The Lion Tamer’s Daughter

by Peter Dickinson

  So that’s that, and I’ve almost done. I had a few more cups of tea in the servants’ hall while I thought it all out, and then I wandered around a bit more checking this and that. One interesting thing was a little room they’d set aside for the history of the house, and there was a photograph of Adalina and her dad, only she was grown up now and she was pushing him round the garden in a wheelchair. You could see the likeness both ways, back to the Adalina I’d known, and forward to Miss van Deering. She’d have been twenty-something then, but already she had that look of having her world the way she wanted it. Oh yes, and he did have a beard.

  I was back in the servants’ hall by the time Tom and Mercury came for me. They realized somehow that I didn’t feel like talking, so they left me alone and let me sit on the outside when we drove home. That’s another thing they’re good at. I don’t know if I’m going to tell them the story, though. Not that they’d laugh at me, but for the moment all I feel like is getting it all down here so it can’t go away, and then putting it in a drawer and, maybe me, maybe somebody else finding it again one day.

  CHECKERS

  At last the car stopped. Its doors opened and jarred shut. Voices spoke briefly. Huddled in the stifling dark of the boot, Dave waited. He heard the sound of something being dragged, the creak of hinges, a quiet thud. A little later the click of a key in the boot lock, and the lid was raised.

  He began to sit up but a hand grabbed him by the throat and jammed him back. The figure that leaned over him in the dimness had no face. The head was a bag with eye and mouth slits. The place smelt of musty hay, or straw. He tried to speak, to protest, but the hand, hard as timber, tightened on his throat. There was a sharp pain beneath his earlobe.

  “No speak,” said a level voice. “No noise.”

  A hand came into view between him and the masked face, holding a stubby knife.

  “Understand?” said the voice.

  “Yes,” Dave whispered.

  The hand relaxed its grip but did not let go.

  “Your name?” said the voice.

  “Dave Doggony.”

  “Your father rich man? American?”

  “I suppose so. Yes.”

  “Man at Principessa Hotel no your father?”

  “No. That’s my stepfather, Chris.”

  “He rich man?”

  “No. Not specially.”

  “Your father address?”

  Dave gave it, spelling it out while another man wrote it down.

  “OK,” said the voice. “We wait. Four hour.”

  The hand loosed its grip and rose to close the boot lid.

  “Please,” whispered Dave. “I need a pee. Er … gabinetti.”

  He was jerked to a sitting position and a bag was thrust over his head and a drawstring tightened round his neck. He was lifted clear of the boot, set on his feet and pushed a few paces and held still.

  “OK,” said the voice.

  He unzipped his fly and peed. They turned him, pushed him back to the car, and lifted him into the boot. They removed the bag and closed the boot lid, leaving a slit for the air to come through. After that all he dared do was lie and wait. When one position became too uncomfortable to bear he moved as carefully as he was able to, trying to make no noise. He felt sick with fear, unable to feel or think. At the slightest sound—the scrape of a match as one of the men lit a cigarette—his heart raced and sweat broke out all over him, so that his clothes were soaked. At other times, in spite of the heat, he was shivering uncontrollably. Apart from his little gold cross on the chain round his neck they had taken everything from him, including his watch. Time meant nothing.

  At long last he heard the door of the place being dragged open, and then closed. There was a plopping sound and a new smell, animal manure, fresh, a horse or something. More time passed. The lid was opened. The bag was thrust over his head. He was lifted, taken to pee again, brought back and lifted not into the boot but laid stomach down across the back of the horse, where his wrists and ankles were lashed to the girth strap or something, so that the leather cut into his forearms. When they led the animal out he realized that it was now dark, but they left the bag on his head all the same.

  For a short while they were on some sort of level road, but then they turned and started up what seemed to be a steep and winding track, so uneven in places that the animal stumbled. The jolting and the pressure on his stomach made him long to vomit. The blood drummed in his temples and roared in his ears. The cords cut agonizingly into his wrists. More than once he passed out. The track leveled and dipped and rose and dipped again, and at last reached a place where they had to climb steeply over rough ground, and the animal kept balking and had to be driven on with curses and blows, while bushes scraped against Dave’s thighs and shoulders. Then, after a brief level place, they stopped and he was untied and lifted down, so stiff and pierced with cramp that when they set him on his feet he could not stand.

  They gave him no chance to recover but dragged him up a slope as steep as the roof of a house, and laid him on his back and dragged him under some bushes. They turned him over, pulled his arms over someone’s shoulders, and carried him down steep steps. His elbows scraped against stone and his dangling feet thumped onto the treads behind him.

  They set him down and held him while he straightened himself out, then removed his hood. A flashlight shone, blinding for a few seconds until in the circle of light he made out some kind of stone wall, a pile of straw, and what looked like a few coarse blankets. A shove sent him to his knees. The light went out. Metal scraped on stone. He heard the rattle and click of a lock, and they were gone. He crawled forward and found the straw, felt around for the blankets, feebly spread one out, lay on it, and pulled the others over him.

  He turned on his side and wept.

  He was woken by the sound of a sigh.

  “Who’s there?” he whispered, his heart pounding, but there was only silence and the earth-smelling dark. He lay aching in all his joints but rigid with the nightmare and the knowledge that it was real and not a dream. The sigh could only have come from his own lips, but he couldn’t rid himself of the feeling that there was someone else close by. Even when he had nerved himself to move and was lying fully awake and enduring the shock and terror of what had happened, this feeling persisted, persisted through the same useless thoughts and memories running and rerunning through his mind until he dropped for a short while back into sleep.

  It happened again and again, he did not know how often. And then he woke in daylight.

  At first he was afraid to stir, afraid even to do more than peep through almost closed eyelids. He was sure that someone was in this place, watching. The light was dim. It must be only just dawn, he thought. When nobody stirred or spoke he opened his eyes fully and looked at what he could see without moving his head. There was an arched roof above him and a wall beside him. Both were rough masonry. The light came through five round holes, each about the size of a Coke can, near the top of the wall opposite where he lay. Moving his head now, he saw that he was in a square cell about ten feet across. There was a door in the wall to the left of the light holes and a green enamel bucket in a corner to their right. From outside came the shrill whir of cicadas. That was all.

  After a while he rose and peed into the bucket, assuming that that was what it was for. He was so stiff and weak and sore and sick that he needed to support himself with his shoulder against the wall while he did so. Then, without any hope at all, he went and looked at the door. It was a single sheet of rusty iron, with no handles or fastenings his side. It seemed shut fast.

  On his way back to the pile of straw he noticed that in the corner beyond it was a opening. He went and looked, and found it was a niche like a narrow passage, several feet deep, ending in a solid blank wall. He had no idea what it was for, so he went back to the straw, lay down, and pulled the blankets over himself, since there was nothing else to do.

  Not long after this he heard the sound of footsteps on the stairs.
There had been three men last night, he thought. Two of them had worn sneakers, or something like that, but the third had worn boots, or shoes, of hard leather, which clicked or scraped when he walked on stone. Heart pounding, throat dry, Dave sat up and faced the door, waiting. The footsteps stopped outside. The voice that had spoken last night called out.

  “You hear me?”

  “Yes,” he croaked, not loud enough, for the man called again.

  “Yes,” he managed to answer more strongly.

  “Lie on bed. Look at wall. Shut eyes.”

  He did as he was told. Iron grated on stone. They came in, put the bag over his head, and lifted him to his feet. They led him a few paces, took his arms by the wrists, raised them above his head, and placed them against the stone of a wall.

  “Stand so. Wait,” said the voice.

  He heard the grate of the door being pulled to.

  “Take cover from head,” said the voice. “Go lie on bed.”

  Again Dave did as he was told.

  “Stand,” said the voice. “Go to wall, same place. Cover on head. Hands on wall, like we show. Understand?”

  “Yes,” he called, and at once obeyed.

  They kept him waiting in darkness for some while before the door opened.

  “Good,” said the voice. “You good boy. Now I bring food. You stay so. I call, take cover from head, eat. You ask question, you speak, no food. Understand?”

  “Yes.”

  “So. Alway when I call, do same. Go to wall, cover head, stand so. Understand?”

  “Yes.”

  “Good.”

  The footsteps moved about, the door grated, the voice called. Dave took the bag off his head and saw that they had left him a blue enamel mug, a plastic bottle filled with water, and a brown pottery bowl containing bread, a bit of cold sausage, a hunk of soft white cheese, and a couple of apricots. He carried them to the bed, sat down, and drank a little of the water. He’d thought he was too sick and scared to be hungry, but when he began to nibble a corner of the bread he realized that he had eaten nothing since breakfast yesterday.

  As he ate he tried to think. He was pretty sure he’d been kidnapped for ransom. They’d checked on his name. They’d asked about Dad. He’d read about kidnaps. They took weeks, months, to sort out. And Dad … Yes, months. He was going to be in here for months. He was going to go mad. Mad with boredom, mad with loneliness, mad with fear. Of course he’d been scared sometimes in his life, but he’d never been through-and-through afraid before, not like this. It wasn’t just that he was afraid of what might happen to him. That wasn’t the main thing. The main thing was that he was afraid of the men, particularly the one with the voice. When he was in the cell, when he spoke, Dave—all of him, mind and body and soul—vibrated like a tuning fork to the note of fear. Just thinking about it now made the note begin, pure fear.

  Close by him somebody sighed.

  His heart clenched.

  “Who’s there?” he croaked.

  Nobody, of course. Outside the cell the cicadas shrilled in the sunlight. He could see small patches of sunlight on the far left-hand sides of the five holes. He watched them dwindle and go as the sun moved up and round, and forced his mind to work it out. The sun rose in the east, so that side must be west, so the airholes faced roughly north. And it had been full day when he had woken, not dawn. It was never going to get any lighter than this in here …

  And there was nobody with him in the cell. And he was beginning to go mad already.

  Though his stomach still told him he was hungry, he had stopped eating because his throat wouldn’t swallow. By the time the sunlight had gone from the holes he had made himself think about something else—the trick Chris had once taught him for getting to sleep by imagining you’re going out of your front door and taking the first right and then the first left and then the first right and so on and seeing how far you can get. This worked well enough to let him get most of the way through his breakfast before he heard the man’s shoes on the stairs. Immediately he rose, stood facing the wall in the place he’d been shown, pulled the bag over his head, and raised his hands against the stonework.

  The man called, and he answered, croaking, that he was ready. The man came in. He said nothing, but Dave heard him moving slowly all round the cell. At last the door closed and he called out to Dave that he could now move. He had left the water and mug but taken the bowl and the rest of the food. He had covered the bucket with a piece of sacking and left a heap of newspaper, torn into quarters, beside it. He seemed to have done nothing else. Dave decided he must have been checking the cell for signs of some attempt to escape, such as scraping at the mortar between the stones.

  After that there was the day to get through, somehow. The first of many, many days. Dave started by exploring the cell more thoroughly than he had done earlier. It felt really old, but the bit round the door and up by the airholes had a different sort of cement. Dave guessed that it was part of an old castle or something up in the hills, which had fallen down centuries ago and got pretty well buried in the hillside, and then somebody had found this room still there and had put the door and the holes in. It wasn’t these men. They just knew about it. Their fathers or their grandfathers or someone had used it before them. Several times, probably.

  He’d thought the floor was just earth, but scraping with a sneaker, he found flagstones beneath the dirt. He tried stamping on them, but none of them sounded hollow. It struck him that the niche in the corner might once have been a passage somewhere, now walled off. The light didn’t shine directly into it, so that the end wall was too dark to see. He groped his way in and felt around, but it seemed to be made of the same kind of masonry as the rest of the cell, and seemed just as solid when he thumped it.

  There was only one other slight oddity. Opposite the door, close by where the man made him stand, there was a stone set into the wall at about knee level which was different from the rest. It was larger, over two feet long and about nine inches high, and smooth. It probably didn’t mean anything, Dave decided. It was just a bit of some other building, a Roman temple or something, which they’d found and shoved in here because it fitted.

  Anyway, there was no chance of escape. Dave found that a bit of a relief, as he knew he wouldn’t have had the nerve. For the time being his only plan was to do exactly what the men wanted, to show them he wasn’t going to be any trouble, and just hope they’d ease up on him a bit. That was all that mattered, getting to a setup where he wasn’t sick with fear every time they showed up. He lay down on the bed and stared at the ceiling. Time passed. Somebody sighed.

  “You think you’ve got troubles?” he said.

  The silence waited. Of course nobody had sighed. He was imagining it. Or else he’d sighed himself, without realizing. But talking was something to do. It passed the time.

  “OK, I’ll tell you about it,” he said. “My troubles are that I’m being held for ransom by some local thugs who’ve cottoned on that my dad is loaded. How’ve they done that? Dad’s in America, and I was out here on an ordinary package holiday and we weren’t throwing money around. But I’ve got this stupid name. There’s not many Doggonys in the phone book, but you’ve heard of Doggony Ribs—or maybe you haven’t, out here in the sticks. Doggony Ribs—Doggone Delicious. There’s one here on the island, right by the harbor. My great-granddad switched from Dolgoni when he emigrated. I’ve got dual nationality, but we haven’t bothered to get me a U.K. passport so I’m here on an American passport in the name of Dave Doggony. You with me so far?”

  It was a relief to talk, to piece his jumbled thoughts and fears together into some kind of order and make sense of them. Usually when he’d tried anything like this—rehearsing a presentation he was going to do in class, for example—he couldn’t keep it up, lost confidence, let his voice trail away. But here, somehow, it was no effort to pretend that he was actually talking to somebody else, the imaginary sigher, who was friendly and interested and attentive.

  “
That’s point number one,” he went on. “Point number two is that my mum likes to talk, and she likes to practice her Italian. Put her down in a bus and before she’s gone a couple of stops she’ll be telling the passenger next to her her whole life history. Not that I actually heard her telling one of the waiters how she used to be married to this all-American millionaire and splitting up with him when I was a baby, but I wouldn’t put it past her. Pretty thick of her in a place like this, and maybe Chris should have stopped her, but maybe he wasn’t there, and anyway you never think it’s going to happen to you, not in this day and age.

  “So it doesn’t look so bad, you think? All I’ve got to do is sit tight and wait for Dad to come up with the ransom. Trouble number two is that Dad’s not going to come up with the ransom. Not until he’s tried everything else he can think of. Let me tell you about my dad. I don’t see that much of him. He lives in America, pretty well all over America. He’s got six homes, last I heard. I live with my mum and Chris and their kids in England in a town called Basingstoke. That’s where I go to school. Dad didn’t take much interest in me when I was small. He didn’t know how to handle little kids, and the wives he had then didn’t want to know, so he’d look in when he was over in England for the polo and he’d send me crazy expensive Christmas presents and that was it. But soon as I was old enough for him to do things with he began to take notice. These days I go and visit him a couple of times a year, and that’s good fun. I wouldn’t want to live that way, but it’s fine for a bit at a time. I fly over first class to Chicago and on to Butte, and Dad’s plane is waiting for me there and takes me on to his ranch, which is right under the Rockies. Winter we do a bit of skiing. Summer—he’s got terrific horses—we ride out, just the two of us, and camp somewhere and build a fire and barbecue steaks and do mantype things together like shooting rattlesnakes and tracking bears and filming them, only if the weather turns nasty he can whistle up a helicopter to bring a couple of the ranch hands out to ride the horses back while we fly home in comfort.