Jeremy Lonsdale — was he also one of them? Then his time was coming, too.
And then there was Alex.
He sat staring at the cross, visualising her face. Dangerous thoughts drifted through his mind. He shook them away. He needed to be strong, and stay strong.
The wind was rising, coming in gusts that shook the car and plastered falling leaves onto the windscreen. Crowmoor Hall’s gates lay open in the darkness. He swallowed hard. Throwing open the car door, he stepped out into the chilly night with the cross in his right hand and his new torch in his left. He muttered the first prayer he’d said in many years, and set out up the crunching gravel drive. Every step that he took towards that place sapped his courage a little more and made him grip the cross more tightly.
As he approached, he could see that the house was completely in darkness. The front door was swinging in the wind and flurries of dead leaves were blowing across the mosaic floor of the entrance hall. Joel walked into the house and shone the trembling torch beam around him.
‘Stone!’ he yelled, but it came out as a dry croak. He wet his lips and called out again, and his voice echoed.
He stood and listened a long time to the sounds of the house. A branch was tapping against a window somewhere. The wind whistled around his feet, leaves scraped across the floor. Sounds of emptiness.
Across the hall was a door. It was the same one through which Seymour Finch had led him and Dec to show them the ‘ballroom’ that had turned out to be a conference room. Joel turned the handle and the door creaked open. He shone the torch inside. The room was just as he remembered it, except for the bare space on the wall where the portrait of Gabriel Stone had hung previously. At the far end of the room, the tapestry still covered what Dec had claimed was the hidden doorway leading down to the crypt.
Joel walked the length of the room and tentatively switched on a side lamp. With some reluctance he laid down the cross and the torch, then grabbed one corner of the tapestry with both hands and gave it a violent tug. Something ripped. Wooden rings clattered to the floor, and the tapestry crumpled from its mountings and fell in a dusty heap at his feet. He kicked it aside.
Just as he’d done the last time, he examined the wall. Up close in the light of the lamp, he thought he could make out a hairline crack extending all the way from the floor to above his head. He used the Mondeo’s ignition key to pick a hole in the rich, velvety fleur-de-lys wallpaper. After a few minutes of frantic scraping, he’d uncovered the clear outline of a doorway in the plasterwork behind.
He shoved, hard, and then shoved again. Nothing moved. Nearby stood an elegant antique table on brass castors. He yanked it towards him, put his weight behind it and rammed against the wall with all his strength. The crashing thud seemed to echo all through the house. He froze, listening intently, but heard only the soft moan of the wind.
Dec had been right. About this and about everything else. There was something behind this wall and Joel was damned if he wasn’t going to find out what. This could be where the vampires were hiding, for all he knew cowering in fear, sensing the presence of the cross nearby, weak and vulnerable. This could be his moment to strike.
But it was going to take more than a flimsy table to ram through the solid wall. It had barely left a mark. Joel snatched up the cross and ran back the way he’d come, out into the windy night. There had to be a tool shed somewhere in a place like this. Maybe there’d be a sledge or lump hammer, a wrecking bar. He’d dig his way through with a damn screwdriver if he had to.
His heart was fluttering wildly as he ran through the grounds. Every rustling bush signalled a sudden attack; every creaking branch was a clawed hand reaching out to grip hold of him; and in every shadow lurked a waiting vampire.
At the rear of the house he found a range of outbuildings. A well equipped tool shed contained everything he could have wished for — but next to that was something even better. Yellow paintwork glittered in his torch beam. He peered inside the cab of the JCB and saw with a rush of triumph that the key was in the ignition. The first and last time he’d driven one of these things had been years ago, helping Sam Carter prepare the groundwork for the extension on his house. But a mechanical digger had all kinds of other uses too.
Joel leapt into the operator’s seat, fired up the engine and the headlights. With the cross clamped between his thighs, he drove the machine out across the yard. Its caterpillar tracks ground and crunched on the gravel as he rounded the corner of the house. He took a long sweeping turn at the front entrance, so he could approach head on. Ten yards from the doorway, he gunned the throttle and the diesel roared as the machine scuttled up the steps and smashed into the ornate stonework. Bricks and plaster and chunks of rendering rained on the roof of the cab. With a terrible scraping screech of rending metal, Joel forced the JCB into the entrance hall. He didn’t slow down for the conference room door either. The machine lumbered through like a tank, wrecking everything in its path. The engine was on peak revs by the time it reached the far wall. Joel held it steady on a collision course with the hidden doorway. A second before impact, he leapt out of the cab, hit the rug and rolled clear.
The digger rammed into the wall with a crash that shook the house and brought a large section of decorative coving and ceiling down on top of it. Joel sprang to his feet and ran over to the half-buried machine. He shone the torch through the clouds of masonry dust and saw the battered front of the digger embedded in a great jagged hole. Attached to the remnants of the hidden doorway was a smashed hydraulic arm and an electronic control unit that must have been activated by a remote or a switch somewhere in the house. Beyond it, Joel’s torch beam swept into pure darkness.
It was a secret corridor.
His terror as powerfully intensified as his resolve, Joel clambered over the dusty caterpillar tracks and started making his way through the passage, holding the cross out in front of him as he went.
He found himself in a maze of corridors and stairways that seemed to go on for miles. Just when he thought he was lost, the torch picked out something on the floor. A drop of dried blood. Then another. He followed the trail down and down.
All the way down to the crypt.
Chapter Sixty-Five
‘Where are you?’ said Rumble’s voice on the phone.
‘Still in Italy,’ Alex said. ‘I’m on a train heading for Bologna. Flying back to London from there.’
Her carriage was empty apart from her, a couple of backpackers and a businessman who’d fallen asleep behind his laptop. Quarter to one in the morning, and the train was speeding through the night, chattering softly on its rails. In the distance were the scattered lights of a village.
‘Bologna?’
‘It’s a long story, Harry.’ Since she’d boarded the train in Venice earlier that night, afraid to return to the hotel or fly straight back to London in case she bumped into Joel or found herself on the same plane as him, Alex had been putting a lot of thought into how she was going to explain herself to Rumble. It was hard to think straight with her head full of what had happened between her and Joel. She cursed herself for her weakness.
‘Save it for when I see you,’ Rumble said. ‘Is Solomon with you? Can you talk?’
She bit her lip. ‘I’m alone right now.’
‘You wouldn’t be coming back unless you’d found the cross,’ Rumble said. ‘Am I right?’ He sounded excited. That wasn’t going to last long, Alex thought.
‘Yeah, we found it. It was hidden under an old church. It had been there for centuries.’
‘The legends — they’re true?’
‘You wouldn’t want to get too close, if that’s what you mean.’
‘But the case — the lead lining — it worked? The way you thought it would?’
‘It worked fine.’
‘This is great. Congratulations, Alex. When you land, I want you to bring it straight here to VIA. Then we’ll figure out the next step.’
