Authors: Andrew Lane
He glanced back at the lawn. Kneeling down, he looked straight at the apple trees, trying to establish if there was any slope to the ground. He supposed it might just be possible, if the house
was
flat on the surface of the ground, and
if
the ground was muddy enough and sloped enough, that the house could
slide
towards the orchard, but that would require some kind of
triggering event, like an earthquake, that would be more suited to a foreign country than to England. It would leave traces as well – gouge marks in the earth. The trouble was that even if
all of those things were true, the house might well slide in one direction, but how could it possibly slide back again? And do so repeatedly?
He stood up, sighing. The whole theory was improbable, if only because the ground did not slope in the slightest.
‘Get out!’ a voice shouted from behind him. ‘I said, get out!’
With a deafening
bang!
a patch of overgrown lawn beside Sherlock suddenly exploded in a spray of earth and bits of leaf. He felt moisture from the grass splatter his cheek. He turned
– slowly, so that he didn’t spook the man who had shouted. ‘I’m sorry,’ he called, ‘but we’re here to help. Ferny Weston sent us! We have a letter from
him!’
As he turned, he saw a man leaning out of an upstairs window. He was pointing a gun at Sherlock – a massive fowling piece with a long barrel. It would shoot lots of small lead balls,
Sherlock knew – making a mess of whatever they hit.
The man with the gun was unshaven. His wild white hair stuck out in all directions, and his small, round glasses were askew on his nose. His eyes, behind the glasses, glared wildly at Sherlock
and Matty.
‘You, boy!’ the man cried, waving the gun in Matty’s direction. ‘Go and stand beside your friend. I want you close enough that I can hit you both with a single shot! You
say you have a letter?’
‘Yes.’ Sherlock pulled it from his jacket and waved it. ‘Are you Mortimer Maberley?’
‘I might be. Wait there.’ He vanished from the window. Sherlock and Matty just stood there as he made his way through the house, eventually appearing at the front door. ‘Come
over here and let me see.’
Sherlock and Matty made their way to the front door, painfully aware that the gun was pointed at them again, and equally aware that Mortimer Maberley was not the most stable of men. Sherlock
handed the letter across and they waited while Maberley opened it, squinted at it, adjusted his glasses so they were nearly straight and then read it again. Eventually he put it down and stared at
them.
‘So, Weston sent you to help, eh?’
‘Sherlock ’ere is very good with puzzles an’ stuff,’ Matty boasted, ‘an’ I’m good with scams an’ confidence tricks. Whatever’s goin’
on, we can solve it!’
‘Neither of you has any expertise in the field of evil spirits then?’
The boys looked at each other.
‘No,’ Matty said. ‘Why?’
‘Isn’t it obvious? Demons are trying to drag this house to hell, but the angels keep stopping them and moving it back again.’
‘Why would demons want to drag your house to hell?’ Sherlock asked reasonably.
‘If I knew that,’ Maberley snapped, ‘then I wouldn’t need the services of an expert, would I?’ He realized that he was still pointing the gun at them and swung it
away. ‘You’d better come in. I can make some tea, or there’s cider if you prefer. A lot of cider.’
‘Tea would be wonderful,’ Sherlock said.
Maberley led them into a living room that was cluttered with bric-a-brac, old furniture and books in piles. There was a smell to the house that Sherlock found familiar – a medicinal smell
that made his flesh creep for some reason. He filed that information away for later consideration.
Once Maberley had vanished off into what Sherlock presumed was the kitchen, Matty glanced at Sherlock. ‘’E’s crackers,’ he muttered. ‘I think we know what the story
is ’ere.’
‘I’m not so sure,’ Sherlock replied. ‘Let’s keep our minds open until we know more.’
Maberley came back with a pot of tea and three mismatched cups, and they all sat down wherever they could find a space. Maberley read Weston’s letter again, and then gazed at them over the
top of his glasses.
‘You must think I’m mad,’ he said directly.
‘Yes,’ Matty responded.
‘No,’ Sherlock said.
Maberley gazed at the two of them through eyes that were bloodshot and watery. ‘You’re just kids,’ he said softly. ‘What can you do to help?’
Matty bristled, preparing to make a strong retort, but Sherlock gestured him to silence. ‘We can be witnesses,’ he said softly. ‘We can see what happens, and if what you say is
right then we can tell people. We can corroborate your story.’
Maberley nodded. ‘That is good enough for me,’ he said soberly.
‘Now,’ Sherlock continued in a deliberately businesslike tone, ‘tell us everything.’
‘Did Ferny Weston not tell you himself?’
‘He did, but I want to hear it from your lips. There may be things that you forgot to mention to Ferny, things that seemed so simple or so obvious that you left them out, but which could
prove the key to the whole affair. Or there might have been things that he skipped over in your letter because they were trivial details, but which might help unravel the mystery. It’s always
better to go to the original source for a story, rather than rely on it being told second-hand.’
Maberley nodded. ‘You know that I used to be in the Oxford police?
Sherlock nodded.
‘Well,’ he continued, ‘that attitude of yours was one that Ferny and I tried to get our constables to follow, but they rarely did. They would far prefer to believe a story if
it was colourful and it backed up their prejudices than if they had tracked it back to an original, and probably more boring, source.’
‘Not,’ Sherlock said, ‘that I think your story will be boring.’
‘I hope not. Very well – I will tell you everything as if I have never told it before and you have never heard it before.’
The story was, to be fair, pretty much the same as the one that Ferny had told them, with some changes in emphasis, but in Mortimer Maberley’s voice it took on an added
immediacy. He had lived through these events, and it was obvious from his tone, and his expression, that he completely believed that they had happened. When he came to talk about the sight of the
tops of the apple trees waving outside his bedroom window, in a place that they should not have been, his voice was filled with a kind of uncomprehending horror. The natural order of things had
gone awry – nature was not as it should be, and he was scared.
‘You say that you tried to keep yourself awake, to see these things start,’ Sherlock asked. ‘How exactly did you do that?’
‘One night I tried making a pot of strong coffee,’ Maberley answered, ‘and drinking one cup every half hour, regularly. Another night I held a bell in my hand, so that if I
became sleepy and my hand dropped then the bell would ring, or if it hit the floor then the same thing would happen. A third night I stood up all the time.’ He laughed suddenly. ‘A
fourth night I tried balancing a tumbler of water on my head, but that was a failure from the start. But no, it didn’t matter what I tried – on the nights when the house moved into the
orchard I would invariably fall asleep, only to wake up for a little bit, then fall back asleep again.’
‘Or,’ Sherlock pointed out, as he had done earlier to Ferny Weston, ‘the nights when you fell asleep despite your best efforts were the nights when the house seemed to move. We
do not know, as yet, which one caused the other – if they are linked at all.’
‘You think they are,’ Matty said excitedly. ‘I know that expression. You know what’s going on.’
‘I know some of it,’ Sherlock said. ‘The rest I am beginning to work out. I just need to ask two questions, and then my friend and I need to look around.’
‘Very well,’ Maberley said.
‘Firstly, on those nights when the house does appear to move, and you sleep heavily, do you feel rested when you wake up?’
Maberley thought for a moment. ‘No,’ he said slowly. ‘When I wake I actually feel as if my head is filled with a heavy weight and I find it difficult to move.’
‘Ah – very interesting. And can I ask about the windows in the house – do they open easily?’
‘They used to, but I think the wood of the frames has warped. It must be something to do with moisture in the atmosphere. I cannot get them open now, no matter how hard I pull. If I need
to air the house, then I open the front and back doors and let the breeze do the job.’
‘Just as I thought,’ Sherlock said. ‘He glanced at Matty. ‘Right – can you check all around the outside of the house while I check inside? Give it an hour and then
we can swap. If one of us has missed something then the other one will find it.’
‘What am I looking for?’ Matty asked.
‘Anything out of the ordinary.’
‘Do you want to narrow that down?’
‘Absolutely not.’
‘And I,’ Maberley announced, ‘will make some sandwiches. Will fish paste do?’
‘Over the next sixty minutes, Sherlock visited every room in the house. Some were as filled with stuff as the sitting room, while others were virtually empty. All of them had that faint
medicinal smell to them.
Remembering the story that Ferny Weston had told him and Matty about Cavalier refugees hiding in the house from Oliver Cromwell’s Roundhead forces during the English Civil War, Sherlock
checked all the walls and floors, looking for secret passages or hidden rooms. He carefully paced out the length of each room, and then checked those dimensions against the lengths of the corridors
outside, but there were no discrepancies. As far as he could tell – and he’d had a lot of experience – there was nowhere in the house that even one person could have been hidden,
let alone several. No priest’s hole, nothing. Either he was missing something, or the family legend just wasn’t true.
Sherlock also checked all of the windows in the house as he was going around. He found, as he had expected, that the windows had been nailed so that they could not be opened, with the nails
passing through the bottom of each frame and into the wood of the sill. The heads of the nails had been dabbed with a brown paint so that they could not be seen unless you knew to look for them.
Working on the assumption that Maberley hadn’t done it himself and then forgotten about it, someone had been inside the house without his knowledge, and for some time as well.
Sherlock also found holes in the wooden skirting board of every room. They looked, at first glance, like mouse holes, but they were strangely regular – as if they had been drilled, rather
than nibbled or scratched. There were no signs of mouse droppings either.
He passed Maberley on the stairs at one point – him going down, Maberley going up. ‘Did you ever think,’ he asked, ‘that any of your possessions had been moved around, or
made more untidy?’
‘Quite the reverse,’ Maberley said, running a hand through his wild white hair. ‘Before all this bizarre stuff started happening with the house moving at night, there were a
few days when I thought that the place was tidier than usual. Very strange it was.’
A little later, when Sherlock was searching through the kitchen, Maberley entered to make another cup of tea.
‘Do you have much of a problem with mice, or cockroaches, or any other kind of vermin?’ Sherlock said over his shoulder.
‘I used to.’ Maberley shrugged. ‘They seem to have all vanished now. I think the moving of the house has scared them off.’
‘That’s one explanation,’ Sherlock muttered.
‘Pardon?’
‘I’ll explain later.’
At the end of the hour he met Matty in the hall. ‘Anything?’ he inquired.
‘’Oles in the walls,’ Matty said. ‘They ain’t natural either.’
‘Yes, I found the other ends inside the house. Anything else?’
Matty nodded. ‘A couple of things. Come and look at this.’
He led the way outside the front door, to the scruffy mass of grass and weeds that counted as a lawn. He gestured at a particular patch that appeared no different from the rest.
‘What do you make of that?’ he asked.
Sherlock looked closer, but he could see nothing. ‘Make of what?’ he asked.
Matty glanced around, frustrated. ‘Come over here,’ he said, pulling Sherlock’s arm. ‘It’s easier to see if the light from the sun is behind you.’
Sherlock looked again, and suddenly he could see what Matty was talking about. There was a circular patch of grass that was slightly different from the rest. Sherlock wasn’t sure if it was
slightly greener, or slightly taller, or what. ‘Some kind of fungus?’ he guessed.
‘Or a fairy ring,’ Matty countered. ‘I dunno what it is, but there’s a few of them.’
Sherlock estimated the size of the ring. It was about as wide as he could stretch his arms. He looked around. Matty was right – there were other rings around, and some of them
overlapped.
‘All right – that’s a puzzle,’ he said. ‘It might not have anything to do with the house supposedly moving, however.’
‘Then what about this?’ Matty asked. He led Sherlock to near the point where the orchard began, where he stopped. ‘Look.’ He pointed at the ground.
Sherlock bent down. ‘What am I looking at?’ he asked.
‘Look sideways,’ Matty urged.
Sherlock turned his head and moved down until he could feel blades of grass tickling his ear. He stared back towards the house. For a minute all he saw was grass, weeds and the occasional ant,
but then, like an optical illusion suddenly resolving itself, he suddenly saw what it was that Matty had noticed. The grass seemed to be
bent
. Close to the ground it grew straight up, but
after a few inches it suddenly but unmistakably veered sideways, pointing towards the orchard. It was almost impossible to see from above, there being so many blades of grass being ruffled in
different directions by the breeze, but at ground level there was an obvious kink in the way the grass was growing.
‘It looks like it’s been flattened by something heavy,’ he murmured.