Thorn (41 page)

It was a curious sensation to be made love to by another female. It was something Thalia had never before experienced, but it was something she might want to explore more thoroughly when all this was over. Under certain conditions it could be considered inconclusive, of course, and even frustrating. But it was not frustrating to Thalia; not while she was keeping the creature in the attic alive.

Yes, tomorrow night again, for sure. She would bring Quincy up from the cellar again. It pleased her to think of the two creatures serving her sensuality: the male in the attic, the female in the cellars. Her mind spiralled with delight and anticipation.

Every time Thalia went up the attic stair she experienced a fierce surge of power. She went up tonight, her mind spiralling with delighted anticipation.

There was electricity in the attic room, but it was a single naked light bulb suspended from one of the main ceiling joists and the light it gave was harsh. Thalia did not switch it on; instead she set candles in silver holders around the room – one on the small deal table and another on the washstand where it would reflect in the small mirror. As the candles flared up soft light fell across the attic, blurring its ugliness, casting a glow over Dan's supine body. There was a dark growth of beard on his face, and his hair, badly in need of cutting, tumbled over his brow and on to the pillow. He looked like a drop-out, but it was a drop-out from the eighteenth or nineteenth century: the planes of his face were a little sharper than they had been, and he looked like one of the romantic poets – Keats dying of consumption in his garret, or Coleridge deep in an opium-sleep.

Thalia discarded the thin robe she had been wearing, turned back the blanket and slid into the bed. There was the scent of warm masculinity. She ran her hands over Dan's thighs and then slid one hand in between them. Was he aware of her? Yes, his reactions were slow, but the drugs had not entirely quenched them. Her hand enclosed him, and even out of the depths of the drugged slumber he was responding. Thalia pushed back the bedclothes and moved astride him, gripping him with her own thighs and supporting her weight on her hands. As she began to move rhythmically, time slipped for her, and the face she saw on the pillow was no longer Dan's, but Edmund's.

Dan was aware now that he had lost large sections of time, and that there were intervals when he slept deeply and not-quite-dreamlessly. Margot stalked those dreams, and sometimes she had Thalia's face and sometimes there was only a blurred pale oval surrounded by black hair. Once or twice Imogen was there as well, wavery and insubstantial. Imogen. Each time the name was like a cool reviving draught of fresh cold water. That's what this is all about, thought Dan, fighting the smothering waves of sleep. That's why I'm here.

The attic was furnished with a narrow bed, and a deal table and chair. At one end was a small kitchen unit, with a lavatory and washbasin through a partition. Dan thought the place had probably been intended as a self-contained flat for a live-in servant, or even an elderly relative or a teenager. He could not imagine why Thalia had tricked him up here, or why she was keeping him locked in, unless she was simply keeping him out of the way while she carried out some deep-laid plan against Imogen. The execution of her horrible desires, remember, Daniel?

After the first few days he understood that she was drugging the food she brought him, and he thought she might have been drugging him ever since he got here. He began to work out the pattern in her visits, and he began to see that the food was brought at the same hour each day, and that the strange bed-visits were made exactly two hours after the supper tray. She's only coming into the attic when she thinks I'll be too doped to try to escape, thought Dan. She's taking a bit of a chance, in fact she's being bloody arrogant. But wasn't arrogance and vanity the hallmark of all genuinely evil people? Dan had no idea whether his villainess was genuinely evil or just plain mad, and by now he was beyond caring.

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 could 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.

I
t 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.