Prey

by Graham Masterton

  “He was a skinner?” I asked him.

  Young Mr Billings glanced at me sharply. “Who have you been talking to? Charity?”

  “It doesn’t matter, go on.”

  “Well—you’re not far wrong. He did have a weakness for very young girls. He first saw Kezia Mason at Dr Barnardo’s house. He was bewitched by her. Absolutely besotted. He wanted to take her into his care at once, but Dr Barnardo was very cautious about men like him... and, apart from that, Dr Barnardo apparently suspected that Kezia Mason wasn’t quite what she seemed to be. As far as he could make out, she considered herself to be beholden body and soul to a creature called Mazurewicz, who lived in a huge rat-run under one of the most dilapidated London wharves.

  “At considerable risk to his safety, Dr Barnardo had taken Kezia Mason away from Mazurewicz again and again, but she always escaped and returned to him. To it—to whatever Mazurewicz was. Dr Barnardo said it was the most unholy relationship that he had ever witnessed—a creature who lived and looked like the king of the rats, and one of the fairest Cockney girls that he had known.”

  Although I would have done anything to make my way back as quickly as I could to Fortyfoot House; and to return to 1992, where Danny and Charity were still playing in the garden and expecting their breakfast; I felt like the wedding-guest in The Rime of the Ancient Mariner who could not choose but stay. Young Mr Billings had woken, risen from his bed, and followed me down to the beach so that he could tell me everything, and I had to listen.

  He coughed, and took out his handkerchief, and wiped his mouth. “What Dr Barnardo hadn’t counted on, of course—and what my poor father never counted on—was that Kezia Mason was only the mortal image of a fair Cockney girl. Outside, she was flesh and freckles and Cockney cheek. Inside, she was a creature ten thousand times stranger and more vicious than Mazurewicz. Much later—when it was far too late—I discovered that it was Mazurewicz who was under her thrall, not the other way around. And whenever she went back to him, it was for a very specific purpose.

  “The story of Mazurewicz is very disconnected and abstruse. But I heard from my father that he had come to London in 1850 or thereabouts from the dockside slums of Danzig. He was supposed to have been born of a beautiful Polish ballet-dancer who had a strange taste in sexual entertainment. What she had lain with, nobody would ever tell. But there are cases of humans and animals cross-breeding, no matter how scientists and theologians try to deny them. Women have given birth to Alsatian dogs; and pigs; and even ponies. There are dozens and dozens of recorded cases; and probably thousands which have never gone recorded, because they happened in isolated rural communities, and whatever monstrosity was born was killed at birth.”

  “So what happened?” I asked. “Your father brought Kezia Mason to Fortyfoot House?”

  “Yes. Quite suddenly, she acquiesced. My father was delighted. He bought her new clothes and taught her to read, and treated her like a princess. He persuaded her to pose for him, too, so that he could draw her and photograph her—although, with hindsight, it was probably she who tempted him. In return for posing, she insisted that my poor father buy her jewelry, and furs, and brandy, and morphine—anything she wanted. Of course he didn’t dare to complain. And he still worshiped her. God almighty, he didn’t have an inkling what she was!”

  “How did you find out?” I asked him, suspiciously.

  “Me? Ha! I caught her one day by surprise, in my father’s library, making the people in his oil-paintings move. Making the clouds move, the windmills turn—making the pictures come to life. It was then that I knew for certain that she was a witch—or what the Hampshire people call a ‘wonder-worker.’”

  “So what did you do?” I wanted to know.

  “The same as you did, when you were trying to find out all about Fortyfoot House—I went to the library. Well—it was different in those days, it was a private library, very small—but old Mr Bacon could find you anything you wanted.

  “I read the true history of witches; and it startled me, sir, believe me. I had never believed them to be real; not in any shape or form. I mean—all of us know some crone or other, some poor old biddy who gets the blame for the hens not laying or the milk turning sour. But this was about witches—a word which was first spoken more than three-and-a-half thousand years before Christ. The Viking word wicca came from the gypsy word wycjka which in turn came from the Sumerian word willa, meaning witch.

  “The ancient Egyptians built their pyramids according to highly-developed mathematics—mathematics which actually slow down time, in order that the bodies of their sacred pharaohs should never decay. The power of the pyramid is well-known—many respectable vintners store their wines in pyramid-shaped cases in order to slow their maturity.

  “The Sumerians used the same mathematics to do something which the Egyptians didn’t dare to attempt—they devised ziggurats which would take them back so far in time that they could visit the earth before man existed… when the world was inhabited by what they called the Great Old Ones, and the servants of the Great Old Ones. This was a time when huge mysterious cities covered the Middle East. There are plenty of records that these cities existed… you have only to look in the British Museum. Apparently they were ruled by beasts whose faces looked like smoke, with strange tentacles dangling out of them; and by things that frothed; and by indescribably evil organisms who appeared as globules of dazzling light.

  “These were entities which had been created from the original darkness—the very same stuff of which the whole universe is made. They were strange and dreadful beyond anything that you could imagine.”

  “And you’re trying to tell me that Kezia Mason is one of these entities?”

  Young Mr Billings nodded.

  “Nobody knows how many witches there are. There could be thousands; there could be fewer than two or three hundred. When one human host dies—or is hanged, or drowned, or burned at the stake—the entity simply conceals itself, dormant, in the place where its host died, until another host happens by. So the same witches are renewed, time after time, life after life.”

  I suddenly thought of the flickering vision of the nun that I had seen in my bedroom; and a dark feeling of dread and suspicion began to seep through my mind, like ice-cold water seeping across a carpet.

  Young Mr Billings said, “As far as I know, the entities escaped from the Pleistocene Era when they were visited by Sumerian priests. The priests went back in time to Sarnath, one of the greatest cities of the Old Ones. There are six or seven separate accounts of how they did it, on different cuneiform tablets. It was an incredible triumph of mathematics; not to mention sheer bravery. But the priests made a basic and terrible mistake. When they reached Samath, they thought that they were seeing a civilization at its very apogee. I suppose this was understandable, since their own cities were quite primitive, by comparison. But the truth was that the Old Ones were on the very brink of complete extinction. They had failed to adapt to the changes in the earth’s climate, and they had individually lived for so long that they had forgotten many of their survival skills, like suspending themselves for hundreds of years with almost no sustenance. More critically, they had warred between each other for so long that they could no longer trust each other to take part in the Act of Renewal—in which all three main species of the Old Ones, at intervals, have to be conceived and gestated in the host-body of an animal which is native to the planet Earth.”

  “I don’t understand,” I confessed.

  “Well… I don’t either, to tell you the truth,” said young Mr Billings. “I could never get Kezia to talk about it clearly. But it seems as if the Old Ones were not of this world at all… and that it was necessary for them gradually to adapt themselves to the Earth by regular Acts of Renewal. A host would be chosen, and impregnated with one of each of the three main species… the tentacled creatures, the froth creatures and the creatures which appear as globules of shining protoplasm. There have been numerous cases throughout history of women’s b
odies being found horribly torn apart, in a way which suggests that some thing or things burst out of them from the inside. In Siberia, in 1801, a party of foresters found the frozen, burst-open body of a female mastodon. There was no doubt that it had been furiously attacked from the inside. They said that she looked almost as if she had eaten dynamite. In 1823, a French peasant woman was found in a vineyard near Epernay, her body torn to pieces and scattered across nearly a hectare of ground. A young boy who had witnessed her death spoke of deep voices and bright lights, and when he was asked to describe what he had seen, he covered his face with his hand and peered out through a gap in his fingers, and that was all that he would do. Similiarly—in 1857, a young bride of 17 was found by her husband in a shack in Nightmute, Alaska, looking as if she had literally exploded. The shack had been so violently shaken that it had been physically moved twenty feet away from its original foundations. Mazurewicz showed me accounts of these incidents in some of his books. There were pictures, too, drawn by eye-witnesses, and believe me, sir, they gave me nightmares for weeks.”

  “Do you mean that the same thing is going to happen to Liz?” I asked him, appalled.

  Young Mr Billings said, “Yes, I’m afraid I do.”

  “She’ll be killed, for God’s sake?”

  “I’m sorry. There is nothing I could have done to prevent it.”

  “But how?” I asked him.

  Young Mr Billings looked at me gravely. “I regret to tell you, dear sir, that your Liz has already been possessed by the witch-entity.”

  Oh, God. The nun.

  “I saw it,” I said. “At least, I think I saw it. It was a flickering kind of figure—like a nun.”

  “Yes,” he nodded. “The soul, if you like, of that pre-human creature that originally came to Fortyfoot House in the guise of Kezia Mason. You see—Kezia Mason died here. I know that to be a certainty, because I saw her die myself, and I concealed her remains in our bedroom—your bedroom, in the future—in a partition in the roof. That is why there will be a bricked-up window on one side of the house; and your bedroom will have such an oddly-sloping ceiling.

  “The witch-entity was waiting in the very fabric of your room when you arrived—dormant, yes, but capable of wakening as soon as a suitable host came close. It will begin by exerting an influence on your Liz—has already done so. Perhaps you’ve noticed pronounced changes in her mood—irrational arguing, things of that kind.”

  “Yes,” I said, numbly.

  “Well, then,” young Mr Billings went on, “when the witch-entity is convinced that your Liz will make a suitable host for it—it will emerge from the walls and make its home inside her mind and body. Or has already emerged, from your point of view.”

  “And then?”

  “And then its primary business will be to get itself impregnated by a human being. You, as luck would have it. You will impregnate her thrice—orally, with semen; vaginally, with saliva; and rectally, with blood. These three impregnations will lead to the embryonic growth inside her body of the three different species of Old Ones. In your time, two of those three acts of conception have already occurred… only the third remains unfulfilled.”

  “How long does it take these things to gestate?” I asked him. “I mean—how long before they come bursting out?”

  “Six or seven months. But during that time, your Liz will become almost unrecognizable. She will change—physically—and she will develop many strong and strange appetites. For your own sake, for the sake of your son, it would be better for you not to be anywhere near. Kezia became—well, I don’t care to think of the way in which Kezia changed. Or will change, rather.”

  “That’s how Kezia died, too? Giving birth to these things?”

  “Sadly, yes. Sadly—and very gruesomely.”

  I paused, thinking hard. “Tell me something,” I said, after a while, “is there anything left of Liz? Or has this witch-thing cleared out everything she ever was?”

  “I really don’t know,” young Mr Billings replied. “Sometimes when I talk to Kezia I see glimpses of the sweet young girl that once she must have been. But whether that sweet young girl could ever be revocable… I simply couldn’t say.”

  “I’m thinking about Liz,” I said. “If she’s still Liz, then it’s worth trying to get that witch-thing out of her, isn’t it?”

  “You can’t. At least there’s no way of getting it out of her that I know of.”

  “Supposing I don’t make love to her again? Supposing the third son isn’t conceived?”

  “The other two will grow—though much more slowly than the three together. But when they eventually emerge, they will be quite violent enough to kill her, without their brother to help them.”

  “What about exorcism?”

  Young Mr Billings shook his head. “There’s nothing you can do, sir. Nothing at all. We’re not dealing with the devil here. We’re dealing with real beings—real creatures—things with substance and form and highly-developed intelligence. They built whole cities in Asia Minor and Antarctica and dominated the world for millions of years. They made a mark on this planet that can never be erased.”

  “And because of that, I’m supposed to allow Liz to be ripped to pieces?”

  “It’s not a question of ‘allowing’ it, I’m afraid. You simply can’t prevent it.”

  I bit my lip. I couldn’t think what to do. Perhaps young Mr Billings was lying to me. Then again, perhaps he wasn’t. His story certainly seemed to fit most of the facts—and I was particularly convinced by the references that he had made to the Sumerian ziggurats. I had seen for myself that the roof of Fortyfoot House—the “impossible” roof which an East End orphan had designed—exactly matched the strange angles which the Sumerians had used in order to travel through time.

  “What happens when these three creatures are eventually born?” I asked, in a hollow voice.

  “They join together… that’s what Kezia told me, anyway… and they form between them the great Unholy Trinity… an all-powerful hermaphrodite being rather like a queen ant… which in turn spawns thousands upon thousands of new forms of all three species of the Old Ones, and dominates them all, for millenia to come.”

  “But you said that they may not survive.”

  “It’s touch-and-go. Even in your time, the climatic conditions are not yet suitable for them. Ideally, the Old Ones need air that is dense with sulphurous gases, a sky without birds or insects, and an ocean without fish or corals or plankton. They need a world the way it was in pre-human times... without animal life, without vegetation, toxic and barren. Ever since the Old Ones died out, the few surviving witch-entities keep trying to renew the race… hoping each time they try that the world will have decayed sufficiently to meet their ideal living conditions. Indeed, in your time, the pollution in the air and the sterility of the seas are already giving them great encouragement.

  “As Kezia keeps telling me, she craves the breath of hell.”

  “So—even though they’ll kill her—these creatures that Liz is supposed to be carrying won’t survive?”

  Young Mr Billings shook his head. “Not for very long… only a few minutes, perhaps, before they virtually dissolve… but in twenty or thirty years thence… well, the world will be very different. To humans, the air will be almost unbreathable, but to the Old Ones, it will be nectar.”

  I was about to ask young Mr Billings if it was any use taking Liz to an abortion clinic, when I heard a soft rustling in the bushes of the garden. Young Mr Billings heard it, too, and raised his hand.

  We both listened for a long drawn-out moment. Young Mr Billings’ heart must have been beating as fast as mine.

  “Nothing...” he said, after a while. “Not Brown Jenkin, at least.”

  “Exactly what is Brown Jenkin?” I asked him.

  “Kezia’s familiar,” said young Mr Billings. “Witches have one disadvantage… because they’re already misplaced in time, they’re unable to use the Sumerian doorways to move from one time to an
other, as humans can, as you and I can. If they entered the Sumerian doorway, they would simply find themselves back in pre-human time, which is where they really belong.

  “Because of this, witches always give birth to a familiar to run errands for them, to go from one time to another. Sometimes it’s a cat, more usually it’s a dog, or a dwarf. In Kezia’s case, it’s Brown Jenkin. She’s a very perverse witch, very strange and powerful. She once told me her pre-human name, but I find it difficult to remember. Something like Sothoth.”

  I thought of old Mr Billings whirling around the sundial, crackling with electricity, screaming N’gaaa nngggg sothoth n’ggggaaAAA.

  I shivered.

  Young Mr Billings said, “Brown Jenkin has already gone forward in time to prepare for the next Renewal—when the Old Ones will at last be triumphantly reborn, and dominate the world as they always believed they were meant to. Even the Sumerian doorways cannot take you beyond this time… it is the very forward-edge of the world’s evolution—the frontier of time, if you like.

  “By your standards, my dear sir, you would probably consider it very grim. The air is yellow, the seas are black, and—most critically—human men and women are universally sterile, because of radiation and because of fast-breeding cancers.

  “There will be no children,” he said, with considerable drama.

  I frowned at him. “That’s terrible. But why do you say it like that? ‘There-will-be-no-children.’?”

  “Don’t you remember your Grimm’s fairy-stories?” asked young Mr Billings. “Children are essential in fairy-stories. Children are essential for the survival of witches; because children are the witch’s staple diet.”

  “Explain this to me,” I demanded. “Are you saying that Brown Jenkin is running back and forth from now to the far-distant future—and that he’s abducting children so that he can take them to the future for food?”

  Young Mr Billings remained calm, his eyes bright, though a little starey; his voice soft and controled. “Without living children, the pre-human creature inside Kezia Mason would die. She looks like a girl, but remember that she’s a creature; an indescribable abhorrence with no earthly shape. Only when the Old Ones are Renewed can they live purely on gases and minerals. In this form, they need flesh.”