The house that Jack built

Dr. Roszó let go of the gate, and suddenly felt much lighter, as though he'd been carrying a heavy weight, somehow without knowing about it.  Sweat sprang out all over his body, abrupt and cold, and he shivered.  He looked over his shoulder: Adam was wiping sweat off his forehead and looked a little shocked, and the dull-eyed policeman was still staring resolutely ahead, seemingly acting on automatic.
"That was hard," said Adam.  He rubbed his hand on his trouser leg.  "That felt harder than when I tried opening the gate."
"I know," said Dr. Roszó.  "But that was guiding it through the the gaps in the pattern.  If we'd had to brute force it, it would have been harder still."
"How much harder?"
"Just harder."  Dr. Roszó didn't feel like telling Adam at this point that the pressures involved would probably have crushed the house and its occupant down to a small cube.  Assuming, of course, they could find enough people to generate that amount of force.
"So do we go in then?"
Dr. Roszó looked at the house and wondered how hard it was going to be to get inside there.  So long as the occupant was focusing on the gate, it couldn't be too bad, but the gate was open now, which meant that the occupant may well have switched its attention elsewhere.  He linked with Adam again, feeling the comfort of the flow of refined energy, and looked at the house and garden through enhanced eyes.
The coiling red and black snakes of the occupants power were still roiling around the gate, holding it firmly fixed in its now open position.  Tracing them back Dr. Roszó saw that they were emerging from an upper window, either a skylight or an attic window, set into the roof.  Concentrating, he looked at the front door, and after a few seconds effort realised that the coiling snakes around the gate linked to the front door as well, but that the windows on either side were free from influence and looked to be entirely unprotected.
Then he looked at the path to the front door, and immediately saw the attempts at hiding lines of force beneath it; the paving stones looked rucked up and impossible to cross in this view.  There were tendrils of power spread out across the grass of the lawn as well, but the flower beds bordering three edges of each half of the garden away from the path, were untouched.  Dr Roszó nodded slightly as he recognised this; it would have been impossible to hide their presence there in realsight as the plants would draw up energy straight away and start growing or mutating.
He let the energy flow drop, and noticed that Adam was staring at him.
"I got some of that," said Adam.  "Red and black snakes crawling over and under things.  It was yuk."  He shivered.
"Those are the lines of power," said Dr. Roszó.  "The occupant of the house has trapped the path and the grass, and the front door, but seems to have left the downstairs windows alone at least.  The flower beds are untouched as well, so we do have a path to get in to the house, but it looks like they're upstairs, probably on the top floor.  And I would expect that when we enter the house, the occupant will draw some of its power back so that it can deal with the intruders."
"When?" said Adam.  "You mean we're still going ahead with this?"
"Yes," said Dr. Roszó.  "We have to, we're the guys who deal with these kinds of problems."
"Can't we just call in a SWAT team?"
"Apart from the fact that that's American, we are the SWAT team."
"Oh."
Dr. Roszó looked at Adam, evaluating him.  He'd been hinting at much of this for the last few cases, but Adam had always been on the periphery until now.  Dr. Roszó didn't dare go into the house alone, given that he'd not been able to shift the gate without Adam's help, but he was also horribly aware that Adam wasn't prepared for this.  If there had been any way to pick an easier case to introduce him to these things, he'd definitely have taken it, but it looked like this would be first blood.  For someone.
"We'll have to check the windows first," said Dr. Roszó, deciding to take things as slowly as he dared.  "We need to be sure that there's no more subtle trap set."
"How do we do that?"  Adam's voice sounded oddly hollow, and he wasn't smiling any more.
"Throw rocks," said a new voice, cheerful and female.  Adam turned round, but Dr. Roszó had seen her waddling up the street already behind him.  The short, rotund woman with the rosy-apple cheeks, plaid skirt and ridiculously tiny hand-bag was Madame Annabel, Head of the department.
"Throw rocks," he agreed.  "There's never any need to be any more high-tech than absolutely necessary."
"We have a name," said Madame Annabel, arriving.  "The occupant was once called Jack Panatheikos, but in recent months has been insisting on only being called Jack."
"Who told us that?  The neighbours?"  Dr. Roszó looked puzzled, as the houses nearby had gently twitching curtains that suggested that the neighbours were all home and nervous.  He started wondering where the evacuation squad was.
"The post office," said Madame Annabel.  "Apparantly he's been phoning them up and complaining that his post is wrongly addressed for months, so that they've now gotten into the habit of blacking his surname from every letter and parcel with a marker pen."
"Were there many parcels and letters?"
"Why does that matter?" asked Adam, who was turning his head between Dr. Roszó and Madame Annabel like he was at a tennis match.
"Lots," said Madame Annabel.  "It matters because those parcels may have contained things that have resulted in this... occupation.
"Yes, but how could we know?"
"Ah," said Madame Annabel looking pleased with herself.  "That one's easy; we know the kinds of things that would be needed for this occupation, so we can simply do a sympathetic check if any of them have been delivered here in the last few weeks.  We can go back about four to five weeks for most of them, a bit further with some of the... let's call them exotica."
"We should start with the exotica," said Dr. Roszó.  "Given the strength of the occupant."
"That bad?"  Madame Annabel appeared to squint at the house and the gate, and after a few seconds she relaxed her eyes and looked at Dr. Roszó in admiration.  "You got the gate open with all that going on?"
"Between us," said Dr. Roszó, attempting modesty.
"I'm still impressed," she said.  "Let's get going then!"

Forcing entry

Dr. Roszó placed his hands on the latch of the wooden gate.  The gate blocked off the flag-stoned path that led to the front door of the non-descript terraced house, and the only noteworthy thing about the whole place at the moment was the policeman loitering beside the gate.  Dr. Roszó nodded at him, and tried to open the gate.
For a moment the whole world seemed to blur around him, and, as though very far off, he heard a faint screaming, a woman crying out his birth name over and over again.  Then things returned to normal, the noise disappeared, and he realised that although he was leaning his full weight on the gate, it wasn't moving.
"It's been like that since we found it, Sir," said the policeman.  His voice was deep and gravelly, not quite in keeping with his slightly plump appearance.  Dr. Roszó felt as though the voice belonged to some chiselled 1930's film star with stubble and a hidden life that the public were kept away from.  "Madame Annabel went in, but she came straight out again and wouldn't talk to anyone.  They've taken her back to the station to talk to her."
"Who's talking to her?"  Dr. Roszó looked across the road as he spoke, but couldn't see any sign of his assistant yet.  He looked back at the policeman.  "Have they called Rupert?"
"No-one's told me who's talking to her, Sir, and I don't know who Rupert is."  The policeman stared straight ahead as he spoke.  His eyes were slightly dull, and as he looked at him a thought grew into a certainty in Dr. Roszó's mind.
"Were you at twenty-one Cameron Road two weeks ago?" he said.  "It would have been mid-afternoon, there were three officers turned up in a patrol car when we radioed in."
"Yes Sir," said the policeman.  Dr. Roszó nodded.
"When you get off duty you are to go and talk to Rupert Warning," he said, his voice suddenly sounding colder and harsher.  The light around them darkened a little as though a cloud had chosen that moment to cross the sun.  "Tell him that you remember the toad-priest."
"Yes Sir," repeated the policeman, giving no sign at all that he'd understood the instructions.  Dr. Roszó stood next to, wondering if it was worth reinforcing the suggestion, and was just deciding that it probably wasn't when a lively young voice jerked him from his reverie.
"Sorry I'm a bit late, Doctor, I was eating ice-cream with my friends and they didn't want me to leave."
Dr. Roszó looked round, and there was his assistant, eighteen year-old Adam, grinning cheerfully at his elbow.  Adam was about a foot shorter than Dr. Roszó, had skin pale enough that he was often mistaken for a goth, a shock of black hair that he let grow, and a very European taste in clothes.  Today he was wearing canary-yellow jeans and a carnelian t-shirt with a faded slogan almost unreadable across the chest.
"You're here, and that's what matters," said Dr. Roszó.  "Want to try opening the gate?"
Adam was bright but unmotivated and had shown no interest in either work or study until Dr. Roszó had found him hanging out with friends outside a supermarket.  One of Adam's friends had gone to push Dr. Roszó and the doctor had automatically defended himself, creating a paper-thin barrier of fluxing space-time around himself.  Anything touching it would be pressed thin and sucked through, deposited in a random alternate universe that might, if they were very lucky, support life.  As he'd reflexively thrown the barrier up he'd felt the energy flow between himself and Adam, felt the lad acting as a deep resevoir for the exotic energies he commanded.  Although Adam's friend (not a good one, he'd confided later) had disappeared through an interdimensional rift with no proof of where he'd gone or how, Adam had also felt the connection.  The taste of the power that Dr. Roszó commanded had been enough to pull him along for now, learning about the strange new sciences that people like Dr. Roszó had access to, and seeing them put to use in all the dark ways that humanity seems determined to experiment with.
Adam gave the gate a push, and it didn't move.  He bit his lower lip and tried harder, the muscles on his thin arms standing out as he did so.  The world seemed to blur again, but then righted itself and Adam had moved the gate a mere centimetre.  Dr. Roszó was very impressed.
"Stuck solid," said Adam, shaking his head.  "Shouldn't be possible, that's just wood.  It should snap if was that stuck."
"It's being held," said Dr. Roszó.  "Maintained, if you like.  All I know for the moment is that something terrible happened inside that house, and the occupant is now–"
"Occupant?  Like they're not human?"  Adam was staring at Dr. Roszó with interest now.
"Occupant like I don't know what they are," said Dr. Roszó.  "Someone, possibly something.  But they're maintaining the entire house like this, and we need to know how long it's going to last and what kind of effect it's having on them."
"Like, if they're going to die?"
"Maybe, but more like if they're going to end up not human."
Adam looked a little worried; Madame Annabel and Rupert liked to tell him horror stories of the department's work to keep him a little wound up.
"So what do I do?" he said, his voice letting reluctance creep in to his tone.
"Help me," said Dr. Roszó.
This time when he placed his hands on the gate he felt Adam's reservoir of energy open up, and established a connection between them both, one that fed raw power into Adam and a second that pulled the refined energy back out again.  Then, when he was sure of the pipeline, he pushed on the gate and saw how the black-and-red energies wrapped around it, emanating from the house.  It was now child's play for him to guide the gate through the gaps in the patterns and then free it altogether so that it was free to move once more.