Prey

by Graham Masterton

  He showed us into the hallway, with a tiled floor and brown wooden wainscoting. There was a strong smell of mince and cabbage in the house, and Danny wrinkled up his nose and said, “School dinners.”

  I told him to shush but the vicar laughed. “Quite right,” he said. “I always used to like school dinners.”

  A woman in a flowery print frock appeared at the kitchen door, carrying a goldfish bowl. Her face was as plain as a dinner plate.

  “Mrs Pickering,” the vicar explained; and the woman gave a vague smile.

  “You can use the library if you like,” the vicar continued crossing the hallway. “The records are all there, rather out of sequence I’m afraid. You did say 1875, didn’t you?”

  “Around 1875. I’m not entirely sure.”

  “You have the names of both parties?”

  “Yes… Billings, that’s the name of the groom. And Mason, that’s the name of the bride.”

  He stopped, with his hand on the library door. “Billings, you say, and Mason? From Bonchurch?”

  “That’s right, from Fortyfoot House.”

  “Oh...” he said, defensively. “That’s a slightly different kettle of fish. You’re not—writing anything about this, are you?”

  “No, no. I’m a decorator, not a writer. I’m staying at Fortyfoot House at the moment. I’m supposed to be doing it up so that the owners can sell it.”

  “You’re—sorry? Doing it up?”

  “You know, painting it. Mending the guttering, that kind of thing.”

  “Ah,” said the vicar. “Please forgive me, I misunderstood. The thing is that occasionally I have some rather unwelcome enquiries about Fortyfoot House… from the more lurid popular newspapers, you know, and people writing books on black magic and occult mysteries, that kind of thing. I do my best to discourage them.”

  “I didn’t realize that Fortyfoot House was so famous,” I said.

  “Well, perhaps notorious is more the word,” he replied. He opened the library door and showed us inside. It was airless and hot and dramatically untidy, with stacks of leather-bound books and photograph albums and yellowed parish newsletters on every shelf, and more books and magazines piled in great tilting heaps on the threadbare carpet. A tortoiseshell cat slept curled up on the windowsill, its lip open in a comatose snarl, next to an empty Möet & Chandon bottle and a hunchbacked African statuette carved out of ebony.

  “You’re staying there, you say?” asked the vicar.

  “That’s right. Mr and Mrs Tarrant want it finished as soon as poss.”

  “Ah, yes—well, that’s understandable. That house seems to bring nothing but ill fortune to everybody who owns it.”

  “Have you any idea why?”

  The vicar took off his glasses and dryly rubbed at his eyebrows with the heel of his hand. “I’ve made a bit of a study of it—well, I’ve always been interested in local history and superstition. But there have been so many conflicting stories… most of them wild… it’s hard to know what to believe.”

  “But you’ve heard about young Mr Billings, and the woman he married, the woman called Mason, and you’ve heard about Brown Jenkin, yes?”

  The vicar said, in a level tone, “You couldn’t fail to, living in Ventnor. It’s part of the local mythology”

  “Have you ever seen anything there? Anything that makes you think that some of it could be true?”

  He looked at me steadily. “Do I gather from your intense interest in the subject that you have?”

  Danny was over by the window, stroking the cat. “I’m not sure what I’ve seen,” I told the vicar. “There’s a girl living with me at Fortyfoot House—she’s almost managed to convince herself that there are squatters hiding somewhere in the attic, and that they’re trying to scare us away.”

  “But that’s not what you think,” said the vicar, fastidiously smoothing back what was left of his hair.

  “Personally, yes, I find that hard to believe.”

  “You’ve heard voices? You’ve seen bright, inexplicable lights?”

  “More than that. I’ve seen something that looks like a rat but isn’t a rat; and I’ve seen a child in a nightgown who looked as if she was dead; and I’ve seen somebody who could be Billings, too, I’m sure of it. The trouble is, it’s like some kind of hallucination. It’s always over in an instant; and I’m never sure if I really saw anything or really heard anything or whether—”

  “Or whether you’re going mad,” the vicar finished for me.

  “Well, yes,” I said, lamely. “I mean, my son’s seen Billings, too; and the dead girl in the nightgown. So has Liz. But—I don’t know—”

  “You think that you could all be victims of the same delusion? A sort of collective hysteria?” the vicar suggested.

  “I suppose so, yes. I don’t know very much about the supernatural, or what goes on beyond the grave.”

  “Well, none of us do,” the vicar admitted. “By the way—my name’s Dennis Pickering, but do call me Dennis, everybody else does. Would you like a cup of tea? My wife makes some perfectly awful seedcake. And perhaps your boy would like an orange squash?”

  Danny wrinkled up his nose. To a boy brought up on Diet Pepsi and Lucozade Sport and Irn Bru, the idea of tepid orange squash from the vicarage kitchen was distinctly unappealing.

  “Perhaps my wife can find you some yogurt, then?” Dennis Pickering suggested.

  Danny’s face turned from faintly disdainful to the gargoyle of Notre Dame.

  “He’s just had his lunch,” I explained.

  Dennis Pickering cleared away a heap of papers and books, and we perched knee-to-knee on the edge of the dusty brown leather sofa.

  “There’s something else,” I told him. “Something I saw on my own… which makes me think that it can’t be collective hysteria. Last night; about two o’clock in the morning, I saw something in the corner of my bedroom ceiling. At first it was nothing but a foggy sort of light. Then it slowly turned into something like a nun, or a nurse. It wasn’t completely clear. It frightened the hell out of me, to tell you the truth. I shouted—well, I screamed, as a matter of fact—and it disappeared.”

  Dennis Pickering nodded, thoughtfully. He placed his bony hands together as if he were praying, and for a very long time he said nothing at all.

  “You do believe me, don’t you?” I asked him, with an embarrassed laugh. It suddenly occurred to me that perhaps he didn’t, and was trying to decide whether to call the police or the local loony-bin.

  “My dear man!” He clapped his hand on my knee; then obviously realized that his gesture might be misinterpreted, and snatched it away. “Yes—yes, I believe you. All of my recent predecessors have been aware of what I suppose you could call spiritual irregularities at Fortyfoot House. I was simply wondering what advice I can possibly give you—and, indeed, what I can possibly do.”

  “Is there anything you can do? For instance, could Fortyfoot House be exorcized? Or can you lay all these ghosts to rest? They always seem to manage it in films.”

  Dennis Pickering sighed, and said, “Yes—they do, in the films, don’t they? But this is real life, I regret, Mr Walker, and the restless and the should-be-dead are not as easy to appease as they are in fiction.”

  “Do you have any idea what’s causing all this disturbance?” I asked him.

  He shook his head, almost sorrowfully. “I know the history of Fortyfoot House quite well; and I’ve seen lights and heard noises that one might put down to supernatural influences. But what they are—and what their business might be—well, I simply have no idea, and nor did any of the incumbents of this parish before me. It’s rather like living next to an active volcano, don’t you know. You may not like it, but you have to live with it.”

  I took out the photostat that the plain, voluptuous woman in the library had made for me. “I have a theory—well, not so much of a theory, but a sort of feeling—that Fortyfoot House is in two places at once. Or rather, two times at once. You see here, look, the ancient
Sumerians built ziggurats that were supposed to give them access to another world that was in the same place, but even more ancient.”

  Dennis Pickering unfolded the photostat and studied it scrupulously. “This is extremely interesting, yes,” he said. “I’ve heard of this before. There was supposed to be not just a prehistoric but a prehuman civilization in Arabia, which was then called Mnar; and its principal city was Ib. According to several historians, like Dr Randolph Carter—ah, yes, you see, look! Carter’s mentioned down here—the Sumerians were able to travel back in time to Ib by means of certain mathematical formulae and unusual architectural designs. Yes, fascinating!—if a little dated, we did learn about most of this in college. Very suspect, I’m afraid. The Piltdown Man of ancient Babylonia.”

  He took off his spectacles and looked up at me. “I can’t see the parallel with Fortyfoot House, however. In my opinion, Fortyfoot House is simply one of those buildings that is pervaded by the venality of those who once owned it, and by the tragedy of those who died there. A classic haunting. In fact I wrote a modest article about it myself, The Haunting of Fortyfoot House. It was published in the Church Times in the early 1970s.”

  He gave me back my photostat, and said, “The vicar of St Michael’s when Fortyfoot House was built was the Rev. John Claringbull. He knew Mr Billings extremely well. That’s old Mr Billings, not young Mr Billings. Old Mr Billings was a well-known local philanthropist, and when he decided to build Fortyfoot House to take in orphaned boys and girls from the East End of London, the Rev. Claringbull gave him every kind of pastoral assistance he could. It’s all clearly recorded in his diaries, and his diaries are all still here, in the vicarage, as indeed they should be.

  “All went well with the building of Fortyfoot House, apparently, until old Mr Billings brought back from London an orphaned girl to act as his maid and cook and cleaner. Mr Billings considered the moral salvation of this girl to be one of the greatest challenges of his life—beyond any challenge that he had ever faced before. She was fourteen years old; and had been a prostitute since she was ten; and was depraved beyond imagination. She was said to have been brought up in the dankest warrens of London’s docks, among rats and whores and criminals and people whose moral turpitude would shock you, Mr Williams, even today.

  “According to Mr Billings, Dr Barnardo had rescued this girl from the custodianship of a nameless and filthy being who resided in the very center of the rat-runs of the London wharves. He had been unable to tell whether this being was man or woman, or even if it were human. You can read in Dr Barnardo’s own diaries that it sat in almost total darkness, surrounded by the remains of literally thousands of huge sewer rats, some of which were so old that they were nothing but dust, but some of which were comparatively recent, and were still partly-mummified.

  “The girl had been sitting dressed in filthy velvet at the being’s feet, reciting—according to Dr Barnardo—a grotesque and guttural chant, over and over again. Even though he was unable to understand it, Dr Barnardo said that the chant filled him with an appalling horror; almost as if it were a prayer to Old Scratch himself.

  “The girl protested violently when Dr Barnardo tried to take her away; but in the end he called on the help of two burly young friends of his, and they ambushed her one night in Slugwash Lane, and carried her off to old Mr Billings’ London house. Although she was locked in, she tried to escape twice; so in the end old Mr Billings decided to take her to the Isle of Wight with him—as far away from London as he could—even though Fortyfoot House was not yet finished. He believed that, between them, he and Mr Claringbull could soon transform her from a dockside slut into a clean, moral and obedient young lady.”

  “The Pygmalion syndrome,” I remarked. “Making ladies out of flower-sellers. ‘The rine in Spine falls minely on the pline.’”

  “Well, exactly,” agreed Dennis Pickering. “Unfortunately, old Mr Billings’ attempts to play the part of Professor Higgins went seriously awry. Is your boy sure that he wouldn’t care for a yogurt? My wife makes it herself.”

  “No thanks, honestly.”

  “Mhm… I can’t say I blame him. I detest her yogurt.”

  “What went wrong between old Mr Billings and the girl?” I persisted.

  “My dear man, everything! The girl was of such wilfulness and deviousness and strength of character she soon had Mr Billings in her thrall, and rendered Mr Claringbull powerless to assist him. It’s all told very vividly in Mr Claringbull’s diaries… they’re really very harrowing to read.

  “According to Mr Claringbull, she insisted almost immediately that he spend hundreds of guineas on fine clothes and jewelry for her, and even though she was only fourteen she dressed and made up her face like a woman of twenty. She insisted that he buy her brandy, which he did, and morphine, which he procured from Dr Bartholomew in Shanklin. She would have sex with any man or boy who took her fancy and even—” (his voice was already low, but now he lowered it almost to inaudibility) “—with ponies and dogs.”

  “Oh, dear,” I said. I didn’t know what else he expected me to say.

  “Strangest of all, though,” Dennis Pickering continued, “she absolutely insisted that he alter the architect’s plans for the roof of Fortyfoot House. She produced drawings and figures that astounded the architects, who refused to sanction them on the grounds that they were technically impossible, and that such a roof could not be built.

  “But—the girl was determined that she should have her way, and old Mr Billings eventually bowed to her determination, as he always did, and the builders followed the plans that she had drawn up, and built the roof, and as you see today the roof was possible, perfectly possible—though why she should have insisted so strenuously on having it redesigned and how she was able to draw up such diagrams—nobody shall ever know. Mr Claringbull saw less and less of old Mr Billings, and when he did see him, he seemed exhausted and fretful—unable to remember what day it was, or even what month it was.

  “Whenever Mr Claringull caught sight of the girl, he felt ‘chilled beyond all comprehension.’ If he was in the same room with her, he came out almost immediately in a scaly rash, like dry eczema; and when he was invited to the dinner to celebrate the opening of Fortyfoot House, and had to sit next to her, he had to excuse himself after the tomato soup and spent most of the evening in the garden, vomiting.

  “‘I vomited things which I knew I had not ate,’ that’s what he wrote. ‘I vomited things that moved of their own volition, things that shuddered and wriggled in the grass, and then crept off painfully into the shelter of the hedge.’

  Dennis Pickering suddenly paused—glancing with dramatic effect from right to left, as if he were concerned that some ghost from the past might overhear him, and wreak its revenge.

  “That, of course, was Mr Claringbull’s side of the story. If you take it at its face value, then indeed it’s a very horrifying and distressing story. But there were others who were not so sure that Mr Claringbull was altogether compos mentis.” He tilted himself close to me and whispered, “If you read the verger’s diaries, for example, and if you have a talent for reading between the lines, you might well deduce that—rather than being sickened by old Mr Billings’ young ward—Mr Claringbull in fact had taken rather too much of a fancy to her, and that his violent physical reaction to her was caused by his own shame and guilt. Mr Claringbull was married, of course—but from all accounts his wife suffered from endless spinal trouble—with the inevitable result that Mr Claringbull was getting very much less in the way of—unh, marital comfort than he might have wished.”

  Danny turned around from stroking the cat and smiled at him ingenuously, and Dennis Pickering, embarrassed, flushed with color, smiled back.

  “It’s all right,” I insisted. “You don’t have to speak in riddles. Danny’s already learned all there is to know about the reproductive behavior of amoebae and spirogyrae and sea-cucumbers and gerbils. Believe me—what a few grown-up humans do together won’t exactly corrupt h
im. In fact, it probably wouldn’t even interest him.”

  “Ah—yes, I suppose you’re right,” Dennis Pickering admitted, leaning back in his chair. “Do you care for snuff?”

  “I’ve never tried it.”

  “Good, you shouldn’t.”

  He took out a small silver snuffbox and (watched with total fascination by Danny) proceeded to sniff a little up each nostril; and sneeze; and then sit with his eyes watering.

  I said, while he suppressed another sneeze, and then another. “Mrs Kemble down at the Beach Café told me that old Mr Billings was eventually killed.”

  “Oh, Mrs Kemble! She has quite a thing about Fortyfoot House, although I don’t really know why. Once, you know, she asked me to bless its back gate, although she wouldn’t explain what she wanted me to do it for. Strange woman. Her husband was something of a wartime hero, killed at Dieppe. She runs a jolly good café, though.”

  “You don’t know how old Mr Billings died?”

  Dennis Pickering blew his nose in three keys, like a Maserati motor-horn. “Well… like everything else about Fortyfoot House, there are all kinds of stories. I think the favorite is that old Mr Billings was struck by lightning. This, of course, was long after the orphanage had been established, and some time after his son had come to help him.

  “The next time that the name of Billings appears in the parish records is when young Mr Billings approached Mr Claringbull and asked him to join him and his father’s young ward in marriage. That was the first time that the girl’s name was mentioned—Kezia Mason, spinster. Mr Claringbull had to write a long letter of explanation to the diocese, explaining that Kezia Mason’s ungodly behavior put a church marriage beyond the pale. Apart from that, there were rumors in the village that young Mr Billings was himself involved in some kind of ungodly secret society, rather like the famous Hellfire Club by all accounts, and that the chapel at Fortyfoot House was being used for animal sacrifices and black masses. These rumors were obviously fueled by all the odd characters who used to appear at Fortyfoot House when young Mr Billings was in charge. ‘Wanted murderers and freaks,’ Mr Claringbull called them.