I was very lucky not to have walked straight through, as there was a sudden drop into some kind of pit. The opposite wall was a couple of metres away, but I couldn’t tell how far down the floor was. Kneeling on the threshold, holding the lamp low, and nearly retching now at the fumes assaulting my nostrils, I could make out various shapes some way below. I waved the lantern to and fro, but couldn’t make any sense of what was down there.
Stepping back from the ledge, I took the camera from over my shoulder and put it down on the floor to my right so that it wouldn’t get in my way. I lit one of the other lamps, so I now had two, and took them both back to the edge of the pit. Setting one down carefully behind me and to my right, I lay down on the floor and dangled the other into the darkness. I swung the lamp about but still couldn’t understand what I was seeing. Deciding there was nothing else to do, I took off my belt, looped one end around the handle of the lamp, securing it tightly through the buckle, then lowered it over the edge. I let the lamp drop lower and lower until, in a moment of clumsiness, I lost my grip on the belt. The lamp dropped onto the huge pile at the bottom of the pit. Squinting, I could make out a familiar object, now illuminated by the lamp, which had landed upright. I gasped, forgetting for a split second the stench that surrounded me.
‘Oh God,’ I uttered in a voice barely recognizable as my own. Frozen in a claw of death was a hand, jutting from a tangled heap of bodies, some clothed, some not, all in various stages of decomposition. Shivering suddenly, and finding it hard to draw breath, I got to my feet and stood, staring down at the horror below. Just then something in the room behind me clattered to the floor. My whole body jerked in reaction to the sound and I lost my balance, falling forward, hopelessly, into an open grave.
VII: DESPERATION
I plunged head first into the mound of corpses. Luckily I had my arms in front of me to soften the impact, but I was still left dazed. In my fall I had kicked over the lamp by the doorway, in addition to the lamp in the pit, so that I was in darkness. As I pushed myself onto my elbows, I felt something soft and wet yield beneath me. I slowly turned and sat up, not wanting the pile to collapse. The smell was nauseating now, and each breath brought me closer to madness. Keeping the food in my gut was an ordeal. The smell was in my lungs, my throat, my sinuses, everywhere. I tried slowing my breathing, but the only result was an oxygen deficit, which I had to compensate for by gulping down huge mouthfuls of the detestable air.
My right foot started to slip between two bodies, so I shifted my position to avoid being sucked down. The noise I’d heard could have been made by someone in the room above, but all was silent now; there was no reaction to my heavy, desperate breathing. The lamp which had been between my legs slipped from its position and fell forward slightly. In the gloom around me I could see nothing but indistinct shapes of black and grey. I took the box of matches from my pocket and relit the lamp. It looked as if there were at least two dozen bodies in the pile beneath me.
My breathing calmed as I sat there, unable to tear my gaze from the doorway, waiting for Mather’s silhouette to appear at any second. Why hadn’t he approached the hole? Why wasn’t he coming to kill me? Surely that was what he intended to do now? I began muttering under my breath, praying perhaps, begging for someone to deliver me from the horrifying mess I’d landed myself in. Time passed, and I was beginning to wonder what the hell he was doing, when I heard a sneeze, then a strange rasping noise. I tensed, waiting for something terrible to happen, then at last a dark shape appeared in the doorway.
Mr Hopkins scanned the mound of bodies below him, as though looking for the quickest way down. His sense of smell must have been way in advance of mine, so I couldn’t understand why he wanted to get closer to all that dead flesh. He uttered a long, indulgent miaow, then walked along the length of the doorway, as if trying to find a better way to join me. Giving up, he lowered his whole body, then stretched his front legs over the edge, so that his paws were against the wall. He kept moving until he began to slip, then tensed himself for the fall. He landed softly and without any noticeable discomfort to my right, on the back of a large body wrapped in dirty sheets.
‘Hello,’ I said, my voice rougher and drier than I had expected. Mr Hopkins miaowed again in reply, then started rubbing his body against my legs. ‘You could have picked a better moment. Still, at least it’s you and not that madman. What the hell is going on here?’ Mr Hopkins stopped prowling around and lay down next to me, purring softly. I shook my head and looked back up at the doorway. It was possible for me to reach the ledge, but it would be difficult. The cat just lay there purring and blinking at me. Maybe he had no sense of smell at all. I moved into a crouch, knowing that at any moment the mass of bodies might collapse. Holding the lamp aloft, I was able to grasp the full extent of the horror around me.
Limbs were tangled together. There were a couple of uncovered faces, distorted by decay, teeth bared, the skin stretched. I didn’t dare let my attention stay for too long on any one sight, lest it be burned into my memory for the rest of my life. There then came a sound, muffled, soft and echoing, as though from some dark recess of memory. It was my mobile phone. I panicked and realized I’d lost my bag in the fall. Listening carefully, I managed to fix the direction of the sound, and reaching forward I grabbed one of the shoulder straps and hauled the bag towards me.
Retrieving the handset wasn’t as difficult as I’d expected, though I nearly emptied the entire contents of the bag onto the pile below me before managing to answer it.
‘Hello?’
‘Hi, Ash, it’s Gina. Look—’
‘Gina, listen,’ I said, both amazed and relieved to hear her voice. ‘I’m in some serious trouble here. There’s bodies, loads of them. I think—’
‘Ash? I can’t hear—’
Oh God
, I thought.
Great time for the signal to fail
.
‘Gina!’ I was shouting now, no longer concerned about keeping quiet. If Mather had been in the room above, he would surely have made his presence known by that point. ‘Gina, can you hear me?’
‘. . . sh . . . breaking . . . all ba . . . ater . . . kay?’
‘Hello? If you can hear me, Gina, call the police. Get them over here right now! There’s a psycho on this island!’
‘. . . ’ Just static.
‘Gina?’ But she was gone. I looked forlornly at the screen. The quality of the reception was now irrelevant. The battery was dead.
I felt hopeless and lost. I’d been given an opportunity to summon help, and had quite possibly wasted it. It could be a long while before people started to worry seriously about my absence. I prayed Gina had heard enough to raise the alarm.
Getting myself out of that stinking hole wasn’t as difficult as I’d feared. I left the lamp where it was, knowing there were more above. In the flickering light I threw my bag over my shoulder and made my way carefully over the soft lumps of flesh and cloth until the doorway was right above me. Ensuring that Mr Hopkins was a safe distance away, I put first one then the other foot on what looked like an arm. It started to give way, so I tried the back instead. This too started to move, but it stopped after a second or two, so I decided to trust it. I jumped up, reaching for the ledge with both hands. Despite my best efforts, my fingers failed to get a purchase and my flailing body fell backwards onto the unstable pile. My feet went into the gap between two limbs, and for a moment I thought I’d disappear into the heap. I found a more solid platform and tried again. This time I managed to grab hold of the ledge and, heaving my body up, slid first one knee then the other onto the floor of the theatre. Looking back down into the pit, I saw a pair of glowing green dots. I lay on the floor and lowered my arm down as far as possible. Mr Hopkins walked forward, tensed himself, shaking slightly, then leaped up and clung to my shirtsleeve. I winced as his claws punctured the skin beneath the cloth, then raised him up and lowered him to the basement floor. He made a strange gurgling sound in the back of his throat, then turned and ran off out of the room. I retrieved my camera, lit another lamp, and followed the cat out of the basement.
I didn’t catch up with Mr Hopkins until I was outside in the daylight once more. My eyes stung after being in the dark, and my head had started to ache. After the foul air below, the oxygen outside was like a fine wine for the lungs. I paced around, drawing in breath after grateful breath, until I remembered the vulnerability of my position. I scanned the path in front of me, then walked a little way down it before sitting on a patch of grass by the trees. My nerves were making my limbs shake. I had to calm myself down and get my thoughts straight before doing anything else.
Mather, it seemed, was a murderer. Unless there was someone else on the island. Either way, it seemed unlikely that he could have been unaware of the bodies. They were still decomposing, so he must have been around when they were dumped here, and could easily have had something to do with them. I was in serious trouble.
My breathing slowed and became regular. The oxygen seemed to be helping me think a little more clearly now. Bizarrely, I couldn’t help but see the whole situation from a journalist’s perspective. This was one hell of a story, definitely something for the national papers. The scoop of a lifetime. It was hard to get my head round everything though. Why kill so many people? And why dump the bodies in that pit? The room above the pit was also a mystery, unless . . . Suddenly I remembered the peculiar colour of the table and the floor. Was it blood? Had Mather been conducting experiments on people to satisfy some dark, twisted curiosity? It occurred to me that he might in fact have continued the experiments initiated by his old friend Soames. But how much of what he’d told me had been the truth? Was he really the innocent party in that whole sorry affair? Had Soames even existed? Was he bringing people to the island so that he could butcher them, remove their organs? It seemed insane then that he should tell me the story of Soames and the tramp. It was almost as though he’d been playing with me. Perhaps it was all an act to pull me in. How long would he have waited before drugging or killing me, and carrying me down into that basement to be a guinea pig for one of his morbid experiments? And the question about an accomplice remained. Luring all those people and killing them would be a huge endeavour to embark upon unaided. Was there someone else on the island?
The victims now rotting in the basement must have been missed by family and friends. It made me think again of Gina and the aborted phone call. Had she heard anything? If not, how long before she realized something was wrong? Mum and Dad were visiting relatives in America, so they would be none the wiser. My sister, Carol, lived in Wales, and was rarely in to answer the phone. She wouldn’t know if I was missing or not until Sunday, when I failed to make my weekly call. My friends would think nothing of me being out of contact with them for a few days. Unless Gina and the others at work knew something was up, I was screwed.
I pondered the question of how Mather had selected his victims. He struck me as the sort of man who would do things methodically. After all, he had plenty of time to plan in great detail. He must have seduced them all with the promise of seeing the Ganges Red. And once they were on the island, cut off from civilization by a good mile or two, they were his.
But why the mosquito? Why that creature in particular? And surely he could have drawn people to the island and killed them without them seeing even the faintest glimpse of it. Why had he gone to the trouble of showing me the insect and filling me in on the myth surrounding her? It seemed pointless. Whatever was really going on, it was anything but straightforward. Perhaps he had some grand scheme that required the presence of the Ganges Red. If Mather
had
been conducting his experiments on the island, maybe the mosquito was in some way involved. I couldn’t quite see the connection, but I had a strong feeling that there was one.
I thought about getting to the mainland. My only concern was putting as much distance between myself and Mather as possible. And yet, I was fascinated. My curiosity couldn’t leave the matter alone. I wanted to flee, but at the same time I wanted to uncover the truth. Every last bit of it. I guess that’s what it means to be a journalist. I would be putting my head in the lion’s mouth, but if I was to get to the bottom of this horror, I’d have to get Mather to spill the beans. At the very least I’d need my Dictaphone which, like a fool, I’d left in the living room. Mather’s words, coupled with the mass grave in the basement of the research centre, which I really ought to have photographed, would make for damning evidence indeed. But once more my mind was flooded with the danger of the situation. I decided not to push my luck. If I could get over to Tryst, I could find the police and tell them everything. Mather’s secret would be exposed, and there was still a good chance that I would have the exclusive story. After all, who better than me to write it?
I stood and brushed myself down. There were now patches of damp on my trousers and shoes from contact with the bodies in the pit, the mere sight of which made me retch. By my watch it was just after ten thirty. Mather might already be out looking for me. I needed to move. The boathouse wasn’t far away: if I didn’t make too much noise, I could be out on the lake before he realized what was going on.
As I jogged along the path my mind hovered over Mather’s character. When I first arrived on the island he’d seemed so charming and welcoming. The way he talked, the subjects that interested him had made him seem like someone I, and no doubt a lot of people, could get along with. But all that solitude must have taken its toll on the man’s mind. The charnel pit was proof of that. But why had he appeared so normal, so sane? Was he cleverer than he appeared? Was he a criminal genius? The fact that he could think rationally made him all the more frightening. If he’d been mad, my suspicions would have been aroused a lot earlier. And what of the Ganges Red? Was it really as lethal as Mather had made out? I’d seen a huge mosquito, but for all I knew it could have been a harmless freak of nature, or perhaps a clever trick, an illusion. As before, I was confused by the oddity of the plan. Why use such unusual bait?