“Are you going to call the police?” asked Liz.
I turned around. “What’s the point? What do I tell them? ‘The vicar’s just been murdered a hundred years ago!’?”
“Well, I’ll tell them!”
“Oh, yes? And they’re going to ask where was he murdered.”
“Where was he murdered?”
“In the living-room. So then they’re going to ask who murdered him, and you’re going to say a rat-thing murdered him. And then they’re going to ask you when he was murdered, and you’re going to say eighteen-eighty-six. Oh—and by the way, we’ve brought back an orphan from eighteen-eighty-six who’s never seen an aeroplane or double-glazing or a Mars Bar, and who’s never heard of the Bash Street Kids or the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.”
Liz had been slowly soaping her breasts. She stopped, and stared up at me, saying nothing.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “But if I can hardly believe it, how can we expect the police to believe it? We can’t produce even a single bloodstain on the carpet, let alone a body.”
“Not even if we go back down through the trapdoor?”
“Oh, no!” I said. “We’re not going back down through that trapdoor, ever. That’s bolted and it stays bolted.”
“But perhaps we could get his body back. They can’t have buried it yet. Then we can prove that he’s dead; and prove that he’s been murdered, and prove that we didn’t do it.”
“No,” I replied. “We’re not going back through that trapdoor full stop.”
There was nothing much more to say. Tonight’s experience had already convinced me that our departure from Fortyfoot House was long overdue. Whatever was happening here, it was beyond my control and none of my business, even if a vicar and a rat-catcher and a café proprietor had been deliberately murdered, and even if Charity and the rest of the orphans of Fortyfoot House were in mortal danger.
I stepped into my pajama trousers and eased open the bedroom door. From Danny’s bedroom I could hear voices—Danny and Charity talking together. So much for their being dead to the world. I crept along the corridor, trying not to make the floorboards creak, and I pressed my ear close to the door.
“…in Whitechapel, when I was a kid. Then Mrs Leyton found me and took me round to Dr Barnardo, and then Dr Barnardo sent me here.”
“No… parents?” That was Danny’s voice.
“Must have had some, but never knew them. Sometimes I think I can remember my mother singing to me, and I can see her black button-up boots, but then I can’t hear her at all, and can’t see her boots neither, so I suppose I must have dreamed it.”
“Will you have to… go back?”
“I haven’t thought about it. I don’t understand what’s going on. I thought I was still here, but I’m not still here, am I? I mean it’s the same house, isn’t it, but none of my friends are here, and everything’s queer.”
I listened for a little while longer, but it was surprising how quickly their conversation turned to toys and games, with Danny trying to explain to Charity what a Transformer was. “It’s a robot only it’s a spaceship, too.”
“What’s a row bot?”
“It’s a man made out of metal. Only you go click-click-click and he changes into an intergalactic star cruiser.”
“A what?” giggled Charity. And when I heard her laugh, I knew that I was right to have saved her; and that I was more than justified in thinking that I should keep her and protect her, no matter what.
Liz was already in bed by the time I got back. She was sitting up, her head propped on her hand, reading Narziss and Goldmund by Hermann Hesse. I climbed into bed beside her and watched her read for a while.
“Are you really enjoying that?” I asked her.
She smiled, without looking up. “Listen to this: ‘Believe me, I would rather ten thousand times have had your foot to stroke than hers. Yours never came to me under the table to ask me whether I could love.’ You know what he’s talking about, don’t you? Footsy.”
I said, “The children are still awake. They’re talking. They seem to be getting along well.”
Liz was silent for a while, then she closed her book. “What are you going to do, David? You’re not going to stay here any longer, are you? If that Brown Jenkin thing can kill people…”
“Don’t worry,” I said. “I’ve already made up my mind.”
“That makes a change.”
“I took your criticism to heart, that’s why. You were quite right, I was letting things drift. I suppose I felt that if I made any really positive decisions and got myself together, I’d be taking myself further and further away from those days with Janie. Now I can see that those days have gone, even if I make no decisions at all—even if I lie in bed all day and do absolutely nothing.”
“So what are you going to do?”
“I’m going to take Danny and Charity to my mother’s in Horley, and then I’m going to come back here and burn this house to the ground.”
Liz stared at me in astonishment. “You’re going to what? You can’t do that!”
“I can and I will. This house is possessed or haunted or whatever you like to call it. I don’t know what young Mr Billings and Kezia Mason were up to. I don’t know what Brown Jenkin is, or who Mazurewicz was. I don’t know what happened to old Mr Billings, except that he got struck by lightning. But this whole place is riddled with ghosts and unrest and groans and moans and Christ knows what. Now Dennis Pickering’s dead and that’s enough, that’s going to be the end of it.”
“But supposing you get caught?”
“I won’t get caught. I won’t even lose my pay. I’ll just say that my blowlamp set light to a window-frame, and the whole place went up by accident. God almighty, somebody should have done it years ago.”
“David—this house is historic. You can’t just burn it down.”
“Living people are more important than history. And people who should be dead and aren’t—they’re more important than history, too.”
Liz laid her book on the quilt and lay back on the pillow. I had grown more and more attracted to her by the hour. I loved those snub-nosed babyish looks of hers; her puppy-fat voluptuousness; her clean soapy smell. The only piece of the jigsaw that I couldn’t quite fit in was what she really thought of me, and why she stayed. Sometimes she was offish and impatient; sometimes head-buttingly critical; occasionally fun; occasionally passionate—but always as if she were laughing at a joke that I didn’t fully understand, and as if she were making love inside her head, privately, instead of sharing herself. She had now gone down on me several times—once or twice when (to begin with, at least) I was asleep. Each time her head was turned away from me, and she swallowed without any show of lust or emotion or even enjoyment.
“Think about it tomorrow,” she said.
“I’ve thought about it, and it is tomorrow.”
“So what about me?”
“I’ll find you somewhere to stay.”
“What about us?”
“I don’t know. Perhaps we ought to cross that bridge when we come to it. I want to sort out Fortyfoot House first.”
She turned on the pillow and stared at me unblinking. There was the tiniest orange fleck in the iris of her left eye. “When I said you ought to be more decisive, I’m not sure that was what I had in mind.”
“Tough problems call for tough solutions.”
“Hmm,” she said, and ostentatiously turned her back on me.
I picked up Narziss and Goldmund. ‘“One day,”’ I read aloud, ‘“blushing very deep, with a mighty struggle against herself, to give him a great joy, she showed him her breasts: shyly she unlaced her bodice, to let him see the small white fruit concealed in it.’”
“Trust you to find the dirty bits straight away,” Liz said, her voice muffled against the pillow.
She turned around. That orange fleck in her iris almost sparkled, like fire. “Don’t do anything rash, David. I care about you.”
“If you c
are about me, you’ll help me.”
*
I slept and dreamed a dark magnetic dream about gliding kitelike over a sloping beach. The sea below me was black and gelatinous, more like treacle than sea. I knew that the water was thick with crabs, millions of them, crawling and heaving all over each other. The sky was blackish-bronze, and a reverberating gong sound rang in my ears, and almost deafened me.
The world as it was; the world as it is; the world as it will be.
I hadn’t flown far out over the sea before I began to realize that I was gradually sinking toward the surface. I tried to tuck my legs up, so that my feet wouldn’t drag in the water, but the wind died to a whisper and I sank lower and lower. At last my feet plunged into the water, and then my legs, and then I was sinking up to my groin. The water was freezing cold and I could feel the crabs rattling and crawling all around me, over my feet, between my legs, up my stomach.
I screamed but I didn’t really scream: it must have been more like the terrible grunting deaf-school scream of a dreamer. I suddenly realized that I had wet my pajama trousers: fortunately, not the bed. Sweating, shivering, I rolled out of bed and went to the bathroom, where I stripped and washed myself. My face in the mirror looked dislocated and haggard, as if the mirror had been smashed.
As I toweled myself, I thought I heard that scurrying, scratching noise behind the walls, and then across the floor of the attic. I stood still, naked, listening, but as soon as I listened the scratching stopped, and all I could hear was the faint sound of the wind, sighing in the trees, and the discontented whispering of the sea.
I drank two glasses of cold water and then switched off the light and tiptoed back to my room. Danny and Charity must have been asleep by now. I couldn’t hear them chattering to each other, anyway. I thought of going to take a look at them, but their bedroom door squeaked so loudly that I was afraid of waking them up.
I was just about to open the door of my room when I saw a dim flickering of blueish light underneath it. I paused, my hand already on the handle, frowning to myself. It certainly wasn’t the bedside lamp. It was more like the flickering of a television, although we didn’t have a television in the bedroom. Perhaps it was lightning, shining through the curtains. The weather had been unusually disturbed over the past few days, and several times I had heard distant grumbles of thunder from across the Channel. It had been a reminder (apropos of nothing at all) that during the First World War, holidaymakers on the South Coast of England had been able to hear the artillery barrages in France. I had always found that poignant and disturbing.
Again, I heard that scratch-scuffle-scratch, and I felt a horrible tingling sensation down my bare back, like a mild electric shock. Instead of opening the bedroom door, I knelt down in the corridor and squinted through the keyhole. The draft blowing through it made my eye water, but I could see the dark shape of the bed, and Liz’s head on the pillow, and part of the window.
The light flickered again, but it certainly wasn’t lightning. It was coming from inside the room—over in the opposite corner. It flickered brighter, so that I could clearly see Liz’s hair, and at the same time I heard a deep, distorted chanting, so low in pitch that I could feel it vibrate through my jawbone. Ygggaaa sothoth nggaaa. Although it was low and blurry, more like an organ-pipe than a human voice, I recognized a similar chant to the words that old Mr Billings had been screaming in the garden, as he was electrocuted by the sundial. Nngggnggyyaaa nnggg sothoth.
I had no idea what the words meant, but they were chanted in such a persistent, invocative way that they filled me with an irrational anxiety that verged on panic. Someone or something was being summoned to Fortyfoot House—but who, or what, I couldn’t begin to imagine. I wasn’t sure that I wanted to imagine it, either.
The light flickered again, almost dazzling this time. I was amazed that Liz hadn’t woken up. I made up my mind to open the door, and I had actually started to turn the handle—when the source of the light came into view, and I stayed where I was, transfixed.
The nurse or nun that I had seen hovering halfway up the wall had taken shape in the middle of the room. A tall, shimmering creature with an elaborate wimple, wrapped in a habit of blueish light that rose and fell as if it were floating on a phosphorescent ocean. The creature moved across the room in a slow, mesmerizing glide, leaving a series of fading after-images behind it.
The chant continued, vibrant and lewd. NggGGAaa—sothoth—gnoph-hek—nggaaAA—and in spite of the unfamiliarity of it, in spite of the fact that it bore no resemblance to any language that I had ever heard, I felt that I was right on the edge of understanding what it meant—the way that a word clings to the very tip of your tongue—felt, tasted almost, but refusing to be uttered.
The nun-figure glided over to the foot of the bed and stood for some time, its robes undulating, apparently watching Liz as she lay asleep. Then it began to lean forward over the bed, not bending, but leaning at an impossible angle, until it was only a few inches above the quilt.
I saw Liz stir. I didn’t know how dangerous this apparition was, or what it wanted, but I knew that I couldn’t stay outside any longer. I twisted the doorhandle, and shouldered open the door, so that it banged loudly against the wall. I had thought of letting out a war-cry, or a rebel yell—not only to frighten the apparition away but to give myself courage, too. But when I found myself standing in front of the bed, stark naked, my throat tightened and I couldn’t manage anything but a hoarse, high-pitched aahhh!
With a thunderous rumble, the creature on the bed turned over, and beneath the wimple I saw a face—a cavernous-eyed death-mask with dropped-in cheeks and vicious teeth. My throat seized up completely, and all I could do was to stand staring at it in terror.
There was a sound like hundreds of gallons of water emptying suddenly out of a huge zinc cistern—a rushing, rumbling, draining-away sound—and the apparition seemed to melt into the quilt, its arms melting into Liz’s arms, its hideous face melting into Liz’s face. Her hair stood up on end for a moment, and crackled with tiny blue sparks of static electricity. Her eyes opened, and for the briefest of seconds they flared red.
Then there was stillness, and silence. Uncanny silence. Even the wind had died down. Even the sea had stopped its whispering. Liz stared at me, her eyes wide, and I stared back at her.
“What’s the matter?” she said, at last. “What are you standing there like that for?”
“I—went for a drink of water.”
“Where’s your jim-jams? You must be freezing.”
“It’s not that cold.”
“Still... you can get back into bed, can’t you? Or are you going to stand there frightening me all night?”
“I—yes, of course.” I approached the bed, still looking at her intently. “Are you all right?”
“Of course I’m all right. Why shouldn’t I be all right?”
“I mean, do you feel all right?” I asked her.
She laughed, impatiently. “Of course I feel all right. Why shouldn’t I?”
I climbed back into bed. Immediately, she put her arm around me, and pressed herself close, her breasts against my side, her thighs against my calves. She rolled my right nipple between finger and thumb.
“I thought you said you weren’t cold,” she teased me.
“I’m not. I had a bit of a start, that’s all.”
“A start? What kind of a start?”
“That thing that I saw before—that nun-thing. I saw it in the room when you were asleep and it sort of leaned over you.”
“What do you mean—leaned over me?” She was smiling, almost laughing.
“I don’t know. I saw it with my own eyes. It leaned over you and then it disappeared.”
She ran her fingers down my side, and touched a nerve that made me jump. “I think you’ve been drinking too much.”
“Liz, I saw it. It was right over the bed.”
She stroked and squeezed and scratched my thighs, and then she started to rub my coc
k up and down. I took hold of her wrist and stopped her. “Don’t—I really don’t feel like it.”
She kissed me, but she wouldn’t let go. As soon as I released her wrist, she started rubbing me again—fiercely, rather than affectionately, digging her fingernails deep into my skin.
“That hurts,” I protested.
“Oh, dear,” she mocked me. “Can’t you take a little pain? I thought men enjoyed pain.”
She kept on rubbing, harder and harder, until at last I took hold of her hand again and held it firmly. “Liz, that hurts, and enough is enough.”
“Don’t tell me you’re not enjoying it. You’re stiff as a broomstick.”
“It hurts and I’m not in the mood.”
She laughed—a high, derisive laugh that was almost a scream. I had never heard her laugh like that before, and it made my skin prickle and my balls scrunch up. She dragged aside the blanket and balanced up into a kneeling position astride my chest, her knees clutching my ribcage, her hands clamping my hands flat against the bed. Although she was so small, she felt fleshy and powerful. It was so dark that it was difficult to see her face clearly, but I could make out her teeth glistening and her eyes shining. She was breathing harsh and deep, her ribcage rising and falling, her breasts rising and falling.
“Liz?” I said, cautiously. I felt as if I didn’t know her any more.
“Why did you stay?” she panted.
“What? What are you talking about?”
“Why did you stay? Why didn’t you leave, as soon as you realized that something was wrong?”
I tried to sit up, but she pushed me back against the pillow again.
“Liz,” I said, “is this you I’m talking to, or someone else?”
She let out another of those terrible screaming laughs. “Who does it look like? My God, David, you’re such a fool!”
I took a deep breath and tried to stay calm and sensible. For me, that wasn’t easy. I had always been prone to opening my mouth and putting my foot in it. “Liz…” I began, but she pressed her fingertips against my lips and said, “ssshh, you don’t understand any of this, and you don’t have to, either.”
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