Flesh and Blood (13 page)

“I want to go, too,” shuddered Jo quietly. “But … we ought to find out all we can.”

“I think you’re right,” I said, fighting a rising urge to throw up. “We’ve gone to a lot of trouble to get here. We have to finish the job.”

“Well take some of the organs out of that fridge there! Nobody’s going to argue with that for evidence!” Liam replied bitterly. “What, you don’t want to pick that stuff up?” He wiped at his cheek with the sleeve of his coat then took a single step.

“Don’t go,” said Jo. “Please, stay with us. With me. Stay together. Then we know we’re all safe.”

Liam’s expression was an agony of indecision. If we’d gone at that moment, we
would
have been safe. There were more than forty minutes left before the Greenhills got home. We could have photographed what we’d seen, and got out without leaving any noticeable trace.

But we didn’t. And it’s my fault. It had been my idea to break in, and if I’d backed Liam up, then I’m
sure Jo would have gone along with us. I have to live with that now.

We stepped through the archway, close together, shaking but silent, our minds numb with it all.

To the left was a kind of glass booth, reaching from floor to ceiling. Beside it was one of the trolleys from the first room, stacked with pill bottles, sterile packs containing hypodermic syringes and packs of surgical dressings.

Inside the booth was a man, on a low fold-out bed strewn with heavily stained sheets. He was dead, although from the look of him, he hadn’t been for very long. He was dressed in grubby blue overalls, opened at the front, and was sprawled, half on the bed and half off. His legs ended just below the knees. His feet had been replaced by mechanical grippers, one of which was smeared with blood that had leaked from a split in the join with his skin.

His eyes were rolled up, his jaw slack. Through the opening in his overalls, we could see eyes. Dozens of them, crammed in next to each other, embedded deep into the flesh of his chest. A heaving mass of eyes. Wires sprouted from reddened skin next to some of them, connecting up to a box in the top
pocket of the man’s overalls. His arms were held up beside his face, his fingers frozen into claws.

Jo stifled a scream with her fists. Even muffled, the sound echoed off the tiled walls. I staggered slightly, suddenly realizing I hadn’t taken a breath for what seemed like days.

Opposite the booth was a second one, to the right-hand side of the archway. Inside this one, lying on a similar fold-out bed, was a girl. Half a girl. Her face was drawn and sunken, shadowed with fatigue, and her long hair hung in matted clumps.

Several of her organs had been extracted, through a long, heavily bandaged incision in her side. They were contained in separate life-supporting machines that ticked and pumped on a wide shelf above her head, all connected together by plastic blood vessels like those we’d already seen. A laptop on the shelf controlled them.

She lay very still, her eyes staring. I thought she was dead, too.

From the waist down, the two halves stitched together in an elliptical curve, her body had been replaced with that of a large, short-haired dog. At a guess, the same dog I’d seen that first night.

Hind quarters, rear legs and a tail instead of human parts. A hybrid creation, like a grotesque mermaid.

Jo sobbed, her voice quivering. “Oh my God, it’s Kat Brennan. Remember? S-She … ran off. On the news. Oh my God, Kat!”

Suddenly, the girl’s eyes blinked. I almost stumbled over in fright. Her mouth opened and closed, emitting only vague sounds.

Jo’s trembling fingers reached out and pressed against the glass of the booth, until she realized there was nothing that any of us could do. I felt as if I was hollow, like the tiniest push would shatter me into fragments.

Liam stood beneath the archway, his face turning from one hideous scene to another and back again. He gasped, his eyes stretched wide.

“Sick … twisted … bastards,” he cried, his voice cracking with emotion.

I think the shock of it all pushed me into a kind of forced detachment. I felt like I was hearing myself speak, and watching myself act. “Evidence,” I said. “Liam, give me the camera from your bag.”

“What?” he yelled. His voice bounced off the walls. Fear was bursting out of him as anger. “Don’t be so
fucking cold! We have to help this girl first! We have to get her out of this hellhole!”

“We can’t,” said Jo, swiping tears away from her cheeks. She tried to grab Liam’s shoulders, but he shrugged her away violently. “Listen, we can’t help her.”

“No!” shouted Liam. “We’re not abandoning her! We can’t! It’s not right!”

“None of this is right,” I said. “Give me the camera.”

“Oh, stuff your bloody evidence! Look at her, she’s alive! Are you going to walk away? Are you? I’m bloody not!”

“If we try to disconnect her from all that machinery,” I quivered, “she’ll probably be dead in minutes.”

“And that’s a life worth living she’s got there, is it?” spat Liam. He stalked about, his arms flailing, frustration powering through him. “Then we should kill her. Put her out of her misery. That’s what I’d want. I bet that’s what she’s trying to say!”

“Go on, then!” I cried. “You can do that, can you?”

He glared at me.

Then something faded in his eyes, and he slumped. “Sick in the head, sick in the head,” he muttered helplessly. He dug into his bag, and handed Jo the digital SLR camera he’d brought with him. She fumbled at its settings with her trembling fingers. I took out my phone and switched it on.

“No signal down here,” I said. Jo and Liam tried theirs, too.

Jo took pictures. She had to use the flash, and a very fast exposure, otherwise camera shake turned everything into a blur. After a few minutes, she handed the camera to me.

“I can’t,” she said. “You do it.”

I continued from where she’d left off, photographing every detail of the basement, every horrible creature, every jar of preserved organs. I took pictures of the dead man in the booth. With the bitterest feelings of self-hatred, I took pictures of Kat Brennan. Jo buried her face in Liam’s shoulder, while Liam stood looking drawn and grim.

We have to do this,
I kept telling myself.
We have to expose this, we have to tell the world.

I’m not sure Kat Brennan even knew we were there. Her eyes were glazed and distant. It was life in name
only. Her mind had long gone. Even so, walking away from her ripped my heart from my chest.

I hurriedly stuffed the camera back into Liam’s bag, and he slung it over his shoulder. We stood in the basement’s first room, with the medical trolleys and the collections of instruments. I assumed that I looked every bit as pale and scared as Jo and Liam did.

This place wasn’t the work of one madman, was it? Surely, the rest of the family couldn’t live with it and stay silent?

Without saying another word, I switched off the lights and closed the basement’s sliding entrance. As it bumped shut, we could hear the bolt snap back into place behind it.

Liam checked his watch. He spoke with forced calm, the way you hear people speak on the news, at the scene of a tragedy. “Well, no cops have turned up. You were right about no alarms, Sam.”

I think we were all feeling that same kind of stunned acceptance, a numbness that insisted we had to pull ourselves together and get on with it now. My mind was still reeling. If it hadn’t been, my phone wouldn’t have stayed in my pocket at that moment.

We went up the stone steps, and back into the
room lined with locked drawers and cupboards. I led the way along the narrow passage, into the area behind the door that opened on to the rear garden, and from which steps ascended into the main part of the house.

I hesitated, looking up the stairs. “Do you think we should look up there?”

“We’ve seen enough, haven’t we?” whispered Jo. “We must have seen the worst.”

“Yes,” I mumbled.

A muffled thud suddenly came from upstairs.

The three of us froze to the spot in terror. “What was that?” gasped Liam.

“There’s someone else in the house,” I breathed.

“There can’t be,” whispered Jo.

“Run!” hissed Liam.

I put out a hand to stop him. “If someone’s upstairs, someone else could be right out there in the garden, too, waiting.”

“Cops?” said Jo.

“They’d just have come down and got us, wouldn’t they?” whsipered Liam. “There’s only one way into that cellar. If someone wanted to catch us, they could corner us down there far more easily. There can’t be anyone waiting – that’s rubbish.”

“There can’t be anyone at all,” said Jo quietly. “They’d have heard us coming in. We made enough noise, and this back door creaked like hell.”

“It wasn’t footsteps,” I whispered. “It sounded like something falling over.”

“That’s probably all it is, then,” whispered Liam.

“But it must have been quite heavy,” I said.
“To make a thumping sound like that. It must have been loud up there. Heavy things don’t just fall over.”

“What if… What if it’s another of their victims?” hissed Jo. “Someone locked up? Trying to escape? We know at least one other person’s gone missing in the last few weeks. Maybe they
did
hear us coming in! Maybe they can’t cry out! What if they’re trying to attract our attention?”

We glanced at each other, unsure what to think.

“Well, it’s not the Greenhills,” I muttered. “They’re halfway across the Atlantic.”

Our helpless revulsion at having to leave Kat Brennan was gnawing at our guts. That was what drove us on. That was what stopped us from thinking straight.

“If anyone was coming for us, they’d be here by now,” said Liam. “Waiting for us doesn’t make sense. It must be someone else in trouble.”

Jo rubbed a shaky hand across her forehead. “You’re right. It can’t wait, they might be dying, or desperate. We have to look for them.”

Suddenly, my mind flashed back to that face at the window, weeks before. Had it been someone
looking for help? Had that eerie smile…? I felt my spine collapse like shattering glass.

Fuelled by what we thought was a fresh sense of purpose, the three of us climbed the stairs.

At the top, we emerged into a broad hallway, with a polished wooden floor and stylishly framed family photographs hanging on pastel walls. There was a curving structure above our heads, the underside of a sweeping staircase.

The floor creaked slightly underfoot. As we walked further out into the hall, we could see up the staircase. A tall stained-glass window shining wintry light on to a landing. Up above, the stairs joined a kind of balcony.

Keeping together, listening intently for further sounds, we peeked into each room we passed. None of them were locked. All were tastefully decorated, formal but comfortable. A scattering of magazines lay on the floor beside an armchair. The red standby light glowed on the TV. A corner writing desk was heaped with papers.

In the kitchen, which looked out on to the garden, pots and pans dangled from a chrome hanging rack above a rectangular island unit. A hefty,
American-style fridge hummed. A dozen handles reared up out of a wooden knife block.

A slightly smaller room at the front of the house was partly a library, partly a games room. A console was hooked up to a wall-mounted screen. Round the walls were smart white bookshelves, filled with volumes of every shape and size.

“Over there!” hissed Liam.

I hurried across the hall. Beside a grandfather clock that ticked a low, slow beat, he’d spotted another keypad.

“There’s no door here, though,” said Jo. “What does it operate?”

“Whatever it is, it probably leads to this other victim we heard! Quick, let’s get it open.”

Liam took the laptop from his bag. When the keypad activated, we heard the corresponding clunk come from inside the wall itself. A narrow section of the wall, complete with grandfather clock fixed to it, could be pushed inwards.

“What is it – a panic room?” said Jo.

“In a Georgian mansion?” I said. “Probably a pantry, or something similar, that’s been disguised.”

Inside, the lights came on automatically.
The room was average size, but had no window.

At first sight, it appeared to be a study. Shelves went from floor to ceiling, all the way round the room, every shelf filled to capacity with books, files, small storage boxes…

And more jars. More specimens. Old ones, this time, smaller and domed.

I realized that this must be Gottfried Hugelgrun’s collection. The liquid inside these jars was dark, and brownish, the specimens themselves colourless with age. Many were unidentifiable, and those that could be identified were only recognizable by their shape.

Hands. Feet. Brains.

There was a small, low wooden table that acted as a desk, a fold-out chair propped against it. Liam picked up a dusty cardboard box and gently lifted the lid. It was filled with loose teeth. He slapped it back on to the table with a horrified cry. It rattled.

Slowly, the truth about this room dawned on us. A creeping, biting ache of horror gradually crawled up our insides.

We took a thick hardback from a shelf. On the cover, in felt tip, was ‘1975/6’. It was a journal, filled with handwritten notes and diagrams, cross-sections
of body parts, records of experiments that obviously related to the things we’d seen in the basement. I picked out another. More of the same, but this one in a cramped, inky style. It was dated 1891 and written in German. Translations tucked into the pages referenced the work of Luigi Galvani and Allesandro Volta. On another shelf, a file of loose papers from 1906. On another, notebooks detailing the grafting of skin, bone and muscle tissue on to living people, dated 1958, 2004, 1995, 1917. A tiny, delicate volume was stamped 1888.

There were files filled with photographs pasted to sheets of paper. On the papers, more notes about experimental results. In the pictures, stuff that made the ones we’d just taken in the basement seem innocent. Pictures going back ten years, twenty, thirty, forty. There were old, ragged-edged sepia prints from the earliest days of photography.

Fat, disc-shaped cans of film. Data CDs and DVDs, old-fashioned plastic audio cassettes, even older reel-to-reel tapes, videotape cassettes, computer floppy discs from the 1980s. I unwound strips of film from their reels, saw screams and incisions caught forever.

Other documents had been filled in by the victims themselves. Horrible day-by-day log entries of how they were feeling as they were dosed with drugs, or kept alive after amputations, or hooked up to machines. The Greenhills must have made them do it. There were a couple of victims’ sketchbooks, too. Agonized pencil drawings of faces, imagined landscapes, loved ones.

How many people had been locked up down there over the years? How often were there living prisoners in that basement?

Pages of notes left on the table were dated over the last few months. Some were printed out, others written in at least two – no, three – different handwriting styles. Sheets of A4 inkjet photo paper showed everything that had happened to Kat Brennan, and others, in forensic detail. Some showed the hands of an old man administering an injection. Some showed very young hands, female hands, pulling innards up through a slit in flesh. I quickly turned them all face down.

Here was the truth, then.

Yes, it
was
Byron. And it was Caroline. And it was Ken.

And it was Emma. I recognized Emma’s handwriting here and there, and so did Jo.

It was all of them. Going back for more than a century! A family of maniacs. A whole dynasty of bloodthirsty monsters. Recording it all, keeping it all, revelling in it all, following some huge, twisted programme of research that we now realized we’d barely
glimpsed
in the basement.

Liam, and Jo, and I, we just gaped at it all. The sheer, unravelling scale of what had been going on, it was too big to even hold it in your head all at once. The basement was the lair of a madman, but this room, this archive, multiplied the horror of it a hundred times, a
thousand
times! Here was murder on an industrial scale. Tucked away, here, in this house, for so long.

Almost without thinking, I picked up one of the smaller, slimmer notebooks and pressed it deep into the back pocket of my jeans. “Evidence,” I muttered.

We’d only spent a few minutes in the archive, but we were all conscious of the fact that we’d been wrong. The victim we’d heard wasn’t to be found in here.

“We’ve got to search upstairs,” said Liam.

Closing up the archive behind us, so that nobody could tell we’d been inside, we crossed the hall. Jo took a few steps towards the curved staircase. “Nobody’s coming,” she muttered. Then she called up, her voice shattering the stillness. “Hello? Hello?”

There was no reply, at first. But then…

A voice. High-pitched, a young voice, a woman’s.

“Help! Is there someone there? Can you help me?”