae. For instance, Corvus corax, Corvus corcone, Corvus frugilegus, Corvus splendens and the magpie, Pica pica. Chiefly insectivorous, in winter it will become omnivorous. Earthworms and grubs. And seeds. It eats… it eats grubs and seeds…” She drifted off, leaning between the front seats, staring through the windscreen at the frolicking birds on the roof of the house.
“Where…?” Doug said. “Honey? Where did you learns stuff like that? They teach you that at school?”
Gemma turned to him, glaring blankly. Her mouth hung slightly open and a string of drool was threatening to spill out. “Huh?”
“Honey, what’s wrong?”
“Dad, I’m so thirsty,” she said. Her voice was weak, diluted. Not as strong as it had been moments before. Not as definite.
“Gemma, how do you know all that about crows —?”
“Leave her, Doug,” Lucy-Anne said. “Let’s just get her in, can we? For God’s sake? We need a rest.”
Doug nodded, smoothed Gemma’s hair behind her ears, tried to stretch his legs. He could hear the concern in Lucy-Anne’s voice, and the doubt, and the fact that she was as unsettled as he. Gemma had never been very good at school… had never taken much of an interest in anything…. had been on the verge of being sent to a special school for slow learners.
Corvus corax, Corvus corcone, Corvus frugilegus… Christ, where the hell did she get that from?
“Ahhhh,” a voice boomed, and Doug’s door was snatched open. He jerked back, gasping in relief at the fresh air gushing in, wondering at the same instant what he was inhaling, whether the nanos were here already, inside him now, starting work on his lungs so that the next breath he drew and let out would mist red in front of him.
“Uncle Peter?” Lucy-Anne said.
“Thought I might see some of my folk over the next day or two,” the voice said. Then a man leaned down next to the car to give the voice a face. A wild face indeed, with unruly tufts of hair and cheeks veined with evidence of years of alcohol abuse. His eyes though, they were different. Mad, but intelligent with it.
“Sorry to say,” Uncle Peter said, “there’s nothing I can do for any of us. But still. It will be nice to have company when the time comes.”
Doug, his wife and daughter heaved themselves from the car, all of them patiently helped by Lucy-Anne’s Uncle Peter. He held them when their legs bowed, their muscles cramped, and he wiped tears from Gemma’s face when she cried. When Lucy-Anne went to him he hugged her close and closed his eyes. Doug felt a brief but intense moment of jealousy, unreasonable yet unavoidable, and he gathered Gemma into his arms as if to ward off his uncertainty.
“Amazing house,” he said, staring up at the grotesque decoration three stories up.
“Made them myself,” Peter said. “I must be a fucking fruitcake!”
Laughing, they left the mad night behind and went inside.
“London went hours ago,” Peter said. “So it said on the TV.” He was peeling potatoes while Doug diced some vegetables. Lucy-Anne and Gemma were washing and changing in one of the upstairs bedrooms. None of them felt like sleeping. “Haven’t been there in a decade. Now all I want to do is to go to Trafalgar Square and feed the pigeons.”
“My father lives in London,” Doug said. He took his time with each carrot he slit, relishing the hard, crunchy sound. It was a solid sound. Firm. Not too far south of here, solid and firm were words that no longer held meaning.
“Well,” said Peter, but he did not continue.
They worked in silence for a while, Doug thinking around the subject of death, Peter perhaps doing the same. Everything Doug did now was tainted with the promise of their own demise: this food would not be fully digested when the time came; he may never sleep again, it was a waste of time… so no more dreams. Gemma would not grow up to go to university, marry, bear her own children…
“It’s just so unfair!” he shouted, throwing the knife at the flagstone floor. He regretted it instantly, felt a cool hand of shame tickle at his scalp. He had not seen this man for ten years, and here he was trying his best to destroy his kitchen.
And there’s another irony, he thought.
Peter glanced at him but said nothing. He continued peeling potatoes.
Doug wondered whether the old nutcase was as far gone as he led to believe. “Why all the lights? And the animals on the trees? And the gargoyles?”
Peter shook his hands dry and transferred the vegetables into a huge pan of boiling water. “In reverse order: the gargoyles to keep people away from the house; the animals on the trees to keep trespassers from my land; the lights so that people can see what I’ve done. It took a long time. Why have it all hidden half the time?”
Doug smiled at the simple logic of it. “But why keep people from the house?”
The old man shrugged. “Don’t like people, mostly.”
There was a clatter of feet from the hallway and Gemma and Lucy-Anne hurried in. They both had wet hair, loose-fitting clothes that Peter had found in some mysteriously well-appointed wardrobe and rosy complexions that made Doug’s heart ache.
“Your turn,” Peter said.
“Huh?”
“Shower. Change. Forgive my bluntness, but you smell.”
“Daddy smells, Daddy smells!”
He relented, and after giving his wife and daughter a kiss — a hard hug for Gemma, a long, lingering kiss for Lucy-Anne — he made his way up the curving staircase to their bedrooms.
There were towels on the bed, a basket of fruit on the dressing table, a bottle of red wine uncorked and
