Hidden (Marchwood Vampire Series #1) (23 page)

Maddy went
upstairs into the kitchen, sloshed some water over a teabag and
mashed it around with a few drops of milk. She grabbed an unopened
packet of chocolate digestives and headed back down into the
darkness.

‘
Have you got a key for it?’ she asked, passing him the tea
and biscuits.

He took a sip
of tea and opened the packet of biscuits.

‘
Oh yeah,’ he said slowly. ‘I’ve found a key for the
lock.’

‘
Oh my God! You’ve actually done it.’

‘
Yeah I’ve done it. But you won’t get that door
open.’

‘
What?’

‘
No, you ain’t gonna get him open. Not from this side anyway.’
He looked quite pleased with his pronouncement.

‘
What do you mean?’

‘
Well, he’s been dead-bolted from the other side. He’s got a
bolt at the bottom, here. And one up here.’ He looked at Maddy. ‘Is
this an external wall? If it is, you could go outside and have a
look for the other side of the door.’

‘
I don’t know’, said Maddy, disappointed. If it was an
external wall, then there would be nothing interesting on the other
side of the door. It would just lead outside.

‘
Let’s have a look.’ The locksmith shoved half a biscuit in
his mouth and followed the wall round to the right. ‘There’s a
corridor here,’ he mumbled through a mouthful of crumbs. ‘And look,
there’s a room off your corridor but it starts about fifteen foot
away from your wall. That metal door don’t lead outside, it leads
into a room.’

‘
I knew it!’ Maddy said. ‘How can I get into it
though?’

‘
You can’t,’ he said. ‘That’s a solid metal door and this is a
load-bearing wall. You mess with this wall and your stately home
won’t be looking so stately.’

‘
There must be some way.’

‘
Well now, there’s a few options, but you’ll have to get the
professionals in and that’d eat into your bank balance and it’d
take a fair few days to sort out,’ he continued. He looked like he
was settling in for a long enjoyable conversation, but Maddy was so
impatient she wanted to scream. He continued talking in his
ponderous manner, alternately swigging tea and munching
biscuits.

‘
Now I reckon this is a listed building, so they probably
won’t let you do any of this anyway, but hypothetically you could
take down some of the wall and put in a steel - that’s a large
supporting beam - and then …’

Maddy tuned
his brain-meltingly boring conversation out of her head. She had an
idea that was far quicker and easier than any of his complicated
theories.

‘
Yeah that’s great,’ she smiled, cutting him off in mid-flow.
‘So what do I owe you for opening the lock?’

He looked a
bit taken aback at the interruption. ‘Oh okay. Glad I could help.
Here’s your key. I’ll go upstairs and fill out the paperwork.’

Maddy couldn’t
wait for him to go. She was going to get that door open today, even
if she brought the whole house crashing down. She was on a
mission.

*

Once the
locksmith had left, Madison returned to the cellar. She climbed on
to a crate and reached up to one of the dirty windows at the top of
the wall. Unhooking the rusty metal latch, she gave the window a
push. It was stiff, but yielded open. A small shaft of afternoon
light shone into the cellar. Maddy realised she should have opened
the windows earlier and then she would have had some extra light
down there instead of just relying on the torch.

Next, she went upstairs and out of the back door, looking
along the outside of the building for the open cellar window. She
spotted it at ground level on the north western side of the
property.
That shouldn’t be a
problem
, she thought.
I think I can get close enough.

Her Land Rover
had been delivered the previous weekend and Travis had given her a
couple of rudimentary lessons. She still didn’t know exactly what
to do with the pedals, but figured she’d be able to work it out.
Maddy opened the wooden doors to the garage and climbed into the
pristine vehicle, starting the engine and putting the gears into
reverse. Trying to remember what Travis had told her about the
clutch and accelerator, she released the handbrake, shot backwards
out of the garage and stalled.

Calm down
, she told herself and
tried again. She shot out a bit further this time, but didn’t
stall. In first gear and then second, she headed carefully towards
the main driveway and drove effortlessly up a smooth grass bank
which led round to the side of the house. She nosed the Defender as
close to the open window as she could get. It now sat on a high
bank, above the low window. The Land Rover was too wide to drive
along the narrow gravel pathway which ran next to the side of the
house.

Madison turned
off the engine, jumped out, walked to the winch at the front of the
Land Rover and grabbed the end of the cable. She slid down the bank
and fed the cable down through the open window. Then she went back
down to the cellar and secured the cable to the metal door, tying
it around the large brass door knob. She had no idea if her plan
would work, but if it did, it would be quick and save her a lot of
hassle.

Once back
outside at the Land Rover, she locked the cable tight. She climbed
back into the driver’s seat, started up the engine and put it into
reverse. Releasing the handbrake, she eased down gently on the
accelerator. The vehicle went backwards a few inches and then
stopped. Maddy put a bit more pressure on the pedal until the
engine roared loudly. She stopped for moment, drove forward a
smidge and then reversed hard again.

The engine
growled and then, as Maddy put more pressure on the pedal, it grew
more throaty and insistent. The wheels churned up grass and mud.
Something was going to give, but whether it would be the engine or
the door, Maddy couldn’t tell. Suddenly she heard a loud bang. The
cable went slack and the Land Rover shot backwards across the lawn.
Before she had a chance to slam on the brakes, the vehicle lurched
to a sudden stop and skidded around sideways. At the same time she
heard a reverberating clang from the house. Maddy’s heart boomed.
Had it worked or not?

She turned off
the engine and jumped down onto the grass. Darkness had bloomed and
she could just about make out the mess of turf and mud in front of
her, where the tyres had wrecked the immaculate lawn. There was no
time to worry about that. She had to see if she’d done it or not,
to find out what lay beyond the door. She jumped off the high bank,
ran inside and grabbed the torch, heading down into the cellar
again, fingers crossed her efforts had been worth it.

Maddy held the
torch out in front of her, surprised to see her hands shaking. The
metal door had been ripped from its hinges, dragged across the
floor and up the wall. It had gone as far as it could and now
completely blocked the window.

In addition to
the hole in the first brick wall, there was now a small,
door-shaped hole in the second stone wall. Thick dust swirled, but
Maddy ignored her dry throat and walked towards the newly made
entrance. She peered inside.

Straight ahead
she saw shapes covered with white sheets. On top of the sheets,
rested a haunted house-worth of dust and cobwebs. Maddy lifted up
the pick axe and used the handle to waft away the thick strands of
cobwebs in front of her. To her left she could just about make out
some other large objects covered in layers of dust and spider webs.
But it was like trying to see through a thick night mist.

She stepped
closer and saw something surprising. It was a single bed and next
to that, a bedside table on which sat a metal cup, a candlestick
and a book. Strange that someone would have slept down here. She
drew closer still and saw something else, something so gruesome she
couldn’t help but scream a shriek of terror.

She stumbled
back out of the room and up the stairs, slamming the cellar door
shut, turning the key and locking it with shaking fingers. She made
it into the kitchen and stared glassily around her, the grisly
image still imprinted in her brain. She had to get out of the
house.

Madison
tripped and staggered through the hallway and out of the front
door, letting it slam behind her. She ran down onto the large front
lawn. It was almost pitch black outside now and Maddy would have
given anything for a bit of reassuring daylight. Her first instinct
was to run the half mile to Morris and Esther’s house. They would
sort this out with their no-nonsense approach. But she dismissed
the thought almost as soon as it popped into her head. She couldn’t
give them the satisfaction of seeing her at a loss and needing
their adult help.

Maddy sank
down onto the grass and hugged her knees to her chest. She knew
that what she’d seen wouldn’t hurt her, but she was freaked out
just the same. For down there in the scuttling gloom, when she’d
looked at the dust-covered bed, she’d seen something odd peeking
out from under the covers. She had drawn closer and shone her torch
directly at it.

The beam had
illuminated the bone white face of a grinning skull. A dead person.
A skeleton. Lying in the bed as though asleep.

Now, outside on the lawn, Maddy realised her breathing was
rasping and shallow and she tried to take a steadying breath, tried
to calm down. She couldn’t tell Ben about this, he’d freak even
more than
she
had. He was pretty sensitive and she didn’t want to give him
nightmares. It would certainly give
her
nightmares, probably for the
rest of her life.

How would she
ever find the courage to go back into the house? She couldn’t let
Ben know why she was out here. He’d be home soon. Oh my God, a
skeleton bricked up in the cellar! It was like something you read
about or saw in a horror movie. Here she was, all alone in the
grounds of a spooky house, no one else around and at least one dead
body down there.

She remembered
other stuff down there too - things covered over with dust sheets.
She shuddered again and squeezed her eyes tightly shut. How could
she live here now? With the creepiness of that. She remembered the
cellar window was still open with the metal door jammed up against
it, still attached to the winch cable. Well no way was she going
anywhere near it tonight. It would have to stay like that.

Why had she
been so desperate to look behind the door? She should have just
left it alone. She could have carried on living in ignorant bliss.
But no, she had charged ahead without thinking of any consequences.
She shivered. Why couldn’t she get the image of that grinning skull
out of her head? It was just a skeleton, it couldn’t hurt her. But
why was it there? Why would someone shut another person up in a
cellar?

God, maybe her
ancestors were a bunch of psychopathic nutters. That would be just
her luck. Yes, Maddy, here’s a beautiful house in the country and a
few million quid, but your family were murderers and you have to go
and live with the corpses of their victims.

Should she
call the police? She didn’t want to. Mainly because she knew she
and Ben shouldn’t really even be living here on their own without
proper adult supervision. They were lucky Vasey-Smith had sorted it
for them so no nosy social workers would come sniffing around
asking questions. Maybe she should call the solicitor and ask him
what to do? Oh God, she felt like her head was going to
explode.

If she hadn’t
fallen so in love with the place, she would just move out. But then
she’d lose her allowance and the inheritance and they’d have
nothing. She couldn’t lose all that just for the sake of a
skeleton. They couldn’t go back and live with Trevor and Angie.
Quite honestly, she’d rather sleep on the streets. She shivered and
shuddered again. She’d just sit here until Ben came home and by
that time, she might feel brave enough to go back inside. Yeah
right.

Chapter
Fourteen

1881

*

The small
group were mesmerised by their discovery. The underground city was
real and the implications of this were only just beginning to sink
in. Careers would be made this day.

‘
Here is the staircase, Alexandre said. ‘Shall we
descend?’

They trooped
down the long, almost vertical staircase.

‘
Stay together, everybody,’ Alexandre’s father called out. ‘We
do not know how big this place is. We already know it stretches for
some miles and it would not do to get lost down here.’

They passed
small rooms, large rooms, tunnels, artefacts and yet more
staircases leading downwards.

‘
I think we should go back up and work out how we are going to
map the area,’ Harold said. ‘The place is so very vast we will need
to work out a way to systematically mark out routes and catalogue
our finds.’

‘
You are right,’ Alexandre’s father agreed. ‘I am starting to
get disorientated. Let us return to the surface for
now.’

Alexandre
blinked and squinted in the bright sunshine as he emerged from the
deep hole in the ground. It felt wonderful to breathe in the
afternoon air and feel the warmth of the sun on his chilled
face.

There was so
much to talk about. They sat around the remains of last night’s
fire and told Jacques, Isobel, Leonora and Freddie what they had
seen. Harold suggested a way to tackle the mammoth task ahead of
them.

‘
I think it would be prudent to explore one floor at a time to
get the measure of how wide an area we are looking at. Alexandre,
you walked for several hours before you reached us, but the city
may also stretch out in other directions.’