Prey

by Graham Masterton

  “I was hoping you’d want to come with me,” I told him. “Sergeant Miller said that he’d show you a real police car.”

  “Then what?” asked Danny the Supercilious.

  “Well… then I have to go over some evidence with him. That shouldn’t take too long.”

  I wished that I’d thought of a more attractive lie, but I had already been snagged on my own hook. I could picture exactly what was going through Danny’s mind: do I want to spend a long tedious afternoon waiting for Daddy in some hot stuffy office, or do I want to run around the beach eating sweets and jumping in the sea?

  Liz cocked her head slightly to one side and said, “You don’t have to worry, you know, David. I shall take care of him.”

  “Oh go on, Daddy,” Danny urged me. So what could I say, with a shrug of my shoulders, but yes?

  I made a point of looking quickly at Liz, to see if there was even the slightest hint in her eye of malice or self-satisfaction or deceit or (God help me!) greed. But she was just the same Liz and she almost made me feel guilty for doubting her.

  Only the keys spoke differently. Throw—jingle—catch.

  D-s Miller knocked on the front door and he looked impatient and flushed. The afternoon was almost unbearably hot now, and the air rippled up from the gravel shingle like the rippling waters of a crystal-clear trout-stream.

  “Are you ready, then?” he demanded, staring down at his stainless-steel wristwatch as if it had just said something impertinent to him.

  “Yes, fine, thanks for coming. I know this sounds terribly far-fetched.”

  He walked around his car and opened the door. “Far-fetched isn’t the word. It’s downright lunacy. You’re letting this house get to you, you know. The next thing I know, you’ll be ringing me up and saying that you’ve seen Satan himself.”

  “I don’t think so,” I said, trying to sound very sober, as he backed and turned the car around Dennis Pickering’s Renault.

  “Hasn’t the Reverend Pickering been around to pick up his car yet?” he asked me.

  “He lost his keys. He said he was going to go home and pick up his spare set. So far I haven’t seen him.”

  “Odd,” said D-s Miller. “He needs his car for his rounds.”

  “Perhaps he borrowed his wife’s.”

  “His wife’s is in dock. She had an accident with it last week in Ventnor car park.”

  “Anybody hurt?”

  D-s Miller shook his head. “Mrs Pickering nearly got hurt. She ran over somebody’s shopping-trolley, and flattened their whole week’s groceries.”

  I turned around in my seat as we drove out of the gates of Fortyfoot House. Liz and Danny were standing in front of the porch, their eyes scrunched up against the bright reflected sunlight, waving.

  Somebody else was waving too. From a dormer window high in the roof, I thought I saw Charity, her mouth dragged downwards in an expression of fear and distress—not waving goodbye, but help me, for God’s sake, help me!

  “Stop the car!” I shouted.

  “What?” asked D-s Miller, wavering across the road.

  “Stop the car! Please! Now go back a bit… that’s it, so that I can take another look at Fortyfoot House.”

  Impatiently, D-s Miller did what I asked. I sat for a long time staring up at the window where Charity had been, but now there was no sign of her. The window was empty; black as young Mr Billings’ hat.

  “All right,” I said, after a moment or two had passed, and Charity didn’t reappear. “Perhaps you’re right after all. Perhaps I am letting it get to me.”

  “It’s not surprising,” said D-s Miller. I noticed the large H. Samuel signet ring on his fourth finger. The head of the Roman emperor Augustus. All I knew about Augustus was that he had divorced his first wife Scribonia in order to marry a much prettier woman called Livia. The more things change, the more they stay the same, I thought to myself.

  “How did Mrs Pickering sound when she called you?” I asked.

  “She sounded normal, I suppose,” said D-s Miller. “I didn’t really notice, to tell you the truth.”

  “Did she tell you what her husband had been doing all night?”

  D-s Miller slowed the car at the junction with the main road. “When a husband stays out all night—particularly when a vicar stays out all night—we don’t usually ask too many awkward questions. Not our job.”

  When he had joined the main-road traffic, he said, “You realize that we could be making complete arseholes of ourselves?”

  “I don’t think so,” I told him. “I keep trying to convince myself that I was hallucinating, that Dennis Pickering didn’t look like Brown Jenkin; but he did. Just for a split-second. Teeth, hair, everything. There was no mistake.”

  D-s Miller jammed his foot on the brake and swerved the car in to the side of the street. The truck behind him blew its horn furiously, but D-s Miller wound down his window and yelled, “Up yours!” at the top of his voice.

  Then he turned back to me. “You really believe that it wasn’t the Reverend Dennis Pickering at all?”

  I nodded. Suddenly my mouth was dry. Perhaps D-s Miller wasn’t going to be the ally that I had expected him to be. “As I say—it was only a split-second. You could have blinked and missed it.”

  “What if he opens the door and he’s perfectly normal?”

  “Then I don’t know. Let’s just go and see Mrs Pickering and make sure that she’s all right.”

  D-s Miller thought for a moment, then restarted the engine without a word. He pulled out into the traffic without making a signal, occasioning another deafening outburst of lorry horns and voices shouting, “Where’s your white stick, mate?”

  We reached the vicarage and D-s Miller pulled into the driveway. There were no cars parked there, only an elderly black-painted bicycle resting up against the porch, with the Pickering’s cat draped over the seat like an overstuffed fur cushion.

  The cat watched us with sly eyes as we approached the front door and rang the doorbell. There was no reply, so I rang again. I could hear the bell echoing in the hallway.

  “She could be out shopping, of course,” D-s Miller suggested, as we shuffled our feet impatiently on the worn red-and-white chequered tiles. “And the reverend himself could be anywhere. He goes hospital visiting—pops in to see the old folk—all that kind of thing.”

  I was thinking to myself that if I were elderly, the last thing that I would want to have visiting me would be Brown Jenkin. But then D-s Miller leaned over and opened the brass letter-box flap and peered into the hallway and shouted, “Hello! Mrs Pickering! Anyone at home?”

  Still no answer. D-s Miller continued to squint into the letter-box, waiting. Then he suddenly said to himself, “Hullo,” and stood up. He reached into the inside pocket of his jacket and produced a small black leather wallet. He opened it up and took out a lock-pick.

  “This isn’t always as easy as it looks on the TV,” he told me. “We may still have to kick it down.”

  “What’s the matter?” I asked him. “There’s nobody at home, is there?”

  “I don’t know yet,” he said grimly. “But take a peek through the letter-box. Tell me what you see. Look—there on the left-hand side, close to that open door. On the floor, for God’s sake!”

  I tried to focus on it. The polished boarded floor seemed to be marked with a pattern, or perhaps somebody had dropped some dark, shiny varnish on to it. I couldn’t decide for the life of me what it was. I stood up, and shrugged, and D-s Miller said, “No? You don’t know what it is. Perhaps you haven’t seen enough of it. It’s blood.”

  “Oh, Jesus,” I said, softly.

  “Exactly. Oh, Jesus. And you’ve got yourself some serious explaining to do, my friend—seeing as how you seem to have an uncanny facility for finding the remains of the recently-deceased. This is getting a bit like a Poirot story, this is. Oh, shit, this lock is practically Houdini-proof!”

  But after a few more careful turns, there was a satisfying clic
king noise and the front door silently swung open. At once I smelled an odd, distinctive smell, like having an overripe peach pressed close up against my nostrils. Sweetness, and decay. This was a house in which something was dead.

  “You can wait outside if you want to,” D-s Miller suggested, without turning around to look at me. “That’s if you give me your word that you won’t attempt to run away.”

  “No, I’ll come with you,” I said. “I want to see what the hell’s been going on here. I have to.”

  We stepped carefully along the hallway, slowly approaching the mark on the floor which I had assumed was a shadow or a scarf. Closer, there was no doubt that it was blood. A wide, black-red pool, with a perfectly glossy surface, except for motes of dust that had settled on it, and flies that walked this way and that across its surface-tension.

  “Somebody’s been gutted here, well and truly gutted,” said D-s Miller, in a thin colorless voice. He stepped into the drawing-room, tippy-toeing like a ballerina in order not to get blood on his shoes. He stood for a long time with his left side profile toward me, flare-silhouetted by the sun; and he was so silent and so still that I seriously began to wonder if he had lost the thread of what he was doing; or if he had actually fallen asleep on his feet.

  “Sergeant?” I asked him. I heard a soft lapping noise behind me, and turned quickly around, alarmed. To my disgust, I saw that the cat had followed us into the house, and was now crouched close to the edge of the pool of blood, its eyes tight shut, contentedly drinking. I kicked it and it screeched and spat at me, so I kicked it again. It ran out of the house and into the sunshine.

  The noise had awoken D-s Miller out of his reverie. He lifted his left hand and made an almost imperceptible beckoning-gesture. “You’d better come and take a look,” he said. “After all—for all I know, you might have done it. I’d like to see what you think—how you react.”

  “Is it Mrs Pickering?” I asked. My voice sounded like somebody else’s; muffled and uncontrolled.

  He nodded. “Come and take a look for yourself.”

  I took two unbalanced steps into the room. It was a large room, very bright in the four o’clock sunlight, with a marble fireplace and massive comfortable 1930s armchairs draped in chintzy loose covers. A polished Benares tray on beaded legs served as a coffee-table. Copies of The Daily Telegraph Magazine and Church Times and Punch were wedged tightly into a magazine rack. Ordinary, all of it. An ordinary South-of-England vicarage drawing-room on a warm summer afternoon.

  It was so ordinary that the horror which sat in the center of the room was ten times more shocking that it would have been if I had come across it in, say, the London Dungeon, or a multiple car-crash on the M25, or in the intensive-care ward of a major hospital.

  The blood had prepared me to see somebody dead. But nothing in the world could have prepared me for how she had died. I stood next to D-s Miller and literally lurched at the knees—a terrible, involuntary genuflection.

  In one of the chintz armchairs sat the headless body of Mrs Pickering. She had been wearing a blouse of peach-colored silk and an off-white cotton skirt, but these had been ripped into barely-recognizable shreds. Her entire body had been slashed with such force that skin and fat lay across the arms of the chair in ribbons.

  —in gay profusion lying there—scarlet ribbons, scarlet ribbons—

  Her bloodied neck rose out of the bloodied collar of her blouse, and most of her internal organs—her lungs, her liver and her stomach—had been dragged squashily and stickily out of her windpipe, to be draped over her shoulders in a grotesque parody of the painting at Fortyfoot chapel of Kezia Mason, with Brown Jenkin draped over her shoulders.

  I could see her ribs and her pelvis through her savaged flesh—glistening-white, with only a few fragments of scarlet flesh clinging on to them, like gnawed dog bones. Her corset and her suspenders had been sliced into shreds of white elastic—an act of intrusion—especially on a vicar’s wife—which almost seemed more indecent than beheading her. Between her legs hung a dripping jungle of intestines.

  There was blood everywhere. The walls were sprayed with blood, the carpet was soaked. Blood was squiggled across the mirror, blood had painted the white tea-roses on the table, a terrible parody of the painting of the roses in Alice—because what had the Queen of Hearts said then? Off with her head! And that is exactly what had happened to poor, pathetic Mrs Pickering.

  I couldn’t see her head at first. I turned aghast to D-s Miller and said, “Where’s her head?”

  He pointed to the corner of the room. His face was the color of gray pork. I tried to see what he was pointing at but my mind simply couldn’t take it in.

  “For Christ’s sake, sergeant!” I almost screamed at him. “Where’s her head?”

  He pointed again to the corner of the room—but all I could see was the brown varnished sideboard with the blood-speckled white runner on it, and the fishbowl on top.

  Jesus, the fish-bowl.

  Inside the glass, the water had been stained pink. Two small goldfish still struggled to swim in their crowded home, but one of them was gasping for oxygen, and another had a damaged tail.

  Through the murk and the fronds of weed—grossly magnified by the curved glass of the bowl—the face of Mrs Pickering stared out at me, her eyes wide, her mouth half-filled with colored pebbles.

  D-s Miller approached the sideboard. He walked stiff-legged like a robot. He stared at the fish-bowl. Mrs Pickering’s graying brunette hair matted the surface like thick, sodden weed.

  “Can’t you get it out?” I said, hoarsely. Mrs Pickering’s head bobbed and turned and stirred, so that she looked as if she were following me with her eyes as I came up closer.

  D-s Miller shook his head. “There’s no way—not without breaking the glass.”

  “What do you mean?” I asked him. “If you can’t get it out without breaking the glass—how did he get it in?”

  D-s Miller looked around the room. “You were right all along,” he said, flatly. “Fortyfoot House is haunted, or possessed, or whatever you like to call it. And Brown Jenkin is real, no matter what the Isle of Wight constabulary think about it.”

  He crossed to the open window, which gave out on to the tangled, fragrant, rose filled garden. The garden couldn’t have contrasted more with the hideous scene in the living-room.

  “Look,” he said, and pointed to the bloody marks on the windowsill, and on the glass itself. They were paw-prints: the prints of a rodent’s feet. All that distinguished them from rattus rattus, the common sewer-rat, was their enormous size.

  It was all real. Brown Jenkin was real. Kezia Mason was real—and so was Yog-Sothoth. Only one thought burst in my mind at that instant, and that was Danny.

  “Where are you going?” D-s Miller barked at me, as I hopscotched around the blood, and out into the hallway.

  “The house! Liz has got Danny! And I’ll bet you anything you like that Brown Jenkin’s there, too!”

  “What the hell are you talking about? We can’t just—” He looked desperately around the grisly living-room.

  “Sergeant,” I begged him. “Please.”

  20

  Tomorrow’s Garden

  I could tell that something was wrong as soon as we took the Bonchurch turning and started driving along the narrow road that led to Fortyfoot House. Although it was a bright, warm afternoon, the sky over the roof of Fortyfoot House had a strange dark quality about it, like a video-camera aimed directly at the sun.

  I could feel tremors, too. The very air around was warping and shuddering, and as the house itself came into view, I saw mirage-like distortions in the air. The trees seemed to lean and twist, and Fortyfoot House looked oddly as if it were suspended a few invisible inches above the ground.

  D-s Miller slewed his car into the driveway, climbed out, and slammed the door. “Watch what you’re doing,” he snapped at me. “Technically, we’re pursuing a suspected murderer and I’m not supposed to risk civilian lives.”
<
br />   A great shuddering groan came from Fortyfoot House, as if it were a huge beast, rather than a building—a beast whose very soul had been wrenched to the core. Brilliant blue-white lights flickered in the upstairs windows.

  “I don’t give a shit about ‘technically,’” I retorted. “That’s my son in there.”

  I tried the front door, but it seemed to be locked—or rather, fused—as if the door and the frame were carved out of one seamless piece of wood. The lock was solid brass, but it had no keyhole. Supernaturally, we had been denied access.

  D-s Miller braced himself against the architrave and gave the door two or three punishing kicks, but it didn’t even budge.

  “It’s no use,” I said. “It’s solid.”

  “Let’s try the kitchen door,” said D-s Miller. He quickly checked his wristwatch. “We should be getting some back-up any minute now.”

  We skirted around the house. That strange bright darkness covered the whole of the garden. The oaks dipped and seethed in a wind that I couldn’t even feel, and every now and then there was a scurrying through the bushes and flowerbeds, as if a sudden gust had blown through them. Behind the trees, the sea gleamed dull as hammered lead.

  We crossed the patio and I tried the kitchen door. Just like the front door, it was locked solid.

  D-s Miller tugged his portable phone out of his pocket and said, “George? Where the hell are you? I need two mobiles up at Fortyfoot House, soon as you can.”

  I heard a tiny exasperated voice say something about “roadworks at Luccombe Village.” D-s Miller said nothing, but the expression on his reddened face was just as expletive as any swear-word. “What’s happening?” I asked him. “Are they coming, or what?”

  “They’re coming,” he said, under his breath. Then, “What about a side door? Or a scullery door? There must be some way in.”

  Another deep rumble shook Fortyfoot House down to its foundations. Now—somewhere in the back of my consciousness—I could hear the slow blurry chanting that I had heard before. N’ggaaa—n’gggaaa—sothoth—n’ggaAAA. There was a brittle cracking noise, and the bricks of the patio began to ripple underneath our feet, almost as if a huge centipede were running underneath it. I heard windows cracking in their frames, and a small shower of tiles dropped from the roof and shattered on the path below.