by Prey (lit)
At that instant, however, we heard a heavy tumbling sound in the attic directly above our heads, as if somebody had knocked an armchair over.
Liz sat up straight, listening, my cock still deep inside her. "What was that?" she whispered. "That couldn't have been a rat."
"I told you, it's really big."
"Big?" Her voice was bleached with fear. "It must be enormous."
We waited and listened, and we were just about to continue making love when there was another noise: a dreadful scurrying sound, followed by a sharp clatter, as if a collection of walking-sticks or curtain-poles had fallen over.
Liz climbed off me. I felt the cold draft on the wetness between my thighs. "That's no rat," she said. "There's somebody up there."
"Oh, come on," I protested. "Why the hell should anybody want to bang around in the attic? It's a rat. It just sounds worse than it is because we're underneath it."
"Perhaps there's somebody living up there, without you knowing. I saw a film about that once. He used to come down at night when the family were asleep, and walk around the house. It was really frightening."
"What would anybody want to live in a pitch-black attic for?"
"I don't know. Maybe they were squatting here before you came, and now they're hiding up in the attic and waiting for you to go."
I switched on the bedside light. "People who are trying to hide don't usually make so much noise."
"Maybe he's trying to scare you," Liz suggested.
"I've been up there," I told her. "I saw something like a rat, but it definitely wasn't a person."
"Well, it sounds like a person to me."
We waited a few moments longer. I was frustrated as well as alarmed. I felt like taking a poker or a cricket bat and beating this stupid Brown Johnson to death. I just wondered if I'd have the nerve, once I was face-to-face with it. And supposing it wasn't a rat? Supposing it was a squatter, or a vagrant, or a psychopath hiding from the light, or from the law? Supposing it wasn't any of those things, but some different kind of creature altogethersomething so horrible that nobody could describe it?
Whatever it was, it had to go; but I wasn't at all sure that I was capable of getting rid of it. If the people of Bonchurch had known about it for so many years, why hadn't somebody tried to get rid of it before? Why hadn't the Tarrants tried to get rid of it?
We heard no more noises for over five minutes. Eventually I took hold of Liz's hand and said, "Come on, back into bed. We should try to get some sleep."
"I'd better go back to my own room," she said. "We don't want Danny finding me here, do we?"
"I don't think Danny would mind at all."
"Yes, but I would. I'm not his mummy and I'm not your lover. We just had an interrupted fuck, that's all."
I didn't know what to say. I had been hoping that we might continue where we had broken off, or a few thrusts earlier; but obviously Liz wasn't in the mood any more. I thought of at least five sharp answers, but I bit my lip instead. Least said, soonest mended, and all that kind of thing. Perhaps, tomorrow night, she'd be back in the mood again, who knew?
She climbed out of bed, tugging her T-shirt down, but not before I had glimpsed the glistening rose-pink lips of her sex. It was the kind of vivid, split-second image that you could see again and again in the magic-lantern of your mind, for the rest of your life.
"Knickers," I said, and held them up.
"Thanks," she smiled. "Sleep well."
She blew me a kiss, then eased open the bedroom door, went out, and closed it quietly behind her. I stayed where I was, propped up on one elbow, feeling as if I would never understand girls. My friend Chris Pert once said that girls were the only insoluble problem that you could get sexually excited about.
I was about to turn off the light when the door opened again, and Liz came back in.
"What's the matter?" I asked her. She looked odd, unsettled, wide-eyed.
"There's a light coming from the attic. A really bright light."
"There aren't any lights up there. The wiring's all rotten."
"Come and have a look."
I swung myself out of bed and found my toothpaste-striped boxer shorts. Liz said, "I was just closing my door when I saw it flickering. It looks like something's wrong with the electricity."
I stepped out into the corridor and Liz followed me close behind. It was totally dark. The moon wasn't up yet; the curtains were tightly drawn. "I don't see anything," I told her. "It was probably a reflection. You know, when you opened your bedroom door. There's a mirror on the landing."
"It wasn't a reflection," Liz insisted. "It was blue, like electricity."
I felt my way along the corridor to the landing. It was so dark that I found it easier to shut my eyes, and feel my way along the walls as if I were blind. Liz stayed close behind, her hand on my shoulder. "It only lasted for a couple of seconds. But it was so bright."
We had almost reached the landing when we heard a high-pitched screaming, like a young child in terrible distress. My hair stood up, and I said, "Shitwhat the hell's that?" Liz gripped my hand in fright; and I gripped hers just as tightly in return.
The screaming rose in pitch as it came nearer; as piercing as an approaching train-whistle; then changed from major to minor as it faded away.
Immediately afterward, we both heard a noise that resembled a deep reverberating growl. Or maybe it wasn't a growl. It didn't sound like any animal that I had ever heard before, not even in zoos, or on nature programmes. It sounded more like a slowed-down, amplified human voice. Deep, blurryand so loud that the windows rattled and buzzed in their sashes.
Then the light flickered and dazzled from the cracks around the attic door. A sharp blue light that momentarily illuminated the whole corridor, and the landing. I saw Liz's face, bleached and frightened. On the corridor wall, I saw a picture of Jesus crucified.
"God almighty," whispered Liz. "What do you think it is?"
I straightened myself up, almost Blimpishly, and patted her hand. "Perfectly reasonable explanation," I told her. I was shivering, and I could still see shafts and triangles of light swimming around in front of my eyes. "It's a short-circuit, something like that. Or maybe it's static electricity. We're close to the sea. It could be St Elmo's Fire."
"What?"
"You know, St Elmo's Fire. Sometimes you can see it on the masts of ships, or the wingtips of aeroplanes. Sailors used to call it St Elmo's Fire after the patron saint of Mediterranean seamen, St Erasmus. Or corposant, sometimes."
I stopped, and looked at her. She was obviously wondering how the hell I knew all of this trivia. "I read all about it in Eagle annual, when I was twelve."
"Oh." She was too young to remember the Eagle the way it used to be. "What about that screaming, then?"
"Don't ask me. Maybe it was air in the water-pipes.
Maybe a pigeon got itself trapped in the attic; and the rat went for it."
"Pigeons don't scream like that."
"I know. But maybe this one did."
We waited in the darkness. I had never felt so alarmed before, so defenseless. Liz squeezed my hand and I squeezed her back but I didn't know what else to do. I didn't think for a moment that what was happening in the attic was anything but earthly and real. The lights were shorting out; a huge rat was screaming and roaring and running around. But it still didn't occur to me that there was anything supernatural about it. I found it quite scary enough as it was, without thinking that it might defy any natural or rational explanation. "Perhaps you ought to take a look," Liz suggested.
"Perhaps I ought to take a look?"
"You're the man."
"I love this," I retorted, still shivering. "You're like every other woman I've ever met. You're only prepared to be equal when it suits you."
All the same, I knew that I was going to have to go up into the attic and face up to whatever was rampaging around up there. I couldn't go back to bed with all these lights and screams and bumpsnot because I couldn't possibly
have slept, but because this giant rat was threatening my whole summer's work, andall rightmy virility, toomy male credibility. I couldn't have Liz thinking I was frightened of it.
I couldn't have Liz thinking that I was frightened of anythingespecially her.
The light flickered again. It wasn't so bright this time, and it had a more orangey tinge to it, and a few seconds afterward I was sure that I could detect the faint, sour smell of burning.
"You don't think the attic's on fire, do you?" asked Liz.
"I don't know. But I think you're right. I'd better take a look."
I looked around for a suitable defensive weapon. In the bedroom next to usapart from half-a-dozen tea-chests crammed with damp-stained cushions and hideous table-lamps and varnished bookends and water-foxed copies of The Field , and a bean-bag that felt as if it had lost most of its beans, there was a broken kitchen chair. I said to Liz, "Hold on," and I went into the room and wrestled with the chairback until I had noisily disjointed it, like a giant turkey, and torn one of its back legs free.
"There," I said, waving my caveman-like club. "Any nonsense and it's chair-leg time."
I approached the attic door. The lights had stopped flickering now, although I could still hear an intermittent electrical zizz-crack-ZIZZ-crack-zizzing. I could also smell that distinctive sourness which could have been burning or could have been something else. It was a little too sweet for burning, a little too thin. It was hard to place exactly what it was. For some reason it put me in mind of the stuffy, vinegary smell of antique bureaux, when you slide open the drawers and look inside.
"Sounds like it's quietened down," said Liz.
"That doesn't reassure me in the slightest."
"Oh, go on," Liz chided me. "It can't be that bad, if everybody in the village knows all about it."
"You don't think so?" I said, dubiously. "It could be worse. I meanwhy would they all know about it, if it isn't something terrible?"
Liz looked at me, her face shadowed in darkness, and I looked back, questioning, but getting no answers. Hell hath no more complicated problem than a woman you like who wants you to do something you hate. But in the end I unfastened the stiff little metal catch and opened the attic door and smelled again that closed-in smell, that smell of exhaled air. I could still distinguish that sour burning smell, but only faintly, and there was no smoke. What was more, the air was cold, very coldlike an open refrigerator.
Liz shivered. "It doesn't look like it's burning."
I smacked the chair-leg into the palm of my left hand, so hard that it smart. "I don't think it is, either."
"Do you need a torch?"
"I haven't got one. Actually, I have, but I left the batteries in it all winter and it's gone all green and crusty. I meant to buy one today."
I switched on the landing light. Just like the mirror, the light illuminated only the first few stairs. After that, the brown, thick, worn-out underfelt was immediately swallowed by darkness.
"Go on, then," Liz encouraged me.
"All right, all right. I'm thinking what to do if I find it."
"Hit it with your chair-leg, of course."
"But supposing it jumps up at me?"
"Hit it higher, that's all."
I thought for a moment, then I decided, "Yes, you're right." It was a rat, that's all. A big, hoary overgrown rat, a rodent version of General Woundsworth in Watership Down. And as for that screamingwell, all noises sounded ten times worse at night.
I ducked my head down and climbed the first three stairs, the stairs that I could see. I reached the point where I was high enough to be able to look through the banister rails and see across the attic. I could make out some of the shapes that I had seen before, some of the shapes that were obviously dust-sheeted furniture, or heaps of clothes. It was too dark to see much else. I turned back to Liz and whispered, "There's nothing here. It must have been a pigeon."
"Just wait a bit," Liz encouraged me.
I sniffed, and looked around. The burning smell seemed to have died away altogether. My eyes were becoming accustomed to the dark, and I could see the lofty curlicues of a hatstand, and the secretive gleam of a mirror.
I was just about to retreat downstairs, however, when there was a sharp, electrical crackling noise, and the whole attic was illuminated for a split-second in blinding blue light.
"David!" called Liz. "David, are you all right?"
At first I couldn't answer. I couldn't be sure what I had seen. In that brief dazzling flicker it had looked like a childa young girl dressed in a long white nightgown, caught by the light as she stepped across the attic. Her oval white face was turned toward me, and by the doubt-shadowed look in her eye I guessed that she had seen me, too.
"David?" Liz repeated.
"I don't know. I'm not sure. I thought I saw something."
"David, come down."
"No, I'm sure I saw something. It's not a rat at all. It's a little girl."
"A little girl? What on earth is a little girl doing in the attic, in the middle of the night?"
I strained my eyes. The light had temporarily blinded me, and I couldn't even see the hatstand or the mirror any more.
"Who's there?" I called, trying to sound coaxing, rather than angry. "Is there anybody there?"
A long silence passed.
"Is there anybody there?" I repeated.
"You sound as if you're holding a séance," Liz joked, but nervously.
I looked and listened; but all I could hear were the usual sounds of the night. "Perhaps I am," I told her.
"Come down," Liz insisted.
I waited two, nearly three minutes; I called again and again, but there were no more flickers of light and no more screams, and no more signs of the little girl. Just as I was about to leave, I heard a low, furtive shuffling in the far corner of the attic, but it could have been anything. I climbed carefully back down the steep flight of stairs, trying not to show how frightened I was by hurrying; and closed the door behind me.
"What do you think it is?" Liz asked me.
I shook my head. Don't know. Never knew. Never cared to find out. "Perhaps it's just some kind of electrical disturbance. We're close to the sea, maybe it's lightning. I'll ask in the village about a lightning-rod."
Liz said, "Would you like some tea? You're shaking."
"Yes . . . so would you be."
"You don't really think you saw a little girl?"
"It looked like a little girl. But then maybe it looked like a high-backed chair, draped in a sheet. I don't think my nerves could tell the difference."
But I had seen her face: her lost and bewildered face; bruised by doubt and drained of all its color by neglect.
We went downstairs together, into the kitchen. The dreariest of dishrag dawns was just beginning to smear the sky. I sat at the deal-topped kitchen table while Liz put on the kettle.
"Perhaps there are children up there," said Liz. "Perhaps they've made it into a camp."
"Oh, yes, and perhaps I'm Genghis Khan. How the hell could they get in and out of the house without our noticing? And besidesif they were real children, they wouldn't make all of that noise. They wouldn't want to be discovered, would they?"
"Would you mind?" asked Liz, dropping a round Tetley tea-bag into my mug, and stirring it with her finger. "Ouch, that's hot."
"Would I mind what?"
"Would you mind if they were real? They're probably just local children, hiding from their parents."
I took my tea, but I had to blow on it for a minute or two before it was cool enough to drink. "I'm not sure," I replied. "I don't mind so long as they don't make a mess, and let me for once get a decent night's sleep."
Liz sat down opposite me. She took her tea blackor dark amber, ratherso that it was almost the same color as coffee.
"I know," she said. "Why don't we set a trap for them?"
"A trap? What kind of a trap? If there are any children there, we don't want to hurt them."
"Of course we
won't hurt them. What we have to do is spread the floor with paper, and then dust the paper with soot or talcum powder or something like that. If they tread on it, they leave a footprint. We used to do it at school, to tell if anybody had sneaked into our rooms."
"We could give it a try, I suppose."