by Prey (lit)
"Brown Jenkin," I mouthed, almost silently.
Doris Kemble nodded, her mouth tight; the expression on her face like a smashed window.
"My mother used to talk about it a lot before she died. She was eighty-four and she went a bit doollally, you see. She kept thinking she was back in those times when she used to clean the house. Young Mr Billings was long-gone by then, of course. But the stories that people told her . . . well, they must have made quite an impression on her, don't you agree? Sometimes she talked about young Mr Billings as if she knew him quite well. And that Brown Jenkin, too. Brrrr! Makes me shudder just to think about it."
"Yes, it must," I agreed. But all the time I was thinking: could that be true, that the rat-thing was young Mr Billings' son?
Danny said impatiently, "Can we go now?"
But something made me looknot in his directionbut along the row of cottages and boarding-houses that fronted the sea, of which the Beach Café was the last. At the foot of the steeply-sloping path which led down from Fortyfoot House, under the dark green shadow of the trees, I thought I saw a pale-faced man standing, a pale-faced man dressed entirely in black. He was watching us intently, his eyes narrowed so that he could focus at such a distance.
Doris Kemble raised her head, and saw me peering along the promenade, so she turned, too. But when she did so, the man vanished, almost to melt, as if he had never been anything more than a trick of the afternoon light.
But a water-jug on the shelf just behind Doris' head abruptly and inexplicably toppled and dropped to the linoleum floor, and smashed; and I felt in some unsettling way that the man's disappearance and the broken jug were cause and effect.
That afternoon, instead of scraping the paint from the kitchen windows, I took Danny off with me to carry out some research. We walked hand-in-hand along the mile-long concrete seafront promenade to Ventnor. It was a blissfully warm day, and the sea was bright, and seagulls wheeled and screamed around the cliffs. We climbed a steep path, up through bushes and crumbled limestone, until we reached a car-park and the back streets of Ventnor.
Ventnor wasn't much to look at: a typical British seaside town with a bus-station and a cinema-turned-Bingo-hall and shops crowded with beach-balls and straw hats and buckets-and-spades. But it had a parish church, St Michael's, and a library, and those were all that I needed.
In the library, which was small and sunny and far too hot, and smelled of lavender floor-polish, I sat in a corner and looked up GHOSTS and OCCULT PHENOMENA. I read about the Scottish castle in the Kingdom of Fife, where, once a year, on St Agnes' Eve, blood bucketed down the stone stairs, and flooded the hallway. I read about the man with no face who appeared at a small terraced cottage in Great Ayton, in Yorkshire, a casualty of Passchendaele who was looking for the comfort of his long-dead mother.
I also looked up TIME and RELATIVITY. Most of what I found was so arcane that it was impossible for me to understand, although there were some interesting passages in The Arrow of Time about alternative realities, and how it was scientifically possible for the same cosmic scenario to have several different but parallel outcomesin other words, the Indians could have defended and kept America for themselves, and Hitler could have been a wise and benevolent Chancellor who brought peace and prosperity to Europe, instead of war.
Then, at the very end of the shelf on TIME, I found a dog-eared copy of the National Geographic magazine, June 1970, bound in plastic, with a yellowed sticker on it saying TIME & ANCIENT SUMERIANS, p. 85. I flicked through it until I found the article'Ziggurat Magic of Ancient Sumeria, by Professor Henry Coldstone II. It was all about the ziggurats of Babylonthe multi-terraced towers that had been built around Ur, on the river Euphrates.
It wasn't the subject-matter of the article that caught my attention, however. It was the grainy black-and-white photograph at the side of the page, with the caption 'Sumerian temple demolished by the occupying Turks in August, 1915, because its shape disturbed the local bey,"
The temple was scarcely visible, because the quality of the photograph was so poor. But there was something deeply familiar about its hunched and tented silhouetteabout the way in which its angles tricked the eyeabout its dark and unnatural perspectives.
I would have bet all the money that I didn't have, then and there, that I was looking at a photograph of the roof of Fortyfoot House.
I skimmed through the rest of the article as quickly as I could. The library was obviously about to close, and a plain but voluptuously-bodied woman in a gray twinset and glasses was watching me from the main desk as if I were a potential book-stealer.
Professor Coldstone suggested that several important ziggurats had been built in ancient Iraq thatalthough they were constructed of solid stonewere capable of altering their physical shape, and that the Babylonians had used them to travel from one world to the next.
The Babylonians used to believe that there were infinitely ancient civilizations that were accessible through the use of certain astro-geometric shapes, based on the patterns of the major constellations. Modern mathematicianseven with computers that were capable of plotting accurate trajectories across the universehad so far failed to reproduce these shapes, because they contained so many apparent absurdities and mathematical impossibilities.
Professor Coldstone ventured that "Sumerian civilization in its entirety was founded on knowledge brought from another ancient world beyond the ziggurats." Their wedge-shaped writing bore no resemblance to any other writing on the planet, in spite of attempts by Victorian translators to show that it was nothing more than a system of simplified pictographs, turned on their sides. Sumerian gods and Sumerian legends had no religious or anthropological connection in any way with any other human religions or myths. As far back as 3,500 years before Christ, they were talking with eerie familiarity about "the place where no days are counted"a place which their priests and their scribes could visit with comparatively little difficulty, but not always safely. What some of their priests saw beyond the ziggurats drove some of them staring-mad; and there was a special cuneiform for "One-Who-Has-Seen-What-Waits-Beyond." Not "Lies" beyond. Not ''Lives" beyond. But "Waits" beyondalthough for what, Professor Coldstone didn't say.
There was very little about the temple that had been demolished by the Turks, except a note from the bey which said "it is a center of dissension and unease. At night, we see lights, and hear voices raging in languages which we cannot understand. On the basis that its continued existence is a challenge to Turkish control in this area, I have ordered its demolition by dynamite."
I asked the plain, voluptuous woman in the gray twinset to make a photostat of the article for me. "This looks interesting," she said, as the copier lit up the awkward cubby-hole in which it had been positioned, next to the sink and the kettle and half-a-dozen coffee-mugs. "Ziggurats."
"Well, they're pretty boring, on the whole," I said, and I couldn't even manage a smile. Motes of book-dust sank through the afternoon light. In the children's corner of the library, Danny was sitting cross-legged reading a children's version of Dracula.
"Why do vampires drink people's blood?" he asked me, as we walked down the library steps.
"They don't like fish-fingers, that's why."
"No, seriously why do they drink people's blood?"
"It's only a story. It's supposed to frighten you."
"What would happen if they drank somebody's blood and the person had AIDS?"
I stopped on the corner of the street as a bus roared past us and stared at him. "How old are you?"
"Seven."
"Well, don't talk like that. You don't have to worry about AIDS. Not yet, anyway."
"But what if a vampire bit me and the vampire had AIDS from somebody else?"
"What if you asked me so many questions that my head exploded?"
We reached St Michael's, an unprepossessing Victorian church with flint walls and cypress trees in the churchyard. Obviously its grounds had once been much more extensive, but a large part of the c
hurch-yard had been taken up to widen the main road, and twenty or thirty grave-markers had been crowded like teeth against the far wall, under the dank shade of the largest trees.
Inside the church our footsteps squeaked and echoed and it was surprisingly cold. An elderly woman was arranging flowers and the vicar was up on a wooden step-ladder, changing the hymn numbers. I walked up to the foot of the ladder and said, "Good morning!"
He lowered his glasses and looked down at me. He wasn't an old man, maybe forty-five or fifty at the outside, but he was freckled and balding and he had all the fussy, exaggerated mannerisms of a man of retirement age. He wore a green tweed jacket and a pair of worn green corduroy trousers.
"I'll be with you in just a tick!" he said, sliding in the last of the numbered cards. "Hymn No. 345, 'Oh God, our help in ages past.' "
He came down the ladder. "Have you come about the drains?" he asked me.
"No, I haven't as a matter of fact. I was wondering if I could take a look at the parish records."
"The parish records! Well, that'll be quite a business. Apart from last year's and this year's, they're all in the vicarage. It depends how far back you want to go."
"I'm not sure. At least 1875."
"May I ask you exactly what you're looking for, Mr ?"
"Williams, David Williams. Yes . . . I'm looking for a record of a marriage."
"I see! Ancestors of yours?"
"Not exactly. But people I know of."
"They were local, were they?" the vicar asked. Then turned to the old woman arranging the flowers and called, in a voice that echoed and re-echoed, "Don't overdo the gladioli in front of the pulpit, Mrs Willis, I want to be able to see my flock!"
"Yes, they were local," I told him. "They lived in Bonchurch."
"And you're sure that they were married here? They could have married at Shanklin, you know."
"Well, yes, but I thought I'd make a start here."
He looked at his watch. "I'm going back to the vicarage now. Perhaps you'd like to come along."
We left the church, crossed the road, and then walked down a narrow street to a large late-Victorian house surrounded by laurel hedges and a broken-down wooden fence. There were weeds growing through the shingle driveway, and the brown paint on the doors and windows was blistering.
"I'm afraid the place is looking rather shabby these days," the vicar remarked, opening up the front door. "Not much money for luxuries like housepainting."
He showed us into the hallway, with a tiled floor and brown wooden wainscoting. There was a strong smell of mince and cabbage in the house, and Danny wrinkled up his nose and said, "School dinners."
I told him to shush but the vicar laughed. "Quite right," he said. "I always used to like school dinners."
A woman in a flowery print frock appeared at the kitchen door, carrying a goldfish bowl. Her face was as plain as a dinner plate.
"Mrs Pickering," the vicar explained; and the woman gave a vague smile.
"You can use the library if you like," the vicar continued crossing the hallway. "The records are all there, rather out of sequence I'm afraid. You did say 1875, didn't you?"
"Around 1875. I'm not entirely sure."
"You have the names of both parties?"
"Yes . . . Billings, that's the name of the groom. And Mason, that's the name of the bride."
He stopped, with his hand on the library door. "Billings, you say, and Mason? From Bonchurch?"
"That's right, from Fortyfoot House."
"Oh . . ." he said, defensively. "That's a slightly different kettle of fish. You're notwriting anything about this, are you?"
"No, no. I'm a decorator, not a writer. I'm staying at Fortyfoot House at the moment. I'm supposed to be doing it up so that the owners can sell it."
"You'resorry? Doing it up?"
"You know, painting it. Mending the guttering, that kind of thing."
"Ah," said the vicar. "Please forgive me, I misunderstood. The thing is that occasionally I have some rather unwelcome enquiries about Fortyfoot House . . . from the more lurid popular newspapers, you know, and people writing books on black magic and occult mysteries, that kind of thing. I do my best to discourage them."
"I didn't realize that Fortyfoot House was so famous," I said.
"Well, perhaps notorious is more the word," he replied. He opened the library door and showed us inside. It was airless and hot and dramatically untidy, with stacks of leather-bound books and photograph albums and yellowed parish newsletters on every shelf, and more books and magazines piled in great tilting heaps on the threadbare carpet. A tortoiseshell cat slept curled up on the windowsill, its lip open in a comatose snarl, next to an empty Möet & Chandon bottle and a hunchbacked African statuette carved out of ebony.
"You're staying there, you say?" asked the vicar.
"That's right. Mr and Mrs Tarrant want it finished as soon as poss."
"Ah, yeswell, that's understandable. That house seems to bring nothing but ill fortune to everybody who owns it."
"Have you any idea why?"
The vicar took off his glasses and dryly rubbed at his eyebrows with the heel of his hand. "I've made a bit of a study of itwell, I've always been interested in local history and superstition. But there have been so many conflicting stories . . . most of them wild . . . it's hard to know what to believe."
"But you've heard about young Mr Billings, and the woman he married, the woman called Mason, and you've heard about Brown Jenkin, yes?"
The vicar said, in a level tone, "You couldn't fail to, living in Ventnor. It's part of the local mythology."
"Have you ever seen anything there? Anything that makes you think that some of it could be true?"
He looked at me steadily. "Do I gather from your intense interest in the subject that you have?"
Danny was over by the window, stroking the cat. "I'm not sure what I've seen," I told the vicar. "There's a girl living with me at Fortyfoot Houseshe's almost managed to convince herself that there are squatters hiding somewhere in the attic, and that they're trying to scare us away."
"But that's not what you think," said the vicar, fastidiously smoothing back what was left of his hair.
"Personally, yes, I find that hard to believe."
"You've heard voices? You've seen bright, inexplicable lights?"
"More than that. I've seen something that looks like a rat but isn't a rat; and I've seen a child in a nightgown who looked as if she was dead; and I've seen somebody who could be Billings, too, I'm sure of it. The trouble is, it's like some kind of hallucination. It's always over in an instant; and I'm never sure if I really saw anything or really heard anything or whether"
"Or whether you're going mad," the vicar finished for me.
"Well, yes," I said, lamely. "I mean, my son's seen Billings, too; and the dead girl in the nightgown. So has Liz. ButI don't know"
"You think that you could all be victims of the same delusion? A sort of collective hysteria?" the vicar suggested.
"I suppose so, yes. I don't know very much about the supernatural, or what goes on beyond the grave."
"Well, none of us do," the vicar admitted. "By the waymy name's Dennis Pickering, but do call me Dennis, everybody else does. Would you like a cup of tea? My wife makes some perfectly awful seedcake. And perhaps your boy would like an orange squash?"
Danny wrinkled up his nose. To a boy brought up on Diet Pepsi and Lucozade Sport and Irn Bru, the idea of tepid orange squash from the vicarage kitchen was distinctly unappealing.
"Perhaps my wife can find you some yogurt, then?" Dennis Pickering suggested.
Danny's face turned from faintly disdainful to the gargoyle of Notre Dame.
"He's just had his lunch," I explained.
Dennis Pickering cleared away a heap of papers and books, and we perched knee-to-knee on the edge of the dusty brown leather sofa.
"There's something else," I told him. "Something I saw on my own . . . which makes me think that it can't be colle
ctive hysteria. Last night, about two o'clock in the morning, I saw something in the corner of my bedroom ceiling. At first it was nothing but a foggy sort of light. Then it slowly turned into something like a nun, or a nurse. It wasn't completely clear. It frightened the hell out of me, to tell you the truth. I shoutedwell, I screamed, as a matter of factand it disappeared."
Dennis Pickering nodded, thoughtfully. He placed his bony hands together as if he were praying, and for a very long time he said nothing at all.
"You do believe me, don't you?" I asked him, with an embarrassed laugh. It suddenly occurred to me that perhaps he didn't, and was trying to decide whether to call the police or the local loony-bin.