Heathen, p.26
Heathen, page 26
Donna heard it too.
The unmistakable creaking of floorboards.
Someone was on the floor above them.
‘It must be Paxton,’ Donna said quietly.
‘He was below us,’ Julie protested.
‘He said that we could pass each other without knowing. Perhaps he went up to double check, in case we missed something.’
The footsteps receded.
The two women remained motionless, gazing up at the ceiling as if to trace the source and direction of the footsteps.
There was one more protesting creak, then silence.
‘I’m sorry,’ said Julie none too convincingly. ‘This place . . .’ She allowed the sentence to trail off.
Donna squeezed her hand and nodded.
They paused a moment longer, then moved further down the gallery, inspecting each exhibit, checking any books which could be the hidden Grimoire. Finally satisfied that these tableaux held no secrets, they turned round and headed back towards the gallery marked THE ENTERTAINMENT WORLD.
At the top of the stairs between the two galleries Donna paused and peered into the thick shadows, listening for movement from either above or below. She heard nothing. She wondered if she should call out to Paxton, just to find out where he was. She decided against it and walked through the archway to be confronted by the figure of Elvis Presley.
Julie followed, past the cast of Dallas, glancing at figures of Rod Stewart, Tina Turner and Madonna.
So many eyes watching them.
These exhibits were mostly just single figures, not set out in any kind of tableau, but isolated in their stage clothes with just a name plate for company.
Kate Bush stood defiantly before them, her hair frozen in an imaginary breeze, curling in the air like the deadly locks of a Gorgon.
Bob Hope was leaning on a golf club.
Frank Sinatra was holding a microphone.
Donna moved quickly through the gallery.
‘There’s nothing in here,’ she said. ‘Let’s try the next floor. Perhaps Paxton’s found something.’
‘He would have called, wouldn’t he?’ Julie enquired.
‘Perhaps we didn’t hear him.’
At the top of the stairs just beyond the archway at the exit from the gallery stood figures of Michael Jackson and Stevie Wonder.
The former of the two was in a glass case.
Donna moved close to it, peering in at the finely sculpted features, momentarily distracted by the sheer artistry of the effigy.
She and Julie moved nearer to the glass.
Julie touched it.
The figure turned and looked at them.
Seventy-Six
Julie could not suppress a scream this time.
Her shriek of surprise echoed around the building, drumming in their ears, amplified by the stillness.
The figure turned stiffly and fixed them in a sightless gaze.
It took Donna a moment or two to realize that it had been activated by some kind of electric eye. When the glass was touched, the mechanism was set in motion. The figure swayed slightly on its base, then was still.
Julie ran a hand through her hair and closed her eyes, her heart racing.
‘Oh God,’ she murmured.
Donna too felt her heart thumping; the sudden shock made her tremble. She squeezed Julie’s hand and motioned for her to follow down the stairs that led to the ground floor.
They were halfway down when the thought struck her.
Why had Paxton not come to find the source of the scream? Why, at least, had he not called out? There was no question of him hearing the noise in the stillness of the waxworks. Where the hell was he?
Perhaps they had been his footsteps they’d heard above them earlier. But even so, why had he not come running to find out what was happening?
Donna licked her tongue across her dry lips and stopped at the bottom of the stairs. Julie joined her.
‘What now?’ Julie wanted to know.
Donna glanced across into the gallery on the ground floor then at another doorway ahead of them marked PRIVATE.
She crossed to the door and found that it was unlocked. It opened out onto a narrow flight of stone steps. There was a cloying fusty smell rising from below, like drying clothes. It was cold in the narrow stairwell; the metal banister was freezing when she touched it.
‘Come on,’ she said. ‘This must lead to the basement.’ She began to descend, and Julie followed. They trod carefully on the bare stone until, finally, Donna pushed open the door at the bottom and stepped out.
The smell here was even stronger. The odour of decay as well as damp was strong in her nostrils. She looked round.
The door from which they had emerged was also marked PRIVATE.
To the left was a light, well-illuminated area that contained various electronic games and fruit machines.
To the right, a set of steps led down into what looked like seething blackness. The darkness was so total that she wondered if they would even be able to proceed without the aid of a torch. There was a sign on the wall beside this entrance:
ALL THOSE WISHING TO LEAVE THE WAXWORKS HERE, KINDLY USE THE APPROPRIATE EXIT. IT IS RECOMMENDED THAT YOUNG CHILDREN OR THOSE OF A NERVOUS DISPOSITION LEAVE NOW.
Donna took a step closer to the top of the steps and peered down.
There were five stone stairs leading down to a wooden floor and a narrow stone corridor.
The smell of damp and rot seemed to waft from the doorway as if expelled from putrid lungs. There was a sign just inside the doorway, suspended from the ceiling by two rusty chains. Donna read it aloud.
‘Abandon hope, all ye who enter here.’ She smiled. ‘It would have been just like Chris to hide the Grimoire down there,’ Donna said, pointing towards the abyss beyond the steps. ‘It would have appealed to his sense of humour.’
‘What is it?’ Julie wanted to know, wrinkling her nose at the smell.
Donna raised her eyebrows.
‘The Chamber of Horrors.’
Seventy-Seven
It was like stepping into empty space.
Donna, who couldn’t see her feet beneath her, moved cautiously for fear of slipping on the stone steps. Julie followed behind, steadying herself against the wall, recoiling slightly as she felt the moistness of the stone.
Paxton must have had the place treated with something, Donna thought. She was sure the basement that housed the waxworks’ grisliest exhibits was not naturally damp and decaying. Part of the process of making the viewing experience all the more real and eerie was the smell which went with the darkness and unbearable silence. There were companies in the film business who made fake blood; why not someone to recreate the smell of damp and neglect? Perhaps that odour could indeed be bottled and sold. Paxton must have bought a crateful.
Fake cobwebs had been sprayed over the walls, too, although how much of the gossamer-like material was real and how much was fake she wasn’t sure. There would be no need to clean this part of the waxworks. Grime and the odd spider could only serve to enhance its appearance.
The figures of the murderers themselves were arranged behind what looked like rusty prison bars. These too were covered by cobwebs both fake and genuine.
Dependent on their stature or the nature of their crimes, figures were enshrined within their own individual displays. Others were grouped together, usually with a newspaper of the day framed beside them proclaiming their arrest or, in the case of those before 1969, of their execution.
How perverse, Donna thought, that there should even be a hierachy amongst killers. Men like Denis Nilsen, Peter Sutcliffe and John George Haigh were presented in tableaux of their own, while those who had killed only once or twice, or who were there more for their notoriety than their savagery, merited a smaller setting where they were crowded together. Ruth Ellis, Lee Harvey Oswald and the Kray Twins stood together.
Christie was displayed surrounded by his nine victims, portions of them visible from gaps in the walls and floor of the mock-up of his front room at Ten Rillington Place. Behind him stood Timothy Evans, the man wrongly hanged for a murder Christie committed.
If the atmosphere in the rest of the waxworks had been unsettling, in this odorous basement it was close to oppressive. These glass eyes stared out with a venom and hatred that matched those of their inspirations. Julie felt her skin crawl.
Nilsen stood at the cooker where he’d boiled down the remains of his victims.
Sutcliffe gripped a claw hammer and a screwdriver, his face twisted into a half-smile.
Haigh, dressed in a leather apron, was in the process of dissolving one of his victims in an acid bath.
Julie tried to swallow but felt as if someone had blocked her throat.
Beneath the model of Eichmann were newspaper cuttings about Auschwitz; yellowed with age like some of the other clippings, they were still as abhorrent, even after all these years.
Dr Crippen was standing by a desk on which lay a pile of books.
Donna looked for a way in to the exhibit. The only door was in the side of the cage-like display, at the end near the exit. In order to reach the figure of Crippen she would have to pass the other figures, too. She turned and headed for the door immediately, relieved that it was open when she pushed. She stepped inside.
Julie gripped the bars, wincing as she felt how cold and wet they were, watching as her sister drew closer, pausing to look at the tableau of Christie. There were many cupboards in the display; Ward could have hidden the Grimoire in any one of them.
Donna opened them but found that they were empty. She glanced at the figure of Christie and walked on. Past Haigh. Past Nilsen.
The figure of Peter Sutcliffe was standing over the body of a woman, old newspapers beneath his feet. Donna paused to lift the newspapers and look beneath them.
Julie sucked in an anxious breath, her eyes fixed on the model of Sutcliffe.
The head moved a fraction.
She opened her mouth to shout but no sound would come.
Donna was still at his feet.
Julie blinked hard and looked at the waxwork again.
This time she saw no movement. A trick of the light? A trick of her mind? A little of both, she fancied.
‘Come on, Donna,’ she said, her breath coming in gasps.
Her sister nodded, got to her feet and finally reached the Crippen figure. She looked at the books on the desk: a medical book and a book on anatomy.
The third had a picture of a bird on it. A hawk?
Was this the Grimoire?
Her hands were shaking as she lifted it.
A picture of a hawk, not an embossed crest.
Could it be ...
She opened it.
Blank pages.
‘Shit,’ she muttered angrily and replaced the book. She hurried out of the cage and rejoined Julie. Ahead of them was another wall with a small gap in it; barely five feet high and three across, it formed a doorway into the last part of the exhibit. The Torture Chamber.
Donna advanced towards it.
There was a red light over the narrow opening. As she waited for Julie to join her, the light bathed her in crimson so that it looked as if she’d been drenched in blood. She looked down into the Chamber and saw that the same inky blackness awaited them. Only the models were lit, but this time by even weaker beams from hidden spotlamps in the low ceiling. This was the only entrance in and out. Donna led the way, glancing at several severed heads arrayed before a guillotine. Nearby a wax body dangled from a hook embedded in its side. Behind them a display featured a man with rats trying to eat their way through his stomach while imprisoned in a red hot cage.
Burning out the eyes.
Driving needles beneath the fingernails.
Tearing off the nose with red-hot pincers.
The horrors came thick and fast, vying with each other.
A man being boiled alive in what looked like a massive metal bowl.
A man with a steel ring through his tongue, the ring attached to a metal ball by a chain.
The revulsion Donna felt was tempered by her recognition of the skill with which these monstrosities had been constructed. They were obscenely realistic.
The two women turned a corner and Julie groaned aloud.
THE MURDER OF SHARON TATE proclaimed the plate on the bars of the enclosure that housed one of the most horrendously realistic exhibits in the building.
In front of the tableau a newspaper of the day headlined the slaughter of the Hollywood star and four others by members of the Charles Manson family. The figure of Manson himself, eyes wild, hair flying behind him, watched over the scene. It showed the living-room of the Tate residence with the film star’s killers, armed with knives and guns, and the other people who died with her. Whoever had modelled it had certainly been painstakingly accurate in the depiction, anxious to show that Sharon Tate had been eight months pregnant when she’d been hacked to death, her blood used to write the word PIG on the wall.
‘Jesus Christ,’ Julie whispered, her attention drawn to the vile display.
Donna had her eye on something else.
Further down the corridor another, larger exhibit showed the Spanish Inquisition. It featured several hooded figures and a victim being racked, while another was being hung from the ceiling on chains, his glass eyes fixed on a cowled figure carrying what looked like a set of rusty garden shears. The intention was castration.
Another hooded figure sat at a desk, a book open before it.
A book of Latin phrases. An old book.
Donna looked round frantically for the entrance to the exhibit and found it nearby in the form of a metal door. She opened it and stepped inside, making for the book. She pulled it towards her and flipped it over, looking at the cover.
The crest showed a Hawk.
The cover felt cold and clammy, as if the book had been in a damp hole for months, years even. The pages were stiff with age, some of them split at the edges. Some of the writing was in Latin, the rest in the same quaint script she’d seen in the book in the library in Scotland.
‘Julie,’ she called.
Her sister hurried over.
‘I’ve found it,’ Donna said triumphantly. ‘This is the Grimoire.’
It was then that the hooded figure at the desk leapt to its feet.
The cowl slipped away to reveal the face of Peter Farrell.
Seventy-Eight
Farrell lunged at her, his face contorted in an expression of pure hatred.
His grunt of anger mingled with Donna’s own shout of surprise and Julie’s scream.
Donna jumped back, pulling the book with her, allowing it to fall to the floor with a crash.
Farrell leapt over the desk, not sure which to grab first, Donna or the Grimoire. He launched himself at Donna, who managed to avoid his rush, seeing him crash into the figure holding the castrating irons. An arm broke off and the metal implement went skidding across the dusty floor. Donna snatched it up as she saw Farrell reaching inside his jacket, pulling the .45 free.
She swung the castrating iron with all her force and caught him across the back of the hand, the clang of metal on bone reverberating through The Torture Chamber.
The gun flew from his grasp, but instead of trying to retrieve it Farrell came at her again.
Donna swung the iron again. This time she caught him in the face with it.
The blow split his cheek almost to the bone and blood burst from the wound and ran down the side of his face. Grabbing the book, Donna dashed past him towards the door where Julie was waiting.
‘Get them,’ roared Farrell. As if from nowhere, Ryker and Kellerman appeared from the shadows. Like two spectres rising from the umbra they rose up before the women.
Donna pulled the .22 Pathfinder from her handbag, thumbed back the hammer and fired twice. The first shot carved a path through the shoulder of Ryker’s jacket without touching flesh; the second missed both men and blew the head off the model of Torquemada.
Ryker dived to one side but swung his foot at Donna and managed to trip her.
She pitched forward, the gun falling from her grasp and skittering across the floor. As she hit the ground, she fell on top of the Grimoire.
