But, of course, that was all nonsense. Kit did not really do it. She was delusional when she said she had murdered Fergus.
“Get up, Agnes. There is something you must see. Get up now.”
The merciless fingers digging into her shoulders had the power to bruise, even to the bone. I may bear Kit’s imprint forever, she thought. This irrational fear of such contaminations generated a surge of uncommon strength. She was able to push Kit away and leap to her feet.
For an instant, before Kit closed in on her again, Agnes had a clear view of the mottled complexion and, above all, of the wide, eerily unfocused eyes. She had no doubt the inner scene Kit beheld was a protracted torment. If she had indeed been to Siena to see her therapist, then she had obviously found neither lasting comfort nor clarity there.
“Get dressed, Agnes!” The command had the force of a slap, so much so that Agnes instinctively averted her cheek. “Move!” Kit pushed a fist into her sternum.
“Stop it, Kit. What’s got into you?” She immediately regretted the foolish idiom. Insanity had got into Kit and there was perhaps no way ever to get it out again. But surely there was hope? If she could stay sober, Kit could be made well. She frowned, aware this was facile, a child’s line of thinking. Clumsily, she tried to clasp the hand that had just punched her. “Try to calm down, Kit. We don’t have to race out into the night.”
Kit glared. “Oh yes we do, Agnes. And we won’t be going far. I need you to see why you must help me kill him. I want to bring you into the presence of his evil. Unless you witness it, you’re never going to believe me.”
The oddly Biblical phrase, “the presence of his evil,” intensified Agnes’s alarm. Unwanted pictures crowded her mind: of Hugh, naked and slug-white, hunched over a computer screen on which were played out deeds so repellent they ought never to have been conceived. Or was it something far worse Kit would show her? Agnes plumbed the scale of human iniquity, hit vivisection, both animal and human, and chose to go no further.
“Hurry!” Kit snapped as Agnes pulled her loose cotton pants hastily over her nightgown, thrust her arms into yesterday’s T-shirt. When she fumbled putting on her canvas shoes, Kit prodded her in the shoulder.
Tomorrow, Ages resolved, tomorrow I will give Hugh my notice. I cannot bear this any longer. I do not have the resources to withstand the toxic atmosphere Kit creates. It is too vast and riddled with pockets of hatred and horror. If I were able to help her, I would. But the root and reach of her illness are insuperable. It is like trying to grapple with a hurtling meteor. These inane thoughts came far too late; the spectre of fear was already grotesquely swollen in her chest, corded tight.
“Hurry!” Kit shadowed Agnes so closely down the stairs she could feel feverish breath on her nape. It was to her advantage that she knew the topography of the steps so well, which treads had worn away in a smoothed bevel and which narrowed as the winding stair curved, once, twice, three times. Otherwise, she might have stumbled and fallen with Kit’s relentless harrying behind her. The planed wooden handrail was noticeably damp. She did not want to admit this was because her palms were sweating profusely. She could not afford to dwell upon her fear.
Once they passed through the kitchen, Kit took the lead, gesturing Agnes to silence with a finger to her lip, then beckoning her onward toward the front door. This mute instruction brought Agnes untold relief. She had been dreading a forced march up the main staircase to the sacrosanct second floor where she had never yet set foot, where Hugh and Kit slept — separately? But who was to say?
So her spirits rose with an unwarranted lightness, as she and Kit went out into the night. The first thing she saw was the moon, so full and low riding over the hills, it appeared a thing unreal. Its pallid sheen had a greenish tinge, like the febrile complexion of a restless patient too long confined. She grasped at the crude explanation it was the moon making Kit unwell. There must be some truth in the old idea of lunar influence, the planet’s gravitational pull working upon the watery vapours of the brain, so that it overheats and madness ensues.
Kit ran ahead to the villa’s single-storey left wing with its shuttered windows. There she stopped, demonstrating her agitation by leaping from foot to foot, then scrutinizing the ends of her hair, holding the individual strands close to her eyes as if seeking out some microscopic life form to exterminate.
“Hurry!”
When Agnes caught up, Kit seized her by the shoulders and gave her a shake. “Now, you will see,” she said, her hand on the doorknob, which she twisted forcibly counterclockwise. Then she pushed the door open and flicked on the light. Immediately, there was a high-pitched shriek, a rustling sound and the grind of metal.
“Look!”
Kit pushed her into the raw-lit space of the long, low-ceilinged room. At first, Agnes could see nothing. The glare of four bare light bulbs strung from the ceiling momentarily blinded her. But worse, her eyes were streaming in reaction to the potent stench of urine-sodden sawdust, feces and formaldehyde.
When at last she did see clearly, her deepest, craven desire was to flee. Six macaques clung to the crossbars of a cage perhaps six feet by ten, wincing and blinking in the light. As their eyes adjusted, they fixed on her a look that spoke of a desolate sorrow and bafflement. They resembled pathetic little men—an image she at once throttled as denigrating to their essence. Three of them wore gauzy bandages, stained and stiffened with blood and lymph, taped to their groins.
Agnes’s nails were embedded in her palms, driven there by a bolt of useless outrage, pity and self-disgust. It was of no consequence that she had not personally kidnapped and imprisoned the macaques then sliced open their scrotums for some vile purpose. By the fact of her humanity, she was complicit. Besides, she had twice heard their screams and done nothing to investigate.
“We have to get them out of here, Kit. Call the authorities. Now.” Her fury was infecting her speech, the words slurred as if she were drunk. She repeated: “We have to call the authorities. What’s the equivalent of the Humane Society in Italy?”
The monkeys had retreated to the back of the cage in reaction to her strident tone. She was intensifying their distress, which was unforgivable. She must stay calm and think clearly.
Kit rounded on her, eyes narrowed. “I don’t know, Agnes. First, you help me. Then we’ll deal with the damn monkeys. You wanted proof he’s evil. Now you see it. This is the kind of thing you care about, isn’t it? You and the idiotic Ark. He’s using their hormones to pump up his own failing virility. That’s what the technician’s visits are for. He deals with the monkeys and gives Hugh the injections. So, just help me kill him. You won’t have to do much. Just hold down his skinny old arms.”
“Kit, you’re unwell. You don’t know what you’re saying. Our responsibility is to help these . . .”
“Shut up, Agnes!” Kit shoved her outside and shut the door behind them. She strode off, then abruptly stopped and turned to face Agnes, her features stark and blanched in the glaucous moonlight. “One last time, will you help me?”
“No, of course not.”
Kit raised her arm as if to strike, then let her words serve that purpose: “You’re a pathetic coward, Agnes. One of life’s mistakes.”
Agnes watched benumbed as Kit re-entered the house. She pictured the fettered brass monkey fixed to the front door and winced at his newly revealed portent. At least the little figure fashioned of metal could not be made to suffer. This is the kind of thing you care about, isn’t it? That Kit could divorce herself so completely from the macaques’ plight appalled her almost as much as did Hugh’s callous use of them. She felt increasingly frantic. She must stay rational; go back to her room and find the right number to call.
She entered the house warily, alert for any sounds of disturbance, the creak of the old man’s bed or a floorboard as he rose to greet his alluring flesh-and-blood succubus. It occurred to her that Kit had been dressed all in black: matador pants and one of her scoop-neck leotard tops. Her “killing clothes
”? She will not really harm Hugh, Agnes reasoned. She would not keep asking me to help her if she felt able to act alone. And of course she may only be raving, or taking a bizarre vengeance on me because of Campbell and my part in the Ark.
Sitting on the edge of her bed, she was overtaken by a tremor that convulsed her head to toe. She lay down and hugged herself, trying to quell her body’s reaction to this fresh horror the inhabitants of Villa Scimmia had spawned. If this were a nightmare . . . but it was not. There were indeed six of them, bleeding and terrified in their cage, while the vainglorious and contemptible old man lay in his bed, indifferent to the pain he caused them. From the welter of thoughts crowding her brain, she plucked out the most self-damning: that she might take pleasure in seeing Kit slice Hugh open. How hot and raw and despicable the atavistic urge for retribution was.
Was this how it was inside Kit’s head, all rational constraints eaten away? She must remember that Kit was ill and broken. The tormenting notion returned that she had been an unwitting agency in Kit’s regression; that her mere presence had summoned up far too vividly the primal scene of Campbell’s death. She ought never to have come to Tuscany. Yet if she had refused the chance, who would there be to act on the macaques’ behalf?
Her smart phone soon displayed the phone number and address of the Italian State Animal Rights Office in Florence. The Italian name, Officio Diritti Animali, was reassuring. Diritti Animali. Backed by the full force of law. Their officers, with gentle hands inside protective gloves, would liberate the captives and tend their wounds in a healing sanctuary. The office opened at 8:00 AM. She began hunting in her phrase book for words to piece together a semi-articulate and compelling case for the Officio’s immediate intervention. Scimmia. Maltrattato. Imprigionato.
Around two she succumbed to a sour sleep. As she went under, the successive hypnagogic visions were all mimetically detailed portraits of the macaques, except that their baleful eyes stared out from their groins. This surreal obscenity forced her to wake fully. There was a smell of burning in the air, which she at first assumed was dream-residue; her unconscious had conjured up the stink of Hugh’s corruption. But when the odour turned palpable and caught at the back of her throat, she could taste the smoke.
For a split-second, her head emptied, a dead husk on a stalk. There were ice pellets in her blood. Then her skin prickled and instinct drove her on. She stuck her feet into her canvas shoes, grabbed her pants and shirt, her packed bag from under the bed, and her money belt with passport from the nightstand. When she opened the door, she was relieved to see the smoke in the hallway was a thin, swirling grey, not the dense black it would surely be closer to the fire’s source. Keeping her head low, she started down the winding stair. She kept crying out to Kit and Hugh, but as she descended the smoke thickened, invading her eyes and lungs. If she continued calling out their names, she might choke to death.
Thirty-five. Thirty-six. She counted each step mentally, nearly doubled over now as she tried to catch the less polluted air near her feet. Forty. This meant she must be standing near the entrance to the kitchen, but all she could see was an opaque grey murk ominously streaked with black. She groped blindly, seeking the rasping texture of the rough-hewn stone wall she could follow with her fingers to the back door and the glorious promise of sweet air beyond. To her far left, where the kitchen opened to the hallway leading to the main quarters, the smoke was an unadulterated black, and just behind it was an unnerving lurid orange-red glow. Were she to turn that way, she had no doubt she would asphyxiate.
Where were Kit and Hugh? She prayed hard they had already escaped. From somewhere in the house there was a crash and then a roaring, as if a vast furnace had leapt into life. She reached out in panic into inchoate nothingness and lurched on her feet. Taking little sideways steps to the right, all the while striving to steady her frantic heart and thoughts, she dislodged with her foot an object that made metal clatter on stone. The cursed rat-trap. She took two baby steps left again, well away from the serrated jaws that could so easily have maimed her. But at least she now knew where exactly in the kitchen she was, with the ancient hearth immediately to her right. She reached up and grasped in triumph the protruding ledge of the mantle. She progressed slowly along its length until it yielded to the stone wall. Every few seconds she had to clamp her hand over her mouth and nose to control the amount of smoke she was taking into her lungs. There was an uncomfortable pressure in her chest. Its very lining hurt. Her brain was befuddled, and for a foolish instant she considered lying down and resting a while.
There was a sudden bang behind her, like a cork drawn from a vast bottle. When she turned her head, she saw a wedge of crimson filling the far door. This solid wedge was soon rent apart to become a mass of darting flames. In the light of their demonic dance, she saw how pitiable her resources of breath and brain were against the fire’s power.
Terror pricked her onward and at last her fingers touched the wood grain of the back door that would open onto sweetest air, air that heals the lungs. She will be able to seek out Kit and Hugh and free the macaques. She must do these things. Her fingers scrabbled over the door, seeking the old-fashioned latch. When at last she found it and managed to depress its little tongue, the door would not budge. She felt sick. Could the wood have swollen or become fused to its frame? Then she remembered the high-set bolt. She strained upward on her toes, cursing her temporary blindness, her weakness and the ever-encroaching fire behind her. Its ferocious heat was already scorching the back of her head. She drove the bolt back, out of its housing. Now the tongue on the latch obeyed her touch. The door flew open and she fell on her knees outside in the night air, gulping it down. Then she was up and stumbling toward the trees. Here she dropped her bag. Surely the flames would not reach that far? Besides, help would soon be on its way. Ernesto, in his doting wakefulness, will have spotted the fire and called in an alarm. Or Kit or Hugh will have made the call.
The flames surged from every window of the upper storey. Did they both get out of that inferno in time? Please, oh please. She rushed around to the front of the villa, in time to see the oak door burst open under the incendiary pressure. The fire that roared out appeared first in the shape of a ball, then became a many-tongued hydra. Even at that distance, she felt its terrible heat on her face trying to peel off her skin. She ran toward the left wing but the flames outstripped her, racing along the horizontal wooden ridge of the roof. She could hear the terracotta tiles cracking. She reached the door behind which the macaques shrieked, a cacophony that made her nauseous and deathly cold. Although the actual wood of the door had not yet caught fire, both the lintel and the frame glowed red-hot. The roof directly above them was fully ablaze. She must free them before it collapsed and burned them alive.
In her desperate haste, it did not occur to her that the metal of the door knob would be hot enough to sear off her skin. She yelped and pulled her hand away, only half aware of the disc-shaped blister oozing in the centre of her palm. She bundled her T-shirt around the wounded hand for insulation. With this ungainly fist she succeeded in gripping the handle and turning it strongly clockwise as she had seen Kit do some hours earlier. The pain in her hand was excruciating, but removed from her, a trivial matter that belonged to some time she might never attain. Then she was through the door, the thick smoke invading her eyes and throat. She unthinkingly switched on the light, only to discover that the flaming interior roof beam cast sufficient hellish light upon the captives. Everything seemed to be on the edge of combustion — not least the monkeys, whose shrill screams would surely rupture their brains if she did not free them soon. There was a padlock on the cage door. With her left hand she tugged at it in the faint hope it was unlocked. It did not give. The monkeys wailed and retreated to the back of the cage. She detested herself for making them more afraid. She must find the key. Her eyes swept the walls, which flickered in the reflected light of the burgeoning flames above her head. As one licked low, she was forced to her knees, and so she sp
ied it, tiny as the elusive passe-partout in a fairy tale, hanging from a hook beneath the bench on which the cage was mounted.
Her right hand proved useless for manipulating such a featherweight instrument, and she was not at all adept with her left. Three times she fumbled, while the monkeys fixed on her their huge eyes hollowed by terror. When at last the padlock responded with a melodic click, it was the most wonderful sound she had ever heard. She lifted out the padlock, opened the cage door and positioned herself behind it lest their claws tear at her as they emerged. For a second, they all stared at the open cage door, quivering.
“Go!” she yelled, gesturing to the black night beyond.
They leapt out, two at a time, and there was no hesitation as they fled to a freedom whose pitfalls she could not dwell upon now. She followed after, rushing as they did, toward the protective cover of the forest. She strained to catch a last glimpse of them, hoping the moon would illuminate their progress. But they had disappeared. How would they survive in the Tuscan woods? What instincts would protect them from wild boar, ravaging dogs, the dreaded viper and curious humans without conscience? What choice had she had but to free them?
By way of moonlight and firelight, she was able to find her bag, from which she retrieved a shirt to cover the stained and soot-smeared nightgown. Then she started, as quickly as she was able, down the steep drive that led to the main road. Help would be coming soon and she’d get news of Hugh and Kit. She was halfway down the drive when she fell, clutching the throbbing hand to her chest. Several hundred feet above and behind her on its hilltop, Villa Scimmia groaned as the crumbling charred beams brought down another wall of stone.
“Agnes!”
She was roused from her stupor by a familiar voice, from which she flinched nonetheless. Mayday. It was Horace Fairhaven extending his hand to help her rise.
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