“If you prefer, we provide disposable panties. Some of our guests use them, some do not; it is entirely how you feel comfortable. And now I will leave you to undress. The shower, if you wish it, is through here.”
She indicated a door to the left of the bed, and then backed out of the room with a smile, closing the door softly, and I began to strip off my clothes layer by layer, feeling more and more uncomfortable. I piled them on the chair along with my shoes and then, when I was completely naked, I stepped into the flimsy paper knickers and climbed onto the bed, my bare skin sticking uncomfortably to the plastic, and pulled the white sheet up to my chin.
Almost as soon as I’d done so—quickly enough to make me wonder queasily whether there was some kind of camera in the room—there was a soft knock on the door and I heard Ulla’s voice.
“May I come in, Miss Blacklock?”
“Yes,” I said croakily, and she entered, holding a bowl of what looked like, and presumably was, warm mud.
“If you would like to lie on your front,” Ulla said softly, and I wriggled around. It was surprisingly difficult, with the sticky film clinging to my skin, and I felt the sheet slip, but Ulla deftly tweaked it back into place. She touched something to the side of the door and the room was filled with soft whale sounds and the crash of waves. I had the unsettling image again of the weight of water just the other side of the thin metal hull . . .
“Could you . . .” I said awkwardly, speaking into the bed. “Is there another track?”
“Of course,” Ulla said. She pressed something and the music changed to Tibetan metal bells and wind chimes. “Is that better?”
I nodded, and she said, “Now, if you’re quite ready . . . ?”
The treatment was surprisingly soothing, once I had forced myself to relax a little. I even got used to the feeling of having a complete stranger massaging mud into my mostly naked body. Halfway through I realized, with a jolt, that Ulla was speaking to me.
“Sorry,” I managed sleepily. “What did you say?”
“If you could turn over,” she murmured, and I turned onto my back, the mud slipping and sliding against the plastic. Ulla draped the sheet over my upper body once again and began to massage the fronts of my legs.
She worked her way methodically up my body, and at last smoothed the mud over my forehead, cheeks, and closed eyes, before speaking again, in her low, soothing voice.
“I will wrap you up now, Miss Blacklock, to allow the mud to work, and I will return in about half an hour to help you unwrap and shower. If you need anything, there’s a call button to your right.” She pressed my hand to a button set into the side of the bed. “Is everything quite all right?”
“Quite all right,” I said drowsily. The warmth of the room and the soft chimes of the music were extraordinarily soporific. I was finding it hard to remember everything that had happened the night before. Harder to care. I just wanted to sleep. . . .
I felt the plastic film close around me, and then something heavy and warm on top of that—a towel, I thought. Behind my closed lids, I was aware that the lights of the room had been dimmed.
“I will be just outside,” she said, and I heard the soft click of the door. I stopped fighting the tiredness, and I let the warmth and the darkness close over my head.
I dreamed of the girl, drifting miles below us in the cold, sunless depths of the North Sea. I dreamed of her laughing eyes white and bloated with salt water, of her soft skin, wrinkled and sloughing, of her T-shirt ripped by jagged rocks and disintegrating into rags.
Only her long black hair remained, floating through the water like fronds of dark seaweed, tangling in shells and fishing nets, washing up on the shore in hanks like frayed rope, where it lay, limp, the roar of the crashing waves against the shingle filling my ears.
I woke uneasy and heavy with dread. It took me a while to remember where I was, and still longer to realize that the roar in my ears was not part of the dream but real.
I climbed off the bed, shivering slightly, and wondering how long