by Prey (lit)
"I thought he was with you," D-c Jones repeated, frowning at me as if I had just walked into the room.
I shook my head. "Sorry, I don't know where he is." And that, in a way, was the God's-honest truth. I didn't know where he was; or what was happening to him. I prayed only that he wasn't suffering too much.
"Well, take that leg down to the hospital," said D-c Jones. "We'll be back later. I've got quite a few questions for you."
"All right," I told him. I was beginning to feel chilled, and I was shivering from shock and exertionnot to mention the wound that Brown Jenkin had inflicted on my leg. I sat down in one of the armchairs, and covered my face with my hands.
Danny came up to me, then Charity. "Are you all right, Daddy?" asked Danny, seriously.
I took hold of his hand and squeezed it. "I'm all right. Brown Jenkin scratched me, that's all. That detective's right: it may need some stitches. What about you? Are you all right?"
Danny nodded.
Charity said, "The other man . . . what happened to him?"
I looked towards the front doorwhich seemed to have freed itself from its frame. The last of the police officers was leaving now. He called back, "Open or closed?"
"What?"
"The door. Do you want it open or closed?"
"Open, I think."
Charity said, "It's happened, hasn't it? The Unholy Trinity? It's come to life?"
"Yes," I told her. "Young Mr Billings wanted to bewell, in some way he wanted to be part of it. But right at the last moment, D-s Miller pushed him away, and took his place."
Charity looked thoughtful. "In that case, your D-s Miller will go on many strange journeys, to places that men have never seen. You ought to envy him, in a way."
"I think I'm all right here, thanks. Where's Liz?"
"Liz has locked herself in her room. She's no threat to us yet. But soon her power will increase, and her three sons will start to grow inside her, and then I won't be able to do anything to control her. I can barely do anything now."
"What you suggested beforethat we wait until she gives birth, and then destroy the witch-entity that comes out of herdo we have to do that?"
"It's the only way to stop the witch-entity from possessing another woman, and then another, and then at last Vanessa Charles. It's the only way to change that future you saw."
"Isn't there any other way?"
"No other way in which you can be sure that it will never happen, no."
I was silent for a moment, thinking.
"Why?" asked Charity. "Do you have some qualms about it?"
"Qualms?" I still found it difficult to accept the adult way in which she spoke to me. "Yes, I do have qualms as a matter of fact. I saw what happened to Vanessa Charlesshe was huge and fat and all these things were moving around inside herthen she was literally ripped to pieces."
"Yes?" said Charity, her eyes expressionless.
"Well . . . my qualms are that I don't want Liz to have to go through that. I don't want Liz to be torn to pieces."
Charity was silent for a long time. Then she said, "You know the risks that you will be running, if you don't destroy this witch-entity for good and all? You know that as long as just one witch-entity survives, the Old Ones will always be able to return?"
"I've seen that thing for myself, yes. Yog-Sothoth. But perhaps if the world is going to get as bad as all that . . . if the skies are going to choke us and the sea's going to be thick with chemicals . . . well, maybe we deserve it."
"Do you care, then, what happens to Liz?" asked Charity.
"Of course I care. I like her. I liked her, anyway. I think I might have loved her."
"Well, of course there is a different way," said Charity. "You can go back to the moment when she first came here, and you can make things happen differently."
"How, differently?"
"As differently as you like. The choice is yours. But if she doesn't stay here . . . if she isn't possessed by the witch-entity that possessed Keziaand if you don't impregnate her with the Unholy Trinity of Yog-Sothoth . . . then she will be saved, won't sheeven if the witch-entity survives."
"Can't we burn down the house? If the witch-entity is hidden in the house, and we burn it down?"
"It will still survive, in the ashes, in the earth. The only time to destroy it is when the three sons are born. At that moment, it has given all its strength to its children. At that moment it is weak."
"And how do you destroy it?" I asked. "What do you dowork some sort of spell"
Charity smiled and shook her head. "No . . . you allow it to possess you . . . you allow it to crawl into your very soul . . . and then you" and here she made a slashing motion with her finger, across her own throat. "You die, and you take the witch-entity with you."
I stared at her. "You were going to do that? You were going to kill yourself?."
"It's the only way."
"Then forget it. I'm not going to stand by and see Liz torn to bits and you cutting your own throat. Not a hope. Forget it."
"I'm prepared to do it," Charity asserted.
"Perhaps you are, but I'm not."
"You're sure?"
"Yes," I told her. "I'm sure."
"In that case," she said, "we'll have to try it the other way."
She led Danny and me out into the garden, and across the lawns, and across the brook. We climbed over the graveyard wall and walked between the gravestones. Gerald Williams, Gathered Unto God, November 7th 1886, Aged 7 Years. I could hardly bear to look. Gerald Williams had been dragged into the future, and butchered, and roastedan innocent sacrifice to an evil god. Susanna Gosling, Now At Peace.
We forced our way into the chapel. Our feet crunched on the broken slates. I looked around. The mural of Kezia Mason grinned at us still, but there was no sign yet of the hideous carnage to come. The sky was bright, butterflies fluttered through the glassless window.
"Look," said Charity, climbing up to the window-sill, and pointing into the garden.
I climbed up next to her, and looked out. The grass was neatly scythed, geraniums flowered brightly in circular beds. And there were no gravestones. Not one.
"It's morning," I said, in bewilderment.
Danny climbed up beside me. "Look, Daddy," he said, pointing towards the sea. "There's that fishing-boat again."
At that moment, I saw somebody step out of the kitchen door of Fortyfoot House and walk, quite confidently and calmly, across the sunlit patio. It was a man in a black tailcoat and a tall black hat. He was grasping his lapels as he walked, and turning his head from side to side as if he were making a tour of inspection.
He reached the center of the lawn, and stood with his hands behind his back, evidently enjoying the sea-breeze.
"Hey, you!" I shouted. "Yes, you on the lawn!"
The man turned and stared toward the chapel with a dark, displeased expression on his face. He hesitated for a moment, but then he turned round and started to walk briskly back toward the house.
"Hey!" I shouted. "Hey! Hold on, there!"
But the man took no notice whatsoever, and continued to walk with long scissorman steps toward the house.
The door flew openin he ranthe great, long, red-legged scissorman!
"Come on, Danny!" I said. "We have to catch up with him!"
We scrambled down from the window and squeezed ourselves out through the doorway. We hurried down the grassy slope, and balanced our way across the stream, and then climbed panting up the lawn toward the patio. As we approached the house, I saw that the kitchen-door was ajar. I knew for certain that I had closed it when we went out of the house together.
I motioned for Danny to keep behind me, and I approached the kitchen door as slowly and as quietly as I could. I eased it open, and let it swing wide. It banged against the wall, and juddered, then it stayed still.
"Who's there?" I called.
There was no reply. I paused, and listened. Then I called, "I know you're here! I want you to come out!"
&nbs
p; You want him to come out? That grim, tall-hatted man?"
There was another long silence, and then I heard a quick shuffling noise in the hallway, and the sound of the front door opening. Without hesitation I ran through the kitchen and banged open the hall doorway, just in time to see a black silhouetted figure leap out of the front door of the house, and run furiously up the steep shingled driveway.
I ran in hot pursuit, but even as I ran, I knew that I wasn't chasing the man in the sidewhiskers and the tall stovepipe hat, and by the time I reached the roadway, I had seen that I was running after a short girl with streaky-blonde hair and a black sweatshirt and linen shorts, with a cramful duffel-bag bouncing on her back.
Liz, I thought. This is the moment, this is the chance. This is the time when I can save her from Fortyfoot House, and from the same grisly fate as Vanessa Charles. This is the time when I can save her from me.
There may be other consequencesconsequences just as terrible. But at least Liz will be safe.
I stopped, while she ran on. I heard her sandals slapping on the hot summer tarmac. Then she had disappeared behind the laurels, and was gone. I stood in the roadway for a very long time, staring at the place where she had disappeared, and I suddenly realized that my heart was breaking.
Danny came up the driveway and stood next to me. "Who was that?" he wanted to know.
I shook my head. "I don't know. A girl. whatever she wanted, she didn't stop to tell me."
We walked back down to the house. "Do you fancy a drink?'' I asked him. "There's a café down by the beach."
"Gin-and-tonic," he said, seriously.
We crossed the lawn hand-in-hand. The morning was warm and very peaceful. I looked across at the chapel, and thought that there was something different about it, something I couldn't quite place. Then I realized what it was. There were no gravestones any more, only an overgrown garden, with stunted apple-trees and feathery grass.
Whatever I had done by letting Liz go, I had changed the fate of the orphans of Fortyfoot House. They were all long dead, of course: but they hadn't been taken from here.
"Where's ?" asked Danny, suddenly, turning around.
"Where's who?"
"I don't know," he said. "I thought there ought to be somebody else here, but there isn't."
We walked down the sloping path to the promenade, and then along to the Beach Café. We sat outside, next to the wall, so that Danny could watch one of the local fishermen staking out his nets. An elderly woman who looked like gran'ma in The Waltons came up to us, wiping her hands on her apron. Doris Kemble, alive and well, and smiling.
"What would you like?" she asked us.
Danny stared at her, and then whispered, "Coca-Cola."
"No gin-and-tonic?" I teased him.
He shook his head, without taking his eyes off Doris Kemble. He looked as if he had seen a ghost.
"There's lots of crabs on the beach," said Doris Kemble. "You could have a crab-race."
Later, when Danny was playing on the rocks, Doris Kemble came and sat next to me. I sipped my lager contentedly, my hand lifted to shield my eyes from the mid-morning sun.
"He won't remember any of it," she said, after a while. "You will, but then it was your choice, to change things the way they are; and the whole responsibility for what happens now will be yours."
"You're still alive," I asked her, "what about the Pickerings, and D-s Miller, and Harry Martin?"
"They're still alive, too. None of them even know you."
"Did any of it really happen?" I asked her.
She nodded. "Yes, it all happened. It's all still happening, somewhere in time."
"What about the Old Ones?"
"You could have destroyed their chances of returning for ever. But that wasn't your choice. All you can do about the Old Ones is to pray . . . and do everything you can to forestall that day when the earth is so polluted that they can come back to life."
"And young Mr Billings? And Mazurewicz?"
"Gone from here. Gone from now. But still there somewhere."
"And Brown Jenkin?"
Doris Kemble laid her hand on top of mine. "Take my advice, David. Always keep an ear cocked for Brown Jenkin."
We left Fortyfoot House the following day. I told the estate agents that I had just been forwarded a report from my GP in Brighton that I had a suspected heart murmur, and couldn't attempt anything strenuous. I promised to pay them their money back, and I'm still doing it, at £5 a month.
Danny and I drove back to Brighton, and at the moment we're living together in the back room of my old friend John Smart's flat in Clifton Terrace. I like it up here. It's sunny, and airy, and an easy walk down to the seafront (although it's a bloody hard walk back up again.)
I kept only one souvenir of Fortyfoot House, and that's the black-and-white photograph of young Mr Billings standing on the lawns, Fortyfoot House, 1888. I didn't take it because I liked it. I took it because Kezia Mason worked her magic on it, and made it capable of movement. It's like a barometer; like seaweed; like a weather-vane. If ever young Mr Billings goes looking for Brown Jenkin again, I shall be able to see it before it happens.
Every morning, while I'm making the coffee, I've made something of a ritual of taking a close look at that photograph. It's up there, next to my Greenpeace poster.
This morning, October 15th, I thought I could make out a small dark triangular smudge behind the curve of the grassy lawn. I took the photograph to the window in order to scrutinize it in sunlight. Down in the yard below, among the overgrown elder-bushes, I could see Danny playing with his Dinky lorries, the sun shining on his hair. It looked as if he was building a municipal leisure center.
I studied the mark on the photograph intently. It's possible that it was always there, and I just hadn't noticed it before. A stain, a speck, anything.
But it could be a hat.
It could be the tip of an ear, or an upraised claw.
It could be that creature that still scurries through my nightmares every single night, long-clawed, yellow-eyed, yellow-fanged, scratching and tittering behind the wainscot of my sanity.
It could be something hunched-up and infinitely evil, running remorselessly towards us through the maze of time.
