‘You don’t know?’ I was surprised. After all, they had been inside my head more than once now.
They both shook their heads and I was relieved to see that the girl appeared to have got over her fright.
‘My name is Dismas,’ I told them.
‘The Good Thief?’ Joseph said instantly with a kind of half-smile.
‘That’s right, the Good Thief, the bad-guy-turned-good, who died beside Christ on the Cross.’ I’d forgotten that their favourite reading was the Bible. Joseph and Mary seemed pleased, despite their nervousness.
‘Dismas . . . ?’ Joseph said.
‘Just call me Dis, okay?’
‘Dis?’
‘What is it, Joseph?’
‘We are the same, aren’t we?’
I was puzzled by the question. ‘Of course, we’re all the same. We’re all human.’
‘But you are more like us than others.’
‘Yeah, I’m more like you. But there are plenty like us in the outside world.’
‘I’m glad. Although I don’t understand why only we are kept here, locked away.’
‘Neither do I, Joseph, but we’ll find out. I promise you, we’ll find out.’
Another question that burned me was precisely what was Constance Bell’s role in all this? She wasn’t kept here under lock and key like these poor wretches and, from what Joseph had told me, she obviously cared for these people. It was impossible to believe that Constance was in league with her guardian, Leonard Wisbeech, but what other explanation was there? It was another question whose answer I intended to find out. I limped to the rail and stared into the stairwell. Mary did not try to back away from me.
There was the usual gloom from the floor below, as if the interior of the building was set in permanent twilight, and I heard no sounds, no other signs of life. Joseph joined me and stood on tip-toes to look over.
‘D’you know what’s down there on the other levels, Joseph?’ I asked him.
His sad little face looked up at me and for the first time I saw the child behind the mask. There was a trusting in his eyes, even though there was apprehension too, and somehow it made me feel both inadequate and determined at the same time.
‘The laboratory is on the next floor,’ Joseph answered. ‘The Doctor refers to it as his “museum of the anomalous and curious”.’
I had to remind myself that Joseph was still a mere boy, even though he appeared otherwise and the words he spoke suggested a learning beyond the capabilities of a twelve-year-old. In normal society, he might even have been considered a child prodigy, and I wondered if Wisbeech treated him as such, feeding his intellect, encouraging him to extend his knowledge by reading from learned tomes. Maybe that was Joseph’s true uniqueness, not his disease, but his intellectual powers. Something tugged at my sleeve and I turned to find Mary peering earnestly into my face.
‘M-m-must go now.’ She continued to pull at my jacket, demanding a response.
I straightened and managed to give her a smile, hoping it wouldn’t frighten her. She, herself, managed a tentative smile in return and it made me feel a little better.
‘I’ll get you out of here,’ I told her quietly. ‘I’ll get you all out of here. But we must find Constance first.’
Yes, I eventually would get them all out of this cruel, Godforsaken place, but I wouldn’t take them to the authorities, not to the very people who had allowed this, either by negligence or plan, to happen. No, it would be the media first, a television station or an upmarket newspaper, not a tabloid but a broadsheet whose headlines would not feature the word ‘FREAKS’. I’d make the story public first and only then would I involve the Law.
As skittish as a young deer, the girl hurried past me to the top step, where she grabbed the rail for balance and looked back at me for reassurance. Joseph’s fingers curled around mine and this time he led me.
The three of us began the descent together.
We listened at the door on the next level, holding our breath, the tension between us almost palpable. I could feel Mary trembling beside me and Joseph had closed his eyes as if meditating. I guessed he was trying to pick up ‘vibes’ from Michael, our so-called ‘guide’, and mentally I shook my head in despair. We had to rely on ourselves, not this poor mute, helpless thing whose thoughts, they claimed, would assist us in our search for Constance. Despite all I’d learned, my natural sceptism was hard to overcome.
‘You say there’s a laboratory through here?’ I whispered.
‘Yes, but we must go on,’ Joseph insisted.
‘I want to see it.’
His eyes snapped open. ‘No, no, please let’s go before we are discovered. Michael is letting me know that Constance is not there.’
‘I’m still curious. I’d like to know exactly what Wisbeech is up to before we leave this place. Look, why don’t you two wait here while I sneak a quick look around.’
They both clutched my arm as if afraid to be left alone.
‘It’ll only take me a couple of minutes.’
They still clung to me.
‘Okay. Then you’ll both have to come with me. I promise it’ll be quick.’
I could see the consternation on their faces, but nevertheless I tried the doorhandle. As expected, the door was locked and I reached for the keyring once more. The same key that had opened the landing door upstairs opened this one too.
There were pitch-black shadows inside, although moonlight flooded through from windows of the room’s right-hand wall, apparently no ban on them at this level. Through them I saw that most of the clouds in the night sky had dispersed. The strong smell of formaldehyde wafted over us and it was almost a relief from the general stench that continued to cloy my sensitive nostrils. Cautiously, I pushed my head through the opening and was able to discern long bench tables running the length of the room, with cupboards, glass cabinets and shelving around the walls. Using the torch, I saw there were large glass cases and jars on the work benches, all of which contained floating things of no recognizable form – at least, not from where I stood. I felt the material of my jacket being pulled again.
‘Please let’s leave,’ I heard Joseph implore from behind me.
‘There’s no one here,’ I whispered back to him, my eye still drawn to those specimen jars and cases on the long tables. Although impossible to identify their contents from that distance, there was nevertheless something repugnant about them. The shapes suspended inside the clear liquid appeared to have no regular form and seemed almost like weird, modernist sculptures or the sick creations of HR Giger. I decided I wanted a closer look and so stepped into the laboratory, much to my companions’ audible dismay.
Once inside, I was able to see work benches along the windowed wall, desk lights and computers on their surfaces. There was the usual scientific paraphernalia around on other worktops, from Bunsen burners to both ordinary and electron microscopes, from flat-bottomed and conical flasks to evaporating dishes and measuring cylinders, whose purpose I could only guess at. While Joseph and Mary waited by the door, I wandered further into the huge room.
I approached one of the long benches and shone the light on the closest glass cabinet there. With a small cry, I recoiled at the sight of the thing inside.
Again I felt sickened, yet I was also perversely fascinated with the huge, peculiar, unborn foetus floating in the preservative. The bulbous but only partly-formed head was tucked into tiny arms, a lizard’s comb running from the scalp, over its arched back, to end in a pointed tail. Minute legs were bent and raised into its stomach, but I could see the fleshy webbing between its tiny, splayed toes. I would have assumed it was an animal or reptile of some kind had it not been for the pallid and soft-looking skin, the one visible eye, blue and very human, the growth that almost formed a natural ear. And if it were not for the glassy blankness in its stare, I might even have imagined it was alive. I prayed then that it had never lived.
Swiftly, as if for relief from this monstrosity, I turned the beam on a
tall, thick jar standing next to the glass case and I groaned, for the specimen in this was as gross as its neighbour. Behind the curved glass there floated an infant’s small head, its eyelids closed, its little pink lips parted. The face was not easy to look at, for it was squashed slightly and the cheeks protruded, as if it had been crushed between skull and jaw. It was attached to a trailing column of vertebrae and lengthy spinal cord; there was no body, no limbs, just a baby’s flattened head drifting in pellucid liquid with a soft spine dangling from it.
The next jar held within it a large fibrous mass, a rough-shaped ball that looked like some terrible overgrown cyst, only embedded in its scabrous surface was an eye, and a few crooked teeth, and pieces of tufty black hair, all that remained of an embryo that had existed in some unfortunate woman’s womb, sharing the space with, and finally absorbed into, this abnormal sac. I moved the light on, dreading what else I might find, but somehow powerless to stop myself, horribly gripped by these macabre exhibits, repulsed by them, yet curious to see more, as if I were under their morbid spell. Another large, glass case, suspended inside a tangled mass of limbs, intertwined arms and legs, two young bodies fused together in cursed embrace, heads melded by the faces, no spaces between their flesh. I thought I had seen the worst earlier that night, but nothing could match these fresh obscenities. Still I went on, my thoughts numbed, revulsion now strangely submissive; my sensitivities had detached themselves from the observations, my emotions self-protectively had hardened. This chamber of true horrors was too gruesomely awesome to remain shocking, for the normal mind cannot abide heinous repetition and will always strive to shield itself for the sake of sanity. I’m not saying I wasn’t disturbed as I progressed along these rows of outrageous specimens, displayed here like bizarre trophies: all I mean is that by now I was too stunned to be affected. The mummified boy, who had another head growing from the top of his own, the supernumerary head having grown upside down and ending at the neck, meant nothing to me; the two small skeletons lying flat inside a glass cabinet, both of them joined together in longitudinal axis at the pelvis, so that instead of legs each had the torso of the other – none of them truly registered with me. The sights had all become too overwhelming, and mercifully so; I passed between them in a daze, the terrible afflictions at least muted by moonlight, the torchlight never lingering on any one exhibit.
When I reached the end of the room and briefly swung the torchbeam along the shelves bearing rows of various-sized containers and jars, each one of these filled with fleshy substances, I decided I had had enough and a glimpse of disembodied eyeballs staring back at me from behind glass reinforced the decision. I turned and almost dropped the torch in surprise. Someone was standing right behind me.
‘Jesus!’ I said, almost jumping into the air. ‘Joseph, don’t do that!’
He looked suitably abashed. ‘I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to frighten you.’
‘’S all right. It isn’t you, it’s this bloody place.’ I scythed the light beam around the big room, not allowing it to loiter on anything specific. ‘Why? Why are all these things kept here?’
‘They are for the Doctor’s researches,’ Joseph replied, ‘and for his pleasure.’
‘He takes pleasure in all this?’
‘He is obsessed by our forms.’
‘He’s told you this?’
‘The Doctor likes to converse with me. I suppose he is really testing my intelligence.’
‘But what is he researching?’
‘Our very nature. He talks very much of genetics and how tests on this thing he calls DNA eventually might lead to the eradication of the hereditary diseases that cause our malformations.’
I had to keep reminding myself that this was a twelve-year-old speaking, but it was almost impossible when I looked into that century-old face and listened to his words.
‘And that’s his sole purpose?’ I asked. ‘He’s using you and your friends, he’s studying you all, for the benefit of mankind?’
‘Yes, or so I once believed. The Doctor has changed though; I think he has grown weary of us. I believe that he has other motives – perhaps he always had more than one. But we must go now, it isn’t safe for us here.’
He began pulling at my arm, the way a child who hates a place might pull at a parent. I resisted though, because I had seen another door at the end of this room, a plastic double door without handles, the kind you might find leading to an operating theatre in a hospital.
‘Come,’ Joseph insisted. ‘Mary is waiting for us and she’s very frightened.’
‘Wait, Joseph.’ I indicated the plastic doorway. ‘D’you know what’s through there?’
I felt his shudder, and he continued to pull at me.
‘I want to take a look inside,’ I persisted.
‘No!’
His cry startled me. ‘Tell me why not, Joseph.’
‘Michael is urging us to leave.’
‘It’ll only take a moment.’
‘No, we cannot go in there. We will not.’
‘Then tell me why.’
He stopped tugging and his voice was shaky when he answered me. ‘Because,’ he said, fearfully looking past me at the door, ‘because that is the dissecting room.’
36
I could feel the beat of my heart as we stood beneath the dismal light of the ground-floor stairwell, me with my ear pressed against the locked door there, my companions holding on to each other like the two lost children they were. I listened for any signs of activity beyond the heavy wood, but either the door was too thick, or there was nothing going on on the other side.
Even I had not ventured into the dissecting room. I was scared. Yes, my senses had become numbed against all the distressing sights in this abominable place, but fear was something that could not be denied. I was afraid of the house itself, as if evil was seeping from its very walls, permeating the air with its corruptness, and creeping into me with malign intent. I wanted to get away from there, wanted to take deep, fresh untainted breaths again: with terrible guilt, I felt that I wanted to be among normal people once more. But I would not leave without Constance. Nothing could make me do that.
I stepped away from the door. ‘What’s through there?’ I whispered to Joseph.
‘I . . . I don’t know.’ He looked up at Mary, who shook her head. ‘We’re brought here sometimes, but none of us remember . . .’
‘You’re not telling the truth, are you?’ There was something in his voice, the way he avoided my gaze.
He hung his head and I knelt in front of him. ‘What is it, Joseph? I’m your friend, you know that.’
‘We . . .’ He took a breath. ‘We have dreams. Michael tells us they are memories.’
‘Of what? What happens in them?’ Dreams were something I could no longer dismiss out of hand.
He kept his eyes downcast. ‘Bad things,’ was all he would say.
Before I could press him further, a noise started up behind the bare wall to our left. It was the familiar sound of the elevator moving. Almost at the same time we heard muffled voices approaching from the other side of the door. Then there came the scrape of a key being inserted into its lock.
I looked around wildly. I’d never get my two companions back up the stairs to the next floor in time – with my limp slowing me up, I probably wouldn’t even make it myself. A narrow corridor ran alongside the staircase and in the dim light I thought I could make out a closed door at the end, one which undoubtedly led out to the riverbank behind the building.
‘Come on,’ I hissed, spinning Joseph and Mary round and pushing them in the direction of the back door.
Joseph shuffled and Mary hobbled, both moving as quickly as they could. I pushed past them, determined to have the door open before they reached it so that they could scoot outside without delay.
‘Oh shit,’ I groaned quietly when I saw it was bolted top and bottom. I guessed it would be locked as well, although now it was a moot point: by the time I’d unfastened the bolts, let
alone tried one of the keys on the ring, the door at the other end would be open anyway and we would be in full view. The voices behind us grew louder as the door began to move.
It was as I looked back, ready to face whoever came through, that I noticed the pitchy hole underneath the stairway, more steps, these of stone, descending into it. Without a word, I grabbed the wrists of my companions, pulling them out of sight just as I glimpsed the door at the far end opening wide, two figures coming through. I expected to hear a shout, footsteps running after us, but the voices did not change their tone, nor did the footsteps quicken.
The girl almost stumbled as I urged them on, but I was able to steady her with my grip on her wrist. I wouldn’t let either of them stop, because those sounds were advancing down the corridor, the people above us heading towards the rear door. I almost stumbled myself when I realized they might even be making for this stairway.
The stone staircase obviously led to the cellars or a basement area. I kept my companions moving, and I think the only reason that we were not heard was because the other people were making too much noise themselves, laughing and joking, one of them – there had to be three – even humming a tune. I might have been wrong – Lord knows I had more urgent things on my mind – but I thought I detected an edge to their laughter: it seemed too high-pitched, nervy, and their conversation was stilted, somehow forced.
It was even darker at the bottom of the stairs and I could only just make out the huge, black door that faced us. I listened for the sounds of bolts being drawn above, the click of a lock, but when I heard none of these and the footsteps suddenly grew heavier, I knew that the people behind us were descending the stairs. Even if the door in front of us was unlocked, there was no time to open it without being seen, so I did the only thing possible: I put my arms around Joseph’s shoulders and Mary’s wrist and hurried them round to the back of the stone stairway, quietly forcing them into the deeply shadowed and ever-diminishing gap between floor and angled ceiling. We huddled there, each of us holding our breath, listening to the loudening footsteps over our heads and the voices that approached with them. It was almost pitch black in our hideaway, and I was grateful for that. The air was musty-damp.