Full Dark House (32 page)

‘I guess it just, you know, decomposed or something. Bryant was given the tortoise because it wouldn’t hibernate in the theatre. It lived right through the war, although its nerves went towards the end.’

‘It’s a bit Steptoe-ish, but it’ll have to do.’ She lit a pair of candles and set them at either end of the tortoise’s earthly remains. ‘Rest your fingertips on one end of the shell.’

‘Which end?’

‘It doesn’t matter.’ She seated herself opposite and extended her fingers to touch the tortoise, then began breathing deeply through her nose.

‘You think you can really contact him?’ May could hardly believe that he was doing this, after all the times he had given his partner grief about believing in the afterlife.

‘As long as it’s an object he touched many times in the past.’

‘Oh, he had many happy years with Nijinsky.’

‘Good. Now shut up and let me concentrate.’

May watched in the half-light of the front room as Maggie rolled back her head and fell into a light trance. After a few minutes, she started snoring. May wondered whether he should wake her. He leaned forward and reached out his hand, but just as he was about to touch her, she spoke. ‘Do you remember the first time we met, John? What a sceptic you were in those days?’

‘I still am,’ he whispered.

‘I can’t be right all the time.’ Her eyes remained closed. ‘But you—I was right about you. You always did have a very powerful aura.’

‘That’s what Edna Wagstaff once told me.’

‘So you do, and it’s that which enables the sensitively gifted to read from you. You’re a bit of a tuning fork.’

The wind breathed around the sashed windows, pulsing them in their casements. The sound faded from the street, and time was gently suspended. He remembered his first visit to the flat in 1942, when Maggie had just passed her nineteenth birthday. The surroundings were more elegant; she had fallen on hard times since then. But the flickering candles were the same, and so were the oddly shadowed corners of the room. He remembered the settling silence of the street outside, the suspiration of the wind, and the strange visions she had described to him.

‘Oh, we’re like hypnotists,’ said Maggie, her slack mouth barely moving. ‘Nobody believes in our effectiveness until some time later. You and I have known each other for over sixty years, and you still don’t really have faith in me.’

‘I wouldn’t say—’

‘There’s no point in pretending, John. We’re both far too old for that.’ She drew a long breath, her trance state deepening. ‘I am speaking now to the owner of this shell.’ She tightened her eyelids, focusing her thoughts. ‘He is dead, but present,’ she explained casually, ‘here in the room with us, right now. He is standing between us, silently watching.’

A chill lifted the hairs on May’s arms as he shifted uncomfortably in his seat. ‘Arthur?’ he called, searching the shadows.

‘He can’t speak, poor man, he’s dead. His injuries are terrible to behold. I can barely bring myself to look. He’s put on quite a bit of weight. There is something he must communicate, but it’s so difficult, so painful . . .’

I must be daft, thought May, sitting in darkness above a London pub, listening to the ramblings of a mad old woman. This is doing neither of us any good.

‘He wants to show you what he feels, but to do so he must cross the divide between the spiritual and physical worlds.’ Maggie raised her arms in a creaky gesture of prestidigitation, like an elderly magician’s assistant. May had started to rise from his armchair when, to the surprise of both, a low rumble shook the room. There was a sheen of metal in the kitchenette, and something shiny shot between them. When May glanced down, he realized he was looking at a kitchen knife, and that it was sticking out of his calf. He sat down sharply in shock.

‘Why on earth would he become violent?’ asked Maggie, examining the cut on May’s leg. ‘That’s not like him at all.’ She found a length of crêpe bandage and unrolled it over the cut. ‘It’s not deep,’ she consoled, ‘but I’m surprised by his behaviour. It’s rare for spirits to react so violently.’

‘It was the underground,’ said May, wincing. ‘Just a passing train. The vibration made your breadboard fall over and it flipped the knife from your drying rack, that’s all. This bandage isn’t very clean.’

‘Well, you can choose a rational explanation if it makes you more comfortable.’ Maggie poured herself a generous tot of Scotch. ‘You never were much of a believer.’

‘Not when the alternative is believing that my dead partner just tried to kill me. This is crazy. I’m being trailed by a man with werewolf fangs, and now this.’ May rose and collected his coat. He saw what a mistake it had been to come here. ‘Thanks for the drink.’

‘But how are you going to find Arthur’s killer?’ Standing in the middle of the faded rug she suddenly looked lost and frail. This was how it would end for her, he realized, alone and bewildered, stranded by the world racing ever faster past her window.

‘I’ll think of a way,’ he promised, taking a card from his wallet and handing it to her. ‘That’s my new address. If you need me, please call.’

It was the least Arthur would have done, he thought as he headed back down the stairs to daylight.

48

FALLING INTO HADES

‘Hymn to Bacchus, we’re missing someone, who’s late?’ Helena Parole checked behind her as she strained to hear the commentary on the backstage speaker. Pluto’s party girls were arriving onstage in a hail of artificial flowers while the gods of Olympus and Hades caroused around them in various stages of undress.

‘Goddesses are all on, Helena.’ Harry checked the clipboard he kept on a string round his neck. ‘The rest of the chorus are at the traps.’ There were five narrow iron staircases on the first understage level leading to hatches on the stage, the centre of which was known as the grave trap because Hamlet had jumped into it during his graveyard scene. ‘Everyone’s present, they’re just bunched up,’ he explained.

‘It’s going to look awkward if the ends of UR and UL have to duck their heads exiting.’ Helena checked the peephole at the rear of the stage, but the image it presented was so confusing that she could not tell who to move.

‘Why didn’t we see that in the technical?’ she whispered over her shoulder to Madeline Penn, the ASM, who was trailing behind her with a pad and pencil, keeping notes on all the changes that would have to be made after the first night. ‘Go and see if they’ve got the same problem over the other side, because there are a lot of flats coming down in a minute.’

The final tableau was long, and the full cast remained onstage throughout. Before they reached the cancan, additional chunks of scenery were to be brought up from under the stage and flown down from the flies. This left only a narrow strip for the girls to dance in, but the cancan was performed in a series of lines, with the girls yelling and pushing through each other, their ruffled dresses covering any awkward motions. It was a highly disciplined routine that was designed to give a look of wild, spontaneous sexuality.

Helena knew which of her dancers were weak, and had placed them in the second line. She was hoping that the attention of the audience would be focused on the bare white thighs of the girls and the high-cut French knickers they were wearing instead of traditional British bloomers. She knew that the reception accorded Offenbach’s finale at the Gaîté-Lyrique in 1874 had never been topped, but she was hoping to beat it tonight.

Now Cupid, Eurydice, Jupiter, Diana, Orpheus and Pluto were onstage with assorted gods, goddesses and chorus members as the fiery crimson walls of Hades, great tilting shards of fractured glass, rose in panels, segmenting them off into different parts of the stage, ready for the revolve to begin its rotation as Orpheus commenced his ascent.

Sidney Biddle had started his tour of the building, working from the roof downwards. He pointed his torch up at the ladders leading to the grid, but could see little apart from a confusion of ironwork, suspended steel girders and cable drums. A pair of stagehands were balanced on rails in the gloom, listening for their cue beside the drum and shaft mechanism. Several more were waiting on the sides of the carpenter’s bridge at the top of the three gantry levels, uplit in yellow and pink, like characters from a French Impressionist painting.

At this height the combined sound of the singers and orchestra passed upwards through the distorting baffles of the theatre’s fifty-year-old mechanisms, creating strange discords that vibrated the cablework and hummed forlornly in the grid, dislodging ancient cobwebs.

Biddle walked down a floor to the area behind the balcony, past the offices to the fly and loading galleries. The scene was the same here: staff waited for cues, immobile, then burst into sudden movement for a few seconds before returning smartly to their positions. It surprised him that the backstage personnel were as disciplined and concentrated as the performers. He stayed out of the main backstage area, away from the gantries; he had no designated position to occupy, and was in the way wherever he stood. Consequently, he found himself relegated to the corridors and passages, unable to see much of the stage or the audience. He longed to be away from the whole rigmarole, to be useful somewhere, in an office of order and precedence.

To the right-hand side of the balcony, he could see the floor’s electrical engineer watching for cues, and, for want of something better to do, went to join him.

‘How much longer to the end of the act?’ Biddle whispered.

The engineer held his forefinger to his lips, checked the stage and counted off fifteen minutes. ‘Including encores,’ he mouthed.

Sidney sighed and leaned back against the wall, frustrated.

Arthur Bryant pushed his unruly fringe from his eyes and folded the paper into the top pocket of his overcoat. He redirected the torch and shoved the catalogues of drawings back in their places. After the death of Orpheus at the hands of the Maenads, his severed head prophesied until it became an oracle more famous than that of Apollo at Delphi, at which point the sun god bade him stop. His limbs were gathered up and buried by his mother’s sisters, and his lyre was placed in the heavens as a constellation, so that his life began and ended at the same point in a great cycle.

Bryant was angry with himself for failing to recognize the symbolism earlier. He reached the door of the archive room and tried to open it. As he attempted to do so, he caught a glimpse of an angry white face in the gap. Someone on the other side wrenched the door shut and turned the great brass key. Footsteps thumped away along the hall. He pulled on the door, but the lock was set in thick oak and remained immovable.

He ran through to the adjoining chamber, but it contained no exit, only a half-boarded window that looked down to the street four floors below. With his heart thudding erratically in his chest, he watched as the torch beam flickered and began to fade.

John Styx took Eurydice’s hand as Orpheus led them through the labyrinth of Hell. In front of the group, the earth’s surface beckoned in the form of the single piercing beam of a par lamp, a lighting effect used to simulate daylight. At their head stood Public Opinion, Valerie Marchmont’s face concealed behind a grotesque mask of tragedy. The procession walked forward against the revolve, appearing to climb towards the surface, as Public Opinion warned Orpheus not to look back for fear of losing his wife for ever.

To John May’s mind, Eve Noriac was looking worried. He was not familiar with this part of the production, but even from the side of the stalls he could tell that something was going wrong. Eurydice stopped and nervously tried to pull free of John Styx’s hand. May followed her eyeline up to the flies, but the gantries were concealed by the lurid decorative border that stood in for a proscenium arch.

At that moment, Jupiter was goaded into action, and sent a thunderbolt, in the form of an electrically ignited flash, across the stage. Orpheus looked back and Eurydice, now on her mark above the grave trap, vanished in a mushroom of white smoke. The scene changed as Eurydice—in fact a life-sized puppet cast from her nude body—was seen falling back to Hell, and a pair of great curving skycloths were flown down by the same drum and shaft device that hauled up the backcloths.

As he watched it swing lower, May realized that not all of Orpheus’s group had moved clear of the revolve. Public Opinion, with her great trailing skirt, was still on the turning disc. The edge of the skycloth, weighted with a steel rod, dropped down sharply, moving towards Valerie Marchmont. Before May could do anything, it had swung down to her face, shattering the china tragedy mask she wore and yanking her off the stage like Eurydice’s doll, but the audience noticed nothing because now the long-awaited cancan dancers were pouring on, screaming and high-kicking their way onto the extended runway of the stage.

May ducked out of the stalls’ side entrance and ran towards the pass door, but it was shut tight. He hammered on it until someone pulled the handle on the other side, then pushed his way through to the rear of the stage. Behind the fallen skycloth, Marchmont lay on her back, her skull smashed through by the iron pole. Blood pumped from her severed carotid artery across the floor to the rear wall, pouring down into the run-offs that led to the main drain.

May looked around for Sidney Biddle and saw the young officer scaling his way along the iron-rung ladders that led between the first and second gantry levels above the stage.

Sidney had seen something from the corner of his eye, a blurred bluish figure strobing beneath the coloured lenses of the lights, but as he scrambled across one of the stage bridges, feeling it sway beneath his weight, he suddenly lost his sense of direction. The stage lighting distorted shadows, throwing them at mad angles across the scrims.

The dancers were screaming and whooping beneath him, a shimmering mass of white flesh and crimson silk. Above his head a shape shifted, knocking over a coil of cable, sending it unravelling down the side of the wing. Biddle ran forward, but the end of the bridge was blocked with equipment. There was no way of reaching the far side. He lowered himself over the bridge and swung his feet out until they touched the next gantry. Once he had established a foothold, he threw the upper half of his body forward and stretched out his arms, but even as he did so he felt the bridge beneath his feet kick away beneath his police-issue boots.