Prey

by Graham Masterton

  “May God give us the strength we need,” breathed Dennis Pickering, and led the way down the stairs.

  The house appeared very much the same in 1886 as it was in 1992, except that there was dark oak wainscoting all the way down the stairs and around the hallway, and that the walls above the dado had been papered with yellowish-green flowers and trellises which reminded me of drawings by Aubrey Beardsley—delicate, decayed, greenery-yallery, with colors that spoke of corruption rather than decoration. There was a pervasive smell of damp plaster and boiling fish and lavender-wax.

  In the hallway, there were many more photographs and drawings—but not, of course, the photograph of “Fortyfoot House, 1888.” As Dennis Pickering and I made our way cautiously to the open sitting-room door, I passed a minutely-detailed Gothic etching of The Arrival of the First Course at James I’s Coronation Dinner; and then strange steel engravings of mysterious gardens crowded with extraordinary follies and gazebos and animals the size of deer with insects’ legs and armored carapaces. There were veterinary diagrams of mutant animals and medical illustrations of pregnant women breathing chloroform from octagonal glass jars and other startlingly explicit drawings of women being internally inspected with lights and the “double duck-billed speculum.”

  I didn’t have time to look at all of the pictures, but I couldn’t have imagined a collection less suitable for a children’s orphanage. All of them were bizarre or frightening or blatantly gynecological. There was even a gruesome engraving of a “Soldier’s Wife, Having Followed. Her Husband Into Battle, Being Split In Half By A Cannonball, And Giving Instantaneous Birth To A Live Infant.”

  Dennis Pickering raised his hand—signaling me to stop, and stay silent. We were only three or four feet away from the sitting-room door, and now we could distinctly hear the breathy, high-pitched whimpering of the little girl, and the garbled tittering of Brown Jenkin, and the dull, persistent voice of young Mr Billings. The gray autumn light fell across the red-and-brown patterned carpet, already shiny with the scuffing of a thousand leather-soled boots. Somewhere behind us—in the kitchen, perhaps, I heard clattering noises, and someone singing Two Little Girls In Blue.

  “What do you think we ought to do?” Dennis Pickering hissed at me. I could smell the stale tannin of too many cups of tea on his breath. So much for Liz’s idea that vicars usually drank alcohol.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “What can we do?” And then I thought of Liz saying “You can’t make your mind up about anything, can you? Go—stay—stay—go—David for God’s sake make up your mind about something, even if it’s wrong.”

  I was still trying to think of a plan of action when I heard a sharp, opinionated, worldly-wise voice that made me catch my breath. It was a woman’s voice, Cockney-accented, with “eooowwwing” Eliza-Dolittle vowels, but it bore no resemblance to today’s mumbling Cockney accent. It was clear, sharp, odd and highly vernacular. No question about it: it must have been Kezia Mason—old Mr Billings’ protégée, young Mr Billings’ mistress.

  “Come on, then, you little tyke; time to get up them apples and pears. The Old Friend’s waiting on you.”

  The child screamed again—a short, breathy scream—and then young Mr Billings said, “Kezia, this isn’t what was agreed, not by a long chalk. Twelve, you said, that’s all, twelve would do, and by God twelve was bad enough. But no more than twelve.”

  “When did I say twelve, my love?”

  “You said twelve when we first agreed; and Jenkin said twelve; and that was all.”

  “I said twelve in the days of Queen Dick.”

  “Kezia—you can’t take any more of them. What will Barnardo say?”

  “We’ll send for Mazurewicz, that’s all, and he’ll attest they’ve all had notice to quit.”

  “Damn it, Kezia, you can’t take all of them!”

  “The Old Friend takes what the Old Friend has need of,” Kezia told him; while the child screamed and screamed without taking a breath. “And the Old Friend, my friend, wants more than a doorstep and a sea-rover.”

  I whispered to Dennis Pickering, “It sounds as if they’re coming this way. I’ll snatch the girl—you give them a damn good shouting-at—anything—prayers, curses—just enough to throw them off-balance.”

  Dennis Pickering unexpectedly grasped my hand. “If we seize her—and take her back up to the attic—to our own time—do you think she’ll survive?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Do you think she’ll survive? We’re in eighteen eighty-six, as far as I can make out. That child may be ten or eleven here, but supposing we take her back to 1992, where she’s more than a hundred years old? We’ll be killing her just as effectively as Kezia Mason! Perhaps more cruelly!”

  But the girl shrieked even more loudly now, and I knew that we had to do something. “For Christ’s sake, Dennis—we’ve managed to come back here, to a time when we weren’t even born! Surely the same thing can work in reverse!”

  Dennis Pickering briefly pressed his hands together and mumbled the quickest prayer in the history of Christian worship.

  Then he opened his eyes and said, “Very well, David. Let’s try it, at least, God help us.”

  The girl screamed and screamed and screamed. I shoved Dennis Pickering sharply with the flat of my hand, and we tumbled together, side by side, into the open door of the sitting-room.

  12

  Devil’s Thumb

  The nightmarish tableau that confronted us as we fell into the room will stay with me forever: in dreams, in shadows, in half-seen mirrors, in half-heard whispers.

  It takes only the glimpse of a high-backed Victorian chair in an antique-shop window; or a particular kind of grayish autumn light. It takes only a brown patterned carpet, or the smell of dust and beeswax furniture-polish.

  At that moment, when Dennis Pickering and I entered that sitting-room, I realized for the first time that we were really and truly back in a time that didn’t belong to us, and that the horrors that we were facing were not ghosts, or moving pictures; or figments of our stressed imaginations, but alive, and real, living and breathing, and smelling of hell.

  Young Mr Billings was standing furthest away from us, one elbow stiffly raised in a half-finished gesture of protest. He was taller than I had imagined him to be, and his black hat and his black frock-coat were very much better-tailored, with black satin braiding and button-holes. But his cheeks were wrinkled like tissue-paper, and his eyes were bloodshot, and he had all the appearance of a man whose inward collapse has at last revealed itself, without mercy, on his face.

  Kezia Mason’s mural on the wall of Fortyfoot Chapel hadn’t done her justice. She was small and fine-featured, nearly beautiful, perhaps more than beautiful, although there was an odd dislocated wildness in her eyes which would have frightened even the cockiest men that I knew; and which certainly frightened me. Her hair was spectacular. It was a fiery pre-Raphaelite red, and it seemed to rise from her scalp as it if were charged with static. She wore a loosely-woven shawl around her shoulders, of undyed wool, and a flowing wide-sleeved dress of very fine white voile, embroidered here and there with eyes and hands and stars. The dress was so transparent that I could see that her thin, almost-anorexic body was tightly bound with a collection of straps and cords and bandages. Her feet were bare, blue-veined, white, and dirty.

  She hissed when she saw us. That was her first reaction, to hiss.

  But it was my first close sight of Brown Jenkin that really paralyzed me. Brown Jenkin the rat-thing, of unknown origin, except that it might have emerged from the warrens of London’s docklands; or been born by disastrous genetic accident to young Mr Billings and Kezia Mason; or simply grown from a simple rat into this monstrous creature that now stood in front of me, humpbacked, sleek-haired, a parody of a human boy, a parody of an animal, reeking of something sweet but long-decayed.

  Brown Jenkin was no taller than four feet high, perhaps an inch or two shorter. His head was narrow and tapered, like a rodent’s,
although it bore more resemblance to the grotesquely elongated human skull in Holbein’s painting of the The Two Ambassadors than it did to a rat’s. His eyes were white as mushrooms, even the irises were white. His nose was multi-structured and bony, although it flared widely into nostrils that exposed stretched and glistening mucus membrane, and were much more human than animal. His mouth was closed, although I could see that his lips were grayish-black, and that the tips of two sharp teeth slightly protruded from his upper jaw.

  He wore a filthy white collar and his neck was wrapped in equally filthy bandages. His misshapen body was dressed in a long coat or jacket of balding brown velvet, its front encrusted with soup and egg and the nameless spillings of a hundred other meals. Out of the overlong sleeves of his coat two white long-fingered hands emerged, two human-looking hands, except that their nails were hooked and blackened, like a rat’s claws. Beneath the hem of the coat, which trailed on the carpet, I could see two long attenuated feet, bound like the creature’s neck in soiled white bandages.

  Brown Jenkin had snagged his claws right through the linen of the little girl’s pinafore, and was holding her up on the end of his stiffly-lifted arm so that her button-booted feet dangled clear of the floor. The girl herself was rigid with terror: her fists clenched tightly, her shoulders hunched, her face colorless. Her coppery-brown hair had been neatly braided, but now one of the braids was unwound, half-covering her face, making her look madder and more desperate.

  There was an instant like the taking of a flash photograph in which we all stood and stared at each other in surprise. Kezia Mason stepped back, hissing. Young Mr Billings shouted, “Kezia! Who are these? What kind of a game are you playing with me now?” He bounded across the room and seized a black silver-topped cane that was propped beside one of the chairs, but as he did so Dennis Pickering raised both hands and bellowed, “In the Name of God!”

  “Priest!” hissed Kezia Mason, as if she could smell his priestliness.

  “In the Name of God, let that young girl be!” Dennis Pickering roared. He stalked forward, his hands still raised, and he was firing on all brimstone. Young Mr Billings lowered his cane in bewilderment, and even Kezia Mason seemed to be taken aback.

  “He who touches a single hair on the head of one of these young ones shall be answerable to Me, saith the Lord!” shouted Dennis, his neck bulging, spit flying from his lips.

  I almost managed to convince myself that we had overwhelmed them with sheer authority, when Kezia Mason stepped forward, gathering up the diaphanous skirts of her dress, and pulled a cheeky, vinegary face at Dennis Pickering, and curtseyed.

  “Answerable to the Lord, eh, cocker?” she challenged him. “Well, if I was you, I’d remember that my Old Friend Scratch doesn’t take kindly to having a holiday in Peckham. Get back to the Holy Ghost shop, I would, if I was you!”

  She spoke dense, low, late-Victorian slang, but it didn’t take a professor of language to work out that she was warning him that the devil wouldn’t take kindly to being deprived of his dinner.

  “I command you!” Dennis Pickering quivered. “In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit!”

  I tried to dodge around Dennis Pickering’s back, to snatch the young girl away from Brown Jenkin. But in response, Brown Jenkin dragged her around the back of the sofa, her heels tumbling and bouncing on the floor. It was like a nightmare game of musical chairs. She wasn’t screaming now, but she was still rigid, and she was letting out intermittent mewls and whimpers of fright. She didn’t seem to be at all aware that Dennis Pickering and I were trying to rescue her. She didn’t even give any indication that she had noticed us.

  Young Mr Billings lifted his stick, as if he were about to strike Dennis Pickering on the head, but Kezia Mason said, “No!” and stretched out her right hand to hold him back. Instead, she clamped her left hand tightly over her eyes, and chanted, in a shrill Cockney voice, “You will see what I see! All my sight be yours! All my vision you will have! As out your color pours!”

  Then—with a shrill hair-raising scream, she pointed her right index finger rigidly at Dennis Pickering’s face. “Sadapan, Quincan, Dapanaq, Can! Panaqan, Naqacan, Quacanac, Can!”

  Dennis screamed, too, but his scream wasn’t triumphant. His eyes bulged wide for one taut, baffling instant. Then his eyes burst out of his head, right in front of me, and flew in a fine spattering of blood across the room. One eye dropped into the ashes in the hearth. The other crept slowly crept down the leg of one of the armchairs, like a snail, trailing behind it a thin ribbon of blood-streaked fluid and optic nerve.

  I was seized with such a panic that I couldn’t think what to do next. But then Brown Jenkin tittered a high, breathy titter and sang, “Eyes, pies! Yeux, peur! Augen, Angst!” and then I thought shit, David, we’re seriously out of our depth here. I reached forward to grab hold of Dennis Pickering’s hand, to pull him back out of the door. But Kezia Mason parted the fingers that covered her eyes and hissed at me, “No, chummy, it’s not for you to touch him. Not now.”

  I took one more cautious step toward Dennis Pickering, who was still standing with both hands raised, but silent now, blind and silent, shocked by the power that had so suddenly overwhelmed him. All of his life he had known about hell; and had talked about hell; and the history of hell; and could hell be real? Now hell had come straight up to him and plucked out his eyes.

  This time, Kezia Mason stretched back her lips and bared her teeth and gave me the scraping warning, “One more step, Mr Would-Be-Good, and we’ll have your pumps out, too.”

  I backed away, swallowing dryly with fear. I tried to make a lunge for the door, but Kezia Mason shrilled, “None of that, neither! Close that oak!” and she slashed her hand in the air, in a sharp diagonal. The door slammed shut in front of me, with a deafening bang. I seized the handle, and tried to twist it, but Kezia Mason cried, “Snatch my forks, would you?” and the tarnished bronze handle became a tarnished bronze hand, viciously powerful, clutching and crushing my fingers until I had to tug them away.

  I turned back to her, panting, massaging my hand.

  “I know who you are,” I warned her.

  “Well, then, I’m honored, cocker,” she said, nodding her head, and smiling a slow, feral smile. Out of the corner of my eye I could see that Dennis Pickering’s eyeball had finally slid glutinously down to the carpet, bare eyeball against bristly carpet-pile, but I couldn’t bring myself to look at it directly.

  “There’s no way that any of you can get out of here,” I said, in a high, shallow voice. “There are people waiting for us upstairs, and if we’re not back in a couple of minutes…”

  “No use threatening, my friend,” said young Mr Billings. This was the first time that I had heard him speak close-to. His voice sounded sad and fatigued, as if he had struggled and threatened in the same way that I was now struggling and threatening, but had long ago given up. “My colleagues cannot be hindered or arrested by anybody. Once you have accepted that fact, you will find that they are very much easier to get along with.”

  “Well spoke,” said Kezia Mason, winking at me flirtatiously.

  The girl began to whimper again, and let out tiny little short-breathed screams.

  “What are you going to do with her?” I asked.

  “Do you think that’s any concern of yours?” replied young Mr Billings.

  “I’m staying here, I’m living here. I’m supposed to be looking after the place.”

  “But this... this child... she’s nothing to do with you whatever.”

  Dennis Pickering suddenly groaned, “God help me! Oh God! God help me!” and dropped to his knees on the carpet. Kezia Mason glanced at him disinterestedly, and then turned back to me.

  “Nothing but gutter-slushes here, don’t you know, cocker? Nothing for you to worry your bonce about.”

  “What are you going to do with her?” I repeated, although I could hear my voice shaking.

  “She’s going on a picnic,” said Kezi
a Mason. “That’s all. Nothing to get so aereated about. A picnic, and that’s the truth of it.”

  “Mr Billings?” I asked.

  Young Mr Billings lowered his head and didn’t look me in the eye. “Yes, that’s quite correct. She’s going… on a picnic.” He spat out the word “picnic” as if it were a mouthful of gritty wet mud—showing his obvious displeasure at having to corroborate such an obvious lie.

  I pointed furiously at Brown Jenkin. “With that? She’s going on a picnic with that?”

  Instantly, terrifyingly, Brown Jenkin quivered his narrow nose and uttered an awful whistle-like screeching, as if he had a cleft palate. He clawed at the back of the sofa, ripping the fabric so that the kapok stuffing flew out. For one heart-lurching moment, I thought that he was going to throw down the little girl and fly at me.

  “With that?” he raged. “Was denkst Du, dummkopf? Bastard-bastard parle comme ca!”

  I stepped away in alarm. Young Mr Billings stepped away, too, and kept his stick well-raised. But Brown Jenkin’s screeching seemed to jolt the little girl out of her rigidity. Her eyes blinked wide and she stared at me in sudden awareness.

  She screamed, and held out her arms to me. Brown Jenkin, already seething, shook her violently with his clawed hand, and screeched at her, “Silenzio! Double whore! Tais-toi! I rip out your lunchpipes!”

  I can’t say that I thought of anything brave. I didn’t even think “what-the-hell.” I simply rugby-shouldered Kezia Mason aside, leaped up on to the seat of the sofa, and kicked Brown Jenkin in the region of his collar-bone.

  Brown Jenkin let the girl drop and screeched even more horribly, his white-on-white eyes staring at me unblinkingly, his nostrils flaring even wider, his lips drawn back. I jumped down from the sofa and circled around it, breathing heavily. I didn’t know what I was going to do next, but presumably Brown Jenkin had a pretty clear idea of what he wanted to do to me. He rolled back his lips like the rolled-up fragments of a broken black balloon, revealing crowds of ragged teeth, chipped and discolored, but obviously sharp enough to tear through skin and bone. I dodged from side to side, trying to keep the bulk of the sofa between us, but it wasn’t easy. Brown Jenkin had a strange way of appearing to dart so quickly from one side of the sofa to the other that I felt I must be hallucinating; or jet-lagged.