Prey

by Graham Masterton

  Or even dreaming.

  “Bastard-bastard, rantipole-rider, oui? Pavian Saugling! I take your lunchpipes yes-yes? I slice you, yes? Zerschneiden, ja?”

  This unintelligible but hate-filled torrent of gibberish was accompanied by a sudden rushing-forward of this horrible Brown Jenkin, so that I took or three quick steps backward, caught my heel on the edge of the hearth, and sent the fire-irons flying with a catastrophic jangling sound.

  “Stay back!” Kezia Mason ordered Brown Jenkin. “This is going to be one for me. My grunter’s gig, this one. I’ve taken a shine to him, see.”

  But Brown Jenkin snorted and tittered and lashed out quickly. His nails tore right through the sleeve of my jumper and I felt them snag like barbed-wire across my skin. It hurt so much that—for a split-second—I thought that he had actually torn off my arm. But when I lifted my hand up, gasping in pain, I realized that he had only just succeeded in drawing blood.

  “David?” groaned Dennis Pickering, hollow-eyed, bloody-faced, from his kneeling-position in the middle of the carpet. “David, are you all right?”

  “I’m all right, Dennis, I’m fine. I’ll help you in a second.”

  “What’s happening, David? You must get us out of here! Can you hear me, David? You must get us out of here! This is the devil’s place, this is the devil’s work!”

  “Oh, shut your meat-mincer, you old Hackney,” Kezia Mason snapped at him. “How would you like your lights to come out of your ears?”

  Despite Kezia’s warning, Brown Jenkin came tittering and ducking and lunging after me again. Panic-stricken, I reached behind me and scrabbled for a fire-iron. I dragged a heavy black poker out of the hearth in a spray of ashes, swung it around, and caught Brown Jenkin across the shoulder. There was a dull thump, like striking a thick velvet cushion, and without warning, soft and whispering as salt, a thick shower of yellowish-white lice fell out of the skirts of his coat, on to the carpet.

  “Aggh fucker-fucker!” screamed Brown Jenkin, stamping and whirling. “Tu as my Schulterblatt gebroch’!”

  I swung the poker to hit him again, but as the heavy iron reached its apogee above my head, Kezia Mason raised her hand and it was forcibly plucked out of my fingers and sent flying—with a sharp minor-key whistle—across the room. It buried itself deep in one of the panels of the door, where it quivered with supernatural tension.

  “You pack it in, Brown Jenkin,” Kezia Mason warned him. “Else I’ll have a fit in the arm, gawdelpus. This gentleman’s for me.”

  Brown Jenkin put on a repulsive display of giggling, snuffling, snarling and spitting. He dragged himself reluctantly away from me, in a shower of nits and dying lice, scratching himself behind the ears with his terrible claw-like fingers. “Ich habe sore now, bellissima, Je suis malade, Show me pity, yes? Hah! hah! hah!”

  “Get away with you, you and your gentlemen’s companions!” Kezia Mason hissed at him. Really hissed, like a steam-kettle, and for the first time Brown Jenkin backed away in genuine fear.

  At that instant (and I was regretting it almost at the same instant that I was doing it), I threw myself at Brown Jenkin in the hardest rugby-tackle I could manage. God almighty, twenty years after I had last played rugby—still hearing Mr Oecken the rugby-master yipping “Go, Williams! Go, Williams! Go!”—and then my shoulder jarring against velvet and whiplike rodent muscle and scrabbling legs.

  But he was down, and I kicked against his pointed face, and stumbled, and hopped, and managed to pick the girl up in my arms.

  She was far heavier than I had imagined she would be, and I lost my balance and collided against the curtains, and fell. That fall probably saved me—because just as I fell, young Mr Billings cracked out with his cane and struck the curtains only two or three inches above my head.

  “Stay where you are!” Kezia Mason shrilled. But as she started to walk towards us, her white dress billowing in the draft, Dennis Pickering beat his chest with his fists and roared out blindly, “God! Why have You forsaken me now? Why?”

  Kezia Mason hesitated—and, as she did so, Dennis Pickering flailed out sightlessly with both arms, and caught hold of her dress.

  “Leave go, you toerag!” Kezia Mason screamed at him. “What do you want me to do—stop your ticker?”

  “You Godless creature!” Dennis Pickering wailed back at her. His face looked appalling—gray, drawn, with sightless crimson eye-sockets and blood-smeared cheeks. But he kept on dragging and pulling at her dress, and shuffling after her on his knees as she tried to wrench herself away from him.

  “David!” he cried out. “David, save yourself! Save yourself! And save the little girl!”

  “God swop me, aint you the holy martyr!” Kezia Mason mocked him. “Now, leave go, priest, before I send your knackers to look for your eyes!”

  “Oh, Lord!” Dennis Pickering shouted. “Oh, Lord, let this be a nightmare, and nothing more!”

  With that, he heaved himself up from the floor and stumbled on top of Kezia Mason, so that both of them overbalanced against the armchair and fell heavily onto the carpet. Kezia Mason’s dress tore open from neck to hem, and as she struggled to her feet again, kicking at Dennis Pickering’s face and shoulders to get herself free from him, she tore it wider and wider open, in a rage, and then reached behind her with both hands, seized the collar, and ripped the dress completely off. Dennis Pickering was left floundering on the floor, twisted up in the billows of white diaphanous cotton, slapping at the carpet in a blind attempt to discover where Kezia Mason had gone, groaning, bleeding, praying, shaking his head.

  Kezia Mason shook her fiery hair away from her face. She was left wearing nothing but an extraordinary arrangement of bandages and knots and braided scarves, which criss-crossed her breasts, squashing each of them into bulging white quarters. The bandages were wound so tightly around her painfully-thin body that I could see her ribcage protruding. The bandages around her abdomen were pinned with scores of metal tokens and tufts of dark hair and things that looked like dried-up mushrooms, but which could have been anything from truffles to human ears. Between her thin white thighs she wore only a twisted scarf, which cut deeply between her skinny buttocks at the back, and which separated her pubic hair into twin red flames in the front.

  She gave Dennis Pickering another bare-footed kick, and then she turned to me, as I was trying to hunch-carry the little girl toward the door. She was transfigured with anger. Her eyes stared at me madly, and her mouth was pulled into a downcurving grin of utter hatred.

  “You don’t know what you’re playing with, cocker,” she spat. “You’re playing with clocks, and fear, and your very own life.”

  The little girl began to wriggle and whimper in my arms. She obviously didn’t understand that I was trying to save her. As far as she was concerned, I was just another roaring, noisy adult, pulling her from one place to another. For a moment, I thought that she was going to struggle out of my arms, and I shouted, “Don’t!”

  But then Dennis Pickering thrashed wildly at Kezia Mason, blinded but bursting with righteous fury. “Witch!” he roared at her. “I know you for what you are! Witch! Bride of Satan!”

  “Fool!” Kezia Mason screamed back at him. “D’you think that the likes of you can give a name to the likes of me? The devil’s thumb to you, you fat priest!”

  With a stoat-like running motion that sent firework prickles all the way up the back of my neck and into my scalp, Brown Jenkin dropped down behind the sofa and then came scampering low and evil across the carpet. He seized Dennis Pickering’s shirt-front with both clawed hands, and noisily tore open his shirt and his undervest, exposing his podgy white belly and his hairless chest.

  “Oh God, protect me!” Dennis Pickering cried out.

  “Dieu-dieu sauve-moi!” Brown Jenkin mocked him, tittering and sniffling through his stretched-open nostrils.

  “Leave him alone!” I shouted, my voice high and strained.

  But Brown Jenkin lewdly and enthusiastically wrenched open the wais
tband of the vicar’s black trousers. Then, without hesitation, he drew back his right arm, and plunged all five claws deep into the plump white roll of flesh of his lower belly. I saw them go in: right up to Brown Jenkin’s narrow gray fingertips. Dennis Pickering cried, “No! Oh God, no!” and tried to wrestle Brown Jenkin’s hand away, but Brown Jenkin viciously slashed a criss-cross pattern in the air, cutting Dennis Pickering’s cheek and chest and opening up the artery in his left wrist. Blood exploded everywhere, a blizzard of blood, all over the carpet and the sofa and even pattering up against the windows. I felt some spray warm and wet against my face, like the first warning of a summer storm.

  “Blut und Tranen!” rasped Brown Jenkin. “Je sais que my Redeemer liveth!”

  “The devil’s thumb!” said Kezia Mason, in triumph. “Something bloody this way comes!”

  Brown Jenkin raised himself up into a half-standing, half-hunching position. He laid one clawed hand on Dennis Pickering’s shoulder, to give himself balance and leverage, and then he dragged the other hand upward, opening the vicar’s belly in five parallel slices, like thick ribbons of soft overboiled pasta.

  Dennis Pickering screamed, his head shaking from side to side in crashing, impossible agony. Brown Jenkin hissed and tittered, “Was ist los, Pfarrer? Pourquoi-pourquoi crie-toi?”

  With a flourish, he twisted his bloodied claw, and pulled out the contents of Dennis Pickering’s belly on to the floor. They came with a sudden slippery rush. Hot bloodied yellowish intestines; gore-red stomach, still contracting and flinching in peristalsis; purplish liver, and a whole heap of steaming puddingy things that I couldn’t recognize. Worst of all was the ripe gunpowdery stench of blood and human insides. My throat constricted and I gave a great throat-cracking retch. The little girl in my arms suddenly clung to me.

  Dennis Pickering abruptly stopped screaming. He reached down, groping around his stomach, unable to understand what had happened to him. He lifted his own intestines in a heavy, dripping heap. For one sickening, eccentric moment, I was reminded of those African witch-doctors who foretold the future by studying the entrails of human sacrifices. Dennis Pickering, at that moment, must have understood his own future with terrifying certainty. He was, in effect, already dead. He threw back his head and let out a roar of despair and fear like nothing I had ever heard before.

  “Shut your row, priest!” Kezia Mason snapped at him.

  Brown Jenkin darted his sleek head forward, and bit Dennis Pickering right in the mouth, silencing his roar immediately. There was a moment when it looked as if Dennis and Brown Jenkin were involved in a grisly, hideous kiss; but then Brown Jenkin savagely shook his head, like a terrier ripping a rabbit apart, and tore away Dennis’ lips and cheek and half of his gums and teeth. I could see his bloodied jawbone, with teeth still sticking in it.

  Brown Jenkin was about to bite him again when young Mr Billings, who had been standing close to the wall at the back of the room, called out, “Enough! For the love of God, kill him and get it over with!”

  Kezia Mason turned around and stared at him with open hostility. “What’s a little blood-sport, Mr Leary-Bloke?”

  Dennis Pickering collapsed on to his side, and lay shuddering on the carpet, his head half-hidden under one of the chairs.

  “Kill him for God’s sake!” young Mr Billings repeated, stepping forward. But Brown Jenkin—his mouth bloody, his cuffs soaked crimson—wiped his face with a filthy gray handkerchief, and did nothing.

  It was then that I made my decision to run. I knew that Kezia Mason’s attention was just about to turn back to me—and when that happened, I wouldn’t stand a snowball’s chance in hell of getting away. I heaved the little girl over my shoulder in a fireman’s lift, and made a jumbling rush for the door—snatching open the doorhandle before Kezia Mason had a chance to bewitch it.

  “Come back with you!” Kezia Mason shrieked. The door slammed—but an instant too late. It did nothing more than hit my shoulder, and throw me off-balance for a moment. I ran two or three stumbling steps along the hallway, with Kezia Mason’s shrieks splitting my ears, and the little girl suddenly wailing in fright.

  “Raining glass! Raining pitchers!” screamed Kezia Mason, and all the prints and paintings flew from the walls and hit my head and face and shoulders in a barrage of sharp-edged frames and smashing glass. But somehow I managed to reach the end of the hallway with nothing worse than a few cuts, and I bounded up the stairs with a strength that surprised me.

  I reached the landing, and the attic door. For a moment I was tempted to open it, and to run straight up into the attic, but I guessed that if I went into it this way, I would still be back in Brown Jenkin’s time. To get back to my own time, I had to use the trapdoor through which we had entered.

  I heard Brown Jenkin running claws and hair along the hallway, chasing after me. I heard Kezia Mason shrieking, “Catch him now, Jenkin, you bloody merkin, or I’ll have your fries!” I reached my bedroom and slammed the door behind me, and locked it. That would give me a minute or two, and a minute or two was all I needed. Gasping for breath, I put down the little girl, who stood staring at me wide-eyed and shivering.

  “It’s all right,” I told her. “You’re going to be safe now.”

  I pulled over a wheelback chair, and climbed up on it. Then I reached down, took hold of the little girl’s arms, and lifted her up. “See if you can reach that trapdoor… that’s it… hold on tight.”

  She whimpered as she tried to climb up through the trapdoor. “Come on,” I urged her. “All you have to do is pull yourself up. That’s right.”

  She was still struggling when I heard a tremendous rattling of claws along the corridor outside, followed by a huge crash as Brown Jenkin threw himself against the door. The doorframe shuddered and the key fell out, ringing plaintively onto the bare-boarded floor.

  “Ouvrez! Ouvrez!” screeched Brown Jenkin. “Mach die Tür auf fucker-fucker!”

  Terrified, the little girl spasmed, and lost her hold on the trapdoor, she tilted sharply to one side, almost toppling me off my chair.

  “Open up bastard merde!” Brown Jenkin raged, violently rattling the doorhandle and kicking at the panels. One of the lower panels splintered and cracked, so Brown Jenkin kicked at it again.

  “Hurry!” I urged the little girl, lifting her up toward the trapdoor again. She may have been only ten or eleven years old, and very underfed, but she was still heavy enough to have me panting with effort.

  “I rip out your lunchpipes bastard!” Brown Jenkin kicked and shook and hammered on the door, and one of the top panels split, too. At that moment I thanked God for the solidity of Victorian doors.

  The little girl tried once again to climb up through the trapdoor. As I heaved her up as high as I could, her petticoats almost suffocated me. They smelled sweetish-sour, like lavender and pencil-shavings.

  “Come on,” I begged her. “You can do it if you really try!”

  But she seemed to have no strength, no will. And as Brown Jenkin began to kick a V-shaped split in yet another door-panel, she let her fingers drop limply from the trap-door, and bowed her head, as if she was already resigned to being disemboweled and ripped to pieces.

  “Try, for God’s sake!” I shouted at her. “If you don’t try, he’ll catch us!”

  Door flew open—in he ran—long red-legged—

  I saw Brown Jenkin’s claws tearing through the panelling, splinters and shards. He was throwing himself almost suicidally at the woodwork, fuming and screeching, and I knew that if he caught up with us, we wouldn’t be granted even the momentary grace that Dennis Pickering had been given. He would rip into us like a circular saw.

  “Please—try!” I asked the little girl, but she remained limp and heavy and unmoving in my arms. If she didn’t climb up through the trapdoor, I wouldn’t be able to hold her up for very much longer. I thought of Danny, and Janie, and I thought of Liz, too. I began to think the disgraceful and cowardly thought that I might have to save myself, and leav
e the little girl behind.

  After all, what had Dennis Pickering said? Supposing we take her back to 1992, where she’ll be more than a hundred years old? We’ll be killing her just as effectively as Kezia Mason… perhaps more cruelly!

  A whole door-panel was smashed out, and when I turned around, I saw Brown Jenkin glaring at me out of the darkness of the corridor. Eyes like tack-heads, teeth like broken milk bottles. His claw came clattering through the splintered hole and groped and patted for the door-handle,

  “Go!” I shouted at the little girl. “For God’s sake, go!”

  It was then that a miracle occurred. In the trapdoor above my head, Liz’s face appeared, half-silhouetted by the gray daylight from the attic window.

  “David?” she said. “David—what’s the matter? I heard you shouting.”

  “Help her up!” I said, as Brown Jenkin furiously rattled the doorhandle.

  “What?”

  “She can’t climb up, she’s lost her nerve! Please—help her up!”

  Liz reached down through the trapdoor and caught hold of the little girl’s wrists. “Come on,” she coaxed her. “You can do it.”

  “Liz!” I shouted at her. “For Christ’s sake, hurry!”

  “I’m doing my best!” Liz shouted back. “I’m not Arnold Schwarzenegger, you know!”

  Limp, like a sack of lentils, the little girl allowed Liz to heave her out of my arms and up through the trapdoor. I took some of the weight off Liz by pushing the soles of the little girl’s feet as she went up. There was a moment of maximum strain when I didn’t think that Liz was going to be able to make it. She wasn’t much larger or heavier than the little girl herself. But then she deliberately tumbled over backward, and the little girl was dragged up through the trapdoor, badly grazing her ankles, but safe, and alive. And the worst-grazed ankle had to be better than the mildest cut that Brown Jenkin could inflict.