Ironic Foreshadowing
Spoiler alert: Clarissa gets murdered. It is not that much of a spoiler as really just before the dead gets done, Clarissa begins behaving in a way that makes her a perfect victim. In fact, some readers might even hope she soon gets offered. One even may suspect that secretly so Cordelia. As the anxiety intensifies, imagery is used to convey an inherent tendency toward others wishing Clarissa was dead in her interaction with Cordelia which even includes an ironic foreshadowing of the near-future:
"`Can't you understand English? What are you trying to do, spy on me? I've told you! I don't want you next door and I don't want you pussyfooting up and down the corridor. I don't want you, or anyone, near me. What I want now is to be left in peace’…Clarissa was locked in. There was nothing more that she could do until two forty-five. She looked at her watch. It was just one twenty.”
The Skulls Inside the Crypt
There is a definite gothic vibe to this mystery. Not gothic as in actual 18th century settings, but more in line with 1960’s black and white gothic horror movies during that period. The island, the castle on the island and the crypt below the cast on the island are all presented less like something from another time and more like the image of a Hollywood version of something from another time:
“A door in the vestry led down to the crypt. To make their way down narrow stone steps lit by Ambrose's torch was to descend into a different world, a different time. Here alone was there any trace of the original Norman building. The roof was so low that Ivo, the tallest of them, could hardly stand upright, and the squat, heavy pillars strained as if bearing on their capitals the weight of nine centuries. Ambrose put out his hand to a wall switch and the claustrophobic chamber sprang into harsh unflattering light. They saw the skulls at once.”
Sensory Imagery
Imagery is often considered to work best when it directly appeals to the senses, creating a conduit of associational effects which facilitate drawing the reader into the tangible reality of a scene. The idea plays upon the workings of the mind akin to the strange phenomenon that if someone enters a crowded room and merely mentions donuts it is almost a certainty before the day is out that some of the people in that room will have consumed a donut. Seeing things written down can have a greater impact on the ability the mind to make a person smell scents that aren’t there or briefly feel warm in a cold room:
“The room was filled with the smudged half-light of dawn. Going to the window, Cordelia saw that the eastern sky was just beginning to streak into brightness and that a low mist hung over the lawn and curled like smoke between the tree tops. It was going to be another lovely day. There was no sign of any bonfire, yet the air held the smoky wood-fire smell of autumn and the great mass of the sea heaved, grey and silver, as if it exuded its own mysterious light.”
Faces of Death
A rather extreme form of imagery is used to sustain the sense of disorientation created by the discovery that Clarissa is dead. Cordelia is already emotionally unbalanced by this turn of events and the gruesome manner of the murder does little to facilitate a speedy recovery to mental acuity. For a brief second or two she looks at the dead Clarissa’s face and imagines she sees an inexplicably unlikely face mask:
“a darkening, sticky mess which had even seeped into the two eye-pads; the canopy was disintegrating, dripping its crimson fibres, obliterating her face with its richness. And then the ridiculous fancies faded and her mind accepted the stark reality of what her eyes had seen. Clarissa no longer had a face. This was no beauty mask. This pulp was Clarissa's flesh, Clarissa's blood, darkening and clotting and oozing serum, spiked with the brittle fragments of smashed bones.”
