Page 21

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

ANOTHER HORRIFYING DISCOVERY IN THE HOUSE OF DEATH

T he third and final floor was eerily similar to its predecessor. Smaller, thinner, but what space there was had also been converted into cells. One bed, metal frame, bars on the windows.

Percy peered through the grimy glass and down at the dead, brown earth far below. Every inch, right up to the wall, lifeless, then flourishing beyond that stone barrier.

He assessed the makeshift graveyard. It was probably a pointless exercise, as Cleo had locked the place up so long ago, but he couldn’t help but observe, with a touch of relief, that the graves looked undisturbed. Something heinous awaited them within the house. He could sense it in the walls, and he could smell it on the musty air. The last thing either of them needed, in addition to that, was the unveiling of an eight-month-old corpse at the bottom of a long dig.

“Althea said there was a secret compartment somewhere in the house.”

Percy turned to look at Joe. He was holding it together remarkably well. Perhaps better than Percy was. Even as he made the assessment, Percy’s hands gripped his dagger tighter than usual because his fingers shook, and he was trying very hard to hide that fact from Joe. Maybe to make Joe believe he was more capable than he really was.

What Percy wanted was to flee. To tell the police, pass the buck, and pat himself on the back for a job well done. Cleo would, in theory, be found, arrested, and that would be the end of that grisly saga. But two considerations halted him.

First, the house was alive and bad. Police might, eventually, get everything they needed. But Percy expected at least a few would die in the process, maybe more, if he and Joe didn’t fix the place first. It was a death trap, set and waiting. He didn’t know how, or where the spring was, but he was determined to loosen it before anyone else set foot in the place.

The second, and more pressing, consideration—the thought that had begun to nag at him incessantly as they searched the house—was the increasingly certain belief that Cleo wasn’t to blame. At least, not for all of it.

Althea knew her. Recognised her. Told them she did it. Percy saw Cleo, saw the change in her, saw the supernatural creatures she presumably had some sort of control over. One thing and another all pointed straight at her…

But not these walls. Not the forethought and the cold calculation. Not the time it must have taken to build these cells. And if she needed blood for some reason, maybe the undertaking made sense at an extreme stretch… But there were so many dead beneath his feet. So many girls burned to obliteration and scattered into one careless, thoughtless mess.

Cleo, he was sure, didn’t have it in her to do it.

He knew her.

She didn’t do it.

But what could have happened there in that forgotten mansion, on that small and lonely island, to set such a cascade of gruesome events in motion?

His eyes flicked to Joe’s patient face. “Follow me.”

Down the first flight of stairs, reluctantly, Percy dropped one foot before another.

The dark, suffocating feeling the entire house and the very land had taken on, he now recognised as the same foreboding he’d felt in front of her bricked-up fireplace, only amplified one hundred fold.

She must have knocked it through.

Dust flew up around Percy’s ankles as he reached the ground floor and quickened his pace across the long hallway, darker, lower, more claustrophobic, where floorboards gave way to slate, until they arrived in that small, miserable little room at the end. A huge eighteenth-century bookcase that sat bereft of books was taken in four strong hands, and on Percy’s lead, was hurled to the floor. The entire wall behind was smooth and seemingly untouched, out of the ordinary only because it was the one ordinary spot in the old, cold remains of the original twelfth-century dwelling, where a ramshackle fireplace had once stood.

“Smash it.”

At Percy’s word, Joe rammed the crowbar into the plaster, looking at Percy with a mixture of impressed and fearful when it went straight through so easily he almost lost his grip.

“Stand back.” Percy took his place in front of the wall and kicked an enormous hole in it.

Just as quickly, that smell—that dead and rotting, thick and malevolent, humid and clinging smell—flooded the room, and sent both Joe and Percy into a fit of retching so extreme they were forced to stumble back to the passage, leaning on one another for support.

“What the fuck-blurrrrh,” gagged Joe.

“I don’t kn-uuuurrrh,” gurgled Percy.

“Is it—is that—dearrrgh,” Joe tried.

“Not dead,” uttered Percy, bracing himself against the wall and heaving great breaths into his lungs. “Not just dead. Whatever that is, that’s worse.”

“Okay.” Hands on hips, gaining control of his stomach spasms, “Are we going in?”

“I don’t think we have a choice. Are you ready?”

“Yes. Deep breath.”

As though it would help at all, each took in a lungful of comparatively fresh air, and strode full speed back towards the hole in the wall. They attacked it, kicking it through with arms over their mouths and noses. Once the gaping hole was big enough for an easy escape, Percy took out a torch to illuminate the gloom.

It was a black staircase, glistening wet with slime, all enshrouded in curious, unexplainable white mists that made it impossible to see beyond the distance of a metre.

“I feel like this is a very bad idea,” said Joe.

“I agree.” And Percy stepped through.

The air was the sort of humid one expects in an area of mass decomposition. Like a dumpster. Or a body bag, occupied and left in the sun for three weeks. Immediately their hair was wet against their faces, and the warm mist mingled with the sweat that broke out on contact with heat and fear.

The stairs were wide, short, and uneven. They were old, clearly, crumbling here and there, but not worn. This staircase, it occurred to Percy, had always been kept out of the way. By design, it, and by association, this entire space, was meant to be seen by very few people.

The further they descended, the more the mist thinned, and they found themselves in a sort of antechamber. The stairs covering the full width, wall to wall, came to the ground about three feet from a narrow, arched stone doorway. Inside, a long, low-ceilinged, granite-walled room presented itself. The floor, when their boots finally touched it, was slate, wet and trickling with the inexplicable, malodorous heat of the chamber. There was no light—no fire to warm the atmosphere—but the ground, the walls, the very air, all thrummed with a sweltering and unpleasant energy.

On approach to the doorway, Percy lowered the light of his torch towards the ground, and found there the enormous pentagram Althea had spoken of, carved into the floor. The edges glistened black and green under his illumination, which traced the unmistakable lines, coming to rest on metal restraints at the top, then the bottom, held fast to the slate with screws driven deep into the rock.

Percy looked to Joe, who had pressed the backs of his fingers to his pale lips, and whose eyes stared at the horrifying evidence of immense suffering with a slightly disparate vacancy to them. Percy could virtually see him attempting to compartmentalise the day’s atrocities. Trying to shove this into the ‘movies I wish I’d never seen’ category, and out of the ‘images that will haunt me every waking hour for the rest of my life’ category.

Percy wondered at his instinct to keep silent in the obviously empty space, but Joe responded to a wordless nod from him with his own equally noiseless gesture. Each took an opposite side of the room, which was perhaps thirty feet long, maybe twenty wide, so neither was ever so far from the other that it wouldn’t be a simple matter to dash to the other’s assistance should it be needed. Even if it meant dashing over that dismal, deeply cut pentagram.

Joe’s search along the left wall discovered chains and handcuffs, grim and stiff, but all-too-usable. Percy’s wall was bare and blank, from the top, all the way to the bottom, except where a thin slit, maybe two inches tall, six wide, sat at the base of the stone. It lay there in such a way as made it apparent the slit was no accident. The ancient wall was built around it, the stones beneath and above of the same uniform size and age, designed with the clear intention of keeping that slit open. Strange, but lent an especially unsettling air when coupled with the fact that this slit was the final destination of the sharp ridges of the pentagram, slashed here, slashed there into the slate, and leading down the slightest of inclines, straight to this hole.

Percy heard Joe’s footstep by the back wall, and turned to see him supporting himself against a table, taking in a long, shaky breath. Percy’s raised torchlight revealed a flicker of reflection from the items he had found there. Items which came into harrowing recognition on approach, rusted as they were. It was sparse, what was left, but the two short, sharp paring knives, a cluster of rusty razor blades spilling out of their little box, and a cleaver, told a story neither was quite prepared for.

Percy took an arm around Joe, who attempted a stoic silence, but Percy felt his watering eyes against his neck when he pulled him in, felt the trembling in his chest, and held him closer still.

He thought only of the stone and the structure, of the age of the buildings, of topics and ideas as bland as his mind could manage to think of, because otherwise it would break all apart.

Joe whispered, low and barely audible, “I can’t stand the thought…”

He couldn’t finish, and he needn’t have. It was Althea who had told them about the place. Althea, who was seventeen years old, who was kept a prisoner in this house for months, since she was only sixteen. Althea, who had shown Joe the scars she received when she was strapped to the rusty restraints on the floor, when Cleo had cut her all over and let her blood drip and drain into the pentagram, to be funnelled into that slit in the wall. To whatever was in there.

A good, healthy flush of anger propelled Percy’s quick steps away from Joe, across the wet brown-red dust at the bottom of the carved floor, and onto his knees by the wall. He aimed his torch through, evoking an immediate screeching howl—ear piercing, abrupt, and unearthly. Percy reeled back at the shock, and straight into Joe’s arms.

Joe’s only response was a meeting of the eyes, then an eager nod.

Percy repositioned himself, and, a little more gingerly this time, aimed his torch into the black.

A growl, a fierce growl right at the wall, and deep huffs of ferocious hot breath snuffled at the light.

Percy lowered his head, down and down, and almost against the putrid floor, then leapt up, pulling Joe with him at the flicker of pink. A flicker at first, then a long, encroaching, thick slit tongue poking and lapping at the carved stone.

“What the fuck is that?” Joe took a few steps closer, then was arrested by Percy’s hand on his arm.

“It’s got a long, forked tongue, and it drinks blood. We don’t need to know what it is. We just need to burn it.”

“Agreed.” Joe wrenched his gaze away from the slithering tongue and back to Percy. “Where can we get a whole lot of gasoline?”

“Lerwick. We’ll have to go in immediately?—”

“We can’t.” Joe turned, casting disgusted eyes over the pentagram, the chains, and the shackles. “How many girls? She’s filled the roof with them. She needs to pay for this. And— Percy, you said, that smell….” Joe searched the silent walls. “Where are the rest of the bodies?”

He was right. Just like he always was. Percy absolutely would burn the place to the ground, but to delete all the evidence of the horror… Joe was, unfortunately, completely right. “Maybe we can poison it.”

“We can.” The pair thought for a time. “It can’t be too hard to get blood from a butcher?—”

“I’m not convinced it likes blood from a butcher.”

“No.” Joe wrinkled his nose and mouth at the slobbering pink mass, still searching over the floor, the growl behind it blowing gusts of bad air over their boots. “No, I’m not convinced it does either.”

“We’ll figure something out.” Percy accompanied the words with a scrunch of his fist that flexed the fine veins in his beautiful wrists, that drew Joe’s eyes, and gave him an inkling of what he was thinking.

Joe grabbed his hand. “Not your blood. Not ever.” And he retained the hand against his chest as he led Percy back to the door of the room. “I think we have two options. This chamber needs to be sealed again, for obvious reasons, unless we can take care of this whole mess before anyone else comes. So we can search the entire mansion and try to find another way into that compartment with that—” He glared across the room. “With that beast, whatever it is. And see if we can find these bodies, which, I don’t know, are they in there with it? Or are they somewhere else? And that —searching for this scent of dead—that is going to take a long time, because we still haven’t found any clues in this entire house, but…” He tightened his grip on Percy’s hand. “Percy, I think there’s one way we can be sure, quickly, where the bodies are.”

Percy trusted and valued Joe’s common sense and intelligence immeasurably, so of course he asked, “And that is?”

Percy was therefore horrified and flabbergasted when Joe replied, “A séance.”

Staring at his beloved with humour in his eyes, for it must have been a bad joke, “Have you gone completely mad?”

With a slight jut of his lower lip, “I don’t think so.”

Percy’s intonation switched to clipped with the realisation that Joe was perfectly serious. “I’m sorry, but I had assumed you wanted to survive the night.”

“One might say that’s a little melodramatic?—”

“The house of death,” Percy announced through gritted teeth. “The house that was boarded up for one hundred and thirty years because of the evil here. The house of the massacres. The house where a ghost has been throwing things at us since we walked in the door?—”

“Yes, exactly!” Joe shouted so loud he drew a howl from the beast, and both he and Percy took an involuntary step away from the thing. “Exactly,” he stage-whispered. “Something—some one —wants to communicate with us. It might be one of the girls.”

“It might be dozens of the girls, mad from months of imprisonment and torture, all at once, wanting to break through and take their revenge on the first person they come across. Or it might be some evil lord from three hundred years ago who brought this beast here in the first place. Is that really who you want to have a sit down with?”

Joe gave a small shrug. “It’s worth a shot, isn’t it?”

“No, it’s not.”

Percy broke from the conversation and was halfway up the stairs before Joe caught him, placing a stalling hand on his arm. “It’s not like we haven’t done this before. It’s just a séance.”

Percy spun around, furious. “Need I remind you of the mess you got into when Eve and Anna did their little séance and you ended up possessed?”

“Eve and Anna,” Joe waggled a finger at him for emphasis, “are shit at doing séances. Not like you and me.”

“You’ve never done a séance with me in your life,” Percy rebuffed, feeling a touch of pride that he refused to let show at Joe’s implied compliment. Damn right he was better at séances than his handsome brother.

Joe stepped up level with Percy, intertwining their fingers. “But I know you’d be great at it. We can do this. We can find the bodies, kill that thing, and end this. Today. There will be a warrant out for her arrest by breakfast tomorrow, and she won’t touch anyone else.”

“She won’t anyway,” Percy argued, a little petulantly. “She’s living in hotels. Leo updates me every time she moves. We’re keeping tabs on her.”

“For how long? For all you know, she might be planning to come back here tomorrow. To feed that—that whatever it is, with more victims. And then what does she intend to do with it?” Upon Joe voicing that worrying notion, both looked back at the long tongue still lapping at the dried blood of dead teenagers. As though he needed to add a little more to drive his point home, “It’s clearly supernatural, or it would be dead by now. We’re the only people who can fix this. We need to finish it. Right now.”

“Fine.” Percy took a step closer to Joe, their lips almost touching. “But at the first sign of trouble, we pull out. Promise me.”

Joe’s gleeful smile did not quell Percy’s concerns. “Yes!” He slapped a kiss on Percy’s lips, bounded up the stairs, and disappeared through the hole in the wall.

Percy sighed just as heavily as his feet hit the filthy stairs, and he called, “I never picked you for a séance-lover.”

Joe poked his head back around the corner. “What could go wrong? They’re just kids.” And he was gone to search for candles or something.

“Mmm,” Percy grunted, making his way out of the wall. “Just kids…”