by Sarah Rayne
And Dan was neither inarticulate nor important.
Yes, it would be a pity to let Dan get away.
Dan had gone back to Sleeping Beauty’s origins, back beyond the Grimm brothers’ emasculated version, beyond the nineteenth-century Covent Garden actor-managers with their pantomimic extravaganzas, and certainly back beyond Disney and the film-makers, to the story’s core.
He had begun with Charles Perrault’s startling tale, and had found it so very much grislier than he had realised that his imagination had been fired and he had worked backwards to uncover other sources. There was an Italian writer called Giambattista Basile who had published an even earlier version than Perrault’s, around 1636. Dan half-bullied, half-coaxed his local library into tracking down a translation, promising any number of author’s acknowledgements and credits by way of reward. It occurred to him as well that Perrault and Basile and one or two others might provide good subjects for biographies sometime, and he jotted a few notes down. When he finally got Basile’s translation, he was so pleased that, without thinking, he took it to bed to read that night, only to discover that it was so strong and so macabre it would probably give him a fresh batch of nightmares to put alongside the ones already engendered by Oliver’s material on Victorian madhouses. Dan had to get up and check that all the doors in the flat were locked before he could read any more of Signor Basile.
Perrault and Basile both presented the villainess not as the cross fairy godmother who had sulked at not being invited to the christening and thrown out a bad-tempered curse as a result but as a fierce, blood-guzzling, child-eating creature who, in Perrault’s picturesque prose, ‘had come of a race of Ogres, and that it was whispered about the court that she had Ogreish inclinations, and when she saw little children passing by, she had all the difficulty in the world to refrain from falling upon them . . .’
Monsieur Perrault, clearly anxious that none of the horror should be lost on his readers, added a rider which further informed his audiences: ‘Now an Ogre is a giant that has long teeth and claws, and with a raw head and bloody bones, that runs away with naughty little boys and girls and eats them up . . .’ Which was all a very long way indeed from Tchaikovsky and Walt Disney.
Basile portrayed the villainess as the prince’s mother, but Perrault portrayed her as the prince’s wife. Adultery as opposed to mother-in-law problems, then. There was a black irony in regarding the fairy princess as the prince’s bit on the side, but whichever way you viewed it, the prince had not been nearly as eligible as Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm, and certainly Walt Disney, had made him out. As for the ogreish lady herself, Dan felt a cold prickle on the back of his neck at the resemblance to Margot. He felt a clutch of fear in his stomach at the resemblance between Margot and Thalia Caudle.
He burrowed deeper in, finding echoes in the unlikeliest of places, like a bloody thread running through scores of gentle romances. Yes, there was unquestionably material for a half-scholarly, half-entertaining non-fiction book here. Dan carefully noted source references as he went.
The legend surfaced in English lore as well as French and Neapolitan; Dan thought it was even possible that Shakespeare had tipped his Elizabethan bonnet to it in the writing of Titus Andronicus. There were resonances in Norse legends as well, most notably in the Volsunga Saga where Brynhild was placed in a deserted castle by Odin and surrounded by a massive barrier of flame in order to escape the curse of being mated to a coward, and a human coward to boot. Dan supposed that this was something any self-respecting immortal might go a long way to avoid.
But it was amazing how strongly the menace of the prince’s mamma came across.
It was amazing how strongly the sensuality came across when Dan heard Thalia’s voice on the phone. There was a purring resonance, and there was certainly no hint of the strange and arousing ferocity of last time.
The supper invitation was proffered with a kind of amused cap-doffing to the conventions. I’m really inviting you to bed again, Thalia Caudle was saying. I know it, and you know it. But it’s polite to pretend for a while, isn’t it?
Dan thought he could be forgiven for feeling a quickening of his heartbeat as he went up the stairs of the Great Portland Street block. Well, all right, it was more than just a quickening, and it was not his heart that was most affected either. But, for heaven’s sake, he was surely allowed a scudding of lust-ridden apprehension. Of apprehension-ridden lust.
Thalia, on the phone, had said something about leaving the door on the latch for him – ‘Just push it open and come inside’ – and it was ridiculous in the extreme to hear the dark echo: Lift the latch and step inside, my dear . . . But Dan did hear it, and the scales tipped over to apprehension because this was surely the timeless invitation by all dark ladies of chill and hungry intent, and by all icy-hearted snow queens of sorcerous lineage. Come inside, my dear . . . But here I go again anyway. Straight into the land of the greenwood shade where sinisterly beautiful sorceresses offer the poisoned chalice and the tainted apple. You’d think I’d know better.
But Margot and Thalia were still inextricably tangled in his mind, and Margot, his own dark, sensuous Margot, had slid under his skin and fastened her claws, if not about his heart then around his loins. He disliked and distrusted Margot, but he could not deny her sensual pull. And it had been almost impossible to forget the feeling that Margot’s phantom had come into the bed with them that night, raking her nails across his skin, sliding her hands between his legs . . . As Dan went warily into the flat, he thought that Margot was at his side. Down into the greenwood shade together then.
Thalia was lying on the smooth-sheeted bed, only her bare shoulders and arms visible. There was candlelight again, just as there had been last time, only tonight there were dozens upon dozens of tiny glowing flames, reflecting over and over in the mirrors. There was a strong scent of expensive perfume and candle warmth, and Dan could almost hear the heady, sensuous thrumming of the air.
Thalia said softly, ‘The wine is in the cooler over there, Dan. Will you pour us both a glass?’
So it was not only the greenwood shade, it was the poisoned chalice as well. But she does it with style, thought Dan, pausing transfixed in the doorway. You have to admit she does it with tremendous style.
‘And when you’ve poured the wine, come to bed, Dan,’ said Thalia.
For the second time Dan fell fathoms down into the surreal world of his own creating.
There was virtually no conversation after that soft invitation; it was as if Thalia had created a flame-lit cave, a glowing secret world for them both; a land singing with sexual stirrings and erotic rustlings. To have made polite small talk would have splintered the atmosphere. Never let it be said I killed an atmosphere, thought Dan, shedding his clothes at speed and turning back the sheets.
This time it started off by being easier, and by being very nearly companionable because they were a little more familiar with one another’s bodies. Dan was managing to keep Margot at bay, and Thalia’s hands were insistent and exciting, her fingers flicking at nerve endings, her tongue probing. She pushed him flat on the bed, and bent over him. Dan drew in his breath sharply as he felt the silken brush of her hair between his thighs. Her lips closed over him, working expertly, and for a time that could have been five minutes or five hours he was totally lost in voluptuous eroticism.
Without warning, something began to seep into the warm sensuous room; something jarring and faintly disturbing. It reached Dan through a warm sea of pure pleasure and rasped lightly on his mind. Something to do with Thalia? Was she about to suggest something outrageous? Something that would probably be erotic but that might verge on the perverted? Wild visions of throbbing sex toys –the empty wine bottle, even? – of animals introduced into the bedroom or whips and chains and near-strangulation to heighten orgasm spun through his mind. He had absolutely no idea how he would react if any of these were proposed.
Thalia lifted her head and said, very softly, ‘And now, Dan, I’m going to blind
fold you.’
It was not precisely what Dan had been imagining, but it was unexpected for all that. He blinked and stared at her. She reached across the bed and took a silk scarf from the bedside table. Their eyes met. ‘All right?’ said Thalia, still in the same purring voice. Her tongue came out to lick her lips and Dan stared, caught in fascination.
Blindfold. He said, ‘I’ve heard of it, although I’ve never actually done it.’
‘It concentrates the senses, Dan.’
‘I don’t think mine could be any more concentrated than they are at the moment. But let’s find out.’ He took the silk blindfold from her hands and twisted it round his head, tying it in a loose knot at the back.
The silk did not quite blot out the candlelight. Dan could still make out tiny specks of flames, but nothing more. When Thalia’s tongue flicked him again, and then when he felt her mouth go round him once more, he half-closed his eyes and gave in to the swelling waves of arousal a second time. Every fibre of his body was focused on what she was doing to him; there was nothing in the world save this warm, candle-scented, female-scented bower, and there was nothing save the silken mouth of the woman bending over him.
He felt her move slightly, and he thought one hand went out to the bedside table. She had done this last time; not making a fuss, not even referring to it, simply sliding the condom over him without comment. It had been a smooth, practised movement, but it had also been unexpectedly exciting. In another minute she would do it again, and then Dan would push her on to her back and go in—
There was a faint scrape of something that had nothing to do with condoms waiting discreetly and conveniently in bedside tables. Dan half turned his head. Something on the bedside table. She had put something on the bedside table. She was enclosing him again, moving up and down, her hair swinging across his legs which was arousing by itself. In another minute he would be beyond the point of control . . . There was something different about the angle of her head. She was lying more to one side and for some reason this broke into the mood of heady passion. Dan reached up to pull the blindfold away.
Thalia was still crouching between his thighs, her mouth and her lips working with that deadly expertise. But she was facing the small bedside cabinet, and her eyes were on the silver-framed photograph that was angled towards her. It had not been there earlier on; Dan knew it had not.
The photograph showed a young man with Imogen Ingram’s eyes but with a cruel mouth and fair hair. Edmund. Edmund.
Thalia had been watching the photograph with unblinking worshipping eyes all the time she was licking Dan into orgasm.
Sickness welled up in his throat; at the same instant he felt his body spin out of control and spasm in climax.
They did not leave the bedroom to eat; Thalia brought food in, and Dan saw with a sinking heart that it was the kind of sensuous, tactile food that they could feed to one another, in an extension of the earlier passion. Cold duck with cherries and triangles of brown bread spread with rich pâté. There were petits-beurre spread with almonds and melted chocolate, and small ripe grapes which had been dipped in sweet dessert wine and then in sugar. She’ll certainly expect me to feed her with the grapes, he thought, torn between revulsion and a sudden treacherous stab of fresh arousal. This is either immensely sexual or it’s farcically old hat. Hell and the devil, I really don’t want to screw her again! But it looks as if I’ll have to. Noblesse oblige. I only hope I can oblige after what I saw earlier. Thank God she’s brought in another bottle of wine at any rate. That ought to settle matters. One way or another.
Thalia was still asleep in the tumbled bed when Dan finally slipped out and dressed with silent swiftness in the bathroom.
He used the loo and scowled at his reflection in the mirror. He was not really in hangover territory, but there was the suspicion of a skewering headache above one eye and his mouth felt intolerably dry. Too much wine, drunk too quickly. Too much sex with somebody who was mentally having her sex with someone else? And that someone her dead son? But this was too convoluted and too potentially worrying a thought to consider yet. Dan concentrated on the immediate and the tangible, which was getting a cold drink before leaving.
He padded through to the kitchen. There was a carton of milk on one of the worktops, and he flipped the top open and poured it into a tumbler. It was fresh but it was at room temperature, and he opened the fridge for an ice cube, only to find that the tray was empty. That was the trouble with service flats, small details got missed by cleaners. He glanced round the kitchen, and his eye fell on the chest freezer in the far corner.
He did not stop to think that freezers are usually kept solely for food rather than for neat little trays of ice cubes; he did not think, either, about invading anyone’s privacy – people do not normally keep their bank statements or unit trust account numbers in the deep freeze.
It held the usual jumble of stand-by food. Bread and bags of frozen vegetables and ice cream and packs of steaks and chops. Dan propped the lid up and moved a pack of chicken portions aside, exposing the lower section of the cabinet.
Exposing what was lying on the freezer bottom.
The kitchen tilted and spun sickeningly, and jagged tag ends of memory splintered his mind. Imogen bringing in the covered dish that was supposed to be a baked ham but that had not been a baked ham at all. The bloodied fragments of legend about Sybilla and Lucienne Ingram, prowling those grim pages of Ingram history. Even, incredibly, snippets of half-understood information about human transplants and human embryos, about kidneys and livers and eyes that were kept at sub-zero temperatures and severed limbs packed in ice until they could be grafted on or sewn in or joined. And the nineteenth-century anatomists plundering fresh graves for the raw material of their groping research. But the anatomists had had to use formaldehyde or formalin; they had not had the advantages of modern freezing processes.
They would not have been able to put a human head in a modern freezer and pack it with ice so that it was glazed and hoar-rimmed, so that its once-golden hair was matted and stringy, and so that it stared with clouded ice-poached eyes at whoever lifted the lid.
Chapter Eighteen
By the time he let himself into the blessed normality of his own flat, Dan had passed through a dozen different emotions, ranging through repulsion to perplexity and then finally to downright disbelief.
What he had seen must have a perfectly innocuous explanation, and the likeliest was that he had misinterpreted. Almost certainly it had been an animal, and something to do with cooking. But people didn’t eat the heads of animals, did they? At least not any more. Vague notions of chitterlings and sweetbreads crossed his mind, along with memories of his grandmother telling how people made brawn during the war because you had to use what food you could get. Dan thought there might conceivably still be enthusiasts who hoarded pig’s faces in freezers and then boiled them up to make brawn and it was probably very good indeed, but homemade brawn and Thalia Caudle were not two things that occurred to you in the same breath.
What he had found was not credible at all. Margot might with impunity stalk Lady-Macbeth fashion through the pages of his book, dealing out death and mutilation and boiling away troublesome corpses, but Thalia would not. This was the twentieth century, for goodness’ sake; people in London and respectable suburbia did not do things like that.
People in London and respectable suburbia did do it. Women did it as much as men, more often than men sometimes. They lived in ordinary places like Gloucester and they had light, feminine names like Rosemary West, or they prowled the moors of northern England in the 1960s and were called Myra Hindley. Or they lived in America and stored chopped-up bodies under the floor and then boiled them up in a cauldron to eat . . . Oh God, yes. Nothing left remarkable beneath the visiting moon, Daniel.
Yes, but they were surely all mad, those people. Then was Thalia mad? Not raving mad, not schizophrenic or depressive or melancholic. But fee-fi-fo-fum mad. Mad as in, ‘Let me strip the flesh from your
bones, my dear.’ Mad as in, ‘Let me store the head of my mutilated son and croon over it by the dead vast midnight.’ But this was so bizarre an image that he refused to consider it.
And then another fact struck him.
He had been trying to persuade himself that it had been the carcass of an animal he had seen, but if he could not tell the difference between a pig’s head and a human’s, even after the better part of two bottles of Chablis, he had a severe problem.
He had been able to tell the difference. The head had been human. It had frosted golden hair, and a crushed-in mouth and splintered cheekbones. Edmund Caudle, carefully preserved. You should recognise him if anyone should, Daniel, you were the one who saw the photograph tonight while Thalia thought you were still blindfold. Yes, and you were the one who clanged the lid down on the appalling thing while all the mourners stood around in mute, helpless horror that afternoon. And if the thing was real then, it was real tonight. Because if you were hallucinating on the day of Edmund’s funeral, then so were about twenty other people.
He considered this. Everyone had believed that Imogen was responsible for that gruesome episode; everyone thought it was the Ingram taint erupting and boiling over in a huge insane froth, and they had put Imogen in a clinic somewhere as a result. Dan did not know where the place was, but it did not matter because if Imogen was in a clinic somewhere she could not have put her cousin’s head in the freezer of the Great Portland Street flat.
Only one person could have done that, and it followed, therefore, that the same person had caused the thing to appear at the lunch. Someone who had wanted it to seem that Imogen was mad. Someone who wanted to get Imogen out of the way and get her hands on the Ingram empire and the Ingram money. Someone who had been named as Imogen’s guardian, and who perforce had the control of Royston Ingram’s publishing empire.
Thalia Caudle.
But Thalia was not Margot – it was vital to keep remembering that. Yes, but that did not mean she was not capable of doing something monstrous. People performed all manner of monstrous actions to get their hands on fortunes. Imogen had been very neatly put out of the way, and was presumably reasonably safe until she was ready to pass out of Thalia’s guardianship. This was most likely at the age of eighteen, but Royston Ingram’s will might overrule the law and as far as the company was concerned Imogen might be a minor until she was twenty-one.
