Heathen/Nemesis

Seventy-Seven

It was like stepping into empty space.

Donna, who couldn’t see her feet beneath her, moved cautiously for fear of slipping on the stone steps. Julie followed behind, steadying herself against the wall, recoiling slightly as she felt the moistness of the stone.

Paxton must have had the place treated with something, Donna thought. She was sure the basement that housed the waxworks’ grisliest exhibits was not naturally damp and decaying. Part of the process of making the viewing experience all the more real and eerie was the smell which went with the darkness and unbearable silence. There were companies in the film business who made fake blood; why not someone to recreate the smell of damp and neglect? Perhaps that odour could indeed be bottled and sold. Paxton must have bought a crateful.

Fake cobwebs had been sprayed over the walls, too, although how much of the gossamer-like material was real and how much was fake she wasn’t sure. There would be no need to clean this part of the waxworks. Grime and the odd spider could only serve to enhance its appearance.

The figures of the murderers themselves were arranged behind what looked like rusty prison bars. These too were covered by cobwebs both fake and genuine.

Dependent on their stature or the nature of their crimes, figures were enshrined within their own individual displays. Others were grouped together, usually with a newspaper of the day framed beside them proclaiming their arrest or, in the case of those before 1969, of their execution.

How perverse, Donna thought, that there should even be a hierachy amongst killers. Men like Denis Nilsen, Peter Sutcliffe and John George Haigh were presented in tableaux of their own, while those who had killed only once or twice, or who were there more for their notoriety than their savagery, merited a smaller setting where they were crowded together. Ruth Ellis, Lee Harvey Oswald and the Kray Twins stood together.

Christie was displayed surrounded by his nine victims, portions of them visible from gaps in the walls and floor of the mock-up of his front room at Ten Rillington Place. Behind him stood Timothy Evans, the man wrongly hanged for a murder Christie committed.

If the atmosphere in the rest of the waxworks had been unsettling, in this odorous basement it was close to oppressive. These glass eyes stared out with a venom and hatred that matched those of their inspirations. Julie felt her skin crawl.

Nilsen stood at the cooker where he’d boiled down the remains of his victims.

Sutcliffe gripped a claw hammer and a screwdriver, his face twisted into a half-smile.

Haigh, dressed in a leather apron, was in the process of dissolving one of his victims in an acid bath.

Julie tried to swallow but felt as if someone had blocked her throat.

Beneath the model of Eichmann were newspaper cuttings about Auschwitz; yellowed with age like some of the other clippings, they were still as abhorrent, even after all these years.

Dr Crippen was standing by a desk on which lay a pile of books.

Donna looked for a way in to the exhibit. The only door was in the side of the cage-like display, at the end near the exit. In order to reach the figure of Crippen she would have to pass the other figures, too. She turned and headed for the door immediately, relieved that it was open when she pushed. She stepped inside.

Julie gripped the bars, wincing as she felt how cold and wet they were, watching as her sister drew closer, pausing to look at the tableau of Christie. There were many cupboards in the display; Ward could have hidden the Grimoire in any one of them.

Donna opened them but found that they were empty. She glanced at the figure of Christie and walked on. Past Haigh. Past Nilsen.

The figure of Peter Sutcliffe was standing over the body of a woman, old newspapers beneath his feet. Donna paused to lift the newspapers and look beneath them.

Julie sucked in an anxious breath, her eyes fixed on the model of Sutcliffe.

The head moved a fraction.

She opened her mouth to shout but no sound would come.

Donna was still at his feet.

Julie blinked hard and looked at the waxwork again.

This time she saw no movement. A trick of the light? A trick of her mind? A little of both, she fancied.

‘Come on, Donna,’ she said, her breath coming in gasps.

Her sister nodded, got to her feet and finally reached the Crippen figure. She looked at the books on the desk: a medical book and a book on anatomy.

The third had a picture of a bird on it. A hawk?

Was this the Grimoire?

Her hands were shaking as she lifted it.

A picture of a hawk, not an embossed crest.

Could it be ...

She opened it.

Blank pages.

‘Shit,’ she muttered angrily and replaced the book. She hurried out of the cage and rejoined Julie. Ahead of them was another wall with a small gap in it; barely five feet high and three across, it formed a doorway into the last part of the exhibit. The Torture Chamber.

Donna advanced towards it.

There was a red light over the narrow opening. As she waited for Julie to join her, the light bathed her in crimson so that it looked as if she’d been drenched in blood. She looked down into the Chamber and saw that the same inky blackness awaited them. Only the models were lit, but this time by even weaker beams from hidden spotlamps in the low ceiling. This was the only entrance in and out. Donna led the way, glancing at several severed heads arrayed before a guillotine. Nearby a wax body dangled from a hook embedded in its side. Behind them a display featured a man with rats trying to eat their way through his stomach while imprisoned in a red hot cage.

Burning out the eyes.

Driving needles beneath the fingernails.

Tearing off the nose with red-hot pincers.

The horrors came thick and fast, vying with each other.

A man being boiled alive in what looked like a massive metal bowl.

A man with a steel ring through his tongue, the ring attached to a metal ball by a chain.

The revulsion Donna felt was tempered by her recognition of the skill with which these monstrosities had been constructed. They were obscenely realistic.

The two women turned a corner and Julie groaned aloud.

THE MURDER OF SHARON TATE proclaimed the plate on the bars of the enclosure that housed one of the most horrendously realistic exhibits in the building.

In front of the tableau a newspaper of the day headlined the slaughter of the Hollywood star and four others by members of the Charles Manson family. The figure of Manson himself, eyes wild, hair flying behind him, watched over the scene. It showed the living-room of the Tate residence with the film star’s killers, armed with knives and guns, and the other people who died with her. Whoever had modelled it had certainly been painstakingly accurate in the depiction, anxious to show that Sharon Tate had been eight months pregnant when she’d been hacked to death, her blood used to write the word PIG on the wall.

‘Jesus Christ,’ Julie whispered, her attention drawn to the vile display.

Donna had her eye on something else.

Further down the corridor another, larger exhibit showed the Spanish Inquisition. It featured several hooded figures and a victim being racked, while another was being hung from the ceiling on chains, his glass eyes fixed on a cowled figure carrying what looked like a set of rusty garden shears. The intention was castration.

Another hooded figure sat at a desk, a book open before it.

A book of Latin phrases. An old book.

Donna looked round frantically for the entrance to the exhibit and found it nearby in the form of a metal door. She opened it and stepped inside, making for the book. She pulled it towards her and flipped it over, looking at the cover.

The crest showed a Hawk.

The cover felt cold and clammy, as if the book had been in a damp hole for months, years even. The pages were stiff with age, some of them split at the edges. Some of the writing was in Latin, the rest in the same quaint script she’d seen in the book in the library in Scotland.

‘Julie,’ she called.

Her sister hurried over.

‘I’ve found it,’ Donna said triumphantly. ‘This is the Grimoire.’

It was then that the hooded figure at the desk leapt to its feet.

The cowl slipped away to reveal the face of Peter Farrell.