The Last Resort

  Why, oh why, Harriet thought, did I not check up on what the Professor was doing? Her tweed suit suddenly felt hot, stuffy and itchy. Her coarse, dry hair greedily sucked up the moisture in the air and tendrils curled and stuck to her face. Flustered and angry, she pushed her hair out of her eyes and shouted out to the Professor. “What on Earth were you thinking, putting re-animated arms in the showers? Are you crazy? Do you want to scare the guests away? Do you want us to fail?”

  The Professor frowned. “You don’t like the massagers?” he asked in his thick German accent. “I know you ask for special massaging shower-heads, but I think, that must be mistake, because heads don’t massage, do they? Hands massage. So I send Mr. Gore. I say, go and find me massaging hands. He go to Sweden, where they train good masseuse. It take a long time, but he find nine dead masseuse, and he dig them up, and break into the coffin, and bring me back eighteen arms. So, I put in all the guest rooms. What is the matter? Are they not good masseuse? Did Edgar get wrong arms?”

  “Massaging heads,” Harriet explained through gritted teeth, “are mechanical devices which pulsate water to create a soothing shower experience. I thought everyone knew that.” The Professor shrugged. “Anyway,” Harriet went on. “What I need to know is can you disable them? Quickly?”

  The Professor shrugged again. “Oh, sure. I can just cut the power to the arms, so they don’t re-animate when the button is pushed.” He looked thoughtfully at a tangle of cables on the floor, then picked out a few, withdrew a knife from the toolbelt around his waist, and sliced them neatly in half. There was a shower of sparks, a sound like a bottle of fizzy drink opening, and a smell unpleasantly like bacon. The professor’s hair was standing on end. “There we go,” he said mildly, extinguishing a patch of flame on his shoulder, and returning the knife to his toolbelt. “All arms rendered inoperable.”

  “Um, thanks…” Harriet said, as the Professor turned back to his baffling machines. Then an unpleasant thought struck her. “Um, Professor? In your capacity as caretaker here, you haven’t used any other… re-animated body parts… around the place, have you?”

  The Professor looked at her and blinked. “Apart from my helping hands?” he said, indicating his creepy assistants. “Oh, and that monstrosity you call a physical fitness instructor?”

  Harriet winced. She’d finally managed to get Norm to tell her the story of his creation at the hands of the Professor, and it wasn’t pleasant. The Professor considered Norm his greatest failure. According to him, Norm was simply a collection of nerves and impulses, with no ability to reason, and no capacity to feel emotions. Harriet knew this to be false, but the Professor’s mind was made up – so much so that when a baying crowd of superstitious villagers had approached the Professor’s cliff-top laboratory, he had happily sent Norm out to satisfy their bloodlust. Norm had only just escaped with his life, and the two hadn’t seen each other again until Castle Romanoff.

  “Well…yes, in fact I have used other body parts,” the Professor confirmed. “Remember? You asked me to dead-head the roses.”

  Harriet slapped her forehead. “Good Lord,” she said, thinking, thank goodness the guests haven’t been into the greenhouses yet. She’d need to send out a clean-up team straight away. She turned and walked briskly towards the door.

  “Oh, and you may recall,” added the Professor, “Viktor asking that I keep an eye on anything mechanical in the castle which could go wrong.”

  “Keep an eye on…? Oh good gracious me!” Not pausing to say goodbye to the Professor, Harriet fled. There was a lot of work to be done.

  Chapter Fifteen

  “There you are!” Della announced as Beryl strolled back into their bedroom. “We were wondering what happened to you.”

  “Oh!” Beryl replied. “I was downstairs. I was talking to that woman – Violetta – I don’t remember why, and then I met the Count!”

  “Oh yes?” said Doreen. “What’s he like then? Old and crusty?”

  “Oh, no,” Beryl answered, hugging her arms around her body. “Young and handsome!”

  Della and Doreen exchanged looks. “Bet he’s boring then,” Della said jealously. “What did you talk about?”

  Beryl wrinkled her forehead. “I’m… um … I’m not sure. I know he looked deep into my eyes…”

  “Oh yes?”

  “And then… and then… he explained that the massage heads in the showers weren’t working yet… and he apologised for the inconvenience.”

  “Wow,” Della said. “He looked deep into your eyes for that?”

  “Yeah,” added Doreen, rolling her eyes. “Sounds like a real romantic.”

  Beryl scratched her head. Something wasn’t right. She wandered into the bathroom, opened the shower door, and pressed the massage button. Nothing happened.

  “We went for a walk,” Doreen called out to her, “and met that Harriet woman again. Man, does she have a moustache! Anyway, she wouldn’t let us into the greenhouse. Something about pesticide fumes.”

  “She was being a bit weird,” Della added.

  “So,” Doreen said, “we came back through reception, and saw that pretty young thing, what’s her name?”

  “Callie,” Della supplied.

  “Callie, right, and we booked beauty treatments for all of us tomorrow. It’s free. Alright?”

  Something was still niggling at Beryl, but she couldn’t figure out what. “Yeah, alright,” she said. “Sounds good.”

  “Why’s your sweater on backwards?” Della asked her, suddenly noticing.

  “I… I don’t know,” Beryl replied, chewing on her lip. She hadn’t taken off her clothes recently, had she? And why was her hair wet?

  #

  Harriet looked up at the hazel eyeball, which was pointing sightlessly in her direction from its perch atop the emergency backup generator. Once again, this one was too high for Edgar to reach, so Harriet took a deep breath then plucked it down and placed it into the jar alongside its companions. It was the forty-seventh eyeball they had recovered. As she wiped the squidgy jelly-like residue off her fingers with her handkerchief, Harriet wondered what was more worrying – the forty-seven eyeballs themselves, or the fact that the Professor thought that forty-seven pieces of machinery could potentially go wrong. “I can’t believe the two of you didn’t know what ‘keeping an eye on something’ meant!” she said to Edgar.

  Edgar Gore shrugged – a movement which is almost undetectable in a hunchback – and explained. “We learned to thpeak English two hundred yearth ago. Around that time we began to live in hiding and therefore we have not heard many modern colloquialithmth and idiomth.”

  “Well,” Harriet said, regarding the bulgy and slightly dripping sack that the hunchback held in one hand, “you now know that dead-heading roses means cutting off the old spent and drooping flowers, right?”

  Edgar patted the sack, and the resulting squelchy sound made Harriet gag. “Oh yes, now we know.”

  “Uh… have you got a good place to dispose of those?” She indicated the bulgy sack with a nod and then passed him the jar as well. “And these? Somewhere the guests won’t go?”

  Edgar took a moment to balance his two loads. “Oh yeth, Mithtreth Fullmoon.”

  “And you’re sure that’s it for body parts?”

  “The Profethor wanted me to collect forty-theven eyeballth, twelve headth and eighteen armth. That ith all.” His small chest inflated proudly. “We uthed one right hand on fixthing Norm, tho I had to get a nineteenth arm too.”

  For a moment, Harriet thought about explaining to the little man just how disgusting it was to rob graves for a living, but then she looked into his proud, eager-to-please face and shrugged. They were all of them vile in some way, weren’t they? She herself knew what it was to taste fresh human flesh. So who was she to judge? “Good,” she said, and Edgar beamed. She rubbed her face, and finding bristles, said, “Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’ve got to get ready for the party tonight.”

  #

  “I'm
wild again… beguiled again… a simpering, whimpering child again,” Hella crooned, hidden behind swathes of fabric and swaying upon the stage suspended above the dancefloor. “Bewitched, bothered and bewildered – am I.”

  Swizelsticks hummed along and snapped his fingers. He was in his element. The band was swinging, wine was flowing and people were chatting and relaxing. Although he wasn’t much of a wizard, Swizelsticks knew his potions work had always been sound, and this made all the difference when it came to mixing cocktails. Plus, he had a small store of ingredients to add extra zing – fairydust, ground eye of newt – that sort of thing. He also found he had a knack for guessing people’s favourite drinks before they asked for them. Perhaps this was not surprising. His mother had been a fortune teller after all. The loud man with the family – he had ‘scotch and soda’ written all over him. The three travel agents – ‘sea breeze,’ ‘pina colada,’ and ‘rum and coke’. Easy.

  Now Dan and Mike, the two sharply dressed businessmen approached the bar, Armani sports jackets over open shirts. The one on the left, he would go for a red wine. And the one on the right, a martini. Swizelsticks poured out the wine, and then readied a solid silver shaker. This guy would ask for “shaken, not stirred,” just like James Bond, thinking he was witty and original. He did. Smiling, Swizelsticks poured measures of gin and vermouth into the container, replaced the lid and mixed it smoothly, looking out at the dining hall as he did so. He saw Harriet passing, dressed in a deep burgundy velvet gown, her hair swept up, and only a hint of a five-o’clock shadow on her chin. Still watching her, hoping to catch her eye, he reached for a jar which was positioned on the top of the bar, unscrewed the lid, and removed an olive, stabbing it with a toothpick and dropping it into a glass in one well-practised motion. Still not looking, he poured the martini over the olive, and slid the glass across to the customer. Then he did look, and all of the colour drained from his face. It was not an olive he had placed in the glass, it was an eyeball. A human eyeball.

  Bewildered, Swizelsticks looked at the olive jar, only to see two jars upon the benchtop, one full of innocuous green fruit, one full of human peepers. With a strangled yelp, Swizelsticks scooped the offending jar off the bench and tucked it away out of sight. Then he turned his attention to the glass. The man had it to his lips, was taking a sip. He hadn’t noticed the eyeball. There was still a chance Swizelsticks could recover the situation. He stared at the glass, and began to intone a charm. “Olive, olive, olive,” he chanted.

  Suddenly Violetta was leaning over the bar, her acute hearing having picked up the yelp. “Is everything alright here?”

  Swizelsticks nodded towards the glass, his eyes large and round, sweat pouring from his forehead. “Olive, olive, olive,” he chanted.

  “Oh for pity’s sake…” Violetta began, seeing the pickled organ in its bath of alcohol. At the same moment, the eyeball sprang to life, jumping and jittering in the cocktail, slopping liquid over the sides. The horrified owner of the cocktail at first thought his arm had been bumped and looked around for the offender, but soon realised the truth. He stared in disbelief at the eyeball, and the eyeball stared back at him, also in disbelief. Then the man began to scream. Swizelsticks wrung his hands together and hopped from foot to foot, unsure what to do. Violetta grabbed the glass, pulled out the eyeball, stuck it in her mouth, removed the toothpick, and swallowed. The man and his companion stared at her. She looked back at them, staring deep into their eyes, and said, “It was only a cocktail onion. Someone bumped your arm.”

  “Y..e…es…” the man agreed after a moment. “It was only a cocktail onion. Someone… someone bumped my arm.”

  “Someone bumped your arm,” agreed the other man.

  “I’m so sorry,” Swizelsticks said. “Let me refresh your drinks.”

  “Th…thank you,” said the first man. “That would be lovely.”

  Bent down under the bar, Lisa let out the breath she had been holding. She had come over to ask for a glass of chardonnay, but noticed a coin on the floor and had bent down to pick it up the moment all the excitement started. She had stayed crouched low, and unseen by Violetta and Swizelsticks, had witnessed everything. It hadn’t been a cocktail onion. Even now, she could see, just through a small gap under the bar, the jar of eyeballs, sitting on the floor out of sight of the guests. How had Violetta convinced those men otherwise? Lisa decided it was best not to find out. She made herself as small as possible and stayed crouched low.

  After a while, Violetta moved away, and Lisa was considering sneaking off, when Craig came over. “What are you doing down there?” he said loudly.

  “Shh!” Lisa hissed, grabbing her brother by the wrist and dragging him down. A moment later, Harriet came bustling over.

  “Can I have a word?” she said sharply to Swizelsticks, motioning him to the end of the bar, away from the guests, but towards Lisa and Craig’s hiding place. Quickly, the pair waddled further away, around the corner of the bar, Craig making quizzical faces at Lisa, while Lisa shook her head and put her finger to her lips.

  “Violetta told me what happened,” Harriet said angrily, “but not how. How could you have been so careless?”

  Looking like a puppy that had just been caught doing a wee on the new carpet, Swizelsticks shrugged. “The jar of eyeballs was on the bar exactly where the olives are kept.”

  Craig gasped, and Lisa pointed to the gap under the bar. Craig lowered his head, had a look and gasped again, loud enough this time for Lisa to clap her hand over his mouth.

  Harriet sighed. “I see. That means this is Edgar’s fault for leaving the jar there. He and the Professor have caused me enough trouble already today. I think this is the last straw. I only hope he hasn’t left the bag of heads anywhere inappropriate.”

  “Bag of heads?” Craig yelped.

  “Bag of heads?” Swizelsticks said at the same time, fortunately covering Craig’s exclamation.

  “Mmm,” said Harriet. “I’ll tell you later. Still, I don’t see how you served the drink without noticing.” Because I was looking at you, Swizelsticks thought, but he didn’t say anything. “Also,” Harriet went on, “why did the dead eyeball spring to life?”

  Swizelsticks flushed bright red. “Oh, that,” he said. “I…I was trying to use magic to make it better. I was chanting olive, olive…”

  “And?”

  “Well, I might have sort of said ‘oh live, oh live’ by accident.”

  “I see,” said Harriet, biting her lip. “Well, you must be more careful in the future.” She turned on her heel and stomped away. Swizelsticks stared at her back, thinking, she’s magnificent, until he was snapped back to attention by the strident voice of Albert Fisher, who had apparently been talking to him for some time.

  “I SAID, a gin and orange, a lemon squash and a scotch and water, PLEASE!”

  #

  The only two people who were not invited to the welcome party stared at each other across the gloomy playroom. She doesn’t look like a babysitter, Amy thought. In Amy’s experience, babysitters were pretty teenage girls who talked on the phone all night to their boyfriends, ignoring Amy, and eating delivery pizza which they wouldn’t offer to share. This woman was like no one Amy had ever seen. Her face was a mass of fissures, like scrunched up tissue-paper and her long, tangled hair was as coarse and dull as mouldy straw. Her false teeth looked metallic – as if they were made of iron. She wore a skirt made of several layers of clashing colours and fabrics, topped by a knitted poncho. In amongst the folds of the skirt, chains and strings of leather held assorted trinkets, like a giant charm bracelet. So far the woman hadn’t spoken to her, and so Amy hadn’t spoken either. The two of them just sat on miniature chairs and stared at each other. After a while, uncomfortable with the staring, Amy began to study the room. Like most playrooms, there were toys scattered around – blocks and balls, dolls and dress-ups, trucks and T-rexes. In amongst these everyday objects were less familiar ones – pieces of rusty metal, crystals of amethyst, a
stag’s horn, a dried-up seahorse, a copper disc patterned with a five-sided star, a silver broom made out of tree-branch and a set of stones with funny carvings on them. Amy then turned her attention to the walls. They were made of dull grey stones which were covered in posters of animals – not the usual puppies, kittens and bunnies, but featuring ugly animals like axolotls, hagfish, tarantulas, toads, vampire bats and an awful lot of chickens.

  “You like animals, little girl?” the old lady suddenly said, right into Amy’s ear. Amy jumped, startled, not having seen the woman move to her side. She bit her lip to stifle a whimper, and nodded. Wide-eyed, she watched the woman reach into a pocket hidden in the folds of her skirt, and remove a live chick. It wasn’t a cute fluffy yellow chick like the teachers brought to nursery school at Easter time. This chick was a bit older – caught in the awkward stage between fluffy down and adult feathers. It peered at Amy and squawked a strangled cry. The woman took Amy’s hand and curled it into a fist. She then tapped the fist three times with a knobbly stick. Amy felt something appearing in her empty hand, growing from nothing. She opened her fist quickly and was astonished to find it full of kibbled maize. As the tiny chicken began to peck the ground corn out of her palm, Amy giggled. If she had been looking at Barbara at that moment, she might have seen one of the deep wrinkles on Barbara’s face vanish as if it had never been there.