The Lure of Solitude
by Michael Burnett
Part 1 appears in this issue.
conclusion
It was around 1885 that I started to detect a change in Mr Hooks’ ordinarily considerate tone.
The meeting transcripts, copied out in a painstaking longhand, began to display a tension in Mayor Hooks’ demeanour that the townspeople, at least initially, appeared to try to take in their stride. But it had all begun to fall apart; soon the transcripts began to read more like arguments than communal debates.
What did the Mayor plan to do about the lamb rustlers, out on the marshes every night? And why, when the streets were so sorely in need of maintenance, had the fiscal year’s budget still not been drawn up, even though its date had already come and gone? Before long, the transcripts began to read like full-blown riots. Eggs, chairs and worse were thrown, and the town’s councillors began to avoid the meetings, their names marked with ever greater frequency under the ‘apologies’ heading.
And then, on the 3rd of October 1887, the notes abruptly ended, the last meeting having been conducted so poorly that it was difficult to tell precisely what had happened. But I did not need meeting notes to know that Mayor Hooks had completely lost control of his town.
I continued to dig further into Mayor Hooks’ documents, but could not find any public records of any kind beyond the date of the last town meeting. What I did find were diaries; dozens of them, in fact. Mr Hooks had, much like myself, become quite the recluse, though, unlike myself, he had not always been one. His family soon fled the Manor, leaving him entirely alone but for the servants, who left shortly thereafter.
Hooks wrote of an increasing fear of open space and an overwhelming desire to be left alone; all of these things were as familiar as salt to me, of course. He, too, began to avoid any kind of human contact, shunning any interactions with the townsfolk and ignoring all of his official duties. I could find no mention of the state of the town, for the Mayor’s interest in it had starkly evaporated.
Hooks’ diary entries became more and more bizarre and nonsensical. He wrote obsessively of the house, of its quirks and its creaks; six entire pages he dedicated to the blackness of the empty windowpanes at night.
In just a few short months, Mayor Hooks had begun to write only of the house. The language he used was oddly suggestive of an illicit love affair, laced with both desire and guilt. He wrote of sleepless nights, tossing and turning on a bed he had become convinced was no mere inanimate object.
I admit that, upon reading those words, I felt my heart leap into my mouth, for I realised that I too had begun to see the house in much the same way, though I could not have told you why. Mayor Hooks and the house appeared bonded for life, wedded to each other, but now it was my turn. The house was mine and only mine; no other person had so much as glimpsed the tops of its four chimneys for months.
And if anyone tried to get close, anyone at all, then they would face my wrath.
* * *
I held the diary in trembling hands. I could scarcely bear to turn to a new page for fear of what Hooks’ words would reveal. I felt I already knew the truth, that my body had known for many months already but, at the same time, I hoped against hope that I could still prevent myself from slipping further down the path that Mayor Hooks had taken; that I could will myself to resist what was happening to me. But I was powerless to stop it. I turned the page, my skin cold with fear, and read the date in the top right-hand corner: 11th February 1889.
I had a terrible and unwholesome dream this night just passed; awakening in the bed, I found myself drenched in sweat and shaking from head to foot. The candles had gone out and, as I fumbled about in the pitch darkness, I found that I could no longer recall the images that I had seen just moments before. I know that I will be thrown into the madhouse for speaking it aloud, but I can no longer deny it, for this was no ordinary nightmare. In this dream I saw my bedfellow as it truly is, and not as I see it with open eyes.
One cannot see its true face, and no waking effort can change this, for its very nature is to mask its form against prying human eyes. What it wants with me I cannot say; only that it wants and needs me, and I must be here with it always. This house is everything to me. I care not what transpires outside its walls; the world can drown or it can burn, it matters not.
I have purpose here, and it is a bliss to me, but I am afraid.
In my dream I felt myself swallowed whole; down into the belly of the creature I slid screaming, but I was without recourse despite my struggling. I know now that this event has already come to pass, I am inside the beast and have been for many months. I am one with this house; I know that I can never leave. I am devoured, and even knowing this, I feel naught but love towards this profane thing that has consumed me. Love, and fear; always love and fear, conjoined and coexisting in the most unnatural manner. That is what it is to me, and that is what I am, for I am no longer myself but only a part of it.
In love and fear I will be digested until there is nothing left of me. And I am at peace with this, for in that fate there is a fulfilment that few could ever know.
G. H. Hooks
As I read those last words, I felt a dark jolt through my body, an electric shock of fear. I felt the creature all around me; everywhere I looked it was there, and yet not there; I could see nothing but floorboards, ceiling beams, stacks of boxes. But it was there, it was everywhere. My pulse pounded in my ears, and as I tried to stagger to my feet I felt my legs give way beneath me.
I do not know how long I stayed unconscious on that floor, but I do know that I too saw the creature’s true face that night, what my waking mind would not see rendered clear as glass in my mind’s unconscious eye, just as Mayor Hooks had seen it more than one hundred and thirty years before.
Dear reader, I know you will not believe it, but even at my lowest point I was not so far gone as Hooks had been. The house had taken many years to consume the Mayor of Winterlock, evidently once a civically minded man of the people; I am certain that I, antisocial as I am by nature, would have been a lost cause in less than two. But I still had the power to resist the creature of Winterlock Manor, and resist it I did. Hooks’ warning had given me a chance, and I took it. I am nothing if not resourceful.
When I woke up, I fled from that house and never looked back. I am told that I was discovered on an anonymous B-road, around six miles from Winterlock Manor, in a state of hysteria, clothes torn and dirty, my face gaunt and half-starved and my eyes crazed. I am told that it took three men to restrain me, and that I had to be gagged to stop my shrieking. I do not remember any of this, but once I awoke, I realised that I was in a hospital bed, my wrists and ankles bound with restraints. I had been judged to be unsound of mind, and I was no longer a free man.
Dr Reeves-Lewis says to me that the things I tell him about Winterlock Manor cannot be real. He ignores all my warnings and my appeals to have the house demolished; he tells me that I had simply been alone for too long and had imagined everything. But I know the truth about Winterlock Manor. I am proud to say that I have worked it out. The good doctor can believe what he likes.
You see, Three Summits Psychiatric Hospital has computers. For half an hour each day we are allowed to use the Internet. I have been here for seven months now, and when I’m not too medicated, I like to spend that time researching. I’m quite the expert in natural mimicry, now; I know that there are many types, some used by predators, and others by prey.
The type known as ‘aggressive mimicry’ is the kind used by the creature of the Manor. Just as the angler fish dangles a bright light in the waters of the Mariana Trench, attracting little creatures for it to devour, the creature had infiltrated the Manor — and who can really say when — sliding its essence into the substructure of the place, hiding invisible behind the very walls just as the angler hides in the darkness, waiting to strike.
Once, in a dream, I imagined that I saw the creature’s full form, a towering living edifice at least a kilometre high, the house a mere minuscule lure, drawing in human prey with their own hopes and dreams. But I can no longer tell you the details; my waking mind cannot fathom them.
I hear there are new owners at the Manor now. The ruse continues to work, and because I am the only living person to have seen through it, I am called insane and not believed. But we are all in danger; this I can feel in my bones, for if they are invisible to us, then who can say how many of them there are?
Sometimes, late at night, I awaken to find my cheeks flowing hot with tears. For after all that has happened to me, I am not ashamed to admit one thing. I miss Winterlock Manor so terribly that it makes my heart ache in my chest. Even here, I am inside the belly of that great beast, feeling only love and fear, as Mayor Hooks once did, and as the Manor’s latest prey soon will.
I might seem like a man, but I am less than that, and more; I was devoured, and I will be a part of that great and terrible whole until the day I die.
Copyright © 2022 by Michael Burnett
