Alchemy, Book Two of the Mercian Trilogy (2 page)

He needn’t have worried though, and was perhaps less visible than he’d thought because he heard Eloise’s uncertain and hushed voice call, “Will?”

“I’m here.”

She changed course and came directly towards him. As she reached him, she smiled, but then looked
concerned and put her hand on his arm as she said, “Are you OK?”

He watched her breath rising in a cloud of mist in the cold air, felt the warmth of her hand on his arm, the scent of her. It should have made his hunger worse, but as he’d hoped, her presence relaxed him.

He smiled and said, “I’m fine.”

Even as he said it, he looked up at one of the darkened windows high above, sensing that someone was looking down at them. He glanced back at the lit window of the common room where Marcus was playing chess, studying the board – so at least it couldn’t be him. But Will definitely felt they were being watched.

“Are you sure? You look …”

“Pale?” She laughed and he said, “Truly, I’m fine, but let’s walk – I don’t like being here so early in the evening.”

She nodded and they set off across the lawns, two black-clad figures.

“You don’t get unwell,” said Eloise as they walked. “But you did look unwell, just now.”

“I could argue that I’ve been unwell for a very long time. But you shouldn’t worry – it’s something that comes and goes, something I’m familiar with.”

“But …” Eloise didn’t stop walking because, he assumed, it was so cold out here as to discourage
standing still, but the mental leap she’d just made required some physical response and she clutched his arm as she said, “It can’t be! You need blood? But you said Jex’s blood would last a long time.”

Will put his hand on hers in an attempt to offer reassurance, but she slipped her hand out from under his in response. Perhaps it was a direct reaction to the coldness of his touch, or perhaps revulsion because this had reminded her of what he really was. He could hardly blame her for rejecting him.

“I thought it would, and I cannot understand why it hasn’t.” He walked a few paces in silence. Their footsteps crunched softly on the frozen grass. “But I’m glad of it in one sense. It allows you to see and understand what I have told you many times, that I’m a monster. It’s no longer just a homeless man who died before I met you. I will have to kill somebody. For the moment I can withstand it, but within weeks the need will become so bad that even you would not be safe – you saw the way Asmund had become.”

At first he thought Eloise might not respond, but then she said, “How soon?”

“As soon as I find someone suitable. I may need to spend a night or two in the city, at least within the next two weeks.”

“There’s no other way?” She was hopeful, even
though she knew the answer. Then she said, “Promise me you’ll …” But that line of thought also dried up.

“Eloise, there is no way to justify this. I pick people who won’t be missed, people who have slipped through the cracks of society, but two months ago that could easily have been you. No life is worth so little as to excuse my taking it.”

“But you’re not a monster, and I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to pull my hand away – it was the shock of how cold you are out here, that’s all.”

“Am I very cold?”

She nodded, giving a small, almost regretful smile. “I don’t want you to kill anyone else. I know you have to, but I don’t want you to, so maybe that’s just a sign that we have to move faster. The more we learn, the more we find out why this happened to you, the more chance we have of … breaking the cycle, I suppose.”

Will smiled back at her, touched by her innocent optimism, as if she felt he might be cured in some way. Briefly, that thought planted a seed of optimism in his own soul, but he knew there could be no cure for this disease, except perhaps the one that Wyndham wanted for him.

They passed around the edge of a small plantation of trees, designed to screen one house from the other, then started towards the desolate shadows of the new house.

At the sight of it, Will said, “I’m glad we’ve talked about this, but it completely distracted me from what I had to tell you. I’ve made a discovery.”

This time Eloise did stop walking as she said, “So have I! But yours first. What have you found?”

“A tunnel. Or tunnels, and I’m certain they lead under the old abbey.”

“From where?”

He pointed as he said, “From the house.”

They walked on, but Eloise said, “I don’t get it – you’ve searched the cellars again and again.”

“True, and I was determined I would find something. I have half a memory from my childhood visits here, talk of tunnels underground, tunnels that long predated the abbey itself. And I know too that if Asmund’s master or even Lorcan Labraid himself is here at Marland, he must be underground. That’s why I kept searching.”

“I don’t get it – underground, but not in the cellars?”

“The cellars would be too obvious perhaps. A passage leads down from the house itself, rather fittingly from the library – we always seem to return to books.”

Eloise knew that Will stayed in the cellars during the day and so she said, “Did you find them last night, or – surely not this evening?”

“Just this evening. I haven’t even explored them myself. I found them and came directly to meet you.”

She looked pleased by that, knowing that they would explore the tunnels together for the first time. And that in itself sparked misgivings in his own mind. He could no longer deny Eloise’s part in this, but he realised he should have searched the tunnels on his own first. As it was, he had no idea what he was about to lead her into.

O
nce inside the house, Will took Eloise by the hand and led her through the unlit rooms to the library – there was unlikely to be anyone for miles around who might see lights on in the house, but it was still safer to leave it in darkness. Eloise couldn’t see a thing, but walked confidently, trusting him entirely.

When they reached the library, he opened the wooden panel in the wall that led to the first secret passage, and once they were inside he put on his dark glasses and turned on the light. Eloise blinked against the brightness at first, but adjusted quickly and looked around the small narrow room in which they found themselves; it was bare-walled, with a metal spiral staircase leading up to the next floor.

Will saw her confusion and said, “The trustees know about this secret passage. During my hours of confinement in the cellar I’ve read all the literature offered in the shop.” Even as he said it, he found it extraordinary that his family’s great house had been reduced to having a
gift shop for souvenir-hungry tourists. “It’s mentioned that Thomas Heston-Dangrave built a secret passage – fashionable at the time – to link the library with the master bedroom. It says nothing else.”

Eloise looked at the walls and said, “There is nothing else.”

Will nodded. “So it appears, but I was standing with my hands resting on this wall, thinking, wondering what it was that I was looking for, when this happened.”

He reached up and put his palms flat on the wall and almost immediately felt the mechanism that lay deep within the stones grinding into life. With surprising speed, the wall trundled sideways, exposing a set of stone steps that disappeared into the darkness below.

He’d been no further than this himself yet, but he could tell from the air that these steps led to something extensive. He stepped back for Eloise to see, but she was still staring at the space into which the wall had slid.

“How did you do that?”

“I don’t know. I can only presume it’s the same power I have over locks and other such things – after all, the wall must contain a mechanism and I assume somewhere there’s a device for opening it, though I don’t know where.”

“At least there’s a light switch,” said Eloise, pointing to the wall at the top of the steps. She turned it on and
lights appeared at regular intervals, illuminating the descent in front of them.

Will hadn’t noticed the switch earlier and was a little disappointed because it meant someone in modern times had at least partially explored whatever network lay below. Somehow, it made it less likely that Lorcan Labraid would be found there – Will doubted that the evil of the world would have permitted workmen to install electric cables.

He looked at the switch and said, “From the 1920s, I would say.” The disappointment receded, replaced by another thought. “Thomas Heston-Dangrave knew about these tunnels – he incorporated them into the design of the house he built. If my guess is right about the age of this switch, his great-great-grandson George also knew about them because he must have installed the lights. Perhaps his own daughters knew too, but those two spinsters must have taken the secret to the grave with them.”

“Of course. Otherwise the National Trust would have made something of it. And if the family kept it to themselves, we have to assume there was some reason for doing so.”

Had they kept it hidden, wondered Will, because these tunnels spoke of secrets, of a secret shared history between his family and this place. If so, he was certain
it predated the family’s acquisition of these lands during the dissolution of the monasteries.

He wished he could recall more than the fragments of memories he had of Marland. Even in those weeks before his sickness, he’d been aware of Marland’s importance to his father and perhaps, if he’d lived longer, that bond would have been explained to him. Perhaps it had been explained to his brother Edward once he was grown and yet it was to Will that it truly mattered.

Will looked at Eloise and said, “Shall we?”

He took the steps first and she followed close behind. But as he neared the bottom and the sense of space and air stretching away from them became greater, he regretted that he’d come here without any form of weapon. For all he knew there could be another like Asmund down here, or demons the like of which he hadn’t yet encountered.

As he’d expected, at the bottom the passageway turned to the left and went on in a straight line for some way. By the time they reached the first junction with a choice of turning left or right, Will reckoned they were under the ruins of the abbey itself.

But they immediately noticed a change here. The first tunnel they’d walked along was perhaps a newer construction, built specifically by Thomas Heston-Dangrave to connect the house with this subterranean
complex, for they were on the threshold now of something much older, and much more disturbing.

The walls here were covered with runic writing and other symbols, and a strange menagerie of monsters and demons, all engraved into the stone and painted in garish colours which had hardly faded over the centuries.

Eloise said, “Oh my God, this is incredible.” She stepped forward, poring over the images and scripts on the wall in front of her, looking away only to check what Will had already spotted, that every part of the walls in every direction was similarly decorated. “This must’ve taken years.” She continued to stare intently at the paintings in front of her.

Will couldn’t quite share in her excitement. The lights also extended in both directions, so these tunnels had been navigated by workmen in the last hundred years, presumably in safety. But there was no disguising the fact that this was a strange and sinister place. Even if nothing had happened to them, he had little doubt that those workmen would have been keen to leave at the end of each day.

There was something untamed and primal here. The very stones seemed to breathe and murmur as if possessed of some form of life, and though there was nothing living close by, Will had an acute sense that they were not entirely alone either.

He saw Eloise shudder and she turned and gave him a relieved smile, as if she’d feared for a moment that he’d left her there.

He smiled back and said, “Do you sense anything strange in the atmosphere down here?”

She still found it hard to take her eyes off the sinister richness of the walls but said, “Do you mean like, is my spine ice-cold, or are the hairs on the back of my neck standing up, or do I have a constant sense that someone’s standing behind me? Because the answer is yes to all of the above.”

“Really?”

“Really. I mean, this is amazing, but there’s something unbelievably creepy about the place.”

He nodded, looking along the tunnel in both directions, then turned to her again and said, “You know I won’t let anything happen to you.”

She looked bemused and said, “Put it this way, I wouldn’t be here without you.”

“Good. Then let’s explore.”

He gestured to the right and they walked along the tunnel for some way before turning left, through a short connecting passage to a parallel tunnel. It became clear soon enough that even though it doubled back on itself in places and led to dead ends, it was a massive circular network, drawing them slowly towards the centre.

And the closer they got to that centre, the feeling of some malevolent presence became all the more intense. Even the air was oppressive, the walls themselves possessed, as if a constant murmuring of ancient incantations was emerging from them just below the level of their hearing.

They walked passage after passage, turning corners, working inwards, and each time they turned, Will expected to be met by some creature or apparition. Yet there was only the empty tunnel with its subdued lights, receding into the gloom. But that didn’t stop him expecting to meet something, didn’t stop his increasing concern that he shouldn’t have brought Eloise here until he’d explored these tunnels himself.

Despite her unease, Eloise seemed less concerned than Will, and rather than look ahead, she was transfixed by the walls, so vivid that they looked in places as if the artists had only recently left off their work. Her faith in Will was total, so much so that it didn’t seem to occur to her that he might be out of his depth too.

Eventually they turned into a passage that curved and then delivered them into a small pentagonal chamber. The chamber had four other passages leading off it, but for some reason, one of those four exits led into darkness. Will’s eyes were drawn automatically to that dark tunnel, but his attention was pulled away by Eloise.