by Prey (lit)
"Well . . . I must say that I don't believe in running away at the first manifestation of ghosts or spirits," said Dennis Pickering. "Most of the time, ghosts and spirits are nothing more than our own anxieties, expressing themselves as visual delusions. The few that are 'real'although they may be frighteningare usually harmless. It is only when huge and terrible acts of iniquity have been perpetrated that a house itself may acquite an aura of evilan aura which may threaten or depress those who later come to live in it."
"Is that what you think might have happened at Fortyfoot House?" I asked him.
"Yes, quite, mm," he agreed.
"So what can I do? I have to live there. I have to work there. So does my son. So does Liz."
Dennis Pickering made a number of distinctly different faces, as if he were trying them out for size. "I suppose I might come and look around," he said, although he didn't sound very enthusiastic.
"Do you think you could?" I said, encouraged. "I don't know who else to turn to. Poor old Harry Martin couldn't help, and I don't think Rentokil can do much, either."
Dennis Pickering gave an ironic smile. "I didn't think the day would ever come when the church would come a poor third for spiritual assistance after a ratcatcher and a nationwide chain of exterminators."
"I'm sorry. It took me some time to believe that these were really ghosts or phantoms or whatever you call them. 'Spiritual irregularities.' "
Dennis Pickering took us through the wainscoted hallway that smelled of school dinners. "What about this evening, after evensong?" he suggested. "Say, half-past eight?"
"That sounds fine. You don't mind going up into the attic, do you? I'll make sure I buy myself a decent torch."
"You could try a little prayer, you know," Dennis Pickering said, as he opened the front door for me. "Not only for yourself, but for the souls of those who still haunt Fortyfoot House."
"Yes, I suppose I could."
He shook hands, first with me, then with Danny.
As we walked across the shingled driveway, Danny said loudly, "Why did that man put dust up his nose?"
"It was snuff. Tobacco. Instead of smoking it, you breathe it in."
"Why?"
I took two or three more steps, then stopped. "God knows," I said.
10 - The Evening Tide
We met Liz at the bus stop outside the tropical Bird Park, a few minutes after five o'clock. Coachloads of summer tourists were just leaving, their shadows dancing like a chain of cut-out paper dollies across the car-park. Beer-bellied dads in fluorescent surfing shorts and golfing caps with Born to Kill printed on them; blonde raggedy-permed mums in overtight white pedal-pushers and clackety little white high-heels; sweating overweight children in New Kids on the Block T-shirts and gray anklesocks and Gola trainers. Over the monotonous rock-thumping of car radios, we could hear the raucous cries of touracos and macaws, and the hideous lonely calling of peacocks.
I thought that Liz looked tired and a littleI don't knowdistracted, as if she had something on her mind. There were plum-colored circles under her eyes, and she kept brushing her hair away from her forehead as if she had a headache.
"How was it?" I asked her, after we had taken our seats on the bus.
"Oh, terrible. I think that all tourists should be exterminated."
"Hey, come on now. No tourists, no job."
She managed a lopsided smile. "I suppose so. It's just that I felt a bit off-color today. It's not a period or anything. I just feel tired."
"Fortyfoot House isn't exactly the best place to get a good night's sleep."
Danny swung his legs and stared up at the flickering sun-and-shadow through the trees. He hadn't taken a ride on a bus very often, and this was a treat. Some treat. Unless I could find some way of fixing my car, we would be riding on buses for the rest of the summer. There was an Audi dealer in Ryde. I thought that tomorrow I would take the bus there, and see if I could scrounge some second-hand spares. Basically, all I needed to get going again was a windscreen and lights and a steering-wheel and a speedometer. I could worry about the fancy bits later.
We got off the bus at the grassy triangular junction which led down to Bonchurch. It was a quiet walk, past the village shop and a "traditional cream-teas" café with a thatched roof and a garden nodding with hollyhocks. On the left side of the road, there was a wide glassy pond, where ducks feathered and fluffed. The late-afternoon clouds were reflected in its surface like the clouds from some drowned medieval kingdom. Camelot still dreamed its dreams in Britain, concealed in lakes and mirrors and memories. King Arthur still pressed his despairing fingers to his brow; Lancelot still stood against the turrets of the dying day; flags furled and unfurled.
I hadn't felt this warm, magical antiquity of Britain for a very long time; not since I was about eight years old, and first climbed up the chalky dinosaur backs of the South Downs. I loved it. But when I turned to Liz to say something about it, I felt quickly and peculiarly chilled, and I somehow knew that she wouldn't be interested in listening, and that I would end up making a fool of myself.
Danny skipped ahead, dancing over the cracks in the pavement so that he wouldn't be caught by bears. "And I keep in the squares, and the masses of bears, who wait at the corners all ready to eat, the sillies who tread on the lines of the street . . . go back to their lairs." It was like a picture-postcard, except that we were walking back to Fortyfoot House and Liz was fretful and I suddenly began to feel that I was losing control of my whole existence. Or perhaps I had lost control of it a long time ago, and I had only just realized it.
"And I keep in the squares and the masses of bears "
We turned the corner by the stone wall under the dark-green shade of the overhanging laurels and there was the gate of Fortyfoot House and the sloping driveway that led down to the front door and I felt fear like nothing I had ever felt before, dread of what was concealed in that house and what I was going to have to face.
I took hold of Liz's arm. "Listen," I said, "let's go down to the Beach Café for a drink first, yes? You know, unwind. You've had a hard day."
She narrowed her eyes at me; then turned to the house. This was the north side, the shadowy side, and all the windows were dark, like the cleared-out wardrobes of the recently-dead. I could feel the tension in her muscles; I could sense her tiredness and her coldness as if we were one person. There was closeness between us, real closeness. Yet why was there no passion? To put it bluntly, I could have undressed and bathed her if she were ill, but I couldn't have made love to hernot really, not real love.
We skirted the house and walked down through the gardens. Danny jumped up onto the sundial and called out, "It says half-past five!"
"He's good at telling the time," said Liz. "I couldn't tell the time until I was about ten."
I stepped up to the sundial. It had a simple triangular pointer made of bronze, with a Roman dial, but it was noticeable that the top of the pointer was broken and discolored. Not so much broken, perhaps, as melted, so that its once-sharp edge was blobbed with lumps of distorted metal. I touched it, and I felt almost as if I knew what had happened to it.
A thin, crackling sensation. A feeling of vertigo, as if I had left the ground and was whirling and whirling and whirling around.
Liz was standing in the "wabe", her hand shielding her eyes against the gradually-descending sun. ''What?" she asked me.
I stepped down from the sundial and followed her across the grass. "I don't know. Just one of those feelings, that's all."
"I think we're letting this place get to us," she said. "We should have left yesterday, whatever's going on here. Squatters, ghosts, or whatever."
"You don't still think that it's squatters, do you?" I asked her.
She gave me a bleak, offhand look. "All right, no. I don't think it's squatters. But then I don't think it's ghosts, either. I don't believe in ghosts. Do you believe in ghosts? For Christ's sake, David! I don't know what it is. I've been thinking about it all day. I'm not so sure that I wa
nt to know."
"If you really want to, we could leave tomorrow," I said. I was trying to be reassuring. Who could be reassuring, with noises and lights and pale dead children in nightgowns and dark people who moved through photographs?
"I don't know," she said. She sounded both fretful and depressed.
"Listen," I said, "I took some time off today and went to see the local vicar."
"What? You're joking."
"Why should I be joking? When your pipes burst, you call a plumber, right? When you've got a houseful of discontented spirits, you call a vicar. You suggested it yourself, didn't you? Get the place exorcized, that's what you said. As a matter of fact, he knows a fantastic amount about Fortyfoot House and the Billings and Brown Jenkin. A lot of it's written down in the parish records."
"And?"
I shrugged. "I don't know whether he believed meyou know, about the lights; and Sweet Emmeline."
Emmeline . . . I quoted to myself "Emmeline . . . Has not been seen . . . For more than a week . . . She slipped between "
"What?" asked Liz. "What are you talking about?"
I blinked at her. "What do you mean, what am I talking about?"
"You said something about 'Emmeline has not been seen for more than a week'."
"I didn't realize I was saying it out loud."
Liz let out a sigh. "David Williams, I think you're going round the bend, you are."
"It's A.A. Milne," I told her. "You know, the chap who wrote Winnie-the-Pooh. Emmeline . . . Has not been seen . . . For more than a week . . . She slipped between . . . The two tall trees at the end of the green . . . We all went after her. 'Emmeline!' It used to frighten me, that poem. There was a drawing of two trees standing by a fence and I always used to think that nobody could have disappeared between those trees unless "
"Unless what, David? I'm getting worried about you."
"Unless . . . I don't know. Unless Emmeline was in the same place but at a different time. She went away for a week? Without anything to eat? Without sleeping? And where was she? That used to frighten me."
"For God's sake, David. It's only a children's nursery-rhyme."
"Perhaps it is. But something put me in mind of it. Maybe my subconscious is trying to tell me something. Emmeline . . . same place, different time."
"I think your subconscious is trying to tell you that you shouldn't spend any more nights at Fortyfoot bloody Housethat's what I think your subconscious is trying to tell you."
"But what if the vicar can sort it all out?" I challenged her.
"Davidwhat do you care if he can sort it out or not? This isn't your problem. It's not mine, either, believe me."
"Of course it's my problem. I don't want to spend money on staying somewhere else unless I can possibly help it. Besides, I've already been paid to do the place up."
"That's right," said Liz. "You've been paid to decorate it, not to exorcize it. Why don't you tell the estate agents that it's haunted and that you're not going to work on it until it's de-haunted."
"Oh, yes. And you think they're going to believe me?"
"Everybody else around here seems to think that Fortyfoot House is haunted. I'm even beginning to believe it myself, and I don't believe in things like that at all."
"Liz, at least I can try."
She shook her head from side to side in despair. "You don't seriously believe this vicar of yours can do anything, do you?"
"He's going to come round this evening and see if he can find out what's wrong, that's all. I meanmaybe he can't help. Maybe it's nothing to do with the church or Satan or anything like that. But if there's a chance that he can put it to rest, I think it's worth a try. For somebody who knows something about spirits, it could be some perfectly ordinary problem, and all it needs is somebody to say the right prayers over it."
"Rather like your marriage," Liz remarked, with her usual thorn-sharp talent for changing the subject.
She caught me off-guard. "My what?" I asked her. "My marriage? What does my marriage have to do with it?"
"Everything and nothing. Perhaps it doesn't have much to do with Fortyfoot House, but it has a lot to do with you and me."
"To be quite honest," I said, "I didn't think there was any 'you and me.' "
"Oh, I've been sleeping with another one of those ghosts, have I? There could have been a 'you and me.' There could still be a 'you and me.' But you can't make your mind up about anything, can you? You can't decide whether you want to leave Fortyfoot House or not. Gostaystaygo, you're like that song by Jimmy Durante. You can't decide whether you want to divorce Janie or not. You can't decide whether you want to make love to me or not. You're so scared of making the wrong decision you don't make any decisions. David, for God's sake, make up your mind about something . . ."
"I'm sorry," I said.
"Don't be sorry!" she retorted. "I don't want you to be sorry! I want to see you pick up your life again, whether you're going to do it with me or with somebody else. You won't be capable of having any kind of relationship with any woman until you've said the right prayers over your marriage to Janie. You need to divorce her, David, and then you need to file her and forget her. Even then you'll probably pine away for years and years. You've got to see it from my point of view. It's not very flattering to go to bed with a man who's trying to pretend that you're his ex-wife, and goes floppy when he can't."
I stood where I was, my face half-covered by my hand, like the Phantom of the Opera in his half-concealing mask. She was right, of course. Well, three-quarters right. The reason I couldn't be passionate or committed wasn't entirely Janie: Fortyfoot House was something to do with it, too. But it was mostly Janie. I was still fiercely attached to my memories of our time together; and still bitterly and furiously jealous about Raymond the Bearded Fart. The jealousy was worse than the attachment. Attachments can gently fade with time, and ticking clocks, and days that light up and days that die away. Jealousy needs to be instantly cauterized with a red-hot poker, like a bullet-wound in a John Wayne movie. Sizzle, arggggh, gone.
"I'm sorry," I repeated. Then, because I'd said that I was sorry, I said, "I'm sorry."
Liz came up close to me and entangled her fingers in the hair at the back of my head, and kissed me. She was very small, much smaller than Janie, and softer than Janie, and brighter, and I thought to myself if only, dear Lord, if only
She pressed her face against my shoulder and I held her close. Danny was standing on the little wooden bridge that spanned the brook and the clouds were passing overhead stately and slow when
As if I were dreaming I turned to the sundial and saw a heavy black-suited figure slowly whirling around it, horizontal, as if he were a huge tattered propellor. His hand was agonizingly outstretched toward the tip of the pointer. His hair stood on end, and smoked. His coat-tails flapped and crackled
"Jesusdo you see what I "
I tried to lift Liz's head so that she could see what I saw, but she pressed her face closer to my shoulder and
Thousands and thousands of volts of snapping, bursting electricity came crawling out of the sundial-pointer, In a furious and extravagant shower of fine sparks, they buried themselves beneath the man's quivering fingernails. I could smell ozone and burned nails. I could actually smell blood boiling. I could smell them. I could hear the man screaming unintelligible words. N'ggaaa nngggaa sogoth nyaaextraordinary choking guttural words that made the hairs rise up on the back of my neck.
Then he shrieked out, Let me die, you bitch. Let me die, Oh damn you damn you let me die
"Liz! Look!" I said, my voice as plangent as a steel saw.
She lifted her eyes and frowned at me, as if she couldn't understand what I was saying. Then she turned toward the sundial but the figure had vanished. All that was left were a few raggedy skeins of thin blue smoke, which hurriedly untangled themselves and fled away on the brisk sea-breeze.
"What's the matter?" she said. "What's wrong?"
"I thought I " I pressed my fingertips to my
forehead. "I thought I saw something, I don't quite know what. I'm probably just tired."
"You're getting as bad as me. I nearly fell asleep today when I was supposed to be brewing up the tea. The supervisor said that if I didn't buck up, she'd fire me. Nothing like losing your job on the first day, is there?"
I looked back at the sundial. What had the Rev. Dennis Pickering said? "Old Mr Billings was struck by lightning." Perhapsin the grounds of this house which seemed to exist in now and then both at the same timeI had just witnessed old Mr Billings' death, as surely and as vividly as if I had really seen it happen.
"Let's go and get that drink," I said.
We crossed the bridge and walked down through the trees and out of the back gate. As usual, Danny ran ahead of us past the cottages and down the sharply-sloping path which led to the seafront. The tide was well out, exposing the humped weed-draped rocks and the dazzling rock-pools. The smell of brine and weed was very strong, and dozens of gulls were swooping voraciously over the shoreline, preying on the tiny green crabs and the whiskery, transparent shrimp.