Thorn (49 page)

At first sight it looked as if there were two people imprisoned down here. One of the two was a young man with untidy dark hair and intelligent eyes. He was seated on the ground quite near to where Imogen had fallen, his back against the wall, his knees drawn up. His eyes were on Thalia, and with a jolt of shock Imogen recognised him. The young man at Edmund's funeral. The dark-haired, good-looking young man who had come to help her while everyone else was staring in stunned, stupid silence, not knowing what to do. She had wanted to phone him, or write a little note to thank him for being so kind, only she had never done it because it had been the next day that the nightmares had started. And I don't think they ever stopped, not really. I think this is another nightmare down here, or maybe it's the same one. The nightmare continuing . . . It sounded like one of those screamer captions you saw splashed across posters for horror films and books. Scarlet blood-dripping letters on a black background and an exclamation mark. She stared at Dan over the scarf gag because for some reason he seemed to be a point of gravity in a dangerously rocking world, and then she looked back at the thing at the cellar's centre that had caused Thalia to give that single, agonised scream.

The nightmare continuing, and deepening . . .

It was sprawled across a broken bentwood chair, and it was the most macabre thing Imogen had ever seen. It was the body of a young man, plainly most dreadfully dead, but it was not so much the death look that was macabre; it was that everything about the body was wrong. It was so utterly wrong and so fearsomely out of proportion that it made Imogen feel dizzy and sick to look at it. But there was a terrible compulsion about it; once you had looked you had to keep looking, to make sure you had seen right. Or perhaps to hope you had seen wrong.

She had not seen wrong. The body appeared to have all the right number of arms and legs and shoulders, but the arms did not quite join up with the shoulders, and the shoulders themselves had a dislocated look. The hips and legs were at a sickeningly wrong angle to the torso, and she saw that the wrists ended in jagged stumps. And the head . . .

The ancient cellar with the appalling too-sweet stench and the steady glow of light from the oil lamp blurred and threatened to start spinning her into sick darkness again, because the head,
the head
. . .

Her cousin Edmund, his face and head dripping with icy moisture. Not decomposing, but
thawing
. Imogen stared. Yes, it
was
Edmund. Oh God, yes, I remember it all now. The afternoon of the funeral. Someone took his head out of the coffin and hid it under the dish. He's deteriorated a bit since then, thought Imogen, in panic. But it was Thalia all the time. She stole Edmund's head. Has she kept him all this time? Then I was right, and she really is mad, she's a million times madder than Sybilla and Lucienne put together. I'm locked in with a madwoman and a hunchback. No, there's this young man as well. She glanced at Dan once more, almost as if to reassure herself that he had not disappeared, and then looked helplessly back to the Edmund-thing on the chair.

Edmund's once-bright hair was plastered to his head, matted and darkened. His eyes were closed, the lashes beaded with moisture, but even like this it was possible to make out the mean craftiness. He died with the sly mood on him, thought Imogen. And if you discount the awful
warped
look, he doesn't look very dead after all. He looks as if he might open his eyes at any minute, as if he might jerk himself to his feet and come walking across the floor . . . But with this thought she twisted her hands behind her back until she could dig the nails of one hand into the palm of the other, because she would not let herself fall back into that terrible haunted forest, she absolutely would not.

It was then that the unknown young man moved across to her, and with angry impatience tore the scarves away, freeing her wrists and her mouth. Imogen gasped and took a grateful shuddering breath of ordinary air for the first time in what felt like hours, and said, a bit indistinctly, ‘Oh, thank you. What—'

‘We'll go into the
what
all in good time,' said the young man. ‘At the moment it's a question of the
when.
As in, when do we get out of here.' He glanced at Thalia, and then looked back at Imogen and grinned suddenly. ‘At the moment your aunt's holding centre stage, I'm afraid,' he said. ‘It's a good performance, although she's going a bit over the top for my taste.'

The sense of having fallen into somebody else's dream increased, but trying to match his coolness, Imogen said, ‘She always did go over the top.' Her voice came out a bit better this time.

‘With any luck she'll burn herself out and we can do something to get free. I don't suppose you've got any ideas on that score, have you?'

‘Well, no, but I'm working on it.'

‘Good girl. I'm Dan Tudor, by the way.'

‘I wish I could say I was happy to meet you, Mr Tudor, but—'

‘But you'd really rather not be here. I'd really rather not be here either.' He sent another speculative glance to Thalia and Imogen saw a hard anger show briefly in his eyes.

‘I saw you at Hampstead that afternoon,' she said, tentatively.

‘Yes. We weren't introduced, were we?' Again the smile. ‘But I know who you are, Imogen.'

Dan had thought he was prepared for the sight of Imogen – he had known Thalia intended to bring her here – but when she half walked, half fell into the cellar, white and dishevelled, his heart had lurched painfully.

When she managed to make that slightly ironic rejoinder, he felt something soft and inexorable fasten itself about his mind and his guts, and even with the appalling danger closing all around them, he knew a sudden sense of fatalism. Until now he had been equating Imogen with his own Rosamund, and Rosamund, it had to be said, was not possessed of the quality known as irony. She was beautiful and gentle and kind, but ironic, no. Dan stared down at Imogen's pale, smudged face and thought, I was really rather hoping that if I ever did meet you properly, you'd turn out to be a pretty nonentity –well, all right, a
beautiful
nonentity – so that I could dismiss you; say thanks, Imogen, for providing the inspiration for my book, see you around sometime. But I don't think I'm going to be able to walk away from you, always assuming we get out of here and I can walk away anywhere.

He turned back to where Thalia was standing over Edmund. After that first tormented cry she had not spoken, but Dan saw now that she was dabbing the monstrous head with a handkerchief, blotting up the trickling water, stroking the dead flesh.

And so much for plans about setting traps and jumping on villainesses and wresting the keys from their hands. When Thalia had moved, the hunchback had moved with her and he was standing between Thalia and Dan, holding a fearsome-looking iron bar threateningly. It was no consolation to Dan to think that the world was probably littered with people who had overreached and underestimated, and to realise that he was now one of them. For a split second he considered bounding forward and trusting to luck that he could take the hunchback by surprise, but even as the idea formed he discarded it. The creature was deformed and apparently more or less dumb, but his eyes showed a cruel intelligence, and they had never once left Dan. In the brief time it would take him to get to his feet, the hunchback would have brought the iron bar crashing down. And this time he might not recover so easily. And supposing it was not him at all but Imogen that the creature attacked? He thought, well, at least I've disrupted their plans by hauling that thing out of its bizarre coffin. They might have to rethink and that might give me an opportunity.

Thalia stood behind the chair holding the body and fixed her eyes on Dan. He only just managed not to flinch because there was such blazing hatred in her expression. But when she spoke her voice was controlled and soft.

‘It was a clever idea,' said Thalia. ‘Although it's a pity for you that it wasn't quite clever enough. You intended me to come near enough for you to get the key and then escape, didn't you?'

Dan said, equably, ‘It seemed a reasonable assumption.' He glared at the hunchback, who leered and brandished the iron bar. ‘But even so, I've screwed up your plans, Thalia,' he said. ‘What are you going to do now with that lump of half-decaying flesh over there? What
can
you do, except burn it or bury it?'

There was a sudden silence and Dan thought he had miscalculated or misjudged, and that she would simply order her familiar to kill them both there and then. He tightened his arm about Imogen.

Thalia said, ‘You haven't screwed anything up at all, Dan. In fact you've helped me. You've brought things forward by several hours.' She regarded them both for a moment, and then brought out of the pocket of her jacket a small, silver-mouthed pistol. The smile that Quincy had seen as an ogress smile showed as she levelled it at the two prisoners.

‘I was going to sacrifice you both at dawn,' she said. ‘Along with Quincy. But instead, I'm going to do it now.'

And then, looking across at Harris, she said, ‘Help me get them up to the studio. Chain them up with Quincy. And then we'll fire the kiln.'

The essence of all the best plans was simplicity, and Thalia employed simplicity now, keeping the pistol levelled as Harris unlocked Dan's chain. ‘Don't try to escape, Dan,' she said coldly. ‘And don't try any ridiculous chivalrous rescue bid either.'

‘Heaven forfend. What do you want me to do?'

‘Carry Imogen up the stairs,' said Thalia. ‘Harris will go first, carrying the lamp, and you'll follow him. I'll bring up the rear. And remember, I've got a gun. If you try to escape I'll shoot you in the stomach and leave you down here to die.'

‘Always the feminine touch, Thalia,' said Dan.

The potter's small kiln was already heating and the studio was filling up with the hot-iron scent as Harris and Thalia chained their captives to the wall. It was a good scent, a purging, cleansing scent. It would consume the remains very efficiently. Thalia had studied the kilns carefully in preparation of her plan; there were three of them and they were all electrically fired, but tonight Thalia was firing the one called a burning kiln, used for glazing earthenware objects, which reached a temperature high enough for vitrification.

She turned to survey her three prisoners. Dan and the bitch-girl were both safely chained and at least twelve feet separated them so that there could be no collaboration, no mad attempt at an escape.

Quincy was lying in one corner where Thalia herself had put her. She had enjoyed the girl's body earlier tonight; she had savoured Quincy's fear and it had lent an edge to all the things she had made Quincy do. But it was time now for Quincy to be sacrificed to Edmund, just as the young men who had gone before her had been sacrificed.

Harris had tied Quincy's hands and feet and he was playing his part very well indeed. Quincy was plainly terrified, and she was trying to crawl towards the door and escape. Harris stood watching her, playing cat and mouse with her. Each time he waited for her to get within a few feet of the door, watching with a drooling leer, and then pounced and brought her back. It was good to see Harris so zealous; Thalia had sensed a brief rebelliousness from him while they were inside Thornacre earlier on. But it was all right.

Harris had remembered what he had to do with the kiln as well. As its temperature began to rise, he picked up the long iron spline that secured the circular door and slotted it into the horizontal grooves on the door's front. The handle protruded on the right-hand side, and Harris grasped it and bore his weight down on it, rotating it through 360 degrees. The grotesque shape of his distorted back was cruelly outlined against the kiln, which was beginning to glow with inner heat. As the spline turned the full circumference, the locking mechanism ground home. Harris nodded to himself as if satisfied, and came loping back.

Thalia's lip curled with contempt as Imogen called out to Quincy, telling her not to be afraid, and Dan said something about escape, about how they would all get out of here. This was all so stupid as to be not worth even listening to, and in any case she wanted them afraid. She wanted them to die knowing what was being done to them; most of all she wanted Imogen to die knowing. If they continued to call out to one another, they would have to be gagged.

Only when she was absolutely sure that everything was in place and that nothing had been forgotten did she help Harris to carry Edmund's body up and to arrange it on the potter's long, bare table. She hated seeing the hunchback's grubby horny hands on Edmund, but it was unavoidable. Once Edmund's body had been arranged on the scrubbed table top, she dismissed the hunchback to the shadows; only her own hands would touch Edmund from now on.

As she went about her final preparations, careful to keep her distance from all three prisoners, Thalia felt the golden inner strength filling her mind. Exultation welled up. This was how high priests had felt as they prepared for ritual sacrifice; it was how the flamens and the druids had felt. And the next few minutes should see a life for a life.

The potter had installed bright, soulless, fluorescent strip lighting in his studio, but Thalia ignored it and lit candles, scarlet ministers of light that made pools of gentle radiance, soft blurry circles that overlapped in places. As she placed them at each end of the long table, they cast their warm, gentle light over Edmund's body, and their scent mingled with the sweet scent of Edmund's flesh and skin and hair. The longing for his presence was so strong that it was physical agony. Thalia paused to stroke the poor dead face, and then took up the ceremonial position in front of the long table. Harris went to and fro, remembering all he had been told, laying a clean white cloth over Edmund's lower body, bringing forward the finely-honed knives. The blades caught the light and glinted redly.