by Prey (lit)
No wonder the Old Ones had so greedily seized the chance of traveling through time. No wonder they had possessed the Sumerian priests who had ventured back those pre-human civilizations to visit them. No wonder they had possessed Kezia Mason, and all of her predecessors and successors. They had been infinitely cunning; and voraciously interested in their own survival. They had immediately understoodas I now understoodthat time could be moved, and shifted, and rearranged. Like politicians, they had realized with heartless clarity that the mastery of time is the key to the mastery of everything, and everybody, and a world in which morals no longer exista world in which their own self-indulgence could reign supreme.
How a plain and ordinary writer like H.P. Lovecraft had ever heard his name, I didn't like to think. But the age of Yog-Sothoth was almost upon us. Yog-Sothoth, who froths as primal slime in nuclear chaos forever beyond the nethermost outposts of space and time!
I lifted up the ring of rusted and encrusted keys and I felt as if the ground was moving under my chair. They were incontrovertible proof that I had gone back to 1886. They were incontrovertible proof that Dennis Pickering had been killed by Brown Jenkin; and that I had taken his body down to the sea, and said my inadequate prayers over him, and let him float away.
That meant that the ''Dennis Pickering" who had visited me this morning hadn't been Dennis Pickering at all. More than likely my double-vision of him had been correct: and he had been Brown Jenkin, creating an illusion of Dennis Pickering with the help of Kezia Mason's magic. She had turned a doorknob into a human hand: there seemed to be no reason why she couldn't change the louse-infested Brown Jenkin into a country vicar.
I went out into the hallway and telephoned Detective-sergeant Miller. He was having a late sandwich lunch in his office, and he answered my call with his mouth full.
"Sergeant Miller? This is David Williams at Fortyfoot House."
"Oh, yes. Anything amiss, Mr Williams?"
"You ought to send someone around to St Michael's vicarage."
"Any particular reason?"
"Just to make sure that Mrs Pickering is safe."
D-s Miller swallowed, and then he said, cautiously, "Safe? Do you have any grounds for thinking that she might not be?"
"Look," I said, "apart from the locals, you're about the only person I've met in Bonchurch who believes that there's something potentially dangerous going on here."
"What if I do?" He still sounded suspicious.
"Well . . . I can't explain it very clearly now . . . but I don't think that the Reverend Pickering is quite what he seems to be. I think the Reverend Dennis Pickering who came home this morning isn't the real Reverend Dennis Pickering at all."
"Clear as mud," remarked D-s Miller. "If he's not himself, who is he? And surely his wife would have spotted the difference immediately."
"There is no difference. He's a kind of illusion."
I heard a lot of chewing and swallowing noises, and then the boot-dragged-out-of-a-swamp sound of D-s Miller sucking at a very hot cup of tea. "You're asking me to stretch my imagination a bit far, aren't you, Mr Williams?"
"Don't you think it's better to be safe than sorry?" I told him.
"I suppose you're right. LookI'll tell you what I'll do. I have to come past your way anyway to talk to Mr Divall at the shop. I'll pick you up and you can come around to the vicarage with me. Then we can get this whole thing cleared up for good and all."
"Sounds all right to me."
I put down the phone. Upstairs, I heard Liz singing The Windmills of My Mind. It occurred to me then that Danny's discovery of Dennis Pickering's keys was incontrovertible proof of something else: that Liz had been lying when she said that I had never gone back to 1886, and I hadn't brought Charity back with me. And if she had been lying about that, then perhaps she had also been lying when she had told me that she knew nothing about young Mr Billings, and the Sumerian doorways, and the Old Ones who had survived for nearly five-and-a-half millenia inside the bodies and souls of innocent hostswaiting for the day when the earth would be polluted enough for them to re-emerge in their pre-human form.
It also occurred to me that if young Mr Billings had been telling the truth, that ghostly nun-figure which I had seen lying down on top of Liz was the same witch-entity which had possessed Kezia Mason, and countless girls before her.
And I had given her the third and final impregnation which she neededthe impregnation of blood.
I stood in the hallway and I felt as if my brain were bursting. In spite of what logic and experience told me, it was almost impossible for me to believe that Liz could have been "possessed" or "taken over." She still spoke the same way; still cracked the same jokesstill looked exactly the same. She appeared at the top of the stairs wearing nothing but one of my shirts, still singing; and came prancing down to the hallway with her hair flying and her breasts bouncing.
"What's wrong?" she asked, kissing me on the tip of the nose. "You look as if you've seen a ghost."
I shook my head. "Everything's fine. Don't worry about it. But D-s Miller wants me to go to Shanklin with him and answer some questions."
"He doesn't think you had anything to do with Harry Martin or Doris Kemble, does he?"
"No, of course not. He's double-checking evidence, that's all. They're holding Harry Martin's inquest next weekhe just wants to be sure that I didn't leave anything out."
"Oh, well that's all right," said Liz. "Danny and I can go for a walk."
A sudden twinge of anxiety. If she were possessed by the witch-entity, should I leave Danny alone with her? Hadn't young Mr Billings gravely assured me that all of the fairy-stories were right, and that the principal diet of witches was children. I had a startlingly clear vision of my Green Fairy Book, and the engraving which showed a hook-nosed hag cramming six or seven terrified children into her oven on a huge baking tray.
"Ier, I was thinking of taking Danny along with me. Sergeant Miller said he might show him a police car."
Liz, walking ahead of me, turned her head and wrinkled her nose disdainfully. "Bor-ing! Danny doesn't want to spend his afternoon hanging around with a whole lot of pigs."
"He's really keen, as a matter of fact."
At that moment, Danny came into the kitchen, still throwing and catching Dennis Pickering's keys. Throwjinglecatch. Throwjinglecatch.
"Your old man has to go down to the cop-shop," said Liz, putting her arm around his shoulders. "Why don't we take a walk along to Ventnor and buy some sweets? Then we can make a sandcastle, and sit in it and eat tons of sweets and spoil our appetites for supper."
"I was hoping you'd want to come with me," I told him. "Sergeant Miller said that he'd show you a real police car."
"Then what?" asked Danny the Supercilious.
"Well . . . then I have to go over some evidence with him. That shouldn't take too long."
I wished that I'd thought of a more attractive lie, but I had already been snagged on my own hook. I could picture exactly what was going through Danny's mind: do I want to spend a long tedious afternoon waiting for Daddy in some hot stuffy office, or do I want to run around the beach eating sweets and jumping in the sea?
Liz cocked her head slightly to one side and said, "You don't have to worry, you know, David. I shall take care of him."
"Oh go on, Daddy," Danny urged me. So what could I say, with a shrug of my shoulders, but yes?
I made a point of looking quickly at Liz, to see if there was even the slightest hint in her eye of malice or self-satisfaction or deceit or (God help me!) greed. But she was just the same Liz and she almost made me feel guilty for doubting her.
Only the keys spoke differently. Throwjinglecatch.
D-s Miller knocked on the front door and he looked impatient and flushed. The afternoon was almost unbearably hot now, and the air rippled up from the gravel shingle like the rippling waters of a crystal-clear trout-stream.
"Are you ready, then?" he demanded, staring down at his stainless-steel wristwatch as if it
had just said something impertinent to him.
"Yes, fine, thanks for coming. I know this sounds terribly far-fetched."
He walked around his car and opened the door. "Far-fetched isn't the word. It's downright lunacy. You're letting this house get to you, you know. The next thing I know, you'll be ringing me up and saying that you've seen Satan himself."
"I don't think so," I said, trying to sound very sober, as he backed and turned the car around Dennis Pickering's Renault.
"Hasn't the Reverend Pickering been around to pick up his car yet?" he asked me.
"He lost his keys. He said he was going to go home and pick up his spare set. So far I haven't seen him."
"Odd," said D-s Miller. "He needs his car for his rounds."
"Perhaps he borrowed his wife's."
"His wife's is in dock. She had an accident with it last week in Ventnor car park."
"Anybody hurt?"
D-s Miller shook his head. "Mrs Pickering nearly got hurt. She ran over somebody's shopping-trolley, and flattened their whole week's groceries."
I turned around in my seat as we drove out of the gates of Fortyfoot House. Liz and Danny were standing in front of the porch, their eyes scrunched up against the bright reflected sunlight, waving.
Somebody else was waving too. From a dormer window high in the roof, I thought I saw Charity, her mouth dragged downwards in an expression of fear and distressnot waving goodbye, but help me, for God's sake, help me!
"Stop the car!" I shouted.
"What?" asked D-s Miller, wavering across the road.
"Stop the car! Please! Now go back a bit . . . that's it, so that I can take another look at Fortyfoot House."
Impatiently, D-s Miller did what I asked. I sat for a long time staring up at the window where Charity had been, but now there was no sign of her. The window was empty; black as young Mr Billings' hat.
"All right," I said, after a moment or two had passed, and Charity didn't reappear. "Perhaps you're right after all. Perhaps I am letting it get to me."
"It's not surprising," said D-s Miller. I noticed the large H. Samuel signet ring on his fourth finger. The head of the Roman emperor Augustus. All I knew about Augustus was that he had divorced his first wife Scribonia in order to marry a much prettier woman called Livia. The more things change, the more they stay the same, I thought to myself.
"How did Mrs Pickering sound when she called you?" I asked.
"She sounded normal, I suppose," said D-s Miller. "I didn't really notice, to tell you the truth."
"Did she tell you what her husband had been doing all night?"
D-s Miller slowed the car at the junction with the main road. "When a husband stays out all nightparticularly when a vicar stays out all nightwe don't usually ask too many awkward questions. Not our job."
When he had joined the main-road traffic, he said, "You realize that we could be making complete arseholes of ourselves?"
"I don't think so," I told him. "I keep trying to convince myself that I was hallucinating, that Dennis Pickering didn't look like Brown Jenkin; but he did. Just for a split-second. Teeth, hair, everything. There was no mistake."
D-s Miller jammed his foot on the brake and swerved the car in to the side of the street. The truck behind him blew its horn furiously, but D-s Miller wound down his window and yelled, "Up yours!" at the top of his voice.
Then he turned back to me. "You really believe that it wasn't the Reverend Dennis Pickering at all?"
I nodded. Suddenly my mouth was dry. Perhaps D-s Miller wasn't going to be the ally that I had expected him to be. "As I sayit was only a split-second. You could have blinked and missed it."
"What if he opens the door and he's perfectly normal?"
"Then I don't know. Let's just go and see Mrs Pickering and make sure that she's all right."
D-s Miller thought for a moment, then restarted the engine without a word. He pulled out into the traffic without making a signal, occasioning another deafening outburst of lorry horns and voices shouting, "Where's your white stick, mate?"
We reached the vicarage and D-s Miller pulled into the driveway. There were no cars parked there, only an elderly black-painted bicycle resting up against the porch, with the Pickering's cat draped over the seat like an overstuffed fur cushion.
The cat watched us with sly eyes as we approached the front door and rang the doorbell. There was no reply, so I rang again. I could hear the bell echoing in the hallway.
"She could be out shopping, of course," D-s Miller suggested, as we shuffled our feet impatiently on the worn red-and-white chequered tiles. "And the reverend himself could be anywhere. He goes hospital visitingpops in to see the old folkall that kind of thing."
I was thinking to myself that if I were elderly, the last thing that I would want to have visiting me would be Brown Jenkin. But then D-s Miller leaned over and opened the brass letter-box flap and peered into the hallway and shouted, "Hello! Mrs Pickering! Anyone at home?"
Still no answer. D-s Miller continued to squint into the letter-box, waiting. Then he suddenly said to himself, "Hullo," and stood up. He reached into the inside pocket of his jacket and produced a small black leather wallet. He opened it up and took out a lock-pick.
"This isn't always as easy as it looks on the TV," he told me. "We may still have to kick it down."
"What's the matter?" I asked him. "There's nobody at home, is there?"
"I don't know yet," he said grimly. "But take a peek through the letter-box. Tell me what you see. Lookthere on the left-hand side, close to that open door. On the floor, for God's sake!"
I tried to focus on it. The polished boarded floor seemed to be marked with a pattern, or perhaps somebody had dropped some dark, shiny varnish on to it. I couldn't decide for the life of me what it was. I stood up, and shrugged, and D-s Miller said, "No? You don't know what it is. Perhaps you haven't seen enough of it. It's blood."
"Oh, Jesus," I said, softly.
"Exactly. Oh, Jesus. And you've got yourself some serious explaining to do, my friendseeing as how you seem to have an uncanny facility for finding the remains of the recently-deceased. This is getting a bit like a Poirot story, this is. Oh, shit, this lock is practically Houdini-proof!"
But after a few more careful turns, there was a satisfying clicking noise and the front door silently swung open. At once I smelled an odd, distinctive smell, like having an overripe peach pressed close up against my nostrils. Sweetness, and decay. This was a house in which something was dead.
"You can wait outside if you want to," D-s Miller suggested, without turning around to look at me. "That's if you give me your word that you won't attempt to run away."
"No, I'll come with you," I said. "I want to see what the hell's been going on here. I have to."
We stepped carefully along the hallway, slowly approaching the mark on the floor which I had assumed was a shadow or a scarf. Closer, there was no doubt that it was blood. A wide, black-red pool, with a perfectly glossy surface, except for motes of dust that had settled on it, and flies that walked this way and that across its surface-tension.
"Somebody's been gutted here, well and truly gutted," said D-s Miller, in a thin colorless voice. He stepped into the drawing-room, tippy-toeing like a ballerina in order not to get blood on his shoes. He stood for a long time with his left side profile toward me, flare-silhouetted by the sun; and he was so silent and so still that I seriously began to wonder if he had lost the thread of what he was doing; or if he had actually fallen asleep on his feet.
"Sergeant?" I asked him. I heard a soft lapping noise behind me, and turned quickly around, alarmed. To my disgust, I saw that the cat had followed us into the house, and was now crouched close to the edge of the pool of blood, its eyes tight shut, contentedly drinking. I kicked it and it screeched and spat at me, so I kicked it again. It ran out of the house and into the sunshine.
The noise had awoken D-s Miller out of his reverie. He lifted his left hand and made an almost imperceptible bec
koning-gesture. "You'd better come and take a look," he said. "After allfor all I know, you might have done it. I'd like to see what you thinkhow you react."
"Is it Mrs Pickering?" I asked. My voice sounded like somebody else's; muffled and uncontrolled.
He nodded. "Come and take a look for yourself."
I took two unbalanced steps into the room. It was a large room, very bright in the four o'clock sunlight, with a marble fireplace and massive comfortable 1930s armchairs draped in chintzy loose covers. A polished Benares tray on beaded legs served as a coffee-table. Copies of The Daily Telegraph Magazine and Church Times and Punch were wedged tightly into a magazine rack. Ordinary, all of it. An ordinary South-of-England vicarage drawing-room on a warm summer afternoon.