Prey

by Graham Masterton

  I turned around on the wall and stared up at the roof. “So who’s taking these children, do you think? Not Brown Johnson?”

  “Brown Jenkin,” he corrected me. “That’s it’s name, Brown Jenkin. And—yes—that’s the one who’s doing it. They’ve been telling that story in Bonchurch for years. Frightening their children, like. Eat your carrots or Brown Jenkin will get you, and carry you off. You heard what my Doris said.”

  “Yes,” I nodded. “Something about being carried away where even the clocks couldn’t catch you.”

  “That’s right,” said Harry. “Off in the future, back in the past, who knows? They say there are places where everything’s the same as it is here, only different. Like the Queen’s a blackie and nobody ever discovered how to fly.”

  “Alternative realities,” I said. “Yes—I read about that, too. There was a long article in the Telegraph about it.”

  “Load of old rubbish, I’d say,” Harry remarked. “But them children vanish all right, and nobody ever finds so much as a shoe, nor a footprint, nor a fingernail.”

  Liz came out on to the patio in khaki shorts and a white T-shirt through which the darkness of her nipples showed. “Do you want some more tea?” she called, her hand lifted against the glare of the sun.

  Harry shook his head. Liz came over and sat on the wall beside us. “You haven’t come to catch our rat, have you?” she asked. Her hair was washed and brushed and shining, and she smelled of Laura Ashley perfume.

  “I don’t know about catching it today, but I’ve come to take a look,” said Harry. “I’ve always had a hankering to catch Brown Jenkin. Same as fishermen get a hankering to catch one particular monster pike. Or Captain Ahab had a hankering to catch that Moby Dick.”

  “Your wife made me promise I wouldn’t let you,” I told him.

  “’Course she did. But then you know what women are like. They don’t understand duty.”

  “What duty?” asked Liz.

  “He’s a ratcatcher,” I explained. “If he catches Brown Jenkin—well, that’ll be the climax of his whole career. They’ll never forget him. Not in Bonchurch, anyway.”

  “That’s not it,” Harry contradicted me. “It’s not fame I’m after. Not a bit of it.”

  “Oh,” I said, put out.

  Harry relit his cigarette, with a sharp sucking noise. “The sort of duty I’m talking about is family duty—duty to my brother.”

  We waited, and listened. Harry cleared his throat, and said, “My young brother William disappeared when he was eight years old. We slept in the same room, William and me, and all he did was go to the kitchen for a glass of water. It was one of those nights when there was lights and noises at Fortyfoot House. I could see the lights, see, shining on the clouds, and I could hear the noises too, like growling under the ground.

  “William got up ’cause he was thirsty. The very last I ever saw of him, he was opening the bedroom door in his nightshirt. I can see him now. I can see him clear. Reddy-brown hair, he had, and a skinny little neck. But you know something, I can’t remember his face.”

  “And you never saw him again?” I asked.

  “Never saw him again. Not hide nor hair. But the kitchen door was locked, from the inside; and the front door was locked, from the inside; and only the fanlight in the larder was open, and even a cat couldn’t’ve squeezed through that.”

  “How long ago was that?”

  There was a long, long pause. Then Harry swallowed, and said, “Fifty-six years, next Michaelmas.”

  “And you think that Brown Jenkin took him?”

  “I heard my mother say it, to the vicar. She was sure of it. She was all for going up to Fortyfoot House and tearing it down brick by brick until they found our William. But my father said that she was demented, like, and that Brown Jenkin was no more than a rat, or p’raps no more than a story about a rat, and that it was the Lord who giveth and the Lord who taketh away, not rats. But I knew different.”

  “How was that?” asked Liz, sympathetically. It was obvious Harry was still distressed and agitated by his brother’s disappearance—even though it had happened more than a half-a-century ago.

  “The very next day I found two footprints in the flower-bed, outside the kitchen wall. Footprints like rat’s claws, only bigger, three times bigger, four times bigger. One of them was plonk in the middle of the pansies, but the other one was only half a print, and looked like it came out of the kitchen wall – away from the kitchen wall, d’you see – just like an animal had walked straight out of the wall without even caring that it was there.”

  “Did you show these footprints to your father?”

  “I was going to, but he was out all day with the police, searching for William on the cliffs, and that night it rained all night, and the next morning the footprints were washed away. I couldn’t prove nothing to nobody, and that was when I had to say to myself that I had to forget what had happened, and think no more on Brown Jenkin, whatever Brown Jenkin was, because I might have lost my mind, else, the same way my mother almost did.”

  I finished my tea. “But now you’ve come to look for it?”

  “Thought I might, if you didn’t object.”

  “Of course not.” I didn’t know whether I believed that Brown Jenkin came out at night and stole children through solid walls, but I did believe that there was something very unpleasant and disturbing up in the attic of Fortyfoot House, and the sooner we managed to dislodge it, the better.

  “Well, then,” said Harry, standing up. “Let me go and introduce myself, eh?”

  “I’m afraid the lights don’t work in the attic, and I haven’t got a torch. I meant to buy one yesterday, but I forgot.”

  “That’s all right. There’s one in my bag, along with all the rest of my tackle.”

  He walked back into the house, hefted up his leather bag, and unbuckled its straps. “Got everything you need in here,” he said, rummaging noisily around. “Traps, wires, poisoned bait. Even a damn great mallet. Best way to kill a rat you can think of, a damn great mallet.”

  I said, uncomfortably, “Your wife did say that I shouldn’t ask you to look for Brown Jenkin, and I shouldn’t let you, either.”

  Harry produced a long chrome-plated inspection torch. “You didn’t ask me, my friend; and there’s no question of letting me. You’re not the master here, are you, you’re the decorator, that’s all, and what I want to do, well, I do it. So that lets you out.”

  I glanced at Liz, but all Liz could do was shrug.

  “You don’t have to go up there,” I said. “I’ve got Rentokil coming later.”

  Harry laid a firm hand on my shoulder and looked me straight in the eye. “Rentokil, my friend, is for ants, and cockroaches, and dry-rot. This is proper ratcatcher’s work.” He tapped his forehead. “Psychology, that’s what you need, for a creature like Brown Jenkin. You’ve got to think on your feet, stay one step ahead of him.”

  “Well... if you say so.”

  At that moment Danny came in with his empty cereal-bowl. “What are you going to do with the rat when you’ve caught it?” he asked Harry. “Can you put it in a cage and keep it as a pet?”

  “Not this rat,” said Harry.

  “I was going to shoot it with my water-pistol but Daddy forgot to buy a torch.”

  Harry gave me a sloping, bashed-up smile. “Probably just as well, sonny.”

  Danny went outside to play, and I led Harry, puffing, up to the landing. As his leathery old hands grasped the banister-rail, I saw that the end joints of right index and middle fingers were both missing. Some rat got a bashing with the mallet for that, I bet.

  “What made you decide to come up here?” I asked him.

  He grunted. “That boy of yours.”

  “Danny?”

  “That’s right. After you visited yesterday, I walked around to Bonchurch to take another look at the house—you know, just to remind myself. Haven’t walked round this way for two, three years; maybe more. I stopped outside t
he back gate and saw your boy playing by the fishpond. He had his back to me, like. And just for one second—” He paused, and swallowed, his exaggerated Adam’s-apple going up and down.

  “Just for one second I thought it was my brother William.”

  He didn’t have to explain himself any further. I opened the catch of the attic door, and he switched on his torch. “Be my guest,” I told him. “But for goodness’ sake be careful.”

  Harry sniffed the draft that blew steadily down from the darkness of the attic. “I can’t smell rats,” he said.

  “What do they smell like, as a rule?”

  “Oh, you get to know it. They smell of sour piss and sawdust and something else, something especially rat-like, like death and babies, all mixed together.”

  “Aren’t you going to take your mallet?” I asked him.

  “Not this time. I just want to take a look, this time. I just want to get the measure of what I’m up against.”

  “A sodding great rat the size of a cocker-spaniel, believe me,” I warned him.

  Heavily, he climbed the stairs, probing the darkness with his torch. I followed close behind him, although quite honestly I would have given anything to go back downstairs, and out into the sunshine, and forget that I had ever heard or seen anything. Supposing that girl were still up here? Supposing she were real—abducted and sexually assaulted and murdered? How the hell was I going to explain that to anybody?

  Supposing the local stories were right, and Brown Jenkin was a beast that was capable of carrying off children? All I had to protect me was a wheezing 67-year-old ratcatcher with a torch.

  Coward, I chided myself. But then I thought: too damned right. I’m not ashamed of being frightened.

  Harry reached the top of the attic stairs and leaned on the banisters and looked around, the beam of his torch probing into every corner. I saw a diseased-looking rocking-horse, its yellow-glass eye gleaming, its mane thinned by time and the tugging of children’s hands. I saw a green school trunk, stencilled with the name R.W.J. Wilson, Headmaster’s House. I saw tea-chests crammed with old books. Far below, faintly, I could hear Danny laughing as Liz chased him around the garden.

  “Last night, it was like hell let loose in here,” I told Harry. “Flashing lights, noises—and then that little girl. Or what I thought was that little girl.”

  Harry reached behind him and clasped my hand. I felt his horny fingers, and his missing finger-joints. “You don’t have to make excuses to me, my friend. You know what’s real and you know what aint—just the same way that I know for certain what took away my brother. Some things you’re just sure about, that’s all, no matter what anybody says. Maybe I can’t smell rat, but I can smell Brown Jenkin.”

  “What are you going to do?” I asked him.

  “I’m going to search around,” he said. “Even the cleverest of rats leaves some trace behind.”

  “Well, for God’s sake be careful, that’s all.”

  I waited on the stairs while Harry shuffled and bumped around the attic, lifting dust-sheets and shifting furniture. “No droppings,” he said, after a long while. “Usually, there’s droppings.”

  “Perhaps it isn’t a rat, after all,” I suggested.

  “All vermin leave droppings,” Harry retorted. “Just like all humans leave litter.”

  I suddenly thought of the Ripple bar wrapper I had tossed out of the car window yesterday, and felt guilty.

  Harry bumped around some more. I couldn’t see him now—he was in the furthest recesses of the attic, over my bedroom. Occasionally I saw the beam of the torch cross the sloping ceiling, but that was all.

  “Hold on a minute,” said Harry. “There’s a skylight here, but no sky.”

  I climbed to the top of the stairs so that I could see him. He was standing over my bedroom, and shining his torch up at a small two-paned skylight in the sloping ceiling.

  “I don’t know why that is,” I said. “If you look at the house from the outside, it looks as if that part of the attic was blocked off.”

  Harry thought about that, and sniffed. “So there’s a sort of a space behind here?”

  “That’s right. In between the old roof and the new roof.”

  “Big enough for something to hide?”

  “Well, yes. But not a rat. How could a rat open and close a skylight?”

  Harry shone his torch at his own face. It looked craggy and ghastly, like a death-mask suspended in mid-darkness. “That’s just the question, isn’t it? And here’s another: How could a rat make off with my brother?”

  I shook my head. I wanted him to look around and find Brown Jenkin as quickly as he could. In spite of the draft that blew steadily through it, the attic was crushingly oppressive—more like being buried three levels underground than standing three storeys high.

  Harry poked around, and shifted a few pieces of furniture. “Looks like we’re going to have think again,” he told me. “There’s no sign of a rat up here; nor a squirrel, neither. No sign of nothing.”

  “I definitely saw something,” I insisted. “It was bristly and dark and it pushed right past me.”

  There was a lengthy pause, then Harry sniffed and said, “I believe you. I know some who wouldn’t.”

  He stood for over a minute staring at nothing at all. Then he flicked the beam of his torch back toward the skylight. “Reckon I’ll take a look up here. Maybe this’ll tell us what’s what.”

  “I doubt if it’ll open,” I told him. But all the same, he dragged one of the boxes across, and climbed up on it so that he could reach the skylight’s old-fashioned catch. He had to bang the skylight two or three times with the heel of his hand, but suddenly it jumped open. He raised it as far as it would go, and then fastened it on its rusty window-bar.

  “Smells different in here,” he said, poking his head up through the skylight and flashing his torch-beam this way and that. Although Harry himself obscured most of my view, I could see rough gray breeze-blocks, crudely pointed, which seemed to indicate that the roof had been bricked up in something of a hurry, by somebody who wasn’t much of an expert at bricklaying.

  “The old roof-tiles are still here,” Harry called back. “I can’t for the life of me think why anybody would have wanted to block this off. Don’t seem to serve no purpose.”

  “They bricked up one of the bedroom windows, too.”

  “Well, damned if I know,” said Harry. “Looks like we’re going to have to think again.”

  He was about to step down from the box when, abruptly, he dropped his torch. It bounced on the floor but it didn’t go out. Instead, it shone on the dusty surface of a cheval-mirror, filling one corner of the attic with unearthly reflected light.

  I was just about to go across and pick the torch up for him when he made an extraordinary noise, like somebody tearing a piece of dry cloth. I glanced up, and saw to my horror that his scalp seemed to be caught on something. He was trying to reach up to disentangle himself, but he couldn’t. He swung around and kicked one leg out, and the box on which he was standing toppled over and fell noisily onto the attic floor.

  “Harry!” I shouted, and tried to seize his legs, so that I could support some of his weight.

  He stared at me with his mouth open but he didn’t seem to be able to speak.

  “Harry! What’s wrong?” I asked him. I managed to grasp his left leg, but his right leg was swinging too wildly. “Keep still, try to keep still!”

  Harry’s head was shaken violently from side to side, so that his forehead knocked against the frame of the skylight. I saw bruises, blood. Then I heard that dry-cloth sound again, and Harry’s face suddenly tightened, his eyes slitted and slanting, his nostrils widening, his upper lip rearing upward in a grotesque snarl.

  “Harry!” I screamed at him.

  The skin of his face was dragged up more and more, until he was leering at me Mongol-madly with a monstrous, agonized grin. Again that terrible crackling and tearing, and I suddenly understood what it was. Harry’s
skin was being gradually torn away from his skull. The crackle was the crackle of fat breaking apart and membranes being pulled away from bone; the tearing was the tearing of hair-roots.

  I managed to grab his other leg, and steady him. Then I heaved downwards, trying to pull him away from whatever had taken hold of him. But he screamed so shrilly that I had to let him go. The skin was being wrenched off his head, like the skin being pulled off a raw chicken, and there was nothing I could do to stop it.

  “Liz!” I bellowed. “Liz!” But she was out in the garden and there was no chance of her hearing me. Awkward, panicking, I righted the box on which Harry had been standing, and took his thrashing tobacco-smelling weight in my arms. He was struggling so much that I couldn’t see anything inside the skylight. I couldn’t see what had seized hold of him, and how it was pulling the skin off his head.

  But then he jerked his head forward. Blood dredged over me, sticky and hot, but in the red-matted thicket of his hair, I glimpsed three curved black claws, shining like knives. They had run right through the skin of his scalp, and then twisted his scalp around, and around again, and yet again, so that his skin was being dragged up off his face in a terrible clawed tourniquet.

  “Harry, hold on!” I begged him.

  He stared at me, his eyes bloodshot and piggy. His skin had torn open at the chin, and suddenly his tongue dropped down, behind the loosened skin, and appeared through the bloody opening beneath his lower lip, as if he had two mouths, one above the other. Then, with a viscous slithering sound, his whole face slid upward, like a bloody rubber-glove being peeled off, and I was confronted with a skinless, meat-ragged skull, with lidless eyes that bulged in terror, and teeth that protruded from their blood-welling sockets in the ultimate smile. The living dead, no less; wearing the ghastly smile of intolerable agony; the smile of knowing that the struggle of living will soon be over.

  I wobbled, lost my balance on the box, and had to step awkwardly down. Harry hung from the skylight, still waving his arms and legs, but in a careless, desultory way, like a man who’s too tired to swim properly. I had the feeling that he was simply trying to pump the blood more quickly out of his ravaged head, so that he would bleed to death without suffering much more pain.