Dad had a stroke about a month ago. He’s alright now, but he gave us all a scare. I am with him now. He’s back at home from the hospital and is up and about. He has no permanent damage to his motor skills but has to go to speech therapy twice a week to be able to pronounce words clearly.
So I’m back at the farm. Sleeping in my old room, moving about the house. We have many conversations together. He gets frustrated with himself when he struggles to get his words out. He tries and tries and tries. I notice the improvement he makes every single day, but he only notices the flaws, the slurring, the slow speech. It is almost like it is painful for him to control his tongue. He applies himself with great focus. I, for one, am proud of his efforts.
Today, while we are sipping our mid-morning coffee outside, he turns to me and asks, a serious look on his face:
Dad: Could you do something for me?
Me: Of course, daddy, what is it?
Dad: There is something in the attic I’d like you to find. I think it is time. They’re tapes, entries from your great-uncle Phil. I’ve put them in a box. They used to be these old reels but I transferred them to cassettes when my old man gave them to me, in the eighties. Maybe you can work your magic with your computer and digitise them?
Me: I’m sure I can work it out… What are they?
Dad: Well, your great-uncle Philip, he was my dad’s uncle, one day, he just disappeared in 1949. His wife was all shaken up about it, maintaining he had been eaten by the mirror. Superstitious lady, she was. Just because there was a broken mirror in his room, when he was nowhere to be found. Before his disappearance, he had recorded an audio diary. I listened to the reels. Personally, I think he was deranged. He just left because he never loved his wife or kids, only himself. He was a piece of work you know. Find the tapes, listen carefully to them and tell me what you think.
Take your time, maybe one day at a time, so you give a proper thought to each entry. Yes, one day at a time, I think that’s a good way to do it.
And so, after lunch, I set up to work. Dad couldn’t remember where exactly in the attic he had set the box, but he gave me a good description of it. It is a hot day, and the attic is stuffy with heat and dust.
After a few hours moving things around, I finally spot the box, right behind a huge mirror covered in a mouldy old sheet. When I open the box, I discover the tapes, eleven of them, bound together with an elastic band.
In the box are also an old journal from my grand-father Paul Compton, a folder full of some notes from Dad and a couple of newspaper clippings dating from November and December 1949.
At the bottom of the box, I find some random filthy old rags as well as a couple of oxidised mirror shards. When I see the darkened broken glass, I have this unexplainable feeling of dread. A shiver works its way down my back. I close the lid, blow the dust off and take it downstairs with me to my room.
The box and its content have brought their humid smell with them. Almost like rot.
As per Dad’s instruction, I take only the first tape out of the box. It is labelled “Oct 22nd 1949 - Afternoon”. I put it in the player and listen to it, eyes closed. I am giving it my full and complete attention. I have captured the recording on my own digital Dictaphone. Here it is here:
As you can hear, Philip’s voice comes on as he is doing a test of his recording equipment. Then he starts talking about some argument he had on that day with a man who was owing him money. A guy named Billings who accused Uncle Phil of being cruel and that, one day, he would come to regret the way he treated people.
The recording is old, some echoes cover the voice, here and there. From his way of speaking, he definitely seems like a pompous heartless person. It does sound like, while enjoying being a cruel selfish person, he does not enjoy being called one.
But I do not know enough about the man to make an assessment of his personality. I will need to talk to Dad a bit more about him, and maybe even read my grand-father’s journal and the notes from the folder.
UPDATE - Night.
I just finished the second tape, labelled “Oct 22nd 1949 - Night”, as it is from the same day.
You can listen to it here:
It is night-time at the Westerly’s and as you could hear it must have been a stormy night then because some words are deafened by thunder. It makes it all quite creepy and eerie. Especially listening to his panicked voice, as he describes how he was getting dressed for dinner and putting on his tie, adjusting it in front of the mirror, when he realised that his reflection was not following his own movements.
I definitely understand why Dad said he was deranged. It feels intrusive for me to listen to a man’s descent to insanity. But I know I am not the only one who listened to the recordings, and Dad was so serious when he asked me to listen to them… It just seems important. I bet the next tapes will only go from bad to worse… I make a few comments on my Dictaphone about my thoughts so far, so I can transcribe them here, later on. Earlier this afternoon, I researched how to digitise old cassettes. I have a cassette player here, obviously, but I needed a couple of cables to plug it to my computer and a program specialised in converting tapes to audio files. I paid for a program online and downloaded it, then made my way downstairs to find my dad, sitting at the dining table, hunched over his crosswords.
I asked him if he wanted to come into town with me so I could pick his brains about what I'd heard on the first tape this morning. He was more than happy to get out of the house to accompany me.
In the car, I asked him about Uncle Phil. From our conversation, I gathered that Uncle Phil had inherited the great family fortune when his parents died. He never worked a day in his life, always had been waited on hand and foot by servants and maids. He was married to Aunt Constance and had two children with her. His sister, Faith Westerly, was Dad’s mother. Dad had talked a great length with Granny about her brother, just like we were doing in the car. Granny said he always was a mean, egotistical, self-absorbed man. As kids, he would play cruel pranks on her and blame them on the household staff. He would enjoy watching their dad scolding the maid, the gardener, the cook. Being born into wealth, and then inheriting the majority of the estates, made him even more difficult. “A man of many whims”, he was always looking to satisfy them. One of them was to keep a diary. And making a point of always following the latest trends and inventions, he switched from writing a diary to recording himself on a reel. Hence the reels. Another of his whims was the love he had for himself. He was a handsome man and satisfied his narcissistic tendencies by having the servants hang countless mirrors all throughout the estate to be able to admire himself at any time. This eccentricity was borne out by the fact that looming in his bedroom was a mirror of gigantic size - the same mirror that is linked with his disappearance.
I asked Dad if it was the same mirror that I saw in the attic when I was looking for the tapes, the one covered in a sheet. And it is. I don’t know how I feel about that. It seems like an obsession, passed down generations to generations... Just thinking about it, collecting dust in the attic, salvaged first by Aunt Constance, who when she died, bequeathed it to Granny Faith, as she wanted none of her children to know about the circumstances of their father's disappearance.
In her will, she was begging Granny Faith to pass the reels down to her children, and their children after that, until the truth could be determined. So Granny left them to her son Paul (granddad) who passed them down to Dad.
And now, it is up to me. It piques my interest. I am intrigued, not only by the disappearance but also by the obsession the people taking care of the recordings seemed to have with the story behind them.
Even Dad admits he got obsessed with them for a long while when he first got them, but being unsuccessful in his research, he had decided that Uncle Phil was just a deranged man and that Aunt Constance simply could not accept his abandoning his family. I'm working on converting the tapes now, with the cables I bought from our trip to town. While I wait for the program to do its work, I've begun to read through Granddad’s journal. He writes:
“Many theories have been advanced as to why and how he vanished so strangely and so completely. Many have wondered why a man should vanish and leave nothing behind him but a smashed mirror. But none of these theories or wild imaginings are half so fantastic as the story I gathered from the diaries and reels which some whim prompted him to keep.”
I wonder what the fascination is? I'll keep you updated.
Next instalment October 23rd.
The Westerly Tapes is a Halloween Horror by Julia Mersobian and Nathan Schulz, for The Drama Merchant, based on the short story by Paul Compton.
The voice of Westerly is performed by Kent Lee