by Prey (lit)
"How many children are left?" I asked them.
"Thirty-one now, all counted, except for Charity; and nobody knows where she went."
I knew where Charity had gone, of course; but I didn't tell them. I hadn't come here to rescue all of these East End tykes from Mr Billings' orphanage. I simply didn't have the time or (God forgive me) the selfless devotion to do it. What had started out as an attempt to discover what was happening in Fortyfoot House had now begun to take on all the characteristics of the Inn of the Sixth Happiness.
The next thing I knew, I'd be marching through 1886 with a gang of abandoned children behind me, singing This Old Man, He Played One, He Played Knick-knack On My Drum.
Right at this moment, all I was interested in doing was heaving Dennis Pickering's body out from under the floorboards, and getting rid of it.
"Listen," I whispered to the three children, "I have something important to do downstairs. When I've finished, I'll come back and talk to you. Where are you sleeping?"
The first little girl pointed to the next bedroom along the corridorthe bedroom which now contained nothing but broken chairs and books and boxes.
"All right . . ." I whispered. "I won't be longer than twenty minutes. Try not to fall asleep."
"We won't." They turned back into the darkness. Butas the first little girl was about to tiptoe back through her doorshe turned to me, and beckoned, and then pressed her finger to her lips.
"Come and see," she said.
She took hold of my hand with fingers that were thin and cold as ice. She led me across the corridor to Liz's bedroomor, at least, the bedroom that Liz had originally been meant to use, before she started sleeping with me. Very carefully, the little girl turned the doorhandle and started to ease open the door.
"Whose room is this?" I asked her.
"Ssh," she said.
As she opened the door wider, I felt a chilly, crawling sensation down my back. One side of the room was dominated by a high wooden bed, heaped with three or four plain wool blankets. On the left, furthest away from the window, Mr Billings was lying on his back, his eyes closed, his mouth open, his arms by his sides. He was snoring thickly; with a slight catch in every breath. Next to him lay Kezia Mason, her Titian hair spread out across the pillow like waves of fire. To my alarm, I saw that her eyes were wide open, and that she was staring at the ceiling.
The little girl felt my fingers tighten. "It's all right," she whispered. "She's not awake. She always sleeps with her eyes open."
"Jesus," I said. It was a horrifying sight, watching Kezia Mason lying so still, scarcely breathing, her eyes open. It was almost impossible to believe that she was actually asleep, and that she couldn't see us.
The little girl closed the door quietly and tightly.
"Where's Brown Jenkin?" I asked her.
"I don't know. He's probably outside somewhere."
"Out?"
"He never sleeps. I've never seen him sleep, anyway. He's always rushing here and there. I hate him."
"Who is he, exactly? Somebody told me he was their sonMr Billings and Kezia Mason. But even if something went wrong with him when he was bornwell, he wouldn't look like that, would he? He's more like a rat than a boy."
"Yes. But he's more like a boy than a rat."
The little girl went back to her bedroom and opened the door. "By the bye," she said, "my name's Molly."
I suddenly thought of one of the gravestones that I had seen in the grounds of the chapel. A simple stone cross, with the plain inscription "Molly Bennett, aged 11 years, At Christ's Right Hand." I couldn't bear to ask her if her surname was Bennett. The thought that this peaky-faced little girl would soon be taken away by Brown Jenkin on one of his sinister "picnics" was totally horrifying. I reached out and touched her tangled hair. She was quite real, even though she and I were over a hundred years apart. If I had learned only one thing in the past few days, it was that the reality of human existence is unaffected by time. Once we are here, we are always here. It was a strange thought; a little sad; but comforting, too.
"I'll see you in a few minutes," I told Molly. Then, quietly, I made my way downstairs to the hallway. The same strange watercolors and etchings hung on the wall. I could dimly see them by the light that filtered through the fanlight above the front door. Now, however, they seemed even more obscene and mysterious; a pictorial catalog of gynecological horrors. I saw distraught faces and terrible surgical instruments and living children cut into segments in a desperate effort to save their dying mothers. I passed the pictures as quickly as I could.
The living-room door was open. The room itself was lampless, and there was nobody there, but I could tell by the way the furniture was still scattered that I had arrived back here only hours after my last visit. The hearth had been swept, the carpet had been rolled back, but that was the only evidence that anybody had been tidying up.
I stepped into the middle of the room, where Dennis Pickering had been killed. The floorboards were damp and smelled of strong kitchen-soap, as if somebody had been mopping them. But soap and water hadn't been enough to take out the wide black bloodstainand I knew from my own experience that it never would. The bloodstain was exactly the same shape as the last time I had seen itabout half an hour ago, in 106 years' time.
I knelt down, and wedged my crowbar in between the floorboards. They were tighter and more polished than they had been in 1992. Carefully, I eased them uppausing every now and then, since the nails made a loud squealing sound as I levered them out of the joists, like a tortured piglet.
Dennis Pickering had been killed only this afternoon, but already the smell of his body was almost unbearable. Sweet, thick and cloying, like breathing in condensed-milk and bad fish. I couldn't think why young Mr Billings and Kezia Mason hadn't buried him outside, somewhere in the groundsbut perhaps they had the same difficulties as I didperhaps they were being watched by police, ormore likelyby inquisitive neighbors. Bonchurch was a tight-knit, gossipy community in 1992: it must have been even nosier in 1886, when it had less than half its present-day population.
I lifted first one floorboard, then another. Poor Dennis lay soft and huddled in exactly the same position in which I had found him before. My throat filled with bile and half-digested lunch, but I knew that I had to get him out of therefor my own sake, for Danny's sake, and perhaps for the sake of his own immortal soul. Nobody deserved to be buried without any kind of requiem, under the floorboards.
Only one thing seriously bothered meand that was whether I was interfering with time. It seemed like a hideous paradox that Dennis Pickering should be lying here dead when he hadn't even been conceived yet. Yet if time was more like a story or a filmor like the Bayeux Tapestry, which unravels itself in sequence but which still exists even after you've passed it byperhaps there was no real paradox at all. Except which Dennis Pickering was the real Dennis Pickering? The Dennis Pickering who would one day be bornor the Dennis Pickering who was lying here dead?
I began to hyperventilateout of fear, out of confusion. After a minute or two I had to close my eyes and clench my fists and tell myself: stop, that's enough, just deal with it step by step.
At last I managed to summon the strength to reach down into the floorboards, and inch my fingers underneath the flabby bulk of Dennis Pickering's shoulders. Panting, I heaved his shoulders and his left arm out of the floor-cavity, so that he was half-sitting. His hand flopped noisily onto the boards. His empty eye cavities were crammed with blackberries of dried blood, and blood had dried on his cheeks in branched rivulets. Perhaps the blood that had dripped out of Brown Jenkin's jaws in the mural on the chapel wall had been a foretellingand a warning not to interfere.
I stood up now, and grasped Dennis Pickering under the arms, and laboriously pulled him out of his makeshift grave and onto the floorboards. Fortunately for me, Brown Jenkin had crammed most of Dennis Pickering's intestines back into his abdomen, and buttoned his bloodsoaked shirt; but all the same I could feel the terrible sloppy hea
viness of his open belly, and I had to stop for a moment, and swallow, and swallow again, and try to think of something else.
I dragged him across to the French windows. Then I went back and replaced the floorboards. I quietly closed the living-room door before I knocked the nails back in. I used a coal-hammer that I found in the hearth, muffled with one of the cushions from the sofa. It sounded to me like Satan knocking on the gates of Hell, but I don't suppose it was really all that loud.
Opening the French windows, I half-carried and half-dragged Dennis Pickering's body out of the house and across the patio. His heels bumped loosely on the brick steps. Then I pulled him across the lawns, past the pond, across the bridge, and into the trees that led down to the back garden gate.
My intention was to take him down to the beach, and drag him as far out to sea as I could; so that by morning the crabs would have got him. Anyone who found what was left of him would think that he was nobody more exceptional than a drowned fishermannot that it mattered, not in 1886. Nobody had even heard of Dennis Pickering, in 1886.
I took him down to the beach. The sea-wall was different, much lower, and there was a flight of wooden steps which led down to the rocks. I remembered the iron bolts with which these steps were fastened to the stone-block wallrusted and broken, with no steps to support. In 1992 I had wondered what they were; but now I knew.
I heaved Dennis Pickering down to the beach. The tide was out, and I had to pull him over two hundred yards along a narrow sandy channel between the rocks. The stars twinkled overhead in their millions: I could see stars all the way down to the waterline. Dennis made a soft, wet sugary sound as I dragged him closer and closer to the edge of the sea.
At last I reached the waves. They splashed cold and salty against my trouser-legs and filled my shoes. Dennis Pickering's body began to float and swirl around; but I pulled him further and further out until I was up to my waist, and he was bobbing and floating right next to me. I gave him one last push and he dipped and floated away. I could just make out the white smudge of his dog-collar in the darkness.
I didn't know any prayers, but I made one up. Under that Victorian sky, in a world in which Britain still ruled Indiaa world in which the Tsars were still on the throne in Moscow, and President Cleveland was still asleep in WashingtonI sent a man from another time on his last journey, to meet his God.
Then, chilled, I waded back to shore.
There was no Beach Café in 1886but the row of cottages were already standing, neat and whitewashed, their gardens cut back for the winter, but just as meticulously swept and tidy as they would be in 1992. I climbed the steep path that led up to the back gate of Fortyfoot House. It had no tarmac on itand my wet shoes crunched on stones and loose gravel. I heard a dog barking in the distance, and saw lights twinkling, and the unreality of what I was doing almost overwhelmed me.
As I approached the back gate, I became aware of a shadowy figure standing close to the hedge, its head concealed by the overhanging ivy. I stopped, and peered at it through the darkness, in case it was Brown Jenkin. If it was Brown Jenkin, then I had no alternative but to run, and try to get back to Fortyfoot House some other way.
But the figure seemed taller and heavier than Brown Jenkin, and it said nothing at all, but waited in the shadow of the ivy. It was dressed in a long soft cloak, and its hands were clasped together in a gesture of extreme patience.
''Who's that?" I said, at last.
The figure stepped forward. Its face was hidden by a soft monkish cowl. I edged awaymy muscles tensed, fully prepared to run if I had to. But then the cowl was slipped back, and I was confronted by young Mr Billingshandsome, haunted, his cheeks faintly pockmarked. He smelled of gin; and of some flowery toilet-water that I couldn't identify. He cleared his throat.
"Don't you recognize me?" he asked, quietly.
"Of course I do," I told him.
"I've been watching you," he said. "I saw what you were doing, down on the beach. You took a grave risk, sir, coming here. You took an even graver risk, coming back."
"You and Kezia Mason, you murdered him," I said, my voice unsteady. "He deserved something better than being buried under the floorboards."
"Oh . . . like being eaten by crabs, you mean?"
"Crabs, worms, what's the difference. I said a prayer for him, at least."
"Well, good for you," said young Mr Billings, pacing slowly around me, eyeing me up and down. "Of course, your act of homage had nothing to do with your not wanting the police to find the Reverend Pickering's body in a house where you were the only conceivable suspect?"
"Perhaps."
Young Mr Billings paused, and stared at me. "I may have sold my soul, sir, but I'm not a fool."
"I didn't say that you were."
He thought for a while, still staring at me. Then he said, "What should I do with you, do you think?"
"My son's waiting for me," I said.
"Of course. And Charity, too."
"Brown Jenkin was going to kill her."
"You don't have to tell me what Brown Jenkin was going to do."
"Is that why you were arguing with him, out in the garden?"
He lowered his eyes. "They've taken so many already. You probably don't believe me, but it breaks my heart."
This sudden admission of remorse took me completely by surprise. Up until now I had assumed that even if young Mr Billings and Brown Jenkin weren't actually related to each otherfather and freakish sonthen at the very least they were working in close collusion.
"What have you been taking the children for?" I asked him. "Not just to murder them, surely?"
"Of course not!" said young Mr Billings. "But it's not at all easy to explain. It involves things that most people find very hard to understand . . . like time, and reality. Morals, too. And whether one human life is worth more than another."
I glanced uneasily towards the dark bulk of Fortyfoot House. "There's no chance of Brown Jenkin finding us here?"
"Why? Does Brown Jenkin alarm you so much?"
"To say that he scares the shit out of me would an understatement."
"Well," smiled young Mr Billings, "perhaps he will find us here. On the other hand, perhaps he won't, and perhaps I'll have to whistle for him."
"What is he?" I asked.
"Brown Jenkin? Brown Jenkin is everything that he appears to be. A vicious little scuttler; a vermin-ridden rodent; a horrible boy. What you make of him is what he is."
"Where did he come from? Somebody told me that he was your son."
"My son? Brown Jenkin? I'd take offense if that wasn't so laughable. No, sir, not my son. But Kezia's offspring, somehow, after she went back to see thatthat creature Mazurewicz." He spat after he had spoken the name Mazurewicz, and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand.
"What the hell's going on here at Fortyfoot House?" I asked him. "Ever since I've arrived here, I've heard nothing but noises and lights and groaning voices, and Brown Jenkin running around; and two innocent people have been killed."
Young Mr Billings thought for a moment, opened his mouth, closed it, then he said, "Noyou wouldn't understand."
"Try me."
He started to pace around again. "Try you? Very well, I'll try you." He stopped abruptly, and took out a pocket watch, and held it up very close to his left eye so that he could read the time in the semi-darkness. For a moment, the watch caught the light, and I glimpsed an engraving of something that looked like a squid, with dangling tentacles. "It's late, it's late. In case we're interrupted, let me first of all give you a warning."
"A warning? What about?"
"Your Liz, that's what. That girl of yours . . . that girl who used to be yours."
"Go on, then," I challenged him. "What about her?"
"Unless you're careful, my dear sir, your Liz will give you three sons. A son of blood, a son of seed, and a son of spit."
"What?" I said, incredulously. "What are you talking about? We're not thinking of having any children. Besides, she's
on the pill. You know what the pill is?"
Young Mr Billings nodded. "I know a great deal about your time."
I frowned at him. "At least, I hope she's on the pill. I've seen her take it."
"It wouldn't make any difference," said young Mr Billings. "No pill on earth can stop the conception of those three sons, my friend. Because those three sons will be the three-in-one, the inverse three-in-one, the Unholy Trinity; and when they are grown, they will father together the Great Beast, and the door to the World That Was will at last be opened, and then all the notions that men have ever had of hell will come to behere, on earth. In our own cities, in our own seas."
He was clutching at the railing that ran alongside the footpath, under that forest of stars, and I began to think that he was completely mad. But he spoke steadily, quietly, with no trace of hysteria in his voice, and I had seen enough madness already at Fortyfoot House to believe that what he was saying might have some truth in it. If I could speak to children who were a hundred years dead . . . if I could meet a rat who walked and talked like a man . . . if I could see an apparition which dissolved itself into a woman's sleeping body . . . then I could at least listen to what young Mr Billings had to say.
