Prey

by Graham Masterton

  D-c Jones rocked himself up and down on a seesawing floorboard. “Somebody’s had this floor up, too, sir. Not recently, but they never put it back properly...”

  D-s Miller gave me a look as sharp as a craft-knife blade. He was doing nothing to conceal his suspicion that I knew more about Dennis Pickering’s disappearance than I was telling him, but I was fairly sure that he didn’t suspect me of murder. Unlike his fellow police officers, he was ready to believe in the lights and the noises and the strange supernatural forces that disturbed the peace of Fortyfoot House. His only problem—like mine—was proof.

  “Mind if we ease a couple of these floorboards up, see what’s underneath?” he asked me.

  “It’s not my house. You’d better ask the estate agents.”

  “We won’t be doing any damage.”

  “All the same, I think you’d better ask the estate agents first. It’s Dunn & Michael, in Ventnor.”

  D-s Miller shrugged. “All right, Mr Williams, if that’s what it takes, we’ll go down there now.”

  “That’s all right. I don’t mean to be obstructive. It’s just that if anything gets damaged… well, I’ll be the one who’s responsible.”

  “I understand,” said D-s Miller, soothingly. “Give us a half-an-hour, and we’ll be back. You don’t mind if we leave the rug rolled back?”

  “No, of course not.”

  D-s Miller and D-c Jones left Fortyfoot House without another word. I stood in the porch and watched them drive away. Then I turned back to Danny and Charity and said, “Listen… why don’t you go down to the beach and play for a while? Danny, show Charity how to run a crab race. I’ll make you some breakfast.”

  “But I’m hungry now,” Danny complained.

  “Danny, please. You know that things are a bit difficult. Come back in—say, twenty minutes. Look, you can borrow my watch.”

  I took off my transparent Swatch and buckled it round Danny’s skinny wrist. He had been nagging me for nearly six months for a watch the same as mine, and he was so delighted that he couldn’t stop grinning. Charity stared at the watch in fascination; but then Danny affectionately shoved her shoulder and said, “Come on, Charity! Let’s go and find some crabs!” and the two of them ran out of the kitchen door and helter-skelter down past the sundial, and out of the gate at the bottom of the garden.

  Here one second, gone the next. God, I thought to myself, if only we could get that innocence back. Me and Janie. Me and Liz.

  *

  I took my short crowbar out of my toolkit and carried it straight to the living-room. If there was anything or anybody under those floorboards, I wanted to find out first. Kneeling down, I jimmied the flat end of the crowbar in between the boards, and gently eased one of them upward, trying not to make too much of a mark. At first, the boards wouldn’t budge. Although they were loose, and rocked from side to side when you stood on them, the nails which held them down had been knocked in hard, and it was going to take a powerful amount of leverage to lift them out.

  I started off carefully; but after six or seven unsuccessful heaves on the crowbar, I decided that—sod it, it didn’t matter anyway. I was in charge of renovating Fortyfoot House, and if I wanted to prise up the living-room floorboards, then I would damn well prise up the living-room floorboards. I could always say that I had smelled dryrot.

  Eventually, with a tortured, screaming noise, I managed to lift one of the longest nails out of the floor; and with some twisting and straining, the board came out, too.

  It was dark, underneath the floorboards. Dark but dry, like a mushroom-shed. I had left my torch upstairs on the landing, but I didn’t need a torch to know that there was something under these floorboards.

  I dug my crowbar under the next floorboard. I strained, twisted and turned the floorboard over. It was then that I saw what Fortyfoot House had been concealing for all these years: an ash-gray, papery, mummified body, stowed carefully between the joists of the floor, in a position that was almost Egyptian—its skin dried tight, the color of varnished mahogany; its arms drawn up in front of it like chicken’s claws; its eyes blind. Its stomach was torn open, but the years had dried it, so that it looked like a wasp’s-nest rather than a stomach—straw-colored overlays, one on top of the other, the mille-feuille of desiccation and death.

  In spite of its mummification, it wasn’t difficult to recognize who it was. It wore a yellowed dog-collar and rotted corduroy trousers. It was Dennis Pickering: disemboweled and buried under the floor, over a hundred years ago. The dry, airy conditions under the floorboards had half-preserved his body and his clothes—enough for D-s Miller to be able to identify him. What D-s Miller would make of a hundred-year-old mummy in Hush Puppies and Marks & Spencers underwear, I didn’t know, and I didn’t particularly want to find out. As soon as D-s Miller was clear of Fortyfoot House, I was going to burn it right down to the basement, and with any luck that would rid all of us of Brown Jenkin, and young Mr Billings, and Kezia Mason; and whatever ghosts had plagued Bonchurch since Fortyfoot House had first been built.

  I stared down at Dennis Pickering’s shrunken body for a long time. It was unbelievable to think that I had been talking to him, only yesterday, and here he was, looking like a relic from the Egyptian room at the British Museum.

  “You poor bastard,” I mouthed. I had never felt so sorry for anybody in my life. And what was worse, I couldn’t tell his wife what had happened to him. I couldn’t even tell her where he was.

  Obviously, I was going to have to get rid of him before D-s Miller came back, but I didn’t know how. There was a big old-fashioned wheelbarrow in the gardening-shed: maybe I could cart him off in that, and hide him under the compost heap, but apart from the fact that he might crumble to pieces when I touched him, the risks were ridiculously high. If D-s Miller caught me burying Dennis Pickering’s body, he would automatically (and justifiably) assume that I knew how Dennis Pickering had died—as if I wasn’t under enough suspicion already for the death of Harry Martin and the unexplained appearance of Charity.

  I walked back through the kitchen. I wanted to take a quick look at the compost heap, to see if I could bury Dennis Pickering inside it without disturbing it too much. As I opened the front door, however, I saw a police Metro pull up beside my Audi, and a uniformed constable climb out. He carefully fitted his cap on, and then stood next to his car with his hands clasped behind his back. D-s Miller had obviously radioed for somebody to keep an eye on me.

  Damn it, what the hell was I going to do now? I could see this whole situation getting more and more complicated. If I could have trusted D-s Miller to absolve me of any blame, I would have told him everything. But no matter how much D-s Miller believed in ghosts, and Brown Jenkin, and the supernatural forces that echoed through Fortyfoot House, he still had to report to his superiors, and if he found Dennis Pickering’s body then his superiors would want him to arrest somebody for murder. Dennis Pickering was the local vicar, after all—not some yobbo or vagrant or drunken holidaymaker. Of course, he could never prove it was me, because it simply wasn’t; but he could have me locked up on remand for literally months, while Danny was sent back to Janie, or went into care; and I lost sight of Liz for ever.

  I went back to the living-room and stared down at the dried-up corpse under the floorboards. I couldn’t drag the body out of the house now, even if I could pluck up the courage to do it. But supposing I dragged the body out of the house then—in 1886—as soon as Kezia Mason and Brown Jenkin had hidden it?

  If I dragged it out then, it wouldn’t be here now—although it did occur to me that since it was here now, perhaps I hadn’t succeeded in dragging it out in 1886. Could you really change history? Could I really go back and make sure that Dennis Pickering’s body would never be found? Could I possibly go back and make sure that he was never even killed? The possibilities seemed endless, kaleidoscopic. Perhaps I could go back and make sure that Kezia Mason had never been brought to Fortyfoot House in the first place, and that old Mr B
illings had never been struck by lightning. Perhaps I could even change history so that Brown Jenkin had never been conceived.

  I replaced the floorboards, and kicked them firmly into place. I hammered back the nails with my crowbar, and then took a handful of dust and ash out of the hearth and rubbed it into the crevices in between the boards so that as far as possible they looked as if they had never been disturbed. I didn’t make a particularly good job of it, but if D-s Miller lifted the boards up quickly enough, without scrutinizing them first, it was conceivable that he wouldn’t notice.

  I checked on Danny and Charity out of the window. They were playing down by the sundial, Charity sitting on the grass making a daisy-chain, Danny hopping one-legged close beside her. Faintly, I could hear him chanting, “…and the masses of bears… who wait at the corners all ready to eat… the sillies who tread on the lines of the street...” I guessed that they’d be safe for a few minutes… at least as long as it took me to go up to the attic and then back down again, and get rid of poor Dennis Pickering’s body.

  There was a high risk, of course, that I would run into Brown Jenkin or Kezia Mason again—but if I was careful, I was sure that I could avoid them—or at least run fast enough to escape them. I picked up my crowbar. This time, at least, I would be going prepared, and I wouldn’t be giving either of them even half a chance to surprise me.

  I climbed the stairs to the attic, opened the door, and listened. For a moment, I thought I could hear voices murmuring, but then I realized that it was only the wind, blowing softly and mournfully through the roofspace. I had half-hoped that the attic would still be light; but it was totally dark, and I had to switch on my torch and probe the stairs with its narrow yellow beam. A cautious, darting searchlight, looking for what?

  Carefully, keeping my back against the wall, I edged my way up the attic stairs, until I reached the banister-rail. The attic may have been dark—but to my relief I saw that there was a faint wash of blue light coming in through the window-pane. This was still the attic of 1886. The only difference from our last visit was that now it was night-time. I walked across to the skylight and looked up. I could see stars prickling the sky, and a thin tangle of violet-gray clouds.

  I flicked the torch-beam across to the trapdoor. It was still bolted from the attic side, although one of the bolts had been forced loose from its screws, as if somebody underneath had been battering the trapdoor with maniacal force. I hesitated for a moment, then I walked over and knelt beside it, and carefully eased back the bolts. The loose bolt rattled a little, and I held my breath and listened for almost half-a-minute, in case somebody below had heard me. The last thing I wanted to do was to swing down into my bedroom, only to have Brown Jenkin tear my legs off.

  Taking a shallow breath, I eased up the trapdoor and looked apprehensively downwards. The room was in darkness, although I could make out the pale shape of the sheeted bed. Brown Jenkin must have knocked the chair away, because I could just see one of its legs. I would have to swing down, trying not to make too much noise. I listened, but I couldn’t hear voices. All I could hear was a door bang pause—banging. Of course, I had no way of telling what time of day it was in 1886—or even if I had returned to 1886 on the same day that I had left it, sequentially. This could be a week later or a week before. It might not even be 1886 at all. It might be 1885 or 1887 or any year at all. There was no way of telling whether the chair had been knocked over just a few hours ago by Brown Jenkin, or whether it had been lying on its side in an empty and abandoned Fortyfoot House for months.

  All the same, I had to take the chance that Fortyfoot House, 1886, was running on parallel time. I eased myself down through the trapdoor, clung on for a moment, and then dropped as quietly as I could onto the bedroom rug. I stayed quite still for a while, listening, just to make sure that nobody had heard me. The bedroom certainly looked the same as it had before. The bed, the window, the upside-down crucifix. Downstairs, I heard the longcase clock chime eleven, sonorous and weary.

  The bedroom door was slightly ajar. I crept towards it, trying to keep my balance so that I wouldn’t make too much noise. One of the floorboards gave a soft, drawn-out creak, but the rest of the floor was reasonably firm. My heart was beating fast and hard, and I was breathing like a man balancing along a tightrope. After all, I had no idea if Brown Jenkin was crouching in wait for me in the corridor outside; or if Kezia Mason was able to sense that I was here.

  The walls are hung with velvet that is black and soft as sin… I heard myself quoting, inside my own head. And little dwarfs creep out of it...

  I eased the bedroom door open. Outside, the corridor was very much darker; almost as black as King Philip’s velvet-lined closet. I waited, listening—my ears aching from the strain.

  It was then that a small white figure appeared out of the darkness, and came gliding towards me—followed by another, and another.

  I was seized with such total panic that I couldn’t move. I didn’t even lift up my crowbar. The figures came closer and closer, with the faintest of rustling sounds. Dwarfs, escaped from the closet. Ghosts, escaped from the graveyard. Or—

  15

  The Warning

  The small figures came close up to me, and in the dim light from the bedroom I could see that they were children, white-faced children, dressed in long white nightgowns. Their eyes were haunted with tiredness and malnutrition, and their hair was tangled, but they weren’t dwarfs, or ghosts. They were simply children—two little girls and a little boy.

  “Who are you?” asked one of the little girls. She was quite pretty but painfully thin. I heard the distinct yowling flatness of the Victorian East End in her voice—the same accent as Kezia Mason. “I aint seen you before. Does the guvnor know you’re here?”

  I shook my head. “He doesn’t know and I don’t particularly want him to know.”

  “You don’t half talk funny,” remarked the little boy. “Where are you from, then?”

  “Brighton.”

  “I went to Brighton once, on the train. My mum took me.”

  “You never had a mum,” interjected the second little girl.

  “Yes I did, too. She took me to Brighton once. Then she had another baby and died of it.”

  “Ssh!” I said. “We don’t want to wake anybody up.”

  “What are you doing then, mooching?” asked the first little girl. “You’re not a skinner, are you? Brown Jenkin don’t like skinners.”

  “What’s a skinner?” I asked her.

  “You know! One of them doctors or reverends who tells you to take off all of your clothes, just so’s they can look at you bare.”

  “No, well, I’m not a skinner, nor a moocher,” I told her. “I’m looking for a friend of mine, that’s all.”

  “You want to be careful Brown Jenkin don’t catch you here,” said the second little girl.

  “I know all about Brown Jenkin,” I told her. “I know all about Kezia Mason, too.”

  “When you’ve found your friend, you’re not staying here, are you?” asked the little boy.

  “No, of course not. I’m leaving straight away.”

  “You wouldn’t take us with you?”

  “Take you with me? All of you? I really don’t know. I don’t think I could. Why?”

  “There’s a lot of us dying, that’s why. Mr Billings takes a look at you and says you’re sick, and you should go on a treat to make you better. So Brown Jenkin takes you off on a picnic, and that’s the last that anybody ever sees of you, before you’re buried.”

  “But we’re not sick,” put in the first little girl. “Mr Billings doesn’t give us much grub, just bread-and-scrape most of the time, so we’re hungry. But we’re not sick, none of us, excepting for Billy, and he’s got the whooping-cough. He’s always had the whooping-cough.”

  “How many children are left?” I asked them.

  “Thirty-one now, all counted, except for Charity; and nobody knows where she went.”

  I knew where Charity ha
d gone, of course; but I didn’t tell them. I hadn’t come here to rescue all of these East End tykes from Mr Billings’ orphanage. I simply didn’t have the time or (God forgive me) the selfless devotion to do it. What had started out as an attempt to discover what was happening in Fortyfoot House had now begun to take on all the characteristics of the Inn of the Sixth Happiness. The next thing I knew, I’d be marching through 1886 with a gang of abandoned children behind me, singing This Old Man, He Played One, He Played Knick-knack On My Drum.

  Right at this moment, all I was interested in doing was heaving Dennis Pickering’s body out from under the floorboards, and getting rid of it.

  “Listen,” I whispered to the three children, “I have something important to do downstairs. When I’ve finished, I’ll come back and talk to you. Where are you sleeping?”

  The first little girl pointed to the next bedroom along the corridor—the bedroom which now contained nothing but broken chairs and books and boxes.

  “All right…” I whispered. “I won’t be longer than twenty minutes. Try not to fall asleep.”

  “We won’t.” They turned back into the darkness. But—as the first little girl was about to tiptoe back through her door—she turned to me, and beckoned, and then pressed her finger to her lips.

  “Come and see,” she said.

  She took hold of my hand with fingers that were thin and cold as ice. She led me across the corridor to Liz’s bedroom—or, at least, the bedroom that Liz had originally been meant to use, before she started sleeping with me. Very carefully, the little girl turned the doorhandle and started to ease open the door.

  “Whose room is this?” I asked her.

  “Ssh,” she said.

  As she opened the door wider, I felt a chilly, crawling sensation down my back. One side of the room was dominated by a high wooden bed, heaped with three or four plain wool blankets. On the left, furthest away from the window, Mr Billings was lying on his back, his eyes closed, his mouth open, his arms by his sides. He was snoring thickly; with a slight catch in every breath. Next to him lay Kezia Mason, her Titian hair spread out across the pillow like waves of fire. To my alarm, I saw that her eyes were wide open, and that she was staring at the ceiling.