by Prey (lit)
"Hold on a minute," said Harry. "There's a skylight here, but no sky."
I climbed to the top of the stairs so that I could see him. He was standing over my bedroom, and shining his torch up at a small two-paned skylight in the sloping ceiling.
"I don't know why that is," I said. "If you look at the house from the outside, it looks as if that part of the attic was blocked off."
Harry thought about that, and sniffed. "So there's a sort of a space behind here?"
"That's right. In between the old roof and the new roof."
"Big enough for something to hide?"
"Well, yes. But not a rat. How could a rat open and close a skylight?"
Harry shone his torch at his own face. It looked craggy and ghastly, like a death-mask suspended in mid-darkness. "That's just the question, isn't it? And here's another: How could a rat make off with my brother?"
I shook my head. I wanted him to look around and find Brown Jenkin as quickly as he could. In spite of the draft that blew steadily through it, the attic was crushingly oppressivemore like being buried three levels underground than standing three storeys high.
Harry poked around, and shifted a few pieces of furniture. "Looks like we're going to have think again," he told me. "There's no sign of a rat up here; nor a squirrel, neither. No sign of nothing."
"I definitely saw something," I insisted. "It was bristly and dark and it pushed right past me."
There was a lengthy pause, then Harry sniffed and said, "I believe you. I know some who wouldn't."
He stood for over a minute staring at nothing at all. Then he flicked the beam of his torch back toward the skylight. "Reckon I'll take a look up here. Maybe this'll tell us what's what."
"I doubt if it'll open," I told him. But all the same, he dragged one of the boxes across, and climbed up on it so that he could reach the skylight's old-fashioned catch. He had to bang the skylight two or three times with the heel of his hand, but suddenly it jumped open. He raised it as far as it would go, and then fastened it on its rusty window-bar.
"Smells different in here," he said, poking his head up through the skylight and flashing his torch-beam this way and that. Although Harry himself obscured most of my view, I could see rough gray breeze-blocks, crudely pointed, which seemed to indicate that the roof had been bricked up in something of a hurry, by somebody who wasn't much of an expert at bricklaying.
"The old roof-tiles are still here," Harry called back. "I can't for the life of me think why anybody would have wanted to block this off. Don't seem to serve no purpose."
''They bricked up one of the bedroom windows, too."
"Well, damned if I know," said Harry. "Looks like we're going to have to think again."
He was about to step down from the box when, abruptly, he dropped his torch. It bounced on the floor but it didn't go out. Instead, it shone on the dusty surface of a cheval-mirror, filling one corner of the attic with unearthly reflected light.
I was just about to go across and pick the torch up for him when he made an extraordinary noise, like somebody tearing a piece of dry cloth. I glanced up, and saw to my horror that his scalp seemed to be caught on something. He was trying to reach up to disentangle himself, but he couldn't. He swung around and kicked one leg out, and the box on which he was standing toppled over and fell noisily onto the attic floor.
"Harry!" I shouted, and tried to seize his legs, so that I could support some of his weight.
He stared at me with his mouth open but he didn't seem to be able to speak.
"Harry! What's wrong?" I asked him. I managed to grasp his left leg, but his right leg was swinging too wildly. "Keep still, try to keep still!"
Harry's head was shaken violently from side to side, so that his forehead knocked against the frame of the skylight. I saw bruises, blood. Then I heard that dry-cloth sound again, and Harry's face suddenly tightened, his eyes slitted and slanting, his nostrils widening, his upper lip rearing upward in a grotesque snarl.
"Harry!" I screamed at him.
The skin of his face was dragged up more and more, until he was leering at me Mongol-madly with a monstrous, agonized grin. Again that terrible crackling and tearing, and I suddenly understood what it was. Harry's skin was being gradually torn away from his skull. The crackle was the crackle of fat breaking apart and membranes being pulled away from bone; the tearing was the tearing of hair-roots.
I managed to grab his other leg, and steady him. Then I heaved downwards, trying to pull him away from whatever had taken hold of him. But he screamed so shrilly that I had to let him go. The skin was being wrenched off his head, like the skin being pulled off a raw chicken, and there was nothing I could do to stop it.
"Liz!" I bellowed. "Liz!" But she was out in the garden and there was no chance of her hearing me. Awkward, panicking, I righted the box on which Harry had been standing, and took his thrashing tobacco-smelling weight in my arms. He was struggling so much that I couldn't see anything inside the skylight. I couldn't see what had seized hold of him, and how it was pulling the skin off his head.
But then he jerked his head forward. Blood dredged over me, sticky and hot, but in the red-matted thicket of his hair, I glimpsed three curved black claws, shining like knives. They had run right through the skin of his scalp, and then twisted his scalp around, and around again, and yet again, so that his skin was being dragged up off his face in a terrible clawed tourniquet.
"Harry, hold on!" I begged him.
He stared at me, his eyes bloodshot and piggy. His skin had torn open at the chin, and suddenly his tongue dropped down, behind the loosened skin, and appeared through the bloody opening beneath his lower lip, as if he had two mouths, one above the other. Then, with a viscous slithering sound, his whole face slid upward, like a bloody rubber-glove being peeled off, and I was confronted with a skinless, meat-ragged skull, with lidless eyes that bulged in terror, and teeth that protruded from their blood-welling sockets in the ultimate smile. The living dead, no less; wearing the ghastly smile of intolerable agony; the smile of knowing that the struggle of living will soon be over.
I wobbled, lost my balance on the box, and had to step awkwardly down. Harry hung from the skylight, still waving his arms and legs, but in a careless, desultory way, like a man who's too tired to swim properly. I had the feeling that he was simply trying to pump the blood more quickly out of his ravaged head, so that he would bleed to death without suffering much more pain.
"Liz," I whispered. Then Harry spun around and dropped heavily onto the attic floor, and lay shuddering on his side in his hairy ratcatcher's suit. I glanced up at the open skylight. The windows were spattered with blood, and there were dark speckles of blood all over the ceiling.
"Harry," I said, touching his stiffening, blood-soaked shoulder. "HarryI'm going to call for an ambulance. Just lie still, Harry. Don't try to move."
He stared at me with those bloodied-oyster eyes. "'Cause I 'cause I " he breathed, between fleshless lips.
"It's all right, Harry," I reassured him. "Everything's fine. But, pleaselie still. I won't be more than a couple of minutes."
"'Cause I " he repeated, his eyes gelid and wincing because he had no lids to close over them.
I clambered down the attic stairs; and then down to the kitchen. Liz was standing in the open door, with sunlight behind her. She said, "Davidwhat is it?"
"Harry, the ratcatcher. He's had an accident." I scrambled the telephone off the wall and dialed 999.
"Emergency, which service please?"
"Ambulance, quickly! Fortyfoot House, in Bonchurch."
Liz went quickly toward the stairs. "What's happened to him?" she asked. "Shall I ?"
"No!" I shouted, and she stopped, her eyes wide; and it was then she understood what had happened.
"Sirwhat's your number, please?" the operator demanded. "Sir?"
7 - Sweet Emmeline
Detective-sergeant Miller came out into the garden and brushed the dust from his crumpled gray suit. He lo
oked more like a young curate than a police officerpink-skinned, with thinning straw-colored hair, bleached blue eyes and circular spectacles. He wore an Isle of Wight Yacht Club tie and a pink rosebud safety-pinned to his lapel. I was never quite sure about men who wore flowers in their lapelsnot because I suspected them of being gay, but because they gave me the impression that they modeled themselves on the dapper chaps of the 1950sall blazers and silk horseshoe patterned cravats.
The dapper chaps of the 1950s (like my father; and my uncle Derek) had usually suffered impoverished and unhappy upbringings, and believed that blazers and silk cravats (and rosebuds in their lapels) would establish them instantly as men of class.
"You mustn't blame yourself, Mrer?" he told me, scanning the garden. "It was an accident, pure and simple."
"I told you what I saw, I saw claws."
He held the tip of his finger against the tip of his nose, to suppress a sneeze. But then he sneezed, and took out his handkerchief. "Sorry. Hay fever."
"I don't understand how that could have been an accident," I told him.
He finished wiping his nose, then glanced at me quickly, as if he didn't really want to look me in the eye. "There's some very nasty hooks in that attic roof, and he caught his scalp. Bad luck, that's all. He lost his footing on the box, and spun around, and the spinning around tore his skin off. That's all. I've seen it happen before. Chap last year caught his hand in a lathe, over at the Blackgang sawmill. Twisted the skin off, skkreeewww! right up to the elbow."
I covered my mouth with my hand. I didn't know what to say. I was sure that I had seen curved black claws digging their way into Harry's head; I was sure that something in the attic had snatched hold of him and had forcefully torn the skin from his head. How could Harry accidentally catch his scalp on a hook? How could he twist and spin so violently that he ended up faceless?
I knew without question that Brown Jenkin had done it; although I didn't know how. I had explained to Detective-sergeant Miller that there could be some kind of "super-rat" in the attic. But while a gingery-haired detective-constable took effortful notes, Detective-sergeant Miller had looked at me with those pale blue eyes through those polished circular spectacles; and he had seemed so strongly disinclined to believe in Brown Jenkin; or a violent attack of any sort, human or rodent ("accident, sir, no doubt about it, accident,") that in the end I decided that the wisest thing for me to do was to shut my mouth, and protect Danny and Liz from whatever threatening things the attic at Fortyfoot House might be harboring; and be thankful that the police hadn't arrested me for attacking Harry Martin.
The police did things like that, when you were least expecting it. Sometimes you wondered if you should call them or not.
"You won't be leaving the area, will you, sir?" Detective-sergeant Miller asked me.
"No, no. Not for two or three months. I came here to renovate the whole house. Plastering, wiring, tiling, decorating, you name it."
"They're coming back, then, the Tarrants?"
I shook my head. "Selling, that's the idea. They've retired to Majorca."
"Lucky for some," Detective-sergeant Miller remarked.
"You obviously haven't been to Majorca."
He stared at me without blinking for a long time. I wasn't sure whether he was trying to intimidate me; or trying to communicate by telepathy that he had been to Majorca. After all, a man who wore a pink rosebud in his lapel? He must have been everywhere. Or, rather, he should have been everywhere.
"That'll be all for now," he said. "I expect we'll have to get in touch with you again. But, you know, it looks routine enough."
"You searched the roof-space?" I asked him.
Still staring at me, he nodded. "Yes, we searched the roof-space."
"Norats? No sign of rats?"
"No, Mr? No sign of rats. Just hooks. Three bloody great iron hooks. They probably used them for hauling stuff up to the roof. You know, before they blocked that bit off."
"I'll get rid of them," I promised him. "Bit like shutting the stable door after the horse has bolted, butyou know."
"We've taken them out already," he told me. "Joneswould you make sure you bring them down from the attic?"
"Right-ho," said the gingery-haired d-c, and hurried back to the house, all arms and legs and flappy trousers.
Detective-sergeant Miller said nothing until he had gone. He looked over at the broken-down chapel, at the gravestones, at the sea, at the cedar tree that groaned from age. Eventually, he said, "I've heard stories about this place, you know. Never been inside before."
"What stories?" I wanted to know.
He shrugged, and his smile was almost silly. "Oh, nothing . . . my cousin used to say that it was haunted."
"Oh . . . haunted. Yes, I've heard that, too."
He took off his spectacles, folded them up, and tucked them into his breast pocket. "I just want to tell you, Mr? that we're not all thick."
"I beg your pardon?"
"We're not all thick," he repeated, doggedly. "We know all the stories about Fortyfoot House, peculiar noises and flashes of light and children going missing. But you can't arrest a light, or a noise, and if a child goes missing and there isn't even a footprint, then what can you do? We only get allocated twenty thousand pounds for a murder investigation. When the money runs out, we stop looking. They're not going to give us tuppence to look for ghosts."
I was amazed. One minute he had been insisting that what had happened to Harry was an accident: now he was speculating that Harry may have fallen victim to the supernatural. I had never heard a policeman talk like this before.
"You've connected the missing children with Fortyfoot House?" I asked him. "I mean, really?"
"Yes, really. Harry Martin lodged enough complaints. Two of our officers even gave up their evenings off to keep an eye on the place."
"But?"
"But nothing. The police have searched the house twice in the past three years, top to bottom. And if you look back over police records since the war, we've searched it six or seven times more. We've been in that roof-space before. There's nothing there. Well, when I say thatnothing physical. Nothing that you can tie a label on, and shove in front of a magistrate's nose, and say, 'Here's Exhibit A.' But that doesn't mean we've given up. That doesn't mean we're thick, Mr? That just means we have to prove things, before we can act."
I slowly shook my head. "You believe in the supernatural? Is that what you're trying to tell me?"
He blinked a challenging blink. "Why not?"
"You're a police officer."
"A lot of police officers are Masons, Mr? They believe in the Great Architect. A lot of police officers are fundamentalists. They believe in fire and brimstone and the Second Coming. I'm not a Mason or a fundamentalist, but I do believe in keeping an open mind."
I didn't say anything; but waited in the warm wind for him to continue.
"If I excluded the supernatural altogether," said Detective-Sergeant Miller, with considerable certainty, "then I'd be failing in my duty. Not as far as the rulebook's concerned, if you know what I mean. But a good detective does more than follow the rulebook. A good detective combines fact, logic and deduction with imagination and inspiration."
"Well," I said. "I'm impressed."
Detective-sergeant Miller blew his nose. "Don't be. Most of the police force is still made up of thugs and idiots and back-stabbers and nest-featherers and pontificating prats. But you do get your occasional professional. You do get one or two who aren't solid Spam from the neck up. Not in the hierarchy, though."
"So you can't go back to your superiors and suggest that Harry Martin was attacked by something not of this world?"
He managed a bitter, tight-lipped little laugh.
"My chief inspector doesn't even believe his own reflection in the bathroom mirror."
"But what exactly would you tell him, if you could?" I wanted to know what Detective-sergeant Miller really thought about the grisly incident in the attic. Had Harry really bee
n caught on a hook, his skin twisted off by his slowly-turning bodyweight? Or had there been something vicious in the roofspacesomething which had been cruelly angry at being disturbed?
Detective-sergeant Miller said, "I'd simply tell him that what happened to Mr Martin wasn't an accident in the accepted sense of the word and it wasn't an assault in the accepted sense of the word. That's all."
"You wouldn't put forward any theories?"
"Not at this stage." He was being cagey. "It wouldn't be useful."
"What about your colleague? Detective-constable Jones, isn't it? Are you going to tell him what you think?"
