"I thought I 'eard somethin'."
"Heard something? Where?"
"Out back. Just 'old on a mo', like I said."
They were listening, and Elizabeth listened with them, yearning for any sound, but above all for Dr Mitchell's knock on the front door. It didn't matter to her now what might dummy3
happen to him if he fell foul of the gorilla-man—nothing mattered but her own deliverance from those other hands, which had crawled over her with such sickening gentleness.
"I can't hear anything," hissed the snake-voice.
"No, nor I can't neither—not now," the gorilla-man admitted grudgingly. "But I could swear I 'eard somethin', an' that's a fact." The pressure on Elizabeth's shoulders slackened.
"Better 'ave a look-see, I reckon—just to be on the safe side, okay?"
The snake-man sighed. "Very well—if you must. But make it snappy. We don't have all the time in the world at our disposal."
Time, thought Elizabeth desperately. Like them, she had heard nothing. But just as the hood disorientated her sense of place, so the dark tide of fear within her had swamped her sense of time, and what had seemed like only a few minutes of nightmare might in reality have taken much longer.
The pressure lifted altogether, and she could move again within the painful constraints of the bonds which held her wrists and ankles.
Time was what she had to hold on to—she had to think of ways to spin it out: she had to hold on to it, and get control of herself.
Then, out of the darkness, he touched her again, and the control she was striving for slipped from her mind in a wave of sick revulsion and instantly-revived panic. The chair dummy3
rocked and the bonds cut into her flesh agonisingly.
Whatever it was that she had been on the point of thinking vanished from her mind, and all she wanted to scream was Please don't— please don't!
But she couldn't scream, and even the incoherent sounds she started to make were stilled as it came to her with a flash of bitter clarity that all pleading was useless, and worse than useless: please don't had been the ultimate encouragement he wanted from her, adding spice to what he was going to do, and had always wanted to do . . . and nothing she could say or do—there was nothing she could say or do—would change that. She didn't even know any of the answers to his insane questions, but resistance or submission was all the same to him now.
So ... there was nothing left to her but helplessness and terrible numbing fear in the dark—and the quiet of his silent enjoyment of her terror, which joined him to her.
The crash of noise which broke the bond between them was so unexpected and so shattering that for a fraction of time she thought it was inside her, as though her brain and her heart had exploded simultaneously.
Then the noise was outside her, repeated and so loud that it convulsed her into movement, regardless of the pain which tore at her again and as the chair toppled turning black into screaming red into nothing as her head hit something hard—
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III
THERE WERE COLOURS, bright as flowers, but crowned with stars—
"Come on, Miss Loftus—Miss Loftus, come on now—wake up, Miss Loftus ..." The voice surrounded her, hectoring and encouraging her at the same time.
The colours revolved, and then became flowers in reality: the flowers in the curtains of the study, with the evening sun shining through them and starring the gaps in the folds of the pelmet with light. Elizabeth blinked the tears out of her eyes and fought her way upwards into consciousness.
She could see again!
More, she could see and her hands moved—hands, wrists and arms ... all of them moved, freely though painfully, falling where gravity took them.
"Come on, Miss Loftus—damn it!" The voice became peremptory and irritable. "Wake up!"
First, she felt aggrieved—then she became aware of hands holding her, lifting and dragging at her, which roused her into a flurry of fresh resistance against them.
The hands became arms, imprisoning her again. "No! Come on, now—it's me— stop it.'"
The hands weren't those hands—they crushed her, but they didn't touch her ... it was as though, even though ungentle, dummy3
they were unwilling to hold her, never mind to touch her—
Elizabeth relaxed, suddenly boneless.
"That's better! Now then . . . I'm putting you down—it's all right, but I'm putting you down—do you understand? Don't move—it's all right. . . I'll come back . . . right?"
There was no way she could answer any of that. But she accepted the soft-hard feel of the carpet against her cheek, and the movement of the bright flowers of the curtains and the stars twisting at impossible angles—and the desk and table legs horizontal when they should have been vertical.
She wrinkled her nose against the smell of burning carpet . . .
Burning carpet! The smell registered in her brain, triggering consciousness and a proper focus on her surroundings at the same time.
The desk blocked half her view of the room from ground level, but there at the end of it, a yard from her face and sending up a spiralling blue-grey smoke signal to her, a cigarette smouldered on Father's best-quality Wilton carpet!
Elizabeth hauled herself on to one elbow and reached out towards the cigarette. But it was too far away after all, and she had to go on hands and knees in order to extend her reach. To her annoyance she saw, as she picked it up, that it had already gouged an ugly brown mark into the thick pile of the Wilton, and—
God! There was someone lying behind the desk!
She froze on two knees and one hand, the cigarette pinched dummy3
between thumb and forefinger of the other hand, hypnotised by the dark suede shoes, and the grey trousers rucked up to reveal socks and an inch of hairy white leg.
"Don't look," said a voice from behind her.
Elizabeth hadn't wanted to look, there was no danger of that: not only the legs themselves, but also their stillness terrified her. But she found it impossible to take her eyes off them.
"Look at me instead," commanded the voice. "Come on, Miss Loftus—look at me."
She didn't want to turn round either, but in the end it was the lesser of two evils.
"There now . . . it's all right, Miss Loftus—Elizabeth—can I call you 'Elizabeth'? And you can call me 'Paul'—right?"
Elizabeth stared at Dr Mitchell uncomprehendingly.
"There's nothing to be afraid of. It's all over, and there's nothing to be afraid of—do you understand?"
She didn't understand . . . except that she knew he was trying to reassure her about . . . about things for which there could never be reassurance.
"It's all right, Elizabeth." He was speaking to her as though to a child, in exactly the same way that she had spoken to little Helen Powell when she'd come offher bike outside the school and broken her wrist.
"Dr Mitchell . . ." she heard her own voice from far away, half-strangled.
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"Paul." He advanced towards her. "Here—you put this on, Elizabeth."
She frowned at what he was offering her: it was her old raincoat from the peg by the kitchen door. What could he possibly have in mind—that she should wear her old raincoat?
Then she looked down at herself, and saw with horror how her dress gaped open, and fumbled instantly in a panic of embarrassment with her free hand to draw the torn edges of her dress across her breasts.
"Here—" He held the raincoat out with one hand and took the cigarette from her with the other "—put it on ... and then we'll get out of here."
Elizabeth rose to her feet and tried to take the coat from him, but her knees were so weak that she found herself holding to his hand through the coat to keep her balance.