Prey

by Graham Masterton

  “Bastard-cunt-ich-tote-dead-you-now!” Brown Jenkin screeched.

  I jumped up and seized the frame of the trapdoor, and for a moment I was swinging from one side to the other, too old and unfit to heave myself up through the trapdoor, as I should have been able to, like a cork out of a bottle of Freixenet Negro. I lifted, grunted, struggled, shifted my weight. And just as I was trying to lift my elbows over the rim of the frame, the door racketed open with a catastrophic crash, and Brown Jenkin rushed in, quick and filthy and dark as a shadow, and slashed at my feet. I didn’t feel it—but when I looked down, his claws had cut right through the side of my brown Doctor Marten’s boot, and blood was dripping quickly onto the chair and the floor and Brown Jenkin himself.

  I kicked out. Brown Jenkin scrambled onto the chair, and tried to rip at my legs. I kicked out again, and this time he overbalanced and fell heavily onto the floor, with a dull thump like a dog falling.

  “Je tué you bastard have no Zweifel!”

  But now I was climbing up through the trapdoor, wedging my knee against the frame. I lifted myself right out, rolled sideways onto the attic floor—then immediately slammed the trapdoor shut and bolted it, without looking down.

  At once, the attic was plunged into darkness. I stayed where I was, kneeling beside the trapdoor, but I was conscious that all of the bric-à-brac that filled up the present-day attic had returned—trunks and chairs and lowboys and cheval-mirrors, and even the rocking-horse. Perhaps it was drawing back the bolts that opened the door to 1886—perhaps it was lifting open the trapdoor. Whatever it was, I didn’t intend to try it again. One visit to the world of Brown Jenkin and Kezia Mason and young Mr Billings had been quite enough.

  I climbed tired and bruised onto my feet—took a deep breath—then shuffled and collided my back toward the staircase. Thank God it wasn’t totally dark—Liz had wedged the attic door open, but after the bright gray daylight of 1886 it was still quite difficult to get accustomed to the gloom. I stepped out onto the landing and closed the attic door behind me. Liz was waiting for me on the landing, holding the little girl’s hand; with Danny close behind, looking pale.

  “Well?” said Liz, trembling with emotion.

  “Well what?” I asked her.

  “Are you all right? You’re not hurt?”

  “No, I’m not hurt. Well, my foot got cut, but that’s all. Good thing I was wearing DMs.”

  “Where’s the vicar?”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “The vicar, Mr Twittering, or whatever his name was.”

  “Oh... Pickering, Dennis Pickering.”

  “All right, Dennis Pickering. But where is he? And what was that thing down there, that terrible screeching thing? Was that Brown Jenkin?”

  “Yes, that was Brown Jenkin. It—he—I annoyed him, that’s all.”

  “Jesus. If that’s annoyed, I’d hate to see stark staring homicidal.”

  “It’s all right, honestly. He’s like a guard dog, that’s all. He gets a little wild.”

  “You’re shaking.”

  “No, no, I’m fine.”

  “So where’s Dennis Pickering then?”

  “He’s fine, too. He’s—” I began—then realized how intently Danny was staring at me, and how closely he was listening. If I told him what had really happened, he would probably have nightmares for the rest of his life. Just like I was going to. How could I ever forget Brown Jenkin’s fingernails piercing the soft subcutaneous fat of Dennis Pickering’s belly, and then slicing upwards through bloody organs and layers of white pillowy fat.

  “…he’s decided to stay behind, just in case,” I explained. “He’s very good with children, you know.”

  “How long is he going to be?”

  “I, er—I’ll talk to you in a minute. Let’s get the kids sorted out first.”

  Liz said, “David, was that really daylight?”

  “Yes, it was really daylight. And it was really autumn. And as far as I can make out, it was really eighteen eighty-six. It’s not a hoax, Liz. You might be able to make scary noises and things that go bump in the night, but you can’t change the time of day. You can’t change the season.”

  She glanced nervously at the attic door. “There’s no chance of anything coming out of there, is there?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t understand any of it.”

  I closed the attic door and latched it. It probably wouldn’t be strong enough to keep Brown Jenkin from bursting his way through, if he really wanted to—but at least it would give us some warning that he was coming after us.

  I knelt down beside the little girl. Her face was very pinched, and her eyes were the pale straw color of agates. Dennis Pickering had been wrong—her journey from 1886 to 1992 hadn’t harmed her—not as far as I could tell, anyway. But it gave me an extraordinary feeling to think that here was a woman who was over eighty years older than I was. Was it God’s work, or the devil’s work, or was it something else altogether—something secret and strong and entirely different?

  “What’s your name?” I asked her. She stared back at me and said nothing.

  “Surely you can tell me your name?”

  Still she said nothing.

  Danny came forward and stood close to her. “Where did she come from?” he asked. “She looks peculiar, like Sweet Emmeline.”

  “I think she’s a friend of Sweet Emmeline,” I said. Then—to the little girl—“Do you know Sweet Emmeline?”

  The little girl nodded. There—I seemed to be making some progress.

  “What happened to Sweet Emmeline?” I asked her.

  “Brown Jenkin,” she whispered, and then something else that I couldn’t hear.

  “Brown Jenkin? Brown Jenkin did something? Brown Jenkin did what?”

  “Brown Jenkin took her away.”

  “Oh my God,” said Liz. “I definitely think we ought to call the police.”

  “Just a minute,” I interrupted her. “Where did Brown Jenkin take her?”

  The little girl covered her eyes with her left hand, and then, in the air, made a curious walking-upstairs motion with the fingers of her right hand.

  “Brown Jenkin took her upstairs?” She nodded, still with her hand covering her eyes.

  “All right, then what did Brown Jenkin do?”

  “Said his prayers.”

  “I see.”

  “He said his prayers then he took Sweet Emmeline up there and along there and through there and down there.”

  She was describing something that she could see in her mind’s eye but which I couldn’t share.

  “When you say ‘up there’—what do you mean by ‘up there’? Up in the attic, is that it?”

  Again, she nodded.

  “Then where?”

  She took a quick breath. “Along there and through there and down there.”

  “I see.” Now she had me foxed. “Along there and through there and down there” could have been anywhere at all, particularly since Brown Jenkin appeared to have the ability to pass from one year to another and back again with all the ease of an actor slipping through a curtain.

  “Do you have any idea why he took her?” I asked the little girl.

  She shook her head. “He took her for a picnic.”

  “He said that he was going to take you for a picnic, too, didn’t he?”

  She nodded.

  “Didn’t you believe him?”

  “I don’t know. Edmond said that Brown Jenkin would take you away and hide you forever where the clocks can’t catch you.” Emmeline—has not been seen—for more than a week—

  “Where do you think that is?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “For goodness’ sake, David, we ought to ring that detective,” said Liz. “I don’t know what these people are doing, but we can’t handle them, can we?”

  “People?” I asked her, turning my head.

  “Well—ghosts, rats, whatever they are.”

  I had a sudden pin-sharp picture of
Brown Jenkin slicing open Dennis Pickering’s stomach. I don’t think that the little girl could have seen what had happened—or, if she had, she hadn’t really understood what was going on. It had surprised me, too—the sheer gaudiness of it. One second Dennis Pickering had displayed nothing more extraordinary than a plump white belly—the next second, he had been cradling a lapful of slippery, disobedient offal.

  I thought to myself: he’s dead, he must be dead. But when? If he was still in 1886, he had died long before he was born. And this little girl in her smock and her petticoats was still alive long after she must have died. I had read in science fiction stories when I was a schoolboy that time travel was crowded with paradoxes, like people going back in time and meeting themselves when they were younger, or killing their own fathers, or visiting their own graves—but until now I had never grasped how mind-splittingly confusing it really was.

  I heard a scratching noise up in the attic. Then a soft dragging sound; then another scratch. “I think we’d better go downstairs,” I said. I had a sudden surge of fear—imagining Brown Jenkin scuttling hairy and low-backed across the attic floor.

  We went down to the kitchen. I took a quick look at the photograph of Fortyfoot House in the hallway, but it had returned to normal—if it had ever really changed. Stress and alcohol can play strange tricks on you.

  I opened the fridge and took out the bottle of wine and unscrewed the cap. It was only when I tried to pour it out that I realized how much my hands were shaking.

  “Is the vicar going to be all right, do you think?” asked Liz.

  “Yes, of course, fine.”

  “But what’s he actually doing? I mean, what’s it like there?”

  I splashed myself half a glass of wine and drank it with wildly juddering hands. “It’s the same as here, really. No different. Furniture’s different; garden’s tidier. All the walls are paneled. But that’s it, really.”

  “Did you meet anybody, apart from this little girl? And Brown Jenkin, of course.”

  “Young—young Mr Billings.”

  “You actually met him? Did you talk to him?”

  “A little. He—seemed distracted. You know, not quite all there.”

  “But you spoke to him, that’s amazing.”

  “Yes, it’s amazing. I still can’t believe it myself.”

  Liz asked the little girl if she would like some milk and biscuits. The little girl nodded and Danny helped her to sit up to the table.

  “What did you do to annoy Brown Jenkin so much?” Liz asked, as she poured out two cold glassfuls of milk. The little girl seemed to be fascinated by seeing the milk in a carton, and even more entranced by the fridge. It suddenly occurred to me that I had brought back a child who had been born before the days of radio, television, cars, aeroplanes, plastics, widespread electric lighting, and almost everything else we took for granted in our everyday lives.

  I sat at the kitchen table and watched her eat and drink. The shock of Dennis Pickering’s death was beginning to make me feel chilled and numb, as if I wasn’t really here at all. I could hear Liz’s voice but it sounded as if she were talking in another room. The little girl adored the McVitie’s chocolate digestives that Liz had put out for her, and ate six of them, one after the other, her mouth crammed. Danny looked across at me and raised his right eyebrow, his imitation of young Fred Savage in The Wonder Years.

  “I don’t want to talk about Brown Jenkin just at the moment,” I said. “He’s not exactly the kind of creature that sweet dreams are made of.”

  “Is he a rat?” asked Danny.

  I shook my head. I wished I didn’t feel so numb. “He looks like a rat, but he dresses like a boy. He’s dirty, and he stinks, and he’s quite disgusting. I’m not sure what he is. But he talks, this jumbled-up mixture of French and English and German and something else altogether, so he must be human.”

  “I didn’t want to go on a picnic,” said the little girl, emphatically.

  “Why not?” asked Danny. “I like picnics.”

  But the little girl shook her head from side to side. “If you go on a picnic with Brown Jenkin, you never come back, and then they make you a grave.”

  “I told you, we ought to talk to that detective,” said Liz. “If they’ve been abducting children, we’ve got to stop them.”

  “I agree,” I told her. “I absolutely agree. But when have they been abducting children? Today? Yesterday? Tomorrow? A hundred years ago?”

  “What about that little girl who disappeared from Ryde? What about Harry Martin’s brother?”

  “What about trying to convince Detective-sergeant Miller that I’m not a complete and utter lunatic? There’s no proof, is there? And unless we have proof, the first thing that’s going to happen is that the police are going to start thinking it was me who took those children. Look—I’ve got an unknown girl here already. I can’t sensibly explain where she came from, or what she’s doing here. I don’t even know her name.”

  “Charity,” said the little girl, clearly. “Charity Welbeck.”

  “Well… that’s something,” I said. “Hallo, good evening and welcome, Charity Welbeck. Allow me to introduce you to the latter half of the twentieth century.”

  “Is she going to stay?” asked Danny.

  “I really don’t know. I suppose so. I can’t think of anywhere else that she could go.”

  “I could teach her how to fish,” said Danny. “We could have crab races, too.”

  “Why don’t we talk about it in the morning?” I suggested. “Right now, it’s time you went to bed.”

  Liz stood up. “I’ll run them a bath. Charity can borrow one of my blouses to sleep in.”

  Danny came around the kitchen table and kissed me. “Good night, Zacko McWhacko,” I told him.

  “Tell us the Scottish rhyme,” he asked.

  I shook my head. “Not tonight. Not in the mood.”

  “Oh, please. Charity’s never heard it before.”

  “She’s lucky,” said Liz.

  “Oh, go on,” Danny nagged.

  “You tell it to her,” I suggested.

  Danny led the way upstairs, marching and swinging his arms. I heard him chanting, “We love oor cockie-leekie, we love oor porridge-skin, and every morning we go oot, tae see if we are in.”

  Normally, I would have smiled. But I didn’t feel like smiling tonight. Dennis Pickering had been killed. I had only just managed to rescue Charity by the skin of my teeth. And I was being hotly pursued by a creature that was fouler and more voracious than any nightmare I could have imagined.

  I sat with locked muscles at the kitchen table and I simply didn’t know what to do.

  13

  Apparition

  I was pressing the largest size of sticking-plaster on to my foot when Liz came into the bathroom, wearing a Marks & Spencer nightie with Minnie Mouse on the front.

  “That looks nasty,” she said.

  I peeled back the plaster to show her. Two of Brown Jenkin’s clawlike fingernails had sliced like craft-knives through the outside welt of my boot, and had inflicted two half-inch cuts on the side of my foot. The cuts stung, and it had taken me nearly an hour to stop the bleeding.

  “You should get a tetanus jab,” said Liz. “If Brown Jenkin is a filthy as you say he is, that could go septic.”

  “I’ll see what it’s like tomorrow,” I promised.

  She lifted up her nightie and tugged it off. Naked, her breasts swaying, she leaned over the side of the bath and frothed up the water. “It’s boiling. You must have skin like leather.”

  “The Japanese always have boiling-hot baths.”

  “Yes, and they eat raw squid, too, but that doesn’t mean that I have to.”

  She poured in some more cold water, and then she climbed in.

  “Are the children asleep?” I asked her.

  “Dead to the world. That poor little Charity dropped off as soon as her head touched the pillow.”

  “I wish I knew what I was going to d
o with her.”

  Liz soaped her shoulders and neck. “I don’t understand why you brought her back with you in the first place. She doesn’t belong here, does she?”

  “Brown Jenkin was just about to take her off on one of his picnics, that’s why.”

  “David—you can’t interfere with time and space. You can’t play God. I don’t know how you’ve done it, or whether you’ve really done it, but you’ve brought a Victorian girl into nineteen ninety-two. How’s she going to cope? She’s all right at the moment, but she hasn’t seen the telly yet. Nor has she been outside. What do you think she’s going to think when a jumbo-jet goes overhead?”

  I stood up, and hobbled to the basin. In the steamed-up mirror, I looked a lot less tired than I felt. In fact, I looked almost real. With the tip of my finger, I drew a pair of spectacles in the steam and peered through them.

  “How long’s Dennis Pickering going to stay there?” asked Liz.

  I didn’t answer at first, but stood staring at myself in the mirror, listening to the gurgle and splash of the bathwater. My steam-spectacles began to weep.

  “I told you a lie,” I admitted. “Dennis Pickering’s dead.”

  “What? David! David—look at me! What do you mean, he’s dead?”

  “Precisely that. He’s dead. Brown Jenkin killed him, cut him open. It was terrible.”

  “Oh my God. Oh, David. That’s three people killed.” I lowered my head. A huge spider was tentatively crawling out of the plug-hole. I watched its feet wave around the slippery chrome rim.

  “I tried bloody hard to persuade myself that Harry Martin and Doris Kemble died by accident,” I said. “But I saw Brown Jenkin kill Dennis Pickering with my own eyes, right in front of me, and I think that Brown Jenkin killed Harry Martin and Doris Kemble, too. Harry with all of his face torn off. That wasn’t hooks. Doris Kemble, all split open like a bag of shopping. She didn’t just trip over. I mean, God almighty, do me a favor! And now the Reverend Dennis Pickering, God help him.”