by Prey (lit)
I looked up at the unusual angles of the ceiling that had been created by the blocking-off of that part of my room. The angles weren't at all symmetrical. The walls seemed to slope more acutely on the north side than they did on the south, and the west wallthe blocked-off walljoined both of them at such an irritating and pronounced diagonal that I found it hard to believe that it hadn't been plastered like that on purpose. These walls were so far out of true that they couldn't have been constructed accidentally. Somebody had built them this way for a reason: and perhaps it was the same reason that the entire roof-structure of Fortyfoot House had been built in such an awkward, perspective-defying manner. Houses were sometimes designed badly, but not that badly.
I was still staring at the angles of the ceiling when I became aware that the way they sloped together was more than accidental. It's a very difficult sensation to describe, but I felt as if I were not only looking at them but beyond themas if I could see my side of the ceiling and the other side of the ceiling, both at once. I smeared my eyes with my fingers, but when I opened them again, the impression was even clearer. I had the distinct feeling that I was looking through the ceiling into the blocked-off partition.
At that moment a blurred shape began to appearbent over to one side, flickering slightly, like the reflection from a black-and-white television seen through somebody else's curtains. The shape was right in the south-west corner of the room, in the angle where the ceiling slanted together; and it was slightly nearer the ceiling than the floor. It hovered in the same place for minute after minute, while I lay in bed tensed and terrified, wondering what the hell it was going to do next.
Gradually, the shape became clearer; although I still couldn't make out what it was. A reflection? A will-o'-the-wisp? I'd heard about gases in old houses, emanating from broken ventilation pipes. In Victorian times, householders had regularly sickened and died from the effects of leaking sewage and coal-gas.
For one split-second, I thought I saw what the shape actually was. It looked like a bending woman in a white winged cap. I thought I saw her turn her head. I thought I saw eyes. Then I screamed out loud and the shape was sucked into the angle of the wall as if it had been vacuum-cleaned and I was left jumping and shouting and sweating with Liz clinging on to me and saying, "What? What? David, what is it?"
I wrestled my way out of bed and dragged back the curtains. Thenin the last of the moonlightI clapped my hands against the ceiling, where the shape had first appeared. I felt nothing but solid, damp wall.
"David, what's the matter?" Liz persisted.
"I saw something. Something came out of the ceiling.
It was like alight, like a ghost. I don't know. A nun, or a nurse."
"David, you were probably dreaming."
I slapped the wall in fury and frustration. "I-wasn't-dreaming-I-was-awake!"
"Well, all right, then," Liz soothed me. "You were awake, okay, but it's gone now, hasn't it? So come back to bed and calm down."
I stormed from one side of the bedroom to the other, slapping at the wall where the apparition had appeared every time I passed it.
"I can't calm down! I was awake and I saw it!"
"David, you've had a terrible time ever since you've been here . . . listen, you're probably hallucinating, that's all."
"I didn't hallucinate anything! I saw a nun, halfway up the bloody wall!"
Liz waited patiently, her head bowed, until I had finished ranting and raving. I didn't really mean to shout at her. I was shouting at myself, at Janie, at Raymond the Bearded Fart, at Harry Martin and Brown Jenkin and everything that had brought me here. I think she knew that, God bless her. In her own way, she was using me, too. Her lovemaking gave her away. It was intensely physically intimate. She would have allowed me to do anything to her; and she would have done anything for me, in return. But she was emotionally remote. Whoever she was making love to, it certainly wasn't me. More than likely, I was just a stand-in for somebody who had really hurt her. It's not particularly inspiring, being a sexual understudy, but sometimes you take what you can get.
Eventually, chilled, I climbed back into bed. Liz immediately lay close to me and put her arm around me.
"You're shivering," she said.
I couldn't take my eyes off the angles of the ceiling. They still filled me with dread. "I saw a woman, bending over. I swear it. A nurse, or a nun. She was right there, look, right where I'm pointing."
"David, it couldn't have been."
"I'm going to look up that article in the National Geographic," I told her, emphatically. "I'm going to talk to Doris Kemble, too, down at the cafe."
"You'd be better off talking to your bank manager, and borrowing enough money for a new car."
I rested my head back on the pillow. I didn't know why, but my eyes filled with tears, and the tears ran down the side of my head. I kept thinking of that old country-and-western song I've Got Tears In My Ears From Lying On My Back And Cryin' Over You. Liz nuzzled my shoulder and kissed my cheek and tangled her fingers in my hair. But I was too tired and too worried and sex wasn't the answer. Eventually she sat up and leaned over me, blocking out the last of the moonlight, and gave me a light, dismissive kiss on the forehead.
"You're a hopeless case," she told me.
"No, I'm not, really," I said, smearing my eyes with my fingers. "I'm just flat broke and fed up and scared and worried about my son. Apart from that, I'm terrific."
She laughed, and kissed me, and I held her in my arms until the moon fell. It was very dark then, intensely dark. I tried to sleep, but I couldn't take my eyes away from those angles in the ceiling, even though I couldn't see them.
Liz slept. But things were shifting in Fortyfoot House, things were moving at an accelerated pace. Bare feet were scampering near-to-silently across the rafters; furry things were running blind and quick through the wallspaces. Young Mr Billings was coming nearer, I was sure of it, accompanied by whatwhat? And when I woke, and it was sunlight, bald and bright, I thought that I had been wakened by the last echoes of a child's high scream.
Liz opened her eyes and looked at me. The morning was warm, and the fringes of the lampshade rippled in the breeze like the legs of some strange ceiling-suspended centipede.
She kissed my shoulder, then my lips.
"Do you know something?" she said. "You look like shit."
9 - Persecuted Priest
That morning, Liz ate two Weetabix and gulp-swallowed a large mug of coffee with two sugars in, and went off to work at the Tropical Bird Park. I promised that we would come on the bus to pick her up at five o'clock, and on the doorstep she gave me the chastest of kisses, which Danny regarded from the shadow of the hallway with a mixture of seriousness and suppressed pleasure. I think that he was beginning to come to terms with the fact that his mother and I wouldn't be getting back together. In factin spite of himselfI think he was gradually forgetting what she looked like, and what she felt like; and he liked Liz a lot.
My God, I thought, as Liz trudged up the driveway. Forgive us our trespasses, and forgive us for being so bloody pig-headed and selfish.
"I think we'll start scraping the paint off the windows today," I told Danny. "We can start with the kitchen, and work our way round."
"Can't I go looking for some more crabs?"
"I thought you were going to help me work."
Danny looked uncomfortable. "Yes . . . but I'm not very good at scraping."
"All right," I said. "But stay close to the Beach Café. Don't go wandering off. And don't go into the sea. You can paddle, but that's all."
He nodded, not even looking at me. Perhaps he wasn't listening. Or, if he was listening, perhaps he didn't fully understand what I was saying. When you're an adult, you assume so much. You assume that you can manage. You assume that you're attractive. You assume that your children understand you when you speak. For all I knew, Danny had heard nothing but "Beach Caféone drink offdon't seepaddle, but that's all."
I watched him run pell-m
ell down the diagonal lawns, past the fishpond, and out through the back gate. I glimpsed the sun shining from his fresh-washed hair as he ran down the path beside the cottages, with all their geraniums. You don't often get the chance to love somebody as much as you love your own son; but I did; and I was thankful.
All morning I thickly brushed the flaking window-frames with acid, jellyish paint-stripper and painstakingly chiseled off limp, crumbling ribbons of ancient paint. There were at least four or five layers underneath the black paint, and I stripped them all, green and cream and peculiar pink, right the way down to the bare gray metal. There was something very therapeutic about doing such a mundane chore, and doing it well. Brush on the stripper, wait for the paint to shrivel, then scrape. By eleven o'clock I had finished most of the main window-frame, and I was ready for a beer and a sandwich.
I walked down to the beach to find Danny. He must have understood what I had told him, because he was crouching over a rock-pool only yards away from the Beach Café, prodding two crabs with a stick. I decided that I would have to give him a lecture about cruelty to crustaceans. I stepped into the café's flint-walled garden, and sat down where I could see him, and it wasn't long before Doris Kemble came out, in her apron and her spectacles.
"What would you like?"
"A pint of lager and one of your prawn sandwiches, please. Ohand a toasted cheese sandwich for Sinbad the Sailor, please. And a Coca-Cola."
She wrote down my order on a small Woolworth's pad. Without raising her eyes, she said, ''You've been having some trouble, then, up at the house?"
"Yes," I said. "You must have heard about Harry Martin."
"I heard what Keith Belcher did to your car, too."
I made a face. "I tried to stop Harry from searching the attic, but he wouldn't hear of it. He said that Brown Jenkin had taken his brother; and that gave him the right."
Doris Kemble visibly shuddered; and sat down opposite me, as if she had suddenly lost the ability to stand.
"You haven't seen Brown Jenkin?"
"I don't know, I think I may have done," I told her, cautiously. "I've seen some kind of a rat, for certain."
"Biga very big ratwith a human face, and human hands?"
"Doris," I said, taking hold of her hand. "There is no rat in the world that looks like that."
"Brown Jenkin isn't a rat. Not what you'd call a rat."
"What would you call him, then?" I asked. Then I turned my head away from her, and shouted, "Danny! Don't be too long! Lunchtime!"
Danny stood up, a small skinny figure silhouetted by the glittering sunlight that sparkled from the sand, and the rockpools, and the waves, and the sky.
"If I was you," said Doris Kemble, with the same sunlight shining on the specks of dust on the lenses of her spectacles, "if I was youI'd take that boy, that's what I'd do, and I'd leave that house, and I'd let those that know how to deal with ghosts and whatnot take charge of it, you know, priests and such; and burn that house down and bless what's left of it. Because it's no good, that's what; and I agree with Vera Martin for smashing up your car, I'm sorry to say, because you shouldn't have let Harry go looking for Brown Jenkin, never."
It took a supreme effort for me not to lose my temper; and to tell her what a silly old busybody she was; but I knew that she would be much more helpful if I was tolerant, and contrite.
"I suppose you're right," I said, watching Danny climb up the rocks to the promenade. "I shouldn't have allowed Harry into the house."
"He always said that Brown Jenkin took his brother," said Doris, shaking her head. "He said it so often that Vera forbid him, in the end. 'You say that just once more,' that's what she said, 'and I'm walking out of that door and never coming back.'"
"Doris," I insisted, "it wasn't my fault. Wild horses couldn't have stopped him."
"Well . . ." she said, "it's too late now, isn't it? Poor Harry's dead and gone, and that's an end to it. All the carping in the world won't bring him back."
I waited for a while; and then I said, "If everybody in Bonchurch has always been so worried about Brown Jenkin . . . why didn't they do something about it before?"
Doris Kemble smiled bitterly. "You can't do much to catch a creature that isn't always there."
"I don't understand."
"Well, let me put it this way. Could you go to the station this lunchtime, and catch yesterday's train?"
"Of course not."
"Could you go to the station this lunchtime, and catch tomorrow's train?"
"No."
"That's why you can't catch Brown Jenkin. He was and he will be, but he very seldom is."
"Doris . . ." I asked her. "Can you tell me something about young Mr Billings?"
"What?" she asked, aggressively, lifting her withered neck.
"You said that your mother knew a lot about the Billings."
"Well, of course. I told she used to clean up at Fortyfoot House, and what she didn't know about the Billings wasn't worth knowing."
"Did she ever mention Brown Jenkin?"
"Not often, she didn't like to. Everybody in Bonchurch knows about Brown Jenkin. Some say it's true, some say it's rubbish. There's a saying around here when a fellow's had too much drink'he's seen Brown Jenkin.' You know, instead of pink elephants."
"And what do you think?"
Doris took off her spectacles. Her eyes looked tired and filmed-over, and her cheeks were wrinkled like fine tissue-paper. "I never saw Brown Jenkin myself; but some of my friends said they did, when I was young. Then there was Helen Oakes, who was my best friend then. She disappeared one day and nobody knew where she went. They blamed her father, and arrested him twice, but nobody could prove nothing, so in the end they had to let him go. It ruined him, though. He had to sell up his shop and leave, and I heard that he hanged himself, just after the war."
"But what about young Mr Billings?" I asked her.
She paused, and thought, but then she shook her head. "It's no good telling stories about the long-dead, is it? Specially second- or third-hand stories. No good at all."
"I think it might be," I told her. "I think that what's been happening up at Fortyfoot Housewell, if we could understand what happened in the pastperhaps we'd be able to understand what's happening today."
Doris Kemble replaced her spectacles and looked at me intently. "My mother said that young Mr Billings knew all manner of things that he oughtn't to know. That's all. He'd been off traveling to places where human beings weren't ever meant to travel; and he'd seen things that human beings weren't ever meant to see. He'd struck a bargain of sorts; but that bargain had to be paid in the lives of innocent children. That's why I wouldn't go to play near Fortyfoot House, when I was a girl, and that's why I won't walk past it now."
"Did your mother say what this bargain was, and who he might have struck it with? Did she give you any kind of clue?"
Doris Kemble said, "I'd better get your sandwiches. Your lad's here now."
I grasped her wrist. "Please, Dorisyes or no. Did your mother tell you what this bargain was?"
Doris Kemble patiently waited for me to release her. "It was all guesses, wasn't it? All a bit of a mystery. Some said it was the devil but others said it was something worse. Nobody knew for sure."
I let her go. "I'm sorry," I said.
"There's no need to be," she replied. "That house is enough to turn anybody sour."
Danny came up to the table and sat down. "I caught six crabs but I let them go and I didn't even pull their legs off."
I scuffled his hair. "You were feeling generous. How about some toasted cheese?"
We ate our lunch together overlooking the beachnot saying much, but enjoying the wind and the sound of the sea. Only Doris Kemble spoiled it for me, because she kept looking at me sharply as if she had something more to tell me. Twice I caught her staring at me from her cashdesk, biting her lip.
When we got up and paid, I said, "You will let me know, won't you, if you remember anything else?"
She nodde
d. She rang up the price of our lunch on the cash-register. Then, while she gave me the change, she said, in a shaky voice, "Young Mr Billings was supposed to be married, that's what my mother said. He was betrothed to a very young girl that his father had brought down from London, an orphan, with the family name of Mason; a strange wild girl by all accounts."
I waited, with the change still spread across the palm of my hand. "Yes?" I asked her.
"The thing was . . . young Mr Billings had a son. But the son wasn't right. The son wasn't right at all. Nobody ever saw him; most people thought that he was dead, although they never saw him buried. But some people went about whispering that young Mr Billings' son was hairy and strange; and some people said that he was just like a rat. Some people said that the fellow with the brown growths all over his face, that was his son, but nobody knew anything for certain."
