Deadlight-Hall(43)

After the first few nightmare minutes the darkness was not quite so absolute, because a flickering light began to glow from the furnace. That meant we could at least see what we were doing, but it would not have mattered if a hundred suns had shone down on us, or if a thousand bright lights had poured into the room, because there was nothing we could do to save Porringer.

If we had known how to disable the furnace that might have saved him, but we did not know, and we did not dare waste time trying to find out. Instead, we tore our hands to shreds trying to get the door open. To no avail. The door resisted our efforts as firmly as if something was leaning heavily against it, or as if – and this really will convince you I went temporarily mad in that hellish place – as if something on the inside was pulling hard on it to prevent it being opened. In the end, the heat became so unbearable that eventually we were forced to stop. Even so, we both had badly blistered hands for some days.

I cannot tell you how long it took Porringer to die, because time ceased to exist in that hellish place. The glow from the furnace turned the room into something from one of the ancient visions of hell. Our shadows, distorted and grotesque, moved across the old stone walls, and more than once I thought other shadows moved with them. Smaller, more fragile silhouettes, their arms outstretched. The old deadlight set into the room’s iron door was bathed in the sullen light; it watched us unblinkingly.

Porringer was screaming, and there was a stench of burning flesh – I cannot find words to describe that, nor is it something that should be described. But at one stage the nausea overwhelmed me, and I was sick, helplessly and messily, spattering on the floor. I think Porringer was dead by that time, for the sounds from the furnace had ceased.

One of the most bizarre, most sinister aspects of the entire incident was that once Porringer was dead, the furnace began to cool. The angry glow faded and the sound of the pipes clanking and growling ceased. There was a ticking as the metal cooled.

We left him – what remained of him – in that room, closing the iron-bound door, and groping our way back through the dark passages. I could not stop thinking about that smeared, blinded deadlight, and how it had seemed to watch everything that happened. That is something else that is in my nightmares.

I suppose Porringer’s body will be found sometime, but I am not sure if it will be possible for it to be identified. I don’t know if there will be enough of it left.

Sch?nbrunn and I walked rather shakily from the furnace room. Neither of us spoke. Both of us wanted, I believe, to simply reach the good fresh air and the normal world, and to get away from Deadlight Hall as fast as we could.

Neither of us can explain what happened to Porringer. There was no one else with us in the furnace room. It can only be that when Porringer fell against the furnace, the cover was dislodged by his fall and the hinges broke, so that when it swung closed, it somehow locked into place. That, we have agreed, is the likeliest explanation.

But we cannot explain how the furnace itself fired.

As we went up the stone steps to the main hall, Sch?nbrunn said, ‘There was no trace of the twins here, was there?’ and I heard a note of appeal in his voice.

‘No trace whatsoever. We’ve done all we can here to find them.’

‘Did he really know anything, do you suppose?’ I said, as we crossed the big hall. ‘Because there was that hesitation when we asked him.’

‘I marked that, as well. But …’ He stopped. ‘Listen.’

‘I can’t hear anything,’ I began, then broke off, because I was hearing it now. Through the dim dereliction of Deadlight Hall came the strange and vaguely sinister call we had heard earlier.

‘Children, where are you?’

‘It’s Mr Battersby,’ I said, but even I could hear the uncertain note in my voice.

‘I don’t think it is,’ said Sch?nbrunn, speaking quietly as if fearful of being overheard.

‘Then who?’

‘I have no idea.’

We went out of the old house without waiting to find out who was calling for the children – I don’t think either of us really wanted to know who it was. We stood for a moment, thankfully breathing in the fresh air, then we drove back to Oxford and our lodgings.

As to Sophie and Susannah Reiss, we still have no information. Porringer wanted us to believe Mengele had them, of that we are sure. And yet there was that hesitation. But we shall not stop trying to find out what happened to them.

Tomorrow I am going to London, and I will follow the twins’ trail from another source – that of the Prague golem that they took when they were smuggled out of Warsaw. It is just faintly possible that whoever took the girls will have tried to sell it – it’s so obviously valuable that it would be a considerable temptation. It’s also sufficiently unusual to be remembered. I have a few contacts in the jewellery quarter of London and I shall approach them – using extreme discretion, of course. I am not very optimistic about finding anything, but it is an avenue that must be explored.