Cages by David Mark (acx book reading TXT) 📕

and occurs when body fat is exposed to anaerobic bacteria. In the right light, in the right environment, it can resemble the surface of the moon. Crumb like, strange, haunting, it feels like soap. It can be moulded. It can be carved. Were one given to such acts of Baroque metamorphosis, one could take a human body, strip it, bind it, and shape it to one’s will. One could expose it to the right bacteria. And over the course of many years, a human being could become a statue: a thing of beauty. Griffin Cox is such a man.

He lays on the cold stone, and stares. Truly, he has accomplished something of merit and significance. He does not mourn the deaths of those whose lives he has claimed – only wishes they were still alive to see the breath-taking results of their sacrifice. He sometimes wonders how it felt for each of them to wake here, in the cold and the dark, tied and nailed and twisted into a position that would eventually become their own spectacular tombstone. He imagines they felt fear, though he struggles to imagine such a sensation. Cox hasn’t been afraid in a long time. As soon as he started killing people and mounting their bodies in the dark place beneath the lake, all of his worldly worries went away.

Slowly, leisurely, Cox turns onto his side. There is moss and pondweed cushioning the rock beneath him. He’s cold but the chill serves to make his nerve-endings more sensitive so he makes no attempt to dress himself. He lies still as the creations that surround him: winged furies; laughing nymphs; a mighty warrior in breast-plate, clutching a spear.

‘Omnia bona capient finem,’ he mutters, and the sound echoes back so that it feels as though his head is reverberating with a hundred whispered voices, all telling him the same thing. All good things must come to an end.

The thought truly dismays him. If there were a way, he would have his sculptures sent ahead to the new home, but the risks are too great. He knows that when he climbs back up through the trapdoor and into the boat shed, he will have to turn the sluice gate and allow the water to flood the chamber. He will have to leave his creations to the rising sludge. He will weep, perhaps, as he drives away; head shaved, a neat goatee beard, little round glasses and a scar upon his cheek: all affectations carefully chosen to make him appear as far from Griffin Cox as can be achieved. He feels excited at the prospect. It has taken an irritating amount of time to make the journey down to Cambridgeshire: a tiresome relay in a series of bland vehicles – their keys left out for him on the rear tyre – and staying in pre-booked, nondescript hotels. His first sip of red wine since his incarceration was a true disappointment. He had let it dribble from his mouth and onto the bedlinen as if it were inferior blood. But soon he will be in a country where pleasure is performed correctly. His life will be beauty, and experience: truly – a paradise worthy of Caesar.

He stands. Dresses himself. Wrinkles his nose as the inferior material of the shirt, trousers and bland tie touch his skin. It will not be like this for long, he consoles himself. Soon it will be silks and ermine. It will be marble and soapstone. It will be flesh, and wax.

As he turns to look one final time upon the soap-rimed, greasy statues, he sees a flicker of movement – something, or somebody is with him, in the dark, beneath the lake.

‘Magister? Wilson, you shouldn’t be here, what if you were followed – imagine if somebody saw you enter …?’

The voice rushes towards him like a gathering storm.

‘Yes,’ says Annabeth, emerging from the stone plinth beneath the mutilated remains of Luke Ashley. ‘Just imagine.’

THIRTY-EIGHT

Annabeth watches him, his face a smudge of dirt and slime but expressionless as a full moon.

‘No,’ he says, shaking his head. ‘No, nobody followed me. I made sure.’

She smiles at him. There’s no humour in it. ‘And yet here I am.’

He stands up, slowly, unashamed by his nakedness. He’s a small man but there’s a strength to him: his limbs hard, roped with thick veins.

He glances at her right hand and Annabeth follows his eyes. Sees the long, lethal-looking boathook. She’d scooped it up from the boat shed as she made her way slowly and silently into the dark – fighting down her rising gorge as she saw what had been done to the young people who had suffered the misfortune of meeting a true personification of evil. Holds it like a lance, as she stares from Griffin Cox to the gallery of disintegrating flesh, and back again.

She has remained silent throughout his communion with the bodies of his dead. She has watched the rapture with which he has beheld the spectacle: the gallery of dripping tallow corpses mounted in a grotesque tableau in the long, gloomy passageway.

‘I don’t understand,’ says Cox, frowning. ‘You did as you were bid. You helped me. I wouldn’t break our pact, Miss Harris. Never. I don’t know how you’ve found yourself here, or why, but you have made a very poor judgement. This won’t end well.’

Annabeth smiles at him, something like pity in her gaze. ‘You really did convince yourself you were in charge,’ she says, quietly. ‘Mark Fellowes told you what I wanted you to be told.’

He shakes his head. ‘No. No, he hates you.’

‘Mark Fellowes, your cell-mate in Frankland – I visited him with the restorative justice charity I worked with. He recognized me at once. He’d gone back to the flat, you see – after Defreitas tried to kill me. I think there may be some goodness in him, somewhere. He told me to go. To get out of there. He cleaned up. Put the body where it wouldn’t be found until