Ash (54 page)

He told her about Juliet, how his father hadn’t been able to save his older sister from drowning and how her ghost had returned to haunt him, blaming him for pushing her into the water. How that had led him to become a parapsychologist in an attempt to prove that there were no such things as ghosts, and how all he’d proved was that spirits of the dead did exist, and that some had evil intent. A woman – another ghost with stronger powers of manifestation – had given him the short scar on his cheek when he’d thought the haunting was over.

Delphine didn’t question him, and he wondered whether his confession had been wise. Would she now think he was crazy? Was the compassion in her eyes merely a psychologist’s acceptance of a patient’s self-delusion?

Nevertheless, he went on to tell her of Edbrook. How he’d been lured to that old manor house eventually to discover its inhabitants were ghosts – ghosts in league with his dead sister who’d joined them to torment him further. And how, despite charlatans who exploited those who truly believed in the realm of the spirits and the paranormal, he had discovered more evidence that the spirits of the dead were real.

Ash decided not to tell Delphine of the ghosts that roamed the village of Sleath in the Chilterns, where he’d lost one he’d come to love through unearthly powers that some might call malign spirits. It was too soon. He needed her to believe in him totally, before he could expect her to believe everything he might say

‘There’s genuine danger here, Delphine,’ he said sombrely, still toying with the lapel of her robe. ‘This is why I want to get out of Comraich now. And why I want to take you with me. Lewis as well, if that’s what you want.’

She was stunned. ‘You know I can’t do that. Besides, the entrance is too well guarded.’

‘I saw a loading bay on the bank of monitors in Babbage’s office,’ he said. ‘Delivery vehicles must be coming and going all the time. We could probably slip out that way unnoticed.’

She shook her head vehemently. ‘The goods entrance is the best-guarded section on the estate, although you’d never know it just on sight. The guards are dressed in normal working overalls, but their weapons are always near to hand. Didn’t you notice how many cameras there are? The tradesmen’s entrance is the most monitored area of all.’

‘Then what about the shoreline? We could follow it round until we found safe ground, a coastal village, or somewhere with a telephone.’

‘No, David.’ She was adamant. ‘You were down on the shore this morning. You must have seen how difficult it is to walk along it. The further you go, no matter in which direction, the rocks and pools get worse and eventually you reach cliffs that rise straight from the sea. On top of that, there’s a watch-tower at each end of the beach.’

The psychologist gave a tiny, hopeless sigh. ‘It’s just impossible, David. Don’t even think about it.’

He took a new tack, ignoring her pleas. ‘Comraich is bad, Delphine. I’ve never felt so definite about somewhere in my life. I believe the castle is an epicentre for something evil . . .’

‘Oh, David!’

‘I’m not joking, Delphine; this is real. Sometimes where ley lines cross, occult powers can gather and create all kinds of havoc. You’ve seen for yourself what’s happened here. The poltergeist mayhem in the ground-floor office before I came, the lift suddenly crashing, the bizarre killing of Douglas Hoyle, my God, the maggots and the flies just last night. And all the things that brought me here in the first place.’

He paused to draw breath, and when he spoke again, his voice was low, steady. ‘Remember how the jet that brought us here suddenly lost all power, how it was nearly dragged down just as it passed over Comraich? Surely you can see what’s happening here? Even the wildcats, drawn south from the Highlands. And,’ he finished, ‘I’m sure you can feel the oppressive atmosphere outside. It’s as if the air itself is filled with a kind of static.’ To illustrate the point, he placed a flat hand about an inch above her head; strings of her hair suddenly stood erect as if she’d received an electric shock.

She was silent. He was right. But to leave – even if they could – was impossible.

‘If you feel so strongly about it,’ she said with such a sad face that Ash already knew he’d lost the argument, ‘you should go alone, David. By yourself you might just have a chance.’

Doing his best to remain patient, he said, ‘Delphine, weird things are happening at Comraich, and they’re going to get weirder. I’ve never felt so sure about anything in my life. This . . . this wickedness is becoming prevalent among the people here. It’s like an infection passed by one to another, and then another. Why did that man, Lukovic, try to kill me last night? I didn’t know him and he didn’t know me. And why would I react with such uncharacteristic violence? Look at what I did to Nurse Krantz. Gradually, we’re all becoming infected, Delphine. Soon we’ll be unable to trust anyone. D’you want to be here for that?’

He was staring hard into her face, and now she crumpled. ‘David,’ she pleaded, ‘I can’t leave Lewis to whatever may happen. Please, you go. Don’t worry about me – or Lewis; I’ll take care of him – but you must go. You’ll have more chance on your own.’

As the tears formed in her eyes, he pulled her to him, and slid his hand into her open robe to feel the arch of her back.

Delphine said, ‘Please, David,’ and he knew it wasn’t a rebuttal; it was the opposite and said in earnest. He could see that she wanted him as much as he wanted her.

After their lovemaking was over, he recalled something Delphine had said that had been nagging at him ever since. If the IC wouldn’t let Delphine leave without erasing her memory, then surely they would never allow him to leave either, with all the knowledge he now possessed.

Or had the intention always been that he would never leave Comraich Castle at all?

PART FOUR: THE CURSE

She had no idea how long she’d been in this dungeon. She was aware this dim, shadowy room was beneath a castle called Comraich – she’d been told that at some point long ago and it had stayed in her memory, a rare light in a rolling sea of blackness. But most of her memories of growing up, of becoming a woman, were murky and obscure. When she had first bled she had thought she was dying. She was aware she was different from the women, the nurses, who had come over the years to hose her down as she cowered in a corner of her room, her only home, laughing at her shrieks of protest – they never used warm water, just that cold, cold, heart-stopping jet of freezing, germ-killing liquid.

She shivered at the thought, the white powder that had been thrown over her by the handful, being told between angry laughter that it was for her own good, it would ‘kill off the lice’ that weaved their way through the sparse hair on her head as well as through her matted pubic hair and the thick bushiness of her armpits. Somehow she was always aware when the time was approaching for the forced disinfection, although she did not know how, for time was a meaningless concept to her, and she would busily search her own body for the tiny things that inhabited her, feeling the small creatures, her only companions, grubbing for them, then popping each one into her almost toothless mouth, cracking their tough little bodies with her gums before swallowing. By now, she found them tasty, as well as a diversion during her long, friendless internment.

She knew she was abnormal, both of body and of mind, for she had been cruelly mocked, chided, tormented, by her so-called carers – although never by the doctors in their white coats and skin-brushed clean hands – and she could compare their untarnished and perfectly shaped forms with her own.

She vaguely remembered also so many, oh so many years ago, when time did have some relevance, for she had been taken from her room – a spotlessly clean room furnished with a comfortable bed and chairs – and the doctors and nurses had worked experiments on her body and mind. They’d always seemed disappointed at the end of them, though still rewarding her with something sweet and lovely to eat. Neither the experiments nor the sweet rewards happened any more. After a while – how long, she did not know – she had been taken to a horrible, cold room below the towering castle, and there she’d stayed, ignored and alone from that day on.

Only two events from her past had remained in her poor sick mind. Once, when one of the male nurses had interfered with her body, her cell door closed so that no one would hear her screams of protest. He’d appeared to take strange pleasure in what he did, even though she knew she was ugly and malformed. The man was physically sick afterwards, vomiting onto the stone floor of her cell, his body bent, hands stretched out against a wall to support himself, his broad shoulders heaving, his throat retching. It disturbed her. Finished, he’d dashed from the room and she had never seen him again.

During the following months her belly had become swollen and her menstrual blood had ceased to flow, though she couldn’t fathom the reason behind these frightening changes to her body.

On the day the baby was born she was hysterical with fear, but no one came to help her, for it had been a long time since her last cleansing and nobody else had noticed the bump in her belly, lost in the voluminous gown she wore. Through intense pain, unbearable pain, she gave whatever help she could to the little thing that had finally emerged between her legs to lie there, covered in slime, faeces, and blood, stillborn and silent. Exhausted, she had held the tiny, slick body in her arms, not knowing what to do with it. She had passed out, and when she had regained consciousness, it was gone.

The second event she could remember, though only vaguely, was when she had been taken to a room with bare concrete walls and laid in a bath half-filled with a silky kind of water. She recalled floating on the strange fluid while all kinds of things were attached to her: wires to the upper part of her head, tubes pushed into her nostrils and fixed to her arms – glucose to sustain her, they’d said. When the room’s light was turned off, she found herself in total darkness, although she could sense she was still being observed. They laughed. ‘Don’t worry,’ they said, ‘it will all be over in three months.’

Strange and bizarre thoughts began to enter her mind after the first few weeks of complete sensory deprivation: a symbol, black and white and red, both awesome and iconic, somehow aesthetic, yet instilling cold fear in her heart.

She was not conscious of its meaning, nor what it represented, yet it was vivid to her. As time passed she found herself first in sympathy with it, then empathizing with it and then, finally, understanding it. Other bewildering, hazy and indeterminate emblems drifted in and out of her subconscious, a place in the mind where she now lived. An evil silver depiction of a skull and crossbones; a kind of embellished angled cross, two letters, SS, sharply defined like lightning strikes.

Further messages formed, risen from the subconscious but not yet defined, only sounds of voices shouting a phrase that was difficult to distinguish for some time. Eventually, those indiscernible voices became as one, swelling with power and rectitude. ‘Sieg Heil!’ they bellowed. ‘Sieg Heil! Sieg Heil! Sieg Heil!’

But other presences were beginning to creep in: sinuous shapes that slithered into her worldless darkness – her only province, her universe, her cosmos – into the recklessly engaging void that was now her mind. These creatures of the mind’s id – one of the three parts of the psychic apparatus and the unconscious source of powerful psychic energy – played and schemed in her brain, only thinly attached to the corporeal, fusing with her collective memory of bygone eras, of atrocities, attaching themselves to these evocations for purposes of their own.

In this woman’s deranged mind they had found the ideal conduit that would help them return to the physical dimension.

Cedric Twigg hobbled on through the castle, desperately trying to keep his trembling hands steady by clutching the bulky satchel tight to his chest. He licked off the drool seeping from the corner of his mouth. Word had soon got around about the wildcats roaming the woods, but apparently the problem had been cleared up that very morning. The guests were intrigued, but thanks to upped levels of Lithium freely administered, even last evening’s frightful event had dulled in their memories. Besides, a proper authenticated ghost hunter, a parapsychologist no less, was already here and on the case. Time was now short, Twigg realized. But it had taken him months to plan and avail himself of the highly dangerous materials and technical equipment required for his farewell to Comraich Castle and all the people therein. And tonight, with the bigwigs assembled for their gathering, was uncommonly fortuitous.

He knew that, as his condition deteriorated, his masters would soon realize he’d be of no further use to them, and so would find their own means of guaranteeing his future silence. He wondered briefly if they would have chosen the now defunct novice, Eddie Nelson, to execute him, and the thought raised a stiff smile.

Over the past couple of months Twigg had had no trouble acquiring the materials he needed – radio control switches to activate the bombs, timers and initiators, ammonium nitrate fertilizer, diesel fuel and, of course, various parts to make improvised detonators – all of which he bought from contacts in London and other cities. It had been a busy time for him, time that became even more precious when he learned of the date that the important Inner Court hierarchy would be attending Comraich for an extra-curricular summit-meeting.

The penultimate bomb, which was of particular significance to Twigg on a personal level, had been well hidden inside one of the castle’s towers and was meant for someone who he truly believed was a monster. With all the excitement last evening, the assassin had found it relatively easy to sneak into the tower. The incendiary device would set alight all of the tower’s interior wooden structure, primarily the floors and spiral staircase, making it impossible for the occupant of the highest room to escape.
He – it – would be sent crashing down into the fiery Hell from whence it had come!
Twigg sniggered.

Now virtually every bomb was in place. Only one more little trip to the castle’s sub-basement was left. As he proceeded, Senior Nurse Krantz appeared from the other doorway to the special care units. ‘Mr Twigg,’ she snapped. ‘What are you doing in this part of the castle?’