Thorn

by Sarah Rayne

  ‘Violently?’

  ‘Abruptly.’ There was no need to give details about oculogyric crises involving obsessive behaviour patterns, or about the nightmares and ‘daymares’ that sometimes reached hallucinatory proportions.

  ‘We could use nets to catch them,’ said the inspector. ‘Or tranquillising darts.’

  ‘Not nets,’ Leo said at once. ‘I’ll get you some chlorpromazine and diazepam from the dispensary. By the way, who phoned you?’

  ‘We didn’t get the name but she said she was the sister in charge of the wing.’

  Leo started to say, ‘But there isn’t a—’, realised that this was only wasting time and could be gone into later, and went through to the dispensary to write up the order for the sedatives.

  On the way back he made two discoveries. One was that Snatcher Harris had apparently gone on one of his tomcat wanderings again. The other was that Imogen had vanished.

  Leo passed this new development on to the inspector at once, answered what appeared to be a string of totally unrelated questions, and returned to his office. His mind was churning and his whole body felt as if it was a mass of raw, exposed emotion. Imogen, his beautiful enigmatic wood nymph, had vanished.

  He had no means of knowing if she had gone out into the night of her own accord, or if Harris or the acromegalics had taken her, or if someone had taken the acromegalics. Or if it was a combination of any of these things, or none of them. But he could not believe that Imogen had gone voluntarily. His mind presented him with the picture of her creeping out of Thornacre under cover of darkness, and he repudiated it at once. She would not have done it; she would not have gone like that, leaving him prey to agonised concern. Oh, wouldn’t she, though? jeered his mind. Why do you imagine she’d give you a second thought? You’re forty to her seventeen; that’s a gap of twenty-three years and it’s verging on the indecent. Svengali was a dirty old man if you analyse it and Frankenstein was a megalomaniac. She’s probably been thinking of you – if she’s been thinking of you at all – as a father figure. The nice doctor who helped her out of an illness. Probably there was a boyfriend all along only you never found out, and probably she got a message from him and now she’s gone to meet him and they’re at it somewhere in the bushes, or on the back seat of his car.

  The thought of Imogen helpless and afraid somewhere beyond Thornacre’s boundaries was like a knife turning in his guts, but the thought of her with some eighteen- or nineteen-year-old boy dug his guts out and flung them on to a blazing pyre.

  He could hear the police still searching the grounds outside and he supposed he should be out there with them, but it seemed more important to remain in one place so that news would find him without any delay. Twice there was a timid tap on the door and he looked up in sudden hope, but the first time was only a request to know if he was all right or wanted anything, and the second was to bring in a tray of sandwiches and coffee. He ate and drank with the uninterest of an engine refuelling.

  The disappearances had to be linked; it was stretching coincidence beyond credibility to believe anything else. Quincy, Imogen, Harris and the acromegalics. There had to be a common denominator. The thought lodged in his mind, but it was a maddeningly elusive thought and it was infuriatingly formless. It was like trying to grasp quicksilver or a piece of a rainbow. Harris was the most suspect of the lot, but Leo doubted that the Snatcher had sufficient intelligence to spirit away so many people. Oliver Tudor had believed Thalia Caudle was involved, but how? And why? Had she made an accomplice of Harris? Would anyone make an accomplice of Harris? And what could possibly be the motive?

  Leo tilted his chair back and stared up at the ceiling. Imogen, Harris, Quincy, the acromegalics. Thalia Caudle. Did anything link them? Think, Leo. He rearranged the names in his mind to see if a different pattern formed. Thalia, Harris, the acromegalics. Quincy, Imogen. Like playing put and take. Like a child’s game where you built up brightly-painted blocks to make a house or a picture. Paint. Pictures. Quincy.

  He moved without thinking, going swiftly through the old house to the ward where Quincy had slept. Pictures. The police had already searched her things, but they would not have been looking for what he would be looking for.

  The ward was deserted, and Leo knelt in front of the flimsy locker. It had been unlocked for the inspector’s men earlier with the master key, and it was still unlocked. Leo began to go through the locker again. She had pitifully few possessions, poor child. Brush and comb, a small pile of underclothes. A couple of sweaters and pair of cheap cotton jeans. There was an expensive box of talc on a shelf by itself, probably given to her, probably by Imogen. The paints he had himself bought for Quincy were tucked in one corner as if she had feared they might be stolen, and next to them was the plastic wallet of aquarelle crayons that Thalia Caudle had brought on Christmas Day. And there, at the very back, was what Leo had been looking for: the block of drawing paper. He lifted it out carefully and sat on the nearest bed, turning the pages, despite himself smiling with wry amusement at the depiction of Matron Porter. And then he turned to the last sketch and felt as if someone had struck him between the eyes.

  All of Quincy’s work had more than a touch of the macabre, but her last drawing was the most disturbing of them all. It was vividly reminiscent of the old Flemish diableries – Hieronymus Bosch or Brueghel, whose works Quincy had surely never seen – and she had drawn in a thick, decorated border crammed with tiny creeping goblin figures and sneering dwarfish ghouls and hag-featured spectres, like a travesty of the illuminated proscenium frames of Victorian theatre posters, or the illuminated manuscripts of the medieval monks.

  The central figure was recognisably Thalia Caudle, but it was a Thalia hugely tall and icily commanding. Quincy had cloaked her in rippling crimson silk, and every sculpted fold suggested corruption and menace. For foreground detail she had drawn a scattering of half-rotting human skulls and bleached finger bones. Crouching nearby, leering out of the macabre frame, was a familiar lumpish figure, and Leo stared at it and thought, Harris! Dear God, she’s drawn Thalia as a kind of ogress witch figure, with Harris as the dark satanic familiar! The face, the pose, was familiar from a dozen different dark fairy stories. The scuttling hunchback servant, the frog prince, all denizens of that almost real fantasy world where deformity equated with evil. Snow White and Rumpelstiltskin and their kin. Leo stared at the figure and felt, as he always felt when confronted with human deformity, the guilt of being normal. But are you sure you’re so entirely normal yourself? demanded his mind. Remember that not all deformities are visible. What about that quirk of the spirit, that kink in the mind that enables you to spin up the coruscating power like the miller’s daughter set to spin straw into gold?

  Clustering against the lowering clouds in Quincy’s drawing were several brutish-featured beings, with great meaty hands and mean, red-glinting eyes. Leo stared at it, and even though he knew perfectly well what Quincy must have seen to have drawn this, and even though his physician’s mind knew the medical terms and the medical palliatives, a prickle of fear scudded through his mind. Because there were giants on the earth once . . . Because they strode across the world in seven-league boots, and they prowled through the dark pages of Grimm and Andersen and Perrault. And they had names. They were called Blunderbore and Brobdingnag, and Pantagruel the ever-thirsty or Cyclops the angryeyed, and they devoured children and ground the bones of men to make bread.

  The shadows of Thornacre seemed suddenly to gather and rear up to confront him. Leo shut the sketch book with a snap and returned it to the locker, and the ghosts and the darkness receded.

  But he had the denominator. Quincy had seen through Thalia’s smooth, urbane mask – he had nearly seen through it himself. She had seen through to something she had believed to be fearsome and menacing. She might have been wrong, but Leo did not think she was. This was her last drawing, clearly done on the night before she went out with Thalia, and it was filled with fear.

  He was straightening u
p from the locker, the drawing still in his hands, when Nurse Carr came into the room to tell him that there was a Dr Tudor on the phone and it was a matter of extreme importance.

  Oliver had driven back to the Black Boar, his mind working at top speed. The most obvious thing to do now was phone the police and haul them out here, but there were several aspects to this that had first to be considered, the most worrying of which was the dialogue that might ensue. Oliver could imagine it only too well:

  ‘I think the missing Thornacre girl could be at October House after all, Sergeant.’

  ‘Really, sir? And what makes you think that?’

  ‘Because I’ve just been out there. I crept into the garden, and peered in through a window.’

  ‘Did you now? What exactly did you see while you were peering through the window?’

  ‘Well, Thalia Caudle was with a young girl and the girl was undressing. It looked as if they were about to have it away together on the hearth rug.’

  ‘Really? And do you make a habit of peering through windows and watching that kind of thing, Dr Tudor?’

  It was a shudderingly awful prospect.

  They would presumably have to check his story, even if they did write him off as a voyeur, but they would be distrustful. They were distrustful already. They might uncover the fact that Dan had known Thalia in London. Why the devil hadn’t he admitted to that at the outset! They might do the checking by telephone. Oliver could easily visualise some fed-up night duty sergeant delegating the task. ‘Just ring up this number, Fred, and check that Caudle woman’s story again. There won’t be anything in it, but the inspector says we’ve got to.’ Whatever they did, the outcome would be that that odd child with the wise-ancient eyes would no longer be inside October House when they got there.

  It was only when he heard the slightly startled voice answering the Thornacre phone that he realised it was now after midnight. But it could not be helped; as soon as Leo came on the line, Oliver said without preamble, ‘I’ve been out to October House, and I think your missing girl’s there.’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Well, it makes rather bizarre telling,’ said Oliver hesitantly, remembering his estimation of the police reactions.

  ‘I’m a psychiatrist, I’m used to bizarre things.’

  Leo listened without interruption as Oliver briefly described the strange scene he had witnessed in the lamplit, firelit room of October House. ‘And I can’t be sure that it was Quincy,’ Oliver said. ‘But the police sergeant who questioned me described her, and it matched near enough. Small, not pretty, with wary eyes and short hair. A kind of urchin look.’

  ‘Yes, urchin describes it very well.’

  ‘And she had a rather old-fashioned air. I don’t mean she had old-fashioned clothes or hairstyle, I mean her face. She looked as if she belonged to a different century. The mid-nineteenth, for choice. The poor mid-nineteenth.’

  ‘It’s Quincy all right,’ said Leo. ‘But since we talked, Dr Tudor, something else has happened. I don’t know how much bearing it has on your brother’s disappearance, or whether it has any at all, but six patients are missing, and so is Thalia Caudle’s niece.’

  There was an abrupt silence. ‘I’m sorry,’ said Oliver, ‘but did you say six patients?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Leo shortly. ‘Six patients suffering from acromegaly –I’ll explain what that is some other time. And with Imogen Ingram it’s seven.’

  ‘Do the police know?’

  ‘Yes, of course they know, they’re crawling all over Thornacre at the moment, for God’s sake. But if you mean do they know about Thalia’s involvement, no, they don’t.’

  ‘You haven’t told them?’

  ‘No, I have not, and the reason I haven’t is that Caudle’s involvement is still only my deduction and yours,’ said Leo. ‘There’s nothing tangible to connect her with this, any more than there was this morning. And the logic we applied then still holds.’ He paused. ‘Exactly how eminent are you, Dr Tudor?’

  ‘I’m not eminent at all. What’s that got to do with anything?’

  ‘I was wondering how much of a professional reputation you had, and whether you were prepared to risk it.’

  ‘I don’t give a damn for my professional reputation, such as it is. What have you got in mind?’

  ‘A little exercise in housebreaking,’ said Leo.

  ‘October House?’

  ‘Yes. I expect I can do it on my own, and if I have to I will. But it’d be easier with two of us.’ He paused, choosing his next words with care. ‘The thing is if we’re caught it’ll be straightforward breaking and entering. We won’t have a leg to stand on. If you want to opt out now, I shan’t blame you. In fact I’d think you were behaving very sensibly.’

  ‘Stuff common sense, and as for professional reputations, isn’t your own far more at risk than mine, Dr Sterne?’

  ‘If I ever had one, I lost it years ago,’ said Leo.

  ‘And I never acquired one,’ said Oliver. ‘I’ll meet you outside October House in fifteen minutes.’

  Chapter Thirty-six

  Quincy knew that she was in the ogress’s lair and that the ogress was going to kill her. That was what this was all about. The ogress had crawled up out of her dark hiding place when no one was watching, and she had caught her. She had also caught Imogen and the young man called Dan. There would not be any escape, even though Imogen was calling to her to be brave, and Dan was telling her that he would get them all to safety somehow.

  Quincy was lying on the floor. There was a fiery glow from the ovens, and the stench of evil everywhere. The ogress was leaning over her, and flaring candles lit her from behind, so that you could see that her eyes were red and glaring. Her lips were drawn back in a snarl.

  The evil-smelling place was beginning to spin round Quincy in a huge, whirling storm. There were immense crimson streaks in the storm, like blood, and there were jagged lights that hurt your eyes and made you feel sick. Quincy thought Imogen was crying, and she could hear the young man swearing at the ogress. She tried to call out to him that it would not do any good; you could not kill ogresses because they were not like humans, and this was the most evil ogress there was; this was probably the queen, like you had queen bees who led the others. But there was something brave-making about the young man, and Quincy was grateful to him. He might be able to get Imogen out later on, and then they would be together. He was exactly the kind of person you could visualise Imogen being with. Quincy held on to the idea of Imogen getting free and being with Dan, because it was a good thought.

  The ogress gave a scream of fierce delight and triumph, and lifted her hands above her head. There was a scalding sizzling sound, like a whiplash curling through the air, and then a flash of steel, glinting in the candlelight.

  Pain tore through Quincy’s hands and exploded up into her arms and shoulders, and through her whole body. It was so fierce and so enormous that the red-lit place wavered and blurred, and she felt as if she was plummeting down and down into a deep, deep ocean. Someone was screaming and there was the choking feeling of agony closing over her head. She was swimming through the agony in her hands, and it was becoming difficult to see and difficult to hear. Imogen was still talking – yes, Imogen was still with her – and Dan was shouting, telling her to hold on, to hold on, Quincy, because they would not let her go . . .

  As Thalia severed Quincy’s hands with that single terrible blow, Dan felt the horror engulfing him. His mind shuddered in disbelief because nothing, not the worst waking nightmare, not the most warped vision, could be as bad as this.

  Thalia was straightening up, holding the two jaggededged lumps of flesh above her head, and Dan caught the white glint of bone and saw the frill of blood-dabbled flesh. The blood was dripping sluggishly to the ground, and Thalia immediately cupped her free hand under it. Cradling the severed hands carefully, she leaned over the white, still form on the table, and began to arrange the hands in place. Her eyes were rinsed of all sanity, and blood
smeared her cheek. At intervals she laughed, and once or twice she crooned Edmund’s name. In his corner, the hunchback was gibbering with delight, scuttling back and forth over the same few inches of ground, like a monstrous human-faced spider busy about its web.

  Quincy lay in a little huddle on the floor, surrounded by clotting pools of her own blood. She looked tiny and frail, and her skin had a waxy look, like tallow or old polished ivory. Dan looked across at Imogen and saw that she was crying, and trying to reach Quincy. But the chain held firm and she could only stretch a foot or so into the centre of the room.

  Quincy’s eyes were filmed over with pain and exhaustion, but as Imogen dragged furiously at the chain, she seemed to hear. She lifted her head and Dan saw that she was still conscious. Her eyes rested on Imogen for a moment and then turned to him, and she moved, holding out her mutilated arms to him in dreadful entreaty. The pity of it clutched at Dan’s guts, because her hands, her poor hands . . . The wrists were soaked in blood, and splinters of bone and muscle and tendon protruded. And she’s dying, he thought; she’s bleeding to death there on the floor, and there’s absolutely nothing I can do to help her.

  Incredibly she was trying to speak. She was almost beyond sight and hearing, but she was not yet beyond feeling, and she was trying to reach him, pitifully trying to reach his arm with the bloodied stumps that were her wrists. Dan swallowed the choking knot of emotion and sickness, and even though the chains brought him up short, as Imogen’s had done, he reached towards her as far as he could get. There was an appalling moment when the dripping, truncated arm brushed the tips of his fingers, and he only just managed not to flinch. ‘It’s all right, Quincy,’ he said. ‘In another few minutes we’ll all be free, and we’ll get you to a hospital and you’ll be fine.’ And God forgive me for the lie, because I don’t think any of us are going to get free, and this poor child is dying fast.