Prey
Page 33
“Danny!” I shouted. “Danny, are you in there? Danny!”
The slow chanting continued; and the building literally shivered. Another avalanche of tiles came down, and one of them hit me on the shoulder.
“Was Danny supposed to be here?” D-s Miller shouted.
“I don’t know where he is. Liz said she was going to take him for a walk. But now I know that Liz isn’t Liz—”
“Liz isn’t Liz? What’s that supposed to mean?”
“She’s a thing. A sort of ancient spirit. I don’t know, if you try to explain it, it doesn’t make any sense. But the spirits came from prehistoric times… and they possessed women one after the other, century after century, waiting for the time when they could be born again.”
D-s Miller stared at me, and then up at the crumbling roof of Fortyfoot House. A row of ridge-tiles came toppling off one after the other, followed by a chunk of sandstone window-ledge. If he hadn’t seen for himself how the building was shaking and groaning and tearing itself apart, I think he would have had me certified. But there was no doubt now that some huge and desperate force was shaking Fortyfoot House—and there was no doubt, either, that this force was malevolent beyond all human imagination. If its familiar could kill with such mockery—what horrors was the force itself capable of perpetrating?
Brown Jenkin killed pointlessly and sadistically—for his own amusement. He thought no more of human life than a boy who plucks the legs off stag-beetles. But he was nothing more than Kezia Mason’s messenger; and Kezia Mason, in turn, was nothing more than the cuckoo’s-nest in which Yog-Sothoth was waiting for his day of Renewal.
It all seemed absurdly apocalyptic. The end of the world as we know it. A change in the natural order of primacy: another species dominant over man. But when I thought how much the world itself had changed since the beginning of the century—with poisoned seas and tainted skies, I began to believe that the Old Ones could re-emerge, and that the huge, cold-blooded civilizations of pre-human times could rise up again.
After all, they had clung on through centuries of human supremacy, concealed in witches and warlocks and walls of buildings and even in the ground itself. They had been prepared to hide and wait, hide and wait. And now—all around us—we were destroying the very things that had kept them hidden. We were felling the forests that enriched our atmosphere with oxygen—which the Old Ones, creatures of the far cosmos, abhorred. We were building over acres of grassland and marshes and draining the water-tables out from under our swamps.
We were filling our seas with mercury and radioactive sludge. We were thickening our skies with sulphur and lead. Whether we were secretly being inspired by the hidden influence of the Old Ones or not, we were gradually changing the world back to what it was—to the way they wanted it. A world of dead oceans and dark skies—a world of heavy metals and Antarctic cold.
I turned to D-s Miller and I said, “You didn’t see this.”
“See what?” he asked me.
I crossed the patio, and hefted up from its position on the wall one of the stone urns that had once held geraniums. It weighed so much that I could barely lift it, and halfway back toward the house I had to put it down. But D-s Miller realized what I was trying to do, and came over to help me.
“Didn’t see a thing,” he told me.
Together, we staggered toward the kitchen window—swung the urn back, and then hurled it through the glass. With a loud smash, it took half of the window out of its frame, and dropped into the sink. I knocked out one or two scimitar-shaped slices of glass that had been left behind, and then I hoisted myself up through the window and into the kitchen. D-s Miller followed close behind.
“Be with you in five, Dusty,” squawked a tiny voice on D-s Miller’s radio. He said “roger-dodge,” and shut it off.
We crossed the kitchen floor, the soles of our shoes crunching on broken glass. Inside, the house was almost humming, as if it were an electricity sub-station. Every time I neared one of the walls, I felt the hair rising up on my scalp with static, and when I reached out to open the kitchen door, scores of whirling, pin-pricking sparks flew between my finger-tips and the metal door-handle.
I opened the door by putting on an oven-glove, to dampen the shock.
Out in the hallway, we stopped and listened. The chanting continued, but on so low a pitch that I didn’t know whether I was hearing it or feeling it. “Mmm’ngggaaa, nn’ggaaa, sothoth, yashoggua…” D-s Miller nervously cleared his throat, and said, “Do you think that Danny’s here? I can’t hear anybody, can you?”
“Danny?” I called. Then I went to the foot of the stairs, and cupped my hands around my mouth, and shouted, much louder, “Danny! It’s Daddy! Are you there?”
I waited, my hand resting on the newel-post. I think I did it as an act of bravery. Everything in Fortyfoot House felt as if it were crawling—the walls, the floor, the banisters. I would have done anything to run back out of the kitchen, climb back through the window, and escape from the sight and sound of Fortyfoot House as fast as the next bus could take me.
But then—very faintly—I heard a high-pitched mewing sound, more like a kitten than a child. But you always recognize your own child’s voice—no matter how distorted it is, no matter how distressed it is, no matter how far away it is.
D-s Miller said, “What’s that?” but I was already halfway up the stairs, shouting, “Danny! Hold on! Danny, it’s Daddy!”
The attic door was open, and the draft that blew down it was thick with foul-smelling smoke. It had the same burning stench that I remembered from before—thick, acrid and metallic. It reminded me of tear-gas, or burning tires.
I dragged out my crumpled handkerchief and pressed it against my nose and mouth. Behind me, D-s Miller shouted, “For God’s sake, David, be careful! They’ll have some breathing-apparatus in the car!” But again I heard that muffled mewing sound, and I knew for certain that it was Danny, and I wasn’t going to let Brown Jenkin get him, breathing-apparatus or no breathing-apparatus.
I clambered up the attic steps, and turned around. The whole attic was filled with eye-stinging smoke, and a flat, gray, penetrating light. The skylight was open, and a stepladder had been set up underneath it. Brown Jenkin was halfway up the stepladder, hunched and precariously-perched—but on the very top step stood Danny, his head and shoulders already through the frame. Close to the bottom of the ladder stood Liz, looking white-faced and shocked, with her hands on the shoulders of the child whom she had sworn was a figment of my stressed imagination—Charity.
“Jenkin!” I roared at him. “Brown bloody Jenkin!”
Brown Jenkin swiveled his head around and his eyes glittered yellow and septic. He was wearing an extraordinary parody of a cleric’s habit—a filthy dog-collar, a dusty black jacket, and a black waistcoat splattered with soup-stains. One claw was upraised—prodding Danny to climb through the skylight. The other clung to the ladder.
“Jenkin, let him go!” I shouted. But as I stormed toward him, Liz lifted one hand and pointed it directly at my chest. I was overwhelmed by a searing sensation inside my ribcage, as if my heart had been pressed against a hotplate. I stopped, clutching wildly at my chest. I felt that meat-smoke must be pouring out of my mouth. It was agony, but I couldn’t even find the breath to scream. I dropped to my knees, coughing. My heart burned and burned and even though I knew that it couldn’t be real, that Liz was doing nothing more than working some of her witch-entity sorcery on me to keep me away from Brown Jenkin—I felt as if I were going to die, right then and there.
Brown Jenkin seized both of Danny’s legs and shot him upward through the skylight, so that he tumbled out of sight, screaming. Then Brown Jenkin himself scrambled after him, in a shower of lice.
“Jenkin!” I coughed, but I couldn’t find enough breath to climb to my feet and go after him. He peered back down through the skylight, wheezing and cackling at me; his eyes narrowed in triumph, his yellow fangs bared. His black tongue flicked across his lips.
“Jenkin, I’ll kill you!” I threatened him; but my voice was so breathless and clogged that I don’t suppose that he heard me.
“Now for you, Charity, up you go!” said Liz, and pushed her toward the stepladder. Brown Jenkin reached down from the skylight with the evillest imaginable grin and long hooked leathery fingers. Charity looked back up at him wide-eyed.
I heard coughing from the top of the attic stairs. Still kneeling in pain, still clutching my chest, I turned around and saw D-s Miller trying to wave the smoke aside.
“You!” he shouted at Liz. “Leave that little girl right where she is!”
“Sergeant—” I gasped. “I can’t—” and pointed up toward the skylight.
D-s Miller lifted his eyes and saw Brown Jenkin. His mouth dropped open. He had heard of Brown Jenkin, he had seen what Brown Jenkin had done. But his first sight of this evil, overgrown rodent startled him so much that he didn’t seem able to move.
The burning in my chest was beginning to die down. Painfully, I heaved myself up on to one knee, then managed to stand up. Liz was lifting Charity up in her arms, so that Brown Jenkin could reach down and drag her up through the skylight. Charity kicked and struggled and screamed, “Let me go! Let me go!” But Liz seemed to have unnatural strength: she lifted Charity higher and higher with no apparent effort, no matter how much Charity fought with her.
“Ah, ma chere petite,” drooled Brown Jenkin, lewdly. “I serve you mit kartoffeln und sauerkraut, oui?”
In a high, constricted voice, D-s Miller said, “Police! You’re under arrest! Put that girl down!”
Brown Jenkin cackled and wheezed so much that he was almost sick. Strings of saliva drooped from his jaws, thick with half-chewed food. “Under arrest shit-shit! Was sagst du bastard? C’est drole, n’est-ce pas?”
He opened his claws so that he could take hold of Charity, but at that instant something remarkable happened. Charity stopped struggling and kicking, and suddenly stiffened, so that she was straight and upright and utterly rigid. Her face became set and stern—and although it might have been a combination of the smoke and the bright gray daylight—she seemed to shine. Her hair flew all around her in a soft, waving halo, and I could swear that she radiated bright white light.
Liz, darkly, like a shrinking shadow, let her go. But Charity remained where she was, still rigid, still stiff, suspended in mid-air between floor and sloping ceiling, exactly where Liz had released her.
It was impossible, but I could see it for myself: there were three clear feet between Charity’s dangling feet and the attic floorboards. No tricks, no wires. Nothing.
Brown Jenkin slowly but noticeably withdrew his claws, his eyes suspicious, his long snout curved in a snarl. “What’s this?” I heard him hiss. “What’s this?”
Charity, her eyes still wide, revolved in mid-air and confronted Liz. When she spoke, her voice was soft, supernaturally soft, like a thousand hands stroking a thousand velvet curtains. “Keep away, witch,” she whispered. She lifted both arms, her fingers outstretched, and then her eyes rolled upward into her head, so that only the whites were exposed. “KEEP AWAY WITCH” she repeated. The words were so blurry that I could barely understand them.
There was a moment of unbearable tension. Then—abruptly—everything happened at once. Liz, with a high-pitched gasp, collapsed. Brown Jenkin slammed the skylight shut and disappeared. Charity dropped to the floorboards and landed on awkward feet. The smoke swirled, the lights flickered, and D-s Miller awoke from his shock like a man who realizes that he’s slept past his train station.
Immediately, I scaled the stepladder and wrestled open the skylight. “Jenkin!” I yelled. “Jenkin—I want my son back!”
I thrust my head out, and I was overwhelmed by what I saw. A dark sulphurous-yellow sky; a row of leafless, naked trees. A garden that had no grass, no bushes, no flowers—nothing but bedraggled rows of pallid and slimy weeds. There was no color anywhere, except for yellow and gray. No seagulls cried; no insects buzzed; nothing. The sea listlessly churned on the beach; but it was black with oil, and its foam was scummy and faintly radiant; and you only had to look at it to know that no fish swam in it; no normal fish.
What had once been the neatly-mown wabe around the sundial was now a devastated patch of barren earth. Under the grim sulphurous sky I saw Brown Jenkin hurrying across it, dragging Danny by the hand; tiny figures in a dream. They must have climbed down from the roof by the fire-escape. I shouted, “Danny!” and Danny tried to turn around. For an instant I could see him clearly, his face jumbled with distress. Then Brown Jenkin had pulled him, whooping, down the hill; toward the brook; and toward the chapel.
I tried to pull myself out of the skylight on to the roof; but as soon as I braced myself, I was seized with an agonizing coughing fit, and had to ease my feet back on to the top of the stepladder. I felt a gentle tug at my trouser-leg and saw that Charity had climbed the stepladder, too, and was smiling up at me. Behind her, Liz had retreated to the corner of the attic, so wreathed in smoke that I could scarcely make her out.
Charity said, “If you go after him, David, you may never come back, either of you.”
“He’s my son.”
She smiled, and nodded. “I know. Just as I was my father’s daughter; and all of the children at Fortyfoot House were daughters and sons.”
“Who are you?” I asked her.
Her eyes closed and opened, as passive as a cat’s. “What you are trying to ask me is what am I.”
“I don’t know,” I said. “Is that what I’m asking?”
D-s Miller came up, wiping his eyes with his handkerchief. “Listen,” he said, “my men have just arrived outside. I’ll get them searching the grounds. That—thing—can’t have taken your son far.”
I was just about to tell him that they would be wasting their time searching the garden in 1992 when Brown Jenkin had taken Danny to some far-distant future; but Charity lifted her hand to silence me.
“Let him keep himself occupied,” she said. “There is nothing that he can do to help you.”
Liz growled, “Let me go. Do you hear me, you miserable brat? Let me go!”
Charity turned to her and nodded and Liz retreated even further into the shadows.
“What the hell have you done to her?” I asked. “What’s going on?”
“You know that she’s been taken,” said Charity, simply.
“Taken?”
“Possessed—occupied—taken over.”
I couldn’t believe that this was Charity talking. But I nodded in understanding. “I saw it happen. Young Mr Billings explained what it was all about.”
“Oh, him,” Charity smiled. “Poor him. Poor young Mr Billings! He wanted everything. He wanted to be saint and sinner, winner and loser. As long as he got his great reward.”
“Who are you?” I asked her. “What are you?”
She reached out and touched my hand. She was real, I felt her fingers. Her nails were bitten, and what could have convinced me of her reality more than that?
“Let me tell you this,” she whispered, in a childish, conspiratorial whisper. “I came to you as a girl. But I am more than a girl. The Old Ones survived by living in human beings—like Kezia Mason, like your Liz—like Vanessa Charles, who will one day give birth to the Old Ones which survive. They tried to hide themselves, but sometimes they gave themselves away; and that was how witches were discovered, you see, and why they were burned—although burning never killed the Old Ones inside.
“Every witch was trying to give birth to the three sons who would become one son… the Unholy Trinity. The son of seed, the son of spit, the son of blood. But some of them, in their guise as human women—” and here she made a charming gesture with her hands that described her own flesh—“some of them gave birth to children who were more human than pre-human... b
ut not altogether human.”
“You mean—like you?” I asked her, my throat dry.
“Yes,” she smiled, “like me. And we became what everybody calls white witches… women with a skill for healing, and for blessing the barren with fertility, and for telling the future… because, of course—” fluttering her eyelashes “—we could travel into the future, and see it for ourselves, with our own eyes.”
“But you’re a child,” I said. “A girl, not a woman.”
Her eyes widened. “You should never judge age by looks. The youngest faces have the oldest eyes.”
“I don’t understand. What were you doing at Fortyfoot House? You have all of this power… but you were an orphan.”
“An orphan, yes,” she smiled. “But a special orphan. I was an orphan because my mother died in childbed. I was an orphan because my mother was burst asunder, giving birth to my three brothers. My three brothers, do you understand? My mother was possessed by the witch-thing, but first she gave birth to me. It was four years before she gave birth to my brothers, the sons of blood, seed and spit. The house was filled with terrible screaming and terrible smells and lights that flashed.
“They died, of course; my brothers all died. The air was too rich and the water was brimming with things they couldn’t swallow. They dissolved, and no trace was left of them at all.
“But—” and here she crossed herself “—my mother’s witch-thing survived, in the cupboard.”
“In the cupboard?” I asked her. I kept thinking of Danny—Danny—but I knew that this was important. I knew that Charity could help me to save him. Patience, I kept telling myself. Patience.
She nodded. “We had a cupboard under the stairs, and every time I opened it I saw a blue light; and a face like this.” She widened her eyes and dragged down her lower lip with her fingers and made an expression like a childish skull. “That was my mother; that was the witch-thing. And one day Dr Barnardo came to our house, collecting children; and one of the children with him then was Kezia Mason. While Dr Barnardo talked with old Mr Billings, I showed Kezia the cupboard. The cupboard door opened and the witch-thing came out and hugged Kezia and took her.”