‘Ah!’ ejaculated the Doctor. Lady Cranleigh led the way through to the main corridor on the second floor of the Hall proper. She touched another piece of carving and the panel repeated its low growl as it closed behind them. The Doctor felt relief at the sight of familiar surroundings and smiled. It was answered by.Lady Cranleigh.
‘Your room is the first on the right, Doctor. And thank you again.’
The Doctor knew this to be a polite reminder of his promise not to embarrass her guests. He bowed his head in acknowledgement and watched his hostess move to the stairs and descend.
On the terrace the caparisoned guests clustered or ebbed and flowed in pursuit of friends or acquaintances with Lord Cranleigh dutifully playing host in the absence of his mother. All nibbled at food or sipped delicately from slim glasses. All, that is, with the exception of Adric who was doing justice to the excellent fare with gusto, uninhibited by the conventions never to demonstrate a healthy appetite and always to abandon a quantity of food on the plate.
Nyssa was talking to a burly young Roman centurion, although it would be truer to say that the centurion was talking to her since what was being said was in the nature of a monologue about how he stroked, as she understood it, eight men in a boat on a river called the Thames. He had, by all accounts, stroked them to victory last year. She pondered deeply how such an activity could be victorious and was sorely puzzled about the day’s preoccupation with birds: ducks on the cricket field, cocktails in the bath and, now, another winged creature, blade on the feather. She was grateful for the interruption by Lord Cranleigh.
‘Ann?’ She turned to him.
‘The other one.’
‘Nyssa.’
‘Yes.’
‘It’s nothing short of uncanny,’ said Cranleigh in a delighted wonderment, ‘how closely you resemble each other.’ He looked at the centurion. ‘Don’t you think so, Tiny?’
‘Uncanny,’ agreed the stroker enthusiastically.
‘Where is Traken exactly?’ asked his Lordship gently.
Nyssa looked about her in a mild panic. She had been rescued from the stroker but who would rescue her from the charming Lord Cranleigh? Ann perhaps? But where was Ann? She voiced the thought as the next best avenue of escape.
‘You were looking for Ann? I haven’t seen her for some time. The last time I saw her she was with the Doctor.’ She could tell from the opaque expression on Cranleigh’s face that she hadn’t succeeded in diverting interest from her origins and added, ‘He’s not been about for some time, either.’ His Lordship smiled engagingly as if he knew she was temporising and she was desperately thinking about what she could say next when help came from an unexpected quarter.
The couple impersonating the Walrus and the Carpenter passed by on their way to join a group, which included the Queen and Knave of Hearts, acknowledging Lord Cranleigh as they did so. They had danced incongruously with other partners almost from the time of their arrival but now, together, they made a sort of literary sense that was even more incongruous to any unaware of their identity. Nyssa grasped at the passing straw.
‘What are they?’
‘The Walrus and the Carpenter.’
‘The what?’
‘The characters in
Through the Looking-glass
.’
‘Oh?’ said Nyssa, inflecting the sound as interestingly as she could in the expectation of more information. She wasn’t disappointed.
‘
Alice
. You must know the book.’
‘No.’
‘Oh!’ responded his amazed Lordship involuntarily. He recovered and continued. ‘Well, the Walrus and the Carpenter conspired against some oysters.’
‘Oysters?’
‘Oysters,’ repeated the bemused nobleman.
‘Why?’
‘They wanted something to eat.’
‘The oysters?’
‘Yes... no, the Walrus and the Carpenter wanted something to eat.’
Nyssa looked with delight at her host’s earnest face. She had, indeed, succeeded in changing the subject. ‘What’s an oyster?’ It was Lord Cranleigh’s turn to look desperate.
Wherever Traken was it must be remote; very out of touch.
‘It’s a shellfish.’ He glanced towards the buffet tables. ‘If there was an "r" in the month I could show you.’ And then he saw a way out of the conversational impasse. ‘Let me help you to a little collation.’ He offered his arm to Nyssa and steered her towards the ever-ready social nostrum of food and drink.
The Doctor closed the door of his room behind him, his eyes going involuntarily to the panel by the bed, half expecting it to be open. The Pierrot costume had been returned; replaced in exactly the same spot from which it had been taken. But since the Doctor was unaware of its temporary and sinister absence it held no interest for him.
He went to the panel and his fingers methodically sought a means of opening it without success. He was about to persist and repeat the examination when he remembered Lady Cranleigh’s last demonstration. The mechanism could be anywhere in the room. He shrugged and turned his attention to the costume on the bed.
Tegan sipped at her champagne and looked around the terrace, watched by Sir Robert Muir. ‘An interesting turn out,’ he suggested.
‘Yes. I was wondering where the Doctor was.’
‘Not being bored by the old codger, I hope?’
The remark startled Tegan almost to the point of shock since it had been made by someone whom she considered neither old nor boring. Impulsively she touched the elegant knight’s arm lightly and reassuringly. ‘Oh, Sir Robert, of course not.’
His eyes ranged among the chattering and laughing groups on the terrace. ‘There are any number of well covered up chaps of the right size and shape. The Doctor could be any one of them since he wants to remain incognito. My guess is that it’s the man’s innate modesty.’
Tegan smiled to herself. The Doctor? Innately modest?
‘Have you known him long?’ asked Sir Robert.
‘The Doctor?’
‘Yes.’
‘A fair while.’ Her tone was such that it discouraged further questions on the subject; a hint taken readily by the courtly Sir Robert. He held out a hand. ‘Let me help you to a thimbleful more of this excellent champagne.’
Ann Talbot lay insensible on the bed in the tower room. A sudden, sharp intake of breath began her revival. Her eyelids fluttered and then opened. Slowly her eyes focussed on the bars at the window, touched with gold by the evening sun. She looked at the window
uncomprehendingly for a moment before turning her eyes on the flower prints and books lining the wall with equal incomprehension. Where was she? The question filled her mind, blocking all memory of the moment before she lost consciousness. She turned her head and a sudden muscular contraction, provoked by extreme terror, robbed her of breath. Her mouth opened in an agonising, noiseless scream.
A creature stood by the bed looking down at her. It was in some sort of human shape but was so monstrously deformed as to deny all evidence of humanity. The trunk and legs were dressed conventionally in an open-necked shirt, a pullover in large diamond check, and grey flannel trousers. The head, face, forearms and hands were such that they could have been fashioned in wax and then melted beyond recognition in a fire.
The head was hairless with exposed and alternative livid and puce puckered skin. Human facial features were barely acknowledged. There were no recognisable ears. The eyes were hideously shot with blood, the right one almost submerged in folds of livid morbid flesh. A fleshless ridge with two perforations and a lipless gash beneath it was small evidence of a nose and mouth. The obscenely puckered forearms supported hands, the fingers of which were welded together, giving a grotesque prominence to the thumbs.
The gash widened and a clicking came from the back of the throat.
Ann pushed at the bed with her hands struggling to get up, her lungs fighting painfully for breath, her eyes forced wide in uncontrollable terror. She sucked in enough air to voice a horrible, rattling scream.
The creature’s visible eye closed for a moment and its hands came up in front of its monstrous face. Ann screamed again and scrambled free from the bed, her eyes on the distant, iron-clad door. The creature lowered its hands and moved to block her path, the clicking from the throat becoming louder and faster. Extending its hands, the creature began slowly to move on Ann. She backed away and tried again to scream but no sound would come.
She fetched up against the wall and pushed out the palms of her hands to hold off the moving monster. The creature stopped and sank to its knees, its arms outstretched. Ann’s scream was loosed at last. The creature lifted the fused fingers of one hand and put them at a right angle to the gash in its face. Ann’s eyes turned upwards under her lids.
She sighed and slid to the floor.
The creature began to crawl towards her.
6
The Doctor looked at his reflection in the cheval-glass with some satisfaction. He donned the head piece and smiled behind the painted mask at the reflected stranger before him. He bowed ironically to discover that his own tail coat, beneath the fancy dress, inhibited free movement. He’d be better off without it. He removed the head piece and began to undo his costume.
It was only natural, he supposed, that Lady Cranleigh should wish the ball to be continued without embarrassment or alarm. The elaborate facade, erected by what was known as high society in this period, hid many social skeletons in many murky cupboards. As many ills and as much unpleasantness as possible were masked from those of delicate sensibility by a cult of good manners in which hypocrisy played a very grubby part. Victorian and Edwardian values in England had survived the revealing Great War in Europe and the still powerful upper and middle classes set great store by the preservation of a social fabric which was now under threat from the vulgar, the self-seeking and the envious.
The body he’d discovered was corporeal enough but it flitted into the good Doctor’s mind that it was not unknown for distinguished piles to house dry, clandestine bones and the dead Digby could be, at one time, well qualified for such a fate. Why not now? No, the police were to be called. The Doctor dismissed the thought.
Nevertheless Cranleigh Hall did contain some closely guarded secret and had been penetrated by a killer. Could they be one and the same?
Ann again lay on the bed, her eyes closed and her face shiny with sweat, but unharmed. The creature sat on the bed, the bloodshot eye fixed on the girl who was twitching with the unconscious reflex actions of a suppressed terror.
The creature slowly put out a hand and gently touched the tortured, pretty face. A muscle shivered beneath the touch and the creature snatched back the hand as if it had been hurt. The inflamed eye closed and the hand was put to the gash in the face in an acknowledgement of pain.
A sound from the other side of the door turned the creature’s repulsive head, the eye wide with alarm. Slowly, the savage deformity rose from the bed to face the door squarely, the melted hands lifting defensively.
In spite of herself Lady Cranleigh flinched from the other side of the door and signalled to the Indian to take her place. He did so and grasped the handle to turn it. The door was unyielding.
‘It is locked, Lady’ the Indian whispered. Lady Cranleigh closed her eyes, her face compressed in pain.
The Indian knocked on the door with his knuckles.
‘My friend, it is I. Open!’
The creature did not move. The Indian spoke again.
‘My friend! My good friend, open for me!’ The creature’s burning eye looked at the key in the lock but still it did not move.
The Indian knocked again and waited. Then he turned to look at Lady Cranleigh shaking his head. Taking a determined grip on her wide, flowing skirt Lady Cranleigh moved to the head of the steps and hurried down out of sight. The Indian knocked again.
‘My friend! My good friend, do not part us in this way!
You will come to harm. You will be unhappy. Open, please!’
The creature hadn’t moved but the knocking and the raised voice broke into Ann’s consciousness and she stirred. Immediately the creature rounded on her, the gap in the face panting open, the clicking in the throat responding to the increased pattern in breathing. The Indian continued to rap on the door with repeated entreaties for his friend to let him in.
Ann opened her eyes and instantly recalled where she was. A cry escaped her dry throat and she swallowed, gulped in air, and rolled from the bed. The Indian heard her with dread in his heart. What he’d prevented so often before had finally taken place. He prayed to his gods no harm would come to the Lady Talbot and renewed his knocking.
‘My friend!’
‘Help me!’ Ann screamed. ‘Help me!’
The creature held out his arms to her and again fell to his knees. The Indian threw his weight against the door impotently, knowing it had been made to withstand much more than all the strength he could muster. Ann screamed again and the Indian called: ‘Lady! Lady, help is here.’ His voice startled Ann into a sort of steadiness but she began to weep chokingly.
The Indian bounded down the steps on the way to his room in search of something with which he could realistically attack the door. The terrified Ann looked at the kneeling creature, her small frame racked with sobs.
The gash in the creature’s face opened wide and the rapid clicking increased horribly.
Then Ann saw the tear drip from the creature’s eye and dribble down the hideous puckered skin. Instantly she sensed that she was in no danger and her sobbing subsided, but it was some time before she could trust herself to speak.
‘Who are you?’
The clicking appeared to take on a pattern.
‘What are you?’
Another tear followed the first. Clearly the creature was trying to speak. Ann brushed aside her own tears. She looked intently at the gaping gash whence came the clicking. The creature had no tongue.
Ann began to weep again but this time the tears were not provoked by terror but by compassion.
The Indian rushed empty-handed from his room as Lady Cranleigh came through the panel opposite the foot of the steps holding a large key. She held it up to the Indian who took it, saying urgently, ‘He has the Lady Talbot.’