by Sarah Rayne
But she’s plotting, he thought, drifting in and out of sleep, occasionally waking to find her in bed with him, appalled at the way she could still coax a response from him. She’s plotting all the time – I can feel that she is. And when she moves, then I’ll move as well.
He studied the food she brought him, with the idea of evading whatever drug he was being fed. Soup could be doctored with crushed tablets and so could the glasses of milk that accompanied most of the meals. Dan tipped all the soup and milk down the loo, and ate only bread, pieces of chicken, and cheese, and was careful to fake drowsiness. At least his villainess was not a mean villainess; Margot would probably have left him to die with a hunk of dry bread and a pitcher of water.
He drank water from the handbasin cold tap, sending up a prayer that it came directly from the mains and not some disgusting septic tank arrangement. And at least Thalia had not tied him up, which Margot certainly would have done.
But despite his care, some of the sedative got through, and he was not completely faking the drugged slumber. The work on the folklore project lay on a small deal table under the skylight window, and at times, by dint of dousing his head with icy-cold water from the washbasin, Dan was even sufficiently awake to spend an hour or two working on it. He thought it might be saving his sanity.
He tried the door at intervals, but it was always locked. He thought it might be possible to break the bolt by smashing a chair against the panel, but so far there was no point. If Thalia was plotting, she was doing so quietly and if Dan broke out now he would never find out what she was planning for Imogen. He would lie low for as long as Thalia lay low, and then, given strength, he would move.
The night he heard the cellar door clang was one of the nights she came into the attic, and it was one of the nights when she was merciless, flicking him into helpless arousal with her fingers and her lips, and then riding him so greedily that when she left, his body felt as raw as if it had been sandpapered.
When she finally left him he heard the church clock in Blackmere striking midnight. After a moment there was the sound of her car revving up outside, and then going down the drive towards the main road.
He was alone in October House. Or was he?
He waited until the sounds of her car faded away into the night, and then got up and pulled on a shirt and trousers and shoes. He ran the cold water tap until the water was icy, and bent over to sluice his face. It did not quite chase the lingering drug fumes away but it helped. He towelled his face roughly dry, and turned to attack the bolt.
It gave more easily than he had dared hope, although the splintering of wood and metal was so loud that he froze, expecting to hear sounds of alarm from below and running feet pounding up the attic stair. But nothing moved and everything was still and quiet. Dan drew in a shaky breath and wiped sweat from his forehead with the back of one hand. His nerves were jangling like tin cans on wires, but at least it would keep him awake.
He went cautiously out on to the tiny attic landing. The strong torch he had originally brought up to the attic had long since died and he thought he would not have dared switch it on anyway. He began to creep down the stairs and through the darkened house, listening all the time for Thalia’s return. But no car engine broke the brooding silence. He looked into each of the rooms carefully. His weekend case had been slung into the back of the large hall cupboard. Dan eyed it, and then unzipped the side pocket and found his pencil torch.
The stone-flagged kitchen at the back of the house smelt faintly of cooking and herbs, and a faint warmth came from the Aga. Dan paused, trying to discern whether there was still the feeling of someone else in the house. Someone hiding somewhere? Where would anyone hide in October House? Broom cupboards, pantries, cellars? Cellars.
He glanced about him, and then picked up a wooden-handled chopping knife.
There was barely enough light to see the way, but Dan did not dare risk using the pencil torch yet. He certainly did not dare risk trying to find a light switch.
He felt his way down to the cellars, placing his hands on the walls for balance, feeling that they were cold and rough. He had not been down here before and he wondered fleetingly how old October House was; it appeared to have been built around the turn of the century, but it might be a much older building renovated out of recognition, or it might have been built on the site of a much older dwelling. He might be descending to the original cellars this very minute, going down into the subterranean depths of a very old building indeed. As he went down, Dan was strongly aware of the brooding darkness of the house above him.
He was still very conscious of the blanketing effects of the sedatives, and he thought it must surely be that that was making the steps seem so deep. They were the kind of steps where you needed seven-league boots – no, seven-league boots were what giants wore when they strode across the landscape scooping up flavoursome human children as they went. It was a cloak of invisibility that the hapless hero was usually given. Dan would not have minded one now.
With the framing of this thought came others, macabre fragments surfacing and nudging into his consciousness, not just his own essay into the macabre world of faery but the entire netherworld of a hundred sinister romances. The deep, dark enchantments gathered by the Brothers Grimm and Hans Andersen edged into his mind, illuminated by the brilliant grisly perceptions of Arthur Rackham and Andrew Lang, stories given to children to read from the Victorian and Edwardian ages down to the present day.
I’m through the curtain, thought Dan with horror. I really am. I’m not in the real world at all. I’ve tumbled through into some kind of Grand Guignol nightmare and I’m in a fantasy world of giant-killing heroes and blood-quaffing villains and beast creatures with human blood and human creatures with beast blood . . . I’m going down into the dungeons of an ogre’s enchanted castle, somewhere in the depths of a lonesome wood . . . No, of course I’m not. Serve you right for reading Perrault’s grisly fairy story and pinching his plot!
Of course these were not giant steps cut for giant feet. They were abnormally big and each one felt about two feet deep, but this was unquestionably because his perceptions were dulled or distorted, and also because he was descending in pitch darkness. There was probably a very good reason for them being so deep. Dan wished he could think what it might be.
He reached the bottom, hesitated for a moment, and then flicked on the torch. If anyone was hiding in the house the thin light could not possibly be seen, and if anyone was hiding in the cellar they would have heard his approach by now.
The cellars appeared to stretch under most of October House, and Dan went warily forward. Deeper into the villainess’s lair.
To begin with there was not very much to see. Dan made out broken or discarded bits of furniture, a rusting copper boiler and an ancient mangle. There were some plywood cases of crockery and glasses, and a couple of old sea chests; he approached these warily and lifted the lid of the first. It came up with a screech of disused hinges that jarred his nerves all over again. But neither of the chests housed anything more sinister than a pile of old clothes and discarded curtains, mostly rotted beyond repair and smelling rather nastily stale. What did you expect to find? Rotting truncated bodies? The poached-eye stare of Edmund Caudle’s head? Or a jumble of flesh-stripped bones, ready to be ground into bread? If you aren’t careful, Daniel, your imagination’s going to derail your sanity. What sanity?
He went forward again, directing the torch carefully, trying not to miss anything. There was a lot of junk down here, but there might be a disregarded fortune as well. First folios of Shakespeare buried beneath the rusting bicycles. Old masters stacked behind the forgotten curtains and back numbers of Reader’s Digest and freezers. Freezers.
Dan stood stock-still and pointed the torch. Set against one wall was a large deepfreeze; a chest freezer, oblong and uncompromisingly angular, and disturbingly reminiscent of a white coffin. It would be another of the household discards, of course, tidily stored down here until it cou
ld be taken to a communal tip or scrap metal yard. Nobody would put a workable freezer down here, miles away from the kitchen, especially when the kitchen was more than big enough to house the thing and not notice it. No householder would arrange things so that a long traipse down dark and awkward stairs was necessary each time a packet of frozen chips or a tub of ice cream was wanted. All the time he had been at October House, he had never once seen Thalia come down here.
But supposing the freezer held something much more sinister than food? It was another moment when it was vital to hang on to reality. But it was also a moment to remember the never-forgotten night in a London flat when a deepfreeze had been opened.
Probably the freezer was only part of the jumble down here. Probably it was rusting and faulty. But as Dan went forward he saw that the outside was shiny new, and that a thick cable snaked from one side and ended in a modern electric plug. And the plug was connected to a socket in the wall on the far side. The freezer was switched on and working. It was purring in the way that freezers and fridges did purr, and there was a small light glowing from one corner.
And now every fairy story and every legend ever told about the fatal results of curiosity coursed through Dan’s mind. The ladies who looked into chambers forbidden to them, who opened boxes they should not have opened, who used keys strictly prohibited. This is Bluebeard’s seventh chamber, it’s the box that Pandora should have left closed. So whatever you do, don’t open the lid and shine the torch, Daniel.
Dan opened the lid and shone the torch.
Chapter Twenty-nine
It was possible that seen by ordinary daylight, or even by ordinary electric light, the contents of the freezer in October House’s cellars would not have sent shock waves scudding through Dan’s body. But it was not very likely. Seen in any light it would have been horrific beyond belief.
Dan was half prepared, but there was still a fraction of time when his senses spun in incredulous confusion. He took a tighter hold on the torch and the world steadied slightly, but the thing inside the white coffin was still there.
Lying packed in ice, remote and terrible, was the unclothed body of a human being, either newly dead or in some kind of suspended animation. But even for a dead body there was something very wrong indeed about it.
Dan forced himself to look properly and he forced his mind to analyse what he was seeing. The body was not complete; the arms ended at the forearms, but apart from that it had torso, shoulders, thighs, legs. It had genitals as well – it was unmistakably male. And it was segmented, jointed and hinged as all bodies are jointed and hinged.
But the joints did not fuse and the segments did not match. The shoulders and arms had been aligned with the neck, but the alignment was not quite true and jagged edges of skin overlapped; the hips and thighs lay at unnatural angles to the torso. The body was like a puppet whose limbs had been dislocated, or a human whose shoulders and arms and legs had been twisted out at the roots and left flaccid and useless. The impression of something broken and flung down was inescapable, but also inescapable was the impression of something that might, under certain conditions, animate and sit jerkily up and climb out of the white coffin, and walk disjointedly forward . . . Stop it, Daniel!
There did not seem to be any putrefaction – Dan supposed that this was due to the sub-zero temperature – but here and there the skin was mottled and darkened like raw meat, and frozen blood caked several places. It was impossible not to visualise someone hacking the requisite lump of flesh away, arranging it more or less in place, like building up a model, and disposing offhandedly of the unwanted parts. How? demanded Dan’s mind. How did she manage that?
He had recognised the head at once. He recognised the hair that was glistening with white frost but which would normally be golden, and he recognised the eyes – closed now – and the narrow, high-bridged nose. Edmund Caudle. Thalia’s dead son, entombed in an ice coffin, provided with this motley collection of human flesh and bone and gristle; waiting to be stitched together in a kind of insane grisly patchwork. Dear God, she’s building him up, she’s going to recreate him out of human scraps and human lumps of flesh. This isn’t Bluebeard’s dungeon after all, it’s Frankenstein’s laboratory.
It was as he straightened up from the freezer that he heard, from overhead, the sound of footsteps crossing the stone floor of the kitchen, and descending the stairs.
Dan had left the outer cellar door open, and although there was not very much light down here, there was some.
He turned to face the door, his heart hammering against his ribs. Someone coming . . . Something wicked this way comes . . .
A wavering light shone on the wall of the stairs, showing up the crumbling stonework and the cold dankness. Dan backed against the wall, searching for the knife he had picked up in the kitchen. But if it’s Thalia, would you really use a knife on her? Could you? After all those nights together? And what if it isn’t Thalia?
Her shadow appeared before she did; impossibly elongated, the shadow of a thing barely human, a massive, fantastic creature prowling down into its dungeons at dead of night, sniffing out the scent of human meat . . . Dan shut the thought off before it could grow into something even more monstrous, and clenched his fists, ready to spring.
And then she was there, framed in the sullen light trickling down from the moonlit kitchen, holding aloft a square old-fashioned oil lamp that flickered in the slight current of air and showered her with its eerie glow, so that for an incredible moment it was as if she wore a rippling crimson cloak.
There was a moment when she stared at him, and Dan waited. Then she said, very softly, ‘Daniel.’ There was a pause, and then, ‘My dearest boy, what a fool you’ve made of me.’
She stepped aside, and there was a scrambling, scuttling sound on the stairs and a second figure joined Thalia and stood at her side, grinning horridly. Dan, his mind by now ready to accept anything that might materialise down here, saw that even in this Thalia was conforming to the traditional villainess pattern: she had her familiar, and it was the obligatory ugly hunchbacked dwarf.
Between his hands, the hunchback held a massive iron spanner and a length of thin chain.
Dan was aware of his mind working on several levels all at the same time.
On the topmost level was simple self-preservation, and he was already trying to assess the hunchback’s strength and the swing he might give the heavy spanner. But what about Thalia? If Thalia came just a little further into the cellar he could probably grab her and use her as a hostage. He remembered he still had the kitchen knife, and he began to reach stealthily into the pocket where he had put it.
On another level entirely, he was acknowledging at last that Thalia was mad, she was madder than any of the mad ladies born into the Ingram family put together, and he was aware of strong revulsion at the knowledge.
At the deepest, most primeval level of all was a crawling fear, because the emotions and the compulsions that were swirling around in this shadowy cellar were very dark and very dreadful, and they had nothing to do with grief for a dead child. They were born out of ancient rituals learned at the black heart of pagan midnights, time-crusted rites celebrated beneath a sickle moon, Devil worship and men’s futile attempts to outwit death . . .
He became aware that Thalia was saying something about a renaissance, even, incredibly, a resurrection. Her eyes rested on the white coffin, and there was the terrible light of the fanatic in them. ‘He is almost ready, you see,’ she said. ‘He is waiting only for hands and heart. And the hands will be artist’s hands.’
‘And then?’
Thalia looked back at Dan in surprise. ‘And then Edmund can live again,’ she said.
I don’t believe any of it, thought Dan, staring at her. It’s pulp horror fiction. Or I’m still suffering from whatever drug she was giving me, and I’m hallucinating.
He said, carefully, ‘How did you do it, Thalia?’ And thought that if he could keep her talking, if he could lull her into a fal
se sense of security, he could inch forward and pounce. He found himself flinching from the thought of striking her, of using violence towards her. But if he could grab her and put the knife against her throat, he might be able to use her as hostage to keep the hunchback away.
He said, ‘You took the head, didn’t you? Somehow you stole Edmund’s head out of his coffin and used it to make everyone think Imogen was insane.’
A smile curved her lips. ‘Edmund . . .’ she said, her voice blurred and slurry with terrible passion. ‘Yes, Dan, I took his head. It was so easy – the undertakers were so trusting. So sympathetic to the poor bereaved mother. The last private farewell, the closing of the coffin.’ Her eyes, which had been unfocused, suddenly snapped back into awareness. ‘And it was so easy,’ said Thalia. ‘It was so very easy to get the bitch locked away.’
‘Why did you hate Imogen so much?’
‘Because she lived when Edmund died,’ said Thalia, sounding surprised that Dan should ask this. ‘Because she would have had everything that should have been Edmund’s. I couldn’t allow that to happen. I wanted her punished. I wanted them all punished. Most of all, I wanted Edmund back.’
‘Resurrection,’ said Dan, softly.
‘Yes.’ The word came out eagerly, as if she was pleased to find him so instantly comprehending. ‘He came to me every night, after he died, Dan. I used to wait for darkness because it was when he would be with me. Sometimes when I couldn’t wait for darkness, I went to the flat and drew the curtains and locked the door . . .’
Dan, feeling sick, said, ‘Because you had part of him there already.’
‘I could stroke his poor mutilated face. I could talk to it. It was all I had left of him. And after a while I knew what he wanted.’ She paused, and Dan waited, hardly daring to breathe in case the spell was broken.
