Prey

by Graham Masterton

  “Mr Claringbull insisted in his letter that young Mr Billings had magic powers, and that he had once distinctly seen him at the window of Fortyfoot House, only to turn around and encounter him face-to-face within less than a half-a-minute on the pathway leading down to the seafront.

  “That letter to the bishop was Mr Claringbull’s undoing. Understandably, they thought that he had gone potty. He was removed as vicar of St Michael’s—first for an enforced Sabbatical and then to Parkhurst as an assistant prison chaplain. He was violently stabbed to death after only a year, by a prisoner who said he was the devil and that his eyes glared red in the dark.”

  “My God,” I said.

  “Yes,” Dennis Pickering agreed. “It was a terrible end.”

  “What about young Mr Billings?” I asked. “What do you know about him?”

  “Very little, I’m afraid. Mr Claringbull’s successor here was Geoffrey Parsley, who seems to have a been very bluff, straightforward chap who was more interested in Southdown mutton and new potatoes than the works of the devil. He took very little notice of any of the local rumors about Fortyfoot House; although he once wrote in his diary that he passed young Mr Billings and the girl Kezia Mason on the road to the village one summer morning, and he felt a distinct chill as they walked past, ‘as if the fish-wagon had rolled close by, fuming with ice and the taint of halibut.’”

  “Mrs Kemble said something about young Mr Billings having a son.”

  “So it was rumored. Kezia Mason was certainly seen to be great with child, as one might put it; and around the time that she might have been considered to be ready to give birth, a doctor’s waggon was seen several times at Fortyfoot House. But nobody ever saw a baby.”

  “What about Brown Jenkin?” I asked. “Mrs Kemble seems to suspect that young Mr Billings’ son—if he ever had one—might have been one and the same creature as Brown Jenkin.”

  “I’ve heard that, too. But Brown Jenkin is supposed to be a rat, isn’t it? And no matter how deformed a child might be, you could scarcely mistake it for a rat.”

  “There’s no mention of it in the parish records?”

  “Nothing at all.”

  “There must be some mention of the children dying, though.”

  Dennis Pickering nodded gravely. “Oh, yes. Of course. Geoffrey Parsley wrote about that at some length. That was, when—?”

  “Eighteen-eighty-six,” I reminded him. “That’s what it says on their gravestones, anyway.”

  “Yes, that’s right, it must have been. Eighteen eighty-six. It was the talk of the whole island, of course, and beyond; and Dr Barnardo himself came to visit Fortyfoot House to see if there was anything that could be done. But the children all died, all of them.”

  “Do you have any idea why? There’s nothing mentioned on their gravestones.”

  Dennis Pickering gave a small tight-mouthed shake of his head. “No idea. There were all kinds of epidemics in those days, of course. We forget how susceptible people were to illnesses that we now regard as quite minor. Before the war, you know, my grandfather used to be friends with Dr Leonard Buxton, the Bursar of Exeter College. But in 1939 Dr Buxton and his wife died within thirty-six hours of each other, of pneumonia, even though they were only in their forties. Unthinkable, today.

  “I think there was some suggestion that it was scarlatina that took the children off. Young Mr Billings called down a specialist from London—made a big show of it, apparently, so that everybody in the district would be aware that he was doing his best for them. But the specialist was a most mysterious fellow, according to Geoffrey Parsley—a very taciturn man called Mazurewicz who spoke scarcely any English and kept the lower part of his face covered with something that looked like a filthy white bandage. Anyway, specialist or no specialist, the children all died within a week or so, and were buried in the chapel at Fortyfoot House, as you obviously know—and nobody made too much of a song-and-dance about it because, after all, children did die commonly of such illnesses, and did die commonly in such numbers. There were many boarding-schools that were decimated or closed completely because of scarlatina or glandular fever or some such sickness.

  “Apart from that, they were all East End orphans and they had no relatives to care what happened to them.”

  “Mrs Kemble said that young Mr Billings eventually went off his head,” I put in.

  “Well… there are all kinds of stories about that, too. People said that he kept appearing and disappearing. He was supposed to have been seen at two different places—Old Shanklin Village and Atherfield Green—at one and the same time. Local imaginations working overtime, if you ask me.”

  “What about Kezia Mason? What happened to her?”

  “Again, there are all kinds of fantastic stories. But in the final analysis, she simply seems to have grown tired of living at Fortyfoot House, and disappeared. Her disappearance, of course, may easily have led to young Mr Billings’ mental breakdown. He told several people—including Mr Claringbull—that he loved her more than sanity itself. Apparently he drank a great deal, and took morphine—and on top of the tragedy at the orphanage, losing Kezia Mason probably finished him off. Eventually he committed suicide.”

  I looked at my watch. It was almost three-thirty: time to get back to the paintscraping before the estate agent came around to Fortyfoot House and realized that I was AWOL.

  “I have to go now,” I told Dennis Pickering. “But what I really need to know is what can I do? Quite honestly, I was going to pack up and leave—but if you can put these spirits to rest…?”

  “Are you totally convinced that what you have experienced is not a figment of your own imagination?” Dennis Pickering asked me.

  “Totally. No question about it.”

  “Well… I must say that I don’t believe in running away at the first manifestation of ghosts or spirits,” said Dennis Pickering. “Most of the time, ghosts and spirits are nothing more than our own anxieties, expressing themselves as visual delusions. The few that are ‘real’—although they may be frightening—are usually harmless. It is only when huge and terrible acts of iniquity have been perpetrated that a house itself may acquite an aura of evil—an aura which may threaten or depress those who later come to live in it.”

  “Is that what you think might have happened at Fortyfoot House?” I asked him.

  “Yes, quite, mm,” he agreed.

  “So what can I do? I have to live there. I have to work there. So does my son. So does Liz.”

  Dennis Pickering made a number of distinctly different faces, as if he were trying them out for size. “I suppose I might come and look around,” he said, although he didn’t sound very enthusiastic.

  “Do you think you could?” I said, encouraged. “I don’t know who else to turn to. Poor old Harry Martin couldn’t help, and I don’t think Rentokil can do much, either.”

  Dennis Pickering gave an ironic smile. “I didn’t think the day would ever come when the church would come a poor third for spiritual assistance after a ratcatcher and a nationwide chain of exterminators.”

  “I’m sorry. It took me some time to believe that these were really ghosts or phantoms or whatever you call them. ‘Spiritual irregularities.’”

  Dennis Pickering took us through the wainscoted hallway that smelled of school dinners. “What about this evening, after evensong?” he suggested. “Say, half-past eight?”

  “That sounds fine. You don’t mind going up into the attic, do you? I’ll make sure I buy myself a decent torch.”

  “You could try a little prayer, you know,” Dennis Pickering said, as he opened the front door for me. “Not only for yourself, but for the souls of those who still haunt Fortyfoot House.”

  “Yes, I suppose I could.”

  He shook hands, first with me, then with Danny.

  As we walked across the shingled driveway, Danny said loudly, “Why did that man put dust up his nose?”

  “It was snuff. Tobacco. Instead of smoking it, you breathe it in.�
�

  “Why?”

  I took two or three more steps, then stopped. “God knows,” I said.

  10

  The Evening Tide

  We met Liz at the bus stop outside the Tropical Bird Park, a few minutes after five o’clock. Coachloads of summer tourists were just leaving, their shadows dancing like a chain of cut-out paper dollies across the car-park. Beer-bellied dads in fluorescent surfing shorts and golfing caps with Born to Kill printed on them; blonde raggedy-permed mums in overtight white pedal-pushers and clackety little white high-heels; sweating overweight children in New Kids on the Block T-shirts and gray anklesocks and Gola trainers. Over the monotonous rock-thumping of car radios, we could hear the raucous cries of touracos and macaws, and the hideous lonely calling of peacocks.

  I thought that Liz looked tired and a little—I don’t know—distracted, as if she had something on her mind. There were plum-colored circles under her eyes, and she kept brushing her hair away from her forehead as if she had a headache.

  “How was it?” I asked her, after we had taken our seats on the bus.

  “Oh, terrible. I think that all tourists should be exterminated.”

  “Hey, come on now. No tourists, no job.”

  She managed a lopsided smile. “I suppose so. It’s just that I felt a bit off-color today. It’s not a period or anything. I just feel tired.”

  “Fortyfoot House isn’t exactly the best place to get a good night’s sleep.”

  Danny swung his legs and stared up at the flickering sun-and-shadow through the trees. He hadn’t taken a ride on a bus very often, and this was a treat. Some treat. Unless I could find some way of fixing my car, we would be riding on buses for the rest of the summer. There was an Audi dealer in Ryde. I thought that tomorrow I would take the bus there, and see if I could scrounge some second-hand spares. Basically, all I needed to get going again was a windscreen and lights and a steering-wheel and a speedometer. I could worry about the fancy bits later.

  We got off the bus at the grassy triangular junction which led down to Bonchurch. It was a quiet walk, past the village shop and a “traditional cream-teas” café with a thatched roof and a garden nodding with hollyhocks. On the left side of the road, there was a wide glassy pond, where ducks feathered and fluffed. The late-afternoon clouds were reflected in its surface like the clouds from some drowned medieval kingdom. Camelot still dreamed its dreams in Britain, concealed in lakes and mirrors and memories. King Arthur still pressed his despairing fingers to his brow; Lancelot still stood against the turrets of the dying day; flags furled and unfurled.

  I hadn’t felt this warm, magical antiquity of Britain for a very long time; not since I was about eight years old, and first climbed up the chalky dinosaur backs of the South Downs. I loved it. But when I turned to Liz to say something about it, I felt quickly and peculiarly chilled, and I somehow knew that she wouldn’t be interested in listening, and that I would end up making a fool of myself.

  Danny skipped ahead, dancing over the cracks in the pavement so that he wouldn’t be caught by bears. “And I keep in the squares, and the masses of bears, who wait at the corners all ready to eat, the sillies who tread on the lines of the street… go back to their lairs.” It was like a picture-postcard, except that we were walking back to Fortyfoot House and Liz was fretful and I suddenly began to feel that I was losing control of my whole existence. Or perhaps I had lost control of it a long time ago, and I had only just realized it.

  “And I keep in the squares and the masses of bears—”

  We turned the corner by the stone wall under the dark-green shade of the overhanging laurels and there was the gate of Fortyfoot House and the sloping driveway that led down to the front door and I felt fear like nothing I had ever felt before, dread of what was concealed in that house and what I was going to have to face.

  I took hold of Liz’s arm. “Listen,” I said, “let’s go down to the Beach Café for a drink first, yes? You know, unwind. You’ve had a hard day.”

  She narrowed her eyes at me; then turned to the house. This was the north side, the shadowy side, and all the windows were dark, like the cleared-out wardrobes of the recently-dead. I could feel the tension in her muscles; I could sense her tiredness and her coldness as if we were one person. There was closeness between us, real closeness. Yet why was there no passion? To put it bluntly, I could have undressed and bathed her if she were ill, but I couldn’t have made love to her—not really, not real love.

  We skirted the house and walked down through the gardens. Danny jumped up onto the sundial and called out, “It says half-past five!”

  “He’s good at telling the time,” said Liz. “I couldn’t tell the time until I was about ten.”

  I stepped up to the sundial. It had a simple triangular pointer made of bronze, with a Roman dial, but it was noticeable that the top of the pointer was broken and discolored. Not so much broken, perhaps, as melted, so that its once-sharp edge was blobbed with lumps of distorted metal. I touched it, and I felt almost as if I knew what had happened to it.

  A thin, crackling sensation. A feeling of vertigo, as if I had left the ground and was whirling and whirling and whirling around.

  Liz was standing in the “wabe”, her hand shielding her eyes against the gradually-descending sun. “What?” she asked me.

  I stepped down from the sundial and followed her across the grass. “I don’t know. Just one of those feelings, that’s all.”

  “I think we’re letting this place get to us,” she said. “We should have left yesterday, whatever’s going on here. Squatters, ghosts, or whatever.”

  “You don’t still think that it’s squatters, do you?” I asked her.

  She gave me a bleak, offhand look. “All right, no. I don’t think it’s squatters. But then I don’t think it’s ghosts, either. I don’t believe in ghosts. Do you believe in ghosts? For Christ’s sake, David! I don’t know what it is. I’ve been thinking about it all day. I’m not so sure that I want to know.”

  “If you really want to, we could leave tomorrow,” I said. I was trying to be reassuring. Who could be reassuring, with noises and lights and pale dead children in nightgowns and dark people who moved through photographs?

  “I don’t know,” she said. She sounded both fretful and depressed.

  “Listen,” I said, “I took some time off today and went to see the local vicar.”

  “What? You’re joking.”

  “Why should I be joking? When your pipes burst, you call a plumber, right? When you’ve got a houseful of discontented spirits, you call a vicar. You suggested it yourself, didn’t you? Get the place exorcized, that’s what you said. As a matter of fact, he knows a fantastic amount about Fortyfoot House and the Billings and Brown Jenkin. A lot of it’s written down in the parish records.”

  “And?”

  I shrugged. “I don’t know whether he believed me—you know, about the lights; and Sweet Emmeline.”

  Emmeline… I quoted to myself “Emmeline… Has not been seen… For more than a week… She slipped between—”

  “What?” asked Liz. “What are you talking about?”

  I blinked at her. “What do you mean, what am I talking about?”

  “You said something about ‘Emmeline has not been seen for more than a week’.”

  “I didn’t realize I was saying it out loud.”

  Liz let out a sigh. “David Williams, I think you’re going round the bend, you are.”

  “It’s A. A. Milne,” I told her. “You know, the chap who wrote Winnie-the-Pooh. Emmeline… Has not been seen… For more than a week… She slipped between… The two tall trees at the end of the green… We all went after her. ‘Emmeline!’ It used to frighten me, that poem. There was a drawing of two trees standing by a fence and I always used to think that nobody could have disappeared between those trees unless—”

  “Unless what, David? I’m getting worried about you.”

  “Unless… I don’t know. Unless Emmeline was in
the same place but at a different time. She went away for a week? Without anything to eat? Without sleeping? And where was she? That used to frighten me.”

  “For God’s sake, David. It’s only a children’s nursery-rhyme.”

  “Perhaps it is. But something put me in mind of it. Maybe my subconscious is trying to tell me something. Emmeline… same place, different time.”

  “I think your subconscious is trying to tell you that you shouldn’t spend any more nights at Fortyfoot bloody House—that’s what I think your subconscious is trying to tell you.”

  “But what if the vicar can sort it all out?” I challenged her.

  “David—what do you care if he can sort it out or not? This isn’t your problem. It’s not mine, either, believe me.”

  “Of course it’s my problem. I don’t want to spend money on staying somewhere else unless I can possibly help it. Besides, I’ve already been paid to do the place up.”

  “That’s right,” said Liz. “You’ve been paid to decorate it, not to exorcize it. Why don’t you tell the estate agents that it’s haunted and that you’re not going to work on it until it’s de-haunted.”

  “Oh, yes. And you think they’re going to believe me?”

  “Everybody else around here seems to think that Fortyfoot House is haunted. I’m even beginning to believe it myself, and I don’t believe in things like that at all.”

  “Liz, at least I can try.”

  She shook her head from side to side in despair. “You don’t seriously believe this vicar of yours can do anything, do you?”

  “He’s going to come round this evening and see if he can find out what’s wrong, that’s all. I mean—maybe he can’t help. Maybe it’s nothing to do with the church or Satan or anything like that. But if there’s a chance that he can put it to rest, I think it’s worth a try. For somebody who knows something about spirits, it could be some perfectly ordinary problem, and all it needs is somebody to say the right prayers over it.”

  “Rather like your marriage,” Liz remarked, with her usual thorn-sharp talent for changing the subject.