by Prey (lit)
"I'm sorry," the girl repeated. She swept back her hair with her hand and raised her head. "I really didn't realize there was anybody here."
I looked her up and down. She was probably nineteen or twenty, not much more. She had an oval English face and very wide eyes, halfway between blue and violet. She wore that cheap silver jewelry that students wear: looped earrings and rings with semi-precious stones. She spoke in quite a cultured accent, Received English tainted with the Home Counties: Hampshire or Mid-Sussex, I would have guessed. She was actually very pretty, in an unformed way. Well, unformed to a man of thirty-three, with a seven-year-old son and a smashed-up marriage. She was small, too, which I wasn't used to: full-figured, under that black Knebworth Rock Concert sweatshirt, but not much more than five-feet-three-and-a-half.
"What were you looking for?" I asked her.
"I wasn't looking for anything. A friend of mine told me the house was empty."
"So?"
"So I was going to squat here, for the summer. I can't afford a room. Well, I could afford a room, but it wouldn't be worth my working if I had to pay rent."
"I see." I looked around. "You didn't see a man in the house?" I asked her.
"What? What man?"
"A man came into the house. He was wearing a sort of a dark coat and a tall black hat. Sort of old-fashioned looking."
She sniffed and shook her head. "No. Didn't see anybody like that."
"Well, I'm sorry I chased you. I saw a man in the garden and I thought you were him. I'm supposed to be looking after this place, doing it up."
She said, "Oh, I see."
"There's a hell of a lot to do," I told her.
"It's a lovely old house, though, isn't it?" she remarked.
I nodded, and shrugged. At the moment I didn't know what I felt about Fortyfoot House. After encountering that thing in the attic, and seeing that black-dressed man in the garden, I wasn't at all sure that I wanted to stay.
The girl tugged her duffel-bag higher on her shoulder. "I'd better get going, then."
"Where are you going to go?"
"Oh . . . there's an empty woolshop in Ventnor. I'm going to try that."
"Listen . . ." I said, as Danny came stalking up the sloping driveway, "we're going down to the seafront for a drink. Do you fancy joining us? You could leave your bag here."
"That would be great," she said. "As long as your wife doesn't mind."
"I'm separated. It's just Danny and me now."
The girl gave Danny a wide smile. "Hallo, Danny. I'm Elizabeth. You can call me Liz but not Lizzie. I hate Lizzie."
"Hallo," said Danny, suspiciously. I sometimes used to think that if Danny had machine-guns for eyes, every girl I ever spoke to would be mown down the second she opened her mouth. His mummy was gone, but he was still fiercely protective about her.
"Elizabeth's coming for a drink with us," I told him. "Would you like an ice-cream?"
Danny nodded.
Liz said, "I've got a summer job at the Tropical Bird Park. You can come and see me there. In fact I can get you in for free. And" to me "do call me Liz."
"All right, then," Danny agreed.
"Here." I took Liz's duffel-bag and we walked together back to the house.
"You're not a professional bird-minder, are you?" I asked her. "Ornithologist, or whatever?"
"No, I'm a student. Third-year social sciences at Essex. Anyway, I won't be looking after the birds. I hate birds. I can't stand their beady little eyes. I'll be grilling the hamburgers."
We entered the house. Danny ran ahead of us, through to the kitchen. "Any particular reason you chose the Isle of Wight?" I asked Liz.
"I don't know. It's an island, that's all. Islands are always different. Kind of stuck in a time-warp, if you know what I mean."
"Yes," I said. "I do know what you mean." For some reason, she really cheered me up. "You can leave your bag here. The cafe should be open by now."
She looked around. "I could have enjoyed squatting here. Quite luxurious, compared with what I'm used to."
She followed Danny out on to the patio. I stayed in the kitchen, watching them stand side by side in the sunshine. Danny said something and Liz nodded, and then she started to explain something to him in a very serious way, with a lot of hand-gestures. Danny watched her, equally serious, and I knew that they would get on well together. Liz was young and open-hearted and Danny desperately needed a woman in his life. Forget about me. All I needed was some equilibrium.
From where I was standing, I could see the photograph of Fortyfoot House hanging on the wall in the hall. I hesitated for a moment, then I walked through to the hall and studied it.
It was one of several pictures left hanging here. There was a muddy oil-painting of the mountains of Kashmir, which had been painted by a retired Indian Army officer from memory, or so Mrs Tarrant had told me. There was a steel-engraving of Regent Street, in London; and a photograph of "Master Denis Lithgow, Who Was The First Boy To Fly To Egypt, Arriving At Alexandria In An Imperial Airways Flying Boat."
Then there was "Fortyfoot House, 1888." The same house, with the same man standing in the garden, in his black tailcoat and his tall black stovepipe hat. I examined it minutely; and there was no question that the gardens looked exactly as they had through the glassless window of the chapel.
If Danny hadn't seen it, too, I could easily have believed that I had been hallucinating. Tiredness, stress; a sudden change of location. But Danny had seen it, too. Fortyfoot House, just the same as it had looked over a hundred years ago.
"Daddy, are you coming?" Danny called.
I took one last long look at the photograph, and walked back toward the kitchen. As I did so, though, I was sure I heard a scratching noise; like something running along the wall, behind the skirting-board. I stopped, and listened.
"Daddy? Come on!" Danny urged me.
"Hold on one second? I called back; still listening.
It was still in the house, somewhere. I could hear it, I could feel it. It was running through cavities and wallspaces and tunnels. I had a terrible feeling that it felt that it owned this house; and that Danny and I were nothing more than irritating intruders.
I also had a terrible feeling that it wasn't a rat at all. It was something much, much more frightening.
3 - The Beach Café
We walked down through the gardens, under the trees, over a makeshift wooden bridge that crossed the stream, and out through the back gate. Here we joined the footpath that ran along behind the seafront cottages; and since every cottage door was open, we could see right inside. Every cottage was furnished with dark oak tables and chairs and shiny brass ornaments and well-pressed linen tableclothsalmost a parody of a neat, cozy seaside home. A ginger tomcat yawned amongst the geranium pots.
With a last steep turn, which Danny rushed down with his sandals slapping on the hot tarmac, the path sloped down to the seafront. The beach wasn't much good for swimming, because it was studded with rocks, and heaped with greenish-brown weed; but there were plenty of pools for Danny to explore when the tide went out, and scores of small green crabs for him to catch.
We walked along to the Beach Café, and sat in a small flint-walled garden under a red-and-white striped awning. A motherly woman in a white apron brought us two pints of lager and an ice-cream cone for Danny.
"We've been awfully quiet this season," she said. "It's nice to see some fresh faces."
"I think the package holiday crowd have gone off to Corfu this year," I told her. "Don't worry, they'll be back next year, when they realize how sleazy it is. Souvlaki-and-chips, and all the tequila slammers you can drink."
"How long are you staying?" she asked me.
"All summer," I told her. "I'm doing repairs up at Fortyfoot House."
"Are you now, Fortyfoot House? They're not thinking of moving back, are they, the Tarrants?"
"No, no. They're selling it."
"Well . . . it's about time that somebody moved in there. Not that I would."
She shook her head. She reminded me rather of Granma in The Waltons. "I won't even walk past the garden gate, after it gets dark."
Liz laughed. "You don't believe in ghosts, do you?"
"No, I don't," the woman replied. "But there are lights and noises, and I don't care for lights and noises."
"What sort of lights and noises?" I asked her, curiously. Liz couldn't stop herself from laughing.
"Oh, you're just pulling my leg, aren't you?" the woman retorted.
"No, I'm not," I told her. "You'll have to excuse my companion here, she's just arrived from Essex University. She's one of those skeptical intellectuals."
"What about you, then?" the woman asked.
I wasn't used to anybody speaking to me so directly. "I'm aI don't know, I'm just an odd-job man. Plastering here, painting there. That's all."
"And you've stayed a night in Fortyfoot House?"
"Y-e-es," I told her, curious.
"And you didn't hear no noises?"
"It depends what you mean by noises. Every old house has noises."
The woman shook her head. "No old houseno old house in the worldno old house has noises like Fortyfoot House."
"Well," I admitted. "There were noises. Up in the attic, most of them. Leaky ballcock, house martins, squirrels."
"Scratching noises? Rat noises? Noises you couldn't explain?" The woman stared at me thinly through her bifocal spectacles; and her eyes looked as if they were swimming in goldfish bowls. It was obvious that she was quietly trying to provoke me.
"No, as a matter of fact, there were no really frightening noises. I think we're speaking at cross-purposes."
"Oh," the woman said. "Have you seen lights, then?"
"No lights. Just noises."
"Tell me just what they sounded like," she persisted.
"Animal noises, I don't know. Like rats or squirrels." She peered at me narrowly through the refractive lenses of her glasses. "You haven't heard anybody crying or screaming?"
I was quite shocked. "Of course not, nothing like that."
Liz said, in mock-terror, "Shush! You're scaring me!"
"And you say you haven't seen any lights?" asked the woman, ignoring Liz altogether.
I shook my head.
"Ah, well," she said. "Maybe your turn will come."
She gathered up glasses, and was preparing to go back into the kitchen, but I said, "Just a minute!"
"Yes?" she asked me. Thin, time-clawed face, careful and small.
"Come on, tell me about this crying and screaming," I said.
She paused; then she shook her head. "It's just my funny ideas," she told me.
"Tell me," I insisted. But again she shook her head and I knew that she wouldn't.
"That's weird, isn't it?" said Liz, clasping her beer-mug between her pale, silver-ringed fingers.
"If you ask me, she does it to amuse the tourists," I said. "Everybody likes a good ghost story."
"But you did hear noises?"
I nodded. "Yes, I did. I even saw something. A squirrel, probably, or a rat. I'm going to look up the Isle of Wight County Council in the phone book when I get back, so that they can send somebody round."
In the brilliant light of the morning, the thing that had rushed past me in the attic didn't seem so frightening. It had been pitch-dark, after all. I could have touched a coat, or a curtain, and it would have felt just as bad. Panic can make you imagine all kinds of horrible things.
I didn't yet understand the view of Fortyfoot House that I had seen through the chapel window; but I was beginning strongly to suspect that it was some kind of illusion, brought on by tiredness and stress. Liz had walked out into the garden, and I had immediately assumed that it was the man in the photograph. It was my mind, jumping to conclusions.
I went inside the café to pay. The old woman was sitting at one of the formica-topped tables, counting out 5p and 10p coins. I stood beside her, waiting, while she finished. On the wall was a brightly-painted plaster plaice, and a handwritten sign saying "Fish'N'Chips."
"Did you really see lights?" I asked her.
She looked up. A curved view of the seafront was reflected in her left lens. "Yes, I did," she said. "Lights, and noises. I won't walk past that house by night, not for nobody."
"Well, Mrs ?" I began.
"Kemble," she said. "But you can call me Doris, if you want to. Everybody else does. Actually my name's Dorothy, but everybody calls me Doris."
"All right, Doris. My name's David."
"How d'you do," she said, stacking coins into piles of £1.
"Tell me about Fortyfoot House," I asked her.
She pursed her lips. "If you're staying there, it's better you didn't know."
"It's not dangerous, is it?"
"Depends on what you mean by 'dangerous,' I'd say."
"DorisI've heard noises in the attic. I've seen some kind of thing in the attic. I think it's a rat. I hope it's a rat. But there's something else."
She sensed the seriousness in my voice, and looked up.
"This morning, I saw a man in the garden."
"Oh, yes? What man? It wasn't Mr Brough, was it? He sometimes comes to clear the weed off the fishpond."
"What does he look like?"
"Ooh . . . sixty-five, seventy; usually wears a floppy summer hat and khaki shorts."
"No, it wasn't him. This man was much younger, and he was dressed in black, with a tall black hat. The funny thing is, there's an old photograph of Fortyfoot House hanging in the hallway, and there's a man in that photograph who looks almost exactly like the man I saw today."
"Young Mr Billings," said the woman, with a decided air.
"You know him?" I asked, surprised.
"Yes, and no. I know of him. But I don't know him to talk to. You can't very well know somebody who died before you were born. But that was young Mr Billings, all right."
At that moment, Liz came into the café. With the light behind her, she looked even smaller and brighter than ever.
"Danny says he'd like a drink," she told me.
"We're going back to the house now. He can have a glass of orange when we get there."
"You look like you've lost something," said Liz.
"My marbles, probably. Doris thinks that the man I saw in the garden this morning was somebody called Billings, who died before she was born."
"Wha-at?" Liz scoffed. Then, to Doris, "I thought you said you didn't believe in ghosts."
"It wasn't Mr Brough," Doris retorted.
"Mr Brough's the pond-cleaner," I explained.
"It was young Mr Billings," Doris repeated. She stood up, and collected a tray of salt-and-pepper pots, and began to bang them noisily down on to the table-tops. "There was old Mr Billings and young Mr Billings. The one you saw was young Mr Billings."
"But who are they?" I asked. "Or rather, who were they?"
Doris banged down the last of the cruets, and started to crash around with a plastic basket of stainless-steel cutlery. "Old Mr Billings started Fortyfoot House, and when he died young Mr Billings took it over. My mother always told me that. My mother used to do cleaning up the house; that was long after young Mr Billings was gone, of course. But in those days there was still plenty of people about who knew what had happened. There was an article about Fortyfoot House in the paper not long ago. Old Mr Billings and young Mr Billings. But it was young Mr Billings that caused all the trouble.''
"What trouble?" I wanted to know.
Danny came in, and said, "Daddy . . . can I go on the beach?"
"Finish your ice-cream first. And take your socks off. I don't know why you're wearing socks anyway."
"Mummy said I had to wear them so that my feet don't smell. If I wear just sandals my feet smell."
"All right," I sighed. "But take them off before you go in the sea, all right?"
Doris stood close to our table. As she spoke she twisted her wedding-ring around and around, almost as if it were a rosary, and she
were saying her prayers. The wind blew warm and pungent off the weedy beach. The sun glittered in the rock-pools, like pots of smashed-up mirrors.
"Old Mr Billings had made a fortune out of sugar, I think it was. He was a friend of Dr Barnardo, right back in the times when Dr Barnardo was still working at the London Hospital. When Dr Barnardo opened up his first hostels for homeless boys, old Mr Billings thought that this was such a marvelous idea that he built Fortyfoot House.