The doorknob was frigid, stinging my fingers.
(Over the many years I’ve had to think about that day, I’ve wondered why Olivia—or the house itself—chose that time to reveal such a horror to me. If it was Olivia, then surely she’d known that my need to see it was urgent. But if it was the house, which, I know now, has a kind of mind of its own, then it picked that time because I was vulnerable: my father was badly injured, and Nonie was leaving me. I was losing everything. And if it were true that the house wanted to hurt me, the question of why remains. It had given me such happiness and yet was taking it away with dizzying speed.)
There was no frost as there had been in the morning room, but the air was just as cold, and again smelled nauseatingly of dead roses. A single lamp burned on a bedside table, and though I knew it was quite late in the morning, in this room it was night. The furniture was the same, the fabrics on the bed and the curtains different. There were four other people in the room, completely unaware that I was watching.
Here is revulsion made real. I must show you this so you will know what evil is possible in the world. Sadly, it was only the beginning of my education.
Olivia—looking much the same as she had two nights earlier—lay against her pillows, her blond hair loosened, her face a luminous white so that her scar shone above her brow as though it were a fresh wound. The sheets were pushed to the end of the bed so that she was obscenely exposed, her gown drawn carelessly to her hips, her slender legs parted, but straight and stiff. She did not cover herself, but hugged her arms around her own chest, staring at the man climbing onto the bed with her. There was a look in her eyes that I can only describe as resigned horror, as though she knew what was about to happen, but also knew she couldn’t change it.
The man was not Michael Searle.
This man’s face sagged with age, but more: his face was pitted with scars and purple sores. Sparse white, greasy tufts of hair were scattered over his emaciated head, and even though I could only see his profile, I saw that his eye was filmy with cataracts and suspected he was almost blind. His skeletal, knobbed hands protruded like nocturnal alien creatures from the sleeves of his elaborate dressing gown and fumbled, clumsy, as he felt his way onto the bed.
Until that moment, Press was the only man I’d seen fully naked, and when this man loosened the gown from his body and let it drop to the bed, I almost looked away. But the unreal nature of what I saw had me transfixed. It was an ancient man’s body, a body that had obviously once been robust (witness the folds of skin hanging about his gut and hips and under his arms), but was now wasted. His entire body looked hairless, and it was dotted with more irregularly shaped purple bruises and sores. There was a palpable air of malice in the angle of his body and the hunger in his face, which I’d never sensed from another human. But his malice gave him no physical strength. He wavered in the lamplight, and there was a small movement from one of the other two people who weren’t near the bed, but he righted himself.
No one spoke.
Understanding what he was about to do, I covered my mouth with my hands. Poor Olivia! Why didn’t she scream?
She didn’t reach out for him, but neither did she try to get away. When she closed her eyes, I was glad. But as the man started to lower himself onto her, he collapsed, and Olivia’s cries were muffled as though I were hearing them through deep water. As the man steadied himself, he spoke to her. She shook her head, and I both saw and heard her vehement, frightened No!
Balancing himself carefully on one bony arm, he slapped her face.
There was a gasp from one of the two men watching from the shadows. Michael Searle pressed forward in an attitude of aggression, his face twisted with anguish, but the expressionless man behind him held him fast.
I recognized that bald, narrow head, the taut, mole-dotted skin.
The scene on the bed was over in a very few minutes. I’ve told you enough, and if I described the sounds that came from that hideous creature that had molested the silent, stoic Olivia, you wouldn’t forgive me. I have long tried to forget them.