“And Kezia told you all of this?”
“She was obliged to. She needed my help. You see, Brown Jenkin discovered that in that future time when the next great Renewal is about to take place—she is the only surviving witch-entity. The rest of them will have died out from starvation or new diseases. Her future self is a local woman called Vanessa Charles: and her future self is fully pregnant, waiting for the great moment. But her future self needs to feed. Eating for four, if you want to put it crudely.
“My father refused to let her have any of the children from Fortyfoot House, and so—as I later discovered—she killed him. For a long time afterwards—before I understood what she really was—I was just as much under her spell as my father had been. As you know, we even married. There was nothing about her physically—nothing—that betrayed what she really was inside.
“She made love like no other woman I have ever met. She made me wealthy, successful; she gave me a feeling of such euphoria! Then one day, one of our children went missing—young Robert Philips, he was only six, God help me. I found his remains in the woods between here and Old Shanklin Village. His dismembered, burned, half-eaten remains. I shall never forget seeing his thigh bone with shreds of red flesh and human teeth-marks on it—never. The next day I found Robert’s brass whistle in one of Kezia’s drawers, as well as a bloodstained handkerchief. I knew then that I had married something very evil.”
Young Mr Billings was silent for a disturbingly long time. Then at last he added, “She promised me money if I stayed quiet. She threatened me with mutilation and death. Then, she told me everything. The point was—she needed to keep Fortyfoot House open for as long as possible so that the children stayed fresh until they were needed… and of course if there was any hint of child-molestation or murder, we would have been closed down immediately, and the children taken out of our care.
“To put it quite bluntly, my dear, sir, Fortyfoot House is nothing more nor less than a provision-store for one of the most grisly and horrifying creatures that has ever existed on this earth. It’s a larder, stocked with living children.”
16
Tooth And Claw
I stared at young Mr Billings and—he in turn—tried to look earnestly back at me—but his shame seemed to overwhelm him, and he had to look away.
“I’ll have to go,” I told him. “I don’t know whether to thank you for what you’ve told me, or curse you.”
“You can at least save Charity,” he said. “Take her as far away from Fortyfoot House as you can—and yourself, too. Brown Jenkin can’t pursue you very far.”
“What about the other children? I met some of them just now, up on the landing.”
“Oh, yes. It was they who woke me, with their whispering and their running-around. You can’t take them with you, I’m afraid. If only you could. But Brown Jenkin would murder twice as many of them out of rage. He’s completely unhinged, completely irrational.”
“But the children are going to die anyway. I’ve seen all their gravestones.”
“Destiny is not immutable, my dear sir, as you’ve already discovered. What if you had left your reverend friend under the floorboards? What if you and he had never ventured back through the doorway at all? Our fate has always been ours, my dear sir. The only paradox is that we do not make the effort to alter our lives when we can.”
He took hold of my hand and clasped it tight. I was struck by the strangest of sensations—that here I was, holding the hand of a man who had been dead for over a hundred years. It made me feel as if I were on a roller-coaster, just about to tilt into nothingness. I could understand how men went mad.
“I agreed that Brown Jenkin could take six of the children,” he said. “I thought to myself—well, if they hadn’t come here to Fortyfoot House, they would have died anyway, in London’s East End—of starvation, or exposure, or violent sexual abuse. Then—when Kezia pushed me even harder—I agreed that he could take six more, but my self-justification began to sound distinctly hollow. Now she wants yet another six; and I know where this will end, unless I do something drastic.”
“What are you going to do?”
“Go forward in time,” said young Mr Billings. “Go forward in time to the very edge, and stop this monstrosity before the Renewal—before the world’s future is condemned for ever.”
I looked at my watch. I had been gone for nearly half an hour now, and Danny and Charity must be worrying where I had disappeared to. “I’d better get back,” I said. “I’m not sure that I can grasp all of this yet. I still can’t work out why Brown Jenkin can’t come back from the future and warn Kezia what you’re going to do.”
“Because this time now—this November in 1886—is my real time. You can leave through the doorway, but if you come back tomorrow I’ll still be here in November, 1886, and the same amount of hours and minutes will have elapsed in my world as they have in yours.”
“I’m even more confused than I was before.”
“Believe me,” said young Mr Billings, “we can save the children if we try. I’m sure of it. If we can’t, then I deserve whatever it is that God has in store for me.”
“Do you want to know?” I asked him.
He shook his head. “I can imagine only too well. Madness and death, I suspect. I feel both of them pressing on me now. But I would rather not hear it from somebody who knows for certain.”
I opened the garden gate, and stepped into the darkness of the trees. Fortyfoot House stood black against the sky—strangely unEnglish and bizarre in the darkness, as if it were a Turkish fortress, or a cliff on some impossibly distant world. I climbed the path, crossed the little bridge that took me over the brook, and then began to cross the lawns towards the back of the house. The fishpond lay like a silvery window in the darkness—a window which looked directly into a terrible, unreachable abyss. If you fell through that window, you would drop directly downwards into the sky.
I was hurrying past the sundial when I heard a sharp crackling noise. I glanced at the sundial itself, and saw that a thin trickle of bright blue sparks was crawling around the pointer and the metal face, outlining the Roman numerals. I quickly looked around the shadows of the garden: some hunched, some monstrous, all of them threatening. If there were sparks around, then Kezia Mason couldn’t be far away—and if Kezia Mason wasn’t far away, neither was Brown Jenkin. I broke into an uphill jog, but I had scarcely reached the edge of the wabe when a long stick-like bolt of electricity jumped out of the sundial-pointer and hit me on the shoulder. All the nerves in my left arm jangled, and my muscles contracted so tight that my fist jumped up involuntarily. Then I felt an intense burning sensation, and a puff of cotton-smoke wafted up from the shoulder of my polo-shirt.
Down the patio steps in front of me came Kezia Mason, closely followed by the limping, scratching tittering figure of Brown Jenkin. Kezia was wrapped around in an eccentric, almost-Arabian costume of soiled torn bedsheets, heaped around her head in a monstrous burnous, with only her eyes showing. The sheets were piled up on her shoulders and fastened with scores of criss-crosses of knotted string. She was naked from her ribcage down to her knees, except for a string pouch tied around her waist, and this was crammed with dead oak-leaves and brown-tinged rose-petals and bunches of mistletoe and even a half-mummified sparrow. Her shins were wrapped in more torn sheets, and her feet were bare, although she had knotted a piece of string around each toe.
The sheets looked as if they were stained in blood and urine, and even though she was almost twenty feet away, I could smell the stench of death. Kezia Mason and Brown Jenkin were death—death and her scurrying companion.
“Bonsoir bastard comment ca va?” giggled Brown Jenkin, flapping around the grass, from shadow to shadow; so that I didn’t know which was shadow and which was rat-creature. “We were so traurig bastard-bastard. But so happy now, das wir your lunchpipes riechen konnen! I hook out your derrière-ring avec meinen Klauen, ja!”
All the time Brown Jenkin was crowing and danc
ing in the darkness, Kezia Mason was circling around me pale and rancid and very strange. Her sheets rustled; her string pouch bounced softly in her naked lap.
“What brought you back then, Mr Mizzler?” she asked me. “Tired of breathing, were you? What did you do with the hot gospeller then? Chuck him in the briny?”
“Ha! ha! Tekeli-li! Tekeli-li!” Brown Jenkin screeched, until Kezia Mason pointed a rigid index finger at him, her eyes wide behind her stinking, makeshift hood.
“Quiet, Jenkin! You look as if the devil shit you flying!”
There was a sharp snap from the tip of her finger, and instantly a vein burst in Brown Jenkin’s ratlike nostril, and blood sprayed all over his whiskers and his upraised collar. He clutched at his nose and circled around the grass, mewling.
“Well, then?” demanded Kezia, coming closer. I could hardly stand the sharp-sweet smell of her, and I could feel the bile rising up in my throat. “What do you want, then, cocker? You’re looking a bit fishy about the gills, aint you? Come for some naughty, have you? Or come for some trouble? Or come for both?”
Quite frankly, I didn’t know what the hell to say to her. I could barely understand a word she was saying, and my throat was so tight with fear and disgust that I don’t think I could manage to speak at all. I glanced quickly sideways to make sure that Brown Jenkin wasn’t circling around the back of me, but immediately she reached out and snatched at my face, with all five ragged-nailed fingers. She thrust her little finger deep into the flesh of my cheek, the next finger into my mouth, the middle finger into my nostril, and used her thumb and index finger to pinch my other cheek so fiercely that I cried out “ah!”
“Hee-hee, fly-blow bastard!” tittered Brown Jenkin. “Barge-arse fucker! Je mange tes fries!”
Kezia’s finger tasted disgusting, like stale blood. My stomach heaved, and I couldn’t stop myself from retching.
“How would you like me to rip off your fizzog?” she challenged me. “I can do it, you know! One twist, and off it comes! Not dead, mind! You wouldn’t be ready for your box just yet! But think of living without no lips, and without no nose, and cheeks like rat-holes! And not a cove alive could look at your Roger without shitting himself! And come to think of it, you’ve got a shitten-look yourself!”
“Let me rip him!” hissed Brown Jenkin. I felt his claws running down the side of my trouser-leg; but Kezia had my face in such a vicious grip that I couldn’t do anything but shudder. I suppose I could have kicked her, or tried to slap her hand aside, but there was something about her which made me feel drained of strength, as if I couldn’t have swatted a fly, let alone slap aside the most obscene and vicious grip that anyone had ever had on me.
Brown Jenkin’s claw ran up the inside of my thigh, and briefly pricked me between the legs. “Ah oui-oui we can rip them off,” the rat-creature sniggered. “Zwei porky pounders for supper, oui? Nicht vergessen Abendessen!” Kezia leaned her sheet-swathed head forward and whispered in a hot hurricane of foul breath, “Tear off your snottle-box then, cocker?”
“Tear off his snossidge!” screamed Brown Jenkin.
But at that moment I heard young Mr Billings call out, “Wait! Kezia, wait!”
“Wait for what, then?” she retorted. “St Lubbock’s Day?”
Young Mr Billings came across the shadowy lawn and stood beside us. Out of the corner of my eye, however I noticed that he kept away by quite a respectable distance. Perhaps he didn’t want to get entrail-splatters on his suit.
“Kezia—he has yet to give you the son of blood,” said young Mr Billings.
Kezia’s response to this piece of intelligence was to snatch at my face even harder. I could feel my lower lip burst, and blood slide down my chin.
“It’s true, Kezia. You can’t do him any mischief this time; not until he’s done what destiny demands.”
“You’re fibbing again,” said Kezia, although I could tell from her tone of voice that she wasn’t convinced of it.
“Think what you will,” shrugged young Mr Billings. “But if you want the Renewal to be sooner, rather than later, you should let this fellow go.”
“He fetched Charity away,” Kezia reminded him. “He’s a fi-heath if nothing besides.”
“Perhaps he did take Charity,” said young Mr Billings, trying to be soothing. “But Jenkin can get her back for you, can’t he? There won’t be any trouble about that. Come on, Kezia, this is the father... and he’s given you two. But two’s as good as none at all.”
Brown Jenkin began to make a horrible soft giggling sound, and reach inside his sleeve to scratch his arm. I couldn’t see them in the darkness, but I could imagine the showers of gray lice that must be dropping out of his hair.
“I can give him his desserts later, then?” said Kezia, although she still didn’t release the grip on my nose and mouth.
“That’s right, Kezia, you can give him his desserts later.”
“Rip him now!” urged Brown Jenkin. “Rip off sa tête and tirer ses Leber durch seine Kehle!” From this garbled giggling, I gathered that Brown Jenkin wanted to tear off my head and drag my liver through my neck. If I hadn’t witnessed his disemboweling of Dennis Pickering, I would have thought that he was exaggerating, just to frighten me. But his cruelty was total. He was a creature from hell and that was all there was to it.
At last, Kezia took her hand away from my face. She stayed close, however, staring at me with a mixture of curiosity, contempt and—something else. Almost a casual lust.
There was a moment in which I wasn’t at all sure that she was really going to let me go. But then she nodded her head; hesitated; and turned around, giving me a momentary glimpse of her pale bare buttocks before dropping her sheets all around herself, and walking back toward the house like a huge, badly-wrapped ghost. Brown Jenkin sniveled and hopped around us for a little while, then traipsed after his mistress, still scratching and tittering to himself.
“I suppose I ought to thank you,” I said to young Mr Billings.
“You have nothing to thank me for,” he assured me. “Your Liz will be wanting her third and last conception; and Brown Jenkin will be coming for Charity; and if I were you I’d watch for that boy of yours, too. All hell is about to open up.”
We walked side-by-side to the patio, and up the steps. Our shoes barked softly on the bricks.
“Can I ask you something?” I said to young Mr Billings, as he opened the back door for me.
“I won’t guarantee to answer it.”
“There’s a photograph of you in the hallway. Sometimes I’ve seen you moving about in it. I’ve seen Brown Jenkin in it, too.”
Inside the house, Brown Jenkin had already lit two or three lamps, and was lighting more, hopping up onto the seats of the armchairs in order to reach them. He was clutching a wax taper in his claw, a wax taper which dripped and flared onto his cuff and ran, still burning, down his wrist. There was a sickening smell of singed hair in the room.
Brown Jenkin eyed me with such carnivorous salacity that I felt a chill right through to my spine, as if I had been sitting on a cold metal-backed chair all day. He didn’t have to speak, his one mucus-crusted eye told it all. I’ll have your liver out one day, my friend—I’ll hook it purple and blood-streaked out of your neck-stump, you see if I don’t.
Young Mr Billings ignored him and guided me along the hallway and back to the stairs. “I know the photograph you mean. Kezia’s little joke. She still has some of her childish playfulness, in spite of what’s hiding inside her soul. She can make all kinds of pictures move. She can touch a painting of a sunny day by the seaside, and turn it into night-time, with high seas and a howling storm. From what I gather, the pre-humans used picture-movement as a way of communicating with each other.”
He seemed matter-of-fact as he spoke, nearly jovial. But there was something disturbing about a man who could speak like a company director taking a visitor on a tour of his carpet-factory when, in reality, he was a haggard and haunted time-traveler, living under th
e same roof as a half-naked witch, a lice-infested rat and twoscore children who were about to be abducted and killed for the sake of their flesh.
We passed the children’s bedroom. The door was just an inch ajar, and Molly and her two friends watched us with their mouths turned down in disappointment as we passed. Young Mr Billings snapped, “Get to bed, you three,” and there was nothing I could do to help them. If young Mr Billings was right, Brown Jenkin would slaughter even more of them if I gave him even half an excuse, and the thought of those skinny, pathetic children being sliced open like rabbits was more than I could bear.
We reached my bedroom, and young Mr Billings helped me up onto the chair.
“Don’t try to come back again,” he cautioned me. “I won’t be able to save you from Kezia the next time. She has a keen taste for tearing off faces.”
“All right,” I agreed. “But I can’t give you any guarantees about what I’m going to do when I get back to 1992.”
“Keep an eye out for your Liz, that’s what I suggest you do. And remember what I told you. You can change your fate if you want to. You can change everything. Time’s nothing more than a box of minutes.”
“We’ll see,” I told him.
I heaved myself up into the attic again. I could see daylight shining up the attic stairs, and very faintly I could hear Danny calling, “Daddy? Daddy? Where are you? Daddy!”
Young Mr Billings looked up at me with a faint, humourless smile; and now we were more than a century apart, as well as worlds apart. He lifted one hand in a small gesture of farewell.
“Tell me,” I said, as I prepared to close the trapdoor, “what did you sell your soul for?”
He kept on looking up at me. For a moment, I didn’t think that he was going to answer. Then he said, “What would you sell your soul for?”
Prey Page 28
