Prey

by Graham Masterton

  “What the hell did you do that for?” I demanded.

  “You can call it revenge, if you like,” said Vera Martin, cradling her bosom in her arms.

  “Revenge? What the hell for?”

  “For ’arry,” said the young man, belligerently. “That’s ’oo the ’ell for.”

  “Who’s this?” I asked Vera.

  “Keith Belcher, my Edie’s youngest. It wasn’t his idea, it was mine, but he volunteered to do it.”

  I walked around my car, surveying the damage. I must say that Keith Belcher had done a pretty thorough job. There wasn’t a single square inch of body surface that wasn’t dented. He’d even managed to bend the steering-wheel.

  “Mrs Martin—I didn’t kill your husband. It was a terrible accident, that’s all.”

  “There isn’t any such thing as an accident, up at Fortyfoot House,” Vera spat back at me. “It’s a bad place for bad people, that’s what. You and that rat-thing, you deserve each other. I hope you’re happy together.”

  “Yeah, ’ope you’re fuckin’ ’appy together,” Keith Belcher put in, smacking the haft of the sledgehammer in his open palm, as if he were daring me to take it away from him.

  “Mrs Martin—you don’t understand. I tried to stop him but he wouldn’t take no for an answer.”

  “I begged you,” she said, and suddenly her eyes filled with tears. “I begged you and I begged you. Don’t let him go looking for that rat-thing, that’s what I said. Don’t let him even if he says he’s got to. And now look. He’s dead, all because of you, and God knows what terrible thing it was that happened to him because the hospital wouldn’t even let me look at him.”

  I kicked one my flat tires. “Well…” I said. “It looks as if you’ve got what you came for.”

  “Just be thankful it was only your motor, and not your ’ead,” put in Keith.

  “I’m thankful, believe me.”

  I watched them walk away up the drive. The Rentokil youth had been standing by his van all this time, and he gave me a waggish nod of his head and a friendly grin. “Hope you know a good body-shop, mate,” he said, and climbed into his van, and drove off. I felt like throwing a brick after him.

  Liz came out, and stood beside me. “What are you going to do now?” she asked.

  “There’s nothing else I can do. Call a garage and see what if they can fix it.”

  “Are you still going to leave?”

  “As soon as I can. But it can’t be today, can it? Look at the state of this bodywork. And look—he’s even smashed all the instruments.”

  “Aren’t you going to call the police?”

  I shook my head. “She’s just lost her husband. I don’t want to give her any more grief than she’s got already.”

  “But your car? What about the insurance?”

  I shrugged. I didn’t like to tell her that I wasn’t insured. “I’ll just say that I rolled it over, nobody else involved.”

  Liz glanced back at Fortyfoot House. “So,” she said, “it looks like another night in Groaning Grange.”

  “You don’t have to stay if you don’t want to.”

  “Oh,” she said, reflectively. “I think I’ll stay. You and me have got a little bit of unfinished business, don’t you think?”

  I looked up at the house, too. Perhaps she was right about unfinished business, and I didn’t only mean making love. Perhaps it wasn’t an accident that Danny and I had come here to Fortyfoot House. Perhaps we had always been meant to.

  Perhaps this was the time when Danny and I had to decide what we were, and what kind of life we were going to lead; and perhaps this was also the time when all those strange figures who appeared and disappeared within the walls and gardens of Fortyfoot House had to decide which reality they belonged to.

  I said, “It might be dangerous to stay.”

  But she didn’t seem to hear me. She turned away and stared out over the derelict stables, overgrown with morning glory; and her profile against the garden was clear and perfect, with the light curving around her slightly-parted lower lip. I felt that I was very close to her; yet very remote—as if she held all of my life and all of my secrets in her silver-plated heart.

  Danny appeared in the doorway with an empty bucket. “I pulled all the crabs’ legs off and threw them in the sea,” he announced.

  “Oh, Danny!” I complained. “That’s disgusting! And it’s cruel, too!”

  “The fishing man told me that crabs eat anything, even when it’s alive, so good riddance. The fishing man said that if you sleep on the beach too long, the crabs will start to eat your feet and your ears and all your soft bits. They always eat the soft bits first.”

  “Go and wash your hands for lunch,” I told him.

  “I thought we were going,” he said, but he suddenly caught sight of the car, and his mouth dropped open and his eyes went round.

  “What happened to the car?” he asked, in awe.

  “It had an argument with a sledgehammer,” I said, “and that’s why we’re staying.”

  8

  Nurse or Nun

  When it was almost too dark for him to see, a huge man like Baloo the Bear in greasy brown overalls came round to look at my car. He stood with his hands in his pockets staring at it and sniffing, and then at last he said, “Give you thirty quid for scrap.”

  “I don’t want thirty quid, I want it to run, that’s all. It doesn’t have to look like new. I don’t mind the dents. But if you can fix the tires and the windows and the steering-wheel. Don’t worry about the rev-counter, but I have to have a speedometer.”

  He shook his head from side to side as if he had water in his ear. “Not worth it, mate. Not worth the trouble. You’d be better off with a new one. It’s going to cost you three hundred quid minimum, and that’s just for parts.”

  “Oh, shit,” I said.

  He gave one of my flat tires a kick. “I’ve got a ’78 Ford Cortina down at the garage you could have for three hundred. It’s a bit rough, but it’s taxed, and it goes.”

  “I don’t know. I haven’t got three hundred, not at the moment.”

  The huge man shrugged. “In that case, mate, can’t help you.”

  He drove off in his pick-up truck with a grinding of gears and a cloud of filthy diesel. I stood for a while in the twilight, listening to the trees and the furtive flickering of bats. Then I walked back into the house where Liz was waiting for me in the kitchen. She was cooking a chicken casserole that smelled delicious; but I wasn’t too sure that I was hungry. I kept listening for scratchings and scufflings, or for distant booming noises and voices that didn’t sound like human voices at all. I kept frightening myself by catching sight of my white reflection in the uncurtained windows, or in the framed photographs in the hallway.

  Danny was kneeling on one of the kitchen chairs drawing a picture with crayon. I leaned over him and took a look at it. It was a thin girl in a white nightgown, with thin red ribbons dangling from her hair, and lime-green cheeks. Sweet Emmeline.

  ‘“Come and play with us,”’ Danny mimicked, in a high-pitched, girlish voice. ‘“There are ever so many of us, and we can have such sport.’”

  “Danny,” I warned him. “Don’t.”

  He looked up at me with eyes that were wide and unfocused and strangely glistening, almost as if he had been crying. Then, after a long silent moment, he returned to his drawing. I watched him with a feeling of helplessness, as if he had somehow gone beyond my control.

  Liz, clattering the casserole dish back into the oven, said, “Well?” in a wifely tone of voice.

  “Well, what?” I said.

  “Well, what can he do with the car?”

  “Oh, the car. Nothing for less than three hundred pounds, probably more. He said I’d be better off buying a new one.”

  “So what are you going to do?”

  “What can I do? Keep on working here until I can afford a new one, that’s all.”

  “I still think you should have told the police.
That Burper or whatever his name was should be locked up.”

  “Belcher,” I corrected her. I went to the fridge and took out a large bottle of cold Soave, and poured us two glasses. “Perhaps you’re right. But that would have caused me some very slight difficulties. Such as why was the road fund license out of date, and why wasn’t the car insured?”

  “You weren’t insured?” Liz said, incredulously.

  “I couldn’t afford it. Janie cleared out the building society account, everything.”

  “What a cow.”

  “Yes, what a cow. But then I probably deserved it. I didn’t treat her very well.”

  Liz swallowed wine and looked at me with eyes that were older than her years. “You didn’t hit her?”

  “No. I just ignored her. I think that ignoring somebody is worse than hitting them, sometimes.”

  “Perhaps you should have hit her.”

  I sat down. “Don’t ask me. Perhaps I didn’t really love her at all. When it comes down to it, perhaps I don’t even know what love is. You know, proper love. The kind you’d die for.”

  “I don’t think many people do,” said Liz. She smiled, and then she said, “When I was about nine, I had a goldfish. I really loved that goldfish. His name was Billiam. I told my mother that if Billiam died, I was going to kill myself, too. So when he really did die, my mother didn’t tell me. She said that he had run away. Like an idiot, I believed her. I told all my schoolfriends there was 10p reward for finding him. They were even bigger idiots, they went to look for him.”

  “What’s that supposed to prove?” I wanted to know. “That you shouldn’t fall in love with anything—not even a goldfish?”

  She shrugged. “I don’t know.” Then she laughed.

  At that moment, Danny came back into the kitchen. I hadn’t even noticed that he had gone. He was carrying his drawing-book under his arm and he was frowning.

  “Where’s that man gone?” he demanded, quite crossly.

  “You mean the garage man?”

  “No, the man in the picture.”

  “What picture?”

  “Out there. I’m drawing a picture of Sweet Emmeline and the man in the chimney hat and I went to look at the picture of the man in the chimney hat because I wanted to draw him properly but he’s gone.”

  I sat up. I felt that dreadful tingling in my wrists again, and down my back. The flat bell-metal tingling of apprehension. It’s started again… the house is stirring… shadows are flickering… voices are murmuring softly in upstairs rooms. For some reason a forgotten couplet surfaced in my mind, “The walls are hung with velvet that is black and soft as sin... And little dwarfs creep out of it and little dwarfs creep in.”

  That was supposed to have described King Philip’s closet at Lepanto, but when I was a boy I had imagined that it was describing what happened to my own wardrobe after dark, and it had always terrified me. Small people, furtive and evil, were burrowing amongst my clothes. Every night I made doubly certain that my wardrobe door was closed and locked, and that my bedroom chair was propped against it. Even then I could hear the little dwarfs stirring inside, making the wire coat-hangers softly, softly jingle.

  I thought that I had long forgotten the feeling of helpless dread with which those words had soaked me from head to toe, but when Danny said, “He’s gone” it all came back to me, and for a moment I could hardly speak.

  “How can he be gone?” I asked, at last, in a dry, tongue-swollen voice.

  “He’s not in the picture any more.”

  I followed him out into the hallway and switched on the light. At the far end of the hallway hung “Fortyfoot House, 1888.” I walked up to it, with Liz close behind me, and bent down to stare at it.

  Danny was right. Young Mr Billings was no longer there. His shadow was still there, lying like a discarded cloak across the rose-bed, but of the man himself there didn’t seem to be any sign at all.

  “This is a hoax,” I declared. “People don’t disappear out of photographs. It’s simply not possible.”

  “Let’s have a look at it in a better light,” suggested Liz, and lifted it off the wall. She carried it back into the kitchen and switched on the main overhead lamp. We gathered around it and stared hard at the place where young Mr Billings had once been standing. The glass covering the photograph was still dusty and unmarked with fingerprints, except for Liz’s and mine, and when I turned the frame over on to its face, there was no indication that the brown-paper tape had been slit open or tampered with in any way. It still bore the framer’s engraved label Rickwood & Sons, Picture Framers & Restorers, Ventnor, Isle of Wight.

  I turned the picture face-up again. We studied it some more; and then Danny suddenly said, “Look—what’s that?”

  Children’s eyes are always sharper. They can read shapes and signs and omens better than any adult. I peered at the place in the photograph where Danny’s chubby bitten finger was pointing, and there it was. Just visible over the slope in the lawns, where they angled down toward the back garden gate and the sea, the tilted black rectangle of a stovepipe hat.

  Young Mr Billings was still in the photograph, but he had taken a walk somewhere.

  Liz shook her tightly-scarfed head. “I don’t believe it. It must be a trick. I bet there are more photographs of the same scene, and somebody’s been shifting them around.”

  “Who?” I asked. “I mean, who? And, more to the point, why?”

  “Squatters,” said Liz. “I told you it was probably squatters, or homeless kids living in the attic. They probably did Harry Martin in, too.”

  “Ssh,” I cautioned her, nodding toward Danny. Luckily, he didn’t seem to know what “did him in” meant.

  “You mean they’re trying to frighten us out of the house?” I asked her. “Just like one of those Bette Davis movies where the children are trying to drive her mad so that they can inherit everything?”

  “Well, it’s a possibility, isn’t it? It’s more likely than ghosts. I mean, David, I’ve thought about it and I’ve thought about it and how could it be ghosts? Ghosts just don’t exist.”

  “What about the noises and the lights and everything?”

  “Tapes? Strobe lights?”

  “All right, supposing it is all a hoax—where are they, these squatters? The police went through the whole house, didn’t they? Even the roofspace.”

  “They didn’t search the bricked-up bit next to your bedroom.”

  “The simple reason for that is that nobody can get in there. Our out of there, for that matter.”

  “Perhaps there’s a secret passage.”

  “Oh come on, Liz! There isn’t enough space for a secret passage—and even if there was, where could it possibly come from, and where could it go to?”

  She stood up straight. “So you’re really convinced that it’s ghosts?”

  “I don’t know. Perhaps it’s not ghosts in the sense of people walking up and down with sheets over their heads. But I’m sure I’m right about this time thing. Somebody once said that ghosts weren’t really ghosts, but people you could vaguely see when today and yesterday kind of overlap. That could make some kind of sense, couldn’t it?”

  Liz picked up the photograph again. “If that’s sense, I’d hate to hear you talk nonsense. I still think somebody’s trying to scare us off. Somebody human, I mean, not a ghost. It’s all too much like The Innocents.”

  *

  After Danny had gone to bed we finished most of the wine and sprawled on the sofa listening to Stolen Moments by John Hiatt. I found a certain empathy in the song about the seven little Indians living in the brick house on Central Avenue, where in spite of daddy’s brave stories about how things were going to turn out for the better “it always felt like something was closing in for the kill.”

  About eleven o’clock, with a headache and a mouth tasting of sour Soave, I eased myself up and said, “I’m going to bed. Are you coming?”

  “Are you asking me to join you?”

  I looke
d down at her. I smiled. I said, “Yes.” I even managed to stop myself adding, “If you like.”

  I went through to the kitchen to tighten the dripping taps and switch off the lights. The photograph of Fortyfoot House, 1888 was still lying face-down on the table. I picked it up just before I switched off the lights, and tucked it under my arm, intending to hang it back up in the hallway on my way up to bed—but then, instantly, I switched the lights back on again, and held the photograph up in front of me, and stared at it with growing alarm.

  Young Mr Billing’s head had appeared over the top of the rise, as if he were coming closer. And next to him, still mostly hidden by the lawn, was a small dark shape with two projections that could have been pointed ears.

  I squeezed my eyes tightly shut, and then opened them again, just to be sure that I wasn’t hallucinating, or suffering from DTs. But the photograph remained unchanged. The rose garden, with young Mr Billings’ detached shadow still draped across it, the sundial, the sloping lawn. And the clearly-distinguishable face of the master of the house, returning from a walk somewhere down by the sea, in the company of what?

  Liz called, “Are you coming, or are you going to spend all night in the kitchen? The light’s gone on the landing.”

  “I’m coming,” I said thoughtfully. I switched off the kitchen light, walked through to the hallway, and hung the photograph back on its accustomed hook. I don’t know why, but I felt that was probably the safest thing to do. Or—more accurately, I felt that it was what young Mr Billings would have preferred—and I had no desire to upset young Mr Billings, especially over something so trivial as leaving him facedown in the kitchen.

  Christ almighty, I thought to myself. I’m losing it. I’m going mad. I’m hanging up a photograph because I think the people in it would prefer it that way?

  Liz leaned over the stairs, her full breasts squashed against the banister-rail. “Come on, then. We can have a bath in the morning.”

  I switched off the hallway light and the stairs were totally dark. And little dwarfs creep out and little dwarfs creep in. I felt my way up the stairs by keeping my right hand pressed flat against the wall, and nudging the risers with my shins. I could hear Liz up ahead of me, patting the banister rail to make sure she could feel where she was going.