Prey

by Graham Masterton

  What made the idea of this blocked-off space even more puzzling was that, when I shaded my eyes—I could see the faintest rectangular outline under the white pebbledash, as if there had once been a window there, which at some very remote date had been bricked up and rendered. So at one time, my room must have had a flat westward wall, and a window overlooking the tall fir trees that rose behind the strawberry-beds.

  I couldn’t think of any logical reason why this window had been blocked up and my ceiling lowered as if the roof sloped down. Maybe there had been dry-rot, or damp, or a structural fault. But blocking up a window didn’t seem to be the sensible way to deal with any of those problems. I sat for a long time frowning up at the roof until Danny stopped singing and asked, “What’s the matter?”

  “Nothing,” I said.

  He stared up at the roof, too. “There used to be a window there,” he decided.

  “You’re right. They blocked it off.”

  “Why did they do that?”

  “That was just what I was trying to decide.”

  “P’raps they didn’t want anybody getting out.”

  “P’raps they didn’t,” I agreed. Then, “What do you mean, getting out?”

  “Well, it’s too high up for anybody to get in,” said Danny.

  I nodded. I’m always impressed by children’s analytical minds. They cut right through all of the excuses and all of the compromises that adults are prepared to accept, and see everything clean and bright, like a picture-book, the way it is. They have something else, too. A sixth sense; a closeness with nature. They can talk to trees and animals and frogs, and sometimes they can get an answer, too.

  Danny said, “I wonder who used to live up in that room.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I wonder who it was they didn’t want to get out.”

  “Oh,” I said. “Yes.”

  We walked back around to the patio, our hands clasped solemnly behind our backs, father and son.

  Danny said, “Is Mummy going to visit us?”

  “I don’t know,” I told him. “Probably not. Well, not just yet, anyway. She’s got a lot to do, up in Durham, with what’s-his-face, Raymond.”

  “You could always re-marry,” Danny suggested.

  I looked down at him, and smiled, and shook my head. “I haven’t even thought about it. Not yet.”

  “But you’ll be lonely.”

  “How can I ever be lonely? I’ve got you.”

  Danny reached up and solemnly took hold of my hand. “Why don’t we go and take a look at that graveyard?” I said. Anything was better than walking around Fortyfoot House, with its unnerving angles and the extraordinary impression it gave of being not only here but somewhere else as well, the same way in which a stick appears to be bent when you slide it into a pool of water. Which angle is real? Which world is real?

  We crossed the garden and climbed down the sides of the stream. Underneath the green shadows of its overhanging ferns, the stream was much more vigorous than I’d expected: bright and noisy and very cold. Two blue dragonflies darted and hovered close to its banks. Danny and I balanced our way over the mossy rocks, and then climbed the steep rounded hill that led to the graveyard wall. There was a strong smell of wild thyme in the wind, and it reminded me of somebody or something that I had known a long, long time ago. Odd feeling, hard to pin down. The more I tried to remember who or what it was, the more elusive it became.

  Danny climbed over the crumbling, moss-bewigged wall, but I walked around and opened the squeaking iron gate.

  Inside the walls of the graveyard, the wind was stilled, and it was very much warmer. We walked side by side through the tall dry grass, while cabbage-white butterflies danced around us, and the huge cedar monotonously creaked and groaned. There was an overwhelming sense of peace and timelessness here. We could have been walking through any summer’s day; or even through several summer’s days, all at once. There was no calendar here. The past was here, alongside the future.

  We came to the first grave-marker, a tilted white headstone with the blind face of an angel on it. Gerald Williams, Gathered Unto God, November 7th 1886, Aged 7 Years.

  “He wasn’t very old, was he?” said Danny, reaching out and touching the lettering with his fingertips.

  “No. Same age as you. But children used to die in those days from diseases they don’t die from now. Like mumps, or scarlatina, or whooping-cough. They didn’t have the medicines to make them better.”

  “Poor Gerald Williams,” said Danny. He was genuinely touched.

  I put my arm around his shoulder and we moved along to the next gravestone. This was marble, carved in the shape of an open Bible. Susanna Gosling. Now At Peace. Died November 11th, 1886, aged five years.

  “Another child,” said Danny.

  “Perhaps they had an epidemic,” I suggested. “You know, that’s when everybody in a whole town or village gets ill.”

  We went on to the next grave, and the next. An angel holding an olive-branch. A tall Celtic cross. A simple rectangle. Again, they were children. Henry Pierce, aged 12. Jocasta Warren, aged 6. George Herbert, aged 9.

  In all, as we explored the weed-tangled graveyard, we found sixty-seven graves, and every one of them was a child. None younger than four; none older than thirteen. And all of them had died within a two-week period in November, 1886.

  I stood beside the half-collapsed wall of the chapel, under the empty Gothic window, and looked around. “Something really strange must have happened here, for all these children to die at once.”

  “It must have been what you said,” Danny nodded, seriously. “An emidepic.”

  “But there are no grown-ups at all. Not one. You’d have thought that if all these children died from some disease, at least one grown-up would have caught it, too.”

  “Perhaps there was a fire,” said Danny. “There was a fire at Lawrence’s birthday-party once. His mummy brought in the cake and set the curtains alight. That would have been all children.”

  “You could be right. But it if was a fire, or some kind of disaster like that, you’d have thought that some of the gravestones would have mentioned it.”

  “If I got squashed by a bus, I wouldn’t want you to put that on my gravestone. Here Lies Danny, Got Squashed By A Bus.”

  “That’s different.”

  “No, it’s not.”

  “All right, it’s not. Let’s take a look inside this chapel.”

  “I thought it was a church.”

  “It is, kind of. A chapel is a small church.”

  The chapel’s weather-bleached doors had dropped from their rusted hinges and wedged themselves together. But I pressed my shoulder to the right-hand door, and managed to force it six or seven inches forward, and Danny and I squeezed ourselves through.

  “Don’t catch your T-shirt on that nail.”

  There was no roof. What was left of it lay heaped around our feet, hundreds and hundreds of shattered slates, through which grass and coltsfoot and thistles grew. The walls were still whitewashed, although they were streaked black with damp, and fluttering ivy had claimed most of the western wall. We crunched across the slates until we came to the high sandstone altar, and then we looked around. It didn’t seem very holy now; just derelict, with only the birds for a congregation and only the groaning of the cedar-tree for hymns.

  “It’s spoogly here,” said Danny.

  “Oh, it’s all right. Just because it’s abandoned.”

  We made our way slowly back to the doorway. As we did so, Danny said, “Look at that. Feet.”

  “Feet? What are you talking about?”

  “Here, look.” He crossed to the west wall and pointed to the bottom of the overhanging ivy. Sure enough, a pair of bare painted feet protruded from underneath it.

  “It’s a mural,” I explained. “It’s probably one of the Stations of the Cross.”

  “What’s that?” asked Danny.

  “Well, I’ll show you.” I grasped the ivy in
both hands, and wrenched it little by little away from the brickwork. It made a noise like tearing linen, and clung to the wall as tenaciously as if it had grasping fingers. But gradually I revealed a painting of white-robed legs, then a hand, then a sash, then another hand.

  “There you are, it looks like Jesus,” I told Danny. But then I gave it one last diagonal pull, and a huge heap of rustling ivy fell away, to reveal a Pre-Raphaelite-looking woman, with bushy reddish hair, a red headband, and an extraordinary, dramatic face. Although much of the color in the painting had been faded by weather and by the drying effects of the ivy, the woman was still striking, and the painting was so lifelike that I felt almost as if she could have spoken to us.

  What disturbed me, however, was not so much the realism of the painting, but what was curled around the woman’s neck. The painting was so flaky and discolored here that at first I thought it was a dark fur stole. But when I looked more closely I realized it was a huge rat, or a creature that looked very much like a rat. It had a white verminous face, and slanting eyes; but it had an expression that was much more human than animal. Mocking, calculating and sly.

  “That’s not Jesus,” said Danny, emphatically.

  “No it’s not.”

  “Who is it, then?”

  “I don’t know. I haven’t a clue.”

  “What’s that horrible thing on her shoulders?”

  “A rat, I think.”

  “It’s horrible.”

  “You’re right. Let’s cover it up again.”

  I tried to drag the ivy back across the painting, but having been torn away from the wall, it now refused to go back. In the end I had to leave the mural exposed—the startling woman and the deceitful-looking rat. For some reason, I found them both extremely unpleasant and disturbing, particularly the implication in the painting that there was some kind of unspoken symbiosis between them, that the woman needed the rat just as much as the rat needed the woman.

  “Can we go now?” asked Danny, and I nodded, although I found it hard to take my eyes away from the woman.

  Danny skipped ahead of me, and climbed a heap of broken slates and stones so that he could look out of the empty Gothic window.

  “You can see the beach from here,” he said. “Look—and there’s the back gate.”

  I stood beside him and rested my elbows on the stones of the sill. The view from up here was delightful—the mature trees, the gardens, the pathway sloping down to the sea. From this distance, the gardens looked remarkably well-kept. Even the strawberry-beds appeared to be neatly-weeded, with strawberries shining red through the netting. The fish-pond glittered in the morning sunshine, reflecting the slowly-moving clouds.

  “There’s a fishing-boat down there,” said Danny. Through the trees, I could just make out its rusty-colored triangular sail, as it slowly tacked in toward the shore.

  “We’ll go out on a boat one day,” I promised. “So long as you promise to learn to swim.”

  “I could wear armbands,” Danny suggested.

  I looked across at Fortyfoot House. Its pebbledash seemed to gleam much more brightly in the sunshine. Even its windows looked bright. And the odd thing was, it looked as if there were curtains at every window, even though the only curtains that I had hung so far were the bedroom curtains in my room and Danny’s room.

  I frowned and narrowed my eyes. Something was badly wrong. From here, Fortyfoot House wasn’t the rundown, damp-stained building that I had been told to renovate. From here, the gardens didn’t look like the overgrown tangle that I was supposed to be clearing and weeding. From here, Fortyfoot House looked almost new, and the gardens were immaculate.

  It was just like looking at the old photograph of Fortyfoot House that hung downstairs in the hallway... Fortyfoot House in 1888.

  With a long, slow chill of apprehension, like ice-water sliding down my back, I looked back toward the cottages down by the beach. They didn’t seem remarkably different, except that there were no television aerials in sight. I could see them much more clearly, too, because there were fewer trees and hedges in the way.

  I looked down at the graveyard. The grass was neatly scythed, geraniums flowered brightly in circular beds. And there were no gravestones. Not one.

  “Danny...” I said, laying my hand on his shoulder. “I think it’s time we left.”

  “I just want to see the fishing-boat put its anchor down.”

  “You can run down to the beach and watch it do that.”

  But before I could climb down from the slate and rubble, 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 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.

  As he did so, however, I saw something else move. In one of the upper windows of the house, I saw the palest, quickest flicker of a face. I looked again, and for an instant I thought I recognized the rodent-like features of the rat that was curled around the shoulders of the woman in the wall-painting.

  Then it was gone; and the windows were dark again.

  I shouted out, “Hey!” to the man on the lawn. If he were real, if he weren’t some kind of hallucination, he’d be able to hear me.

  “Hey, you!” I shouted. “Yes, you on the lawn!”

  “Who’s that?” asked Danny.

  “You see him too?”

  “Of course I do. He’s got a funny hat on.”

  “You!” I shouted again, and waved.

  The man turned and stared toward the chapel with a dark, displeased expression on his face. He hesitated for a moment, as if he were considering whether to come up to the chapel and confront us. But then he turned around 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 open, in he ran—the great, long, red-legged scissor-man!

  “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. Outside, with startling abruptness, I found that the graveyard was overgrown again, and the gravestones stood just as they had stood before—tilted, neglected, but here and real. 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 across the bricks, 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. “I’m warning you, this is private property!”

  There was no reply. I could smell the mustiness of the kitchen; clogged drains, and cupboards that had been closed for too long; and Domestos bleach. The sun falling through the metal-framed windows divided the kitchen into squares.

  I paused, and listened. Then I called, “I know you’re here! I want you to come out!”

  You want him to come out? That grim, tall-hatted man?

  “This is private property, and I want you to come out, and come out now!”

  Danny said, “Daddy, is anybody there?”

  “I don’t know,” I told him. “I can’t hear anybody, can you?”

  Danny cupped his hand around his ear, frowning. “I can hear the sea, that’s all.”

  I took two or three steps into the kitchen. Of all the rooms in a house, the kitchen is always the most alive when a family are living in it, and always the deadest when they’re gone. A row of utensils hung on hooks: a slotted spoon, a
potato-masher, a serving-fork. The enamel on their handles was scorched and chipped, which showed how much they must have been used. But now they were cold, clean, untouched. The utensils of memory; not the utensils of love and pleasure and tonight’s supper.

  “If there’s anybody here, you’d better come out,” I warned. “I’m going to call the police, and have you arrested for trespass.”

  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 must have been mad) 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 that led to Bonchurch village, 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 shoulder.

  “Stop,” I said breathlessly. “For Christ’s sake, stop! I’m not going to call the police.”

  She stopped, and bent forward, her hands on her knees, trying to catch her breath.

  “I’m sorry,” she gasped. “I didn’t realize there was anybody here.”

  We stood side by side in the deep shadow of the elms, both panting. Danny came out of the front door of the house and stood watching us, in the sunshine.

  “I’m sorry,” the girl repeated. She swept back her hair with her hand and raised her head. “I really didn’t realize there was anybody here.”

  I looked her up and down. She was probably nineteen or twenty, not much more. She had an oval English face and very wide eyes, halfway between blue and violet. She wore that cheap silver jewelry that students wear: looped earrings and rings with semi-precious stones. She spoke in quite a cultured accent, Received English tainted with the Home Counties: Hampshire or Mid-Sussex, I would have guessed. She was actually very pretty, in an unformed way. Well, unformed to a man of thirty-three, with a seven-year-old son and a smashed-up marriage. She was small, too, which I wasn’t used to: full-figured, under that black Knebworth Rock Concert sweatshirt, but not much more than five-feet-three-and-a-half.