Beyond Here Lies Nothing - By Gary McMahon Page 0,58

I think I knew him well enough that I’d be able to recognise something... you know, if he was a bad man.” He paused. “And you were his brother: you’d at least have a slight inkling if he was some kind of child abductor. I doubt we’re going to find any bodies buried under the cellar floor.” He tried to smile but it was a struggle. “Worst case scenario: he knew a lot more than he ever let on, and something scared him enough that he kept quiet for all these years.”

“That’s what I’m hoping.”

Marc nodded. “Yeah. Me, too.”

LATER, BACK DOWNSTAIRS, Marc stood at the front window of Harry Rose’s lounge, watching the sky grow dull and leaden. Like time lapse photography, the clouds moved quickly across the heavens, darkening the area, cutting it off from the sun. It was an unusual effect; he had never seen anything quite like it before. When he’d been up in the attic rooms with Rose, he’d glimpsed similar dark clouds out of the attic window, but these were much more expansive. He’d thought of those earlier clouds as harbingers of a storm, and still the idea felt right. But the oncoming storm was not one caused by atmospheric conditions; it was more of a spiritual upheaval.

Marc was not a religious man. Depending on what day he was asked, he would tell people that he was either an atheist or agnostic. He certainly didn’t believe in the God his parents had prayed to. Look what that had achieved for them... nothing; nothing at all. Just a slow, painful, drawn-out death in front of their son.

He watched the darkening sky, his skin prickling as if tiny ghost fingers were pitter-pattering across every inch of his body. He felt cold. The hair on his arms and on the back of his neck was bristling. It was a sensation he’d only ever read about in books, but now that it was happening to him he realised that the physical experience – like most clichés – was based in reality.

“Jesus...” He reached out and closed the window blinds, then turned to face the room. He didn’t feel comfortable here. Not on the estate or in this house. Everything seemed vaguely hostile, as if his presence was unwelcome.

When Rose had left, Marc had gone straight back up to the attic. After studying the model of the estate for a little while, he’d crossed the landing to the library. Ignoring the sensation that there was still someone in there, standing in the corner and watching him, he’d browsed again through the volumes. On a shelf near the door, he found another notebook. He’d failed to notice it the first time, but this time it was as if his eyes had come to rest immediately upon it, deliberately seeking it out. He refused to believe that it had not been there the first time, and someone had placed it on the shelf for him to find when Rose wasn’t around.

The two notebooks were now on the coffee table. He crossed the room, sat down, and picked up the second one again. It was old, the cover creased and stained, yet unmarked by any kind of writing.

There wasn’t much content inside this one, but on the first page was stapled a faded copy of an old-fashioned print or woodcut of a plague doctor. The name Terryn Mowbray was written underneath in Harry’s neat, small script.

“Terryn Mowbray is Captain Clickety...” Even as he said the words, he appreciated their inevitability.

He turned the page and read the words over, trying to understand them more fully this time. There were scribbled footnotes at the bottom of the page, and Marc could at least see the shape and structure that Harry had been attempting to impose upon the writing.

In 1349, during the Black Death, a plague doctor was summoned to the village of Groven1 in the northeast of England. King Edward III himself was said to have given the man his orders. Groven, it was said, had managed to avoid all signs and marks of the Plague. The Black Death had not crossed its borders; the people who lived there were fit and healthy and oblivious to the darkness that had fallen over the rest of Europe.2

The plague doctor, Terryn Mowbray, was around thirty years old. There is no record of his existence prior to his mention here, and even this was difficult to piece together from various unreliable sources. He apparently arrived in Groven sometime