“But I don’t want to! I can’t go down there,” she cried out loud.
You must, said John’s voice in her head. If you don’t, they will die.
“But I didn’t bring them here. You did. They are nothing to do with me. If they die, it won’t be my fault.”
“You can’t let the baby die. If that happens, you will never forgive yourself.”
Marion took a deep breath and got to her feet. With trembling hands, she prepared meat paste sandwiches and a bottle of orange cordial. But what would the baby eat? Would she need to go out and buy formula? The most important thing, she told herself, was to bring the baby up into the house. Then she would work out what to do next.
After removing the key from the biscuit barrel where she had hidden it when the ambulance came for John, she unlocked the cellar. As the heavy oak door swung open, a thousand little pinpricks of fear sank into her flesh. When she tried to move, something solid seemed to be stopping her from taking a single step forwards.
“Just get on with it,” she told herself. “Don’t be such a coward.”
The tray of food rattled loudly with each step she took down the steep stone staircase. At the bottom was another door that had to be unlocked, then behind that, a large room containing a wooden worktable with a vise fixed to it. To one side of the table lay a dismantled radio, abandoned with its innards still exposed, like a patient that had died on the operating table. Next to it an old-fashioned biplane, strange and exquisite as a dragonfly, was mounted on a stand, waiting for John to finish painting its dark blue surface. Fine brushes, their tips hardened beyond use, littered the work surface along with dozens of miniature tins of enamel paint.
The brick walls of the cellar, once painted white, were now a greenish gray streaked with black. Long cobwebs, woolly with dust, dangled from the low ceiling. She felt one catch on her hair and nearly dropped the tray as she tried to shake it loose.
A variety of tools, screwdrivers, several sizes of saw, and a couple of hammers hung on one wall. Off this room were three more doorways. The one to the left led to the back cellar; this had always been used for gardening equipment because there was access to a flight of steps and a door that led out into the garden. The middle cellar had been full of Dad’s office things, files and such, and the front, the largest area, was where her parents stored disused furniture and the Christmas decorations.
On one side of the room stood the ancient movie projector that she remembered Dad and John bringing back from Frank’s Yard to repair. Alongside it were several unlabeled, round metal tins, strips of brown celluloid unspooling from them. John and Dad must have come down here to watch films together. Next to the stack of movies was a pile of magazines. Marion turned away in revulsion when she saw they were the same kind Mrs. Morrison had found in John’s bedroom all those years ago.
She put down the tray on the table and found the key labeled “front cellar” hung up on a peg. She hesitated before unlocking the door. It wasn’t too late to run back upstairs, to go and have a hot bath, then get into bed and fall asleep. Pretend they didn’t exist. “No, you have to keep going, you have got this far, you can’t stop now,” she urged herself. As she opened the door the smell rushed to greet her. It was the stench of things people didn’t talk about. Filth and sickness and shame. Shuffling sounds came from the darkness, noises made by creatures disturbed in their cages. She imagined them lying in wait, ready to pounce upon her and rip the flesh from her bones.
When she turned on the light for a moment, everything seemed too grotesque to be real. The room was around fifteen feet by ten, the whitewash on the brick walls was flaking and mottled with black mold. Plaster had fallen away from parts of the ceiling, leaving the wooden joists exposed like the bones of a rotting carcass. Three mattresses lay on the floor. On one side was an upturned orange crate—these served as a kind of bedside table where the girl’s personal items, such as a toothbrush and a washcloth, were kept. On the other side was a bucket filled with dark slops.
The small amount of available floor space between the mattresses was littered with debris: dirty cotton buds, scraps of grimy tissues, soiled sanitary napkins, food wrappers. By one wall Marion noticed two rattraps, each of which had ensnared a glossy brown victim. In the center of the room there was a single, unvarnished wooden chair, and a large blue washing-up bowl that contained an inch of scummy water.
It frightened her to look directly at the occupants of this hideous dormitory. Each of them lay on a mattress, their hands and feet joined together by a tangle of chains, yet more chains connected them to the walls. Their mouths were gagged by weird things that looked like rubber balls connected to a dog’s muzzle.
How could she have ever believed he was trying to help them? Was it because the truth was so awful? Nothing in her imagination had come close to this.
The smell and sights of the room were so repulsive, Marion worried she might faint. She forced herself to breathe deeply. Soon it will be over, she told herself. You can get through this. Pretend it isn’t real. They are just like the waxworks in the museum, not actual human beings.
The eyes of the girl on the mattress near the door were closed, and she wasn’t moving at all. Though she must only be in her twenties, her bloated face reminded Marion of the dying old woman she had seen in the hospital.
This was Alla. How different she looked from the glamorous woman in her fur coat who had looked down her nose at Marion the first time they met. Her blond tresses had grown out into a dense dark thatch of hair. The lower half of her body was covered with a blood-soaked blanket trimmed with blue satin. In this corner of the room, behind Alla’s mattress, were unopened packets of nappies and formula. She remembered the mysterious packages in the hallway. They must have contained supplies for the baby.
Next to Alla was the blue ottoman; sitting inside was the teddy bear with white fur she had got from the charity shop, and lying next to it was a funny little doll wrapped in what looked like a green-patterned pillowcase. The doll’s eyes were closed and its face blue-gray in color. A wave of horror nearly knocked her from her feet when she realized it was the baby.
That poor little thing, its life over before it even began. A white crocheted shawl lay on the floor next to the ottoman. She picked it up and placed it over the child’s body, carefully tucking it in around the sides.
“I’m sorry,” she said, “you and I would have looked for fairies together in the garden. I would have adored you like my own.” Then as tears blurred her eyes she turned away.