Prey

by Graham Masterton

  “I just hope to God we don’t hear any more of that groaning and moaning tonight,” she said. “Then I really will leave. And I mean you won’t see me for dust.”

  As I reached the turn in the stairs, I saw the pale silvery gleam of the mirror, as pale as a framed memory of somebody’s death. I hesitated, and nearly stumbled in the darkness, and as I stumbled I thought I heard—

  Skrrittchhh—behind the skirting—and then a hurrying scuffle that went along the entire length of the house.

  “Did you hear that?” I asked Liz.

  She stopped at the top of the stairs. I could tell she had reached the landing because she had blotted out the mirror. “No... I didn’t hear anything.”

  “It must be my imagination running wild.”

  “As long as that’s all it is.”

  We groped our way along the corridor. I’d still forgotten to buy myself a bloody torch. There were some candles in the kitchen cabinet downstairs, but like a fool I hadn’t had the presence of mind to light one and bring one up with me. I’d been too worried about the gradual approach of young Mr Billings and his hairy companion, and the little dwarfs from my childhood. I wondered whether my mother ever knew how terrified I was of the lumpish little creatures who ferreted amongst my clothes at night. I wished to hell that I hadn’t remembered them, and that I’d stop thinking about them now.

  Eventually, however, we managed to reach the door of my room, and find our way inside. There was a faint reflected sea-light straining through the curtains, and I could just make out the bed and the dark bulk of the wardrobe.

  “I’ll just go and check on Danny,” I told Liz. She had already crossed her arms, and was lifting her T-shirt over her head, momentarily raising her breasts, then dropping them, with a complicated bounce.

  “Don’t be long,” she said. “And if you hear any more noises, ignore them.”

  I crossed the corridor and peered into the all-swallowing darkness of Danny’s room. I could smell him, and I could hear him breathing, with just a slight stickiness in one nostril. I wondered what he was dreaming about. Crabs, or circuses, or maybe his mother. I felt so much pain for him sometimes but there was nothing more I could do.

  I closed his door and groped my way back. I should have gone to the bathroom and brushed my teeth but I didn’t fancy stumbling around in the dark. Liz was already in bed, naked, waiting for me, and if she hadn’t worried about brushing her teeth then why the hell should I? All the same, I hated the taste of stale Soave.

  I undressed and eased myself under the duvet. Liz cuddled up close and I felt nipples and thighs and wet pubic hair. She kissed me on the forehead, and then on the eyes, and then on the nose. “I can’t see you,” she giggled. “It’s so bloody dark in here.”

  I kissed her back and our teeth clashed. We were both desperately unsettled by what had been happening at Fortyfoot House; we were both tired and we were both a little hysterical. Whether the noises and the lights had been caused by ghosts or by rats or by hidden squatters, they were still frightening; and the worst part about it was that there was nothing we could do about them, except leave. If the police hadn’t been able to find anything, there wasn’t much chance that we would, either.

  So we made love quickly, and fiercely, because we didn’t want to think about anything else for a few thunderous minutes but sex. Liz climbed on top of me again, like she had the previous night, but this time I rolled her over onto her back and mounted her.

  She twined her legs tightly around my waist as I pushed myself into her. I suppose that both of us knew that this wasn’t love; it wasn’t even passion. But we liked each other. I saw something of myself in Liz and she saw something of herself in me. I think in our different ways we were both a warning to each other.

  She reached down between her legs and stretched herself wide apart for me, so that I could thrust deeper and deeper. She began to pant, and her panting aroused me even more. I shoved harder and harder, and the bed began to squeak, squikkety-squikkety-squikkety until I had to slow down and change the position of my knee because the noise was putting me off so much.

  “Here…” she whispered. “Ssshh…”

  She gently pushed me off her, and onto my back again. She kissed me, my lips and my chest and my stomach, and then she took my cock in her mouth and fluently and persistently began to suck it. I could see her head silhouetted against the window, bobbing rhythmically up and down. I could see the curve of her lips over the thick domed shaft of my cock.

  For a moment, she hesitated, and I felt her sharp teeth against my skin. The moment grew longer, the biting grew harder, and for one deranged instant I believed that she was thinking of biting the head off.

  “Liz—” I began, in rising panic; but then I heard her laugh a hollow laugh with her mouth full, and she continued to lick and suck and strum me with the tip of her tongue. Against my will, I felt my muscles tighten, and I climaxed. Liz kept her mouth closed around me all the time, secretly swallowing, allowing me no outward display. When she was finished she sat up and kissed me and her lips were dry.

  “Another time, perhaps,” she whispered, very close. “And definitely another place.”

  We lay side by side in the almost-darkness and she quickly fell asleep, breathing against my bare shoulder. I felt empty and sad and dislocated, as if I had been orphaned by the world; as if everybody in the world shared a secret which they wouldn’t tell me. I heard the sea whispering crossly to itself, and the birds stirring in the guttering. I thought about the photograph of Fortyfoot House hanging downstairs in the hallway, and I said a small prayer that young Mr Billings hadn’t come any closer.

  I decided that it might be a good idea to go down to the Beach Café in the morning and talk to Doris Kemble again. Perhaps she could tell me more about young Mr Billings: something which would explain why he appeared and disappeared so restlessly around the gardens. The spiritual unease of Fortyfoot House seemed to have become such an accepted part of local life in Bonchurch that she might well have forgotten to tell me something important.

  At about two o’clock in the morning, I opened my eyes and the moon had risen. The room was filled with thin, silvery light. Liz was still sleeping heavily against my shoulder. The duvet had slipped and the moonlight made a curving erotic landscape of her bare back and the fullness of her bare bottom. She was like the dunes of the Nefud desert, at night. I listened to the house but the house was unusually silent. No scratchings, no scufflings. No creaking floorboards. Perhaps it had accepted Harry Martin as a sacrifice; and its hunger was temporarily satisfied. At this moment, in the middle of the night, I was prepared to believe almost anything.

  I wished that I could sleep. I was so damned tired. I tried to work out ways in which I could take a temporary job to pay off the estate agents so that I could leave Fortyfoot House without owing them anything. I tried to work out ways of buying myself a new car. Perhaps I could borrow the money from my grandmother. The trouble was, she was 88 and almost blind and her solicitor guarded her assets like the angriest dog in the world. I didn’t have anything left to sell.

  I tried not to think of those little dwarfs, creeping out and creeping in.

  Liz’s suggestion that there could be squatters hiding in the house was far-fetched, but still worth thinking about. There was nobody in the roof-space—Detective-sergeant Miller had attested to that. But there was still the blocked-off area immediately below it; right next to this bedroom—the area which must have once had a window, overlooking the western side of the garden, and the strawberry-beds.

  That area was quite large enough to accommodate three or four people—maybe more. But there was no visible access to it—not from here, inside my bedroom, nor from the roofspace (as far as I could see) and not from outside, either.

  I looked up at the unusual angles of the ceiling that had been created by the blocking-off of that part of my room. The angles weren’t at all symmetrical. The walls seemed to slope more acutely on the north side than
they did on the south, and the west wall—the blocked-off wall—joined both of them at such an irritating and pronounced diagonal that I found it hard to believe that it hadn’t been plastered like that on purpose. These walls were so far out of true that they couldn’t have been constructed accidentally. Somebody had built them this way for a reason: and perhaps it was the same reason that the entire roof-structure of Fortyfoot House had been built in such an awkward, perspective-defying manner. Houses were sometimes designed badly, but not that badly.

  I was still staring at the angles of the ceiling when I became aware that the way they sloped together was more than accidental. It’s a very difficult sensation to describe, but I felt as if I were not only looking at them but beyond them—as if I could see my side of the ceiling and the other side of the ceiling, both at once. I smeared my eyes with my fingers, but when I opened them again, the impression was even clearer. I had the distinct feeling that I was looking through the ceiling into the blocked-off partition.

  At that moment a blurred shape began to appear—bent over to one side, flickering slightly, like the reflection from a black-and-white television seen through somebody else’s curtains. The shape was right in the south-west corner of the room, in the angle where the ceiling slanted together; and it was slightly nearer the ceiling than the floor. It hovered in the same place for minute after minute, while I lay in bed tensed and terrified, wondering what the hell it was going to do next.

  Gradually, the shape became clearer; although I still couldn’t make out what it was. A reflection? A will-o’-the-wisp? I’d heard about gases in old houses, emanating from broken ventilation pipes. In Victorian times, householders had regularly sickened and died from the effects of leaking sewage and coal-gas.

  For one split-second, I thought I saw what the shape actually was. It looked like a bending woman in a white winged cap. I thought I saw her turn her head. I thought I saw eyes. Then I screamed out loud and the shape was sucked into the angle of the wall as if it had been vacuum-cleaned and I was left jumping and shouting and sweating with Liz clinging on to me and saying, “What? What? David, what is it?”

  I wrestled my way out of bed and dragged back the curtains. Then—in the last of the moonlight—I clapped my hands against the ceiling, where the shape had first appeared. I felt nothing but solid, damp wall.

  “David, what’s the matter?” Liz persisted.

  “I saw something. Something came out of the ceiling. It was like a—light, like a ghost. I don’t know. A nun, or a nurse.”

  “David, you were probably dreaming.”

  I slapped the wall in fury and frustration. “I-wasn’t-dreaming-I-was-awake!”

  “Well, all right, then,” Liz soothed me. “You were awake, okay, but it’s gone now, hasn’t it? So come back to bed and calm down.”

  I stormed from one side of the bedroom to the other, slapping at the wall where the apparition had appeared every time I passed it.

  “I can’t calm down! I was awake and I saw it!”

  “David, you’ve had a terrible time ever since you’ve been here… listen, you’re probably hallucinating, that’s all.”

  “I didn’t hallucinate anything! I saw a nun, halfway up the bloody wall!”

  Liz waited patiently, her head bowed, until I had finished ranting and raving. I didn’t really mean to shout at her. I was shouting at myself, at Janie, at Raymond the Bearded Fart, at Harry Martin and Brown Jenkin and everything that had brought me here. I think she knew that, God bless her. In her own way, she was using me, too. Her lovemaking gave her away. It was intensely physically intimate. She would have allowed me to do anything to her; and she would have done anything for me, in return. But she was emotionally remote. Whoever she was making love to, it certainly wasn’t me. More than likely, I was just a stand-in for somebody who had really hurt her. It’s not particularly inspiring, being a sexual understudy, but sometimes you take what you can get.

  Eventually, chilled, I climbed back into bed. Liz immediately lay close to me and put her arm around me.

  “You’re shivering,” she said.

  I couldn’t take my eyes off the angles of the ceiling. They still filled me with dread. “I saw a woman, bending over. I swear it. A nurse, or a nun. She was right there, look, right where I’m pointing.”

  “David, it couldn’t have been.”

  “I’m going to look up that article in the National Geographic,” I told her, emphatically. “I’m going to talk to Doris Kemble, too, down at the cafe.”

  “You’d be better off talking to your bank manager, and borrowing enough money for a new car.”

  I rested my head back on the pillow. I didn’t know why, but my eyes filled with tears, and the tears ran down the side of my head. I kept thinking of that old country-and-western song I’ve Got Tears In My Ears From Lying On My Back And Cryin’ Over You. Liz nuzzled my shoulder and kissed my cheek and tangled her fingers in my hair. But I was too tired and too worried and sex wasn’t the answer. Eventually she sat up and leaned over me, blocking out the last of the moonlight, and gave me a light, dismissive kiss on the forehead.

  “You’re a hopeless case,” she told me.

  “No, I’m not, really,” I said, smearing my eyes with my fingers. “I’m just flat broke and fed up and scared and worried about my son. Apart from that, I’m terrific.”

  She laughed, and kissed me, and I held her in my arms until the moon fell. It was very dark then, intensely dark. I tried to sleep, but I couldn’t take my eyes away from those angles in the ceiling, even though I couldn’t see them.

  Liz slept. But things were shifting in Fortyfoot House, things were moving at an accelerated pace. Bare feet were scampering near-to-silently across the rafters; furry things were running blind and quick through the wallspaces. Young Mr Billings was coming nearer, I was sure of it, accompanied by what—what? And when I woke, and it was sunlight, bald and bright, I thought that I had been wakened by the last echoes of a child’s high scream.

  Liz opened her eyes and looked at me. The morning was warm, and the fringes of the lampshade rippled in the breeze like the legs of some strange ceiling-suspended centipede.

  She kissed my shoulder, then my lips.

  “Do you know something?” she said. “You look like shit.”

  9

  Persecuted Priest

  That morning, Liz ate two Weetabix and gulp-swallowed a large mug of coffee with two sugars in, and went off to work at the Tropical Bird Park. I promised that we would come on the bus to pick her up at five o’clock, and on the doorstep she gave me the chastest of kisses, which Danny regarded from the shadow of the hallway with a mixture of seriousness and suppressed pleasure. I think that he was beginning to come to terms with the fact that his mother and I wouldn’t be getting back together. In fact—in spite of himself—I think he was gradually forgetting what she looked like, and what she felt like; and he liked Liz a lot.

  My God, I thought, as Liz trudged up the driveway. Forgive us our trespasses, and forgive us for being so bloody pig-headed and selfish.

  “I think we’ll start scraping the paint off the windows today,” I told Danny. “We can start with the kitchen, and work our way round.”

  “Can’t I go looking for some more crabs?”

  “I thought you were going to help me work.”

  Danny looked uncomfortable. “Yes… but I’m not very good at scraping.”

  “All right,” I said. “But stay close to the Beach Café. Don’t go wandering off. And don’t go into the sea. You can paddle, but that’s all.”

  He nodded, not even looking at me. Perhaps he wasn’t listening. Or, if he was listening, perhaps he didn’t fully understand what I was saying. When you’re an adult, you assume so much. You assume that you can manage. You assume that you’re attractive. You assume that your children understand you when you speak. For all I knew, Danny had heard nothing but “—Beach Café—one drink off—don’t see—paddle, but that’s all.”

  I wa
tched him run pell-mell down the diagonal lawns, past the fishpond, and out through the back gate. I glimpsed the sun shining from his fresh-washed hair as he ran down the path beside the cottages, with all their geraniums. You don’t often get the chance to love somebody as much as you love your own son; but I did; and I was thankful.

  All morning I thickly brushed the flaking window-frames with acid, jellyish paint-stripper and painstakingly chiseled off limp, crumbling ribbons of ancient paint. There were at least four or five layers underneath the black paint, and I stripped them all, green and cream and peculiar pink, right the way down to the bare gray metal. There was something very therapeutic about doing such a mundane chore, and doing it well. Brush on the stripper, wait for the paint to shrivel, then scrape. By eleven o’clock I had finished most of the main window-frame, and I was ready for a beer and a sandwich.

  I walked down to the beach to find Danny. He must have understood what I had told him, because he was crouching over a rock-pool only yards away from the Beach Café, prodding two crabs with a stick. I decided that I would have to give him a lecture about cruelty to crustaceans. I stepped into the café’s flint-walled garden, and sat down where I could see him, and it wasn’t long before Doris Kemble came out, in her apron and her spectacles.

  “What would you like?”

  “A pint of lager and one of your prawn sandwiches, please. Oh—and a toasted cheese sandwich for Sinbad the Sailor, please. And a Coca-Cola.”

  She wrote down my order on a small Woolworth’s pad. Without raising her eyes, she said, “You’ve been having some trouble, then, up at the house?”

  “Yes,” I said. “You must have heard about Harry Martin.”

  “I heard what Keith Belcher did to your car, too.”

  I made a face. “I tried to stop Harry from searching the attic, but he wouldn’t hear of it. He said that Brown Jenkin had taken his brother; and that gave him the right.”