Thorn (32 page)

And if Dan became troublesome, or if he ceased to be of use, there were ways of dealing with that.

Q
uincy knew that Thornacre's ghosts were the ghosts of the children who had once been kept here. They had not been the ill-mannered jeering children you saw today and the kind of children who had lived in Bolt Place, but pale, silent, thin creatures, hollow-eyed and lank-haired. Men sometimes came to the house to look at them. They were towering brutish men with coarse black hair on the backs of their hands and greedy, snatching fingers. They were ogres really, only they were wearing human-face disguises so that people would not know. They gave the mothers money and took the children away. They said the children would be put to work, they would work in coal mines and sweeping chimneys in rich houses. It was hard work, but at least they would be fed and housed and later on they could be apprenticed and learn a proper trade. But Quincy knew that really the men wanted to lie in bed with the little girls and stroke them with their hairy hands and jab their thick fingers into the little girls' bodies. When they had had enough, they would sell them to other men who wanted to do the same things.

The children had been very frightened of the ogre-men. When they were locked into the east wing, they had known what was going to happen, and they had knelt down and prayed, which was something people did in those days more than they did now. They had said things like, gentle Jesus meek and mild, look on me a little child, and they had held hands and sung hymns so that they would not hear the ogres coming to get them.

The prayers and the hymns had not saved them. When the moon was beginning to change – sickle moon the children had called it, which was an old country word for new moon – the ogres had come, with their huge meaty hands and little mean pig-eyes and brutish red faces. They had come through the forest surrounding Thornacre, so that the ground had shaken with their heavy footsteps, and they had come right into the house and shouted for the children with their terrible deep-chested roars. ‘Four little girls to be taken tonight,' they had bellowed. Or, ‘A nice plump little boy for a change. Bring up the sacks and unlock the doors!'

It had all happened a very long time ago. But Quincy was afraid that they might somehow still be inside Thornacre.

Imogen had been taken to a room of her own, which Quincy thought was very good. There was a ward here called Campbell Ward – Quincy had seen it last time – and it would have been dreadful if Imogen had been put there. It was a terrible place, a long, hopeless room with sad hopeless people in rows of beds and bad smells all the time. It had been so filled up with despair and defeat that it was difficult to breathe. The people had all been senile or so zonked out on the drugs they had been given that they could not do much more than lie in bed and wait for whatever was going to happen to them. Quincy had not known if the drugs had been to help the people get better or if it was simply the attendants' way of keeping them quiet. Most of them had to be fed, and the attendants had been a bit slapdash so that the food was quite often spilled or got dribbled, and was not always properly wiped away.

Quincy would not be able to bear it if Imogen was treated like that, or if she stopped being able to swallow and dribbled everything. She thought she might kill Imogen rather than let that happen. At Briar House she had been allowed to feed Imogen with soup or milk pudding, or something called Complan, and she had done it neatly and carefully, using a small spoon. Dr Sterne said the fact that Imogen was awake enough to take the food when it was spooned into her mouth was a very promising sign; it showed that she was not very far away from them. Quincy had been pleased about this, but after he had gone, Porter-Pig spoiled it by saying, ‘Oh, we'll probably put a naso-gastro tube down her. I can't have my nurses wasting time feeding one patient.' The nurses were not doing the feeding, and if Quincy could not have fitted in her other jobs, she would have stayed up all night just to go on looking after Imogen, but it would not have done to say so.

Quincy's own bed was in the long narrow room which was the women's dormitory. It was cold and stuffy, and there were rows of narrow, black iron beds. Each bed had its own locker where you were supposed to put your things – your sponge and toothbrush and soap, and any money you had. You could lock the little door and wear the key round your neck, but most keys fitted most locks, and last time somebody had stolen the ten pounds that Quincy had painstakingly saved up to buy shoes. No money was going in there this time! Imogen had a locker by her bed as well, and her things were so nice – the beautiful scented soap and powder and the lovely underclothes and lawn nightshirts – that somebody was sure to take them within forty-eight hours if Quincy was not very watchful.

The dormitory looked a bit better than last time but not much. But it did not really matter because Quincy was not going to be sleeping here; she was going to be guarding Imogen. That was why she had come back to Thornacre.

Supper was served in the room that was now the dining room, which the assistants had called the canteen last time.

This, also, looked a bit better. The walls had been painted and there was still the nice fresh smell of new paint instead of sickness and stale bodies, and there was a different arrangement for serving the food. At one end was a long display of all the different things you could have to eat, with everything kept warm on electric plates, like the motorway place where the ambulance men had taken her. You went up to the counter and took a tray and asked for what you wanted. The food was better as well. There was lamb stew or a fluffy fish pie with creamed potatoes on top. Tonight Quincy had a plateful of stew with cauliflower and a roast potato. There was apple crumble for afterwards or jam sponge with custard.

Last time there had been one long narrow table with benches fastened down to the floor so that they could not be drawn comfortably up to the table and you got backache after a while. Dr Sterne or somebody had got rid of these, and there were lots of small tables like a cafe, so that six or eight people could sit together.

At one of the tables was an older woman with wild hair and eyes and the most bedraggled assortment of clothes Quincy had ever seen, even in the Bolt Place years. She sat by herself, and there was a pile of plastic carrier bags at her feet, most of them spilling out filthy rags and rubbish. From time to time she looked furtively around the room and then snatched one of the bags on to her lap and rummaged through it crooningly, shielding the pitiful contents from everyone's view. The bags smelt sour and stale, and the woman smelt of the bags. Quincy remembered her from last time.

She thought some of the others were familiar as well. There was a woman who talked incessantly to an invisible companion in a moaning whine, and another who prowled suspiciously around the tables, peering into people's faces. The attendants kept taking her back to her place, but she would not stay put. At the next table was an ugly hunchbacked man with horrid mean eyes that swivelled in different directions. He might have been any age from twenty-five to sixty-five. He had been in Thornacre for years and his name was Llewellyn Harris, but everyone called him Snatcher Harris because he was always snatching at the groins of the women and sometimes the men and making ugly and obscene gestures at them. He was grotesque and squat, and his mouth was crusted with scabs that did not heal because he was always picking them. No one had ever heard him speak, and he communicated by grunts. Quincy did not know if this was because whatever had deformed his spine had deformed his mouth as well, or if he was too stupid to know how to speak, or even if he was just being sly and pretending.

Porter-Pig was there, of course, patrolling the tables, pausing occasionally to exchange a word with a patient like the royal family did on TV when they walked through a crowd of cheering people. When one of the women near to Quincy's table stood up and started to cry and take her clothes off, Porter-Pig made a puckered, disgusted mouth. While she was telling the woman to sit down and behave herself, Snatcher Harris banged down his plastic knife and fork and scuttled across the floor, lunging at the moaning woman with the invisible companion and thrusting his hand under her skirt, gibbering with glee, and then grunting with a horrid nasal sound when she pushed him off.

Porter-Pig gestured impatiently to the attendants and they ran down the room, dragging Snatcher Harris away and ignoring his threatening fists. One of them said, a bit jeeringly, that Harris would not hit anyone because he was a coward, and the other said that if the Snatcher did not mend his ways they would tie a piece of string round his dick and pull it tight, and then wait for it to wither and drop off. Quincy did not think Snatcher Harris could understand much of this. Porter-Pig understood it, but she made a big thing of showing she was not shocked, folding her chins into her neck and nodding slowly several times.

Things were a bit better than Quincy remembered them but not much. She would not have minded anyway, or at least not for herself. She would have put up with much, much worse because it was all for Imogen.

Leo set up Imogen's first treatment very carefully. He was conscious that several layers below his ordered thoughts there was a strong current of anticipation. This one's different. This one's special.

It afforded him a faint, ironic amusement to discover that he was going about the preparations like a priest preparing the high temple for some elevated act of worship, or a medieval squire undergoing fasting and purification on the evening before his knighting. The hypodermic syringes lay ready, and near to them was the remote control device for the video player. Medical science and media science hand in hand. Well, all right, not quite hand in hand, but on the same table, at any rate.

He was going to play the videos to her, but first there would be a single preliminary dose of methidrine for stimulation. I can just trigger an abreaction and release the suppressed terror, he thought, if I can once get her to hear me . . .

Leo admitted that what he really wanted to do was deliberately summon the strange lodestar power and call Imogen out of her dark sleep unaided. And play Pygmalion, breathing life into the statue? jeered his mind. Once you cross that line, you really will be entering the shadowlands of improper conduct.

He had to make a strenuous effort to remain calm while the attendants wheeled in Imogen's bed and set it to face the small television screen. He was conscious of rising excitement, and the sudden need to be alone with Imogen was so strong that it was almost a physical pain; it was nearly sexual arousal, which was a very dangerous way to feel indeed. When the attendants went out, he drew down the window blinds and turned back into the room.

This is it, Imogen. I'm about to try to bring your mind up out of its silent ocean of nothingness. Here we go. Stay with me, Imogen.

The silence in the room was so complete that the preliminary whirring of the video tape sounded unnaturally loud. And then the jagged, splintering patterns began to whirl across the screen, casting crimson and purple and violet light across Imogen's face, and the pounding of the raw, abrasively sexual music filled the room.

Leo sat back as the video whirred forward. After a moment he took Imogen's hand in his.

Quincy waited until Imogen was with Dr Sterne, and then slipped away from the dining room and across the huge shadowy hall to the east wing.

There was not really a good time to do this, but when Imogen was with Dr Sterne there was no need for Quincy to be on guard and so it was as good a time as she would get. She would be quick and quiet and she would be back in the dayroom before anyone knew she was gone.

It was not logical to be afraid that the ogres were still here. Quincy knew this. But she knew that there was something in Thornacre, something in the air surrounding it, something in the dark clouds that massed behind it as night fell, and she knew that it was something evil. It might not be inside the house at all, of course; it might be outside, crouching in the dark grounds, watching its chance to creep inside and pounce on Imogen. It most probably was outside.

But supposing it was not. Supposing it was in the east wing, hiding itself behind the black iron door. There was a saying, ‘Know your enemy', which meant finding out who your enemy was so that you knew how to fight. Quincy would find out who Imogen's enemies were and fight them.

The east wing was a rambling, echoing place, with long, soulless passages and the smell of pain and fear. Dr Sterne had changed quite a lot of things in Thornacre but it did not look as if he had done anything here yet. This might be because none of the patients lived in here, or it might be for some other reason altogether. Quincy understood that Dr Sterne was trying to make everywhere different but she knew it would take a long time, because you could not rub out years and years of unhappiness and pain like you could rub out a pencilled line in a drawing. You had to put layers of very good things over the bad and even then the bad things would linger.

She paused at the foot of a wide, shallow staircase. The wood was dull and scarred, but it was made from solid oak, beautifully grained, and there was a banister decorated with lovely carved fir cones and oak leaves. Quincy reached out to stroke the surface. It felt harsh and dead, like a cat's fur when the cat was ill. Probably they would do something about that when they began work here; she would ask if she could help with the polishing, because it would be nice to feel the poor dry wood become satiny and warm under her hands.

Beneath the stairs, facing the door leading to the east wing, was the remains of a printed notice fixed to the wall, its surface pitted and dimmed by time but much of it still readable.