There was nobody on the landing, although the door to one of the guest rooms was half-open and Elsie could hear Marjorie, her voice raised in complaint.
‘Fearfully hot… do be a dear…’
Then the door closed, and her voice was cut off.
Elsie darted towards Sowerby’s room on the far side, keeping to the wall, away from the wooden railing that lined the open area in the middle of the floor. If there was anyone in the dining room below, she didn’t want them to look up and see her.
Sowerby’s door was ajar. At least she didn’t have to turn the handle, Elsie thought. It made entering feel like less of a crime. But not much less. As she slipped into the room, Elsie was almost light-headed with fear and guilt.
Should she close the door behind her, or leave it the way it had been? She didn’t know. Her mind had gone completely blank.
She didn’t have time to work it out, she had to hurry. She took a couple of steps forward, gazing around.
The room seemed even more grotesque than before. Elsie wondered how she could have mistaken the contents for ordinary knick-knacks and pieces of furniture. How skilfully the items had been constructed. Polished and gilded, inlaid with precious stones and metals, exquisite in their craftsmanship. Yet it only made them all the more hideous.
The greater their beauty, she thought, the uglier they looked.
Something chimed softly, and she froze. Yet it was only the shiver of crystal beads around the top of a lamp. They caught the sun as they moved, sending points of light dancing over the surface of the shade. It was made of something thin, almost transparent, patterned by lines like threads running through a piece of fabric.
Except it wasn’t fabric. Elsie didn’t know what it was, and she didn’t want to know. She glanced away, her eyes ranging over the walls.
Photographs of men holding guns, a mirror framed by snakeskin with the head of the snake still attached, butterflies in rows behind glass, a vast turtle shell…
Elsie frowned, trying to concentrate. She was supposed to be searching for something that operated the locks on the cages. John had said it might look like a radio. Old-fashioned radios were huge, surely she would see it if it was here.
She crossed the room to the desk. It had claw-foot legs, only these were real claws and real feet, not carved wooden ones. There were boxes on the desk, paperweights with beetles and lizards, and slender, coiled snakes trapped in glass, a pen-holder made from the talons of an eagle, books bound in lizard skin, a gold-tipped rhino horn and three small, bright birds sitting dead on a branch under a dome. But no radio.
Then she saw it. Behind the desk, on a table by the window. A white tasselled cloth covering something bulky and square-shaped.
Even before she lifted a corner of the cloth, Elsie knew what she would find underneath. A glance confirmed it. It wasn’t simply that it looked like a radio, it was also the fact that it looked so unlike a radio. There were too many buttons and dials and trailing wires, and it was too crude in appearance. As if it had been assembled out of bits and bobs of other things by someone not particularly worried about how it would look.
There were numbers next to the switches, although Elsie didn’t wait to examine them. All she could think of was getting out of there so she could tell John. She lowered the cloth and rushed around the desk, heading for the door.
Elsie had never been good at picking up her feet, even in the best of circumstances. She was halfway across the room when her toe snagged on the curling edge of one of the animal skins that covered the floor. She pitched forward, tried to right herself, and landed with a thud at the base of the elephant tusk chair.
Her wrist hurt. It had twisted as it caught her fall. Elsie rose to her knees and rubbed it anxiously. She was about to scramble up when she heard something. It was more of a feeling than a noise. A prickling sense that she was no longer alone in the room.
‘What are you doing here?’ Sowerby said.
He had entered without a sound and was standing so still that it was impossible to tell how long he had been there, his gazed fixed, an unlit cigarette motionless between the fingers of one hand.
Elsie jerked with shock.
‘I was just… just… looking at this chair.’
‘So I see,’ Sowerby said. ‘Interested in it, are you?’
‘Yes,’ Elsie said, seizing with desperation on the word. ‘It’s so interesting.’ She stood up, her face burning. ‘I saw the door was open and I know I wasn’t meant to, but I thought…’
He looked at her, as though considering.
‘I’m really, really sorry,’ Elsie said.
Sowerby broke his stillness, tapping the end of his cigarette against the top of his hand.
‘You can sit in it, if you like,’ he said.
‘The chair?’
He nodded, a faint smile tugging briefly at his mouth.
‘Oh… great,’ Elsie said, perching awkwardly on the edge. ‘Thanks.’
He believes me, she thought. He really thinks I’m interested in his horrible things.
In a way, he was right. Elsie couldn’t deny that the room held a grim kind of fascination. Sowerby too, with his stony features and silent tread. His eyes had a flat, sunless look, as if set too deep in his head for the light to find. Perhaps that was why his face seemed so blank.
Her hands trembled. She clasped them together on her lap, partly to stop the trembling and partly so she wouldn’t have to touch the smooth, ivory arms of the chair.
‘It’s very nice,’ she whispered.
Sowerby must have taken it for a whisper of awe.
‘One of my more impressive pieces,’ he said.
If you were interested in something, you were supposed to ask questions about it. Elsie racked her brains.
‘Did you shoot it yourself?’ she ventured at last. ‘The elephant, I mean.’
‘Of course. Everything in this room is a trophy of mine.’
‘That must’ve… taken you a long time.’
‘Thirty-five years.’ Sowerby went to the desk and lit his cigarette, inhaling with an eager hiss. ‘That was my first,’ he told her, pointing to a black, spiralling horn on the mantelpiece. The horn was set on an ebony base, and the end was tipped with silver.
‘A blackbuck,’ Sowerby said. ‘It was a difficult shot, but I got it. My father had the horn decorated to mark the occasion. After that, I did the same with all my kills.’
‘But why?’ Elsie asked.
He stared at her, as if surprised by her lack of understanding.
‘Isn’t it obvious?’ Sowerby’s arm swept the room. ‘I had them made into treasures, don’t you see? Objects of value.’
Elsie had been expecting him to give her some line about how he’d done it out of respect. As memorials to the creatures he’d shot. Something noble-sounding, about how they had been worthy opponents, and that even though he went around killing things, it was because he actually loved animals, and admired them.
That would have been bad enough, but this was far worse.
Objects of value.
As if the life of the smallest mouse wasn’t worth more than everything in that room put together.
Yet Sowerby was blind to it. All he understood was having and getting. All he cared about was owning.
It was a dreadful thought, but for some reason it made Elsie feel a little less frightened of the man, and she got up at once from his chair. How long had she been in the room? It felt like an hour. John would be wondering what had happened to her.
She glanced at the clock. It was set in a skull, the bone white as the purest marble, two long, curved teeth framing the clock face, as if devouring time itself.
‘Tiger,’ Sowerby said. ‘The largest I ever saw.’
‘Mr Gordon said you’re a tiger expert,’ Elsie commented. ‘He said he didn’t know how you manage to get so many.’
I know how you manage it, she thought.
‘Tigers have been a lifelong interest of mine,’ Sowe
rby said. ‘I’ve studied them for years, using the very latest technology.’
Elsie didn’t say anything. She remembered the caged tigers, their fire almost extinguished in the stinking darkness. He was nothing but a hypocrite.
‘I’d better be going,’ she said.
‘Yes,’ he said, gesturing to the door. ‘But a word before you go. It seems your friend has escaped.’
‘H-has he?’ Elsie quavered.
Sowerby stared at her silently for a moment, as if he had a rabbit in his sights, and was wondering in which direction it would run.
‘The boy must be miles away by now,’ he said at last. ‘Which means there’s nothing keeping you here any longer. You’ll leave first thing tomorrow. One of my men will take you in a jeep.’
Elsie nodded speechlessly.
‘I strongly suggest you don’t come back,’ Sowerby said in a calm, level voice that was somehow far more frightening than any show of anger. ‘This part of the forest is a dangerous place. Remember that.’
There was nothing to do but wait.
They had gone over the plan a dozen times. An hour before dinner, Mandeep would go to the building in the clearing and open the main door. Then, when Sowerby and his guests were sitting down to eat, John and Elsie would creep upstairs. While Elsie kept watch on the diners from above, John would unlock the cages using the device in Sowerby’s room, although first he would have to open the window to allow the radio waves to travel. He thought that as the crow flew, the building was probably closer than it seemed. He might even be able to see its antenna over the trees. In the meantime, Mandeep would stay hidden for the night and make his way to the main road in the morning. One of Sowerby’s men would be taking the others back in a jeep, and John thought that, depending on who it was, there was a good chance he might be persuaded to stop and pick Mandeep up.
By the time Sowerby realised that the tigers had escaped, and his plans were wrecked, John, Elsie and Mandeep would be well on their way home.
They had discussed everything with Mandeep on the walkie-talkie, and told each other to be careful, and Elsie had said, ‘I hope it works, it will work, won’t it?’ at least fifteen times, and now there was nothing left to do but wait.
They lay in their room, the walls golden in the evening sun. Elsie rubbed her nose. It had been itching the day before, and John had accused her of picking it. Now the itch was back, worse than ever.
‘I wonder where the geckos are,’ she said, to distract herself. ‘Perhaps they only come out at night.’
John didn’t reply.
‘What’s England like?’ he said abruptly. Elsie glanced at him. He was staring up at the ceiling, his gaze unmoving.
‘It’s okay,’ she said.
‘It’s not… like here, though, is it?’ John said.
‘No,’ Elsie said. ‘Not much.’
There was a long silence.
‘You don’t get to choose, do you?’ John said in a bleak voice, his eyes still pinned to the ceiling. ‘You just get born somewhere…’
‘Or someone,’ Elsie whispered to herself.
‘And then—’ John broke off.
They fell silent again, each busy with their own thoughts.
‘It won’t be so bad,’ Elsie said at last. ‘At least you won’t have to go to school for nine months at a time. Terms are a lot shorter in England.’
‘There is that,’ he agreed.
‘Plus, you’ve got all the stuff that’s going to be invented to look forward to.’
‘Fathead.’
‘Thinhead,’ Elsie said before she could stop herself. She covered her mouth to hide a giggle.
‘Thinhead?’ John sat up straight, outraged. ‘There’s no such word!’
Then they remembered they were meant to be thinking about the plan, and John flopped back down.
‘I hope it works,’ Elsie said. ‘It will work, won’t it?’
They ate supper in the kitchen, too tense to speak. Mr Agarwal hurried from saucepan to roasting dish, stirring and tasting with a look of harried intensity. On the other side of the table, the young boy who had served them tea that morning was laboriously trimming runner beans one by one, casting anxious glances at the cook.
The guests were due to sit down to dinner at eight. It was past seven now, which meant that Mandeep ought to have gone to open the door of the building, so the tigers could escape when they unlocked the cages. Elsie crossed her fingers under the table.
John had given up chewing his food. He was swallowing it whole, like a pelican. Elsie pushed a lump of her rice on to his plate and watched it disappear.
Finally, the meal was over. They pushed back their chairs and hastened back to the bedroom.
‘We need to make sure Mandeep opened the door,’ Elsie said. She rummaged under the mattress on John’s bed, where they had hidden the walkie-talkie.
‘I’ll do it.’
‘It’s my turn.’ Elsie twisted the dial on the front and heard it click. ‘Hello, Mandeep?’
‘You’re meant to hold down the side button, remember?’ John hissed.
‘Oh, yes.’ Elsie tried again. She heard a burst of static and then Mandeep’s voice saying something.
‘Have you done it?’ she asked.
‘Yes, although…’ His voice grew faint for a second. ‘…but I opened it.’
Elsie took her finger off the button. ‘He says he’s done it,’ she told John.
‘I know he did, I’m standing right here, aren’t I?’
John seized the walkie-talkie and thrust it into the waistband of his shorts.
Then, so suddenly that it made them jump, they heard a loud, ringing note that seemed to spread, like water after the throwing of a stone, and fill the air. It came again.
‘What’s that?’ Elsie asked, although she had already guessed.
It was the gong in the hallway, summoning the guests to dinner.
Elsie lay on her stomach and peered through the banisters. She could see the whole of the dining room below. It was decorated in a grand, rather forbidding way, with wooden panelling on every side. Above the panelling were wrought iron light sconces, and the heads of several dozen deer, whose horns – some straight, some curved, some twisted – cast crisscrossing shadows over the white walls.
The dining table was in the centre of the room. The guests sat two on either side, with Sowerby at the head. Elsie was glad he had his back to her. She looked across to the turbaned bearer standing by the door at the far side of the room. Almost directly beneath her, a little to the right, was the entrance to the kitchen. As she watched, the cook’s assistant came out with two bowls of soup and placed them hesitantly on the table.
‘They’re all there,’ Elsie whispered.
John tiptoed along the wall to Sowerby’s room, hesitated for a second, then slipped inside.
Elsie turned back to the diners. But nobody lifted their head. Even if they had done, she thought she was probably safe. It would be hard for them to see anything much beyond the circle of light. She inched forward, pressing her face against the banisters.
The sounds of glass and chinking cutlery drifted up from below, spoons rattling against china.
‘What is it?’ Marjorie said, gazing stiffly at her soup.
‘Fish of some sort,’ Nottle said. ‘At least, I think so.’
Charles took a sip, coughed, and dabbed at his face with his napkin.
They had all changed for dinner, Elsie noticed. The men in dark jackets and white shirts, Marjorie in a blue, clingy dress with frills around the shoulders. Nottle’s hair shone with an oily gleam as he bent his head.
‘Or turtle,’ he said. ‘Could it be turtle?’
Sowerby said something to the cook’s assistant, hovering uncertainly nearby with a jug of water.
‘I’m told the soup is leek and potato,’ Sowerby said.
‘Jolly good! Ha! Ha! Ha!’
Even from this distance, Elsie could see that Charles’s bow tie was far too large.
It gave him the look of a bravely wrapped, but rather disappointing present. Something you would leave to the end, after all the other presents had been opened, Elsie thought, because you knew it was only a box of pencils, or a bottle of not very bubbly bubble bath.
‘I’d really rather have some bread and butter,’ Marjorie said. ‘If that’s not too much trouble.’
Elsie gave the door to Sowerby’s room a worried glance. John had only been gone a few minutes, although it seemed longer. Perhaps he was having trouble opening the window. Or perhaps he didn’t know as much about radio-wave devices as he’d made out and couldn’t get the thing to work. Or perhaps she’d been mistaken, and it really was just a radio…
The soup was already being taken away, most of it untouched. Elsie wondered what Mr Agarwal would think. His assistant was clearly wondering the same thing. An air of doom hung over him as he removed each bowl.
She startled. John was back. He crawled towards the banister and dropped to his stomach.
‘Did you do it?’ Elsie whispered.
He nodded, his face alight.
‘Are you sure?’
‘I opened the window and flipped all the switches, waited a bit and then closed the window again.’
‘Did you tell Mandeep?’
‘Yes.’ John was still clutching the walkie-talkie. ‘Keep your voice down, they’ll hear you…’
He was right, they had to stay quiet, although there was a lot more Elsie wanted to know. Like how long it would take for the tigers to leave their cages, and whether they would be far enough away by morning.
‘I hope Mandeep doesn’t bump into any of them,’ she whispered.
‘Not likely. They won’t hang around. Even drugged tigers can move pretty quickly.’
‘I still don’t understand—’
‘Shhh,’ John said.
Elsie closed her mouth obediently. She had been about to say that if the tigers scattered that quickly, she was even more baffled as to how Sowerby intended locating them next day. Even if he was only planning to give them a short head start, they would be hard to find. And he couldn’t simply stay in the general area of their building as each one came out. Even the stupidest of guests would wonder why there were so many tigers in that particular corner of the forest. No, to be convincing, he would have to make a show of driving for miles in various different directions.
The Time Traveller and the Tiger Page 14