and a chain unfastened.
“Yes?” an old woman asked, peering out.
Paul had tried his hand selling double glazing door-to-door in his early twenties, and he lapsed back into that patter. He smiled. “Hello there, doll. Sorry to trouble you... I'm looking for a chap called Robert I was led to believe may be staying here?”
The old woman looked at him from beneath a bob of white hair, part expectant, part blank, as if to say, Go on.
“Er,” Paul said. His heart sank as he began to worry if Robert had initially provided them with an incorrect address. If so, there would be hell to pay when he finally turned up.
“Robbie McIntosh?” he continued. “I thought he was meant to be renting this place out for a few months...” Still nothing. He wondered if the old dear was right in the head.
“I'm his brother,” Paul added, uselessly.
At this, a light seemed to flick on somewhere behind her eyes. “Ah!” she cried happily, clapping her hands together. “Mr McIntosh, of course! I'm sorry, my memory isn't what it was... He is the writer, yes?”
Feeling irritation – how could he go round telling people he was a writer when he hadn't published a book yet? – Paul simply said, “Aye, that's the one. I'm afraid I've got some bad news for him.”
“Oh dear,” the old woman said, opening the door wider now. That enormous-sounding dog was still cough-barking somewhere out back. Paul nervously glanced over the woman's shoulder into the hallway behind her, but it seemed any angry hound was secured off in a room somewhere. “Mr McIntosh rented the house from me whilst I was away visiting my niece... She lives in Australia, such a nice girl, she's a doctor, they both are... Fifteen years they've lived there, you know, but neither one of them have lost a bit of their accents...”
Paul continued to smile even as he began to glaze over. “And my brother?” he managed to insert, gently but firmly.
“Of course,” she said, as if that had left her mind completely. “I'm sorry, but he left here perhaps two months ago, when I returned.”
Great. Paul sent another silent curse Robert's way. He looked up and down the street, pointlessly, as if he expected to see him happen to be strolling past.
“Do you know if he stayed in town?” Paul asked, turning back to the old woman's sympathetic eyes beneath her thick spectacles. “Did he rent somewhere else? Or did he leave you a forwarding address at all?”
“Please, come inside,” she said, now moving aside and opening the door fully for him. “He may have left an address... I'll go and see.”
Paul thanked her and stepped inside. She closed the door behind him. The hallway was dim, its only window that in the front door. The dog seemed to know a stranger was inside, and upped its enraged barks. The old woman ushered him through a doorway off the hall on the right. “Please, sit down, dear... I'll see if I can find anything. Would you like a cup of tea?”
“No, thank you,” Paul said, stepping into the bright lounge. “I don't want to be any trouble.” It was warm in here, bordering on stifling. He marvelled at how Robert could stay in such a place for six months. He'd always had an old head on his shoulders, but Christ, surely not this old. Doilies seemed to cover every surface, and on top of these were yet more revolting porcelain dolls and pots of pot pourri and vases of sickly-scented flowers. He didn't want to spend the afternoon stuck in here reminiscing. Although, as he thought this, he did feel a pang of unexpected sadness, and guilt. She was probably just lonely. Like his mother must have been at the end. Of her three children, Kathy was the only one to visit her with any regularity, and even then only once a week or so.
Paul had only lived a ten minute walk from her.
At the old woman's insistence, he perched politely on the edge of an armchair.
“All my paperwork is in the kitchen,” she told him, about to leave the room. She was thin, and moved liked some eager if fragile bird. She turned back to him, and her voice turned a hushed tone of gossipy. “Is it... very bad news?”
Paul wanted to smile affectionately. His stopping by was probably the most drama she'd had since her holiday, poor old soul. He kept his expression respectfully sombre, however, when he said, “Our mother passed away.”
She looked down at him like he was a five year old sadly cradling a popped balloon. “Aw,” she said. “Such a shame.” She turned and scurried away.
With her out of the room, Paul stood up, and strolled idly around the room. Framed reproductions of bland watercolours hung on the walls alongside black and white photographs of people he assumed to be long gone. Men and women posing on the beach in enormous swimming outfits, or smiling at the camera as they tramped heartily across rugged moorland. One particular couple appeared in the photographs more than most – a robust gentleman with a receding hairline and a slight, dark-haired beauty. He wondered if this was the old woman in younger days, with a now-deceased husband. He peered at the pictures but couldn't really tell.
“Are you sure you wouldn't like a cup of tea?” she called out from another room.
“No, thank you,” he shouted back, turning towards a glass cabinet in which there stood more smaller framed photographs. Paul didn't have a single photograph on display of any of his family or friends in his flat. Any that he did have were kept in no particular order in a shoebox in a drawer. He wondered whether this would change, the older he got.
That dog continued its weird barking from somewhere. Paul wondered whether Robert had had to look after it whilst the old woman was away. She surely couldn't have taken it to Australia with her. If it barked like that all the time, it would have been impressive for Robert to manage any work at all.
Paul picked up a small lucky cat figurine from the mantelpiece. He scoffed. It would have been ghastly enough even had it been finished correctly, Paul thought, but to make things worse it had then been mispainted slightly, so its face looked like it was sinking on one side, like the poor creature had suffered a stroke.
Homemade gift, he figured, placing the thing back.
He sat back on the armchair. He felt restless, wanting the old woman to return with an address so he could get out of this slightly sad, stuffy front room.
On a small coffee table beside the armchair was a pile of books and magazines. He uninterestedly looked through them as he waited. The top few were knitting and crochet magazines, then a notebook, then a fairly weighty and highbrow-looking tome bearing the title Eastern Counties Folk Miscellania. He lifted it, intrigued – plain cover, cloth-bound, more the kind of thing he'd have expected to see in an antique shop or dusty college library. The kind of book he would have expected to see on his brother's shelves.
He turned the book over, and noticed several scraps of paper sticking out from a section near the middle. Paul opened the book to this section, where he found a chapter headed 'Old Shock and the Daemon Dogs of the East Coast.' He flicked through the pages. The pieces of paper, he was unsurprised to see, were covered in notes. Robert recognised his brother's handwriting.
Out in the hallway, he could hear the old woman finally coming back. She seemed to be chattering to herself. Paul stood up, still turning the pages of the miscellany, wondering whether she even knew Robert had even left the book when he had departed. He looked at reproductions of medieval woodcut images, of enormous snarling beasts and witches and the devil, and his eye fell upon a note Robert had jotted: “Shock – Shuck – old Eng. 'scucca' – 'demon'?”
“Did you know this had been left here..?” Paul asked, turning round, before the words died in his throat.
He paused, and was about to laugh, unsure how else to react to the sight – baffling, and clearly some bizarre joke. Yet as his naked brother lurched on his hands and knees into the room, the thick collar around his neck attached to the leash being held by the old woman behind him, Paul didn't even know how to laugh. Robert, never a bulky man, was now a lean, wiry creature, muscles tensing beneath skin intersected everywh
ere with scars and lash marks and thin scabbed wounds. Dirty hair hung long and a straggly beard covered his lower face.
“Robert,” Paul said dumbly. Through some instinct, he took a step backward. The heavy book dropped from his hands, forgotten, onto the thick carpet.
Robert snarled, and barked – ludicrously, actually bearing his teeth, and here Paul actually did laugh, stopping only when he noticed Robert's hands. Robert was on his hands and knees, but did not have his palms flat against on the floor – rather, he had both hands curled backwards, wrenched and knotted, and was moving forward with that hideously off-kilter movement with his upper-body weight resting on his twisted bent wrists.
The old woman, standing behind Robert, the thick lead clutched in her fist, had her eyes closed, her head titled up, as she muttered what sounded to Paul like an endless stream of gibberish.
Paul began to crouch, slowly. Robert barked, saliva flicking from between his teeth. Paul's eyes flicked from those of his brother – raging and unrecognising and utterly alien – to the multitudes of sore wounds across Robert's body.