by Simon Clark
It took Marko seconds to cross the corridor. Fisher imagined him feeling his way across the wall until …
‘Got it.’ A second later the lights burned again.
‘Gentlemen. I thought you’d left me alone here in the dark.’
Fisher looked down to see Kym standing there in her patent leather boots. She returned his gaze from a stone flagged walkway a good fifteen feet below him. Kym smiled up at him and he found a reciprocating smile come to his face. Oh, why, does she have to be tied up with Adam Ambrose? Even the way she calls Marko and me ‘gentlemen’ is erotic. OK, OK, concentrate on the job in hand.
‘I thought you were going to use those lights.’ He nodded at the switches just paces from her.
‘Marko’s right,’ she responded. ‘The power supply has been cut down here.’
‘Wait there until I can find a flashlight.’
‘No need. Keep the lights burning up there. I should be able to see. It’s only a question of removing the fuse.’
She stepped forward with that swaying walk of hers. Her boots clicked against the stone floor.
‘Be careful,’ he told her. She smiled back. Was that gratitude for his concern or a ‘Oh, I can take care of myself, little boy’ smile? Hell. She’s beautiful. I could watch her walk all day.
At the doorway she stopped. It formed a roughly squared opening. Its black slab of a lintel bore the weight of the stonework above it. She would have to dip that lovely head of glossy black hair to enter the medieval core of The Tower. Kym paused to glance back at Fisher, her brown eyes met his unflinchingly.
The lights went out. Darkness rushed in.
When she spoke, her Eastern European accents were beautifully modulated. At that moment there wasn’t even a hint of panic. ‘Switch them back on again, gentlemen. No fooling about, do you hear?’
‘Marko,’ Fisher hissed. ‘The light switch.’
‘I can’t find it. It’s crazy, I put my hand straight on it the last couple of times now I can’t … hell, Fisher. What can have happened to it?’
‘Guys? Did you hear me? I can’t see a thing down here.’
Fisher called out into the darkness. ‘Don’t worry, we’ll have them back on for you in a minute.’ Then to Marko. ‘Hurry up.’
‘I’m trying.’
‘Gentlemen. This is not funny anymore.’
‘Marko?’
‘Shit! Wait … wait … got it. There!’
‘So why aren’t the light’s coming on, Marko?’
‘I don’t know. I pressed the strip. I know I did.’
For seconds the darkness weighed on them as if a gargantuan invisible foot ground them down. Fisher even found it hard to breathe, as if that weight settled on his ribs.
‘Bingo,’ Marko exclaimed.
The lights burned as brightly as before.
‘Just a glitch,’ Marko said. ‘I told you I’d pressed the switch.’
Fisher leant over the balustrade to reassure Kym. When his eyes scanned left and right for a second time he had to admit to himself: She’s no longer there. He looked down at the empty walkway. Stone slabs gleamed dully.
‘Kym. Where are you?’ The dead stones, in the face of that house within a house, drained the sound of his voice from the air.
CHAPTER 10
Kym thought: I don’t want to wait any longer. By the time they find the light switch again I can be inside the medieval core. She extended her hand through the darkness. Her fingers found the stone lintel. It was cold. Like handling raw meat straight from the refrigerator. Strange, for a second it seemed as if the stonework twitched beneath her fingertips. Perhaps a build up of static in my body, she reasoned, and you have that same snap of electricity from your fingers as when you touch a car-door handle. Now, concentrate on not banging your head.
With the doorway being so low she had to duck as she moved from The Promenade into what had once been an ancient dwelling in its own right. The quality of the sound was different. The air much cooler. She caught a faint scent of sandalwood. Instinctively, her eyes scanned what would be the interior only it was so perfectly dark she couldn’t make out so much as a silhouette or glimmer of light.
‘Gentlemen, this is not funny anymore.’ So I’ve said the words once already, but they’re worth repeating. What are those two playing at? Are they deliberately trying to frighten me? ‘Can we have the lights please?’ No reply. Surely they can hear? For heaven sakes, they’re only in the gallery twenty feet away. ‘Lights please. Otherwise I shall be angry with you.’
Maybe it is their idea of fun to leave the Czech girl alone in the dark. They might have already returned to the ballroom to laugh about their prank with the others. Idiots. She liked Fisher. She’d even started to imagine herself spending time with him. Why had he played this trick on her? She extended her hand to feel for a wall. I might have to find my way out of her by touch, she told herself. This is a cruel trick to play on anyone. Her fingers didn’t make contact with anything solid. Cool air wrapped itself around her wrists. Another current of cold stroked her naked arms. When she took a step her foot scraped on the floor. The sound returned to her as a flock of echoes from the darkness. She took another step. The echoes grew louder. For all the world it sounded as if someone unseen had taken a step close by.
‘Is anyone there?’ she whispered.
Echoes ghosted down at her. ‘Is anyone there? Is anyone there? Is Anyone there?’
‘Please …’
‘Please, please, please …’
‘Don’t do this.’
‘Don’t do this, don’t do this, don’t do this, don’t do this-sssss …’
The echo became a hiss that continued until it decayed into what seemed to be a whispering, as if there were intruders close by whom she couldn’t see. Meanwhile, her imagination became a menacing, predatory monster in its own right as it transformed the echo into a hiss of sinister voices: Look how she stands with her arms by her side. I could put my hands around her throat before she even knew I was there. She doesn’t know she’s standing at the edge of the old well. Push her down. Imagine how she’d scream as she realized she was falling to her death? Why not creep up behind her? She’d never see us in the dark. We could set fire to her hair. Can’t you just see her dance with her head blazing?
‘Stop it,’ she told herself; the voices weren’t there: it was just imagination.
‘Stop it, stop it …’ mocked the echoes.
‘There’s no one there.’
‘… no one there, there, there, no one. No one …’
That flock of echoes ghosted on the air as if they’d roamed some cosmic distance before their return. In that time they’d become distorted, corrupted – reformed into new sentences that held dark promises for the woman standing alone in utter darkness. ‘No one … stop it. No one stop it, no one … No one … No one …’ The hiss of the echo sank on her as dry as the dust of bones floating through the deathly still air of a tomb … The darkness leaned over her; she felt its greedy presence here. A vampire darkness that would suck the light of her soul from her body. Kym clenched her fists as a surge of panic rose in her chest. Her throat was shrinking. The dry walls of her larynx constricted. She couldn’t shout now. She could barely breathe. She struggled to draw air into her lungs. Her heart thundered in her chest. With a wild effort she struggled to open her eyes wider in case they could capture the meanest glimmer of light. Crimson spots bloomed into blood red stains in the darkness as her optic nerves fought to capture even a glimpse of what haunted this cold, lightless room. Then …
Dear God.
White light streamed through the doorway. More light slanted in rays through the leaded windows, too. At last. What had kept those guys? With illumination came a sense of relief. Suddenly she could breathe again. Inhaling deeply, she looked around the inner core of the building – this house within a house. The angle of the light only revealed her surroundings from the stone slabs of the floor up to waist height. There were no furnishings
other than a large table in the centre of the room – a billiard table maybe? Above her, shadows formed a black pool of surreal intensity. She realized that when the builders of the later house had enveloped this medieval dwelling with their structure they’d removed all the inner rooms, the ceilings, and its roof, to leave a box-shaped husk. Not enough light was reflected upward to be certain, but she guessed that this formed part of the base of the eighteenth-century tower. Now she stood looking up into the shadowed heart of it. Now if only she could find the lights. That would be an awesome view. Only …
Only, she didn’t relish the prospect of the light dying again. The lights in the upper passageway that Fisher and Marko activated (if they hadn’t scooted) tripped out every sixty seconds. Do what you came to do. Find the clock mechanism. Unplug it. Get out. It’s as simple as that. Restricted by the meagre light, she scanned what she could of the whitewashed walls.
How long now before the timer cuts the light. Forty seconds? Thirty? I should have kept track of the time.
At least those malevolent voices she’d imagined had evaporated. And, no, there was no pit yawning in the floor. To one side of her, where a wall ran at right angles from the medieval façade, was a bulky chimney breast of deep red brick that housed a fireplace big enough to roast a whole ox. Set in the whitewashed wall beside the chimney breast was a small wooden door about two feet by four. Bingo, as Marko was fond of saying. That could be the electric clock’s inspection door. Quickly, she crossed the floor.
‘Please don’t be locked,’ she murmured. ‘I just want to get out of here now.’
There’s something wrong with this place. She didn’t put that sentence into words. She knew the truth of the statement, nonetheless. Who would build their mansion round an evil-looking house, anyway? Talk about the imp of the perverse.
Bingo again. There was no lock on the door. She grabbed the brass knob and pulled it open. Of course it was dark in the mechanism housing. If only she had brought a flashlight after all. Now she had to crouch to be eye level with a shadowed lump of something inside the recess. It was too gloomy to see much detail apart from the body of the blind clock, which was rounded rather than squared. If anything, an organic shape. Like a large black cat crouching there. A surreal image she knew, yet an apt one. The curving feline shape sat on a bed of stone which must have been carved from the medieval wall when the clock was installed over a hundred years ago. She could make out cables, then shadowy vertical lines behind the housing of the clock. That could be the hollow tube that transmitted the sound of the chimes through the entire building. Now, there should be a switch to break the current so the engineer could service the mechanism. At least the recess appeared clean. Not even a cobweb. Still crouching by the miniature doorway she inserted her hand into the void. Although deeply shadowed she’d made out a square object the size of a cigarette carton fixed to the wall. A cable snaked in one side and out the other.
The switch box if I’m very not mistaken she thought. She leaned into the recess her hand stretching out toward the inner wall. That was the moment the clock started to chime. Damn.
One … two … three …
Three chimes. It’s not three o’clock.
Four … five …
The chimes continued. A shimmering sound that evoked a shimmering bell given voice by a muffled striker.
Six … seven …
Wait, she thought, there’s something wrong with the timing. I haven’t disturbed the mechanism. Yet the chimes continued. They appeared to grow in volume. The shimmering sound flew outwards only to rush back at her as echoes that had become grossly mutant. The stone surfaces of walls and floors disfigured the purity of the chime. They appeared to grow louder, harsher, more insistent – more like the scream of an alarm warning of approaching danger. Kym turned her head as a residual sixth sense urged her to look back over her shoulder. A man approached through the gloom from the centre of the room. The angle of the light falling through the windows meant she couldn’t see above his waist. But she saw his pale hands dangling by his sides; his dark trousers; a leather belt around his waist.
‘Fisher? Have you brought a flashlight? Fisher …’ Her voice died in her throat.
His feet? The man didn’t wear shoes. The bare feet were grey in that light; dark patches mottled the skin. The toes were blackened with dirt.
The chimes didn’t stop. They grew louder. More insistent. Now it seemed they screamed inside her head. The savage noise tore at her nerves. As she flinched, shocked by the sight of the approaching stranger with its top half concealed by shadow, her hand found the geometric shape of the switch box on the wall. That’s when the lights went out.
‘Fisher!’ She yelled. ‘Fisher! Switch them back on!’
The chimes pulsed their furious sound from the clock. Fisher wouldn’t hear her call. Now she was alone with that barefooted stranger approaching across the stone slabs. There was absolute dark. She could see nothing. Kill the noise. It made sense to switch off the clock chimes so at least she had a chance of hearing how close that sinister figure was. She reached further into the recess as she searched for the switch.
There! Then she knew what her fingers had found in the darkness. Two metal prongs – they formed the contacts that held the mains wire in place. Why she had time to identify what she’d found before it struck she couldn’t tell. But she knew she’d just pressed her fingertips against the naked electrical contacts. The voltage snapped up her arm into her body with such force she felt as if she’d been struck by a car. It knocked the air from her lungs. A blue fire flickered in the inspection chamber. It illuminated the interior with such a vivid light she saw the rounded shape of the clock’s housing, while all the time it seemed to her that sharp teeth had erupted from the wall to gnaw at her fingers as the electricity blazed from the terminals into her skin. Convulsions tore through her body. Her head snapped sideways as the figure extended a pallid hand toward her throat.
Kym opened her eyes. She lay on her back on a hard surface.
Electric shock. She told herself as her mind swam back into focus. Like a fool I touched bare electrical contacts.
Sounds returned as she regained consciousness. Those chimes. Why don’t they stop. Now the chimes tolled with a heavy leaden sound. They were slower, too. She smelt a musty, organic smell. Like an animal’s nest found under boxes in a potting shed.
Switch on the light, Fisher.
Only the shock had robbed Kym of her ability to speak. She blinked. Above her was a piece of timber. A ceiling beam? No. She didn’t remember any of those. But there, directly above her as she lay on her back was a baulk of timber about a foot wide and maybe six feet long. The chimes rose in volume. There was an urgency in that shimmering quality. Kym sensed a figure nearby. She turned her head. She saw a torso that vanished into shadow. The head and arms were hidden by darkness. She turned her head to look down. Bare feet. The same grey bare feet she’d seen before. Panic snapped through her body with the same kind of force as that jolt of electricity. She tried to raise herself from where she lay. Then she realized she’d been tied to a table top. Leather straps fastened her wrists to the timber surface.
‘What are you doing?’
A gaunt face with blotched skin and a stubbled jaw appeared to float out of the darkness. On his forehead a scar formed a moon-shaped crescent. He looked down at her. He nodded, satisfied. The chimes began to clamour in a single throbbing note. Movement from above. She sensed it first. Then saw it. The timber descended smoothly toward her. That didn’t make sense. A ceiling beam can’t be lowered like that. Only then it did make sense. Terrible sense. Monstrous sense. An iron spike protruded down from the centre of the beam. The spike was perhaps three feet long and little thicker than a pencil. She lifted her head to watch its descent. Her eyes bulged. She wanted to scream. All she could do was pant.
And the chimes rose into a phantom’s scream. The iron point approached the centre of her chest. Two feet away. A foot away. Eight inches. Five
. Four. Three. Two.
‘NO!’
One.
The point settled on to her chest. Its point depressed her flesh. The fabric of her sweater pulled tight.
And the agony. Kym had never experienced pain like this before. With a manic sense of disappointment she saw that the point of the shaft was really quite blunt. That’s intentional, she thought. He wants me to suffer.
With a fatal fascination she raised her head as high as she could so she could see the iron point pressing against her ribs. Agony tore through her in withering blasts.
But it’s too blunt. It can’t puncture my skin. It can’t kill me. Only the downward movement hadn’t been stopped yet. Some mechanism applied more pressure.
A pop! One audible even above the mad cacophony of chimes. The iron spike broke through the barrier of skin. Unimpeded it slid smoothly into Kym. The iron shaft was so cold as it entered her lungs. She watched with a horror stricken fascination as blood released through the puncture wound jetted upwards. There was only one lungful of air left in her body now. She used it in the only way she could. She lifted her head from the table, opened her mouth until her lips stretched in a huge agonized O. Then Kym screamed. Oh, how she screamed …
CHAPTER 11
Light flooded the floor. They were slabs polished shinily smooth by centuries of feet walking backwards and forwards. Servants. Footmen. Maids. Lords. Ladies. Even knights in armour. An image rose before her mind’s eye. Men clad in silver metal with feathered plumes rising from the crest of their helmets. One breaks the leg off a roast rabbit to toss it to a black dog that sits in front of the crackling fire …
Wakefulness filled her head with a rush. Suddenly she could see properly. She could hear. She knew the stupid thing she’d done.
Kym opened her mouth; her tongue seemed too big for its cavity; she did her best. ‘Bnn … stupid idiot … I’m stupid … I’ve given myself an electric shock, haven’t I? Then dreamt I was skewered by a man in bare feet, while that thing kept on chiming. What on earth is wrong with it?’