by Prey (lit)
"You don't have to, if it scares you," I said.
"It's my pastoral duty. It's also my duty as a human being."
"But you don't really think it's the devil?"
"You can call it whatever you wish. But it's there; and it's as real as the nose on your face. Can't you smell the evil in the air? It's the very essence of evil!"
I sniffed. "I can smell a sulphury, burning sort of smell, but that's all."
"The essence of evil," Dennis Pickering nodded. "The reek of hell."
"Well, I'm sorry," I said, "but I'm still going up."
Liz gave me a tight, dismissive look; but she was most of the reason I was going. If I didn't clear Fortyfoot House of all its noises and lights, I could scarcely expect her to stay. And ever since we had talked this afternoon, before we had discovered Doris Kemble, I had begun to realize just how much I wanted her to stay. Correction: needed her to stay.
In spite of the light that was filtering down the stairs, I took the torch just in case. If the lights were suddenly capable of mending themselves, it was possible that they were just as capable of unmending themselves, and I didn't feel like being caught in that attic in total darkness, as I had before. I might not have been afraid of the dark before I came to Fortyfoot House, but I was now.
I reached the top stair and looked around. With a slow, crawling sense of disbelief, I began to realize that Dennis Pickering was absolutely right. The attic was filled with daylight. Cold, gray, autumnal light; as if it were mid-November instead of July. Not only that, but there was scarcely anything in it. No rocking-horses, no furniture, no rolled-up carpets, no blanket-draped pictures. Only a few dusty wicker hampers and hat-boxes; and an old-fashioned treadle-operated sewing-machine.
The skylight was uncoveredand, not only that, it was open, and propped up on its window-bar. So this was where the stale humid draft that flowed through the attic was coming fromalthough I had no idea how it managed to keep flowing when the skylight was closed and the roof outside was sealed off.
"Same place, different time," I said. It was frightening and disorienting, but it was fiercely exciting, tooto think that we had walked up those attic stairs and found ourselves in Fortyfoot House as it had looked in the 1880s.
"I don't think that we should go any further," warned Dennis Pickering. He was very grim-faced, and he kept a tight grip on the banister-rail.
"I'm just going to take a look out of the skylight," I told him. I could see clouds passing, and hear the sea, and the soft scurrying of dry leaves. Not only had the year changed, and the time of day changed, but the season had changed, too.
Dennis Pickering was trembling like a man with the 'flu, and although he was Church of England, he crossed himself, twice. "This is the devil's work, no question about it. If you look through that skylight, David, you'll be looking directly into hell itself."
"Pleasejust hold the torch," I asked him, and walked across the gritty bare boards of the attic floor until I was standing beneath the skylight. Up above, the sky looked normal enough. It was a windy seaside day, and I saw two or three gulls slope past, and a few coppery leaves, but I didn't see any smoke from the furnaces of hell, or bats, or witches-on-broomsticks cackling past.
"I do beg you," said Dennis Pickering.
"One look, that's all," I assured him.
He shook his head in exasperation.
Just as Harry Martin had done before he was killed, I dragged a black wooden traveling-box across the floor until it was right underneath the skylight. Then I climbed up on it, and cautiously peered out of the open window. Up here on the roof, the wind blew strongly in my eyes, and made them water. I turned my face away and saw that Dennis Pickering had come to join me. His wonder and his curiosity had overcome his fear.
"Perhaps it isn't the devil's work," he said, in awe. "It's so extraordinary . . . it could only have been done by the Lord."
"Perhaps it's the work of human beings," I suggested. "When I was walking back tonight from the village store, I looked up at this roof and it's almost exactly the same as that Sumerian ziggurat the Turks demolished. Perhaps it's the work of old Mr Billings' young protégée, Kezia Mason."
"I don't know . . ." said Dennis Pickering. "For the very first time in my life, I feel afraid. Well, perhaps not so much afraid, as unsure. I don't understand this at all. It's so unfamiliar. You know . . . as every minute passes . . . the more certain I am that it's something else. It doesn't feel like the devil, it doesn't feel like the Lord. It's something else. Something quite other."
He kept on muttering and thinking aloud while I lifted my head through the skylight again. I could see the rose-garden, where it sloped down toward the sundial. The lawns were immaculately cut, and the roses had all been cut back. In the distance, beyond the decorative screen of the trees, I could see the broken-glass glitter of the Channel.
"Just like the ziggurat, you say?" asked Dennis Pickering. Then, "What can you see? Is it just the same? Is it the garden?"
"It's the garden, yes," I replied. "But it doesn't look quite the same. It's very much neater . . . and the trees are much smaller you know the trees down by the stream. Some of them aren't much more than saplings."
"Then we're back in time, do you think?" asked Dennis Pickering.
I shaded my eyes and looked over on my left, toward the chapel. It was quite intact, its slated roof as gray and shiny as a pigeon's feathers, its stained-glass windows reflective and dark, its graveyard scythed. I could see only about a dozen graves, however, and these were freshly filled-in, and marked not with marble headstones but with plain wooden crosses.
"Yes," I said. "I think we're back in time."
"Do you think that I might see for myself?" asked Dennis Pickering, nervously. "Just a glimpse . . . it's so remarkable."
"Of course, yes," I said. But just as I was about to step down from the box, I glimpsed two dark shadows hurrying through the rose-garden, half-hidden at first by the bushes and the rose pergola. It was difficult to see who they were. They were walking so fast that they looked like figures seen from a moving train. But then they came out into the open, onto the circularly-mown lawn around the sundial, and I recognized one of them immediately. He was tall, with bushy sidewhiskers, a black tailcoat and a stovepipe hat. Young Mr Billings, looking pasty-faced and agitated, accompanied on his left by a smaller figure in a brown hooded cloak, a figure that ducked and circled and dived as it hurried along, almost as if it were performing some kind of extraordinary dance.
I was clutched by a feeling of fright so intense that I let out a short jet of pee. This wasn't a photograph, this was a real afternoon, even if it was over a hundred years ago. And there was young Mr Billings, alive, and very agitated; and there was the small hairy scurrying thing that must have been Brown Jenkin.
From up here, on the roof, it was difficult to make out what young Mr Billings was doing or saying. He kept gesticulating with his right arm, a regular chopping movement, as if he were a butcher chopping up ox-tails, or an old-fashioned semaphore signal. He seemed to be very angry; but the small brown-hooded figure seemed to be equally disinclined to listen. It kept ducking and diving, and circling around, and running ahead, making it impossible for young Mr Billings to catch up with it, except with an awkward hop-skip-jump.
All that I could hear above the fluffing of the wind and the monotonous crying of the seagulls were the bellowed words "don't care what she wantswe agreedyou can take only as many as you"
"Please," Dennis Pickering appealed.
But I stayed where I was, standing on tiptoe and cocking my head to one side so that I could hear what young Mr Billings and the brown-cloaked figure were saying to each other. Young Mr Billings was barking as sharply as a dog, but the brown-cloaked figure continued to dip and dance, as if it didn't care at all, and sometimes it chittered and let out a sound like a high, staccato laugh. It was like a dream, or a nightmare, watching this tall black-suited man shouting so furiously at something that looked more like an
animal than a mana huge, hunchbacked, overgrown rodent.
"We agreed, plain and simple!" the man shouted hoarsely.
But at that instant, a woman appeared directly below me. She must have come out of the kitchen door, or around the side of the house. I couldn't see her face, because she had her back to me, but I recognized the crinkled Titian hair. It was the same woman whose likeness had been painted onto the chapel wall, with the rat-thing draped around her shoulders. She was wearing a thin white dress which flapped and furled in the wind, and in spite of the cold she was barefoot.
She was leading by the hand a girl of about ten or eleven, also wearing a thin white dress; but the girl had a garland of holly and bay-leaves in her hair.
There was some shouting between them. The rat-thing tittered and spun around. Again and again, the man insisted, "We agreed, pure and simple!" but the white-dressed woman plainly wasn't taking any notice.
The man in the black stovepipe hat made a clumsy attempt to snatch the girl's hand, as if he were trying to tug her away from the white-dressed woman, but the rat-thing jumped at him, and snarled, and bared rows of thin curved yellow teethnot just one row, but several, and a thin purplish tongue that flickered and lashed. The man immediately stepped back, and defensively raised his left forearm, as if he preferred to lose his hand than half of his face.
Immediately, the woman turned, and began to walk back toward the house. The man in the black stovepipe hat hesitated, then attempted to follow. On the wind, I heard the girl shrilly screaming.
"What's happening? What's happening?" Dennis Pickering demanded, in a huge state of agitation.
"It looks as if young Mr Billings and Brown Jenkin have been arguing," I told him, stepping down from the box. Dennis pickering hastily took my place and stared out at the garden.
"Yes, you're right! My God, that's young Mr Billings! And that's Brown Jenkin, no question about it! And the woman! That must be Kezia Mason!"
"But what are they doing?" I urged him.
He held out his hand and I helped him down from the box. "Kezia Mason is taking the girl . . . God knows why. But if this is eighteen eighty-six, when all the children at Fortyfoot House died or disappeared . . . then you can rest assured that something extremely unpleasant is about to take place."
"Can't we rescue her?" I suggested.
Dennis Pickering glanced back at the skylight, and swallowed uncertainly. "I suppose we could try. ButreallyI'd steer clear of Brown Jenkin if I were you."
Quickly, I crossed the attic back to the stairs. Liz was still waiting for us on the landing; and down on the landing it was still dark. It was obvious that we couldn't reach the gardens of Fortyfoot House, 1886, by going down that way.
"I suppose we could climb out of the skylight," Dennis Pickering suggested, with a distinct lack of enthusiasm.
"That wouldn't do us any good," I told him. "There's no way down from this part of the roof. It's a sheer drop all the way to the patio."
"Ah, but look . . ." he said, touching my arm. "Isn't that a trapdoor there, in the floor?"
I turned, and he was right. It was almost completely covered by a dusty red-and-green Indian durry, but I could see one hinge and the corner of an ill-fitting frame. I kicked back the durry, and there it was: a trapdoor large enough for a man to climb through. It looked as if it had been cut into the floor some time after the attic had originally been built. The workmanship was amateurish compared with the immaculately-fitting joists and rafters; and the nails and the hinges were already rusted.
Unusually, the bolts which fastened it (and which were now drawn back) were fitted to this side of it, the attic side . . . which meant that when it was locked, it was locked to prevent anyone from below coming up.
Anyone, or anything.
I knelt down and pressed my ear to the trapdoor. Faintly, I could hear the girl screaming in one of the downstairs rooms.
"Are you ready for this?" I asked Dennis Pickering. My heart was chasing itself like a rabbit running at full pelt. "We could be interfering with something that we're not meant to interfere withyou know that, don't you?"
Dennis Pickering swallowed, his Adam's-apple rising and falling. "When the innocent cry for help, we must answer," he said. "And I think that applies to the innocent of eighteen-eighty-six, as well as the innocent of nineteen-ninety-two."
I said, "Amen," and opened the trapdoor, letting it hinge back onto the attic floor.
Peering downwards into the wintry daylight, I suddenly realized that this trapdoor had been cut into the ceiling of my own bedroom . . .except that this was my bedroom without the sloping blocked-off ceiling. This was my bedroom before nearly a third of it had been blindly partitioned, and it was very much larger and airier, with a second window facing out over the strawberry beds. A wheelback chair stood just below the trapdoor, and I swung my legs down and managed to drop down on to it, and then on to the bare-boarded floor. I softly called Dennis Pickering to follow me.
I was fascinated how different my bedroom looked without the sloping ceiling, and how much of it had been walled up. Under the second window stood a plain iron bed, painted dark olive-green, but badly chipped, covered with a lumpy horsehair mattress and a yellowish sheet, but no other bedclothes. A deep-sided tray of discolored copper lay under the bed, as well as a rolled-up apron that was blotched with rusty stains and tied tightly with its own thin strings.
But it was Dennis Pickering who said in a frigid voice, "Look," and pointed up to the crucifix hanging on the wall over the end of the bed. It was a large, Gothic crucifix, elaborately carved out of dark-varnished wood, with a Christ-figure fashioned from ivory and tarnished silver. Christ's eyes stared into oblivion; the eyes of self-sacrifice; the eyes of pain. But what was so chilling about the crucifix was that it was hanging upside-down, suspended from a twisted rope of fraying hemp and shriveled maroon flowers.
"What does that mean?" I asked.
"I don't know. Satanists, possibly. Or followers of the Anti-Christ. I've never seen flowers like that before. It could be some cult that we've never heard of. There were many fringe groups of black magic and devil-worshippers in the late nineteenth century."
"Listen!" I said, touching his arm.
Again, we heard the young girl crying out. It sounded as if they had taken her to the room which was now the sitting-room. Her cries were less hysterical, but more miserable, as if she had accepted what was going to happen to her, but was desperately unhappy about it.
"May God give us the strength we need," breathed Dennis Pickering, and led the way down the stairs.
The house appeared very much the same in 1886 as it was in 1992, except that there was dark oak wainscoting all the way down the stairs and around the hallway, and that the walls above the dado had been papered with yellowish-green flowers and trellises which reminded me of drawings by Aubrey Beardsleydelicate, decayed, greenery-yallery, with colors that spoke of corruption rather than decoration. There was a pervasive smell of damp plaster and boiling fish and lavender-wax.
In the hallway, there were many more photographs and drawingsbut not, of course, the photograph of ''Fortyfoot House, 1888." As Dennis Pickering and I made our way cautiously to the open sitting-room door, I passed a minutely-detailed Gothic etching of The Arrival of the First Course at James I's Coronation Dinner; and then strange steel engravings of mysterious gardens crowded with extraordinary follies and gazebos and animals the size of deer with insects' legs and armored carapaces. There were veterinary diagrams of mutant animals and medical illustrations of pregnant women breathing chloroform from octagonal glass jars and other startlingly explicit drawings of women being internally inspected with lights and the "double duck-billed speculum."
I didn't have time to look at all of the pictures, but I couldn't have imagined a collection less suitable for a children's orphanage. All of them were bizarre or frightening or blatantly gynecological. There was even a gruesome engraving of a "Soldier's Wife, Having Followed Her Husband Into Battl
e, Being Split In Half By A Cannonball, And Giving Instantaneous Birth To A Live Infant."
Dennis Pickering raised his handsignaling me to stop, and stay silent. We were only three or four feet away from the sitting-room door, and now we could distinctly hear the breathy, high-pitched whimpering of the little girl, and the garbled tittering of Brown Jenkin, and the dull, persistent voice of young Mr Billings. The gray autumn light fell across the red-and-brown patterned carpet, already shiny with the scuffing of a thousand leather-soled boots. Somewhere behind usin the kitchen, perhaps, I heard clattering noises, and someone singing Two Little Girls In Blue.
"What do you think we ought to do?" Dennis Pickering hissed at me. I could smell the stale tannin of too many cups of tea on his breath. So much for Liz's idea that vicars usually drank alcohol.
"I don't know," I said. "What can we do?" And then I thought of Liz saying "You can't make your mind up about anything, can you? GostaystaygoDavid for God's sake make up your mind about something, even if it's wrong."
