Alraune. The uneasy legend. The smear of darkness on the edge of consciousness. The ghost-child named for the half-mythical mandragora root.
As they entered the big room at the back of the house Lucy was glad of Michael’s presence. But her heart was pounding and she felt as if she had been running very fast and very hard. I’m about to see the legend, she thought. The fable, the semi-monster from my childhood. ‘A childhood so bizarre and so bitterly tragic that it’s best not repeated,’ Aunt Deb had once said. ‘Alraune, living or dead, is better left in peace…’
Living or dead…
It was not quite a room for the living, but it was not quite a room for the dead either, not yet. There was a hospital air about it, despite the comfortable furnishings and the large bowl of bronze chrysanthemums on a small table. But it’s death’s waiting-room for all that, thought Lucy, and then moved to the bed.
For a long time she did not speak. She was distantly aware of Michael nearby, and she thought there were sounds from beyond the room – homely ordinary sounds of crockery rattling and cupboard doors being opened. But the world had shrunk to this room, to this corner of the room, to this person in the bed…
And after all, the ghost-child was nothing but a dying man, barely conscious, the skin around the eyes ridged and puckered with old scars, the hair that might once have been dark like Michael’s grey and thin…Sad. So immeasurably sad.
Speaking almost in a whisper, as if afraid to break into the listening silence, she said, ‘So Alraune really does exist.’
‘Oh yes.’
‘Those scars around his eyes—’
‘He’s blind,’ said Michael quietly. ‘My mother attacked him when I was a child, and he lost his sight because of it. He killed her that night, and I thought he was dead as well – I couldn’t imagine how he could survive being so badly wounded – but he did. He always was a survivor,’ said Michael.
‘I think,’ said Lucy, in the same low voice, ‘that I always knew at some level that Alraune was more than just a publicity stunt. But I thought Alraune was a girl. Everyone did. I found some news footage recently – you could see it if it wouldn’t be too upsetting – but I can see now that the shot could have been either a girl or a boy.’
‘If you read any of the newspaper articles, they seem to assume Alraune was a girl,’ said Michael. ‘He was born inside Auschwitz.’
‘How dreadful.’ Lucy hesitated, and then said, ‘And he really is Lucretia’s son?’
‘Yes.’ He smiled at her. ‘We’re cousins,’ he said. ‘Half cousins.’
‘I rather like that thought.’
‘So do I.’
Lucy looked back at the bed. ‘Michael, I’m so sorry about all of this.’
‘I know quite a lot of his history,’ said Michael. ‘And what I do know is a very bad history indeed. I suspect that Edmund Fane knows some of it as well. I think he found out that I was Alraune’s son, and he was afraid I had some kind of knowledge – something that Alraune had told me or passed on to me – about Ashwood and Crispin. That’s why he tried to kill me.’
‘Edmund thought you’d know Crispin killed Conrad Kline?’
‘Yes. In fact Alraune never told me anything, and I ran away from home when I was eight.’ There was a sudden note of reserve.
Lucy looked back at the figure in the bed. ‘Is he – dying?’
‘Yes,’ said Michael. ‘He’s in the last stages of cancer. He was gaoled for killing my mother all those years ago, but they released him last year on what they called compassionate grounds. So it was arranged that he came here for the final months of his life. Elsa is marvellous, and there’s a local doctor who comes.’
‘Do they know who he is?’
‘Elsa knows, of course. But local people don’t. He’s known as Alan Salisbury.’ He hesitated, and then said, ‘Since we’re cousins, Lucy, and since there’s already been far too much mystery about all this, in the privacy of this room, I’ll tell you that Alraune von Wolff was a violent man and he had been a vicious child.’