Prey

by Graham Masterton

  Danny was still “flying” around the far end of the graveyard, arms wide. But then he began to circle toward the little girl, and as he caught sight of her, he lowered his arms, and stopped running, and I could see that they were talking to each other.

  “She doesn’t look very healthy, does she?” Liz remarked.

  I put down my beer-can on the wall, and stood up. Danny and the little girl were just too far away for me to be able to see their faces clearly, or to hear what they were saying. But suddenly I felt an irrational panic soak over me, as if I’d spilled my beer down the front of my shirt. I called, “Danny!” and started to walk across the grass toward the chapel.

  Danny turned and looked at me, but then he turned back and continued talking to the little girl. “Danny!” I shouted again, and my pace quickened, and I started to jog.

  “Danny, come here!”

  I passed the sundial and started down the slope toward the brook. Behind me, I heard Liz calling, but the wind was fluffing across my ears and my breath was jostling and at first I couldn’t make out what she was saying.

  It was only when I reached the brook and looked up at the chapel again that I realized what she must have been shouting about. A man’s arm with a white cuff and a black sleeve had appeared between the chapel doors, and his hand was now resting on the little girl’s shoulder. The little girl turned her head and looked up, and it appeared as if she were saying something, although I couldn’t make out what. Danny retreated two steps, then three, then he was backing quickly away, almost tripping over one of the gravemarkers in his haste to get away.

  I splashed through the shock-cold brook. The reeds whipped at my legs. Then I was climbing the moss-covered wall and dropping down into the long grass of the graveyard.

  “Danny!” I shouted.

  He was standing a little way away, one hand pressed against one of the gravestones. He turned and looked at me with a serious face. “I’m over here, daddy.” The chapel doors were wedged shut, as always; but the little girl had gone.

  I walked up to Danny and laid my hand on his shoulder. It was unusually still and windless within the graveyard walls. Crickets scratched; limestone blue butterflies danced around the crosses.

  “Who was that you were talking to?” I asked Danny.

  “Sweet Emmeline.”

  “Sweet Emmeline? That’s a funny name.” I looked around. Liz was jogging toward us, down the grassy slope. “Who was that man?”

  “He was the same man we saw before. He said, ‘Come on, Sweet Emmeline, it’s time to go now,’ and that was all. He had his hat on.”

  Oh God, not young Mr Billings.

  “You mean that black hat? That tall black hat?”

  “That’s right,” said Danny, steepling his hands over his head. “A big black hat, like a chimney.”

  “A big black hat like a chimney. I see.”

  “Sweet Emmeline asked if I was coming to play with them.”

  “With them? Did she say who they were?”

  Danny seemed bored with this questioning. Yet he kept glancing quickly at the chapel doors, as if he were afraid of what might suddenly appear out of them. The door flew open, in he ran—the great, long, red-legged scissor-man. He seemed puzzled and unsure (just as I was puzzled and unsure) how Sweet Emmeline could have walked so easily through them, when he and I had only been able to gain access to the chapel by my strenuously forcing them apart with my shoulder.

  “Does she live in the village?” I asked Danny.

  “She didn’t tell me where she lived.”

  “And she didn’t tell you who her friends were?”

  He shook his head.

  “And she didn’t tell you who the man was—the man who said it was time for her to go?”

  Again, a shake of the head. But then he looked up at me and there were tears of incomprehension and alarm glistening in his eyes.

  “She had worms in her hair. When she turned round, she had all these red worms in her hair.”

  Oh, Christ, I thought. Oh, Christ, what’s going on?

  Liz came through the graveyard gate. I picked up Danny and hugged him tight and said, “Sweet Emmeline was probably a gypsy, you know? They don’t wash very well.”

  Danny held on to me and said nothing. Liz came up and looked around, and said, “Where did they go?”

  I shook my head, trying to tell her to keep quiet, but she didn’t understand. She walked right up to the chapel doors and tried to prise them apart. “She couldn’t have squeezed through here, surely?”

  “Danny and I managed to squeeze our way, through, didn’t we, Danny?” I asked him. I felt his sharp little chin against my shoulder as he nodded.

  “Well… let’s go and see if she’s there,” Liz suggested.

  Again, I tried to mouth, “No,” but Danny twisted himself upright and said, “Yes, let’s.” His eyelashes were stuck together with wet.

  “Are you sure?” I asked him. He nodded again, and wiped his eyes with his fingers.

  I lowered Danny gently into the feathery grass, and approached the chapel doors. Liz held Danny’s hand and smiled at him. She seemed to have a calming effect on him. She had a calming effect on me, too—because she was friendly, because she was pretty, because life is always incomplete without a woman around. I knew right then, as I leaned my shoulder against the chapel door, that I didn’t need sex with her, not particularly; but that I did need her femininity; and that Danny needed it, too.

  “Heave!” said Liz, and I heaved. The right-hand door creaked inward—and, while I held it open, Liz and Danny pushed their way through the gap. I followed them, grazing my arm on a nail. A thin bead-necklace of dark red blood.

  Inside, the chapel was deserted, a sea of gray, smashed roof-slates. We crunched around but there was no sign of Sweet Emmeline, nor of young Mr Billings. How could there be? Young Mr Billings had been dead for over a century, and from Danny’s description of Sweet Emmeline, it sounded as if she were dead, too. Very dead. Dead, and decayed, her hair crowded with meat-worms.

  Liz came up to me and looked at me open-faced. “There’s something going on here, isn’t there? Something really, really strange.”

  I looked up. A British Airways 737 was thundering across the morning sky, full of package-tourists on their way to Malaga or Skiathos or Crete. I looked down, at the roofless chapel and the empty Gothic windows and the rustling ivy, and it was hard to tell which time I was in.

  “Yes,” I said. I watched Danny stamping and jumping around the slates. “I don’t know what it is, but it’s really strange. The whole house is really strange. It even looks strange, haven’t you noticed? It keeps changing shape.”

  Liz lowered her eyes. Her skin had the priceless luminosity of youth, sprinkled with just a few freckles, like cinnamon. “Would you be upset if I said that I wanted to leave?”

  “You want the truth?”

  “Of course I do.”

  “Then, yes, I’d be upset.”

  Liz’s eyes filmed over, as if she were remembering another occasion, such as this. Or perhaps dozens of occasions, such as this. She was one of those girls that no one man would ever own. She was one of those girls who would die, nodding and lonely, hank-haired, hot-water-bottled, in a wallpapered rest-home somewhere. Shit, how I hated to think about that. But I had myself to look after, and Danny, and I couldn’t be responsible for everything and everybody; especially strays like Liz, and the dead, like young Mr Billings, and Sweet Emmeline, and Harry Martin.

  God, how Harry Martin must have suffered. Danny crackled the slates and the crackling sounded like fat, torn from bone. Crackle—crack—creeakk—crackle.

  “But...” I said, “if you really want to go.”

  She hesitated for a long time. Then she said, “No, no. I’ll stay. I can’t spend my life backing out of everything, just because it suits me.”

  “Listen, I don’t want you to stay here on sufferance. Or out of pity. Harry Martin had all of his face torn off, so there’s
something dangerous up in the attic, whether it’s real or imaginary or what. So don’t stay because you feel sorry for me. The world is full of single men bringing up seven-year-old boys.”

  “I want to stay,” she insisted.

  “No, you don’t, you’re just saying that. Go! You’d be better off going!”

  “Look, just because I got into bed with you last night—”

  “That’s nothing to do with it! I swear! We were both fed up, we were both tired. We were both a little drunk.”

  “Well, I liked it,” she said, adamantly. “I liked it, and I want some more, and that’s why I’m going to stay.”

  In spite of everything that had happened, in spite of the horrors of Harry Martin, I shook my head and I started to laugh. What the hell do people argue about, when it really comes down to it? Love, lust, insecurity, frustration and fear. My old friend Chris Pert once said that if a man and a woman can share the same taste in TV comedies and the same Chinese take-aways, then they’ve got a relationship born in heaven.

  Danny said, “Look, daddy. Blood.”

  I stopped laughing abruptly. Danny was standing on the other side of the chapel, in front of the mural of the pre-Raphaelite woman with the red bushy hair. I trudged quickly across the broken slates and stood beside him, and Liz followed me.

  The woman was smiling a louche, eccentric smile—elated, erotic, ever so slightly mad. Her eyes seemed brighter than before. But it was the rat-thing that she wore like a stole around her shoulders that frightened me. Its eyes were mischievous and triumphant and uncontrolled, and out of its jaws ran a long thin stream of rusty blood.

  Cautiously, I touched the blood with my fingertip.

  “Urgh,” said Liz, wrinkling up her nose.

  I showed her my finger. “It’s not wet. It’s not even blood. It’s paint, that’s all. Dry paint.”

  “But it wasn’t here before,” said Danny.

  “No,” I admitted. “It wasn’t. But perhaps some kids painted it on for a joke.”

  Liz couldn’t take her eyes away from the pre-Raphaelite woman in the painting. “Some joke,” she said. “Who’s this supposed to be?”

  “I don’t know, we only found it yesterday. It must have been covered in ivy for donkey’s years.”

  Liz approached the mural more closely. “What an evil-looking woman,” she whispered.

  I glanced at her. “What makes you say that?”

  “I don’t know. Look at her, she’s so evil! And look at that horrible ratty thing around her shoulders!”

  We looked at the painting and walked in circles on the broken slates and somehow we didn’t know what to do next. We had found ourselves unnervingly threatened by some kind of strange other-worldly phenomenon that was no concern of ours at all. I knew then, as I paced crack-snap-crunch around the slates, that the very best thing for us to do was pack and leave and let the estate agents take me to the small-claims court for all the money that they had already advanced me. The Tarrants had obviously realized that Fortyfoot House was haunted or cursed or that something was wrong with it. They shouldn’t have asked me to renovate it without first warning me that people had disappeared here; that people had gone mad here; and that people were very likely to die here.

  Sod them, I thought. I’m going.

  It was then that Danny piped up, “She’s there, daddy! She’s there! Sweet Emmeline, she’s there!”

  He was standing by the Gothic window at the front of the chapel, and pointing out across the garden. I climbed noisily over the slates and stood beside him.

  He was right. The little girl in the long white dress was gliding across the garden, close to the sundial, in that neatly-mown circle that Lewis Carroll had called “the wabe.”

  “’Twas brillig, and the slithy toves, did gyre and gimble in the wabe…”

  As she approached the house, the kitchen door swung promptly open of its own accord. It was too far away to see clearly, but as Sweet Emmeline came closer, I could have sworn that I glimpsed something dark and hairy rush from the open door, and seize her, and pull her quickly inside. Perhaps I was wrong. Perhaps it was nothing more than Sweet Emmeline’s own shadow. But Danny stood and stared through that window aghast and I knew that he had seen more than anybody of seven ever ought to see.

  “That’s it,” I said, turning round to Liz. “We’re going. I’m sorry. I’m really sorry. But I don’t know what’s going on here, and I don’t want to know. Do you think you can find somewhere else to stay?”

  “I suppose so. I’ll just have to ask around. Where are you going to go?”

  “Back to Brighton, I suppose. I’ve got some friends who can put us up for a while. I’ll give you my address.”

  “I thought that detective didn’t want you to leave the island.”

  “Too bad, I’m going anyway. Do you want a lift anywhere? How long will it take you to pack?”

  We left the graveyard, leaving the gate open behind us. We crossed the stream, and walked back up toward the house. The clouds were thickening, and as their shadows crossed its roof-peaks and dormer windows, the house looked almost as if it were frowning. I could feel my heart beating with stress as I approached it. It gave off such an atmosphere of malevolence that I found it difficult to think rationally about it. All I wanted to do was throw our clothes back into our suitcases, jump into the car, and put as many miles between us and Fortyfoot House as I could.

  Danny hesitated, and looked down at the sea. “I liked this seaside,” he said, plaintively.

  I laid my hand on his shoulder. “I know. I did, too. But we’re going to have to find somewhere else. I don’t like all of these noises, and I don’t like girls with worms in their hair.”

  “What happened to the ratcatcher man?” asked Danny.

  “He got hurt, up in the attic. That’s another reason I want to leave. I don’t want you or me or Liz to get hurt.”

  “Can I take my crabs?” asked Danny. He had half-a-dozen little green crabs in a bucket outside the kitchen door.

  “I’m sorry, no. We’re going to have to stay with Mike and Yolanda. There won’t be room for crabs. Why don’t you take them down to the beach and have a race with them? Which one can reach the sea first?”

  “Can’t I take just two?”

  “No, they’ll mate, and then you’ll have thousands of them.”

  “Just one, then?”

  “No, it’ll be lonely.”

  Reluctantly, Danny picked up the bucket and began to walk down to the sea with it. I preferred to have him out of the way while we packed. I’d had to do so much packing lately, it was becoming one of the regular rituals of my defeated life. Once you start packing, you never stop.

  In the kitchen, Liz took hold of my hand. “Well… there goes our idyllic summer together,” she said, with a sad smile.

  “I’m sorry, yes, it does. But I can’t risk Danny getting hurt, or you getting hurt, or even worse.”

  She looked around. “What do you think’s wrong with this house?”

  “I don’t really know. I don’t think I really want to find out—not now.”

  “Perhaps you ought to talk to a priest, and have it exorcized.”

  “I don’t think that would do any good. I get the feeling this whole house was deliberately built to be what it is. Not quite here and not quite anywhere else.”

  Liz said, “Do you want another beer while we pack?”

  I nodded.

  “I could have loved you, you know,” she said, ingenuously. “Another time, another place.”

  I gave her a wry look. “Especially another place.”

  We were pouring out our beer when the doorbell rang and both of us jumped. “Jesus, that frightened the life out of me!” Liz gasped.

  “I don’t think Brown Jenkin or Mr Stovepipe Hat would bother to ring the doorbell,” I said; and went to answer it.

  It was the Rentokil man from Ryde. A bullet-headed youth with a prickly crewcut and earrings, in a shiny blue nylon overall a
nd Dr Marten’s boots. “Mr Walker? Rentokil. Come about your rat.”

  “Oh, God, I forgot. I’m sorry. There’s been a problem.”

  “Oh, yeah?” the youth said, unimpressed.

  “The rat—well, you won’t be able to do anything about it today. There’s been an accident in the house. The police were here.”

  “Oh, yeah? Well, you know there’s a call-out charge, whatever.”

  “All right, just send me the bill.”

  “You’ll have to sign here, then.” He came into the hallway and produced a docket to show that he had paid me a visit. He gave me a biro with a chewed cap and I signed my name.

  “What was this accident, then?” he asked, tearing off the top copy of the docket and folding it up. “Something to do with your car?”

  I frowned at him. “My car? No, it was nothing to do with my car.”

  “Oh,” he said. “Just wondered, that’s all, seeing it all smashed up like that.”

  “What do you mean, smashed up?”

  “That Audi, out in the front.”

  I didn’t know what the hell he was talking about. “Yes,” I said, “that’s my car. I mean, it’s not in brilliant condition—”

  He laughed, a short staccato football-hooligan laugh. “You can say that again.”

  I pushed past him and stepped out through the front door. I couldn’t believe what I saw. My car was dented all over, and all the windows were broken. The tires were flat, the headlights smashed in, the front bumper knocked off. Not far away—obviously waiting for me to come out—stood Vera Martin, Harry Martin’s widow, in a black jumper and a plain gray dress, and next to her stood a short, thick-necked young man with black greasy hair and a green tweed jacket and a large sledgehammer.

  At first I was amazed that I hadn’t heard him, but then I realized that it was a long way down to the chapel, and the wind was coming off the sea, carrying the sound of the surf with it, and even if I had heard anything I wouldn’t have imagined for a moment that somebody was bashing my car to bits.

  I walked up to my car and picked up the front bumper. Then I dropped it again. There was no point in trying to fix it: the car was a write-off.