Prey

by Graham Masterton

  “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, “Shit—what 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, blurry—and 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 bumps—not because I couldn’t possibly have slept, but because this giant rat was threatening my whole summer’s work, and – all right – my virility, too—my male credibility. I couldn’t have Liz thinking I was frightened of it.

  I couldn’t have Liz thinking that I was frightened of anything—especially 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 us—apart 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 mean—why 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 cold—like 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 screaming—well, 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 child—a 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 besides—if 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 black—or dark amber, rather—so 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.”

  As we sat drinking tea, I thought I felt Fortyfoot House give a prolonged shudder; and somewhere right on the very edge of my perception I thought I could hear a child screaming. Yet when I really listened, there was nothing. Only that odd kind of emptiness that you can hear when a train has gone completely out of earshot.

  Dreams, I thought. Imagination. But when I went to the sink to rinse out my mug, I thought I glimpsed a shadow in the garden that wasn’t a shadow at all, but a man in a tall black hat hurrying off into the shelter of the oak trees, like a man hurrying for his life, a man too frightened to turn around to see what unimaginable predator might be rushing up behind him.

  6

  Head Hunter

  There was a brisk postman’s knock at the kitchen door. I looked up from the Daily Telegraph; and Danny solemnly raised his eyes from his bowl of Honey Nut Loops, the curved sunshine reflecting from his spoon on to his cheek.

  It was the ratcatcher, Harry Martin, his face reddened, out of breath, holding a floppy tweed hat in his hand and wearing a thick tweed herringbone suit. He carried a large leather satchel, fastened with buckles, with the initials HJM burned on to it,

  “Mr Martin, come on in,” I welcomed him. To tell you the truth, I was extremely glad to see him, after everything that had happened last night. “I’ve just made some fresh tea, if you want some. Or there’s lemonade. You look rather hot in that suit.”

  He put down his satchel, dragged out one of the kitchen chairs, sniffed, and sat down. “This is my ratcatching suit,” he announced. He pinched up the sleeve between finger and thumb. “See this? There aren’t many rats can bite through that. Not like these nylon overalls they wear these days. Feel it,” he urged Danny, and Danny reluctantly felt it. “What do you think on that?”

  “It’s hairy,” said Danny.

  “That’s right, hairy, like a rat. A rat suit for catching a rat.”

  I poured him a cup of tea. “Sugar?” I asked him, and he said, “Three for me.”

  He stirred the tea around and around until the tinkling of the spoon grew so irritating that I was tempted to tell him to stop it.

  He suddenly put down the spoon and stared at me, one eye narrowed, one eye wide, “You had some trouble last night, then?” he asked me.

  I nodded.

  “I could see the lights in the sky. I couldn’t hear nothing, on account of the wind blowing in the wrong direction. But I guessed you was having trouble.”

  “We did have some noises, yes,” I said; glancing at Danny. “Noises, and a few lights. Danny—do you think you could finish your breakfast in the sitting-room?”

  “I’m watching Play School.”

  I switched the television off. “You were watching Play School. Now you’re not watching Play School. So finish your breakfast in the sitting-room?”

  “Here, here, not to fuss,” said Harry Martin. “Let’s take our tea out into the garden, don’t want to spoil the young fellow’s telly for him.”

  “If he watches any more television his eyes will drop out,” I retorted. But all the same I followed Harry out through the kitchen door on to the patio, and we sat on the wall overlooking the downsloping garden and the lichen-encrusted sundial. The early sun shone scarlet through Harry’s hairy ears.

  The sea sounded strangely reassuring, like a mother shushing a feverish infant.

  “What kind of noises?” asked Harry.

  “Screams, and bumps, and roaring noises. Children’s screams. And a very deep sound that was almost like somebody talking, but very slowly. You know—like a slowed-down tape. I also saw—or thought I saw—a young girl in a long nightgown. But I think that was probably a trick of the light.

  I hesitated. “At least I hope it was a trick of the light.”

  Harry took out his tobacco-tin and rolled himself a cigarette. “Have you
listened to your wireless this morning?”

  “Can’t say that I have, no.”

  “I always listen to the wireless in the morning. Keeps me company before Vera wakes up.”

  “And?”

  “There was a news item this morning how a nine-year-old girl from Ryde disappeared last night. That was part of the reason I thought I’d come along up here to see you.”

  “I’m not sure that I understand.”

  Harry lit his cigarette, and sniffed. “According to the wireless, see, this young girl was locked in her bedroom as punishment for staying out late. The window was locked, too. But somehow she got out. There was a dent in the bed where she’d been sleeping, but that was all. And the only clothes that was missing was her nightgown, the one she was wearing.”

  “I’m still not with you.”

  “It’s happened before, children going missing,” said Harry, patiently. “Whenever there’s lights and noises at Fortyfoot House, believe you me, year in, year out, children go missing.”

  “You really think there’s some kind of connection? Children go missing all the time.”

  “They don’t go missing the way these children go missing. These children vanish; and nobody sees nor hears of them ever again. Not even bodies.”

  He looked at me levelly. “You mark my words. Whenever there are lights and noises at Fortyfoot House, I always listen to the wireless and keep a weather-eye on the newspapers. And every time, children go missing. One, or two. And they vanish for good, like they never was.”

  “Have you told the police?”

  “Told the police? I couldn’t count the number of times I’ve told the police. But all they do is laugh, see. They think I’m just a loony old ratcatcher, that’s what they think. Thirty-five years of Warfarin’s gone to my brain-cells, that’s what they say. I always ring them up and tell them, every time it happens, but they always laugh. Thick as shit, some of these modern coppers.”