Bad Dreams (19 page)

She knew she would have to take a look.

‘Stay here,’ she told Nina, letting her hand go, ‘this will be over in a moment.’

She held the doorhandle, took a deep breath, and opened the door.

…the room was a mess, but there were no people there. Drinks stood abandoned. The Christmas tree was broken, having shed a layer of needles and broken baubles onto the presents. Food and cigarette butts had been trodden into the precious carpet. The open fire had practically died. The lights were still on, and a cassette was clicking in a tape deck.

Nina took her hand again, and tugged her away from the open door. ‘Has everyone gone?’ she asked.

‘I think so.’

‘Should we find someone to say goodbye to?’

Anne turned away from the party room. ‘Let’s not bother. Let’s go.’

‘Amelia usually pays. A hundred pounds. Sometimes more, if you’ve been…’

‘We’ll bill her later, okay?’

‘Okay.’

They got their coats. Nina wanted to keep holding hands, and hurried the sleeves over her arms so they would not be out of contact for long. It was a bit embarrassing but Anne was glad of it.

The instrument panel looked complicated, but all the switches were neatly marked. The monitor showed the street outside in snowy black and white. There was no one about. Anne flipped the switch that opened the front gate, and the ironwork brushed the bottom of the video image. ‘There,’ she said. ‘Easy.’

Nina opened the front door by hand and stepped outside, pulling Anne after her…

It was very dark, and Anne felt something slap into her face and stay there. She lifted it aside – it felt like a heavy curtain – and still could not see anything. Nina’s grip tightened. The door had shut behind them.

‘Anne, where are we?’

She did not know.

In her coat pocket, she had a pen with a little light in it, for taking notes in theatres and other dark places. She felt for it, and brought it out.

The glowworm lit up both their faces. Nina was frightened again. There were mobile shadows above her nose and eyebrows. They were in a large wardrobe. The curtain had been a crinoline, hanging from one of two rails that ran just above their heads.

‘This…’

‘…doesn’t make sense. I know.’

There was no handle on this side of the door. Anne tried to get her fingers into the jamb, but could not. It appeared to have locked itself.

‘We’ll suffocate,’ said Nina.

‘I don’t think so.’ Anne pushed aside an armload of dresses, finding only another rank of old clothes. ‘I don’t think this is a regular closet. It’s deep. More like a passage…’

‘There’s a way out?’

‘At the other end. Right.’

On Anne’s side, there were women’s clothes – elaborate ball gowns with mock jewels sewn into the bodices and rustling, puffy sleeves and skirts. Nina faced a succession of sombre gentleman’s wear – black evening suits, heavy overcoats. A few brass and silver buttons gleamed in the minimal light.

There was not much space. They could not go side by side. Anne took the lead, and dragged Nina. The girl’s hand was cold now, although it was quite stuffy in the passage. It was not an easy progress. The clothes had not been disturbed for a long time and were as thick and tangled as jungle foliage. There would be untold vermin nesting in the folds of material.

Anne would have had good use for a machete.

A few of the wooden hangers had rusted wire hooks which bent and broke as they passed. Bundles fell down, stirring up dust. Nina had a coughing fit. The fallen clothes were as difficult to wade through as thick mud.

They must have penetrated twenty feet into the passage, and there was still no hint of an end within reach.

Anne felt the wind knocked out of her. She had blundered into a suit that was much more solid than most. She staggered back, and had to be steadied by Nina. A dark, hanging shape blocked the way. Holding up her light, Anne saw a cavernous opera cape with a Mephistophelean magician’s tailcoat hanging inside it. And inside both was a large corpse.

Nina had a minor convulsion. Anne’s hand felt crushed.

‘Anders!’

It was, but, for all his weight, he looked hollow. Anne touched his dead white face, and felt nothing that had been alive.

‘No,’ she said, ‘it’s a sculpture. I’ve seen them before. Look, it’s supposed to be Anders grown old…’

The hair was white, the neck muscles flabby. The face was minutely wrinkled, the flesh beneath semi-liquid.

‘Let’s go on.’

Nina was hesitant.

‘You don’t have to touch it.’

They ducked, and squeezed past. There were others. Some were unrecognizably altered or mutilated, but most were obvious caricatures of people Anne had seen at the party. Not only were they made to look lifeless and tormented, but they were crammed into mouldering fancy dress costumes. Toby Farrar wore the braided tunic of a Hussar, and even had a jaunty helmet perched on his head. Jeane Russell was an unsuitably voluptuous fairy queen with gossamer wings and golden spangles on her bare, withered arms. Derek Douane was got up as a Dickensian urchin, with a broken neck and a dirty face. Daeve was a knobbly-kneed schoolgirl in a navy blue pinafore, with red spot freckles on his cheeks and straw-coloured ropes attached to his beret.

It was hot in the thin corridor, and the hanging husks made going forward practically impossible. The two girls paused, grimy and breathless, in the middle of the sick display. Nina tugged Anne back, towards the way they had come from.

‘We can’t give up now,’ Anne said. ‘Try to ignore these things. They’re not real.’

‘There’s a thing in here with us.’

‘What?’

‘A thing.’

Anne listened, but there was no noise at all.

‘It’s an animal,’ said Nina.

A tiger?

‘I don’t think so,’ said Anne. ‘Let’s go on. It can’t be much longer. We must be nearly there.’

They struggled a little further. Baz Something dangled absurdly, in the ballooning pants, curly-toed slippers, tiny waistcoat and bulbous turban of an Arabian Nights eunuch. His paunch bulged over a sash. At the end of the line was the computer salesman, dressed up as the Queen of Hearts. His death was supposed to have been messy, and there was a lot of realistic blood all over his costume. In the centre of his chest, where there was a heart motif on his tunic, there was a ragged hole disclosing his real heart, which looked to have been squeezed by an iron fist.

Nina screamed, horribly loud in the confined space.

‘One of them touched me,’ she said. ‘Touched my hair.’

She tried to put her arms around Anne, but could not. A body got in the way. Anne banged her elbow on a solid wood wall.

‘They’re just statues.’

Anne pulled Nina along. They left the bodies behind them. The passage was wider now, with room for four racks. There were enough costumes here to keep the Paris Opera going for five successive seasons. But it was easier to move forward.

‘They’re after us. They’re not dead.’

Nina was whining. Anne wanted to slap her. She was at the end of her patience. None of this was helping.

Her light was carried forward. It picked out a face, and they stopped. Nina’s hand-grip was painful again. The face smiled.

‘Good evening, Anne.’

It was Skinner. He looked more like Hugh Farnham now. There was some scarring on his cheek. Anne thought it was growing as she stared at it. She had nothing to say.

‘I knew your sister, you know.’ The bastard did not even look evil. ‘Intimately.’

She could not look away from him. He smiled blandly again, without much enthusiasm. He was as tired as she felt.

‘Skinner, what the fuck are you playing at?’

‘Playing?’

She remembered it was not a game any more.

‘Playing? That’s for imbeciles like Amelia Dorf. You and me, Anne, we don’t play games.’

‘Yeah, right.’

Nina yanked her arm hard, pulling Anne’s shoulder painfully. She turned away from Skinner. The other girl had plunged behind a curtain of fur coats. Anne was pulled into the clothes and lost her balance. Then she was down, and Nina was on top of her. The pen-light rolled away. Nina let go of her hand. Anne felt fingers in her throat, squeezing hard. She reached for Nina’s hands, and grabbed what she hoped were her little fingers. She bent the fingers back. There was a squeal, and she was released.

Anne tried to get up, pulling on a coat, but Nina was still pinning her to the floor. There was still some light. Looking up at Nina, Anne saw a dead face. Just like the other effigies.

The scuffle at the Club Des Esseintes aside, she had not been in a fight since elementary school. The trick with the little fingers was the only thing she remembered from a piece she had once written on self-defence courses for women. She was no good at this. She rolled from side to side, trying to get the Nina Thing off her chest.

She got hold of a fallen ulster and stuffed it into Nina’s face. It wrapped around her head. The Nina Thing tore at it, but Anne was released. She pushed the girl hard, and heard her fall over.

The struggle had been silent. Neither girl had grunted or sworn. There had only been a few sharp yelps of pain. Skinner might not even have been there.

Skinner?

Free of Nina, Anne got her head down and charged. She did not connect with Skinner as she had expected, and fell down. She scrambled along on leftover momentum, using her hands and knees more than her feet.

It was dark, and the passage was narrower now. She brushed the walls with both shoulders, and even banged her head when she tried to stand up.

There was something behind her, coming after her, coming to get her. The Nina Thing. And it was not alone. The others, the guests, were there too, in a pack. They were not alive, but they were not dead enough either.

She considered lying down on the floor, covered with fallen dresses, and waiting for their touch on her neck. But she could not make herself give up. She kept on.

She kept on until she ran into a wall of loose boards. They fell apart, wood splintering, nails wrenching, and she burst out of the side of a building.

She stumbled and fell, her palms striking wet, dirty concrete. She felt cold night air on her face.

ENTRE’ACTE

I
n his dream, Cameron Nielson Jr saw life as a motion picture, unspooling steadily in the white-hot gaze of the bulb, the past piling up like celluloid string on the projection booth floor. CAMERON NIELSON in
The Cameron Nielson Story.
A Cameron Nielson Film. From the Cradle to the Grave with CAMERON NIELSON. ‘It’ll run and run,’ Cameron Nielson.

His early years had been mainly montage. The young composer practises his scales while waiting for a big break. The young composer at odds with his family, who want him to follow a less daring course. The young composer working late into the night, notes flowing from his stylo. Women, leaving. Landlords knocking on doors, demanding money. Dishes piling up in a sink. Fingers in close-up, struggling with a recalcitrant piano. Electrical equipment accumulating around the traditional musical instrument. The reflection of a soldering iron in protective goggles as the musical weapons are forged.

Variety
headlines spin out of the papier-mâché mist and chart the rise of a career. Fatherly, distinguished men scoffing at the hero’s genius in smoke-filled clubs, plotting his come-uppance, but ultimately being swept away by the rollercoaster force of his obsessive talent. Early successes are built upon, as different audiences are superimposed, each clapping a little louder than the last, a crescendo rising. The young composer called out of his electronic cocoon after a performance and taking his bows with the other musicians, a rare grin on his sweating face. A devoted woman, her face a blur, clapping from the wings.

And throughout it all the music, first heard as an eerie sketch inside the hero’s head, skeletally indistinct and bone china fragile. Then, as the young composer experiments at his consoles and keyboards, taking on some meat, becoming stronger, deeper. Finally, in a triumphant climax, bursting forth strong and unforgettable, exploding from his mind into reality, in THX sound, blasting at the acoustics of every concert hall in the world.

Then, amid the frenzy of music and applause, a clinch with the devoted woman and a fade to a painless old age. The composer, with talcum powder-white hair and a young face, dying content in his bed, surrounded by adoring and grieving children, his music living on. Under the end title, a pan across a series of busts in some Elysian hall of music. Palestrina. Bach. Beethoven. Mozart. Brahms. Wagner. Mahler. Stravinsky. Schoenberg. Stockhausen. CAMERON NIELSON.
The End
, in curlicue letters. A CAMERON NIELSON PRODUCTION.

‘Cam?’

‘Uh?’ He jumped a little as Alexia slipped the
boutonnière
into the lapel of his tailcoat.

‘You were dreaming,’ she said.

He concentrated. He was calm. Before a concert, some people went to pieces, chain-smoking, hands trembling, shaking whisky out of the bottle. Cameron Nielson Jr became the still centre of a hurricane, as collected and single-minded as a great neurosurgeon before an operation.

‘I’m sorry. I have to carry the whole piece in my head.’

Alexia smiled. His
boutonnière
matched her corsage. She had been his personal assistant throughout the preparation for the performance of the
Telemachus Symphony
, and they had slept together, three times. He was beginning to find the sex interesting, and had already started to wonder whether he should try to make her position permanent. The English girl was efficient and brought him just the right touch of warmth. He knew that he could be an ice-cube at times – God knows, Beethoven, Mozart and Wagner had not been easy to live with either – and Alexia took the chill off him.

She patted his lapel, straightening the flower, and kissed him like a little girl.

She was very English. His father had married an English girl, after divorcing Cameron’s mother. The Nielsons were all drawn to this country. Perhaps it was a genetic thing. In all likelihood, Anne would settle for an Englishman. And Judi…