Bad Dreams (17 page)

‘
N
ina!’

The girl had darted into a dark stretch of the corridor, and could not be found easily. Anne trailed her fingers along the wall at shoulder height, but there were no switches or dangling cords. She could still see, dimly, which meant that there must be a light source somewhere near. Somewhere.

‘Nina!’

She went forwards, step by step. The floor proved untrustworthy. She had already found a few unexpected steps, up or down, and slammed a toe against a new level. It was all fairly pointless, like the needless ha-has of a carnival funhouse.

She stopped and listened. The house was silent. It was as if the whole place were deserted and derelict.

What were Amelia and her guests doing? She hoped that they had not dispersed from their downstairs room. Could they be playing some Sadeian variation on hide and seek? Could they be in the dark, waiting for her?

‘Nina, it’s me. Anne.’

The girl must have calmed down. She must be within earshot, but she was keeping quiet. She had been hysterical, now she was probably close to catatonia. Anne thought Nina had found a hiding place and was lying low. She could imagine the girl curled up in a cupboard, trying to breathe noiselessly, willing her heartbeat to be less loud.

God, the house was quiet! Admittedly, this was a placid residential district, but there should be some exterior noise: occasional traffic, water dripping from the eaves, distant carol singers, murmuring electrical appliances. There was nothing. The walls must be ten feet thick.

She found the light. It came from a tributary passage that lead off from the main corridor at a curious angle. The rooms must be not quite square. A funnel of light fell from a circular ceiling hole, drawing attention to the skeleton of an ornate spiral staircase. It was a rickety old piece of work; presumably intended for servants banished from the regular stairs. It could not have been easy to hump awkward loads up and down the wobbly death trap. There were grinning gnomes worked into the iron filigree, running downwards helter-skelter.

Nina would have been drawn to the light, just as Anne had been. She must have gone upstairs. Anne started upwards on the shaking staircase, but had to stop abruptly. The hole extended a foot or so above the level of the ceiling, and then ended. There was a dim fluorescent tube in the recess. She could not go up, only down. The floors below were dark. Carefully, she descended into an unknown, unlit room.

She stepped off the bottom stair onto a carpeted floor. The light above her was remote and useless, blocked off by the triangular edges of the staircase. In the dark, she took little steps, her hands out before her. She found a wall, and hugged it. She edged sideways, clockwise. After getting into and out of three corners between stretches of flat wall, she found a door. And by it there was a switch. She turned on the light.

The room was bare, except for the staircase, and a pair of indifferent watercolours of dead flowers that hung on the wall opposite the door. The paintings were at eye level. Why had she not jostled them while feeling her way around?

It did not make sense, so she gave up thinking about it.

The door was not locked. The passage outside was unlike the ones on the floor above. It was as wide as a small room, but there were bulky pieces of old furniture against the walls between the doors, and Anne was forced to squeeze through a narrow and irregular middle path. Hard wooden angles pressed into her.

‘Nina.’

On the floor, she found a scattering of porcelain shards. Several ornaments from a displayed collection of unpleasant little figurines had been swept off a small table. The girl had come this way, she was sure. Again, Anne started looking into every room for Nina. All the doors were unlocked. The rooms beyond were filled with more forgotten furniture. This must be where Amelia shifted everything when she was having building done. A few of the pieces were properly stored, with dustsheets and numbered tags, but most of the stuff was just crammed in every which way.

Progress was slower than it had been upstairs. Welsh dressers and tallboys kept getting in her way. And she was alone.

Would Clive die? Could she have helped him?

This was not much of a party. Anne knew she had to expose Amelia and her friends. The magazine would not go for it; they could not afford the lawsuits. But she had friends on the tabloids, the
News of the World
, the
Daily Mirror.
Pop stars and society hostesses in S and M games that led to death. Deaths? She could keep Judi out of it, but ruin a good few careers, businesses and marriages. There would probably be multiple prosecutions. The Global Peace Whatever would lose a lot of credibility, she reflected. Maybe not: those far right moralists had plenty of ways of surviving nasty revelations and expelling offenders from their ranks. She now believed that her sister had died, if not through the direct actions of the people downstairs, then at least through her unhealthy associations with them. What she had seen done to Nina would have wrecked anybody.

Scum. Scum. Scum.

The rooms were like the passage, packed with antiques. Most of them were in states of disrepair. Crippled chairs with missing feet and tufts of stuffing coming through the cracks; dead, useless grandfather clocks with faces but no hands; embroidered hangings eaten with mould patches that made hunt scenes resemble maps of unknown worlds. But there was no dust, no dirt, no cobwebs. All this was looked after, preserved in its current state of decay.

She opened a door, and found herself in the Bacon room.

…but surely that was upstairs. No, she must have invisibly ascended through those upwards-sloping corridors and irritating little steps, and come down again on the spiral staircase. For the last few minutes, she had been travelling in parallel to her previous route. The junk rooms alternated with the gallery chambers like the opposing teeth of a zip-fastener. Only the Bacon room interconnected both strata of the house. It had two doors. Clive would be beyond the other. Dead?

Despite everything, she had to see him. She could not immediately do anything for Nina. Perhaps she would be able to stop the bleeding. Maybe even save his life. Save him for the Old Bailey and whichever penal dustbin they locked dope peddlers in.

Anne had once written a piece about prison conditions. After a tour and a few interviews with convicts, she was in favour of sweeping reforms. But she wanted Clive to get dumped into a
Grand Guignol
Devil’s Island with whip-wielding guards, running filth in the cells and Neanderthal yard bosses. She hoped he would be gang-raped in the showers every night. A liberal, she remembered someone saying, is just a reactionary who has not been mugged yet. Tomorrow, she realized, she would be socially conscious again. Tonight, she would have elected Dirty Harry as chief of police. Shit, she wanted out of this mess.

She opened the other door…

‘Clive?’

…and found herself in a part of the house she had never seen before. It was either a passage or a long, thin room, a stone-walled storage space lined with gunpowder plot-style wooden barrels. It was more like some sort of cellar than an upstairs room.

Obviously, there was more than one Bacon room.

She looked around, carefully this time. One of the dummies was fully dressed. She should have noticed it earlier. It was not at all like the others in the room, like all the ones in the other room. They were all dismembered portions, with exposed ribs and piglike pink hides.

It was the figure of an old, dead man. She was reminded of Dorian Gray at the end of the book, unrecognizably decrepit, identifiable only by the rings sunk into the fleshy fingers. This statue was shrivelled inside its suit, hanging from a hook in its chest.

She did not want to touch it, but she had to.

She had expected it to be weighted, to feel cold and heavy. But it was an obvious fake, papier-mâché light. The wrinkled skin, while rubberized to lend some semblance of naturalism, was dry and fragile.

It was a repulsive piece of work, but paradoxical. The concept was violently unpleasant, extravagantly horrible. But there was a bland expression worked into the prune-like face. It was like a sentimental 19th century vision of peaceful repose after protracted suffering, the miserable on Earth rewarded in Heaven.

Of course, the statue was in modern dress. A suspiciously stained smart dark suit, just like Clive’s. In fact, the costume was exactly like Clive’s, down to the horrible shirt and expensive shoes. It was another of Amelia’s bad taste jokes. And now the effort would be wasted, since its subject was in no condition to be either offended or amused.

Anne was tired, and fed up. It could only be about eight o’clock – her old-fashioned watch, unwound this morning, had stopped – but she felt as if she had been up all night, working to meet an insane deadline. All she wanted was to get this whole thing over with, so she could go home to Kentish Town and sleep in her own bed.

It would be cold though. There was no one in the apartment to turn on the electric blanket.

Downstairs. She would go downstairs and tell Amelia what had happened to Clive. She knew what would happen. Skinner would take over. The guests would disperse. Ambulances and doctors would be called, the right people would all be bribed, and the sordid mess would be efficiently covered up. She would never be able to prove a thing. Whatever. She did not care.

Leaving the Bacon room, she made her way through the junkyard corridor. She thought the spiral staircase would lead her down to the party.

…but she could not find the room. It had been distinct from the others. It was comparatively empty. She turned corners she was sure she had never encountered before. Had she taken the wrong route? Every room she looked into was the same. She came full circle around the house, and opened a door to find herself looking up again at the dangling corpse statue.

Now, she could see that it even
looked
like Clive. Or rather, as Clive would look if he were to live to the age of one hundred and fifty and then die. It really was a wretched thing.

She tried to picture the door of the room with the stairs. Had it been disguised to blend into the wall? Could she have missed it by mistaking it for one of the panelled wardrobes? Did it have an exterior handle? She could remember nothing.

Anne felt an urge to throw the kind of temper tantrum she had been able to get away with when she was six years old. She wanted to whimper in frustration and break something. But there was no one around to be made uncomfortable, or be coerced into helping her out. She was on her own. Anyway, her father and Cam had invariably known when she was faking. The Nielsons had always been a family of know-it-alls.

She walked through the Bacon room again, avoiding the central figure, deciding to try the place with the barrels.

…but now here was a main passage beyond the door, spacious and well-lit. A few yards down, the passage broadened out and became a mezzanine. There was the main staircase she had climbed with Clive a while – how long? – ago.

Could there be Bacon rooms, more or less the same, dotted throughout the house in order to create confusion? If so, then Amelia Dorf was an incredibly subtle and sadistic bitch. But, of course, she had known about the sadistic part. As for the subtlety, that seemed quite alien to the woman who coochy-cooed over children she wanted to mutilate. It was now obvious that Amelia had never been in charge.

Anne knew exactly whose fault this, all of this, was. She remembered his unremarkable eyes. And she remembered that he had known immediately who she was. Whatever game was being played now, it was between them, between her and Skinner.

Now, the walkabout was over. The rest of the party was just a flight of stairs away, in the room off the main hall. She heard a tinny phonograph. The record was ‘Mr Sandman’ by The Chordettes. It always gave Anne goosebumps, especially when the unidentified male voice answered the girls’ plea for Mr Sandman to bring them a dream with a drawn-out, ever-so-slightly creepy ‘ye-e-es?’

…but the main hall was not one flight of stairs down. Peering over the balustrade of the mezzanine, Anne saw a huge conservatory, thronged with man-sized plants. The far wall was a large expanse of ornamented glass, with pitch blackness beyond. Heat rose from the depths, and every smooth cold surface was damp with condensation.

Shit, this house was crazy! Anne realized now how jumbled up and contrived the interior was. The architect must have been an opium fiend.

The Chordettes finished. Something rustled in the undergrowth. Anne cautiously went down the stairs.

‘Nina?’

Tropical blossoms turned towards her, stamens quivering. It was some species of voice-activated flytrap she had never heard of. There was a crackle of static, like a public address system at a church social, then another record started. Mama Cass crooning ‘Dream a Little Dream of Me’.

Anne was annoyed.

‘Stop playing stupid games, assholes!’ There was no answer, just the song. ‘Clive is hurt. He might be dead.’

She knew it was not a game any more. She wished she had a gun, the more powerful the better. She would have been happiest with a flamethrower.

Something clattered on the tile floor, behind a frothing bed of shrubs. The flesh of the plants was waxy, with green highlights from the directional lamps. The whole place was artistically lit. Anne glimpsed a different shade of green, moving among the vegetation.

She looked around for a blunt instrument. Something heavy and barefoot was padding around the conservatory. Something not human.

Then, the foliage parted. A giant cat’s head poked out. Its eyes gleamed as if the irises were neon rings. It was a tiger, dyed green. Its fur was arranged in punkish spikes.

She made it to the staircase, and dashed at random back into the bulk of the house.

This could not be happening. Could not, could not, could
not
!

A
fter Clive, he was full but unsatisfied. And he knew in his bones what that meant. This had all happened before. It was time to make a new start. He would need to feed beyond the point of gluttony, and then retreat to await the change. He would have to build himself up, because the change would take it all out of him.