Graham Masterton - Prey.html

by Prey (lit)

  It was so ordinary that the horror which sat in the center of the room was ten times more shocking that it would have been if I had come across it in, say, the London Dungeon, or a multiple car-crash on the M25, or in the intensive-care ward of a major hospital.

  The blood had prepared me to see somebody dead. But nothing in the world could have prepared me for how she had died. I stood next to D-s Miller and literally lurched at the kneesa terrible, involuntary genuflection.

  In one of the chintz armchairs sat the headless body of Mrs Pickering. She had been wearing a blouse of peach-colored silk and an off-white cotton skirt, but these had been ripped into barely-recognizable shreds. Her entire body had been slashed with such force that skin and fat lay across the arms of the chair in ribbons.

  -in gay profusion lying therescarlet ribbons, scarlet ribbons

  Her bloodied neck rose out of the bloodied collar of her blouse, and most of her internal organsher lungs, her liver and her stomachhad been dragged squashily and stickily out of her windpipe, to be draped over her shoulders in a grotesque parody of the painting at Fortyfoot chapel of Kezia Mason, with Brown Jenkin draped over her shoulders.

  I could see her ribs and her pelvis through her savaged fleshglistening-white, with only a few fragments of scarlet flesh clinging on to them, like gnawed dog bones. Her corset and her suspenders had been sliced into shreds of white elastican act of intrusionespecially on a vicar's wifewhich almost seemed more indecent than beheading her. Between her legs hung a dripping jungle of intestines.

  There was blood everywhere. The walls were sprayed with blood, the carpet was soaked. Blood was squiggled across the mirror, blood had painted the white tea-roses on the table, a terrible parody of the painting of the roses in Alicebecause what had the Queen of Hearts said then? Off with her head! And that is exactly what had happened to poor, pathetic Mrs Pickering.

  I couldn't see her head at first. I turned aghast to D-s Miller and said, "Where's her head?"

  He pointed to the corner of the room. His face was the color of gray pork. I tried to see what he was pointing at but my mind simply couldn't take it in.

  "For Christ's sake, sergeant!" I almost screamed at him. "Where's her head?"

  He pointed again to the corner of the roombut all I could see was the brown varnished sideboard with the blood-speckled white runner on it, and the fishbowl on top.

  Jesus, the fish-bowl.

  Inside the glass, the water had been stained pink. Two small goldfish still struggled to swim in their crowded home, but one of them was gasping for oxygen, and another had a damaged tail.

  Through the murk and the fronds of weedgrossly magnified by the curved glass of the bowlthe face of Mrs Pickering stared out at me, her eyes wide, her mouth half-filled with colored pebbles.

  D-s Miller approached the sideboard. He walked stiff-legged like a robot. He stared at the fish-bowl. Mrs Pickering's graying brunette hair matted the surface like thick, sodden weed.

  ''Can't you get it out?" I said, hoarsely. Mrs Pickering's head bobbed and turned and stirred, so that she looked as if she were following me with her eyes as I came up closer.

  D-s Miller shook his head. "There's no waynot without breaking the glass."

  "What do you mean?" I asked him. "If you can't get it out without breaking the glasshow did he get it in?"

  D-s Miller looked around the room. "You were right all along," he said, flatly. "Fortyfoot House is haunted, or possessed, or whatever you like to call it. And Brown Jenkin is real, no matter what the Isle of Wight constabulary think about it."

  He crossed to the open window, which gave out on to the tangled, fragrant, rose filled garden. The garden couldn't have contrasted more with the hideous scene in the living-room.

  "Look," he said, and pointed to the bloody marks on the windowsill, and on the glass itself. They were paw-prints: the prints of a rodent's feet. All that distinguished them from rattus rattus, the common sewer-rat, was their enormous size.

  It was all real. Brown Jenkin was real. Kezia Mason was realand so was Yog-Sothoth. Only one thought burst in my mind at that instant, and that was Danny.

  "Where are you going?" D-s Miller barked at me, as I hopscotched around the blood, and out into the hallway.

  "The house! Liz has got Danny! And I'll bet you anything you like that Brown Jenkin's there, too!"

  "What the hell are you talking about? We can't just " He looked desperately around the grisly living-room.

  "Sergeant," I begged him. "Please."

  20 - Tomorrow's Garden

  I could tell that something was wrong as soon as we took the Bonchurch turning and started driving along the narrow road that led to Fortyfoot House. Although it was a bright, warm afternoon, the sky over the roof of Fortyfoot House had a strange dark quality about it, like a video-camera aimed directly at the sun.

  I could feel tremors, too. The very air around was warping and shuddering, and as the house itself came into view, I saw mirage-like distortions in the air. The trees seemed to lean and twist, and Fortyfoot House looked oddly as if it were suspended a few invisible inches above the ground.

  D-s Miller slewed his car into the driveway, climbed out, and slammed the door. "Watch what you're doing," he snapped at me. "Technically, we're pursuing a suspected murderer and I'm not supposed to risk civilian lives."

  A great shuddering groan came from Fortyfoot House, as if it were a huge beast, rather than a buildinga beast whose very soul had been wrenched to the core. Brilliant blue-white lights flickered in the upstairs windows.

  "I don't give a shit about 'technically,'" I retorted. "That's my son in there."

  I tried the front door, but it seemed to be lockedor rather, fusedas if the door and the frame were carved out of one seamless piece of wood. The lock was solid brass, but it had no keyhole. Supernaturally, we had been denied access.

  D-s Miller braced himself against the architrave and gave the door two or three punishing kicks, but it didn't even budge.

  "It's no use," I said. "It's solid."

  "Let's try the kitchen door," said D-s Miller. He quickly checked his wristwatch. "We should be getting some back-up any minute now."

  We skirted around the house. That strange bright darkness covered the whole of the garden. The oaks dipped and seethed in a wind that I couldn't even feel, and every now and then there was a scurrying through the bushes and flowerbeds, as if a sudden gust had blown through them. Behind the trees, the sea gleamed dull as hammered lead.

  We crossed the patio and I tried the kitchen door. Just like the front door, it was locked solid.

  D-s Miller tugged his portable phone out of his pocket and said, "George? Where the hell are you? I need two mobiles up at Fortyfoot House, soon as you can."

  I heard a tiny exasperated voice say something about "roadworks at Luccombe Village." D-s Miller said nothing, but the expression on his reddened face was just as expletive as any swear-word. "What's happening?" I asked him. "Are they coming, or what?"

  "They're coming," hee said, under his breath. Then, "What about a side door? Or a scullery door? There must be some way in."

  Another deep rumble shook Fortyfoot House down to its foundations. Nowsomewhere in the back of my consciousnessI could hear the slow blurry chanting that I had heard before. N'ggaaan'gggaaasothothn'ggaAAA. There was a brittle cracking noise, and the bricks of the patio began to ripple underneath our feet, almost as if a huge centipede were running underneath it. I heard windows cracking in their frames, and a small shower of tiles dropped from the roof and shattered on the path below.

  "Danny!" I shouted. "Danny, are you in there? Danny!"

  The slow chanting continued; and the building literally shivered. Another avalanche of tiles came down, and one of them hit me on the shoulder.

  "Was Danny supposed to be here?" D-s Miller shouted.

  "I don't know where he is. Liz said she was going to take him for a walk. But now I know that Liz isn't Liz"

  "Liz isn't Liz? What'
s that supposed to mean?"

  "She's a thing. A sort of ancient spirit. I don't know, if you try to explain it, it doesn't make any sense. But the spirits came from prehistoric times . . . and they possessed women one after the other, century after century, waiting for the time when they could be born again."

  D-s Miller stared at me, and then up at the crumbling roof of Fortyfoot House. A row of ridge-tiles came toppling off one after the other, followed by a chunk of sandstone window-ledge. If he hadn't seen for himself how the building was shaking and groaning and tearing itself apart, I think he would have had me certified. But there was no doubt now that some huge and desperate force was shaking Fortyfoot Houseand there was no doubt, either, that this force was malevolent beyond all human imagination. If its familiar could kill with such mockerywhat horrors was the force itself capable of perpetrating?

  Brown Jenkin killed pointlessly and sadisticallyfor his own amusement. He thought no more of human life than a boy who plucks the legs off stag-beetles. But he was nothing more than Kezia Mason's messenger; and Kezia Mason, in turn, was nothing more than the cuckoo's-nest in which Yog-Sothoth was waiting for his day of Renewal.

  It all seemed absurdly apocalyptic. The end of the world as we know it. A change in the natural order of primacy: another species dominant over man. But when I thought how much the world itself had changed since the beginning of the centurywith poisoned seas and tainted skies, I began to believe that the Old Ones could re-emerge, and that the huge, cold-blooded civilizations of pre-human times could rise up again.

  After all, they had clung on through centuries of human supremacy, concealed in witches and warlocks and walls of buildings and even in the ground itself. They had been prepared to hide and wait, hide and wait. And nowall around uswe were destroying the very things that had kept them hidden. We were felling the forests that enriched our atmosphere with oxygenwhich the Old Ones, creatures of the far cosmos, abhorred. We were building over acres of grassland and marshes and draining the water-tables out from under our swamps.

  We were filling our seas with mercury and radioactive sludge. We were thickening our skies with sulphur and lead. Whether we were secretly being inspired by the hidden influence of the Old Ones or not, we were gradually changing the world back to what it wasto the way they wanted it. A world of dead oceans and dark skiesa world of heavy metals and Antarctic cold.

  I turned to D-s Miller and I said, "You didn't see this."

  "See what?" he asked me.

  I crossed the patio, and hefted up from its position on the wall one of the stone urns that had once held geraniums. It weighed so much that I could barely lift it, and halfway back toward the house I had to put it down. But D-s Miller realized what I was trying to do, and came over to help me.

  "Didn't see a thing," he told me.

  Together, we staggered toward the kitchen windowswung the urn back, and then hurled it through the glass. With a loud smash, it took half of the window out of its frame, and dropped into the sink. I knocked out one or two scimitar-shaped slices of glass that had been left behind, and then I hoisted myself up through the window and into the kitchen. D-s Miller followed close behind.

  "Be with you in five, Dusty," squawked a tiny voice on D-s Miller's radio. He said "roger-dodge," and shut it off.

  We crossed the kitchen floor, the soles of our shoes crunching on broken glass. Inside, the house was almost humming, as if it were an electricity sub-station. Every time I neared one of the walls, I felt the hair rising up on my scalp with static, and when I reached out to open the kitchen door, scores of whirling, pin-pricking sparks flew between my finger-tips and the metal door-handle.

  I opened the door by putting on an oven-glove, to dampen the shock.

  Out in the hallway, we stopped and listened. The chanting continued, but on so low a pitch that I didn't know whether I was hearing it or feeling it. "Mmm'ngggaaa, nn'ggaaa, sothoth, yashoggua . . ." D-s Miller nervously cleared his throat, and said, "Do you think that Danny's here? I can't hear anybody, can you?"

  "Danny?" I called. Then I went to the foot of the stairs, and cupped my hands around my mouth, and shouted, much louder, "Danny! It's Daddy! Are you there?"

  I waited, my hand resting on the newel-post. I think I did it as an act of bravery. Everything in Fortyfoot House felt as if it were crawlingthe walls, the floor, the banisters. I would have done anything to run back out of the kitchen, climb back through the window, and escape from the sight and sound of Fortyfoot House as fast as the next bus could take me.

  But thenvery faintlyI heard a high-pitched mewing sound, more like a kitten than a child. But you always recognize your own child's voiceno matter how distorted it is, no matter how distressed it is, no matter how far away it is.

  D-s Miller said, "What's that?" but I was already halfway up the stairs, shouting, "Danny! Hold on! Danny, it's Daddy!"

  The attic door was open, and the draft that blew down it was thick with foul-smelling smoke. It had the same burning stench that I remembered from beforethick, acrid and metallic. It reminded me of tear-gas, or burning tires.

  I dragged out my crumpled handkerchief and pressed it against my nose and mouth. Behind me, D-s Miller shouted, "For God's sake, David, be careful! They'll have some breathing-apparatus in the car!" But again I heard that muffled mewing sound, and I knew for certain that it was Danny, and I wasn't going to let Brown Jenkin get him, breathing-apparatus or no breathing-apparatus.

  I clambered up the attic steps, and turned around. The whole attic was filled with eye-stinging smoke, and a flat, gray, penetrating light. The skylight was open, and a stepladder had been set up underneath it. Brown Jenkin was halfway up the stepladder, hunched and precariously-perchedbut on the very top step stood Danny, his head and shoulders already through the frame. Close to the bottom of the ladder stood Liz, looking white-faced and shocked, with her hands on the shoulders of the child whom she had sworn was a figment of my stressed imaginationCharity.

  "Jenkin!" I roared at him. "Brown bloody Jenkin!"

  Brown Jenkin swiveled his head around and his eyes glittered yellow and septic. He was wearing an extraordinary parody of a cleric's habita filthy dog-collar, a dusty black jacket, and a black waistcoat splattered with soup-stains. One claw was upraisedprodding Danny to climb through the skylight. The other clung to the ladder.

  "Jenkin, let him go!" I shouted. But as I stormed toward him, Liz lifted one hand and pointed it directly at my chest. I was overwhelmed by a searing sensation inside my ribcage, as if my heart had been pressed against a hotplate. I stopped, clutching wildly at my chest. I felt that meat-smoke must be pouring out of my mouth. It was agony, but I couldn't even find the breath to scream. I dropped to my knees, coughing. My heart burned and burned and even though I knew that it couldn't be real, that Liz was doing nothing more than working some of her witch-entity sorcery on me to keep me away from Brown JenkinI felt as if I were going to die, right then and there.

  Brown Jenkin seized both of Danny's legs and shot him upward through the skylight, so that he tumbled out of sight, screaming. Then Brown Jenkin himself scrambled after him, in a shower of lice.

  "Jenkin!" I coughed, but I couldn't find enough breath to climb to my feet and go after him. He peered back down through the skylight, wheezing and cackling at me; his eyes narrowed in triumph, his yellow fangs bared. His black tongue flicked across his lips.

  "Idiot-fucker du kannst mich niemals fangen! Adieu bastard cet fois for always! Merci pour ton fils! Was fur ein schmackhaft, Knabenicht warh fucker?"

  "Jenkin, I'll kill you!" I threatened him; but my voice was so breathless and clogged that I don't suppose that he heard me.

  "Now for you, Charity, up you go!" said Liz, and pushed her toward the stepladder. Brown Jenkin reached down from the skylight with the evillest imaginable grin and long hooked leathery fingers. Charity looked back up at him wide-eyed.

  I heard coughing from the top of the attic stairs. Still kneeling in pain, still clutching my chest,
I turned around and saw D-s Miller trying to wave the smoke aside.

  "You!" he shouted at Liz. "Leave that little girl right where she is!"

  "Sergeant " I gasped. "I can't" and pointed up toward the skylight.

  D-s Miller lifted his eyes and saw Brown Jenkin. His mouth dropped open. He had heard of Brown Jenkin, he had seen what Brown Jenkin had done. But his first sight of this evil, overgrown rodent startled him so much that he didn't seem able to move.

  The burning in my chest was beginning to die down. Painfully, I heaved myself up on to one knee, then managed to stand up. Liz was lifting Charity up in her arms, so that Brown Jenkin could reach down and drag her up through the skylight. Charity kicked and struggled and screamed, "Let me go! Let me go!" But Liz seemed to have unnatural strength: she lifted Charity higher and higher with no apparent effort, no matter how much Charity fought with her.