Prey

by Graham Masterton

  “So the witch-entity that was inside your mother was the same witch-entity that was inside Kezia Mason, and Liz?”

  She nodded.

  “But if Kezia was practically related to you, how could she have let Brown Jenkin take you?”

  “The witch-entity has no human feelings. The witch-entity has no heart at all. It’s a creature, that’s all, like an octopus or a crab or a spider.”

  “Why didn’t you fight Kezia, the way you fought Liz?”

  “I couldn’t. She was far too strong. But Liz is still weak. Liz is still mostly human. It takes a long time for the witch-entity to penetrate a woman’s body and soul, and dominate her completely. But Kezia—Kezia was scarcely human at all, the last time you saw her.”

  “Did you ever see your brothers?” I asked her. “Do you know what they looked like?”

  Charity said, with sad simplicity, “No. I was very little, and my mother’s room was always locked. I didn’t see her for weeks and weeks before she gave birth. I heard awful screams, and shouting, and I saw very bright lights. Then all I saw through the crack in the door was blood.”

  “Is there really no hope, once the witch-entity has taken a woman over?” I asked.

  In a way which is very hard for me to justify, even today, I think that I was seeking Charity’s approval to take Liz’s life.

  “No hope at all,” said Charity. She made a strange sign with her fingers; as if she were dismissing an evil spirit. “Except to change time; and when you change time, you can never be sure that you haven’t made things worse.”

  “Can you change time?”

  She shook her head. “No more or less than anybody else. I’m not possessed by the Old Ones. I’m not even a proper witch. I was born to a human male and a human woman. The only thing that makes me different is that—when I was conceived—the human woman just happened to be possessed by one of the Old Ones. I inherited some of the Old One’s powers. I’m a white witch… with faraway thoughts in my head, and faraway dreams… but always human. Do I surprise you, being so young, and talking like this?”

  “Listen,” I said. “Brown Jenkin was going to take you on one of his picnics. And the Reverend Dennis Pickering died, trying to save you.”

  “Yes! That was their lie,” said Charity. “They said they needed only twelve children, to feed the witch, at the time of the final Act of Renewal… but of course they needed hundreds more. In the end, Kezia gave me, too. Because she wasn’t Kezia, you know. Not since my mother came out of the cupboard, and hugged her, and sank right into her. She was one of them… the Old Ones. She was my mother. She was not my mother.”

  “What about Danny?” I asked her. I couldn’t control my impatience any longer. Brown Jenkin had dragged Danny across to the chapel and whatever bloody horrible monstrosity was there, whatever hocus-pocus I had to face up to, I was going to go down there and get him.

  Charity said, obliquely, “You can save him, David, yes. But not now.”

  “What do you mean, not now?” She was such a child: why did she make me feel so young? “They’ll feed him to the witch-thing,” she said. “You can’t stop them—not here, not now. You haven’t got the time and you haven’t got the means. But you could go backwards in time and kill the witch-thing, before it even has the chance to exist. Then Danny won’t be eaten, because there won’t be anything to eat him.”

  “What?” I demanded. “What do you mean?”

  Charity shushed me. She was so pale... so pale and fey. “The time for the great Renewal is now, David—which is the future to you. This is 2049—and the earth is so poisoned that at last the Old Ones can breathe, and come out of their hiding. But if you go back… to the time when Liz gives birth to her three sons—her Unholy Trinity—which won’t survive, because we still have too much oxygen, and too many plants, and too many animals, and too many fish—if you go back then, to the moment when Liz gives birth… then you can catch and kill the witch-thing before it can pass to another human host.”

  She stared at me earnestly. “Believe me. Trust me.”

  “I don’t know whether I can.”

  “You saw me float. You saw me fly.”

  “Well, yes, but—”

  She giggled. She had been speaking to me like an adult; but she was mostly a child. “Witches can fly. You know that, from the fairy-stories. And they don’t need broomsticks.”

  “So you’re a witch,” I said. I could scarcely believe that I was saying it. I could scarcely believe that I believed it. But sometimes you have no choice. Sometimes the things that are taking place in front of your own eyes have to be accepted. If you’ve ever seen a road accident, you’ll know what I mean. There’s a kind of terrible unbelievable inevitability about it. You think no! But you know that it’s going to happen, and it does. Crash, crump, what can you do?

  And that was how I felt with Charity. I couldn’t believe her; but I simply had to; because there she was, as real as a road accident.

  All the time that Charity had been talking to me, Liz had been circling around in the smoke. Now she came forward, both hands raised, and her eyes were solid red, as if the pupils were filled with blood.

  Charity turned, with great calmness and dignity, picked a pink-tinged daisy out of her hair and held it up and said to her, “You don’t yet possess enough strength to harm me, witch. Stay back.”

  Liz quivered with frustration, but it was obvious that she couldn’t step any closer. She drew back her teeth over her lips in a feral snarl, and shook her head in frustration; but Charity remained completely placid, still holding up the flower.

  “Now you know why children make daisy-chains,” she said. “It’s to ward off witches. Children are very much closer to the forces of nature than grown-ups. They hear things, they understand things.”

  “I have to go and get Danny,” I said. “I can’t let him be hurt, even if I can go back in time and make sure that it won’t happen. I can’t let him be hurt, even once.”

  Charity said solemnly, “It would be better if I stayed here, to guard your Liz. I can’t do anything against the witch-entity that’s giving birth to the Old Ones… Vanessa Charles. She’s as strong as Kezia used to be. She’ll kill me just as surely as look at me.”

  “Then I’ll have to go on my own.”

  Charity tugged my sleeve. “You’ll be facing the Old Ones themselves, David. They have no conscience, no restraint. They have minds like crocodiles.”

  I was just about to pull myself up through the skylight again, when something made me turn back and stare at her closely. There was a quality about her face that reminded me strongly of someone I knew. She must have realized what I was thinking, because she slowly smiled, and then she said, in a soft, much older-sounding voice, “If I saw a bright light, I would run for dear life, if I were you.”

  I couldn’t believe it. “Doris Kemble,” I whispered. “You’re Doris Kemble.”

  “I will be Doris Kemble, one day.”

  “So Doris Kemble was a white witch, too?”

  Charity nodded. “Doris Kemble is going to be my granddaughter. She won’t have so much power as me… almost all of it will have been bred out of her, and she will have no memory of me. But young Mr Billings will see her talking to you, and still suspect that she’s a threat… and young Mr Billings will send Brown Jenkin to deal with her.”

  “So Brown Jenkin did kill her?”

  “Yes,” said Charity. “And Harry Martin, too.” Outside, in the garden, I heard the high-pitched whistling sound of a child screaming. “I have to go,” I told her.

  “Then bless you,” she said, and glided up into the air, so that she was right beside me, and kissed me on the forehead. Then she sank back down to the ground. I was so stunned that I nearly forgot to climb through the skylight.

  I hoisted myself up, and swung my legs around, grazing my thigh on the window-frame. The roof-tiles were coated in thin, gray slime, which looked like a combination of heavy metals and decomposing moss. I felt a thin
drizzle prickling my face, and stinging the backs of my hands. Acid rain… almost as potent as battery-acid.

  I balanced my way along the rusted uttering, trying not to look down at the wet, greasy patio, seventy feet below me. At last I managed to reach the fire-escape, and grip its corroded handrail. It had been eaten through in places, and about two-thirds of the way down, six or seven rungs were missing, but if Danny and Brown Jenkin had managed to climb down it, then I was sure that I could.

  I shaded my eyes with my hand. Over in the ruined chapel, bright unearthly lights were flickering, and I could hear the deep, monotonous chanting of the Old Ones’ incantation. There was another chant, too, on the opposite end of the sound spectrum: a high, almost inaudible ullulation, like the sound of the wind keening through a narrow crack in the wall.

  I saw Brown Jenkin tugging Danny through the death-white weeds of the graveyard, and then in through the half-collapsed doors. Danny was trying to pull himself free: he didn’t have time to turn around and see that I was following him.

  “Oh God in heaven look after me,” I said; although I wasn’t at all sure that there was a God, in 2049, or if there ever had been a God.

  Cautiously, I turned around and began to climb down the fire-escape, my shoes scraping on the narrow rusted rungs. I glanced down once or twice to make sure that the rungs were safe, and the garden still seemed to be a dizzying distance below me.

  I was almost halfway down when I heard someone shouting my name.

  “David! David! Wait for me!”

  I looked up, blinking against the rain. D-s Miller was leaning over the parapet waving to me, his blond hair stuck down with wet, his glasses misted, his face even pinker than usual. His face provided the only living color in this whole yellowish-gray landscape.

  “They’ve taken Danny to the chapel!” I called back.

  He turned himself around and started to climb down after me. “I searched the garden!” he panted. Of course we didn’t find anything! It was then that I realized what Fortyfoot House was all about! Different times! Different gardens!

  “Of course,” he panted, “I couldn’t tell the woodentops where I was going… they wouldn’t have believed a word of it.”

  “Just take it easy!” I called back. He was coming down the fire-escape so enthusiastically that he was making it shake, and some of its anchor-bolts began to joggle loosely in the wall. We didn’t want only to get down safely, we wanted to get back up again, too.

  At last I reached the last rung, and dropped heavily down to the patio. D-s Miller dropped almost immediately after me, balancing himself on his hands. He wiped the gray slime from his fingers and sniffed them suspiciously.

  “What the hell’s this?” he said. “It’s all over everything. It looks like a mixture of jelly-mushrooms and dead bodies.”

  “That’s probably what it is,” I replied.

  We hurried across the sloping garden toward the brook. All that remained of the sundial was a crumbled stump, like a decayed human tooth. Our feet slid on the greasy dead vegetation, and the sulphur in the air irritated our throats and lungs so much that both of us were coughing like spavined horses by the time we reached the brook.

  A brook still trickled down the narrow crevice in the garden, but it was thick viscous brown, and it stank of raw sewage. We tried to jump over it, but D-s Miller slipped on the opposite bank and his foot plunged into it, right up to the top of his sock.

  “Oh, shit,” he complained, shaking his ankle.

  “You’re probably right,” I told him.

  We scaled the hill that led to the graveyard wall. The ground was rumbling beneath our feet, as if an endless Underground train were passing. Behind the walls of the chapel, dazzling white lights flashed, and I heard desperate panicky screams and awful groans, and something else—something which sent electric prickles down my back. It was the distinctive voice of young Mr Billings, reciting some hair-raising invocation in a language which I couldn’t have hoped to pronounce, let alone understand. It didn’t sound like any human language that I had ever heard. It was more like the bristle-throated chirruping of huge insects, mingled with the submarine rattling and clicking of dolphins. Tekeli-li! Tekeli-li!

  D-s Miller and I hurried swift and low through the decaying weeds of the graveyard, between gravestones that were now tilted and broken and eroded by years of exposure to acid rain. On many of them, even the names had been obliterated. A stone angel stood with nothing but misshapen lumps for wings, and a head that had been dissolved into the unsettling likeness of a slope-browed ape.

  We reached the doors of the chapel. It would be easier to force our way between them than it would have been in 1992—part of the woodwork had rotted away.

  “What’s the plan?” asked D-s Miller.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Well—what are you going to do, once you get in there?”

  “How should I know? I’m just going to grab hold of Danny and make a run for it. What else can I do?”

  “You need some kind of diversion. Otherwise you won’t even get halfway.”

  I thought about it. “I suppose you’re right. What do you suggest?”

  “The first thing I suggest we do is reconnoitre. There could be three people in there—there could be three hundred.”

  He glanced back at the chapel window, through which I had first seen young Mr Billings hurrying across the lawns. “Come on,” he said, and led the way between the gravestones until we reached it.

  Even brighter lights crackled and spat from inside the chapel—so bright that I had to cover my eyes with my hand to prevent myself from being dazzled. Young Mr Billings’ chanting grew fiercer and more complicated, until he was practically screaming. I edged myself upwards until I could just see over the flaking stone window-ledge, and out of the corner of my eye I could see that D-s Miller was doing the same.

  Neither of us spoke when we saw the inside of the chapel. D-s Miller didn’t even understand the implications of what we were witnessing, but all the same he stood with his mouth open and his eyes wide, as if he were defying his brain to tell him that what he was looking at was true.

  On the left-hand interior wall of the chapel, all the ivy had shriveled away, to reveal not just the mural of Kezia Mason, but of scores of other young women. By the historical differences in their clothes, they looked as if they were the women who had hosted the witch-entity from one generation to the next—from Stuart and Elizabethan times to the reign of Henry I—from the Dark Ages to the Roman occupation of Britain—and further back still. Each of these women had the same mocking, triumphant expression on her face. Each of them had her own familiar standing beside her, or draped across her shoulders like Brown Jenkin, or cradled in her arms. The familiars included huge brindled cats and lizards and wild boar and things that could only have been a mixture of toads and dogs.

  In what had once been the nave of the chapel, three huge braziers burned. They looked as if they had been made out of salvaged chemical drums, roughly pierced with holes and filled with sea-coal and dead wood. Iron gratings had been laid across the tops of the braziers, and on these gratings ten or eleven huge joints of meat were roasting. I thought they were sucking-pigs at first, until the smoke swirled away from one of the gratings and I saw a charred and reddened face.

  They weren’t sucking-pigs at all. They were children. The lost, slaughtered orphans of Fortyfoot House. Some of them had had their arms and their legs hacked off; two more were headless. Some had been tied by wire to the gratings—presumably because they had started to roast while they were still alive.

  From the braziers to the altar, the shattered slates were shiny with human grease and scattered with children’s bones. The accumulation of bones grew thicker and grislier—and the altar itself was almost buried in them, thousands of them—some of them freshly-picked, some of them dull, some of them so old that they had partially crumbled into dust. Ribcages, pelvises, femurs, scapulas—and more small skulls than I could p
ossibly count.

  And on top of this mountain of bones lay the most grotesque creature that I had ever seen. The sight of it almost drove me mad on the spot. I felt my jaws lock with horror, and my skin jangled with sheer disgust.

  Say it’s not true my mind kept insisting. Say it’s not true!

  But it was true. It was a woman, a vastly-distended woman, lying naked on a heap of rugs and blood-soiled mattresses and burst-open cushions. Her stomach bulged enormously; and what was doubly horrifying was that the bulge ceaselessly writhed and churned, as if some huge creature were trapped inside her, fretful to make its escape. Her breasts were grossly swollen too. I couldn’t have carried even one of them in my wheelbarrow. And her neck was so bloated that her face looked like a tiny painted doll’s-mask.

  Kneeling beside her on the mountain of bones, his face masked in filthy rags, was the creature with whom Kezia Mason was supposed to have given birth to Brown Jenkin—the king of the docklands underworld, Mazurewicz. With his grimy bare hands, he was feeding her with charred flesh and stringy membranes and bundles of lukewarm fat. With her tiny mouth she was endlessly and greedily gulping it down, most of it unchewed, and the more she gulped down, the more wildly her stomach churned.

  Young Mr Billings was standing not far away—dressed not in black but in a plain white sheet, so that he looked incongruously like Mark Antony in Julius Caesar. I come to bury Caesar, not to praise him. His eyes were closed and both of his arms were raised, and he was still screaming that eldritch chant, over and over again.

  “Tekeli-li! Tekeli-li!”

  D-s Miller said, “Fucking hell.” Then, “Excuse my French.”