Fade to Black (38 page)

Away from any lights, the night was black as tar. She should have grabbed a torch. She had been too worried about poor, Trevor Gordon back at the wrecked car, but at least he’d be spared whatever it was that waited for her up at St. Michael’s Tower. She looked up at the Tor as lightning crackled, suffusing the air with electricity. Thunder followed immediately overhead, echoing across the low land of the Somerset plain all the way to Stonehenge. Her stomach tightened as she contemplated the Tor. She stepped onto the track and started the long run to the summit.

She dropped into a rhythm quickly. It allowed her to think about the myth and legend that had surrounded the Tor for thousands of years. Her father had made the Tor his special area of study and had regaled her and her sister, Jo, with tales of King Arthur and Avalon, the Isle of Glass, Paganism and the supposed Ley Lines, among other mysteries ascribed to ‘that funny hill in Somerset.’ Now she knew why. He had been educating her for this moment. But it had been one character that he had talked about that had disturbed her the most and she knew her brother, Robert, also found him frightening—the ‘Scary Faerie’ as she and Robert had named him, Gwnn ap Nudd, the Lord of the Underworld.

Thoughts of him had given her cold sweats in her sleep for years after her father had stopped telling them the Celtic-Welsh tales. She had never told her father about it. It was no surprise to her that Gwynn ap Nudd loomed large for her now. She remembered the dream she’d had last night about the black creature in the cave, the giant snake, the river and Robert drowning. She was halfway up the hill when her thoughts locked on to the picture of her tenth birthday with Michael in the background and of the strange lights on the Tor about which her father had been interviewed by BBC4 earlier this week. Tears came as she saw again her little friend Isabelle disappear under the speedboat at Middlemoor Water Park, which she knew was only a short drive east from where she now jogged. She quickened her pace.

St. Patrick, her forebear, about whom
The Promise of Maewyn Succat
had been written, was real for her now, too. She thought of his pact with The Archangel Michael,
her Michael,
after whom the ancient cathedral on top of the Tor had been named and of which only the tower now remained. St. Patrick’s pact had become her obligation. ‘
Vinculum infinitas
’—she understood it now.
Bonded forever.
It all came down to the Tor. This was where it would end for her and Robert. This had always been their destiny.

She felt no fear as her run took to the top of the Tor, St. Michael’s Tower now only thirty feet further up the track. It should have been raining at the summit, but it was not. Breathing hard, she looked back to see if the police reinforcements had arrived at the foot of the hill. A heavy mist surrounded the lower reaches of the Tor, obscuring her view of the town and road below. She stood on an island surrounded by white—the legendary Isle of Glass.

She knew deep within her that reinforcements were not coming. She looked at her watch. It had stopped at 12:01 a.m. Her phone, too, was not picking up any signal, its time also frozen at 12:01.—the date, May 1
^st
. She laughed out loud and yelled breathlessly,“Playing magic tricks now, are we?”

The night swallowed all sound. There was no echo. A clammy silence reigned. She walked quickly to the tower, her footsteps mute. She stood in the narrow archway, her arms spread spanning it, her hands flat against the cold, black stone walls. She was alone. Looking through the arch, she pictured the old church to which the tower had originally belonged. Beyond that, she saw a circle of white stones, a recently discovered remnant of an earlier time.

The white mist rose, encircling her, the sky above now clear, the moon bright through the mist. There were no stars. She stood still and listened hard. Nothing. Dropping to all fours she put her ear flat against the worn flagstones of the tower. Sound bubbled up from below. Running water and there was an echo to it. Beneath the tower there had to be a hollow space. She stood again, examining the floor of the tower. She’d stood here many times as a child, played here in fact. She moved to the eastern wall and crouched down; there were her and Robert’s initials: AS and RS, carved in the third stone from the bottom. The third stone.
The number three
. She put her hand to her face. Is this what the murderer had been alluding to?

She cast her mind back to her tenth birthday. It had been after carving their initials all those years ago that Robert had become secretive. She remembered now; they were called back from the tower to go to the local pub for her birthday party. Robert had been ‘funny’ all through it until he had sneaked away after the birthday cake had been cut. Her dream had not been a dream, at least the part about following Robert. She peered at the stone, then in an inspired moment, reached for her phone. She could not call, but the phone should still emit enough light to see by.

It was difficult to hold the phone, her bandaging cumbersome. She stood and unwound the long ribbon, shoving the long strips of bandaging into her pockets. She crouched again, moving the small amount of light from the phone across the surface of the third stone. Five long minutes later, she had found nothing. Her initials stood out like they were carved yesterday, but the black surface of the stone yielded nothing else. Her legs were aching. She half-stood and then saw it.

As the light hit the stone from an oblique angle, a thin spider web of lines was visible. She crouched again and held the phone at a forty-five degree angle to the stone. She remembered now, it had been an early lunch on her tenth birthday. They were planning to go swimming later. The sun, therefore, would not have been directly overhead. She looked out through the archway, imagining where the 11:00 a.m. sun might have been on her birthday and tried to relate it to the new angle of her phone. It would have been near enough to a match, she decided.

The lines were a map. No doubt about it. The Tor and the cathedral upon it were clearly distinguishable. It was drawn as an aerial view, which in ancient times was unusual. She thought randomly that her father would love this little discovery. Or perhaps it wasn’t so little. The map showed a pathway leading from the Tor down the northern side to what looked like a clump of trees. In an almost modern ‘exploded’ view, it showed—she fell on her backside, her eyes wide. She crouched once more. The map showed a king on a throne. She knew who it was. Gwynn ap Nudd, of course. It showed a river snaking its way to something she could not make out. But it was enough for her to realize that her dream from last night had been more. It was
memory
. She had been in that cave. It existed… and it was where she would have to go now. She quickly stood, her head colliding with the heavy leather boots of a man hanging above her.

Allie fell back against the wall of the Tower. The hanged man was dressed as a monk or perhaps an Abbott. His long cloak was resplendent with intricate piping around the sleeves and hems. And he was not yet dead. His legs twitched, his boots swung wildly. She moved around and away from him, backing out of the archway. The moment she did, he disappeared. Again, silence pervaded. She stepped back into the tower. He reappeared, gurgling and flailing. She nodded cynically; she knew who this man was or was
supposed
to be.

“I’m not falling for this!” she yelled to the silent mist. “If you’re selling this as Richard Whiting, the ‘Last Abbott of Glastonbury,’ I’m not buying!” She expected someone or something to step out of the white, but nothing did. She walked back into the tower. The Abbot was gone. It was all part of the game, and the game dictated that she find the entrance to the cave just like Robert had done twenty years ago, of that she was certain.

She ran blindly into the mist, a vivid picture of the wall map from the tower in her head. Her iPhone had a compass—she would use it. The phone was dead. She smiled ruefully; what had she expected? But even the cotton wool mist couldn’t disguise the slope of the Tor. Down was down whether you had a compass or not and she knew she was on the correct side of the hill. She felt the undulations in the surface as she ran down the hill, barely keeping her balance—ancient furrows encircling the hill that had been worn by centuries of pilgrims ritually winding their way to the summit, St. Patrick himself among them.

She ran into a wire farm fence. Her right foot kicked the heavy post before she saw it, her body cannoning into the wire. She backed off and turned right in accordance with the map. She would walk the rest of the way. By her reckoning, she had about forty yards to go before she entered a clump of…

She walked into a tree and cursed. It was an oak—tall, chunky and old. At least she was in the right area. Staying as close to the fence line as she could, she counted out another twenty steps before turning right, back up the hill. She stopped at the point she had determined. There was nothing but grass. She walked another five yards—still nothing, more grass, but longer. She retreated down the hill to the fence line and paced another ten yards along it—once again, with no result. Her heart rate rose; she was wasting time. She took another step, but stopped. With supreme effort, she calmed herself. Then she
heard
something. It was to her right. She moved carefully towards the sound, realizing her feet were tracing a flat path under the spongy, wet grass. Moments later, she confronted a scrubby patch of bushes. Wheel marks disappeared below them. Robert. She recognized the bushes immediately from her dream. She took another deep, calming breath and pulled at the bushes. They came away too easily in a mat of earth and dangling roots. They had been recently disturbed. A hole large enough for her to crawl through beckoned. Her old friend, claustrophobia, revisited her just as it had done twenty years earlier.

She scrambled through the damp hole, ultimately sliding down onto a set of stone steps, skinning her knees before landing on smooth, cool stones.

“Welcome, Miss St. Clair, it’s been a while.”

A deep, mellifluous voice, not at all unpleasant, resonated through the cavern. She looked up, planning to eyeball the man who had kidnapped her brother. But he wasn’t a man. Not strictly speaking. He was tall, about the same height as Michael had been, almost black, but with albino-white hair. Piercing yellow-brown eyes examined her from under a creased, leathery forehead. He was from her world of dreams.

“Cat got your tongue?” It was said with an amused lilt. Not threatening.

“No, but a demon has my brother.”

He clapped his boney hands together. “Bravo! Spunk, I love that! I knew you wouldn’t disappoint!”

Allie stood, dusting herself off, going easy around the bloodied knees. “Where is he?” she asked, as if asking directions to a public lavatory.

“Your brother? Over there,” he said just as casually, pointing a disproportionately long appendage towards the back of the cavern, its source of soft lighting a mystery.

“Do you know,” he continued conversationally, “that the humans in this enclosure now and one other from long, long ago are the only humans to ever set foot in here. Can you believe that?"

“Well, gosh.”

He tilted his head curiously at her. “Do I not impress you?"

“Not favorably, but hey, let’s give it time. Say another minute before Robert and I leave you to your... hole?”

“Extraordinary,” he said, clasping his hands together like a pleased parent at an Eisteddfod. “You really are something!”

“I told you she was.” The voice came from the back of the cave. Her brother was being pushed towards her— his wheelchair was scratched and decorated with clumps of earth and grass. It had been roughly shoved through the hole in the bushes and smashed against the stone steps. Robert though, appeared to be unharmed. She breathed a sigh of relief. It was short-lived. They came closer, into the light. The man in the dark grey suit was immediately familiar to her. He labored at the effort needed to move the wheelchair over the rough-hewn surface. His long, craggy face was contorted as he puffed hard at the exertion.

Commander Bradley Whitcombe attempted a breathless smile. It was more a sneer. “St. Clair,” he wheezed. Allie fought to stay calm. She was expecting Arthur Wendell and even at some level, Mathew Connors, but
Whitcombe!
She hadn’t seen
that
coming, but she would brazen this out.

“I would apologize for not introducing you two,” the creature said, “but of course you do know each other. You should now know that Bradley is a vital part of my network and has been assisting me with my enquiries for many, many years. Get it, Chief Inspector—
assisting me with my enquiries?
”

She kept her eyes fixed on Whitcombe. “Have you been a practicing psychopath for long or is this a new thing?” she asked.

Whitcombe shoved Robert forward, smashing his right leg against a jagged rock. Allie knew Robert’s paralysis would shield him from the pain.

“You’re a long, long way from cloistered Belgravia now
,
Chief Inspector,” Whitcombe gloated. “How ridiculous—
Chief
Inspector
at your age. I can’t believe I agreed to it—the devil must have made me do it. Anyway, I wouldn’t be too relaxed about this if I were you.”

Allie stared at him. “Relaxed? No, I’m not that. The thought of you and Arthur Wendell sawing Paula Armstrong in half during a theatre matinee probably keeps me focused. That and the fact you have my brother leaves me at a slight disadvantage, of course.”

Whitcombe laughed—it was a phenomenon rarely witnessed. He was at home in his true skin. “I should advise you, too, that there’ll be no reinforcements coming. As far as the local constabulary is concerned, you’re having a mental breakdown of sorts.”

“I figured that. But they’ll not be persuaded by the carnage at the Festival?”

“Well, who knows, but it won’t matter anyway.” He made a show of looking around the cavern. “They won’t find you, be assured of that.”

“I won’t be relying on that,
Bradley,
be assured yourself. I also suppose that it was you who told Strauss and Connors that Jacinta Wilkinson had been found safe and sound?”