Doris Kemble visibly shuddered; and sat down opposite me, as if she had suddenly lost the ability to stand.
“You haven’t seen Brown Jenkin?”
“I don’t know, I think I may have done,” I told her, cautiously. “I’ve seen some kind of a rat, for certain.”
“Big—a very big rat—with a human face, and human hands?”
“Doris,” I said, taking hold of her hand. “There is no rat in the world that looks like that.”
“Brown Jenkin isn’t a rat. Not what you’d call a rat.”
“What would you call him, then?” I asked. Then I turned my head away from her, and shouted, “Danny! Don’t be too long! Lunchtime!”
Danny stood up, a small skinny figure silhouetted by the glittering sunlight that sparkled from the sand, and the rockpools, and the waves, and the sky.
“If I was you,” said Doris Kemble, with the same sunlight shining on the specks of dust on the lenses of her spectacles, “if I was you—I’d take that boy, that’s what I’d do, and I’d leave that house, and I’d let those that know how to deal with ghosts and whatnot take charge of it, you know, priests and such; and burn that house down and bless what’s left of it. Because it’s no good, that’s what; and I agree with Vera Martin for smashing up your car, I’m sorry to say, because you shouldn’t have let Harry go looking for Brown Jenkin, never.”
It took a supreme effort for me not to lose my temper; and to tell her what a silly old busybody she was; but I knew that she would be much more helpful if I was tolerant, and contrite.
“I suppose you’re right,” I said, watching Danny climb up the rocks to the promenade. “I shouldn’t have allowed Harry into the house.”
“He always said that Brown Jenkin took his brother,” said Doris, shaking her head. “He said it so often that Vera forbid him, in the end. ‘You say that just once more,’ that’s what she said, ‘and I’m walking out of that door and never coming back.’”
“Doris,” I insisted, “it wasn’t my fault. Wild horses couldn’t have stopped him.”
“Well...” she said, “it’s too late now, isn’t it? Poor Harry’s dead and gone, and that’s an end to it. All the carping in the world won’t bring him back.”
I waited for a while; and then I said, “If everybody in Bonchurch has always been so worried about Brown Jenkin... why didn’t they do something about it before?”
Doris Kemble smiled bitterly. “You can’t do much to catch a creature that isn’t always there.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Well, let me put it this way. Could you go to the station this lunchtime, and catch yesterday’s train?”
“Of course not.”
“Could you go to the station this lunchtime, and catch tomorrow’s train?”
“No.”
“That’s why you can’t catch Brown Jenkin. He was and he will be, but he very seldom is.”
“Doris…” I asked her. “Can you tell me something about young Mr Billings?”
“What?” she asked, aggressively, lifting her withered neck.
“You said that your mother knew a lot about the Billings.”
“Well, of course. I told she used to clean up at Fortyfoot House, and what she didn’t know about the Billings wasn’t worth knowing.”
“Did she ever mention Brown Jenkin?”
“Not often, she didn’t like to. Everybody in Bonchurch knows about Brown Jenkin. Some say it’s true, some say it’s rubbish. There’s a saying around here when a fellow’s had too much drink—‘he’s seen Brown Jenkin.’ You know, instead of pink elephants.”
“And what do you think?”
Doris took off her spectacles. Her eyes looked tired and filmed-over, and her cheeks were wrinkled like fine tissue-paper. “I never saw Brown Jenkin myself; but some of my friends said they did, when I was young. Then there was Helen Oakes, who was my best friend then. She disappeared one day and nobody knew where she went. They blamed her father, and arrested him twice, but nobody could prove nothing, so in the end they had to let him go. It ruined him, though. He had to sell up his shop and leave, and I heard that he hanged himself, just after the war.”
“But what about young Mr Billings?” I asked her.
She paused, and thought, but then she shook her head. “It’s no good telling stories about the long-dead, is it? Specially second- or third-hand stories. No good at all.”
“I think it might be,” I told her. “I think that what’s been happening up at Fortyfoot House—well, if we could understand what happened in the past—perhaps we’d be able to understand what’s happening today.”
Doris Kemble replaced her spectacles and looked at me intently. “My mother said that young Mr Billings knew all manner of things that he oughtn’t to know. That’s all. He’d been off traveling to places where human beings weren’t ever meant to travel; and he’d seen things that human beings weren’t ever meant to see. He’d struck a bargain of sorts; but that bargain had to be paid in the lives of innocent children. That’s why I wouldn’t go to play near Fortyfoot House, when I was a girl, and that’s why I won’t walk past it now.”
“Did your mother say what this bargain was, and who he might have struck it with? Did she give you any kind of clue?”
Doris Kemble said, “I’d better get your sandwiches. Your lad’s here now.”
I grasped her wrist. “Please, Doris—yes or no. Did your mother tell you what this bargain was?”
Doris Kemble patiently waited for me to release her. “It was all guesses, wasn’t it? All a bit of a mystery. Some said it was the devil but others said it was something worse. Nobody knew for sure.”
I let her go. “I’m sorry,” I said.
“There’s no need to be,” she replied. “That house is enough to turn anybody sour.”
Danny came up to the table and sat down. “I caught six crabs but I let them go and I didn’t even pull their legs off.”
I scuffled his hair. “You were feeling generous. How about some toasted cheese?”
We ate our lunch together overlooking the beach—not saying much, but enjoying the wind and the sound of the sea. Only Doris Kemble spoiled it for me, because she kept looking at me sharply as if she had something more to tell me. Twice I caught her staring at me from her cashdesk, biting her lip.
When we got up and paid, I said, “You will let me know, won’t you, if you remember anything else?”
She nodded. She rang up the price of our lunch on the cash-register. Then, while she gave me the change, she said, in a shaky voice, “Young Mr Billings was supposed to be married, that’s what my mother said. He was betrothed to a very young girl that his father had brought down from London, an orphan, with the family name of Mason; a strange wild girl by all accounts.”
I waited, with the change still spread across the palm of my hand. “Yes?” I asked her.
“The thing was… young Mr Billings had a son. But the son wasn’t right. The son wasn’t right at all. Nobody ever saw him; most people thought that he was dead, although they never saw him buried. But some people went about whispering that young Mr Billings’ son was hairy and strange; and some people said that he was just like a rat. Some people said that the fellow with the brown growths all over his face, that was his son, but nobody knew anything for certain.”
“Brown Jenkin,” I mouthed, almost silently.
Doris Kemble nodded, her mouth tight; the expression on her face like a smashed window.
“My mother used to talk about it a lot before she died. She was eighty-four and she went a bit doollally, you see. She kept thinking she was back in those times when she used to clean the house. Young Mr Billings was long-gone by then, of course. But the stories that people told her… well, they must have made quite an impression on her, don’t you agree? Sometimes she talked about young Mr Billings as if she knew him quite well. And that Brown Jenkin, too. Brrrr! Makes me shudder just to think about it.”
“Yes, it must,” I agreed. But al
l the time I was thinking: could that be true, that the rat-thing was young Mr Billings’ son?
Danny said impatiently, “Can we go now?”
But something made me look—not in his direction—but along the row of cottages and boarding-houses that fronted the sea, of which the Beach Café was the last. At the foot of the steeply-sloping path which led down from Fortyfoot House, under the dark green shadow of the trees, I thought I saw a pale-faced man standing, a pale-faced man dressed entirely in black. He was watching us intently, his eyes narrowed so that he could focus at such a distance.
Doris Kemble raised her head, and saw me peering along the promenade, so she turned, too. But when she did so, the man vanished, almost to melt, as if he had never been anything more than a trick of the afternoon light.
But a water-jug on the shelf just behind Doris’ head abruptly and inexplicably toppled and dropped to the linoleum floor, and smashed; and I felt in some unsettling way that the man’s disappearance and the broken jug were cause and effect.
That afternoon, instead of scraping the paint from the kitchen windows, I took Danny off with me to carry out some research. We walked hand-in-hand along the mile-long concrete seafront promenade to Ventnor. It was a blissfully warm day, and the sea was bright, and seagulls wheeled and screamed around the cliffs. We climbed a steep path, up through bushes and crumbled limestone, until we reached a car-park and the back streets of Ventnor.
Ventnor wasn’t much to look at: a typical British seaside town with a bus-station and a cinema-turned-Bingo-hall and shops crowded with beach-balls and straw hats and buckets-and-spades. But it had a parish church, St Michael’s, and a library, and those were all that I needed.
In the library, which was small and sunny and far too hot, and smelled of lavender floor-polish, I sat in a corner and looked up GHOSTS and OCCULT PHENOMENA. I read about the Scottish castle in the Kingdom of Fife, where, once a year, on St Agnes’ Eve, blood bucketed down the stone stairs, and flooded the hallway. I read about the man with no face who appeared at a small terraced cottage in Great Ayton, in Yorkshire, a casualty of Passchendaele who was looking for the comfort of his long-dead mother.
I also looked up TIME and RELATIVITY. Most of what I found was so arcane that it was impossible for me to understand, although there were some interesting passages in The Arrow of Time about alternative realities, and how it was scientifically possible for the same cosmic scenario to have several different but parallel outcomes—in other words, the Indians could have defended and kept America for themselves, and Hitler could have been a wise and benevolent Chancellor who brought peace and prosperity to Europe, instead of war.
Then, at the very end of the shelf on TIME, I found a dog-eared copy of the National Geographic magazine, June 1970, bound in plastic, with a yellowed sticker on it saying TIME & ANCIENT SUMERIANS, p. 85. I flicked through it until I found the article—Ziggurat Magic of Ancient Sumeria, by Professor Henry Coldstone II. It was all about the ziggurats of Babylon—the multi-terraced towers that had been built around Ur, on the river Euphrates.
It wasn’t the subject-matter of the article that caught my attention, however. It was the grainy black-and-white photograph at the side of the page, with the caption “Sumerian temple demolished by the occupying Turks in August, 1915, because its shape disturbed the local bey.”
The temple was scarcely visible, because the quality of the photograph was so poor. But there was something deeply familiar about its hunched and tented silhouette—about the way in which its angles tricked the eye—about its dark and unnatural perspectives.
I would have bet all the money that I didn’t have, then and there, that I was looking at a photograph of the roof of Fortyfoot House.
I skimmed through the rest of the article as quickly as I could. The library was obviously about to close, and a plain but voluptuously-bodied woman in a gray twinset and glasses was watching me from the main desk as if I were a potential book-stealer.
Professor Coldstone suggested that several important ziggurats had been built in ancient Iraq that—although they were constructed of solid stone—were capable of altering their physical shape, and that the Babylonians had used them to travel from one world to the next.
The Babylonians used to believe that there were infinitely ancient civilizations that were accessible through the use of certain astro-geometric shapes, based on the patterns of the major constellations. Modern mathematicians—even with computers that were capable of plotting accurate trajectories across the universe—had so far failed to reproduce these shapes, because they contained so many apparent absurdities and mathematical impossibilities.
Professor Coldstone ventured that “Sumerian civilization in its entirety was founded on knowledge brought from another ancient world beyond the ziggurats.” Their wedge-shaped writing bore no resemblance to any other writing on the planet, in spite of attempts by Victorian translators to show that it was nothing more than a system of simplified pictographs, turned on their sides. Sumerian gods and Sumerian legends had no religious or anthropological connection in any way with any other human religions or myths. As far back as 3,500 years before Christ, they were talking with eerie familiarity about “the place where no days are counted”—a place which their priests and their scribes could visit with comparatively little difficulty, but not always safely. What some of their priests saw beyond the ziggurats drove some of them staring-mad; and there was a special cuneiform for “One-Who-Has-Seen-What-Waits-Beyond.” Not “Lies” beyond. Not “Lives” beyond. But “Waits” beyond—although for what, Professor Coldstone didn’t say.
There was very little about the temple that had been demolished by the Turks, except a note from the bey which said “it is a center of dissension and unease. At night, we see lights, and hear voices raging in languages which we cannot understand. On the basis that its continued existence is a challenge to Turkish control in this area, I have ordered its demolition by dynamite.”
I asked the plain, voluptuous woman in the gray twinset to make a photostat of the article for me. “This looks interesting,” she said, as the copier lit up the awkward cubby-hole in which it had been positioned, next to the sink and the kettle and half-a-dozen coffee-mugs. “Ziggurats.”
“Well, they’re pretty boring, on the whole,” I said, and I couldn’t even manage a smile. Motes of book-dust sank through the afternoon light. In the children’s corner of the library, Danny was sitting cross-legged reading a children’s version of Dracula.
“Why do vampires drink people’s blood?” he asked me, as we walked down the library steps.
“They don’t like fish-fingers, that’s why.”
“No, seriously why do they drink people’s blood?”
“It’s only a story. It’s supposed to frighten you.”
“What would happen if they drank somebody’s blood and the person had AIDS?”
I stopped on the corner of the street as a bus roared past us and stared at him. “How old are you?”
“Seven.”
“Well, don’t talk like that. You don’t have to worry about AIDS. Not yet, anyway.”
“But what if a vampire bit me and the vampire had AIDS from somebody else?”
“What if you asked me so many questions that my head exploded?”
We reached St Michael’s, an unprepossessing Victorian church with flint walls and cypress trees in the churchyard. Obviously its grounds had once been much more extensive, but a large part of the church-yard had been taken up to widen the main road, and twenty or thirty grave-markers had been crowded like teeth against the far wall, under the dank shade of the largest trees.
Inside the church our footsteps squeaked and echoed and it was surprisingly cold. An elderly woman was arranging flowers and the vicar was up on a wooden step-ladder, changing the hymn numbers. I walked up to the foot of the ladder and said, “Good morning!”
He lowered his glasses and looked down at me. He wasn’t an old man, maybe forty-five or fifty at the
outside, but he was freckled and balding and he had all the fussy, exaggerated mannerisms of a man of retirement age. He wore a green tweed jacket and a pair of worn green corduroy trousers.
“I’ll be with you in just a tick!” he said, sliding in the last of the numbered cards. “Hymn No. 345, ‘Oh God, our help in ages past.’”
He came down the ladder. “Have you come about the drains?” he asked me.
“No, I haven’t as a matter of fact. I was wondering if I could take a look at the parish records.”
“The parish records! Well, that’ll be quite a business. Apart from last year’s and this year’s, they’re all in the vicarage. It depends how far back you want to go.”
“I’m not sure. At least 1875.”
“May I ask you exactly what you’re looking for, Mr—?”
“Williams, David Williams. Yes… I’m looking for a record of a marriage.”
“I see! Ancestors of yours?”
“Not exactly. But people I know of.”
“They were local, were they?” the vicar asked. Then turned to the old woman arranging the flowers and called, in a voice that echoed and re-echoed, “Don’t overdo the gladioli in front of the pulpit, Mrs Willis, I want to be able to see my flock!”
“Yes, they were local,” I told him. “They lived in Bonchurch.”
“And you’re sure that they were married here? They could have married at Shanklin, you know.”
“Well, yes, but I thought I’d make a start here.”
He looked at his watch. “I’m going back to the vicarage now. Perhaps you’d like to come along.”
We left the church, crossed the road, and then walked down a narrow street to a large late-Victorian house surrounded by laurel hedges and a broken-down wooden fence. There were weeds growing through the shingle driveway, and the brown paint on the doors and windows was blistering.
“I’m afraid the place is looking rather shabby these days,” the vicar remarked, opening up the front door. “Not much money for luxuries like housepainting.”
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