The Experimentalist

by Nick Salaman

  The man could not disguise a certain quality in his voice that seemed almost gloating. Marie wondered whether it was he who, after all, had perpetrated the monstrosities he spoke of. Somebody must have done? Or must they…?

  ‘And you really believe my father was behind some latter-day version of all this?’ she asked.

  ‘Patience, Marie. One of the last items I shall show you is a signed document in which he admits his guilt. But for the moment, the floor is held by Gilles de Rais. I have invited you here to impart my research into the life and crimes of that gentleman. If you will forgive me for one moment, I will just go and check that they have prepared the pleasaunce and the charnel house which will be our last ports of call before I end our tour in the withdrawing room. Look around meanwhile. Go on. Every corner will have its messages and memories…’

  Marie started to move towards one of the cells with David and then she noticed that Felix was back on the stairs and already closing the bottom door behind him – locking the bottom door.

  ‘Look out,’ David shouted. But it was too late. The huge lock clicked and they were alone. David rushed to the door as if to hammer on it with his hands.

  ‘Don’t,’ said Marie urgently. ‘That is what he wants.’

  ‘Fuck,’ said David. ‘What do we do now?’

  ‘We wait.’

  ‘He can’t keep us here long. We have friends who know where we are.’

  ‘He can keep us as long as he likes,’ she told him. ‘Everything they do is well thought out. But I don’t think it would suit them.’

  ‘Just as well I’m not claustrophobic,’ David exclaimed, somewhat to her surprise, since it rather suggested that he was.

  ‘Let’s look around a bit. There’s plenty of room,’ she said. Indeed the dungeon seemed to stretch out further than the castle itself. There was a central ‘office’ where presumably the gaoler sat, a horribly plausible monster, and there were grilled partitions for the prisoners, at least thirty such chambers. The air was chill and damp and gave out that faint, nauseating aroma of decay. Something the size of a cat scuttled across a cell as they looked in. Messages of despair, fear and impotent hate were scribbled on the walls.

  ‘If it wasn’t so horrible, this place would be a joke,’ she said.

  Sounds again, this time just below the level of human hearing, now began to steal across the psychic barrier of the senses, weeping and lamentations, sudden cries of pain, implorings and hopeless despair. At the end of one of the corridors, there was a larger room with a table and a strange sort of bed with a hole cut out of its middle. Underneath was a large pail. The ghost of a scream made her start.

  ‘I heard something then,’ said David.

  ‘What a hideous place,’ said Marie. ‘But you have to admire the showmanship. They have made a chamber of horrors out of nothing. They have invented their own legend. I am beginning to think that he is right; such horrors might have been contained in the fifteenth century, by a powerful lord, but this could not have happened here. It’s all too … big. The Manson murders were horrible but they were ranch-sized not castle-sized.’

  ‘You’re right. They were essentially a suburban nightmare with their creepy-crawlings through people’s houses while they were sleeping, and the murders mostly done by young girls.’

  ‘Then why did I believe what they told me,’ she asked, ‘that my father was involved? He wasn’t like that.’

  ‘You didn’t know anything about him until they told you something. Something is better than nothing if that’s all you know. And another thing. I’ve been wanting to say I’m so sorry.’

  ‘For what? It’s not your fault.’

  ‘For what I did to you.’

  He squeezed her hand and she squeezed his back. Did he mean abandoning her, or making her pregnant? He really did seem sorry. At that point, just in time, before she could kiss him, a key could be heard turning in the lock.

  ‘I do apologise,’ exclaimed Middleburg, calmly stepping inside. ‘Locked you in. Pure reflex, I’m afraid. We always lock up after showing people round. And then our receptionist buttonholed me.’

  ‘Oh really?’ said Marie. ‘We didn’t notice. Too busy exploring.’

  ‘It opens your eyes as to what went on,’ Middleburg said, sententiously, as they climbed back up the stairs after him. ‘He made them play hide and seek all over the castle, of course. The games were some of the worst things, according to one boy who came forward as a witness. When you were found, you were killed.’

  Middleburg led the way towards a large double back door which led out on to greenery beyond.

  ‘And the last one left?’ enquired David. ‘Did he or she get a reward?’

  ‘No. They were killed too.’

  ‘And who was the boy, the witness? Did he come forward or was he pushed?’ asked Marie.

  Middleburg made a noise like a church organ running out of puff. She took it to be a hollow laugh.

  ‘And now for the pleasaunce and the charnel house,’ he said.

  ‘What do you mean by the pleasaunce?’ David asked.

  ‘It is a part of the garden intended for enjoyment and recreation but in the days of mayhem it came to mean something between an open-air orgy and a place of shadows and secret terror. There is a summerhouse or gazebo there, which I shall show you, where we keep some of the documentation. And a maze where, I must warn you, it is better not to go. I do love a maze, don’t you?’

  He opened the door and disclosed an expanse of garden that seemed a profusion of colour painted against a background of green. ‘Please,’ Middleburg declared expansively, ‘explore and enjoy. But bear in mind the use to which this place of enchantment has been put. Though today, I admit, the thought of such things seems distant.’

  There were flowerbeds and climbing plants, trellises and bowers, pleached walks and quincunxes (which reminded Marie of the Holdsworths’ feeble attempts at such things in Beverly Hills), statues (many of them erotic but undeniably old and original), rustic seats and purling streams. All these and more rendered the place a delight to the nose and a joy to the eye. Trees of various kinds provided enclosure before an ancient brick wall which ran around, and behind, the profusion of flowers and trees. There was a yew maze in one corner which especially pleased Marie.

  ‘I cannot resist a maze,’ she cried, as she peered down the beckoning pathway.

  She had been given a book of mazes long before and had memorised many of them. There was something forbidden, secret and shy about them, as though they were protecting a heart.

  ‘I should warn you, it may take some time,’ said Middleburg. ‘As I said, it is better not to go there. It is where some of the darkest things took place.’

  ‘Perhaps later,’ said Marie.

  ‘Or maybe not,’ said David.

  ‘So … what do you say happened here?’ she asked Middleburg. ‘It looks, it feels, too good to be the scene of another of your mythical horrors. Don’t try and incriminate a garden any more than a person. Leave nature out of it.’

  ‘I wish I could, Marie. But, alas, Gilles and his friends delighted to practise their debauches in such places. They loved to defile beauty. It is what men do. It was their way. As for the maze, don’t you think it has been a place of terror as well as entertainment since classical days? Can you imagine finding yourself lost inside those dark green walls and being pursued by some nameless dread that finally turns into something at the centre, something worse than your worst fears?’

  She looked at Middleburg with a new respect, though perhaps respect was the wrong word. It was interesting that she now thought of him as Middleburg. Felix had dropped out of the running. He was altogether too many-layered to be confined in a first name. She was becoming aware of dimensions in the man taking him beyond what she had thought him to be: an insistent, dangerous, meddling, voyeuristic interloper which was bad enough. But she now glimpsed something darker, and qualities she could not immediately give a name to. Perhaps that was why he seemed
to have grown bigger. Fear was his food, he grew fat on it. Best not to show it or respond to it. He was like a visiting moon whose presence exerted dark tides.

  ‘So you think that was what the maze was about?’ she asked. ‘Not a harmless diversion?’

  ‘Maybe you should go in there, after all,’ Middleburg suggested.

  She was drawn to it. Perhaps there was something at the centre that might help her understand.

  ‘No … don’t…’ David interrupted. ‘Better not to meddle.’

  ‘So you believe me?’ Middleburg enquired, suavely.

  ‘I just think we don’t have much time,’ said David. It was evident that something he had seen or heard had got to him.

  ‘Then I think we had better proceed to the gazebo where we can examine some documentation,’ said Middleburg. He now led them towards a substantial summerhouse positioned at the confluence of three grassy paths. On entering they found themselves facing a table on which was arranged a selection of papers and photographs.

  ‘Here we have the evidence of a boy, Forel, who managed to escape from the castle during a game of hide and seek, or hide and kill as we now know it.’ He continued, ‘These are some photographs of exhumation taken on the premises here and other exhibits: a knife that was found on the premises with blood still encrusted on it and so forth.’

  ‘They are certainly gruesome,’ Marie declared, ‘but they prove nothing.’

  ‘Four children were dug up here,’ exclaimed Middleburg, ‘you surely don’t dispute that.’

  ‘I don’t dispute that they were dug up if you say so,’ replied Marie, stoutly, ‘but the question is, who put them in there? Where did they come from?’

  ‘To the charnel house, then,’ he said.

  ‘No,’ said Marie, ‘we have seen enough. I didn’t come here like a ghoul to gloat over long-distant crimes. I came to find out about my father.’

  ‘Come then. Let us sit and take a little wine,’ said Middleburg, ‘provided by your good friend Joe.’

  They did as he suggested on the banquette that ran around the little summer house. In a recess, a tray was laid out with three glasses and a bottle of Domaines Ott waiting for them. It crossed Marie’s mind that if he required some heavenly music, it would probably be on hand within barely a bar’s rest. How did he know that Joe was her friend?

  ‘So, then … my father…’ she reminded him. ‘What proof can you show me of his guilt? No need to spare my feelings. I’ve spent a lifetime being ashamed of what he did.’

  ‘I think you will enjoy this,’ said Middleburg, pouring wine from the Indian club-shaped bottle. ‘We bought the domaine last year. I don’t think there is a rosé to match it.’

  He and David sipped and, judging by David’s response, it was excellent. Marie drank too.

  ‘As for your father, I’m afraid you have been misled about him. He wasn’t here at all.’

  Marie choked over her glass. ‘Not here at all?’ she asked, ‘Then what…’

  ‘Your father did not come here,’ he continued, smoothly. ‘You did not have a father called Lavell. That name belonged to an educated man who took to drugs and murdered young men and boys for his perverted gratification, out on a ranch in the desert, in the early fifties. It was a famous name at the time. Your father was German, a brilliant scientist and an SS doctor who might have been sentenced to death at Nuremberg for war crimes, but he was taken in by the US Army before other authorities could catch up with him. He couldn’t have come here, immediately to this place, at that time. He was head of a small chemical laboratory doing useful work for national security in Seattle.’

  Middleburg’s bombshell, delivered so matter-of-factly, stopped both of them in their tracks. David rocked slightly as if troubled by a shock wave. Marie was surprised by her reaction – it was indeed a shock, but anything was better than uncertainty. She had a father, at least. He was here, not very far away.

  ‘He was what?’ David almost shouted.

  ‘Why was I encouraged to think of him as a latter-day Bluebeard?’ she asked.

  ‘Because it was less troubling for you than the truth. Your father was involved in supervising or personally conducting vital experiments on people in Nazi Germany. He made them lie in freezing water until they passed out or died, injected them with lethal bacteria and dangerous drugs from which they sometimes died in pain because the experiment was conducted in a hurry, corners had to be cut and the experiment had gone wrong. We thought that, growing up in Britain where people thought the very German language was like the devil talking, you would prefer a French Bluebeard for a father than a Nazi criminal – the lesser of two evils. Even so, as you will understand, we thought it best that you should grow up … somewhat apart.’

  ‘But who are you to think best at all? What are you to me? What have you ever been? Why could you not say my father was a dear man who died in the war? Why did I have to grow up under a cloud? It was all a game, wasn’t it? You think you can throw in unexpectedness like God, just when I am getting used to something…’

  Middleburg turned on her abruptly. ‘What you don’t seem to understand is that you and I are alike. We come from a very dark background. I own you, Marie. I can do what I like.’

  ‘Excuse me…’ David protested. ‘You can’t say that.’

  ‘I would pipe down if I were you, young man. I saw the way you looked when you heard her father was a Nazi murderer wanted for war crimes.’

  David, to his credit, looked sheepish.

  ‘Why did you lead me on with such lies?’ Marie asked him. ‘Lies, false clues, red herrings, wild geese … What you are telling me may be more lies.’ A thought struck her. ‘My god, it was you, wasn’t it? You are my father.’

  He shook his head in amusement. ‘On a huge hill, cragged and steep, Truth stands, and he that will reach her, about must and about must go – your poet John Donne, I believe.’

  ‘It’s no use quoting Donne at me. I will find out, you know,’ she told him.

  ‘You must understand, my dear, that, without me, you are nothing. I found you. I took you on when you were no more than a week old, when I was myself driven out of my own country. I arranged for you to be looked after as you grew up. You owe me your life. With me, you have all the money and power you could ever want. You are my ward. You could even be my heiress and rich beyond measure. Without me, you have no identity. You don’t even have a surname let alone a passport. So … I have my reasons for disclosing the truth by degrees…’

  Marie was silent for a moment. David was clearly thinking about it too.

  ‘What about all the evidence?’ asked Marie, changing the subject, for she too had seen David’s expression. ‘What about the letters from my father – and the documents from Gilles himself?’

  ‘All fake. Hollywood is full of scriptwriters and failed novelists. Some of them even Oxford graduates. We have every resource for make-believe here in Los Angeles. As I told you, this is a city of forgery. What are movies other than forgeries of real life?’

  ‘Why should I believe you now after all the lies? You too could be a forgery.’

  ‘I suspect you would argue with the Devil himself,’ said Middleburg, jovially.

  ‘You would know more about that than I do,’ she replied.

  Middleburg’s cool cheeks showed just a hint of pink. His whole world had been broken in the fall of his country: what was there that could be worse? It took a great deal to unsettle him.

  ‘You’ve made him cross,’ whispered David. ‘Is that wise under the circumstances?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ***

  Middleburg led them out of a door in the end wall surrounding the pleasaunce, explaining that the castle would originally have had a wide bailey of ten acres or so. Instead of this, the more modern concept of a walled garden had been applied by the original millionaire who had brought the castle over.

  ‘In the light of our recent conversation, we will skip the charnel house,’ Middleburg now announced.
‘Today it is just a circular stone building furnished with some rather disturbing photographs. Instead we will visit the labs and living quarters of those of our technicians and researchers who are quartered here.’

  They saw now that, outside the wall, a whole development of new buildings, masked by trees, had been erected in stone to match the colour of the castle but in a style that approximated to the cottages of some utilitarian German village, strung out on either side of a street going up the hill. They looked slightly, in that way some buildings do, as if they had been put up for a film set of Escape from Colditz. As Marie and David inspected more closely, they saw it was by no means a picture of rural Teutonic charm. Instead, there was a clinical precision about the scene. White-coated men could be observed, walking about, speaking together, taking the air and entering and leaving the dwellings.

  ‘These are some of the very specialised laboratories of Messinger,’ Middleburg told them. ‘We try and follow tradition when we are here, admitting only special guests of the family. You, of course, are more special than most, untainted by your German father’s business failure and his questionable clinic in Germany and inheritor of a portion of his estate. You are, in a sense, coming home.’

  ‘A portion?’ queried David.

  It was a question Marie herself had been going to ask. It irked her just a little that David had asked it first. It was not his estate.