Ghouls, Ghouls, Ghouls (16 page)
Read Ghouls, Ghouls, Ghouls Online
Authors: Victoria Laurie
Tags: #Fiction, #Mystery & Detective, #General
“Think of what?”
“I’ve been so worried about Gopher, and I think I assumed that there was no way he could withstand more than a few hours with the phantom. In the very back of my mind I wondered if he had already been murdered, but it never occurred to me to reach out to him using my intuition to see if he’d really crossed over!”
Heath’s eyebrows lifted in surprise. “I didn’t think of it either, M. J. But you’re right. We need to see if we can reach Gopher. That way we’ll know for sure if this is a rescue mission, or a recovery.”
I motioned Heath to the van and we got in and drove at breakneck speed to the causeway. There we got out and I could see that the cobblestones were covered by about two inches of water as both the storm surge and the tide were moving in.
“We’ll need to get a little closer to the castle,” I said, eyeing Heath to see if he agreed.
Heath, however, was staring at the causeway. “It’s dangerous,” he said. “You know how slippery those rocks are when they get wet, and the tide’s coming in.”
“I’m willing to risk it,” I told him. “If you want to stay here, you can.”
“Right,” he said, a hint of irritation in his voice. “Like I’m just going to let you cruise out over the causeway without help.”
“Then let’s stop talking about it and get going, sugar!”
Heath and I sloshed our way onto the cobblestones and I hurried as fast as I could without taking too many risks. The water was freezing and my feet were soon numb with cold. It took us about fifteen minutes to reach the island, and from there I could just make out the line of thick dark clouds on the horizon.
“We’ll have to work fast,” I said, noting the fading light and that the water on the causeway was inching up more and more.
Heath closed his eyes and lifted his chin in the direction of the castle. I did the same and in my mind I called out as loudly as I could to Gopher.
There was no response, save for a cold prickle on my forearms. I opened my eyes again and thought I saw the phantom’s dark figure swaying in the wind at the top of the rock. In the distance I heard Jordan Kincaid’s voice yell, “Alex!” But that was it.
Heath was still deep in concentration, and I wondered if maybe he’d connected to Gopher. My heart sank with that thought, because even though I was prepared for it, I still didn’t want anything awful to happen to our producer.
A few seconds later, Heath opened his eyes, a grim look set firmly on his face.
“Anything?”
He took my hand and turned me around to head back across the causeway before speaking. “Nothing,” he said. “I tried reaching out to Gopher and kept hitting a brick wall.”
“I think he’s still alive,” I admitted, noting that I’d felt exactly the same thing. “And I also think we’ll find him.”
Heath stepped onto the watery cobblestones and paused. “When?”
I shrugged and slogged my way forward. “I don’t know. But soon.”
“I hope it’s in time,” he told me.
I couldn’t have agreed more.
We were late getting to O’Grady’s. By the time we made it back to shore, our pants were soaked and I was shivering with cold. Heath drove us back to the B&B, where we changed quickly, told Gilley what we were up to, and left a note for Meg, Kim, and John before hustling to the pub.
We found Quinn sitting comfortably at the bar, a tall pint of dark ale in front of him. “There you are,” he said when we came to sit next to him.
“Sorry,” Heath and I said together. “We were delayed.”
Quinn didn’t appear to mind; instead he asked us to pick our poison. Heath ordered a beer while I went with a vodka and cranberry. “Now, if I remember, you want to know all about the phantom.”
“Yes, please,” I said, just as my drink arrived.
“It’s a dark tale,” he began dramatically, and motioned for us to follow him to one of the booths. “But one worth the tellin’ if you think it will help find your friend,” he added as we sat down.
After taking a long sip of ale, he wiped his mouth with the back of his hand and told us what he knew. “The first time I heard of the phantom was about twenty years ago. I was a young lad then, just back from holiday at me cousin’s further up the coast, and me mum told me that some poor bloke had died that very mornin’ while out explorin’ Dunlow Castle.
“The poor chap was a Frenchman who’d come across the legend of the hidden treasure a bit before that, and in his research he’d discovered an old letter written by Ranald Dunnyvale’s second wife to her cousin, describing the last words of her husband on his deathbed.
“According to this Frenchman, Dunnyvale’s final words gave away the exact location of his treasure. So the Frenchman came here to look for it, only telling us in the village that the gold was hidden in a secret location, and with the aid of the original blueprints to the castle, he was sure he’d find it.
“After searching the castle top to bottom for near a week, he claimed to have discovered the secret location, but he needed to return to France for a spell to tend to some urgent business.”
Quinn paused here to take a long pull from his pint, and outside we all heard the first rumble of thunder.
“Storm’s comin’,” I heard Heath whisper.
“Aye,” said Quinn. “And she’s likely to be a moody little tempest from the weather reports I’ve seen.”
But I was anxious to hear more about Quinn’s story. “You were saying about the Frenchman?”
“Ah, yes,” he said, wiping his mouth again with his sleeve. “Where was I? Oh, I remember—he’d returned to France. Well, we weren’t sure he’d come back to our village after that, truth be told. We were a wee bit skeptical of his claims, but return he did a bit later. With him was another bloke, who was not from France, as I remember, and they and one other chap they’d hired to carry the heavy equipment set off for Dunlow.”
Another loud rumble of thunder reverberated against the walls and tinkled the glass bottles on the shelves. This was immediately followed by the drumming sound of a hard rain on the roof.
Quinn squinted through the windows and signaled for another pint of ale. “Now, here in the village, we had our doubts about the Frenchy’s claim. I mean, we’ve lived here all our lives, and most of us had been to Dunlow a time or two. Never had we seen any sign of this supposed treasure, but being naturally curious, we waited to see what the Frenchman and his friends would bring back.
“Not in our wildest dreams did we think that the three men would release a demon like the phantom!” Quinn said with a slight shiver.
“What happened on that rock that morning
exactly
, Constable?” I pressed. I wanted to know what the Frenchman had done to call up the phantom.
exactly
, Constable?” I pressed. I wanted to know what the Frenchman had done to call up the phantom.
Quinn shrugged. “I only know what I was told,” he said. “And that was that on that terrible day the Frenchman did discover where the gold was hidden, but when he went to take a few handfuls, the phantom was released. It chased him off the cliffs, drove another man quite mad, and left the third a cripple.”
“How did the village react?” Heath asked.
Quinn gave his empty glass to a waitress, who replaced it with a full pint. “No one quite believed the story. That is, until a few of us bolder lads went to have a look for ourselves.”
I sucked in a breath of surprise. “
You’ve
seen the phantom?”
You’ve
seen the phantom?”
“Aye,” he said. “It was right after word spread that a terrible demon had been set loose at the castle. Me daddy, in fact, was one of the men who helped retrieve the Frenchman’s body from the rocks. He told me that when he set foot on that island, he knew something had changed, and he vowed to never go back there.
“I, of course, was far too curious for me own good back then, and I gathered me courage and decided I’d go to the castle and have a look for myself. I was only about fifteen at the time—you know how impulsive and daft you can be when you’re young?”
Heath and I both nodded.
“Aye, I knew you’d understand. So, the very next day I crept across the causeway at low tide and made it up to the top of the rock when out of the castle a monstrous shadow appeared and came racing toward me. I’ve never been so bloody scared me whole life!” he said, shaking his head at the memory. “And I ran down those steps faster than any Olympic sprinter, I tell you!”
I smiled at the visual. “Oh, I’ve seen that thing up close and personal. I know how it can put a rocket booster to your feet.”
“Aye,” he agreed. “And I didn’t stop runnin’ till I’d reached the shore on this side. And other than a few times when duty has called me back across the causeway, I’ve not returned to that cursed place. Nor could you convince me to go up those stairs ever again,” he said.
I remembered Quinn arriving on the rocky shore when we reported the dead man at the base of the cliffs. He’d kept very close to the causeway, and I remember him eyeing the top of the rock nervously. Something clicked in my head then, and I said, “The phantom never comes down the stairs, does he?”
Quinn gave me a sardonic smile. “No,” he said. “We’ve learned over time that it only haunts the top of the rock.”
“But where did it come from?” I asked. “I mean, you can point to its first appearance twenty years ago, but was there any mention of it before then?”
Quinn shook his head. “None a’tall. And no one in the village knows why it suddenly appeared other than it was released when the Frenchman went for Dunnyvale’s gold. We all believe Dunnyvale himself set the phantom as a trap should anyone get too close to his treasure.”
I remembered Dunnyvale’s ghost insisting that he’d had no part in setting the phantom loose.
Meanwhile, Quinn was still recounting how tame Dunlow had been prior to the Frenchman’s interference. “Why, I remember playing at Dunlow as a wee lad,” he was saying. “Me schoolmates and I used to go there nearly every chance we had. In those days, the castle had a few ghosts roaming the grounds—but most of them were quite tame. None of them ever frightened us or attacked us. Not until the phantom.”
I shifted uncomfortably in my seat. I remembered again Ranald telling me the phantom was put there by someone other than himself. But who, and why? “Have you ever heard of anyone making something of an outlandish claim, like they were responsible for bringing the phantom to the castle?” I asked.
Quinn laughed heartily at the suggestion. “Why, no, miss. There’s no legend or story of that sort connected to the phantom.”
Another thought occurred to me. “What if the phantom wasn’t placed at the castle by Lord Dunnyvale, but by someone more current? Someone who, say, twenty years ago heard that a Frenchman was after Dunnyvale’s gold?”
Quinn looked at me as if I’d just said the oddest thing. Shaking his head, he told me, “I’ve heard some fairly strange boasts in the village and around this pub, I assure you, but no one’s ever claimed they were responsible for delivering Dunlow its phantom.”
Heath looked at me curiously, but I didn’t want to go into what I knew in front of Quinn, so I moved away from the topic to another related one. “What can you tell us about the incident four years ago with Jordan Kincaid?”
Quinn sucked in a breath and blew it out in a heavy sigh. “Ah, now, that’s a terrible tale as sad as the first one I’ve told you.”
“We’re all ears,” I assured him.
“As you know, it happened four years ago. We heard that the famous Jordan Kincaid was determined to come to Dunlow and find Dunnyvale’s treasure. When he arrived, we did our best to warn him about the phantom, and he seemed to listen to us and take it all seriously. In fact, he abandoned his first plans to go there alone, and came back a few months later with two companions.”
“Was one of them a man named Alex?” I asked carefully.
Quinn scratched his head. “You know, I’m terrible with names, but Kincaid did have one man in his group, and one woman. The gentleman’s name might have been Alex, though I’m not certain.”
“He had a woman with him?” I asked. For some reason, that surprised me.
“Aye. And she was a beautiful lass, let me tell you. ...” Quinn’s voice drifted off and his eyes held a faraway cast to them. I could tell he’d been very attracted to Kincaid’s companion. “She was Russian, I think,” he said.
Heath and I looked at each other, the memory of the notepad written in Russian floating between us. “Do you know what her role was?” I asked.
Quinn looked at me curiously. “Role?”
“I’m assuming that everyone Kincaid brought with him had some sort of expertise for the mission.”
“Well, that I wouldn’t know. I believe I was too busy admiring the lovely lady’s figure to pay much attention to what she was there for,” he told me with a hearty chuckle.
Heath smiled knowingly and I barely resisted the urge to roll my eyes. “
Any
way,” I said, getting us back on track, “you were saying?”
Any
way,” I said, getting us back on track, “you were saying?”
“Oh, right,” said Quinn. “So, Kincaid comes to the village with his two traveling companions and they set off for Dunlow loaded down with camping gear and gadgets and all sorts of odd-looking equipment. They planned to stay somewhere on the rock, and take their time explorin’ the castle. I thought they were daft for wanting to take on the phantom, but I also thought that if you were determined to fight that demon, the best way to go about it was the way they’d mapped out. As I’ve said, the phantom doesn’t come down those stairs, so if you can study it from relative safety, and find a weak spot, you might be able to defeat it.”
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