Roots of Evil(44)

Or, said a small voice Fran had not known she possessed, the lid of Alraune’s grave, wherever that might be…

And of all thoughts to have, this was surely the most outrageously ridiculous of them all, although if you could not spin a few ghostly fantasies in a place such as this – a place where people had sacked cities and seduced lovers and killed enemies all on the same afternoon! – then where could you spin them? Yes, but it was disturbing the way her mind had thrown up that reference to Alraune…

(‘A ghost-child.’ Trixie had said. ‘That’s what most people believe now…’ she had said. ‘Alraune’s name was surrounded with myths and moonshine but I’m convinced that once there was a real child…’)

Once there was a real child…Francesca pulled her mind back to the present. Liam was moving ahead, shining the torch into the corners, occasionally making a comment about, Jesus God, would you look at the state of this place, but Michael was silent and Fran had the impression that he was disliking this very strongly indeed. She felt guilty at having more or less dragged him into the whole situation, because none of it was his concern.

Whoever had covered up the old furniture and the tag-ends of scenery had not done so very thoroughly or very neatly. Here and there bits of a table or a chair showed under the edges of the dust-sheets, or a spray of marlin-spikes or a fake tree lay untidily across the floor. Perhaps, when Ashwood was silent and dark, the abandoned film props crawled out to reassemble in the groupings they had known when Ashwood was alive and filled with people and lights and life. Like the ghost stories where toys came to life and moved around a nursery while the children were sleeping. Perhaps the entrance of Francesca and the two men had taken the props by surprise so that they had not had enough time to scuttle back under cover.

Fran shivered and wrapped her scarf more securely around her shoulders, tucking a fold across her mouth, because the stench in here was making her feel slightly sick. Damp, Michael had said. Or cats.

One of the chairs seemed to have got itself completely out of its dust-sheet, and it was standing by itself, half in and half out of a pool of deep shadow. Like the last reel of a werewolf film where the wolf is caught in mid-metamorphosis just as the silver bullet hits it. It had once been a rather elaborate chair: you could still see the carvings along the wooden arms and the remains of beading on the edges of the seat.

Someone had thrown a length of dark brown fabric over this half-and-half chair – perhaps an old curtain – and had flung down some shoes as well. The uncertain light striated the fabric so that if you looked at it for long enough, it began to seem like a pair of corduroy trousers…

A cold horror closed over Francesca, and words started to dance dizzily through her mind: words that repeated themselves maddeningly in her brain, saying over and over that something dreadful had happened here – you do understand that, don’t you, Fran? It’s something that’s all part of the stench that’s been making you feel sick, except that you’re not going to be sick, you’re absolutely not…But you do understand that someone has done a terrible thing in this place? And then there was her own inner voice was saying weakly that, yes, she did know that, of course she did…A terrible thing…


But her mind was somehow stuck, like a car with the gears jammed, and she was unable to move beyond these conventional words and phrases. Something dreadful had happened. An outrage. In a moment she would be able to identify what it was, this outrage, this thing that was so very dreadful, and then she would know what should be done about it.

She was aware that Michael had taken her arm as if to move her away from the outrage, and as if from a distance she thought how odd that she should know it was Michael without needing to turn her head to look at him. But she could not spare any attention for this, because she was still trying to unglue her mind from the stuck-in-one-gear state.

But she was seeing now that somebody was sitting in the elaborate upright chair. Yes, that was what she was seeing, and that was one of the things that was so very wrong, because nobody would sit here in the dark like this. And there was something hideously wrong about the head of the person in the chair, although it seemed to have the face of a person Fran knew. Was it the eyes that were wrong? There seemed to be thick dark ribbons hanging down from the eyes: ribbons that were plastered flat against the cheeks…

The eyes.

The frozen paralysis began to dissolve and Francesca’s mind started to move again, jerkily and painfully, but enough for her to recall some of the grislier things Trixie had said about Ashwood, and some of the old newspaper headlines she had shown to Fran. They were all flickering on to Fran’s mind like vagrant images on a scarred screen in an old movie theatre…‘Von Wolff’s victims both mutilated and left for dead…’ ‘Macabre and vicious injuries…’ ‘The eyes, the EYES…’

She drew in a deep shuddering breath, and her mind snapped properly free so that she knew and understood what she was seeing. The flung-down fabric really was a pair of corduroy trousers – it was a pair exactly like the ones Trixie often wore – and the shoes that were lying higgledy-piggledy under the chair were Trixie’s shoes. Sensible flat-heeled shoes they were, with good leather uppers: Trixie always said she could not be doing with fancy flimsy shoes.

Trixie. Dear God, it was Trixie who was sitting grotesquely upright in the chair, her hands lying submissively along the wooden arms. Brusque, kind Trixie, who had been piecing together an old scandal so that she could eventually put the letters MA after her name, and be able to teach at a higher level than the present sullen fourteen-and fifteen-year-olds. Trixie, who had doggedly tracked down people who might provide links back to that tragic old scandal – and who had probably annoyed several of them in the process, because she often did manage to annoy people, poor old Trixie, poor old thing.