Palmer's Folly

by Dirck de Lint

Not long after arriving in England, Brian Weems began the process of buying Colroyd House.

He’d had a vague idea of what a truly large house would be like, thanks to the regular television appearances of Highclere Castle. His ambitions after winning the tri-state nine-figure lottery jackpot did not extend as far as a castle, and yet, as he was shown room after room at Colroyd, he began to realize the world the Powerball win had opened to him. He almost laughed out loud when the estate agent showed him through a small door at the back of the house to reveal a whole other building standing to one side of a cobbled square.

“The last part of the tour is a drive around the park,” the estate agent told him. She had insisted that he call her Poppy when they met. While friendly, she was also deferential in a way that put Brian slightly on edge, even when he realized it was because she knew more or less what he was worth. He wondered if he would get used to that sort of reaction. He hoped he wouldn’t.

“A little over three hundred acres, with riding trails throughout,” Poppy said, guiding Brian to a sort of steroidal golf-cart standing close to the six-car garage which had come into the world as a carriage house. Brian nearly declined, having essentially made up his mind already without the sweetener of a forest he could call his own, but the slight desperation to please that Poppy gave off made him climb into the odd ATV.

She drove them north along a path which ran close to the fence separating the park from a field of barley, raising her voice over the engine’s blat as she explained how the surrounding fields were not technically his but by some oddity of English law produced rent that would offset his property taxes by a sum which had been substantial two hundred years earlier and was still almost perceptible. Brian nodded, not really attending, preferring to look back in an attempt to glimpse Colroyd through the newly-budded trees. As the path curved at the end of the park’s outward extent, it rose a little, and through a break in the trees, he saw a hint of brick.

But surely far too close. He touched Poppy’s shoulder, pointing out what he saw. “What’s that?”

“Next stop,” Poppy said, smiling like it was something she had made herself, and turned them onto another path cutting through the trees. Soon afterward, the cart bumbled up to a small building set into a clearing. Unlike Colroyd House itself, which was in roughly Palladian style, the little structure was Gothic. The placement of the windows and the height of the door gave the impression that it had been the cloister of monastic hobbits.

“Lord Peter’s Folly,” Poppy announced, slightly louder than necessary with the cart dropping into idle. She hitched her shoulders and went on in a more conversational tone. “It was built by the... fourth, I think, Lord Colroyd, using materials from the old Colroyd Hall. This was fairly early in the craze for follies, so he didn’t build it very large. It and the trees are arranged so it’s only really visible from the house looking out of Lord Peter’s private study. I think I mentioned it, actually, when we were there—the pink room.”

Brian remembered the room and remembered falling into a fugue after she mentioned it having been converted to a bedroom from a study, lost in wondering how anyone could either sleep or think clearly there. Apart from walls the colour of a Rubens lady, the frescoed ceiling was alive with a heavenly host, many of whom seemed intensely interested in the human occupants below them. He had barely noticed the window, let alone the view outside it.

Now, he gave the folly careful scrutiny. It looked old, with rounded bricks and a duvet of moss clinging to the slates of its roof, but then from his American perspective it was old. He pondered the scale, if it was meant to be built to a scale, with two levels of glassed-in lancet windows, the largest about the same length and breadth as his outstretched arm. The door, while small, seemed passable, the centre of its arch high enough that he would hardly have to duck; the door to the toilet in a pub he’d visited had been lower.

“What’s it like inside?” Brian asked, holding a hand flat near the top of his head, then lowering it while crouching down.

“Oh, no,” Poppy said, looking at the big ring of keys she had been carrying. They were the old sort with the big paddle at the end, and each had a paper tag attached to it. Poppy’s face fell. “I thought I had the key here, but I must have left it on the board in the kitchen. There’s no upper floor, so it’s easy enough to walk around in. It would be a great place to come to write or draw without distraction.”

“Cool.” Brian looked around, saw the tawny bulk of Colroyd looming through a notch in the trees, a single dark window looking back at him. He had not seen the folly from the pink room, but he could imagine Lord Peter sitting up there looking at it, enjoying the romantic view he’d invented for himself; a little trip to the continent without having to walk downstairs in his own house. “OK, let’s go back.”

He saw Poppy become slightly more downcast, making an effort to smother the emotion with professional enthusiasm, and he found he did not have the heart to leave her dangling. As the cart turned toward Colroyd House, he said, “How long will it take to get the paperwork settled for the sale? I’d like to move in as soon as possible.”

Her professional enthusiasm cracked from the pressure of contained joy. That, thought Brian, is the right way to use all this money I’ve got—bringing a little more happiness into the world.

#

The happiness Brian hoped to underwrite began to spread. Businesses in the towns around Colroyd House felt it as he refilled the larder and made small amendments to the place to turn it from a House into his home. His parents and his sister, already beneficiaries of Brian’s new fortune, appeared for the initial housewarming, using Colroyd as the staging point for an extended sight-seeing tour of Europe. Then, once the family-focused segment of largesse spreading was complete, the net of happiness was cast more widely to encompass friends. Even with the purchase of the house, his pockets seemed to have no bottom and he could afford to ship people over from the States for vacations they could not possibly afford without his help. The life of the rich had seemed to him, in his previous state, to be an endless party, and he was willing to examine the possibility that he had been right.

A small party of people he had liked at work appeared shortly after his family left, they and their own families filling Colroyd House to something near capacity, making day trips around the south of England with his backing if not necessarily his participation—he could hardly be in Dover and Bath at the same time—until the commitments they could not escape indefinitely called them home. More distant friends replaced them and left in their turn, until as spring was giving way to summer Brian found his list of those he had wanted to bring over, whether to let them bask in the reflected warmth of his millions or to wave the revenge of living well in their faces, was almost complete.

Late in June, he only had three guests in the house. He had told his old high-school friend Ben Jacobsen that he was welcome to bring family, and had been slightly surprised that his family had consisted of a husband named Ivan Holowatiuk. Marriage and admission of his own nature had done Ben a world of good, and Brian found his company much better now than it had been in high school. The third, arriving a day later, was one of the first of the friends Brian had invited out, but he’d had to put off his departure until the end of a contract. “Unlike some people,” Marcus Palmer had written in his responding email, “I have to work again someday. Don’t want to burn any bridges!”

When Marcus stepped out of the taxi which brought him from the station, Brian reflected that when they were teens, his friend had been one of several unvouched-for attendees at a party which had gotten far out of the host’s young hands. Brian had met Marcus in a corner away from the main focus of the mayhem, two of the very few black people at the party, anxious to be clear of the area cops might take an interest in. Over the course of a beer-lubricated conversation, they had become firm friends, the sort that might not talk for months but could pick up the threads of long-dormant conversation without a hint of awkwardness.

Marcus was also the sort of person whose humour included the exchange of small practical jokes. With this in mind, Brian helped him carry his suitcases up to the room he would be staying in. It had seen no other guest since Brian had moved in, because if it wasn’t going to go for a joke, the pink room was something he wasn’t going to inflict on any guest. Marcus roared with laughter when he stepped through the door.

“What the hell is this?” he said after he got some control back.

“Lord Peter’s pink study,” Brian said, struggling to keep a straight face, “a national treasure of the people of England. Probably.”

Marcus’s response was renewed laughter. He pointed at the squadron of cherubs over the bed, who bore between them a ribbon emblazoned with an illegible motto in French or Latin. At dinner, he described the room to Ben and Ivan in breathless detail, to the point that afterwards there was a migration up the stairs so that the couple could be amazed by it as well. The jocular tone continued through the evening, and the last Brian heard of his guests that night was Marcus giggling at the ceiling of his room as he closed his door.

Marcus was the first of the guests to appear then next morning, finding Brian in the kitchen by following both the smell of bacon and the note in the dining room. The adjoining scullery had been converted into a smaller and less formal eating area, and it was here that Brian ate when he did not have caterers seeing to the meal.

After general morning greetings, Marcus asked, “Hey, what’s that weird thing out in the trees?”

Brian looked up from the pan of eggs he was scrambling, quizzical. “Animal, vegetable or…”

“Dunno,” Marcus said. “Big goofy-looking whatsit sticking up out of the woods.”

“Oh, that’s the folly.” He began transferring bacon to a paper-covered plate in the warming drawer. “It’s supposed to look like an old monastery that’s a lot farther away.”

Marcus just looked at him for a few seconds, wearing the half-smile of one who expects a punch-line. When none came, he said, “Damned funny looking monastery… Oh, wait. No, not that. The other thing.”

“What other thing?”

“If I knew what it was, I wouldn’t be asking. I went to look for it this morning, but all I could see was your foolie.”

“Folly. How many eggs you want?”

“Three.” Marcus had walked through the kitchen to perch on the edge of the prep island. “Seriously, what else is out there?”

Brian didn’t speak immediately, concentrating on making compact bull’s-eyes of the eggs he was dropping into the bacon fat. As he drew breath to answer, Ben appeared in the scullery.

“Hey, guys,” he said, and there was a tension in the way he stood that prepared the way for bad news. “Ivan just had a call from his dad—his mom had a stroke. We need to get home. He’s packing right now.”

“Aw, shit,” Brian and Marcus said it together, an unpracticed chorus. Brian asked Marcus to take over breakfast preparation, then said to Ben, “I’ll get you onto the first flight I can. Go help Ivan, then we’ll get the trip to the airport figured out.”

An hour later, Brian’s SUV left Colroyd House carrying the four of them, bound for Gatwick with plenty of time in hand to catch a mid-afternoon flight across the Atlantic. It returned in the long shadows of evening bearing only Brian and Marcus. As they ambled between mews and house, only the uppermost parts of the buildings still had sun upon them and the top of the moon peeked at them through the hills to the east.

They had stopped to eat at a pub in town, and between the long drive back from the airport and the meal in a setting full of social opportunities, Brian had contemplated changes in his friend since their last meeting. He could almost convince himself that Marcus was hardly changed at all, and that his appreciation of his friend was affected by his own alterations. Had he matured? Had coming into money put filters on his perception of people? Marcus seemed the same open, slightly impulsive person as ever, yet Brian found himself wishing the man would tone down just a little bit.

They made their way up to the media room which had once been a staff dormitory, where they settled into chairs that in no way fit the house to watch a remake of a film both had enjoyed when they were younger. The climax was interrupted by the ringing of Brian’s phone; Ben was calling from New York during the brief layover to let him know all had gone well, and to thank him again for underwriting the sudden return. While he talked, Marcus stood and roved around the room.

“Hey, is this the same side of the place as my room?” he said when Ben was off the line.

“Yeah,” Brian responded, after a moment of thought. “Other end of the house.”

“Huh.” Marcus was standing by a window, almost pressing his nose to the glass. “I can’t see that thing.”

“No. The trees are cut so you can’t see the folly from anywhere but the pink room.”

“Man, I’m not talking about your folly.” He stepped away from the window, setting the beer bottle he had been holding on the sill. “Hang on a minute.”

Brian rose as Marcus trotted out of the room. He looked out the window at the moonlit treetops beyond the carriage house. Without haste, he picked up Marcus’s bottle, and after giving it a little shake to establish there was still something in it, dropped it into the cupholder of a chair. Almost as if that had triggered it, he heard Marcus calling for him down the length of the house. As ridiculous as it was, Brian dialed his number. It was easier to phone him to find out what he wanted than shout back.

“Come see it,” Marcus said to him.

“I’ve seen it,” Brian said, not moving.

“No, I don’t think you have. Come and look.” There was something in his voice that got Brian walking. It was not the note of insistence, although that was certainly present. It was an underlying awe, which Marcus might not even have been aware of. Whatever made him sound that way, Brian wanted a look. Even if it was just the roof of the folly, its old-world charm made sinister by the light of the moon.

He switched on the light as he entered the pink room, which made Marcus bring up a hand to shade his eyes. The window Marcus stood beside was a mere rectangle of blackness, reflecting the room an octave darker. Brian threw the switch again, pulled the door most of the way closed against the glare of the hall, and moved to stand on the opposite side of the window.

Outside, the bright moon painted the trees and the more distant fields in tones of frost, while the only colour to be seen was distant sodium orange dots of farmyard lamps. Off to one side lay the angular bulk of the carriage house, while directly ahead, set among the trees…

“What?” Brian put his hands around his face, leaning close to the glass to block even the dim scatter from the hall. He stared. He knew that this room’s main feature, apart from the comically baroque décor, was the view of Lord Peter’s Folly, even if he had not spent much time enjoying that view. He had looked out this window a few times by daylight, and had a clear sense of how that should translate into the moonlit vista now before him. And yet, down the arcade of trees groomed as a setting for the petite Gothic jewel, there was no sign of sharp angles of brick and timber.

Instead, there was what came across at first as a Greek temple, replaced as the eye adjusted to the light and the distance by something more organic, a henge of rough pale blocks supporting a low conical mound, all elements so rounded and natural that there was no sense of the details to be had across the width of the park.

“What?” Brian repeated. Marcus moved closer, putting his head close, a co-conspirator sharing the secret of the view.

“So, you don’t know either, huh?” he said.

“No clue.” They stood for a time, peering at the unexpected vision. Eventually, Brian said, “It must be some trees or something, we’re just not seeing it right.” He stepped back, trying to prove to himself that they were just looking along the wrong line. The unknown thing became obscure as the glow of the hall light was allowed to reach the window, but it remained central to the view.

“Maybe some locals playing a joke?” Marcus suggested. “Not so happy about a black man taking over the castle?”

“They’ve got to be damned persistent,” Brian said. He walked to the door and threw on the lights. “This is the first time I’ve looked out this window, at least at night. Come on. Let’s go see what it is.”

A few minutes later, they were driving into the park, the LED bar on the front of the little ATV rendering the trees and leaves around them into unlikely comic-book colours. Between them, an axe and a crowbar rattled together, impromptu weapons taken from the carriage house in case surly locals were at the bottom of the mystery. Marcus had taken visitors out to the folly on several occasions, enough that markers of the way were somewhat familiar—a vivid fungus on a tree, a decades-old post with no evident use—and he drove with assurance along the most direct path.

He swore when the lights shone across the whiskers of the neighbour’s barley.

“We lost?” Marcus asked.

“Went too far.” Brian looked back the way they had come. Colroyd was not easy to make out in the night, but he saw the lights they had left on in the media room and the pink room. The latter was much farther to one side than he had expected given the route he had driven, but now reassured of his bearing, he started the cart again and brought it about to re-enter the woods.

They emerged, the path bringing them to an unexpected corner of two fences. The cart’s lights picked out a narrow paved road running beyond one of them, waking the embedded catseyes. The other fence separated park and lawn, with Colroyd House close at hand beyond. The pink room’s window was now so close it was a slightly trapezoidal, while the media room showed as a mere slit, far down the side of the house.

“How the hell did we get here?” Brian said, the question directed to the steering wheel.

“Here, let’s use my phone’s GPS,” said Marcus, shuffling to pull the device out.

“What are we going to put in as a destination? Is ‘weird thing near Lord Peter’s Folly’ on the drop-down?”

Marcus poked at his phone all the same. Brian began to maneuver the cart to point it away from the corner of the fences. He realized, slowly backing with the wheel hard over, that there was no path directly behind them. There was a track which ran parallel to the road, as far as he could see in the darkness, which made a ninety degree bend under them to follow the line of the lawn... but they had not been travelling with either road or house beside them when they had stopped. He frowned, but rather than ask any question aloud, he concentrated on wiggling the vehicle around until it was pointing away from the road, and toward the unexpectedly distant gate of the park.

When they began moving in that direction, Marcus looked up from the phone. “What are we doing?”

“Going back,” Brian said.

“Wait, wait, whoa.” The cart came to a stop, nearly even with the bright window of the pink room. “Look, why don’t we just walk it? We know it’s a straight line from that window, right?”

Brian said nothing, but he also did nothing. The engine of the ATV burbled to fill the silence.

“Fine,” Marcus said, switching on the flashlight feature of the phone. “You hang here, I’ll go have a look.”

He had taken four steps away from the cart when the eerie cry of a fox came from somewhere back toward the road. Brain twisted his head toward the sound, and when he looked back, Marcus was just taking his next step, his shoulders pulled up near his ears but moving with resolve. Brian reached for the key to kill the engine, his own resolve wavering, when he heard a yelp from Marcus, who was far enough off the path that he had become obscure in the undergrowth. Marcus trotted back to the cart, swinging his light erratically to illuminate where he had just been.

“What’s up?” Brian said as Marcus slid in beside him.

“You didn’t hear it?”

“What, that screechy sound? I think it was a fox.”

“No,” Marcus said, still playing his light on the trees and leaf litter. “Growling. Low down, close to the ground.”

“Nope.” He thought for a moment, then took his foot off the brake. “Don’t need to, either.”

By the time they had convinced themselves that Marcus had heard a badger, it was late enough that neither wanted to go out again that night.

The next day was taken up with trying to discover what they might have been seeing out the pink room’s window. The new day showed nothing that seemed likely to be misinterpreted in low light conditions as what both men had seen. A journey to the folly found it was just as expected, and the small clearing in the trees which rendered it so easily seen from that one window held no sign of activity other than their own that morning. Marcus, who had not been to the folly previously, prowled around it and through it, admitting when questioned he had no clear notion what he was looking for. Before they went back to the house for a long-delayed breakfast, he sat on the sturdy trestle table, looking at the little lancet windows, staring as if concentration would reveal secrets.

The rest of the morning and much of the time after lunch was given to research. Both sought through the internet for some clue. There were plenty of search hits for Colroyd House, even leaving out the residual effects of it having been for sale recently. Many of these mentioned the folly, but generally only to acknowledge its existence. It was not notable in size or theme, and appeared to have not drawn much attention to itself. Marcus had briefly thought he had struck gold on a paranormal site containing a page titled The Haunted Wood of Peter Colroyd, but it turned out to be about the ghost of a highwayman which was supposed to stalk the area of his death, somewhere in distant Yorkshire.

In the middle of the afternoon, just after their late lunch, Brian was struck with a notion that took him away from online searching. The house had come with shelves full of books, and he wondered if anything there might have a clue. He found a great deal of fiction by authors he had never heard of, like Thomas Peacock and Louisa Stanhope, much of it lightly punched by worms. There were also records of the business of the estate, which seemed more hopeful at first, but he soon set it aside as the mere recitation of money and goods that it was. He finally found a small group of miscellaneously bound volumes of various sizes which contained journals and diaries of Colroyd’s past owners.

Several of these were children’s copy-books, in which he learned that Arthur Colroyd had practiced his signature frequently from 1821 until 1829 and that the decoration for math pages preferred by Evelyn To Whome This Book Belongs was dancing mice. These things came to him as he skimmed through each book to find some sense of a date or author, setting each aside as it proved to be either of the wrong era or entirely illegible, until he found a book that was kept by Lord Peter himself.

It was a journal used by someone for whom journaling was a habit easy to resist. The entries would come in spasms of a week or two, then unrecorded months would pass before the next entry. It had also suffered more than most had from the attention of bookworms, with many pages made lacey by the gnawing pests. Brian turned the pages carefully, trying to do as little damage to them as possible, and found that one of the intervals of writing included the inconvenience of home renovation. Lord Peter complained about “saucy carpenters” and the disruption of the house’s smooth running and of the cost of stone, before his impulse to record his life faded again. Five months passed, and then he wrote again. These pages the worms had found more than usually tasty, and they had done strong redaction.

I cannot s… m displeased with the new prospect from m… udy. The ‘Abbey’ loo… ad hoped, and I am p…ed to admire it daily. Alas, t… nning of the full moon has proven that neither ‘Abbey’ nor Bis… wne’s blessing upo… has put an end t… ance of the unwelcome fantasm. Mother Shipw.. ld me as much, but Pride has …nd on a fruitless remed.. itless? No— for do I not gain in joy …enever I glance out in the da… nd on five and twenty nigh… f Luna’s passage? I shall be stoi…

Brian looked back through the volume, searching for any other references to the view from the pink room, but found nothing. Carrying on from that one mention of the folly, he found only one other appearance of it, a less-devoured passage which spoke of a picnic for Bishop Browne and his unmarried sister taking place there, with the servers “got up like Popish monks, to general amusement.”

Brian discussed his findings with Marcus. Marcus had little to relate apart from negatives—no mentions of the strange thing, no mysterious deaths, no sign even of the ghosts that are supposed to be standard issue for the stately homes of England—and his reaction to even the small morsel Brian had dug up was enthusiasm. The two friends soon found themselves at odds regarding the next step. Brian pointed to Lord Peter’s quiet surrender, a policy that had apparently served him well for the remaining thirty or so years of his life. Marcus was excited at the prospect of documenting a mystery and suggested a better-prepared expedition that night.

As they debated the matter, the discussion began to grow heated, until Brian put up his hands. “OK, OK. Let’s do it tomorrow, though. Get some proper jackets and boots for hanging out in the woods overnight.”

Marcus’s face brightened a little. Brian could not remember if he had mentioned the implication in Lord Peter’s writing that the thing was only there under the full moon and a day either side of that, but he knew he had not concentrated on the point. He went on, “In fact, let’s head into town for supper. We’ll hit that little pub again, maybe have a couple more drinks than last night.”

“Sure,” Marcus said, looking pleased at the prospect. He glanced at his watch. “I’m going to go up and have a shower before we take off, though. Sitting in front of the computer all damn day, I feel greasy.”

“Good idea,” Brian said, thinking of what book-eating insects might have left on the pages he had been handling. They went upstairs, Marcus peeling off at the washroom closest to the pink room, where his toiletries were already installed, while Brian carried on to the master suite.

When he emerged from his shower, wearing a fresh shirt, Brian nodded at the orange light slanting in through the bedroom’s north-facing windows, painting not just the walls but touching the ceiling. Nearly sundown, and by the time they were done with dinner, it would be well after dark and he could easily point to the previous night’s failed efforts as a reason not to go out until the next day.

He stopped at the pink room, tapping at the door which was slightly ajar. Marcus was not there. He went along the hall and heard the shower through the door of the bathroom. Shrugging, he kept going until he got to the media room. A little TV and a mere taste of scotch would, he decided, keep him occupied while Marcus finished his prolonged ablutions.

When his drink had been finished long enough that he was considering having a second, Brian decided it was time to be impatient. He killed the TV, and marched back along the hall. He knocked on the bathroom door, and when there was no response he shouted loud enough to be heard over the running water inside. Still, there was no response. He tried the door, found it was unlocked, and looking at the floor he opened it a little to call again.

The shower was barely on, the water dribbling out of the head to patter on the floor of the tub. Brian frowned. He hustled into the pink room, where there was also no sign of Marcus. He was about to jog downstairs when his vision passed over the view of the folly. In the trees near it, a little point of light swung and wavered. The sun was down now, and the pale skyglow of early twilight did not reach under the trees. A man walking to the folly, a man who had spent his whole life in cities, would likely want a flashlight on in that tree-thrown dimness.

Brian pulled out his phone and called Marcus. The light in the trees paused, then began to sway again. The moment the connection was made, Brian said, “What the hell are you doing?”

“You know I don’t have any patience,” Marcus replied, the same lightness of tone he had always used to minimize his indiscretions. “I’m going to just sit myself down in the folly and see if that weird thing pops up for me.”

“You’ve got the key?”

“Sure do.” Brian could hear the crackle of Marcus’s progress through the undergrowth. There was a brief flare of colour on the side of the folly as the flashlight splashed against it. “And here I am.”

Brian was staring out the window, feeling an anticipation so strong it might as well have been fear. Before he could think of anything else to say, he heard Marcus make a little gasp, followed by an even smaller chuckle. “That’s weird.”

Brian looked at the phone in his hand, an involuntary spasm of his illogical element trying to see who he was talking to. “What?”

When no answer came, he asked again, turning his eyes back to the window. Outside, moonlight fell on the irregular columns of whatever it was that took the place of the folly, no other light there but the cool blue of the moon.

On his phone, under the picture of his friend, under the words MARCUS PALMER, was a subscript signal lost.

Brian drove the cart along the dark paths of the park, calling his friend’s name until his throat was sore, coming no closer to the folly than he had the previous night and getting no answer. He dialled the phone again and again, and each time he was answered by a friendly voice expressing regrets that the person he was calling was outside the service area.

By the time he thought to call the police, the ATV was out of fuel and he was stumbling through the trees on foot.

The police arrived just before dawn. Brian managed to meet them at the gate, and as the first rays of the sun were gilding the high clouds above, he brought them to Lord Peter’s Folly. It stood, silent and innocent, its door ajar with the key sticking out of its lock. The only sign of Marcus that was found by a search party eventually numbering in the dozens, was his phone. It lay on the floor of the folly, the screen crazed as if the device had been dropped on its corner. The search swept the whole of the park, tramped the grain in the nearby field, and in the person of three poker-faced detectives passed through every room of Colroyd House.

When the searchers had left and when the calls from Marcus’s relatives—all in various degrees baffled, sad, and angry—had ceased, Brian would still ramble the grounds of his property. He usually went in the hour before sunset, and he would always pass the folly to make sure the door remained unlocked, but he would always head back for the house when the light began to change from gold to blue. He watched the folly from the window of the pink room, leaving the lights off. He stood and watched night after night, as the moon waned, casting ever less illumination upon the trees and the steep roof of the little gothic building, until the moon and the sun were travelling so close together that the park remained a uniform sea of darkness through the night.

Then came the night that the moon was up only a few minutes before the sun dropped out of sight. Brian was looking directly at the folly when it ceased to be there, the moment of replacement passing a grey haze over his vision for a fraction of a second before the silver light of the moon revealed the strange organic temple. He stood for a moment, peering out the pink room’s window, almost not believing in what he saw after a month of believable immobility from the landscape. Then he ran.

He ran outside, hardly slowing as he passed through the house to snatch a flashlight. He ran past the carriage house, ignoring the ATV. He ran past the gate and into the park with the heedless headlong speed of a child. Just as he was about to enter the main growth of the trees, he stopped.

The sound he heard defied explanation as thoroughly as the unknown edifice in the park. No bird in England screamed like a man. No animal could be screaming from a far distant point in the sky, somewhere high above the thing he had been running toward. But the sound was, without question, a man’s scream.

When the sound came again, the flashlight dropped from Brian’s hand. Another scream, transforming as it drew out to manic laughter that with the unmistakable cadence and tone of Marcus. It came again, and this time whether it was scream or laugh Brian could not tell, and he backed away.

In the morning, Brian Weems began the process of selling Colroyd House.