Prey

by Graham Masterton

  “Liz,” I whispered. Then Harry spun around and dropped heavily onto the attic floor, and lay shuddering on his side in his hairy ratcatcher’s suit. I glanced up at the open skylight. The windows were spattered with blood, and there were dark speckles of blood all over the ceiling.

  “Harry,” I said, touching his stiffening, blood-soaked shoulder. “Harry—I’m going to call for an ambulance. Just lie still, Harry. Don’t try to move.”

  He stared at me with those bloodied-oyster eyes. “’Cause I—’cause I—” he breathed, between fleshless lips.

  “It’s all right, Harry,” I reassured him. “Everything’s fine. But, please—lie still. I won’t be more than a couple of minutes.”

  “’Cause I—” he repeated, his eyes gelid and wincing because he had no lids to close over them.

  I clambered down the attic stairs; and then down to the kitchen. Liz was standing in the open door, with sunlight behind her. She said, “David—what is it?”

  “Harry, the ratcatcher. He’s had an accident.” I scrambled the telephone off the wall and dialed 999.

  “Emergency, which service please?”

  “Ambulance, quickly! Fortyfoot House, in Bonchurch.”

  Liz went quickly toward the stairs. “What’s happened to him?” she asked. “Shall I—?”

  “No!” I shouted, and she stopped, her eyes wide; and it was then she understood what had happened.

  “Sir—what’s your number, please?” the operator demanded. “Sir?”

  7

  Sweet Emmeline

  Detective-sergeant Miller came out into the garden and brushed the dust from his crumpled gray suit. He looked more like a young curate than a police officer—pink-skinned, with thinning straw-colored hair, bleached blue eyes and circular spectacles. He wore an Isle of Wight Yacht Club tie and a pink rosebud safety-pinned to his lapel. I was never quite sure about men who wore flowers in their lapels—not because I suspected them of being gay, but because they gave me the impression that they modeled themselves on the dapper chaps of the 1950s—all blazers and silk horseshoe patterned cravats.

  The dapper chaps of the 1950s (like my father; and my uncle Derek) had usually suffered impoverished and unhappy upbringings, and believed that blazers and silk cravats (and rosebuds in their lapels) would establish them instantly as men of class.

  “You mustn’t blame yourself, Mr—er—?” he told me, scanning the garden. “It was an accident, pure and simple.”

  “I told you what I saw, I saw claws.”

  He held the tip of his finger against the tip of his nose, to suppress a sneeze. But then he sneezed, and took out his handkerchief. “Sorry. Hay fever.”

  “I don’t understand how that could have been an accident,” I told him.

  He finished wiping his nose, then glanced at me quickly, as if he didn’t really want to look me in the eye. “There’s some very nasty hooks in that attic roof, and he caught his scalp. Bad luck, that’s all. He lost his footing on the box, and spun around, and the spinning around tore his skin off. That’s all. I’ve seen it happen before. Chap last year caught his hand in a lathe, over at the Blackgang sawmill. Twisted the skin off, skkreeewww! right up to the elbow.”

  I covered my mouth with my hand. I didn’t know what to say. I was sure that I had seen curved black claws digging their way into Harry’s head; I was sure that something in the attic had snatched hold of him and had forcefully torn the skin from his head. How could Harry accidentally catch his scalp on a hook? How could he twist and spin so violently that he ended up faceless?

  I knew without question that Brown Jenkin had done it; although I didn’t know how. I had explained to Detective-sergeant Miller that there could be some kind of “super-rat” in the attic. But while a gingery-haired detective-constable took effortful notes, Detective-sergeant Miller had looked at me with those pale blue eyes through those polished circular spectacles; and he had seemed so strongly disinclined to believe in Brown Jenkin; or a violent attack of any sort, human or rodent (“accident, sir, no doubt about it, accident,”) that in the end I decided that the wisest thing for me to do was to shut my mouth, and protect Danny and Liz from whatever threatening things the attic at Fortyfoot House might be harboring; and be thankful that the police hadn’t arrested me for attacking Harry Martin.

  The police did things like that, when you were least expecting it. Sometimes you wondered if you should call them or not.

  “You won’t be leaving the area, will you, sir?” Detective-sergeant Miller asked me.

  “No, no. Not for two or three months. I came here to renovate the whole house. Plastering, wiring, tiling, decorating, you name it.”

  “They’re coming back, then, the Tarrants?”

  I shook my head. “Selling, that’s the idea. They’ve retired to Majorca.”

  “Lucky for some,” Detective-sergeant Miller remarked.

  “You obviously haven’t been to Majorca.”

  He stared at me without blinking for a long time. I wasn’t sure whether he was trying to intimidate me; or trying to communicate by telepathy that he had been to Majorca. After all, a man who wore a pink rosebud in his lapel? He must have been everywhere. Or, rather, he should have been everywhere.

  “That’ll be all for now,” he said. “I expect we’ll have to get in touch with you again. But, you know, it looks routine enough.”

  “You searched the roof-space?” I asked him.

  Still staring at me, he nodded. “Yes, we searched the roof-space.”

  “No—rats? No sign of rats?”

  “No, Mr—? No sign of rats. Just hooks. Three bloody great iron hooks. They probably used them for hauling stuff up to the roof. You know, before they blocked that bit off.”

  “I’ll get rid of them,” I promised him. “Bit like shutting the stable door after the horse has bolted, but—you know.”

  “We’ve taken them out already,” he told me. “Jones—would you make sure you bring them down from the attic?”

  “Right-ho,” said the gingery-haired d-c, and hurried back to the house, all arms and legs and happy trousers.

  Detective-sergeant Miller said nothing until he had gone. He looked over at the broken-down chapel, at the gravestones, at the sea, at the cedar tree that groaned from age. Eventually, he said, “I’ve heard stories about this place, you know. Never been inside before.”

  “What stories?” I wanted to know.

  He shrugged, and his smile was almost silly. “Oh, nothing… my cousin used to say that it was haunted.”

  “Oh… haunted. Yes, I’ve heard that, too.”

  He took off his spectacles, folded them up, and tucked them into his breast pocket. “I just want to tell you, Mr—? that we’re not all thick.”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “We’re not all thick,” he repeated, doggedly. “We know all the stories about Fortyfoot House, peculiar noises and flashes of light and children going missing. But you can’t arrest a light, or a noise, and if a child goes missing and there isn’t even a footprint, then what can you do? We only get allocated twenty thousand pounds for a murder investigation. When the money runs out, we stop looking. They’re not going to give us tuppence to look for ghosts.”

  I was amazed. One minute he had been insisting that what had happened to Harry was an accident: now he was speculating that Harry may have fallen victim to the supernatural. I had never heard a policeman talk like this before.

  “You’ve connected the missing children with Fortyfoot House?” I asked him. “I mean, really?”

  “Yes, really. Harry Martin lodged enough complaints. Two of our officers even gave up their evenings off to keep an eye on the place.”

  “But?”

  “But nothing. The police have searched the house twice in the past three years, top to bottom. And if you look back over police records since the war, we’ve searched it six or seven times more. We’ve been in that roof-space before. There’s nothing there. Well, when I say that—not
hing physical. Nothing that you can tie a label on, and shove in front of a magistrate’s nose, and say, ‘Here’s Exhibit A.’ But that doesn’t mean we’ve given up. That doesn’t mean we’re thick, Mr—? That just means we have to prove things, before we can act.”

  I slowly shook my head. “You believe in the supernatural? Is that what you’re trying to tell me?”

  He blinked a challenging blink. “Why not?”

  “You’re a police officer.”

  “A lot of police officers are Masons, Mr—? They believe in the Great Architect. A lot of police officers are fundamentalists. They believe in fire and brimstone and the Second Coming. I’m not a Mason or a fundamentalist, but I do believe in keeping an open mind.”

  I didn’t say anything; but waited in the warm wind for him to continue.

  “If I excluded the supernatural altogether,” said Detective-Sergeant Miller, with considerable certainty, “then I’d be failing in my duty. Not as far as the rulebook’s concerned, if you know what I mean. But a good detective does more than follow the rulebook. A good detective combines fact, logic and deduction with imagination and inspiration.”

  “Well,” I said. “I’m impressed.”

  Detective-sergeant Miller blew his nose. “Don’t be. Most of the police force is still made up of thugs and idiots and back-stabbers and nest-featherers and pontificating prats. But you do get your occasional professional. You do get one or two who aren’t solid Spam from the neck up. Not in the hierarchy, though.”

  “So you can’t go back to your superiors and suggest that Harry Martin was attacked by something not of this world?”

  He managed a bitter, tight-lipped little laugh.

  “My chief inspector doesn’t even believe his own reflection in the bathroom mirror.”

  “But what exactly would you tell him, if you could?” I wanted to know what Detective-sergeant Miller really thought about the grisly incident in the attic. Had Harry really been caught on a hook, his skin twisted off by his slowly-turning bodyweight? Or had there been something vicious in the roofspace—something which had been cruelly angry at being disturbed?

  Detective-sergeant Miller said, “I’d simply tell him that what happened to Mr Martin wasn’t an accident in the accepted sense of the word and it wasn’t an assault in the accepted sense of the word. That’s all.”

  “You wouldn’t put forward any theories?”

  “Not at this stage.” He was being cagey. “It wouldn’t be useful.”

  “What about your colleague? Detective-constable Jones, isn’t it? Are you going to tell him what you think?”

  Detective-sergeant Miller shook his head. “Detective-constable Jones is only capable of understanding what he can eat, drink, or punch.”

  “So you know what didn’t happen, but you don’t really know what did?”

  He looked at me with those pale, expressionless eyes. “A word to the wise, Mr—? I was brought up around here. In Whitwell, as a matter of fact. If I were you, I’d be careful about this place. When my cousin said it was haunted, well, it wasn’t just stories.”

  “You think that Brown Jenkin could be real?”

  “Oh… I don’t know about Brown Jenkin. But over the years there have been so many unexplained incidents around Fortyfoot, there has to be something not quite right. No smoke without fire, if you know what I mean.”

  “Well…” I said. “Thanks for the warning.”

  At that moment detective-constable Jones came flapping back across the lawn. Detective-sergeant Miller said, “It was an accident, that’s all. A very nasty accident, yes. A very unusual accident. But an accident, and nothing more.”

  He took out his card and handed it to me between index finger and forefinger. “You can call me if you need me,” he said. “I’m on days this week, nights next week.”

  Detective-constable Jones puffed, “Just had a message from the hospital, sarge. Mr Martin was d.o.a.”

  Detective-sergeant Miller replaced his glasses. “I see. That’s a pity. Another old local character gone.”

  “Do you want me to talk to Mrs Martin?” I asked. I felt as guilty as all hell for having let Harry go up into the attic.

  “No, leave that to us,” said Detective-sergeant Miller. “We’ll send round a w-pc. They’re good at that kind of thing. Tea and sympathy.”

  “All right. I—”

  “There’ll be an inquest,” Detective-sergeant Miller interrupted. “You’ll probably have to give evidence. We’ll let you know in due course.”

  “Yes,” I said, and desolately watched them leave. Liz came out of the house when they had gone, carrying two cans of cold Kestrel. She had tied a white scarf tightly around her head, and she wore a low-cut black T-shirt and black stretch pedal-pushers. We sat side-by-side on the low garden wall and popped the tops of our beer-cans, and drank.

  “Harry’s dead,” I said, at last.

  “Yes. That detective told me. I can’t believe it.”

  “Detective-sergeant Miller thinks it wasn’t an accident.”

  Liz frowned. “Really? He kept saying it was an accident, over and over.”

  “I think he wants to keep the whole thing as quiet as possible, that’s why. If he tries to tell any of his colleagues that there’s something weird up in the attic, they’ll think he’s a nutcase.”

  “What’s he going to do about it? What are we going to do about it? We can’t go on living here with some kind of monster up in the attic, can we?”

  I turned my head and looked up at the high tiled roof of Fortyfoot House. Although the sun was shining brightly across the lawns, it looked as if the roof had been darkened by the shadow of a passing cloud. It had a mean, chill, enclosed look about it; as if it were selfishly harboring all the evil that it could gather in. I was sure that I could see a pale, oval face watching us from one of the upstairs windows; but I knew that if I approached the house or changed my point-of-view, it would look like nothing more than the back of a mirror, or a reflection on the glass, or a shape on the wallpaper inside the room.

  It was the angles of the roof that disturbed me the most. The roof seemed to form a dark geometrical tent of its own, a tent whose shape defied all the laws of perspective. It actually looked higher at its western end, which was furthest away from us, than it did at the eastern end, which was closest. When the sun reappeared, and shone on its southern face, it appeared to alter completely, its south-eastern gully seeming to angle outward rather than inward, as if the entire roof were constructed on a system of folds and hinges, and could change its shape at will.

  It made me feel nauseous to look at it; a thick, headachy, bilious sensation like riding on too many fairground roundabouts.

  Liz said, “Are you all right? You’ve gone all gray.”

  “I’m all right. I think it’s the shock.”

  “Perhaps you ought to lie down for a bit.”

  “I’m all right. For God’s sake, stop fussing.”

  “You mustn’t blame yourself, you know. He was dead set on going up there.”

  “I know, but all the same.”

  She laid a hand on my arm. “I do like you, you know,” she said, with almost improbable directness. “You don’t have to worry about that. And if you want me to sleep with you, I will.”

  I leaned across and kissed her forehead. “I think that’s the problem.”

  “Oh, I see. You like to conquer your women, do you?”

  “I didn’t mean that,” I retorted; although, yes, that was exactly what I meant. I liked her, I fancied her; but right now that wasn’t enough. I had to prove more to myself than the fact that I was capable of reaching up and grabbing a lifeline.

  Danny was running down the grassy slope toward the brook, his arms outstretched, making a noise like a Spitfire.

  “Be careful!” I called. “Don’t fall in!”

  He may have heard me or he may not. He hop-skip-jumped over the brook, his arms still outstretched, and managed to miss his balance and plonk one st
ockinged-and-sandaled foot straight into the water. He ran on, unperturbed, although I could hear his sandal squelching all the way from where we were sitting.

  “He’s a case, isn’t he?” smiled Liz.

  “I just hope he isn’t missing his mother too much.”

  We watched Danny clamber over the wall into the graveyard, and run around the gravestones making machine-gun noises. “Ah-ah-ah-ah-ah-ah!”

  “I suppose you’re going to have to start work soon,” said Liz. “I’ll be starting myself tomorrow.”

  I looked back at Fortyfoot House. The thought of painting it and redecorating it while that thing still scurried around the attic filled me with deep uncertainty. I was tempted for the first time to pack it in; to go down to the estate agents and tell them to forget it. The only trouble was, they had already advanced me a month’s salary and I had spent it—without any conceivable way of paying it back except by doing the work that they had paid me to do. I had also spent some of the money they had given me for paint and materials, too; and they would be seriously displeased if they found that out.

  It looked as if the only alternative left open was to emigrate.

  Liz tugged my sleeve. “Look—” she said. “Who’s that?”

  I looked across at the graveyard and the chapel. I could still see Danny weaving in and out amongst the headstones. But now there was another child in the graveyard; a girl of about nine or ten, dark-haired, in a long white dress that was brightly fogged by the mid-morning sunlight. She was standing in front of the chapel doors as if she had just stepped through them, although they were wedged tightly shut behind her. She was carrying what looked like a garland of daisies.

  “Just a local kid I expect,” I said, shading my eyes with my hand.

  But there was something about the appearance of this “local kid” that I didn’t quite like. Apart from the oddness of her long white dress—I mean, the local kids were wearing fluorescent Bermuda shorts and Ninja Turtle T-shirts, not long white dresses—she looked as if she were ill. Her eyes were nothing more than deep charcoal smudges and her face was so white that it was almost green.