The next step for Carrie was to resolve things with Oliver as soon as he returned home. It would be difficult and painful, but it was absolutely essential. The poisonous doubt that Carrie felt had to be removed, regardless of the outcome.
* * *
Roz wasn’t back, and Oona was gone.
Carrie immediately sensed the difference. She heard Oona’s music coming from upstairs, the usual stuff, but the door to the front hall closet was slightly open, which looked inappropriate. There was a flatness in the air, a lack of vitality – some force of which Carrie became aware now only by its absence.
A warm summer breeze stirred the filmy lace curtains at the kitchen window. Carrie put the shopping bags down on the table and hurried upstairs. The bedroom was empty, the bed unmade. She quickly checked the bathroom, then Roz’s room, and the spare room that was used for storage.
She walked slowly back into Oona’s room. She knew that Oona was gone, but she found it impossible to believe. Why? And where would she go? It made no sense. Even if she had received a call saying that Roz was in some kind of trouble, surely Oona would have waited the hour or two until Carrie returned. Carrie would have driven her to the airport if necessary, have helped her do whatever had to be done. Oona didn’t drive. She went through the rest of the house and checked the yard, but Oona was gone.
When she went back and looked for them she started to see the signs. Desk drawers left open, a few papers scattered on the green blotter. Bureau drawers not quite shut, a couple of empty hangers in Oona’s closet. Oona’s pyjamas balled up on the floor beside the bed.
The big room was the same as it had been on the day of their last session. The pillows were still scattered, the bloodstains had never been washed off. The water in the basin had evaporated and the candles had guttered out. What exactly had happened in this place? She’d seen and heard things, remarkable events, but they were still opaque and indecipherable to her.
Carrie touched a blood spot the size of a quarter, a rusty brown scab on the marble. She half expected to receive a psychic flash, a sudden vision, a glimpse of Oona. But she felt nothing. She thought of those ancient maps where the coastline was clearly marked in detail – but everywhere beyond it was blank, the great emptiness. Sometimes nothing is the definition.
‘Oona.’
Carrie’s voice disappeared at once, as if it had been sucked into thin air. No resonance, no echo. The house felt abandoned. Carrie grew angry and fearful. Why are you doing this to me? It was the worst thing, the least considerate thing that Oona could have done. Roz had warned her about something like this.
She wandered into the kitchen, and discovered the note. She hadn’t seen it when she had come in and put the bags on top of it, on the table. Oona’s scrawled handwriting.
Carrie
Sorry to go like this but I have to. I wish I did more for you but I think you’ll be O.K. Thanks again for being so nice to me. You were a big help. We’re both alone now but you’ll be OK, I think.
Love, O.
Carrie walked out of the house and drove back to Manhattan, where nothing was new and nothing important had happened at work and there were no messages on the answering machine. Early that evening she tried Marthe’s number in Munich.
‘Hallo.’
‘Marthe Frennsen?’
‘Ja.’
‘This is Carrie Spence. Is Oliver there?’
‘Ja.’
‘May I speak with him, please.’
A short giggle. Carrie heard Marthe speaking away from the phone. ‘Oliver, do you have anything to say to your wife?’ She laughed, and then spoke again to Carrie. ‘Nein, danke.’
‘Put him on right now,’ Carrie said coldly.
Another giggle.
The line went dead. When Carrie tried again a minute later, it didn’t ring at all.
* * *
The taxi from the airport skirted central Munich and brought her to a district of dreary warehouses and small factories. The streets were full of lorries and vans. The area was grim enough, but the steady rain made it seem even greyer.
Marthe Frennsen’s building looked like a pre-war office, with high windows, muddy brown stone walls and a slate roof. It was stranded by itself at the end of a cul-de-sac, right up against a tall brick wall topped with coils of razor wire. It was the kind of place that had probably been taken over by underfunded artists and musicians, Carrie thought.
She paid the driver and then climbed the wide stone steps to the front entrance. There were no nameplates or cards, only one bell, and mail was delivered through a rusted metal slot in the tall wooden door. Carrie tried the bell. She didn’t hear if it rang inside, and there was no response. A second attempt had the same outcome.
Carrie turned the handle and pushed the heavy door. It made a scraping sound on the stone floor, but opened. She went into a small foyer, then through a second doorway. Stairs to the right, and a long corridor straight ahead with rooms off it on either side. The place felt like an old cellar, the air cool and moist, the light from outside diminished by grimy windows.
All the rooms on the ground floor were empty, aside from scraps of litter and a few plastic buckets of varying sizes. The paint hung in spiral tatters from the walls and the ceilings were almost bare, marked with cancerous brown damp patches. The floor itself was strewn with fallen paint, dust and grit. It looked as if the place hadn’t been touched since the last occupant departed thirty or more years ago.
The second floor was virtually identical to the first, but a glance out of the back window proved interesting. Carrie saw a car at the side of a cement parking area that was cracked and broken, stitched with weeds. It was an older Audi, with a couple of rust spots. No sign of a new rental that might belong to Oliver.
A small dock had been built onto the back of the house. She figured it was probably for unloading Marthe’s supplies. Carrie looked up and noticed a small crane sticking out overhead, above the dock, with a cable and hook. It would have made more sense, she thought, for Marthe to use the basement and ground floor as her storage area and work space, even if it meant knocking out a few walls.
The third floor was a single huge open area, scattered with drums of chemicals, rolls of fabric arranged on wooden racks, and numerous work tables, measuring instruments and cutting tools. A power winch stood at the rear, next to double sliding doors. The machinery looked recent and well maintained.
Other additions included an array of plastic plumbing pipes, a snarl of heavy-duty electrical cables connected to an extensive bank of fuses, switches and breakers, and what appeared to be a dumb-waiter to the top floor.
The ceiling had been reinforced with steel columns situated along the lines of the load-bearing walls on the floor below. So much unnecessary trouble and expense, Carrie thought. The column plates had cracked and punched through the crumbly old plaster on the ceiling, to the floor timbers above. But in other places the plaster was still intact, and Carrie saw several dark stains that had not been caused by dry rot.
It all seemed so dismal and unlikely. It was what you might expect of an amateur inventor, not a serious professional who was developing a product with legitimate commercial potential. Maybe the important work was done on the top floor. Oliver had spoken of the loft, but Carrie had assumed that it was mainly used by Marthe as living quarters. She walked to the front of the building and started up the final flight of stairs.
There was a wide landing at the top, a wooden railing, and a steel door. Carrie knocked forcefully but nothing happened. She hesitated as she was about to knock again. She had a sudden and painful image of Oliver and Marthe in bed, having sex, scrambling into their clothes at a sound from the door. Or not – perhaps they’d just slip into robes and greet her openly; no pretence, no flimsy lies. She didn’t know which would be worse.
This is where you learn something about your husband, Carrie thought. And yourself. She felt swamped with diffuse anxiety as she reached for the doorknob. It turned smoothly, the do
or swung inward, and Carrie stepped across the threshold.
A chemical stench hit her immediately. It seemed to be made up of several different ingredients, by turns harsh, acrid, oily, or as nauseatingly sweet as durian left out in the sun. How could anyone eat, sleep and live with it? Carrie breathed through her mouth, but that only helped a little.
She seemed to be in a maze with no design. There were more tall wooden racks all over the place, but here the textiles were laid out flat on them, as if drying. Items of furniture cropped up at random – a dresser, a dressing table, bookshelves, a dining table, floor lamps, a wine cabinet, wardrobes, free-standing screens and meaningless room dividers – jumbled among the racks, more drums and work tables, tools, instruments and unfamiliar equipment. It was a chaotic non-arrangement of everything in Marthe’s personal life and her work. No separation. Carrie understood why Oliver described Marthe as eccentric and a kind of genius – most people simply couldn’t tolerate such apparent confusion and disorder in their homes and lives.
There were no windows to be seen in the stone walls, and the skylights overhead did little to dispel the pervasive gloom. She edged slowly down a narrow aisle between towering racks of cloth, passed under a stepladder and went around a corner into a fairly open area with a circle of battered armchairs and a sofa. On the coffee table were the remains of various fast-food meals, crusts of pizza, doner kebabs, burger wrappers, unfinished French fries, rice cartons, soda cups and empty beer bottles. On the dark wood of the floor, a darker stain. Carrie bent down to touch it, and came away with brown powder on her fingertip.
She became aware of certain noises – a steady whirring that might be made by strong fans, some other mechanical droning and music. Industrial rock, driving guitars and drums blended with a variety of sophisticated electronic sounds. Years ago Oliver had had a passing interest in it. Carrie found it oppressive. The music was persistent but not too loud. She couldn’t tell where it came from in the huge, impossibly cluttered loft.
Near one wall Carrie found a cubicle containing a toilet and a sink. The bowl was stained with accumulated hard water mineral deposits. A small stack of German newspapers and Herald Tribunes on the floor – the Trib was Oliver’s favourite whenever he was in Europe, she knew. These papers were faded, months old.
A few yards away Carrie came to another clearing. A rug was hemmed in by shelves and boxes containing various personal items. An ashtray full of Disque Bleu and Senior Service butts. A tin canister of snapshots, some lying loose on the rug. She picked up five or six, and looked at them. Oliver and some woman (Carrie realized that she had no idea what Marthe looked like) on the sofa. Sitting, talking, more or less normal – but the young woman was clearly uncomfortable. Next, Oliver and—
The second Polaroid opened black patches in Carrie’s vision. The pressure on her chest was so immense it felt as if she would never be able to breathe again. Oliver and the same woman on the same sofa. The woman in torn underwear, flat on her back, Oliver kneeling on her, strangling her.
It was a game, Carrie thought. A nasty role-playing fantasy of sex and violence. Next: the woman half off the sofa, her arms dangling uselessly, Oliver sitting back on his heels. Next: the woman’s face in close-up, swollen, cut and bruised, eyes rotated up. Throat slashed, ragged-edged, bloody. The woman was clearly dead. Decapitated, or all but. Not a game.
It was the ugliest photograph that Carrie had ever seen, an appalling image from life too real to abide, a ghastly intrusion that finally shattered for ever the order of things in her world. And the familiar male hand that held up the young woman’s head by the hair was the hand of Carrie’s husband. Her Oliver, in whose life she had chosen to root her own.
This charming man.
You’ll spend the rest of your life trying to understand, she told herself, why you failed to understand.
Carrie dropped the photos to the floor. She never wanted to see them again. But she needed to see Oliver. She had no words for him, for what he had become, but she had to face him one last time. Look him in the eye, and he will know. The fear inside Carrie vanished abruptly, obliterated by the same scorching winds that swept away all of her doubt and uncertainty.
She moved along the wall. She was starting to get a better sense of the loft’s absurd geography. The music was much louder now, and Carrie finally got an idea of where it was coming from. The low mechanical roar in the background was also stronger, but it provided no directional focus.
The temperature went up sharply as Carrie came round a high partition and faced a bank of industrial ovens, all currently in use. Sweat broke out on her forehead and face, and she was about to leave that area quickly when she saw some personal items lying on the floor in a small heap.
A handbag, a crumpled airline ticket, a UK passport. Roz. Carrie knew it even before she picked up the passport and saw the name, the photograph inside. She felt a tremendous sadness, then anger – and not just at Oliver. If Roz and Oona knew the truth about him, why hadn’t they told her?
But would she have believed them? Probably not. It was too great a leap, too soon. Carrie remembered Oona telling her that she could help in the process, but Carrie would have to find her own way to the truth. And she had, at last, but the abysmal squalor and horror of that truth was no consolation.
The music roared as Carrie got closer to it. She continued to sweat freely in the awful heat, and the stench in the air was now almost unbearable. Not far from the ovens she found a series of troughs and vats made out of thick, heavy-duty plastic. Numerous wooden rods lay across the top of some of these containers, and several thin strips of cloth dangled from each, soaking in murky liquids. Oliver had mentioned acid baths and rinses, Carrie remembered. The smell was at its foulest here and it stung her eyes and throat.
Carrie found Oliver nearby, in a zinc trough. He was naked and his features were blurred. The fumes burned in her nose. Bits of his flesh floated in the liquid, and Carrie realized he was slowly dissolving in some kind of acid. The tears came, and she clamped a hand over her mouth as her body shook. But was she crying for Oliver or herself? She had lost him a long time ago, she now understood. It stopped after a while, the stifled sobbing, and she felt very still and calm. She felt cold to the bone.
She became aware of the music again, pulsing through the hot and bitter air all around her. Marthe. It didn’t matter whether Oliver had died at the hands of Roz or Marthe – Marthe was still there, somewhere, and extremely dangerous. Now all Carrie wanted was to get away from that place and find the police.
But Marthe was just a few yards away, sitting at a workbench covered with hand tools and personal items. Carrie was trying to circle back to the door when she spotted her. She knew it had to be Marthe. Dark hair wildly teased and snarled, a leather apron. She was staring at her face in a small makeup mirror that sat on the workbench. Carrie watched for a moment as Marthe held a thin object – perhaps a carpenter’s nail or a needle – with pliers and heated it with a cigarette lighter. Then she rubbed a dab of cream on her right cheek, just below the eye, and carefully pressed the hot metal across her flesh. She gave a short squawk that was all but lost in the relentless music. Her hand didn’t waver, and when she was satisfied she put down the pliers and splashed her cheek with liquid from a glass. She looked quite pleased with herself.
Carrie shrank back, feeling ill again. She started to make her way silently through the infernal mess, using the ceiling and walls as a rough guide. She knew the general area where the door was – way back at the other end.
She went a short distance and then found a narrow path that snaked between racks and steel shelves. Before stepping into the aisle Carrie glanced back down it in the direction of where she’d seen Marthe – but Marthe was standing right there.
She grabbed Carrie by the hair and yanked her violently into the passageway. She clapped her hands over Carrie’s ears with such force that her head rang and she lost her equilibrium. She seemed to be floundering in thick air. A kind of happy
growling sound came from Marthe as she kicked Carrie’s feet out from under her, locked an arm under her throat and dragged her slowly towards the workbench area.
Carrie’s vision was a confused swirl and she had difficulty breathing. She tried to grab something, but her hand slapped uselessly against racks and shelves. She managed to dig in one heel briefly and push up with her leg, knocking Marthe off balance – but the other woman steadied herself at once and tightened her clamp on Carrie’s throat.
Carrie got hold of the edge of a tub, fingers dipping into liquid that burned sharply. Acid. But then it was too late to try splashing it at Marthe, who tugged her into the small open area by the workbench. She slammed Carrie’s ears again, and in a shower of swarming images Carrie saw the brown leather apron swim closer to her face, and then Marthe’s face zoom in, antic-eyed with glee, three horizontal scar lines on one cheek and the fresh burn wound on the other. Behind the bench, a clump of tall floor fans droned and rotated like giant motorized insect heads.
Marthe hesitated for a couple of seconds, as if deciding to take her time and enjoy this. Calmly she ripped Carrie’s blouse and then started to slap her about the face, a sudden flurry meant to keep her off balance more than to hurt her. Carrie took a wobbly step back, grabbed things blindly from the workbench and flung them at Marthe.
But Marthe was in her face again, unbothered, choking Carrie with both hands. There was a smile of casual delight in Marthe’s eyes and her mouth moved silently to some unknown language as she bent Carrie backwards, pinning her spine against the hard edge of the workbench. She eased her grip just long enough to let Carrie get a breath, slapped her several more times, and then went back to the slow strangulation.
Carrie knew dimly that she was being used as a toy. Marthe was a veteran at this, and had no fear. It would be so easy to give in and let her life be ended now. I’ve seen your world. Some world. Keep it. Maybe I’ll come back as a ghost to haunt this woman – but no, people like Marthe and Oliver are not haunted by the dead; they’re haunted by the living.
Fog Heart Page 28
