“Understand what? Liz, this is ridiculous!”
But she leaned forward and kissed me—first my eyelids, then my mouth, and ran the tip of her tongue across my lips, and for some reason I suddenly felt calm, as if it didn’t matter what she was doing or what she was saying… as if it was easier simply to lie back on the pillow and do whatever she told me to do. Her breath was sweet and ripe and heady—summer’s breath, the breath of a girl who has gorged herself on apricots. Her tongue explored my teeth, and then we touched, tongue-tip to tongue-tip, and held our tongue-tips together, and I felt that something indescribable was passing between us, some strange communion, like a secret shared.
Momentarily, I saw that reddish flicker in her eyes. Momentarily, I understood things that I was never born to understand. Such as, there is no God—never has been—never will be—but there have always been Great Ones… some incandescent in their benevolence, some cloaked and remote, some far too hideous and frightening for human beings to comprehend. Liz sat up, and that moment of understanding dwindled and vanished. But I felt as if something huge and dramatic was about to happen, and that I was going to be part of it.
Liz lifted herself from my chest, and awkwardly positioned herself so that her knees were digging into my pillow, on either side of my head. Her vulva was only an inch or two above my mouth, and I could smell the strong, distinctive aroma of sex.
I looked up at her. She was holding on to the head of the bed with both hands. From where I was lying, her face was framed by the V-shaped valley of her cleavage and the shining tangle of her pubic hair.
“You’re hesitating, David,” she said, in an extraordinary voice. “Why are you hesitating? Don’t you like the taste?”
“Liz—” I began, but my mind had sunk into such a slow-moving turmoil of feelings and fears and alluring desires. Supposing you met a girl who would do anything you wanted... anything at all. Had I said that? Had Liz said it? I couldn’t be sure. But as she sat above my face, teasing me, taunting me, I saw myself doing things with Liz that I could never have done with Janie. I saw black nylon, white thighs. I saw licking lips. I saw swollen breasts. I saw wet-stained silk.
With a slow, tantalizing rotation of her pelvis, Liz lowered herself onto my mouth. I was smothered with a warm, slippery kiss; a kiss that almost suffocated me. My tongue slowly relished the ridges and clefts and hollows; probed for a moment her tangy urethra, then slid deep into her vagina, so that the kiss was complete, lips against lips. As she pressed down on me more forcefully, my tongue circled the neck of her womb.
But I was aware—as Liz cried out in some sort of ecstasy, and I was chin-smothered in saliva and juices—that this was far from an act of love. This wasn’t done for love. This wasn’t done even for lust. This was something else. This—in a way that I couldn’t understand at all—was procreation. This was making a child.
Or—if not a child—something.
I remember Liz lifting herself at last off my face. She knelt on the bed beside me for a long time watching me, and I lay back on the pillow watching her, my mouth drying in the warm night draft. Now and then she reached out and touched my bare chest, tracing a pattern over and over. It felt like a flower, or a four-leafed clover, or a star.
“You know something,” she said, gently. “When I was younger, my mother used to send me to my brother’s school, to take him his lunch. I used to see the very small children playing outside, and I always used to think that I would love to have a baby of my own.”
I closed my eyes. I felt impossibly tired. Even if it hadn’t succeeded in killing me, Fortyfoot House had worn me down. “I just need to sleep,” I murmured.
Liz kept on tracing that pattern. “I used to hear my brother reciting ‘tu, ta, ti; bu, ba, bi… ubanu, ammatu, ganu, ashlu’.”
I slept, but I could still hear her voice. She seemed to be capable of making herself heard in my mind, whether I was asleep or awake. I dreamed that I was gliding across the ocean again, on a dark and windless day. Liz was standing on the shore, and even though I was flying quite fast, she stayed in the same relative position, still talking, her face half-covered with bandages. Tu, ta, ti…. bu, ba, bi....
Then—without any warning at all—it was morning, and the sun was lying on the quilt as thick and as golden as butter, and the house-martens were squabbling in the roof-guttering. Liz was still asleep, mouth open, hair disarrayed. I eased myself out of bed and went to the window. Below me, the sea was sparkling.
As I stood at the window, I almost managed to persuade myself that it would be a crime to burn down Fortyfoot House. But while its location was beautiful, the house itself was confused and evil and unsettling, and it had the most hideous effect on anybody who tried to interfere with it. I was sure that if I didn’t burn it down, its next victim could easily be me.
14
Beneath the Floor
After a breakfast of Kellogg’s Country Store muesli and a mug of devastatingly black coffee, I went outside to see if there was any way in which I could get my car running again. Well, it didn’t have to run, exactly. So long as it limped, I didn’t mind. Liz had already left for the Tropical Bird Park. She had been wearing a very tight black T-shirt and a very short canary-yellow skirt, with yellow lace-up boots. I don’t know whether she had been trying to turn me on, or trying to show me that I was at least a decade older than she was, or simply being perverse.
But she had kissed me at the kitchen door, with her eyes open, and the sunlight in her face, and she had squeezed me roguishly between the legs, and whispered, “thank you,” so that if nothing else, I was left with the feeling that I had given her something that she wanted.
I had looked in on Danny and Charity. Both of them were still fast asleep. Now that Charity had been bathed and hairwashed and dressed in Liz’s blouse, she looked flawlessly modern. It was almost impossible to believe that I had brought her here from 1886.
I went out of the front door and of course the first thing that met my eyes was Dennis Pickering’s Renault, neatly parked next to my smashed-up Audi. Oh God! I’d forgotten his car! I felt a terrible surge of guilt and fright. Guilt because his wife must already be frantic, waiting for Dennis to come home. Fright because the police would inevitably see the vicar’s car parked outside Fortyfoot House, and assume (rightly, in a weird sort of way) that Liz and I had something to do with his disappearance.
I walked around the car and tried the doorhandle. It wasn’t locked, but Dennis Pickering had taken his keys with him. I suppose I could have released the handbrake and pushed the car out of sight behind the stable block, but what could I have done with it then? I didn’t have the slightest idea how to hot-wire a car. Besides, the entire populations of Bonchurch and Ventnor must have known the vicar’s car, and I never could have driven it away without being noticed by at least one local busybody.
My friend Chris Pert once said that the only way to deal with an insoluble problem was to take the fattest woman you could find to bed with you, and ask her. Fat women, he believed, had the answer to everything. He had even toyed with the idea of a phone-in agony service called Ask A Fat Lady.
I was still trying to work out what to do about it when Detective-sergeant Miller’s maroon Rover turned unexpectedly into the driveway, and described a noisy half-circle in the shingle before coming to a halt. D-s Miller climbed out, in shirtsleeves and sunglasses. When he took off his sunglasses, he looked exhausted, as if he hadn’t slept for three days. He was closely followed by Detective-constable Jones, looking bright-eyed and gingery and smelling strongly of Brut-33.
“Aha… so the wayward Mr Pickering is here, then,” said D-s Miller, walking up to the Renault and kicking its rear offside tire.
“Well… no, he isn’t, as a matter of fact,” I replied. I knew that I would have to choose my words carefully.
D-s Miller said, “I’m sorry?” in a tone which made it perfectly clear that he wasn’t sorry in the slightest.
“He came… yes. But he’s no
t here now.”
“His car’s still here,” D-c Jones observed.
“Yes,” I said.
“But he’s not?”
“No. He… had a few drinks last night… He decided to walk home.”
“How many drinks is a few?” asked D-s Miller.
“Six, seven glasses of wine. We were talking, we all drank too much. I don’t think we really noticed.”
“Oh,” said D-s Miller. “That’s a disappointment. What time did he leave?”
“It’s hard to remember. Round about half-eleven, probably.”
D-s Miller replaced his sunglasses and stood with his hands resting on his hips staring at nothing at all. In spite of the sunshine, Fortyfoot House stood behind him cold and shadowy and inward-looking, like an aged relative who sits silent at a family party and thinks of nothing but days gone by, and those who were once alive, and knew him, and loved him, but are long since dead.
D-s Miller said, “Mr Pickering promised his wife that he was going to phone her at eleven.”
“Oh, yes?”
“He told her he was going to drop in here, and then go down to Shanklin Old Village to see Mrs Martin.”
“He didn’t mention that to me.”
D-s Miller nodded, but didn’t say anything. D-c Jones gave the Renault’s tire another kick and D-s Miller frowned at him disapprovingly. “Looked a bit soft,” explained D-c Jones, flushing bright pink.
At that moment, Danny and Charity appeared at the door—Danny in his pajamas and Charity in Liz’s striped blouse.
“Daddy!” called Danny. “Charity wants to know what to wear!”
“You’ll have to excuse me,” I told D-s Miller.
“That’s all right,” said D-s Miller. “Looks like you’ve got your hands full. Who’s the little girl?”
“Niece,” I lied. “My sister’s youngest.”
“Well, nothing like a seaside holiday with uncle, is there?” said D-s Miller, and turned to leave. “You’ll call us if Mr Pickering comes back for his car, won’t you? I expect he’s just gone walkabout. Apparently he’s done it before. Mrs Pickering says he has trouble with his sexual identity.”
“Secret woofter, in other words,” put in D-c Jones.
D-s Miller gave him a quick, irritated glance. “He walks up and down the beach communing with God, that’s what Mrs Pickering told us.”
“Trying not to think about choirboys’ chubby bottoms,” said D-c Jones, warming to his prejudice.
“Will you belt up, Jones?” D-s Miller demanded.
“Sorry,” grinned D-c Jones.
The two of them returned to the Rover. They had half-climbed in, and were seconds away from closing their doors, when Charity called, piercingly, “Sir! Sir! Can we really have two eggs each for breakfast? Danny says we can!”
D-s Miller hesitated for what seemed like hours. Then he climbed back out of his car, and took off his sunglasses again, and asked me, with studied policemanly patience, “What’s that little girl’s name?”
“Charity,” I said. “Why?”
Without answering me, D-s Miller called, “Charity! Charity? Come here, please, Charity.”
Charity hurried barefoot across the gravel without hesitating for a moment. A little girl who was used to obeying the whims of “ge’men” without argument. She came up to D-s Miller and actually curtseyed.
D-s Miller looked down at her with obvious puzzlement.
“Is he your uncle?” he asked her at last, jerking his head towards me.
Charity glanced anxiously at me and I tried to communicate yes, yes without altering the nonchalant expression that I had carefully contrived when D-s Miller had stepped back out of his car. I don’t know what my face looked like, but it must have been grotesque enough for Charity to stare at me in perplexity, and then turn back to D-s Miller and announce, “No, sir, he’s not my uncle.”
“Ooooh,” said D-s Miller. “He’s not your uncle?”
“He’s a brave gentleman, sir. He saved me, and took me in, and bathed me.”
“He bathed you, did he?”
“Oh, for Christ’s sake, sergeant,” I put in. “Liz bathed her, not me.”
“But you’re not her uncle?”
“I like to call myself uncle.”
“But you’re not?”
“No.”
“All right, then,” said D-s Miller, with that terrible tedious patience that the CID use to bore confessions out of their suspects, “if he’s not your uncle, who is he?”
“He’s Danny’s papa. He saved me, and took me in. The reverend gentleman was killed but he saved me.”
“The reverend gentleman was killed?”
“Don’t listen to her,” I said, waving my hand dismissively. “She’s a bit, you know, over-imaginative. Well, doollally, to tell you the God’s honest truth. Birth defect.”
But D-s Miller persisted. “Who killed the reverend gentleman, love?”
“You really shouldn’t listen,” I said.
Charity began to look worried. “It wasn’t this gentleman what killed him, sir. This gentleman saved me. What killed him was…” And here she placed her hands over her face in a pointed fashion, so that only her eyes looked out—quick, furtive, darting eyes—and then she hooked her fingertips so that they appeared to be teeth—and then she hunched her back in a hideously evocative imitation of Brown Jenkin, and hopped around the gravel in front of D-s Miller in a ghastly dance that had him frozen with alarm.
“Wellsir,” breathed D-c Jones. “What the bloody hell do you think that is?”
D-s Miller’s face was bloodless. “Brown Jenkin,” he said.
“Whatsir?”
“I said ‘I’m thinking.’”
“Oh. Rightsir. Very goodsir.”
Now D-s Miller hunkered down in front of Charity and took hold of her arms and looked her directly in the eyes. “Charity—where was the reverend gentleman killed?”
“In the withdrawing-room, sir.”
“He’s not still there, is he?”
“Not now, sir.”
D-s Miller’s ears were keen enough to have caught her unusual emphasis on “now” but he obviously didn’t understand the implications of it. Who would? Even Charity’s archaic manners couldn’t have persuaded a reasonable police officer that she and I had just arrived from 1886. I could scarcely believe it myself. It was like something that I had dreamed about, or a film that I had once seen.
D-s Miller stood up again, and looked at me with a tired, exaggeratedly patient expression. “I think you’d better tell me what’s been going on,” he said, standing so close and speaking so quietly that D-c Jones couldn’t hear what he was saying. “My superior officers may not believe it, and D-c Jones here may not believe it. But I believe it, and this is going to stop, one way or another, before anybody else gets themselves hurt.”
“I’m not sure that I can help you,” I replied. I had my own plan for dealing with Fortyfoot House: I didn’t want D-s Miller making things more complicated than they already were.
“Why should this little girl say that Mr Pickering’s been killed?” asked D-s Miller.
“Vivid imagination, I suppose.”
“Still… we could take a look in the house, couldn’t we?”
“All right, yes. You can if you want to.”
D-s Miller turned around and took hold of Charity’s hand. “Why don’t you show me exactly where the reverend gentleman was killed, Charity?”
Charity obediently led him toward the house. D-c Jones and I followed behind. D-c Jones said, “Kids. I hate investigations with kids. You don’t know how much of it’s real, how much of it’s made up, and how much of it’s come off the telly.”
I didn’t say anything. I decided that the safest course of action was to stay silent.
D-s Miller walked through to the living-room and prowled around. Of course the room was quite different from the room it had been in 1886. The wainscoting had gone, the furniture was all modern. The orig
inal hearth was still in place, but the Victorian mantelpiece had been torn out long ago, and replaced with a beige-tiled 1930s fire-surround.
“Well… no sign of any disturbance,” said D-s Miller. “Where exactly was the reverend gentleman killed, Charity?”
Charity pointed to the spot where, yesterday, 106 years ago, Brown Jenkin had so viciously disemboweled Dennis Pickering.
“I see,” said D-s Miller. “And how was he actually killed?”
Charity made her left hand into a pretend claw, and mimed a sharp upward ripping motion.
“Scratched himself to death,” suggested D-c Jones.
D-s Miller said nothing, but continued to circle the room, picking up ornaments and putting them down again, shifting magazines—even lifting an empty wine-glass up to the light and peering at it closely.
At last, he said to Charity, “When he was dead—this reverend gentleman—what did they do with his body?”
Charity shook her head. “I don’t know. We ran away. Danny’s papa took me upstairs and saved me.”
D-c Jones gave D-s Miller a dismissive shake of his head. “With all due respect, sir, it sounds like a bit of a fairy-story to me.”
“There would have been gallons of blood, wouldn’t there?” D-s Miller agreed.
“Gallons,” I agreed. I was beginning to perspire, I didn’t know why. D-s Miller was making me feel guilty even though I hadn’t actually done anything.
“You don’t mind if I look under the rug, do you?” asked D-s Miller.
“Be my guest,” I told him.
D-c Jones tilted the armchair so that D-s Miller could tug the rug out from underneath it. Then, with great neatness, almost like a professional carpet-fitter, he rolled the rug back to expose the floorboards in the center of the room. He was right, of course: there had been blood all over the floor when Dennis Pickering had been killed, but the passing years had reduced it to a dark, russet-colored Rorschach pattern, a shape that put me in mind of a grinning old hag with a hooked chin.
D-s Miller knelt down on one knee and ran his hand over the floorboards. “Something’s been spilled here, but not very recently.”
Prey Page 24
