Prey

by Graham Masterton

  She caught me off-guard. “My what?” I asked her. “My marriage? What does my marriage have to do with it?”

  “Everything and nothing. Perhaps it doesn’t have much to do with Fortyfoot House, but it has a lot to do with you and me.”

  “To be quite honest,” I said, “I didn’t think there was any ‘you and me.’”

  “Oh, I’ve been sleeping with another one of those ghosts, have I? There could have been a ‘you and me.’ There could still be a ‘you and me.’ But you can’t make your mind up about anything, can you? You can’t decide whether you want to leave Fortyfoot House or not. Go—stay—stay—go, you’re like that song by Jimmy Durante. You can’t decide whether you want to divorce Janie or not. You can’t decide whether you want to make love to me or not. You’re so scared of making the wrong decision you don’t make any decisions. David, for God’s sake, make up your mind about something…”

  “I’m sorry,” I said.

  “Don’t be sorry!” she retorted. “I don’t want you to be sorry! I want to see you pick up your life again, whether you’re going to do it with me or with somebody else. You won’t be capable of having any kind of relationship with any woman until you’ve said the right prayers over your marriage to Janie. You need to divorce her, David, and then you need to file her and forget her. Even then you’ll probably pine away for years and years. You’ve got to see it from my point of view. It’s not very flattering to go to bed with a man who’s trying to pretend that you’re his ex-wife, and goes floppy when he can’t.”

  I stood where I was, my face half-covered by my hand, like the Phantom of the Opera in his half-concealing mask. She was right, of course. Well, three-quarters right. The reason I couldn’t be passionate or committed wasn’t entirely Janie: Fortyfoot House was something to do with it, too. But it was mostly Janie. I was still fiercely attached to my memories of our time together; and still bitterly and furiously jealous about Raymond the Bearded Fart. The jealousy was worse than the attachment. Attachments can gently fade with time, and ticking clocks, and days that light up and days that die away. Jealousy needs to be instantly cauterized with a red-hot poker, like a bullet-wound in a John Wayne movie. Sizzle, arggggh, gone.

  “I’m sorry,” I repeated. Then, because I’d said that I was sorry, I said, “I’m sorry.”

  Liz came up close to me and entangled her fingers in the hair at the back of my head, and kissed me. She was very small, much smaller than Janie, and softer than Janie, and brighter, and I thought to myself if only, dear Lord, if only—

  She pressed her face against my shoulder and I held her close. Danny was standing on the little wooden bridge that spanned the brook and the clouds were passing overhead stately and slow when—

  As if I were dreaming I turned to the sundial and saw a heavy black-suited figure slowly whirling around it, horizontal, as if he were a huge tattered propellor. His hand was agonizingly outstretched toward the tip of the pointer. His hair stood on end, and smoked. His coat-tails flapped and crackled

  “Jesus—do you see what I—”

  I tried to lift Liz’s head so that she could see what I saw, but she pressed her face closer to my shoulder and—

  Thousands and thousands of volts of snapping, bursting electricity came crawling out of the sundial-pointer, In a furious and extravagant shower of fine sparks, they buried themselves beneath the man’s quivering fingernails. I could smell ozone and burned nails. I could actually smell blood boiling. I could smell them. I could hear the man screaming unintelligible words. N’ggaaa nngggaa sogoth nyaa—extraordinary choking guttural words that made the hairs rise up on the back of my neck.

  Then he shrieked out, Let me die, you bitch. Let me die, Oh damn you damn you let me die

  “Liz! Look!” I said, my voice as plangent as a steel saw.

  She lifted her eyes and frowned at me, as if she couldn’t understand what I was saying. Then she turned toward the sundial but the figure had vanished. All that was left were a few raggedy skeins of thin blue smoke, which hurriedly untangled themselves and fled away on the brisk sea-breeze.

  “What’s the matter?” she said. “What’s wrong?”

  “I thought I—” I pressed my fingertips to my forehead. “I thought I saw something, I don’t quite know what. I’m probably just tired.”

  “You’re getting as bad as me. I nearly fell asleep today when I was supposed to be brewing up the tea. The supervisor said that if I didn’t buck up, she’d fire me. Nothing like losing your job on the first day, is there?”

  I looked back at the sundial. What had the Rev. Dennis Pickering said? “Old Mr Billings was struck by lightning.” Perhaps—in the grounds of this house which seemed to exist in now and then both at the same time—I had just witnessed old Mr Billings’ death, as surely and as vividly as if I had really seen it happen.

  “Let’s go and get that drink,” I said.

  We crossed the bridge and walked down through the trees and out of the back gate. As usual, Danny ran ahead of us past the cottages and down the sharply-sloping path which led to the seafront. The tide was well out, exposing the humped weed-draped rocks and the dazzling rock-pools. The smell of brine and weed was very strong, and dozens of gulls were swooping voraciously over the shoreline, preying on the tiny green crabs and the whiskery, transparent shrimp.

  We reached the Beach Café and sat down. Surprisingly, there was no sign of Doris Kemble. In fact, there was no sign of anybody at all. In the next garden, giant sunflowers nodded dumbly in the breeze, and a small painted-wood windmill went squik-squik-squik-squik in a little flurry, then paused, then went squik-squik-squik-squik in another little flurry.

  I went inside the café, to the table where Mrs Kemble usually counted out her money. There were five neat stacks of 2p, 5p, 10p, 50p and £1 coins. Probably thirty or forty pounds in all, left out where anybody could have taken it. There was a calendar with Scenes of Hampshire on it, flapping in the draft; and a cold cup of tea with a skin on the surface.

  “Mrs Kemble?” I called, but there was no reply. “Mrs Kemble?” I called again.

  I went back outside. Liz was sitting on the wall, talking to Danny about the parrots at the Tropical Bird Park. “You ought to see the macaws, they’re chronic. And there’s one parrot that says ‘Mind your manners, mind your manners,’ all the time. It’s enough to drive you barmy.”

  “Can I go tomorrow?” asked Danny.

  “There’s nobody here,” I told Liz. “She’s left all her money laid out on the table, but I can’t find her anywhere.”

  “Maybe she had to go and get something from the shops,” said Liz. “You know bread, or salad stuff or something.”

  “Can I go and see the birds tomorrow?” asked Danny.

  “Perhaps we can go on Friday,” I said. I looked around the beach. There was nobody in sight; only a solitary fisherman in a small boat far out to sea.

  “This is very odd,” I said.

  Liz looked up at me with one eye closed against the sun. “What shall we do then, walk along to Ventnor, and go to a pub?”

  “I suppose we’ll have to… unless we help ourselves to a beer from Mrs Kemble’s fridge, and leave her the money for it.”

  “That’s a good idea. The old plates are beginning to feel the pinch.” She pulled out a red plastic chair, sat down, and eased off her shoes. “Look at them, twice their normal size. I knew I should have bought four-and-a-halfs.”

  I went to Mrs Kemble’s huge Hotpoint fridge and took out two bottles of Harp Lager and a Coca-Cola. I opened them up and took them outside, and we sat at one of the tables watching the gulls swoop, and the sun gradually edging its way down toward the horizon. Far away, I could just make out an oil-tanker heading westward along the Channel, the same shape as one of those old-fashioned wooden pencil-boxes. The seaside always made me feel nostalgic, even though I had never particularly enjoyed myself at the seaside, when I was a boy.

  Danny finished his Coke and started to fidget. “Do you w
ant to go down on the beach?” I asked him. “Run another one of your crab Derbies. We’ll keep the fastest crab in a bucket and race him again tomorrow.”

  We watched him climb down the roughcast concrete breakwater to the rocks, and then balance his way out toward the edge of the water, nearly a hundred yards away. I sat back and swigged lager from the bottle.

  “What time’s the exorcist coming around?” asked Liz.

  “You mean the Rev. Dennis Pickering? I don’t think he’s bringing his bell, book and candle. He’s just coming to take a look around.”

  “Do you seriously think he can do anything?”

  “I haven’t a clue,” I said. “He said himself that real ghosts aren’t like ghosts in the movies. They don’t obligingly go away just because you command them to. I mean, we’re not dealing with Linda Blair or Patrick Swayze, are we?” I kept thinking of that bulky black figure, slowly rotating around the sundial, his hair smoking, his face contorted with agony. N’gaaa nngggaa sothoth nggaaa. It had been an illusion. It must have been. But supposing I had reached out and touched him as he flew crackling and fluttering past me? Could I have actually felt him? Or would his legs have passed straight through me, like a shadow?

  “I still think we should leave,” said Liz. “We could rent a caravan down at Shanklin Caravan Park. It doesn’t cost much, and you could still work here during the day, couldn’t you?”

  “I suppose so,” I said. But now that Dennis Pickering was coming, I felt more confident that we could lay the ghosts of Fortyfoot House to rest. The apparitions that we had seen had been really frightening—especially at night—but apart from what had happened to Harry Martin (and come on, let’s be serious for a moment—that must have been an accident)—they hadn’t done anything to hurt us.

  “Why don’t we see what the vicar has to say before we make a decision,” I suggested. “These are only ghosts, after all, they’re only images, and not only that they’re images of people who died over a hundred years ago. They’re just like—I don’t know, living photographs, really. How can they do us any harm?”

  “I don’t think I particularly want to wait to find out,” said Liz. She sounded unexpectedly determined.

  I looked at her carefully. “You mean you’re not even going to stay tonight?”

  “David, I’m sorry, I really am. But I’m having a hard enough time getting my head together without things going crash-bang-wallop in the night.”

  “What’s wrong?” I asked her. I knew she’d been going through some mood-swings, but I had put that down to her age, or the time of the month, or the sheer scariness of everything that had been happening to us.

  She stroked my knuckles absent-mindedly. “Oh, I don’t know. I think I’m as bad as you. I don’t seem to be able to decide what I want to be. I don’t even seem to be able to decide who I want to be. And coming here hasn’t made it any easier. In fact it seems to have made it worse.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  She smiled. “I think I’m having an identity crisis,” she said. “One minute I feel strong and independent, the next minute I feel as if I’m weak as a kitten. One minute I feel as I’ve got my life totally under control, the next minute I feel as if I’m falling to pieces. Happy, sad, happy, sad. And this morning I opened my eyes and I didn’t even feel like me at all. I can’t describe it. But staying here isn’t helping.”

  “So you really want to leave?” I said.

  She nodded. She may have looked tired, but she looked very pretty, too. I laid my hand on top of hers.

  “Really,” she said, “the last thing I need is weird noises and bloody great giant rats and poor old men getting their heads torn off.”

  “Well, that makes two of us,” I told her.

  “Yes,” she said. “But I don’t need a man who can’t make his mind up, either.”

  “No,” I agreed. “I don’t suppose you do.”

  I looked around. There was still no sign of Mrs Kemble. A thin silhouetted figure was coming around the seafront path from Ventnor, about half-a-mile away, made spindly and red-legged by the sunlight behind it, the door flew open, in he ran—but when I shaded my eyes I could see that it was an old man walking a black-and-white dog.

  The sun was still quite high, but the shadows were growing longer, and there was a slight edgy chill in the breeze; the kind of chill that made you suddenly shiver as if somebody had just walked over your grave. I couldn’t understand why Mrs Kemble should have left her café open and deserted so late in the afternoon.

  It was then that I heard a high, piping noise from the beach. At first I couldn’t make out what it was. It sounded like a flute, or a whistle. I narrowed my eyes and focused on the water’s edge, where the rocks were still surrounded by idly-slopping foam and weed, and where the seagulls persistently circled. I saw Danny out there, amongst the rocks, and waved, but he didn’t wave back. Instead he stood with his fists clenched, stiffly, in a strange hunched-up posture; and gradually I realized that he was making that high, piping noise. He was screaming.

  “Danny!” I vaulted over the café wall and jumped heavily down to the beach. I knocked my ankle-bone against a slippery rock, but then I managed to catch my balance and leap like a mountain-goat from one rock to the next, occasionally splashing into a rock-pool, falling once and grazing the heel of my left hand, but eventually reaching a flat sandy stretch and sprinting out to the water’s edge with water spraying up the backs of my legs, my heart thumping, and the sea-breeze softly thundering in my ears.

  Danny was standing next to a line of low, brownish rocks. He had stopped screaming but he was still clenched and tense, and his face was contorted with fright. He didn’t have to tell me what had frightened him, I could see for myself. I snatched hold of him and picked him up in my arms, and immediately began to walk back across the wet sand toward the promenade.

  Liz had followed me, panting. As she reached us, I said, “Can you take Danny back to the café? Use Mrs Kemble’s phone and call the police.”

  “What’s happened?” she asked, her eyes wide.

  “It’s Mrs Kemble,” I told her.

  I lowered Danny to the sand and Liz took hold of his hand. “Daddy,” he said, miserably.

  “I know, Danny,” I said. “I’m just going back to see if there’s anything I need to pick up before the tide comes in. Then I’ll come straight back to the café.”

  “Is she dead?” asked Liz, in a pinched voice.

  I nodded. “I won’t be long.”

  Reluctantly, I walked back to the rocks. The wind ribbed the thin clear seawater that was beginning to swill over the sand. The gulls cried and cried above my head. Mrs Kemble was lying on her back, naked, except for her torn tights, which had been dragged right down to her knees, and which were filled with sand and flecks of seaweed. Her head was lying in a shallow depression in the rocks, her gray hair stringy and wet like a floormop. Her thin forearms were both tautly drawn up as if she were still trying to fight somebody off. Her skin was white; dead-fish-belly white; and unhealthily bloated with seawater.

  Worst of all, though, the crabs had been at her. I had seen plaice and halibut that the local fishermen had left in their nets too long, their abdomens eaten out. But I hadn’t realized how voraciously the crabs could attack a human body. Mrs Kemble’s face had been turned into a ghastly caricature by the small green-shelled crabs which now nestled busily in her eye-sockets and had already devoured her lips and half of her right cheek, so that her false teeth were exposed in a ghastly sneer.

  They had attacked her stomach, so that her entire abdominal cavity was nothing but a jostling, struggling, pincer-waving mass of scores of little crabs, their shells and their claws clicking and rattling together like ceaseless castanets. Crabs were already crawling out from the gaping, half-eaten opening between her legs and tugging at the soft white flesh of her thighs.

  My throat tightened, and my mouth was flooded with warm, acid lager. There was no way of saying offhand how Mrs Kem
ble might have died, the crabs had already eaten too much of her. Even as I stood there, one of them forced its way out from between her teeth, and started to fight with two or three others for the grayish skin of her gums.

  I looked around. The tide had already turned, and was beginning to wash back around the rocks, bringing scummy foam and fragments of driftwood and rainbows of oil. There was no sign of Mrs Kemble’s clothes; no sign of her handbag; no sign of anything that might give the police an idea why she had died. I wondered if I ought to try dragging her body back to the seafront, but I knew that I couldn’t bring myself to touch her, and in any case I would probably damage any forensic evidence that the crabs might have left behind. Well, that’s what I told myself. In reality I was terrified that I would take hold of her arms to drag her along, and that the bones would just pull straight out of the shoulder-sockets, like the legs of an overboiled chicken.

  I walked back toward the seafront. I had only gone six or seven steps when I caught the smell of brine and oil and freshly-opened human body. It was vinegar and sewage and iron-bitter blood. My stomach clenched, and I doubled over and heaved and heaved, one great cackling retch after another; and I had to wait for a long time with my hands resting on my knees and mucus sliding from my nose until I was sufficiently recovered to make my way back across the rocks to the Beach Café.

  *

  Detective-sergeant Miller came into the kitchen and stood under the raw electric ceiling-light and stared at me in the same way that I had stared at my sledgehammered car, with the tired poached-egg eyes of a man who has seen too much of this kind of thing to be shocked any more.

  “This is a right bloody how’s-your-father,” he said.

  “Yes,” I said. “Do you want a drink?”

  “No thanks, but I’ll have a cup of tea if there’s one going.”

  I got up and switched on the kettle. D-s Miller dragged out a chair and sat down at the kitchen table and opened his notebook. He had been writing in a tiny, almost clerical script, in fountain-pen, which was so rare these days that it was almost an affectation.