Prey Read online

  “Danny! I’m up in the attic and the door’s shut!”

  Again, no reply. I shifted my way around the head of the stairs, clinging tightly to the stair-rail, which was all I had to orientate myself. I tried widening my eyes and straining them as hard as I could, but no light penetrated the attic whatsoever, not even a chink. It was blacker than being buried under the blankets.

  “Danny!” I called, but without much hope of him hearing me. Why the hell couldn’t I locate the stairs? I knew they were steep, but surely they weren’t that steep? I waved my foot around again, but still I couldn’t reach them.

  It was then that I heard that scuffle-scuffle yet again. It was very much closer – so close that I instinctively backed away even further – as far as I could without releasing my grip on the stair-rail.

  “Danny,” I said, in a low voice. “Danny, it’s Daddy.”

  Scuffle.

  My heart was beating in long, slow lurches. My mouth dried out like a sponge on the side of an empty bathtub. For the very first time in my adult life, I didn’t know what to do; and I think it was that feeling of complete helplessness that frightened me more than anything else.

  Scuffle.

  And then a high, tittering sound; like somebody speaking in a foreign language they didn’t understand very well. It was incomprehensible. It could have been a human being, speaking in Thai or Burmese. But it could have been the chittering of an excited animal, an animal that smelled blood.

  “Pssssstttt!” I retorted. But the tittering didn’t stop. If anything, it became quicker and more excited. It gave me the most appalling feeling, as if I were about to die.

  DANNY. Had I called that? It had either been so soft or so loud that I hadn’t been able to hear it. DANNY IT’S DADDY.

  Then something brushed past me in the darkness. It felt hideous and cold and bristly, the size of a ten-year-old child, and heavy, too, an overweight child. It scratched my arm with a quill or a claw, and I yelped out loud, and stumbled, and lost my grip on the stair-rail. I fell backward, hitting my shoulder against a box, but I heard the creature scurry past me, only inches away, with a triumphant, sibilant hiss. Hih-hih-hih-hih-hih!

  I rolled over, bruising my side, and dropped down the stair-well. It was like falling off the edge of a hundred-foot building, in the dark. I may not have been able to find the stairs with my feet, but I found them now. I jarred against the edge of every stair, all the way down to the bottom. Head—shoulder—hip—elbow. By the time I reached the bottom, and my knee burst open the landing door, I felt as if I had been beaten all over with a cricket-bat.

  I was dazzled by reflected sunlight.

  “Oh, Christ!” I exclaimed.

  Danny was standing on the landing in his striped Marks and Spencers pajamas, waiting for me.

  “Daddy!” he said, excitedly. “You fell down!”

  I lay back on the carpet with my feet still tangled halfway up the stairs.

  “It’s all right,” I reassured him; although I was really saying it to reassure myself. “There weren’t any lights, and I tripped.”

  “You were calling,” Danny insisted.

  “Yes,” I said, climbing on to my feet, and closing the attic door, and quickly latching it. Did I hear any scuffling, just the slightest scratch?

  “What were you calling for?”

  I looked down at him, then shrugged. “The door closed. I couldn’t see.”

  “But you were scared.”

  “Who said I was scared? I wasn’t scared.”

  Danny stared at me solemnly. “You were scared.”

  I stared at the attic door for longer than I really had to. “No,” I said. “It’s nothing. It was dark, that’s all. I couldn’t see.”

  2

  The Chapel Window

  We had breakfast together in the huge old-fashioned kitchen. It had a chilly red quarry-tiled floor and cream-and-green painted cupboards, the kind that used to be considered ultra-modern in the 1930s, and a shallow white sink that looked as if it had once been used for carrying out autopsies. Through the window I could just see the broken tip of the derelict chapel. Danny sat at the deal table with a bowl of Weetabix, swinging his legs, sunlight turning the top of his head into a shining dandelion-puff.

  He looked so much like his mother. Big brown eyes, skinny-wristed, skinny-legged. He talked like his mother, too—plain and practical. I suppose I should have known right from the very beginning that I could never live for long with a plain and practical woman. I was always too much of a theorist—ready to rely on inspiration rather than judgement.

  Janie and I had met each other at Brighton Art College, when I was in my last year and she was in her first. She had giggled a lot, and hidden her face behind her hair, but she had been so strikingly pretty that I always went out of my way to talk to her. We had met each other again one summer evening three years later, at a party in Hastings. That evening she had been wearing a long purple-and-white dress of thin Indian cotton, and a purple scarf around her head, and I had fallen in love with her instantly and irrevocably. I was still in love with her now, but in a dull resigned kind of way. I knew from countless rages and countless screaming-matches that she and I could never stay together.

  I had been running an interior design business in North Street, Brighton, when she had finally walked in one wet February morning to say that she was leaving me. At least she had the courage to tell me to my face. She wanted to go to Durham with somebody called Raymond and work for the local council. Could I look after Danny for a few months? Bloody good luck to you, I said. I hope you and Raymond are deliriously happy together.

  The shop-bell jangled and then she was gone and there was a bearded, solicitous-looking man in a wet camel-colored duffel-coat waiting for her outside. Bloody Raymond.

  After that, I completely lost interest in the interior design business. I took Danny for long walks on the seashore, and never answered the phone, and after three months I had to sell up my wallpapers and my sample-books and look for some regular work, without very much luck, as it turned out. I didn’t want to work behind the fish counter at Asda, and I didn’t have an HGV license.

  But at the beginning of the summer, I ran into Chris Pert in the King’s Head in Duke Street. Chris was one of my old drinking friends from art-college, white-faced, a little reclusive and odd, heavily into Zen and brown corduroy trousers. We bought each other a couple of rounds of Tetley’s bitter, and told each other our sob stories. His mother had died, and there wasn’t very much I could do about that, except to suggest that he went to see Madame Tzigane on Brighton Pier, cross her palm with silver, and ask if he could chat with his mother on the Other Side. But Chris was able to help me quite a lot. He was a step-nephew of Mr and Mrs Bryan Tarrant, the carpet-tile millionaires, and the owners of Fortyfoot House, on the Isle of Wight. Chris mentioned that the Tarrants wanted the house inexpensively decorated and repaired, and the gardens weeded – “generally tarted up,” was the phrase he used – with a view to selling it. It sounded like just the kind of quiet, isolated job I was after. I could spend the whole summer on my own with Danny, without having to think.

  We had arrived on the Isle of Wight late yesterday, on the ferry from Portsmouth, then driven down to the southernmost shore, to Bonchurch, a seaside village that could have come straight out of a British children’s annual, with tidy flint cottages and shady lanes, and hot white-washed gardens filled with hollyhocks and bumble-bees.

  I had never visited the Isle of Wight before. Unless you had children, and wanted to give them a cheap seaside holiday – or unless you were a student of Victorian history, and wanted to walk round Queen Victoria’s house at Osborne there was no earthly reason why you should. It’s a small diamond-shaped island off the south coast of England, only a twenty-minute car-ferry journey across the sheltered waters of Spithead from Portsmouth, not much more than twenty miles from west to east, and twelve miles from north to south—a stray fragment of the Hampshire Downs that the Roman
s used to call Vectis.

  Most of the towns and villages were tourist-traps, with thatched cottages and doll museums and miniature steam-railways and flamingo parks; but toward the west the fields gradually rose through the walls and the gardens and the cedar-trees, and became higher, and wilder, until you reached the sandstone cliffs of Alum Bay, and the sheer church-like spires of the Needles.

  It was up on the cliffs, away from the crowds, that you could see what the Isle of Wight really was. A scenic island with a strange sense of timelessness about it; a sense that Romans had landed here; that Anglo-Saxons had raised sheep on the broad backs of its Downs; that Victoria and Albert had walked and talked through its manicured gardens; that 1920s buses with balloon tires and flat windshields had driven up and down through its close-hedged byways.

  I liked it because of that, and because of its cozyness; and Danny liked it, too, and that was all that mattered. Perhaps we both felt that were escaping from the real world of bankrupt business and lost mummies, into an endless golden seaside of starfish and rockpools and buckets-and-spades.

  I had called Janie in Durham soon after we arrived, to tell her our telephone number, and to say that Danny was safe.

  “You won’t alienate him against me, will you, David?”

  “Why should I? He needs a mummy, just like everybody else.”

  “But you won’t make him feel that I’ve abandoned him?”

  “I don’t have to make him feel that, for Christ’s sake. He feels that already.”

  She had let out a tight, testy sigh. “You promised you wouldn’t alienate him.”

  “He’s all right,” I had reassured her. I hadn’t wanted another argument, not on the telephone, not then. “I’m doing my best to refer to you as often as appropriate.”

  “And how often is that?”

  “Janie, do me a favor, will you? I keep saying things like, ‘I wonder what mummy’s doing now?’ and ‘I bet mummy would like to see you in those trousers.’ What more do you want?”

  There had been a suspended silence. Then Janie had said, genuinely heartbroken, “I miss him so much.”

  I had pulled a face, which of course she hadn’t been able to see. Not a sarcastic face; but one of those faces you make when you know you’ve done your best but it just isn’t good enough; and you’re going to have to live for the rest of your life with the painful consequences. “I know you do,” I had told her. “I’ll take some photographs on the beach tomorrow, and send you some.”

  Janie had put down the phone without speaking.

  *

  “So, what shall we do today?” I asked Danny.

  He was standing on the mossy brick patio at the back of the house with his legs extremely wide apart and his hands on his hips and his lower lip stuck out. It was a pose he adopted when he wanted to look grown-up. He was wearing a red-and-green striped Mothercare T-shirt and a pair of red shorts with an elasticated waistband.

  “Explore,” he suggested.

  I looked around, shading my eyes against the sunshine. “I think you’re right. Let’s walk all the way around the house, and see what we need to do.”

  “You’ve got a bruise there,” he said, pointing to my left cheekbone.

  “I know. That’s where I fell downstairs. I’m covered in bruises.”

  “We need a torch,” he decided.

  “You’re absolutely right. Let’s explore, then let’s go and buy ourselves the most incredible powerful torch known to man.”

  Danny led the way down the steps. Grass grew up between every brick, and in some places the moss was so thick that it looked like a sodden green carpet. I remembered seeing a green carpet like that dragged out of a house in Brighton, after a fire in which two little girls had been burned to death.

  Danny walked along the retaining-wall which edged the patio, singing The Grand Old Duke of York.

  I said, “I talked to mummy on the telephone yesterday, after you went to bed.”

  Danny kept swinging his arms. “He had ten thousand men…”

  “Don’t you want to know what she said?”

  “He marched them up to the top of the…”

  “She said she loved you. She said she missed you. She said she was going to come and see you very, very soon.”

  “And he marched them down again.”

  “Danny—”

  He stopped at the very end of the wall. Above his head, a gull was spinning on the wind, and crying like a child. The morning was already warm, and the blue sky was spun with fine cotton clouds.

  “She said she loved you and she said she missed you.”

  There was a single tear on his cheek. I stepped forward to hold him close but he backed away. He didn’t want to be held close.

  “Danny, I know how hard it is.”

  I sounded like a character in a bad Australian soap-opera. How the hell could I know how hard it was, for a seven-year-old boy to lose his mother?

  I turned away, feeling helpless, and looked up at Fortyfoot House—the back elevation of Fortyfoot House, which faced the gardens and the sea. Because the garden sloped away so sharply, the walls appeared unnaturally high. They were faced with dark red brick; so dark that in places they were almost chestnut-colored; and the huge ill-shaped roof was clad in mossy brown tiles. Originally, all of the windows had been oak, or so Mrs Tennant had told me, but in the 1920s they had been replaced by metal windows. The glazing bars had been painted black, which gave the windows an empty, derelict appearance; and one of the first things that I had decided when I first saw Fortyfoot House was that I was going to repaint all the metalwork white.

  The chimney-stacks were all original: high, wide, with elaborate steps of bricks; designed to draw coal-fires hot and fierce. Although it was almost sub-tropical now, I guessed that the winters at Bonchurch were probably wicked.

  At one time, there must have been creeper all over the back of the house, but this had long ago died and shriveled away, leaving nothing but a few frail tendrils trapped in the pointing.

  There was something about the proportions of Fortyfoot House which unsettled me. For some reason, its angles didn’t look right. The roof looked as if it were too big, and as if one end of it was pitched far too sharply. I stepped back, but again the angles looked all wrong. I stepped to the side; and again they changed; but again they didn’t seem to fit. Fortyfoot House was one of the most perverse buildings that I had ever come across. No matter which way you looked at it, it always seemed to be awkward, and ugly, and unbalanced.

  Its awkwardness was so consistent, from every viewpoint, that I could almost bring myself to believe that its architect had designed it that way deliberately. From every viewpoint, it looked as if it were only a facade, a stage flat without any depth. I felt as if—behind the walls that I could actually see—there was nothing at all, but a derelict, empty garden. I felt as if—behind the walls that I could actually see—Fortyfoot House simply didn’t exist.

  Danny refused my hand and jumped down from the wall. Then he plodded solemnly up the side of the garden, beside the tangled flowerless rose-bushes, and I followed him, with a sickness in my stomach that was as bad as a hangover. How could Janie and I have inflicted such misery on him? Sometimes I felt it would have been better if we hadn’t created him in the first place. It was as bad as breeding gamebirds, just to shoot them.

  “I think there’s a rat in the attic,” I told him, as we trudged up the gravel path beside the stable-block.

  He didn’t answer.

  “When we get that torch, we’ll go and look for it, shall we?”

  He stopped, and turned, and frowned at me. “Rats can bite you.”

  “Well, yes. But if you wear thick trousers and gloves you’re probably all right. And most of the time they’re scareder of us than we are of them. I saw them in the sewers.”

  “I could take my water-pistol,” Danny suggested.

  I took hold of his hand. “Yes, you could,” I said. “Perhaps you could fill it with red ink
, like they do in the comics. Then it would look like blood, if you hit it; and if we saw it again, we would know which rat it was.”

  Danny liked that idea. He accompanied me round to the front of the house, and seriously assessed the rhododendron bushes with me; and made some expert noises about the condition of the roof, and the sparsity of shingle on the driveway.

  God almighty, I loved him.

  He began to chatter about going to school, and Button Moon on the television, and how he had decided to change his comic to Beano, which was more grown-up. He asked me if it were possible for him to throw his teddy so high that it went into orbit. I mean if he really swung it around and around and then let it go? He had been frightened to try, in case he lost his teddy for ever, and of course his mummy had given it to him, and he would have been devastated if he had lost it.

  We sat on a white-painted cast-iron garden bench, up to our knees in grass and weeds, and looked out over the gardens toward the sea. The wind blew warm in our faces, and ruffled our hair.

  “Sometimes people can’t live with each other,” I told him. “They love each other; but they just can’t live together.”

  “That’s silly,” said Danny.

  “Yes,” I agreed. “It is.” Then, “Knock-knock.”

  “Who’s there?”

  “Cowsgo.”

  “Cowsgo who?”

  “No, you idiot. Cows go moo, not who.”

  Danny looked at me accusingly. “That’s rubbish.”

  “Of course it is. All jokes are rubbish. But they make people laugh, and that’s all that matters.”

  While Danny sang under his breath and kicked his legs, I casually and curiously looked up at Fortyfoot House. Even from here, the angles of the roof seemed unusual. I could see the dormer window of my room, facing south, and the tiles sloping down on either side of it; but the odd thing was that—contrary to my expectations—the westward wall of the house was completely vertical, all the way up to the roof-ridge, despite the fact that the ceiling of my room sloped on that side, too.

  In other words, there had to be a curious blocked-off space like an inverted pyramid between my sloping ceiling and the vertical outside wall of the house.