At the sight of it the men and women in the lorry drew instinctively closer to one another for comfort, and even from the lorry, Alice could see the high fences surrounding the entire compound, with, beyond them, serried rows of barrack-like buildings. Guard towers jutted up from the fences at intervals, with massive black-snouted machine-guns mounted in each one. A terrible bleak loneliness closed around her. No one knows where I am. Conrad doesn’t know, and Deborah doesn’t know. There’s absolutely no means of anyone reaching me here.
The gates swung slowly and silently open, as if some invisible machinery were being operated, and the lorries drove through. Alice glanced back and saw the gates close. Shutting her into the nightmare.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
Lucy had almost finished the horror-film presentation for the satellite TV companies, and she was quite pleased with it. Her idea of setting it all in a tongue-in-cheek horror framework seemed to have worked quite well. Quondam’s technical department had dubbed part of Tartini’s The Devil’s Trill to use as background for The Devil’s Sonata, and although there had been a bit of a royalties tussle with the record company who had included it in a recent compilation of semi-and quasi-religious string music, Lucy thought the tussle had been worth it because the music gave terrific atmosphere to the film.
She was putting together a final set of visual and audio effects – she had unearthed some beautifully menacing out-takes from an ancient Tod Slaughter version of Dracula, which could be blown up and possibly tinted with suitably blood-hued crimson or even back-projected on to a screen – and she had spent two hilarious afternoons in the sound department, helping them to fake creepy footsteps and creaking doors.
But since finding the old newsreel of Lucretia on Howard Hughes’ Stratoliner, the unreadable face of the dark-eyed child who had been at Lucretia’s side kept coming between Lucy and the grainy black-and-white images she was working on. With it came the familiar nagging curiosity from her own childhood: the need to know the truth about Alraune and to know whether Alraune had really existed. Who were you? said Lucy to the ghost-child on the film. And what were you? Did you exist, and if you did, what happened to you? But I daresay that even if I could trace you, I’d find that you were only on that newsreel because you were the son or daughter of one of the cabin crew, or a friend’s child that Lucretia was chaperoning to or from some Swiss resort.