The Experimentalist

by Nick Salaman

  ‘What do you think, Joe?’ she asked.

  ‘I’ll do some sniffing around behind the scenes when I am next up there. I have wine to deliver and, as it’s a major account, I usually turn up myself, so they won’t be surprised to see me. The man is clever, he’s powerful, he’s devious and he wants something from you. There will be a moment of cards on the table, but I don’t think we’re quite there yet. That’s when I want to be around.’

  ‘How about you, Margot?’

  ‘I think you should take David.’

  Margot likes Joe, thought Marie. Now there’s an idea.

  ***

  Two days later, an invitation from The Other Judas, Inc arrived in an embossed envelope. It contained a card from Middleburg inviting her on Wednesday the following week to accompany him on a tour of the Château Cauchemar where she might be interested in certain things that had come to light. She was welcome to bring a fellow guest of her own choosing.

  She replied giving the name of the guest of her choice. David had preened about it, forgetting his grump – since when had he become a preener? Was it wise to introduce him to Middleburg? It would give him another pawn to play with, but she wanted David to see him close up. Festina lente, that was the watchword. She felt bad about Joe because he was a good man and she really liked him – possibly better than David – but David had a part to play in all this and he was the father of her child. Let Margot have Joe if he liked her, it would be only fair.

  Meanwhile, there was one thing that caused her slight concern. She was glad she had given David the news about the baby, their little lost girl, because there was just a chance that Middleburg would air the subject, whether out of carelessness, ignorance or malice – probably the latter. She would have felt guilty about not telling David if he then learnt about it from anyone else, even though he was the man who’d dumped her when she needed him. It still rankled. How different her life would have been if he had stood by her! Or maybe not.

  Middleburg would know about that. Middleburg never dropped a catch.

  ***

  On the appointed day, a large Mercedes appeared, bigger than the Red Indian’s Rolls and with Middleburg sitting in the back. He greeted them with a kind of grave deference and indicated that Marie should sit next to him and David should sit on a plush pull-down seat opposite.

  ‘I am glad you decided to come,’ he announced to Marie as they made themselves comfortable in their respective quarters. ‘I understand from my sources that you have seen certain documents purporting to have come from your father, Giles Lavell, deceased.’

  He gave no indication that they had already spoken of the documents at his office. He motioned to the driver and the huge car surged forwards like a tidal wave.

  ‘They do not purport,’ replied Marie, calmly, ‘they do come from him. He wrote them himself. They are vouched for by a very reliable witness.’

  ‘They were vouched for but the very reliable witness is dead. Things aren’t always what they seem, as Gilbert and Sullivan remind us. Skimmed milk masquerades as cream.’

  ‘It is something I’ve come to expect, especially in my dealings with you and your company; there has been plenty of skimming and very little hard fact,’ Marie told him. ‘Nonetheless, I shall believe in the reliability of the documents unless there is some strong evidence to the contrary.’

  ‘I am glad you say that, Marie, for that is exactly what I will show you at Cauchemar.’

  ‘It had better be good,’ said David, with a glance at Marie.

  ‘Oh it will be, Mr um…’

  ‘Drummond,’ Marie told him.

  ‘Drummond,’ said David, almost simultaneously

  ‘Ah yes. Mr Drummond. It will not just be good, it will be irrefutable.’

  ‘I would like to remind you, before we get too comfortable,’ Marie told him, ‘that the time before the last time we met was when you were holding me against my will in your house in Beverly Hills.’

  ‘Against your will? You were sick, Marie. You had had a breakdown. I personally had saved you from a situation where you were – I don’t exaggerate – dying from complications following the stillbirth of your child.’

  ‘Stillbirth? I don’t think so,’ said Marie. ‘The little girl is called Lily and you are still cruelly holding her. You have kidnapped her. You have stolen her from her rightful mother. How cruel is that?’

  ‘I didn’t know that, Marie,’ said David. ‘You were dying? You didn’t tell me that.’

  It was true, she hadn’t, but it was irritating of him to say so, nonetheless. It undermined the united front.

  ‘There is plenty you don’t know, Mr ah Drummond,’ observed Middleburg, drily, communicating to David with a lift of the eyebrow that she harboured this idée fixé.

  ‘Such as?’ David was hot for information now, but Middleburg continued imperturbably as he fixed his eye on Marie.

  ‘I took you in because I cared for you, brought you over to California to recuperate, found you the best doctors, paid for your medication, raised you from your sick bed … and you were well on the way to recovery when you suddenly – with the help of a petty criminal who had been paid for his involvement – got it into your head that you must “escape”. Maybe that too was part of your recovery and I am glad that we went along with it, since it seems to me that you are now, indeed, back to your old self. I became very fond of you, as you know, and, foolishly, I thought that you might reciprocate my feelings, but I realise that was just the fantasy of an older man. I am sure you won’t blame me for that. You are a very bewitching young lady.’

  Although she might have taken it as a compliment, he said it as though it were a slight misfortune.

  The Mercedes had wafted them through the suburbs and was now cruising with imperceptible sensation – save the ticking of the clock – down the freeway and out of town while Middleburg proceeded with his plausible explanations. Now and then, David glanced at Marie to check her reactions and indeed his own.

  At length, they pulled up outside the castle, as Marie had done with Joe some weeks back. It was high summer now and all around the hills looked parched and the trees in the valley were beginning to show the slight degree of listlessness that presages drought.

  ‘Last time I was parked here,’ she told Middleburg, ‘someone took a pot shot at us.’

  He seemed perplexed and concerned, though not altogether surprised. ‘Really?’ he queried, ‘Are you sure?’

  ‘The bullet went whizzing overhead.’

  ‘Must’ve been the gamekeeper. He’s a real old boy. We had some poachers earlier, out of season, and that really infuriates him. I’ll have a word.’

  The Mercedes now embarked on the silent ascent of the driveway, finally pulling up on a wide circle of gravel in front of the castle.

  ‘I hope you’ve warned him we’re coming,’ said Marie.

  ‘Please don’t worry your head about anything. You are a guest of The Other Judas. We always use that name, that company, for PR purposes.’

  ‘I understand he was the saint of hopeless causes,’ said David.

  ‘Very good,’ replied Middleburg. ‘Information is everything. In the quantum world, it is the one thing that cannot be destroyed. Now, may I suggest you leave the car and follow me? You will find the castle deserted today. No cleaning staff, no groundsmen, not even a gamekeeper. I have asked them all to stay away so we can have the place to ourselves. Your tour of the castle will take in the old story of Bluebeard and the more recent tales of California’s very own nightmare.’

  They followed him as he talked on. ‘The papers in your possession say that your father was the victim of an elaborate deception while all he wanted to do was to study. Is that correct?’

  ‘That is the general drift of them, yes,’ Marie told him.

  ‘What if I told you that he was deceiving himself as well as you? That he was the origin and perpetrator of the crimes and murders of which he was accused? That, in the end, the drugs that he was tak
ing, particularly the LSD, began to turn his mind?’

  Marie contained herself at the impertinence of the man. She felt comforted and reassured by David’s presence by her side. ‘I would want you to prove it.’

  ‘I see you are more confident now with your old boyfriend by your side. But isn’t his arrival at this particular juncture of your life another example of the unlikeliness of things?’

  Middleburg was smiling gently, as he so often did, but Marie seethed with disquiet. What was he insinuating? That David’s appearance at Merrymaids had not been coincidence at all? And if it was not, what had it been?

  ***

  Middleburg led them up the front steps and into a hall typical of the kind of castle it was meant to be. It was tall, wide and designed to impress. On the wall were various heads of animals and one or two portraits of hairy-looking ancestors. There was armour and weaponry, there was a great bear, stuffed and rampant. Right down the middle of the hall was a long table and at one end stood another table slightly raised on a dais, the high table where the lord and lady would sit with special guests.

  So this is the place that the old beatnik called Daddy, back in the squat off King’s Cross, had spoken of, not with relish, he wouldn’t have felt that, but with a kind of awe. How far away that seemed now, far away in time and place! She could hardly believe it had been her, living with those people. Where were they now? Where was Ivo? Wherever do good men go when the clocks stop ticking? And these in themselves were questions that now nagged at her with another thought. What if Daddy, his very name of Daddy, and his talk of castles and beatniks in California, had not been coincidental after all but had served as a disturbance, a foreshadowing? Brickville had been up there too in Kings Cross, ferreting around, and worse. What if she were part of a long conspiracy that had framed her entire life? It was too absurd, and yet, it all made sense. And if it were true – which we could hardly think possible – what purpose could it possibly have?

  Middleburg now led them to the far end of the hall where there was a small side-chamber under a vaulted ceiling. He stopped at a circular grille in the floor and peered down. The two guests stepped forward beside him. Cold dank air and a smell of bones rose up to greet them.

  ‘Down there are the dungeons,’ Middleburg told them. ‘That is where we tell the tourists some of the horrors took place. We will go down there in a moment but first I want to show you more of the floor we are on. Of course, I want you to remember that what we are speaking of all happened in France nearly six hundred years ago, though the walls seem to recall it as though it were yesterday. Some say that stone can receive and record the impressions that we force upon it. What you must also remember is that Gilles de Rais, whose castle this was, was a very plausible and powerful man, as well as being a Marshal of France and fellow general of Joan of Arc. One did not argue with Gilles de Rais.’

  ‘What about my father?’ she said.

  ‘I am giving you the Bluebeard tour,’ said Middleburg. ‘Questions later.’

  At that moment, Marie thought she heard, almost at the level of silence, a scream.

  ‘Did you hear that?’ she asked.

  ‘What?’

  Of course, it was a trick of the acoustics.

  ‘Nothing,’ she said. ‘Just me.’

  ‘I suspect you are a little bit psychic, Marie,’ said Middleburg.

  ‘She is impressionable, like myself,’ said David. ‘And who wouldn’t be in a place like this?’

  Middleburg held up a hand. ‘Bear with me,’ he said. ‘All will be explained.’ He moved them on through the building.

  ‘There are various other service rooms here,’ he continued, indicating the various directions, ‘a butler’s pantry, a scullery and a withdrawing room for the lord and lady and special guests which is here behind the hall.’ He opened another door which disclosed a rather more comfortable chamber with no beasts on the wall but rather some hangings and even pictures. A stringed instrument lay against the wall. ‘A rebeck,’ Middleburg explained, ‘a fifteenth century version of the viol which in turn pre-dated the violin.’

  There were tourist leaflets on the table. Marie picked one up. It showed the design of a maze; she loved a maze so she slid it into her pocket. Middleburg did not seem to object. He was proud of his marketing for Cauchemar Castle.

  ‘We have open days, banquets and feasts but only for privileged groups,’ he said. ‘People cannot just turn up – it would interfere with our work here – we are very strict about that. But people do indeed seem to have a macabre fascination with what went on here all those years ago. We shall now go down to the dungeons, always a popular port of call on party nights.’

  ‘Doesn’t that seem in rather bad taste?’ asked Marie, crossly. Even if her father had not been involved, people had died within these walls, at some point or other.

  ‘I suppose it may seem so to you, Marie. I can understand that. But Château Cauchemar is now a discreet commercial venture, it is a profit centre of its own in the TOJI empire and we have to go where the market is. What we do is far more demure than the proceedings of yesteryear when Gilles de Rais’ preferences were what mattered. Non-stop parties, orgies, trials, beatings, breakdowns, magical practices, demon raising and, apparently, semi-ritual slaughter. That is what I should call bad taste, all with a considerable injection of drugs. We still allow weddings, balls and extensive functions to take place but all on the understanding that the proceedings are somewhat mitigated. Hallowe’en occasions are very popular. Human sacrifice is discouraged.’ He smiled wintrily as if to indicate that he had made a joke.

  David looked at Marie with the air of one who has heard more than he bargained for. ‘Be that as it may,’ he said, ‘all these things are speculative, they are assertions, they do not prove that Marie’s father was here too.’

  ‘I am coming to that,’ said Middleburg. ‘For the moment, I am just giving you a tour d’horizon. It is important that you should feel the redolence of a place where so much evil happened. I will take you now to the tower where some of the scenes of horror were perpetrated and thence to the dungeons, which need no introduction since horror is implicit in the very word. After that we will proceed to the pleasaunce and the charnel house outside, which are also locations where offences took place. Bodies were thrown into the charnel house even before they were dead.

  ‘Where the offences were supposed to have taken place,’ corrected David.

  ‘Quite so, quite so. You make the point again, Mr Drummond, but you will retract it, I believe, before the tour is finished. I will now take you to a secret room in the north tower where at least six young people of both sexes were violated and killed…’

  He led them up a narrow, indeed claustrophobia-inducing, circular staircase whose stone walls appeared stained with some red substance. At length they stopped in a rounded chamber distinguished by narrow arrow-slits of windows and a number of iron hooks in the wall. For a moment a tableau of three figures – two young and one in full maturity – a boy and a girl of around thirteen years of age, cowering in front of a tall man with a whip, flooded her mind, and as quickly vanished.

  ‘Here the victims were strung up,’ Middleburg continued, ‘and sodomized. Some were first killed and then raped, all perpetrated by Gilles de Rais in the years 1430 to 1440. There is a book here of illustrations if you wish to see… It is thought some aspects of the original were re-enacted in orgies here only fifteen years ago.’ He started opening a venerable volume, bound in tooled leather.

  ‘No, thank you,’ exclaimed Marie, hastily. ‘We are not ghouls. Is this what you show your escorted tours?’

  ‘Indeed it is. It is always salutary to remind people of the depths of depravity to which the human race can fall, don’t you think? They seem to have an appetite for such instruction. Let us now, talking of depth, visit the dungeons…’ He led them down now, through the claustrophobic staircase, to the ground floor where, at the base of the stair, was another door set in the wall. Middlebur
g produced a key, suitably large and presumably mediaeval, with which to open it. The dank air floated up, laced (or was it her imagination) with suffering, hopelessness, tears and blood. He pressed a switch, which illuminated precipitous circular steps with a dim light, and led them down to another door at the bottom which he also unlocked.

  ‘Do you have many accidents as you show people round?’ asked David.

  ‘Quite a few,’ answered Middleburg casually.

  ‘Could be expensive.’

  ‘Not at all, Mr Drummond. Privileged visitors – and we only have privileged visitors – have to sign a form before they start saying that they waive all rights of recompense. And still they come! A night at the Château Cauchemar is often a prize in the product competitions the ad agency dreams up.’

  ‘What happened here, according to you?’ Marie asked.

  ‘Girls and boys were sometimes locked up here for days, consigned to the care of a monstrous gaoler who appeared sometimes in the form of Gilles de Rais, otherwise known as Bluebeard. No one ever escaped. Imagine what they must have felt. Bribed with sweetmeats or money, and then … the cold, the hunger, the dread, the pain…’