Prey

by Graham Masterton

  “What about a glass of wine?” I asked Liz. “There’s some of that Bulgarian stuff left.”

  “Yuck, all right.”

  She came up to me and hung her arms around my neck. Her hair was wet and clung to her forehead in curls. I kissed her, and I decided that I liked her.

  “I should get on with some decorating,” I told her.

  “So you’ve decided to stay?”

  “I think so—for the time being, anyway. I get the feeling that Fortyfoot House doesn’t want me to go.”

  “I don’t think it’s such a bad place,” said Liz. “In fact I’ve grown quite fond of it.”

  Danny came into the kitchen, still zipping up his shorts. “Can I go down to the beach?” he asked.

  “It’s raining.”

  “That doesn’t matter. I’ll wear my swimming-trunks.”

  I looked out of the kitchen window. It was warm enough, outside; and over the Channel the sky was already beginning to clear. “All right,” I said. “But stay on the rocks or the sand. Don’t go in the sea. We’ll come down and see you a little later on.”

  Danny changed into his bright blue-and-yellow Hawaiian-style swimming-trunks, collected his bucket and spade, and walked off through the rain.

  “I think he’s as mad as you are,” grinned Liz.

  I gave her a glass of wine, and said, “Nasdravye. Here’s to madness, in whatever shape or form.”

  She clinked glasses, then kissed me. “Why don’t we go upstairs?” she said. “Wine always tastes much better in bed.”

  I looked at her over the rim of my glass. The rain pattered softly against the window, and began to blow in through the open kitchen door, speckling the lino. In the far distance, thunder grumbled indigestively. Three sons, young Mr Billings had told me. One of seed, one of saliva, one of blood. Or had I really dreamed it, or imagined it?

  Liz climbed the stairs ahead of me, turning around two or three times to smile at me and to make sure that I was following close behind. By the time we reached the bedroom, the sun had come out, and the whole room was charged with brilliant light. Liz put down her glass of wine beside the unmade bed, and immediately unbuckled her belt. She kicked off her jeans and then knelt on the bed, holding out her arms to me. Through the sheer white nylon of her panties, I could see the dark fan-shape of her pubic hair.

  I stripped off my shirt and stepped out of my trousers, and joined her on the wrinkled sheet. We knelt face to face like the lovers on the cover of The Joy of Sex, kissing each other and exploring the taste of each other’s mouths. Liz tasted of wine, and some indefinable but highly-evocative sweetness that reminded me of some taste from long ago which I couldn’t place.

  I lifted her T-shirt over her breasts and her upraised arms. Her breasts swung heavily into my hands, and her nipples knurled in the sunlight, as bright as tangerine-flavored fruit pastilles. I kissed her breasts and teased her nipples with my teeth. She raked her fingers through my hair and chanted, “David, I love you; David, I love you,” over and over again, in the breathiest murmur I had ever heard. It was almost like a song, or a ritual chant.

  Awkwardly, I tugged her panties halfway down her thighs, and then eased her gently on to her back so that I could lift her legs and pull her panties right off. Her pubic hair glowed in the afternoon sunlight like gilded wire. The lips of her vulva glistened. She reached down with both hands and opened herself up for me, stretching herself wide apart.

  —door flew open—somebody whispered. It could have been me.

  I wrestled out of my boxer shorts. My erection reared thick and crimson-headed. Liz took hold of it in one hand, massaging it slowly up and down, rolling the ball of her thumb against the cleft in its swollen head. “David, you’re gorgeous; David, I love you.”

  I tried to force myself downwards so that I could slide myself into her, but she resisted, gripping my cock even more tightly. I felt her fingernails digging into my skin.

  “I want you,” I panted.

  She gave me a taunting smile. “You may want me. But I haven’t decided whether I’m going to let you have me.”

  I weighed down on her again, feeling more and more frustrated. She clutched my erection so tight that the head darkened reddish-purple with constricted blood.

  “Liz—that hurts!”

  “Don’t you like pain?” she teased me. “I thought you were the kind of man who got a kick out of being hurt.”

  I hesitated for a moment, then pushed forward again. This time I felt a sharp scratch on the underside of my cock. I looked down, and a thin trickle of blood was running between Liz’s fingers. It slid down the back of her hand, formed a heavy, viscous droplet, and then dripped between the chubby cheeks of her bottom.

  I stared down at her. She stared back up at me, her eyes challenging me to say anything.

  One of seed; one of saliva; one of blood. The three species of the Old Ones, waiting the great Renewal.

  “What’s the matter?” Liz asked me. My erection began to soften and die.

  “I want you to tell me who you are,” I demanded.

  “You know who I am.”

  “I’m not sure any more. You’ve had all three things now—sperm, spit and blood. You could be one of the Old Ones that young Mr Billings was talking about. You probably are.”

  “David—you’ve really gone off your rocker.”

  “Oh, yes? So what was this scratching all about?”

  “I like to scratch when I make love, that’s all. It’s the animal in me, I suppose.”

  “The animal? Or the thing?”

  Liz sat up, and put her arm around my shoulder. “David, this is crazy. I’m sorry I scratched you, I was only playing around. But there is no thing and there is no ‘young Mr Billings’ and there is no ‘Brown Jenkin’ and there is no ‘Kezia Mason.’ They’re all in your mind, David. They’re nothing but fantasies… nothing but your own imagination.”

  “They can’t be,” I insisted. “If they’re part of my imagination, how can I possibly remember them in such detail? I can even describe the engraving on young Mr Billings’ pocket-watch. It was like a kind of an octopus. I was there, I went there, I’m sure of it.”

  Liz put her arms around me and held me close, her cheek pressed against my shoulder. “David,” she soothed me, “I know that you think you went there. I know that you really believe it. But it just didn’t happen. You didn’t go anywhere.”

  “I don’t know,” I told her. “I don’t know what the hell to think.”

  I climbed out of bed and went over to the window. Liz lay back on the pillow and watched me.

  The sky was clear now. The storm had passed. Only the faintest rainbow shone over the ruined roof of the chapel. No chimney-hatted figures stalked the wabe. No hunched-up rodents rushed behind the bushes, hooded and clawed and shaking out showers of lice—behind the bushes. With a huge sense of relief, I began to understand that at Fortyfoot House I had created a world of fantasy for myself... an invented world in which I had tried to deal with all of my problems by giving them faces and shapes and names.

  Liz came up behind me and put her arms around my waist. I felt her nipples brush my bare back. “You remember what I said before?” she asked me. “You can get over Janie. You can learn to be yourself. It’s your life, David. Take hold of it with both hands.”

  I turned my head around and kissed her. Her eyes flashed scarlet in the sunlight. One of blood. Outside the window, the seagulls screamed, and the afternoon swelled with warm and sunlight, a benison from nature, perhaps from God.

  “Look at it—it’s brilliant,” I said. “It makes you glad to be alive.”

  But then I saw Danny emerge from the trees and walk slowly toward the house. In one hand he carried his bucket and spade. In the other, he was carrying something which he was throwing and catching, throwing and catching.

  19

  A Summer’s Death

  I was still buttoning up my shirt when I met him at the kitchen door.

  �
�Hallo! Fed up with crab-racing?”

  He rubbed his forehead as if he had a headache. “I don’t like crabs any more. Not after what they did to Mrs Kemble.”

  “They weren’t to know. They don’t know the difference between fish and people.”

  “They’re horrible.”

  “Well, yes,” I said. “I suppose they are. Do you want some limeade?”

  He threw something dark and metallic up in the air, and caught it again.

  “What’s that?” I asked him, as I unscrewed the bottle of limeade and filled up a glass for him.

  “Keys,” he said. “I found them on the beach. They must be a hundred years old.”

  “Keys?” I asked him. “Let me have a look.”

  “They’re all rusty. And they’ve got oysters on them.”

  He handed me a small bunch of keys on a ring. I laid them flat on the palm of my hand and examined them. He was right. They must have been at least a hundred years old. The steel keys had been rusted by seawater until they were nothing but wafer-thin prongs, and the brass keys had been blackened by salt, and encrusted with tiny limpets.

  The key-ring itself was a metal disk, with some kind of triangular badge on it. There were a few traces of blue enamel around the triangle; and underneath it I could make out the corroded letters “Re..lt”.

  “Do you think they’re worth a lot of money?” asked Danny. “They could be pirates’ keys, couldn’t they?”

  Slowly, I shook my head. “No… they’re not pirates’ keys. They’re car keys.”

  “But they look so old.”

  “They are old. But look what those letters say, underneath the badge. Re—something-something-something—lt. Renault. These are the Reverend Pickering’s car keys. He was trying to find them this morning.”

  “How can they be so old when he only lost them this morning?” Danny frowned.

  I had pushed his disemboweled body into the sea, and the waves had carried him away… but his keys must have slipped out of his pocket, on to the rocks. They were over a hundred years old, yet Danny must have found them almost exactly where they had fallen. They were over a hundred years old, yet they hadn’t been there until this morning.

  I sat down, sorting through Dennis Pickering’s keys again and again, while Danny watched me in bewilderment. These keys vividly demonstrated the numbing paradox of Fortyfoot House. In Fortyfoot House you could change both the past and the future. You could make sure that things had happened in the past, even though they had never happened. And most disturbing of all, you could make sure that things hadn’t happened, even when they had.

  Dennis Pickering’s body had lain under the living-room floorboards since Brown Jenkin had murdered him in 1886. I had seen him there. Yet now he wasn’t there at all… now I had changed the past. I suddenly understood that time wasn’t linear, but parallel. Our awareness moved from one event to the next like the flicker-cards in a “What The Butler Saw” machine. But we could always stop the cards, and go back to the beginning. We could always take cards out, and replace them with other cards. The events were always there, from pre-history to the end of time. Queen Victoria was still there, Henry VIII was still there, Caesar was still there. So was I, as a boy. So was Janie. Perhaps I could go back in time and make sure that Janie never met the Bearded Fart.

  No wonder the Old Ones had so greedily seized the chance of traveling through time. No wonder they had possessed the Sumerian priests who had ventured back those pre-human civilizations to visit them. No wonder they had possessed Kezia Mason, and all of her predecessors and successors. They had been infinitely cunning; and voraciously interested in their own survival. They had immediately understood—as I now understood—that time could be moved, and shifted, and rearranged. Like politicians, they had realized with heartless clarity that the mastery of time is the key to the mastery of everything, and everybody, and a world in which morals no longer exist—a world in which their own self-indulgence could reign supreme.

  How a plain and ordinary writer like H.P. Lovecraft had ever heard his name, I didn’t like to think. But the age of Yog-Sothoth was almost upon us. Yog-Sothoth, who froths as primal slime in nuclear chaos forever beyond the nethermost outposts of space and time!

  I lifted up the ring of rusted and encrusted keys and I felt as if the ground was moving under my chair. They were incontrovertible proof that I had gone back to 1886. They were incontrovertible proof that Dennis Pickering had been killed by Brown Jenkin; and that I had taken his body down to the sea, and said my inadequate prayers over him, and let him float away.

  That meant that the “Dennis Pickering” who had visited me this morning hadn’t been Dennis Pickering at all. More than likely my double-vision of him had been correct: and he had been Brown Jenkin, creating an illusion of Dennis Pickering with the help of Kezia Mason’s magic. She had turned a doorknob into a human hand: there seemed to be no reason why she couldn’t change the louse-infested Brown Jenkin into a country vicar.

  I went out into the hallway and telephoned Detective-sergeant Miller. He was having a late sandwich lunch in his office, and he answered my call with his mouth full.

  “Sergeant Miller? This is David Williams at Fortyfoot House.”

  “Oh, yes. Anything amiss, Mr Williams?”

  “You ought to send someone around to St Michael’s vicarage.”

  “Any particular reason?”

  “Just to make sure that Mrs Pickering is safe.”

  D-s Miller swallowed, and then he said, cautiously, “Safe? Do you have any grounds for thinking that she might not be?”

  “Look,” I said, “apart from the locals, you’re about the only person I’ve met in Bonchurch who believes that there’s something potentially dangerous going on here.”

  “What if I do?” He still sounded suspicious.

  “Well… I can’t explain it very clearly now… but I don’t think that the Reverend Pickering is quite what he seems to be. I think the Reverend Dennis Pickering who came home this morning isn’t the real Reverend Dennis Pickering at all.”

  “Clear as mud,” remarked D-s Miller. “If he’s not himself, who is he? And surely his wife would have spotted the difference immediately.”

  “There is no difference. He’s a kind of illusion.”

  I heard a lot of chewing and swallowing noises, and then the boot-dragged-out-of-a-swamp sound of D-s Miller sucking at a very hot cup of tea. “You’re asking me to stretch my imagination a bit far, aren’t you, Mr Williams?”

  “Don’t you think it’s better to be safe than sorry?” I told him.

  “I suppose you’re right. Look—I’ll tell you what I’ll do. I have to come past your way anyway to talk to Mr Divall at the shop. I’ll pick you up and you can come around to the vicarage with me. Then we can get this whole thing cleared up for good and all.”

  “Sounds all right to me.”

  I put down the phone. Upstairs, I heard Liz singing The Windmills of My Mind. It occurred to me then that Danny’s discovery of Dennis Pickering’s keys was incontrovertible proof of something else: that Liz had been lying when she said that I had never gone back to 1886, and I hadn’t brought Charity back with me. And if she had been lying about that, then perhaps she had also been lying when she had told me that she knew nothing about young Mr Billings, and the Sumerian doorways, and the Old Ones who had survived for nearly five-and-a-half millennia inside the bodies and souls of innocent hosts—waiting for the day when the earth would be polluted enough for them to re-emerge in their pre-human form.

  It also occurred to me that if young Mr Billings had been telling the truth, that ghostly nun-figure which I had seen lying down on top of Liz was the same witch-entity which had possessed Kezia Mason, and countless girls before her.

  And I had given her the third and final impregnation which she needed—the impregnation of blood.

  I stood in the hallway and I felt as if my brain were bursting. In spite of what logic and experience told me, it was almost imp
ossible for me to believe that Liz could have been “possessed” or “taken over.” She still spoke the same way; still cracked the same jokes—still looked exactly the same. She appeared at the top of the stairs wearing nothing but one of my shirts, still singing; and came prancing down to the hallway with her hair flying and her breasts bouncing.

  “What’s wrong?” she asked, kissing me on the tip of the nose. “You look as if you’ve seen a ghost.”

  I shook my head. “Everything’s fine. Don’t worry about it. But D-s Miller wants me to go to Shanklin with him and answer some questions.”

  “He doesn’t think you had anything to do with Harry Martin or Doris Kemble, does he?”

  “No, of course not. He’s double-checking evidence, that’s all. They’re holding Harry Martin’s inquest next week—he just wants to be sure that I didn’t leave anything out.”

  “Oh, well that’s all right,” said Liz. “Danny and I can go for a walk.”

  A sudden twinge of anxiety. If she were possessed by the witch-entity, should I leave Danny alone with her? Hadn’t young Mr Billings gravely assured me that all of the fairy-stories were right, and that the principal diet of witches was children. I had a startlingly clear vision of my Green Fairy Book, and the engraving which showed a hook-nosed hag cramming six or seven terrified children into her oven on a huge baking tray.

  “I—er, I was thinking of taking Danny along with me. Sergeant Miller said he might show him a police car.”

  Liz, walking ahead of me, turned her head and wrinkled her nose disdainfully. “Bor-ing! Danny doesn’t want to spend his afternoon hanging around with a whole lot of pigs.”

  “He’s really keen, as a matter of fact.”

  At that moment, Danny came into the kitchen, still throwing and catching Dennis Pickering’s keys. Throw—jingle—catch. Throw—jingle—catch.

  “Your old man has to go down to the cop-shop,” said Liz, putting her arm around his shoulders. “Why don’t we take a walk along to Ventnor and buy some sweets? Then we can make a sandcastle, and sit in it and eat tons of sweets and spoil our appetites for supper.”