Mr. Flood's Last Resort(29)

Dame Cartland comes slinking through the gap in the Great Wall with her rear low to the floor. She glances around and, hearing a rustle, gives chase, her tattered rump shaking as she runs. I watch her disappear out of sight at the end of the corridor.

Farther along, under a magnificent domed bell jar, is a tray of glass eyes. As I draw nearer I hear a click. The click is followed by a whirr.

I watch in horror as the tray begins to move and tip, causing each eyeball to turn in its own small hole. As I pass by, the eyes follow me. A hundred lidless glares, each one pale, pale, boreal blue.

On a nearby stand sits a shrunken head, a sinister coconut in a hellish shy. It cries trails of thread from its sewn-up eyes, on its wrinkled lips a stitched pout. A plume of hair spills down and around its stand.

There is a card tacked to the plinth, it reads:

Cathal T. Flood

Purveyor of Antiques and Curiosities

Flora and Fauna, Medical, Scientific

Specialist in Taxidermy and Victorian Automata.

Out of the corner of my eye I see movement. Along the corridor a pack of stoats are playing poker. The dealer wears a visor and a cigar in its twisted smile and deals a rackety hand. Across the hallway there is a raven in a Yeoman Warder’s hat. It shifts on its perch, ruffling its wings with a noise like the grinding down of gears, the black beads of its eyes glittering.

Certain words return to me from Biba Morel’s legal disclaimer (hardly read). Council raid, booby traps, ingenious mechanisms—

I freeze and wait for the feathered darts with fatal poisons to hit, the net to drop, the whetted axe to fall.

The floor beneath my feet is covered with Turkish rugs. There are trapdoors lying under them. A headlong route onto bloodstained stone flags in a dank cellar, cranium smashed, splattering skull shards and jelly. I move slowly, treading carefully, keeping my eyes open for tripwires. I pass doors obscured by drawers and cabinets. I creep gingerly between them to try locked handles.

The corridor gives way to a grand entrance hall with a sweeping dark-wood staircase. A stained glass window, graced with knights with pointed feet and ladies with great ropes of hair, throws a kaleidoscope of jeweled colors on the stairs below.

And there, perched on the newel post, is a nightmare.

I would consider running if I could move my legs. For here is a horror that not even Jason and a whole rake of Argonauts would take on.

A four-headed beast keeps watch in every direction.

The exact species that contributed their heads is uncertain, but I hazard a guess at dog, horse, pig, and deer. Each creature appears to have met its death through a collision. The heads are set on the body of a carved wooden figurehead, full-breasted, arms by its side. Swan’s wings, molting badly and yellow with age, curve from the shoulders of this terrible, raddled guardian angel.

As I inch nearer to the bottom of the staircase the wings flutter stiffly and the heads begin a slow revolve. Each set of eyes, in their respective mashed orbits, addressing me in turn. I stand firm and expect the worst. The mechanism comes to a tottering halt with the head of a pig facing me.

I wait. The pig has a flinty twinkle in its eyes and a haughty wrinkle to its nose.

Nice pig. Good pig.

I force myself to look away—at a staircase awash with curiosities.

There are oddly shaped parcels and baskets of furled rolls of paper. A prosthetic arm sticks out from one of them as if hailing a cab. There are specimen jars containing slivers of gristle and boxes of contraptions with rubber nozzles, like distant relations of the sink plunger. On the bottom step a plaster model of a human heart lies broken.

There is a rustle and a clank above me. A shadow flits along the first-floor landing. Every last hair on my neck nape stands up.

I watch, riveted, as an object begins to roll down the stairs. It pitches unhurriedly from step to step. Sometimes falling with a dull thud, sometimes with the chink of glass on china or metal. Occasionally it loses momentum and wobbles on the spot for a while. Then it musters strength and continues. Eventually it lands at the bottom of the stairs, where it knocks against my feet.

Something wrapped in newspaper.

I pick it up. Unwrap it. It’s a paperweight. Cut glass, a carved starburst on the base. I stare at it in my hand for the longest time and wonder what the message is.

Then I realize.

I put the paperweight down and look at the newspaper cutting in my other hand. I read the headline:

Missing Dorset Schoolgirl

A girl with fair hair looks at the camera with a wide, rakish grin. She has her arm around a goat and seems to be intent on feeding it a crisp packet. Underneath is a name: Maggie Dunne.





CHAPTER 11


At Pearl Strand the tide would arrive in a sly fashion. Insinuating itself in snaky rivulets carved in the sand, at first lazy, then rushing in with a pace that terrified me. If I wanted to survive I should stay exactly where Deirdre said. To the left of me was sinking sand, to the right, a nest of horseflies. Behind me Old Noel was taking his afternoon stroll with his fingers just twitching for a feel. And before me the Atlantic was always sneaking nearer.

*

DEIRDRE SHAVED her legs with Mammy’s razor. When she cycled she tucked her dress into her drawers. She stole lipstick and money and cigarettes. Deirdre was wild. This was common knowledge. That summer Mammy made her take me everywhere with her, for wouldn’t that take the wind out of Deirdre’s sails?

*

ONCE UPON a time we had chased each other up and down the beach, Deirdre and me. She had chased me one way and I had chased her the other. That was the summer that Deirdre lived only for horses. We had a stable full of them, with golden manes and diamond hooves and we rode them fast along the hem of the sea.