The Wicker Tree (27 page)

THE CAREFULLY CALCULATED drug dose injected into Beth's bottom earlier in the day – a quite sufficient sedative to keep her from waking until the hour Beame's taxidermy procedures commenced – was now wearing off. She lay much as Beame had left her when he hurried off in search of the glass eyes. His arrest had delayed his proceeding by the timetable he usually followed. If she had not been disturbed, she might have remained unconscious for another hour or so.

Daisy, however, was one of those people in whom alcohol begets hyperactivity rather than sleepiness. As the evening wore on, with her cooking all finished for the May Day feast, and Mr Beame still absent and nothing else to do except listen to a pop programme on the radio, she worried that Beth might awake in the Queens' Room and wonder where she was.

Remembering how destructive Beth could be when aroused, she wanted to make sure that all was well. If Daisy had been sober she would have realised that there was very little she could have done if she had found the Queen wide-awake and anxious to escape by any means possible. However, as she was already well into a freshly opened bottle of cherry brandy, nothing inhibited her from going to the Queens' Room, unlocking the door, and swaying over to the gurney that held the trestle on which the unconscious Beth lay.

Daisy peered at the beautiful Queen and noted that she was still breathing regularly, but was otherwise in a satisfactory state of sedation. Her peering, in the dim, pink light of the Queens' Room, caused her to step forward and jog the gurney. Daisy did not notice this as she whispered 'sleep well, my lovely!' and tottered, rather unsteadily, back out of the room, locking the door behind her. However, the wheeled gurney had started to move slowly but steadily towards a gentle collision with one of the walls.

The shock of this slight collision was sharp enough to jerk Beth awake. People who have been sedated usually return to consciousness by stages. If they awake in strange surroundings it takes a little more time for them to find their bearings. If they awake in a huge room bathed in pink light where some twenty elaborately dressed women sit absolutely motionless in rows upon gilded thrones, all staring into space, a normal person will close their eyes again and hope the nightmare will go away and that next time they open their eyes they will be in a normal bedroom, preferably one they recognise. In Beth's case the scene that met her was still the same – same motionless women, same pink light.

Her head ached and she was very conscious that her feet were sore, and she wanted to examine them, but more urgent was her need to go to the toilet. This need was great enough to make it a priority even over finding out where on earth she was. Seeing the door by which Daisy had just left, she tried to open it. But it was a big heavy polished mahogany door and firmly locked. She banged on it as hard as she could with her fists but all she could hear from the far side was the very distant, muffled sound of Franz Ferdinand on a disc or radio. It told her she was somewhere in the twenty-first century, nothing more… Another thing, there was a nasty sweet rancid odour about this place. It baffled her that she was quite naked, although there was some kind of garment that had been draped over her when she slept. But no time to examine that now, her other need was too urgent.

Beth literally raced around the room looking for some way out. Five sets of huge French windows lined one side of the room. All were heavily curtained and locked. In between each was a large Chinese vase containing a potted plant. Since she could find no other exit, she very soon dispossessed one vase of its plant and used it for her own purposes, replacing the plant as tidily as she could.

Now, with this necessary chore complete, she examined her surroundings quite carefully. The motionless, staring women were presumably waxworks. Her priority still lay elsewhere. Apart from about fifty little gilt chairs stacked in one corner there was no furniture except the gurney and trestle on which she had awoken. There were no chests of drawers and no closets. Apart from the garment that had been lying across her, like a blanket, when she awoke, none of her clothes were anywhere to be seen. Accordingly, she went and examined this one available garment. Holding it up to one of the pink lights, which resembled sanctuary lamps in churches, she saw at once that the dress was beautifully made. She remembered having once worn it, but not where… It looked like a costume for Titania, the Fairy Queen, which she had once seen in a production of
A Midsummer Night's Dream
she had witnessed in Central Park when doing a gig in New York. The sight of it started to trigger her memory of what had happened in the last forty-eight hours. The dress was of course that which Mary Hillier had made for her as Queen of the May. This room must be in Tressock Castle.

She was about to put the dress on when she saw the hideous collection of taxidermy instruments. Their intended use was still obscure, until she remembered the stuffed animals in the hall. Memory was now kindling memory. Mr Beame in particular loomed as a monstrous threat. She knew she was still in terrible danger. The locked door might open at any moment and he would be there with his dreaded syringe. There were, she now noticed, next to the taxidermy things, two clothes bags hanging from the end of the gurney. To her great relief, she opened them to find a pair of tights and some horribly ornamental shoes, which were something other than her bare feet to walk on nevertheless.

Dressing hurriedly, she turned her attention to the waxworks. There were actually ten of them in all. The larger number had been an illusion created by an enormous mirror at one end of the room. There was also an empty throne.

Beth knew that finding some way of getting out of this room was desperately urgent, but she couldn't resist a closer examination of the waxwork figures. The one sitting closest to the empty throne had a beautiful high cheek-boned face, but her most notable feature was her hair. It was a deep red colour, glossy and thick and wavy. Beth moved closer to examine the girl's face. It had a waxy look to it, but it was almost too full of natural blemishes – one eye very slightly higher than the other, for instance – to not be based on a real person. Beth touched the hand resting on the arm of the chair. It had a clammy feel to it. But it wasn't wax. There seemed to be a crack where the thumb joined the hand. Beth touched it and a chunk of matter fell away. Below was the bone structure of a woman's thumb. She gave a silent scream.

Moments later, she was searching frantically behind the curtains for some way out. She found that all the windows were locked, but that the locks were of course to guard against intruders from outside. Keys hung from little hooks inside the window embrasures. The window locks were set into the sides of the frames, twelve in all, and they were stiff from lack of use.

Panic and fear that the door behind her might open before she had finished the job gave her extra strength. Within minutes, she had forced a window open and was running, gulping fresh air, across a terrace punctuated with pots of ornamental shrubs. As she ran, weird animal sounds, shrieks and moans, laughter and occasional screams seemed ever nearer. But all she cared about was that she was leaving that dreadful room behind. She was impelled forward. The sound of singing, bawdy songs and folk airs, drifted towards her. Smoke from bonfires eddied in little gusts. Beth ran towards the sound of humanity.

There were quite a lot of people up there on the hill that overlooked Tressock. The hill loomed over the ornamental trees that fringed the garden. As she started down a path which led to the stables she saw, riding towards her, a woman leading a lame horse. Because they were backlit by the setting sun, which still shone from just above the hill, she did not recognise Lolly until she had drawn level with her.

The woman looked at Beth with a face so drawn and reddened with weeping that it was hard to imagine it had ever been that of the laughing, provocatively sexy female she had so instinctively disliked. Beth was filled with dread by the sight of her. For, astonishingly, she was wearing Steve's hat and riding the black horse they called Prince.

'Where's Steve?' she asked at once.

Lolly looked for a moment as if she was going to ride on without answering. Then she gave an involuntary sob; it sounded almost like a groan.

'It's too late, Beth,' she said. 'I tried to save him. I begged him to follow me. Steve's no more, Beth. Dead. Can you ride? This mare is lame. But come with me to the stables and I'll lend you a mount so you can ride the hell out of here…'

'Dead – Steve?' these were the only words Beth had really heard. Her tone was one of total disbelief. 'That's not possible.'

'You've got to understand, Beth. The Laddie is like a – like a sacrament. We need the blood of the best, sweetest, goodliest, the bravest young man we can find. That is the perfect sacrifice. Steve! Why did it have to be Steve? Because he was the perfect Laddie, Beth. Just as you are the perfect Queen of the May. I could have saved him. I tried. But he thought it was just a silly game.'

'They killed him? Steve? That Lachlan? That Delia? I've gotta hear this from them. I mean I just don't believe this.'

'Don't you?' asked Lolly wearily. 'How did you manage to escape? Did Delia wake you up with a nice cup of tea and send you off sightseeing while they and the whole town killed your fiancé? I don't think so.'

Beth suddenly realised that Lolly was telling the truth; that there was no point, would be no point, in her lying about something as dreadful as this. This woman she hated was telling her the truth, was the only person to do so for days now. Her own experiences confirmed that Steve was dead. How long would she have lived if those terrible instruments had been used on her? But this woman had Steve's hat and that she just could not bear.

'Gimme that hat!' She shouted it at Lolly. 'You stole that!'

'It was all that was left, Beth,' said Lolly. 'You can have it if you

like. You probably have more right to it than I do.'

She handed Beth the hat. The young Redeemer snatched it from her hand and walked determinedly towards the bonfires that dotted the hill just ahead of her. Lolly rode after her, dragging her limping mare behind her.

'Don't go up there, Beth!' she cried. 'You must know by now what they are going to do to you. Somehow you escaped from Beame. Run now, while you can, girl! Come with me, I'll help you.'

Beth stopped and turned. Her face wore an almost trance-like expression of shock and grief.

'If Steve is really dead, I am certainly not going to run away. I think the Lord has chosen me for this, Lolly. He saved me from Mr Beame. He'll protect me now.'

'But you're forgetting,' shouted Lolly, as if decibels would somehow penetrate Beth's fixed resolve, her blinkered vision of herself. 'You are the other perfect sacrifice! You just have to be next to die! Because you're the Queen of the May!'

'That is right. I am one Queen of the May no one is ever going to forget.'

BECAUSE THE SUN was rimming the top of the hill with an amber light as it set, Beth found herself walking in search of Lachlan and Delia through a shadowed, chilly upland, but one alive with scattered bonfires and people roaring drunk, people dancing, people singing, people rutting, people freed from all civilised restraint by their shared experience on the King's Island. When, together, you have devoured another human being, then any merely sexual enormity is but a bagatelle. When you can tell each other, the morning after, that it was all in honour of the god, an offering bound to bring a great reward for all concerned, then councillor, trade unionist, laird, shop keeper, labourer, housewife and whore can all express mutual satisfaction and look forward to next spring. For May Day comes but once a year.

Beth had seen her quarry far away in the distance, at the very top of the hill, where a huge tree was silhouetted against the setting sun, bleeding through its branches and foliage.

Standing to one side of the tree, supervising a number of people hanging votive offerings, was the tall, unmistakable figure of Lachlan.

Beth hardly looked at the frolicking men and women of Tressock and, at first, they were totally unaware of her. The Coronation normally took place on the terrace outside the Queens' Room on May Day at about noon, before the festival's major and final feast. The great gates of the castle were closed while the embalmed Queen was carried around the building three times, seated upon her throne. She was then crowned with a garland, to great acclaim, by Sir Lachlan, and carried to her last resting place in the Queens' Room. Everyone bowed to her as she passed and applauded and, before the windows of the Queens' Room were closed for another year, the whole community filed past her. Some left requests for favours or cures at her feet. It was assumed that the Queen, in the state of ecstasy, bliss and endless love that she now found herself, would be glad to grant their requests and she certainly had the power to do so. She had been turned into a latter-day saint.

This being the case, it is easy to imagine the shock of a group of three or four men and women, each gratifying him or herself with some sensitive and pleasurable part of one of the others, when one of them hisses: 'Good gods, we're being stared at by the Queen herself. I'm not kidding. It's her. Do you think I don't recognise her?'

But for the most part, those who saw her were awe-struck by her beauty and dignity as she moved on and on, up the hill, closer to Lachlan.

Word was going around now, from camp-fire to camp-fire, that the Queen herself, dressed for her coronation, was amongst them. No Queen had ever appeared before at the Saturnalia. People started to rise to their feet, to disengage from whatever they had been doing, to move up the hill behind her. It became so that it seemed, by the time she was getting quite close to Lachlan, that she was leading a great crowd of murmuring people.

Lachlan had been performing another of his priestly duties, the hanging of the votive offerings upon the 'great tree'. Since each year the great tree was ritually burnt with all its presents, this ceremony moved geographically around Tressock, always on some hill or eminence where the dying sun, if it should be visible, could form part of the spectacle.