“Looks like we got it wrong,” Jago said. There was anger in his voice as he stared around him. Samuel Ragg’s pistol was held loosely in his hand.
They had checked the two doors leading off the entrance hall. The rooms beyond were dark, cold, and empty. The tiny arrows of desultory moonlight slanting down through thin gaps and holes in the window shutters had revealed no signs of recent habitation. The air smelled of dry dust and abandonment.
Hawkwood said nothing. He had been so sure the answer would be here. Yet there was no sense that anyone was present, other than the two of them. He stood at the foot of the stairway and looked up towards the next landing. All he could see was a well of darkness. He held out his hand. “Give me the light.”
They were halfway up the stairs when Jago paused. “Smell that?”
Hawkwood had already noticed it. It was the same odour as had been leaking from the vats and the benches in the cellar of the Black Dog. He suddenly felt an overwhelming sense of dread. It was as though the house was starting to close in around them.
The first floor was also empty. Most of it was taken up by one large room containing rows of empty shelves. There was an ancient wooden packing chest resting against one wall; inside were some paper boxes and a collection of empty glass jars.
The smell grew stronger the higher they climbed. Jago was the first to use his neck cloth to cover his nose. By the time they arrived at the second floor it was reaching in to the back of their throats. They stopped outside a closed door. The smell coming from inside the room was intense.
Hawkwood turned the handle and pushed.
“God in Heaven,” Jago said.
When Molly opened her eyes for the second time, little appeared to have changed. She still felt as if she could fall asleep for a hundred years, and the odd taste at the back of her throat refused to go away.
The mattress was as hard as a board. She was cold, too. She could still make out the glow of candles, scores of them, arranged around the room. Her eyes tried to penetrate the darkness beyond. The walls, she noticed, had a curious, curved shape to them; so much so that they seemed to be spiralling away from her towards the ceiling. It was a most peculiar sensation.
She went to push the sheet away, only to find that she was still unable to move her arms and legs. Her first reaction was to call out, but all she could manage this time was a dry croak. She strained to raise herself up but the harder she tried, the more difficult it became. Her efforts grew progressively weaker. Finally, exhausted, feeling as helpless as a kitten, Molly sank back and closed her eyes.
There was a noise. Molly started. The candles were still burning. She could see them, flickering dimly, and she could smell the tallow. Had she been asleep? she wondered. Perhaps she’d fainted. If so, for how long? It was very cold now, and growing colder by the minute. She shivered and tried to raise her hands to lift the sheet higher, but the simple task eluded her. The walls were behaving very oddly, too, the way they were revolving around her, like a child’s top.
The noise came again, instantly familiar, even in her confused state: footsteps on a wooden floor. As she tried to locate the source of the sound, a dark shape detached itself from the edge of the shadows beyond the reach of the candle glow, and moved slowly towards her.
Hawkwood stared at the skull. It was some kind of monkey. The skull was in a jar on a shelf. The monkey’s eyes looked as if they were on the point of opening, giving the impression that the animal had been sleeping when its head had been removed. The face, although heavily wrinkled, looked strangely young. It was framed by an incongruous cap of wispy reddish hair.
The jar was one of several score that filled the shelves along the right-hand wall. They came in all shapes and sizes, each one labelled. Every single jar was full of cloudy liquid. Suspended in the liquid, like insects trapped in amber, Hawkwood saw a bewildering assortment of objects. There were lizards with two tails and baby crocodiles emerging from eggs. According to the labels, others held brains of deer, of goats and dogs, the eyes of a leopard, the testes of a ram, the foetus of a pig, kittens, mice, snakes, baby sharks, two-headed chickens … All manner of oddities and abnormalities were displayed.
But it wasn’t the freakish animal parts that drew Hawkwood’s eye. He was no anatomist, but during his time as a soldier he’d seen surgeons at work and had been both the victim and beneficiary of their administrations. Similarly, as a Runner he had paid court to coroner’s surgeons like McGregor and Quill and was thus familiar with some of the more gruesome aspects of their work. So he knew what he was looking at. They were human body parts.
Most of the specimens appeared to be internal organs, at least according to the labels: hearts, livers, lungs, bowels, kidneys … the list was extensive. Some of the contents were easily identifiable, like the coils of gut, which bore a strange similarity to empty sausage skins; others he could only guess at. The patina of dust on top of the jars and the faded ink on the labels indicated that they had been on the shelves for some time. The sealant on several of the jars had rotted away, allowing air to intrude and the liquid inside to evaporate. Whatever had been contained within them had long since disintegrated and so bore no resemblance to its original state. Beneath the shelves, a dozen or so jars lay broken, the contents having spilled out across the floor. It was hard to distinguish the remnants of their desiccated contents from the lumps of calcified rodent droppings that littered the floorboards.
“What the hell are these?” Jago whispered.
“Preparations,” Hawkwood said. His eyes moved around the room. In the darkness, he had not seen how large the room was. It occurred to him that an internal wall had probably been removed to create the space, as on the floor beneath. There were more shelves on the opposite wall. They supported another collection of jars. The middle of the room was occupied by an oblong table. He moved towards it. On top were what looked like a butcher’s cutting board and an assortment of basins, both deep and shallow. There were some familiar items lying on top of the butcher’s board. Hand tools. Not the butcher’s tools of the Dog’s cellar, however; these were much more refined. But he’d seen their like before, in the hands of Surgeon Quill. These were medical instruments.
His eyes moved across the tabletop. It took him a moment to notice the difference between the table and the specimen shelves behind him. There was no dust.
The touch on her arm came from nowhere. Molly flinched.
“It’s wearing off,” a voice said. “She’s waking up.”
When she heard the words and realized there were two people in the room with her, the memory of her ordeal at the hands of the Ragg brothers came flooding back. And with the memory came the panic. She saw again the Raggs’ leering faces, felt the wiry strength of them, smelled their rank unwashed bodies, as sour as vomit, as they took turns with her. She remembered, too, the shame she had felt in allowing herself to submit to the degradation in the vain hope that they would spare her further hurt, knowing all the while that these were men without pity, men who derived pleasure from the humiliation of others. Now, when she felt the hands upon her, Molly knew she was about to be subjected to more of the same.
But this time she was not going to give herself to them without a fight.
When she tried to lash out, though, her arms and legs refused to obey. It was as if they belonged to someone else. She felt the sheet being lifted from her body. She looked down and understood immediately why she felt so cold. She was naked.
That was the moment true fear took hold. She tried to cry out, but what emerged was still no more than a feeble croak. Strong hands gripped her shoulders, forcing her down.