by Prey (lit)
"Ah, ma chere petite," drooled Brown Jenkin, lewdly. "I serve you mit kartoffeln und sauerkraut, oui?"
In a high, constricted voice, D-s Miller said, "Police! You're under arrest! Put that girl down!"
Brown Jenkin cackled and wheezed so much that he was almost sick. Strings of saliva drooped from his jaws, thick with half-chewed food. "Under arrest shit-shit! Was sagst du bastard? C'est drole, n'est-ce pas?"
He opened his claws so that he could take hold of Charity, but at that instant something remarkable happened. Charity stopped struggling and kicking, and suddenly stiffened, so that she was straight and upright and utterly rigid. Her face became set and sternand although it might have been a combination of the smoke and the bright gray daylightshe seemed to shine. Her hair flew all around her in a soft, waving halo, and I could swear that she radiated bright white light.
Liz, darkly, like a shrinking shadow, let her go. But Charity remained where she was, still rigid, still stiff, suspended in mid-air between floor and sloping ceiling, exactly where Liz had released her.
It was impossible, but I could see it for myself: there were three clear feet between Charity's dangling feet and the attic floorboards. No tricks, no wires. Nothing.
Brown Jenkin slowly but noticeably withdrew his claws, his eyes suspicious, his long snout curved in a snarl. "What's this?" I heard him hiss. "What's this?"
Charity, her eyes still wide, revolved in mid-air and confronted Liz. When she spoke, her voice was soft, supernaturally soft, like a thousand hands stroking a thousand velvet curtains. "Keep away, witch," she whispered. She lifted both arms, her fingers outstretched, and then her eyes rolled upward into her head, so that only the whites were exposed. "KEEP AWAY WITCH" she repeated. The words were so blurry that I could barely understand them.
There was a moment of unbearable tension. Thenabruptlyeverything happened at once. Liz, with a high-pitched gasp, collapsed. Brown Jenkin slammed the skylight shut and disappeared. Charity dropped to the floorboards and landed on awkward feet. The smoke swirled, the lights flickered, and D-s Miller awoke from his shock like a man who realizes that he's slept past his train station.
Immediately, I scaled the stepladder and wrestled open the skylight. "Jenkin!" I yelled. "JenkinI want my son back!"
I thrust my head out, and I was overwhelmed by what I saw. A dark sulphurous-yellow sky; a row of leafless, naked trees. A garden that had no grass, no bushes, no flowersnothing but bedraggled rows of pallid and slimy weeds. There was no color anywhere, except for yellow and gray. No seagulls cried; no insects buzzed; nothing. The sea listlessly churned on the beach; but it was black with oil, and its foam was scummy and faintly radiant; and you only had to look at it to know that no fish swam in it; no normal fish.
What had once been the neatly-mown wabe around the sundial was now a devastated patch of barren earth. Under the grim sulphurous sky I saw Brown Jenkin hurrying across it, dragging Danny by the hand; tiny figures in a dream. They must have climbed down from the roof by the fire-escape. I shouted, ''Danny!" and Danny tried to turn around. For an instant I could see him clearly, his face jumbled with distress. Then Brown Jenkin had pulled him, whooping, down the hill; toward the brook; and toward the chapel.
I tried to pull myself out of the skylight on to the roof; but as soon as I braced myself, I was seized with an agonizing coughing fit, and had to ease my feet back on to the top of the stepladder. I felt a gentle tug at my trouser-leg and saw that Charity had climbed the stepladder, too, and was smiling up at me. Behind her, Liz had retreated to the corner of the attic, so wreathed in smoke that I could scarcely make her out.
Charity said, "If you go after him, David, you may never come back, either of you."
"He's my son."
She smiled, and nodded. "I know. Just as I was my father's daughter; and all of the children at Fortyfoot House were daughters and sons."
"Who are you?" I asked her.
Her eyes closed and opened, as passive as a cat's. "What you are trying to ask me is what am I."
"I don't know," I said. "Is that what I'm asking?"
D-s Miller came up, wiping his eyes with his handkerchief. "Listen," he said, "my men have just arrived outside. I'll get them searching the grounds. Thatthingcan't have taken your son far."
I was just about to tell him that they would be wasting their time searching the garden in 1992 when Brown Jenkin had taken Danny to some far-distant future; but Charity lifted her hand to silence me.
"Let him keep himself occupied," she said. "There is nothing that he can do to help you."
Liz growled, "Let me go. Do you hear me, you miserable brat? Let me go!"
Charity turned to her and nodded and Liz retreated even further into the shadows.
"What the hell have you done to her?" I asked. "What's going on?"
"You know that she's been taken," said Charity, simply.
"Taken?"
"Possessedoccupiedtaken over."
I couldn't believe that this was Charity talking. But I nodded in understanding. "I saw it happen. Young Mr Billings explained what it was all about."
"Oh, him," Charity smiled. "Poor him. Poor young Mr Billings! He wanted everything. He wanted to be saint and sinner, winner and loser. As long as he got his great reward."
"Who are you?" I asked her. "What are you?"
She reached out and touched my hand. She was real, I felt her fingers. Her nails were bitten, and what could have convinced me of her reality more than that?
"Let me tell you this," she whispered, in a childish, conspiratorial whisper. "I came to you as a girl. But I am more than a girl. The Old Ones survived by living in human beingslike Kezia Mason, like your Lizlike Vanessa Charles, who will one day give birth to the Old Ones which survive. They tried to hide themselves, but sometimes they gave themselves away; and that was how witches were discovered, you see, and why they were burnedalthough burning never killed the Old Ones inside.
"Every witch was trying to give birth to the three sons who would become one son . . . the Unholy Trinity. The son of seed, the son of spit, the son of blood. But some of them, in their guise as human women " and here she made a charming gesture with her hands that described her own flesh"some of them gave birth to children who were more human than pre-human . . . but not altogether human."
"You mean like you?" I asked her, my throat dry.
"Yes," she smiled, "like me. And we became what everybody calls white witches . . . women with a skill for healing, and for blessing the barren with fertility, and for telling the future . . . because, of course " fluttering her eyelashes "we could travel into the future, and see it for ourselves, with our own eyes."
"But you're a child," I said. "A girl, not a woman."
Her eyes widened. "You should never judge age by looks. The youngest faces have the oldest eyes."
"I don't understand. What were you doing at Fortyfoot House? You have all of this power . . . but you were an orphan."
"An orphan, yes," she smiled. "But a special orphan. I was an orphan because my mother died in childbed. I was an orphan because my mother was burst asunder, giving birth to my three brothers. My three brothers, do you understand? My mother was possessed by the witch-thing, but first she gave birth to me. It was four years before she gave birth to my brothers, the sons of blood, seed and spit. The house was filled with terrible screaming and terrible smells and lights that flashed.
"They died, of course; my brothers all died. The air was too rich and the water was brimming with things they couldn't swallow. They dissolved, and no trace was left of them at all.
"But " and here she crossed herself "my mother's witch-thing survived, in the cupboard."
"In the cupboard?" I asked her. I kept thinking of DannyDannybut I knew that this was important. I knew that Charity could help me to save him. Patience, I kept telling myself. Patience.
She nodded. "We had a cupboard under the stairs, and every time I opened it I saw a blue light; and a face like this." She widen
ed her eyes and dragged down her lower lip with her fingers and made an expression like a childish skull. "That was my mother; that was the witch-thing. And one day Dr Barnardo came to our house, collecting children; and one of the children with him then was Kezia Mason. While Dr Barnardo talked with old Mr Billings, I showed Kezia the cupboard. The cupboard door opened and the witch-thing came out and hugged Kezia and took her."
"So the witch-entity that was inside your mother was the same witch-entity that was inside Kezia Mason, and Liz?"
She nodded.
"But if Kezia was practically related to you, how could she have let Brown Jenkin take you?"
"The witch-entity has no human feelings. The witch-entity has no heart at all. It's a creature, that's all, like an octopus or a crab or a spider."
"Why didn't you fight Kezia, the way you fought Liz?"
"I couldn't. She was far too strong. But Liz is still weak. Liz is still mostly human. It takes a long time for the witch-entity to penetrate a woman's body and soul, and dominate her completely. But KeziaKezia was scarcely human at all, the last time you saw her."
"Did you ever see your brothers?" I asked her. "Do you know what they looked like?"
Charity said, with sad simplicity, "No. I was very little, and my mother's room was always locked. I didn't see her for weeks and weeks before she gave birth. I heard awful screams, and shouting, and I saw very bright lights. Then all I saw through the crack in the door was blood."
"Is there really no hope, once the witch-entity has taken a woman over?" I asked.
In a way which is very hard for me to justify, even today, I think that I was seeking Charity's approval to take Liz's life.
"No hope at all," said Charity. She made a strange sign with her fingers; as if she were dismissing an evil spirit. "Except to change time; and when you change time, you can never be sure that you haven't made things worse."
"Can you change time?"
She shook her head. "No more or less than anybody else. I'm not possessed by the Old Ones. I'm not even a proper witch. I was born to a human male and a human woman. The only thing that makes me different is thatwhen I was conceivedthe human woman just happened to be possessed by one of the Old Ones. I inherited some of the Old One's powers. I'm a white witch . . . with faraway thoughts in my head, and faraway dreams . . . but always human. Do I surprise you, being so young, and talking like this?"
"Listen," I said. "Brown Jenkin was going to take you on one of his picnics. And the Reverend Dennis Pickering died, trying to save you."
"Yes! That was their lie," said Charity. "They said they needed only twelve children, to feed the witch, at the time of the final Act of Renewal . . . but of course they needed hundreds more. In the end, Kezia gave me, too. Because she wasn't Kezia, you know. Not since my mother came out of the cupboard, and hugged her, and sank right into her. She was one of them . . . the Old Ones. She was my mother. She was not my mother."
"What about Danny?" I asked her. I couldn't control my impatience any longer. Brown Jenkin had dragged Danny across to the chapel and whatever bloody horrible monstrosity was there, whatever hocus-pocus I had to face up to, I was going to go down there and get him.
Charity said, obliquely, "You can save him, David, yes. But not now."
"What do you mean, not now?" She was such a child: why did she make me feel so young?
"They'll feed him to the witch-thing," she said. "You can't stop themnot here, not now. You haven't got the time and you haven't got the means. But you could go backwards in time and kill the witch-thing, before it even has the chance to exist. Then Danny won't be eaten, because there won't be anything to eat him."
"What?" I demanded. "What do you mean?"
Charity shushed me. She was so pale . . . so pale and fey. "The time for the great Renewal is now, Davidwhich is the future to you. This is 2049and the earth is so poisoned that at last the Old Ones can breathe, and come out of their hiding. But if you go back . . . to the time when Liz gives birth to her three sonsher Unholy Trinitywhich won't survive, because we still have too much oxygen, and too many plants, and too many animals, and too many fishif you go back then, to the moment when Liz gives birth . . . then you can catch and kill the witch-thing before it can pass to another human host."
She stared at me earnestly. "Believe me. Trust me."
"I don't know whether I can."
"You saw me float. You saw me fly."
"Well, yes, but"
She giggled. She had been speaking to me like an adult; but she was mostly a child. "Witches can fly. You know that, from the fairy-stories. And they don't need broomsticks."
"So you're a witch," I said. I could scarcely believe that I was saying it. I could scarcely believe that I believed it. But sometimes you have no choice. Sometimes the things that are taking place in front of your own eyes have to be accepted. If you've ever seen a road accident, you'll know what I mean. There's a kind of terrible unbelievable inevitability about it. You think no! But you know that it's going to happen, and it does. Crash, crump, what can you do?
And that was how I felt with Charity. I couldn't believe her; but I simply had to; because there she was, as real as a road accident.
All the time that Charity had been talking to me, Liz had been circling around in the smoke. Now she came forward, both hands raised, and her eyes were solid red, as if the pupils were filled with blood.
Charity turned, with great calmness and dignity, picked a pink-tinged daisy out of her hair and held it up and said to her, "You don't yet possess enough strength to harm me, witch. Stay back."
Liz quivered with frustration, but it was obvious that she couldn't step any closer. She drew back her teeth over her lips in a feral snarl, and shook her head in frustration; but Charity remained completely placid, still holding up the flower.
"Now you know why children make daisy-chains," she said. "It's to ward off witches. Children are very much closer to the forces of nature than grown-ups. They hear things, they understand things."
"I have to go and get Danny," I said. "I can't let him be hurt, even if I can go back in time and make sure that it won't happen. I can't let him be hurt, even once."
Charity said solemnly, "It would be better if I stayed here, to guard your Liz. I can't do anything against the witch-entity that's giving birth to the Old Ones . . . Vanessa Charles. She's as strong as Kezia used to be. She'll kill me just as surely as look at me."
"Then I'll have to go on my own."
Charity tugged my sleeve. "You'll be facing the Old Ones themselves, David. They have no conscience, no restraint. They have minds like crocodiles."
I was just about to pull myself up through the skylight again, when something made me turn back and stare at her closely. There was a quality about her face that reminded me strongly of someone I knew. She must have realized what I was thinking, because she slowly smiled, and then she said, in a soft, much older-sounding voice, "If I saw a bright light, I would run for dear life, if I were you."
I couldn't believe it. "Doris Kemble," I whispered. "You're Doris Kemble."
"I will be Doris Kemble, one day."
"So Doris Kemble was a white witch, too?"
Charity nodded. "Doris Kemble is going to be my granddaughter. She won't have so much power as me . . . almost all of it will have been bred out of her, and she will have no memory of me. But young Mr Billings will see her talking to you, and still suspect that she's a threat . . . and young Mr Billings will send Brown Jenkin to deal with her."
"So Brown Jenkin did kill her?"
"Yes," said Charity. "And Harry Martin, too."
Outside, in the garden, I heard the high-pitched whistling sound of a child screaming. "I have to go," I told her.
"Then bless you," she said, and glided up into the air, so that she was right beside me, and kissed me on the forehead. Then she sank back down to the ground. I was so stunned that I nearly forgot to climb through the skylight.
I hoisted myself up, and swung my legs
around, grazing my thigh on the window-frame. The roof-tiles were coated in thin, gray slime, which looked like a combination of heavy metals and decomposing moss. I felt a thin drizzle prickling my face, and stinging the backs of my hands. Acid rain . . . almost as potent as battery-acid.
I balanced my way along the rusted uttering, trying not to look down at the wet, greasy patio, seventy feet below me. At last I managed to reach the fire-escape, and grip its corroded handrail. It had been eaten through in places, and about two-thirds of the way down, six or seven rungs were missing, but if Danny and Brown Jenkin had managed to climb down it, then I was sure that I could.
I shaded my eyes with my hand. Over in the ruined chapel, bright unearthly lights were flickering, and I could hear the deep, monotonous chanting of the Old Ones' incantation. There was another chant, too, on the opposite end of the sound spectrum: a high, almost inaudible ullulation, like the sound of the wind keening through a narrow crack in the wall.
