by Pavel Kornev
"Are you ready?" I asked Ramon.
In reply, he swung the spigot of his flamethrower.
"I am."
Inside, it was empty. Just bare rock walls and that was it; not even the stucco under the ceiling remained. And also, the ceilings themselves gaped in places with dark gaps. The palace had taken a lot of damage in the assault.
We went carefully from room to room in search of a way down into the basement. When I looked back, I discovered without particular surprise that we were leaving tracks; the floor was covered with fine gray-ash dust.
The first hatch in the floor was found, as expected, in the kitchen. I turned on the electric torch I'd brought with from the armored vehicle and pointed it at the stairs.
"I'll go first," Ramon decided.
I hesitated briefly, then wrestled back an uncomfortable shiver. How I hate basements! And I went in after my partner, intently holding my torch to the side.
The basement was spacious and absolutely empty. The only things there were iron hooks sticking out of the walls and ceiling. Some of them were sagging, and absolutely all were rusted completely through.
Ramon and I quickly exchanged glances and went hurriedly back up. Perhaps, somewhere, there really were secret passages here, but finding them now would involve knocking on walls. A fool’s errand.
"The basement is too small," Ramon decided. "There has to be more to it!"
"You're right," I agreed with my friend.
So, we kept going and immediately ran into a pile of collapsed flooring from overhead. We had to crawl out the window to get into the next room, which had caught our interest from outside.
Our efforts were rewarded with a huge hole in the floor. Ramon stayed standing at the wall. I carefully walked over to the hole, looked down and said:
"It seems this was the arsenal."
"And?"
"It was totally filled in."
We went past a few rooms with floors sagging down into the basement, checked the left wing of the palace and stared skeptically through a window at the utterly demolished right wing.
"Climb in there at your own peril," Ramon decided.
I nodded and called him after me:
"Let's go! We haven't checked everything here yet."
The last way down into the basement we found was blocked off by a collapsed beam, but we still managed to squeeze through the narrow opening. From there, the passage was open, but Ramon had to take the tanks from his back to crawl behind me.
When he had dragged the flamethrower in after himself and put it back on, I went first down the stairs, squatting, and pointed the flashlight down a darkened subterranean corridor.
"Looks like we found it!"
"I do not understand why you're so glad," grumbled my hulking partner.
I ignored my friend's griping. Letting him through first, I took up the rear, my Winchester propped on my shoulder. It was extremely inconvenient to use both the rifle and the torch at the same time.
Soon, we found a side branch and turned down it, looking over the room and its fallen ceiling. From there, we went into the next small room and found a way down to an even lower floor.
"That way?" Ramon sighed.
"Yes!"
He went first down the choppy stairs and soon stopped to wait for me. I joined him and shined my torch over an even surface of black water that came almost all the way up to the ceiling.
"Perhaps they have a boat," Ramon suggested.
"I don't think so," I decided and took a step back.
My partner's theory really did have something to it, but I was already shaking all over with the desire to get out under the open sky.
"We'll leave this for last," I announced. By this point, I was decently worked up, in that it was now near five in the evening. In some places, we’d had to walk over rubble, and in others, we'd had to find a detour, then go down one level. The worst places even had knee-deep water.
But in the end, we found nothing and no one.
The only thing I did find was the pressure of an increasing sense of danger, the whispers of half-forgotten fears, and the shivering of my veins at every unexpected rustling. And not only I was nervous. Ramon was also on edge. He was looking around constantly with an irritable expression and pointing his flamethrower in all directions.
So, when he heard my suggestion that we set the search of the lower level aside for tomorrow morning, he latched onto that idea with unhidden joy.
"It will start getting dark soon," he shivered.
I nodded. It would be totally ghastly here at night.
So, we rushed to the exit. We came up from the basement and, not getting lost in the palace, went outside under the measured drizzle sprinkling down from above through the first window we saw.
Ramon put out his flamethrower and caught his breath with relief.
"Maybe there's no one here," he declared, letting the rain fall on his flushed face.
"Maybe you're right," I sighed, hiding my electric torch under my jacket.
We exchanged glances and walked to the armored car we'd left by the central entrance. The blackness of burned-out earth spread out from all sides and the complete silence affected the nerves in a surprising way, encouraging us to get out of there quickly and never return. It was scary to even think what had happened here on the day of the assault.
We found the self-propelled carriage just where we'd left it. Ramon threw the flamethrower into the back quickly, closed the tailboard and jumped into his seat. I pressed down on the pedal right after that, and the armored car rolled back to the road.
The farther we got from the ruins, the calmer I felt inside. So, when the earth burnt by the rage of the fallen was left behind and the wheels started squelching in the rain-soaked field, I stopped the armored car and got out.
"Leo, what happened?" Ramon asked in surprise, himself still shivering slightly.
"Nothing," I called back and threw a sugar-drop into my mouth. I spun the half empty tin in my hand and asked: "Are you alright?"
"I am," my partner confirmed, shrugging his shoulders. "But I'd still like to get out of here!" and reminded me: "By the way, what about my money?"
I counted out five hundred and looked around. The hill with its overgrown shrubbery was an eyesore, but I wasn't able to figure out exactly what about it bothered me so much.
"What do you think, scatterbrain?" I asked him as he stashed the money in his wallet.
He looked at the ruins and shrugged his shoulders indefinitely. His fear to return to the cursed property and his desire to get another five hundred francs were clearly being weighed against one another. But in the end, he gave a fateful sigh:
"I don't know, Leo. I just don't know. We didn't check the basement all the way, but it was full of water..."
"That's all true," I called back, pointing to the hill. "Ramon, look up there. Does something seem amiss?"
The hulking man removed his cap, stroked the back of his head thoughtfully and shook his head:
"No."
"The bushes!" I suddenly realized. "There's a gap! Look there, the bushes have been cut down!"
"Not a bad vantage point," Ramon decided after taking a look. "Shall we check it?"
"Of course. But we don't need to bring everything this time. Let's stay light-weight. No flamethrower."
"Are you sure?"
"Yes," I confirmed as I threw on the backpack containing Dyak's single-use flamethrower.
We drove the armored car into a glade, put a lock on the door and started walking up the steep slope. Getting through the bushes was quite the strenuous activity due to the thickly overgrown briar, and only thanks to a washed-out ravine were we able to get nearer the top without wasting the rest of the day.
The top of the hill was capped with tall Lebanese cedars. Under the canopy of their shady crowns, neither bushes nor grass could grow. There was just dried out brush everywhere, and a layer of rotting needles giving a spring to my step. It was dark, damp and spac
ious, so the rest of the way took no more than five minutes.
"I hope you inherited the gift of tracking from your New-World forbearers." I joked, leaning against a shaggy cedar trunk in order to catch my breath and give my sprained leg a rest.
Ramon grabbed his Winchester and called me after him.
"Let's go!" he grumbled. "It'll be dark soon."
Ten minutes later, we found the cleared-out area and evaluated the view that revealed itself from there.
"It's an excellent firing position, I'll tell you that," said the hulk, impressed.
We walked a circle around the top and soon discovered another clearing. This one looked out on the country road that led us here.
"That doesn't mean anything yet," Ramon decided. "Anyone could have done that."
"It's all very suspicious," I said, not agreeing. "You'd never find a better vantage point of the area."
"Your point being?"
"You and I are missing something."
I stood up on the edge of the clearing, looked down below and noticed a few cigarette-butts a bit down the hill.
"Where are you going?" Ramon shuddered when I, grabbing the roots sticking out of the ground, started climbing down to the clue I'd discovered.
"Just a second!" I called back, picking the butts out of the grass.
They were fresh. I gathered five, made sure they were all the same, with a characteristic flavoring in the middle of the filter, and kept one for myself as I extended a hand to my partner. Ramon pulled me back, saw what I found and shook his head:
"Anyone could have been smoking here. Anyone."
"You think so?" I snorted, demonstrating the name on the filter.
"Ethereal," Ramon read, looking closely at the small script. He gasped: "You can't mean, they're Egyptian?!"
"They are," I confirmed. "Judge for yourself. What is the chance someone just happened to be smoking these contraband cigarettes in the same place we're now looking for the den of the Moors?"
"We're missing something," my hulking partner reminded me, then shuddered and looked around nervously. "They could have seen how we got here!"
"During the day?" I doubted.
"We have to get out of here!" Ramon continued to insist.
I thought about it, but didn't get stubborn. We followed the familiar path quickly to the bottom of the hill, loaded up the armored car and flew away.
Inside, I felt a mess. The den of the Moors was somewhere nearby, but, if their leader really had belonged to the retinue of the brilliant Rafael at one point, finding his lair would be very difficult. I'd be out of money in a few days, and what then? Acting alone in such matters was pure suicide. Doing nothing, though, was the same.
"Devilry!" Ramon cursed as the armored car gave another jump on the rural road, all beaten up by cart wheels. "My back!"
"Did you get hit in the kidneys yesterday?" I couldn't resist mocking him.
"No," the hulk winced. "That flamethrower has ghastly heavy tanks. It strained my lower back."
"Five hundred francs," I reminded him. "You know how many wagons of coal a worker has to unload to earn five hundred francs?"
Ramon got offended and turned away. He stayed silent like that the whole rest of the way to town.
And it should be said that I wasn't feeling like talking either: evening fell quickly, a fine mist was coming down, the wheels were slipping and the armored car was going out of its way to fly into the ditch. Driving the self-propelled carriage no longer seemed like fun to me due to the uncomfortable sitting position and the strain causing constant pain in my neck and shoulders.
That was precisely why, when the suburban lights started beckoning in the distance, I stopped the armored car on the margin and asked my partner to take the wheel.
"Where should I go?" he asked, getting moving.
"Take the armored car back to the warehouse," I ordered him, " come pick me up tomorrow morning. The earlier we get started the better."
"Back here?"
"Yes."
Ramon nodded with a sour look and asked:
"Shall I drop you off at home?"
"No, just let me out on the way," I answered, sitting back deep in the uncomfortable seat and closing my eyes.
My head was just splitting.
8
WHEN I GOT back home, it was already nine o'clock. I could have ended my business early but, despite my migraine, I decided not to give myself the indulgence and spent a few hours in the public library groping for information on the estate of the brilliant Rafael and its surroundings.
In the end, before poking around in the submerged palace basement, I got the idea to check the ruins of the cemetery chapel and catacombs. The little church was of such ancient construction that no historian had any idea when exactly it had been erected in the center of a field open to the four winds near the residence of a fallen one. But even more than the chapel, my interest was caught by the nearby underground. It seemed there should have been an entrance to the catacombs on the eastern slope of the hill whose top Ramon and I had visited today. And despite all the caution I could muster, I just couldn't call that a mere coincidence.
For that very reason, I decided to start with the catacombs. But tomorrow was another day.
AS I WALKED up onto the veranda of my manor, I was nearly falling down in exhaustion. And as soon as I had my jacket, damp derby hat and dirty boots off, I heard a thud and a shrill cry coming from the dining hall.
"Grub!" shouted the leprechaun. "Grub, now, bugger!"
Marveling at the depraved audacity of my imaginary friend, I walked into the room and grew even more surprised when I discovered Elizabeth-Maria setting the table while the pipsqueak banged a spoon, repeating his chant:
"Grub! Bugger! Grub! Bugger!"
"Chill out!" I demanded.
"The vanquisher of Moors needs grub!" the leprechaun immediately shot back, but stopped slapping his spoon on the table.
Elizabeth Maria looked at me gratefully and went into the kitchen.
"How is Theodor?" I asked when she had returned and placed a huge dish on the table.
"Your butler cannot bear seeing him," the girl said with a nod at the leprechaun. "As soon as he does, he starts to shake."
To my view, Theodor had taken the disappearance of the silver too close to heart. In life, my servant had been distinguished by pedantry and an unhealthy commitment to principle, but after his death, convincing him to compromise had become an utterly impossible affair.
So I just shrugged my shoulders and headed off to wash my hands.
When I was back, the leprechaun had a napkin tied around his neck and was licking his lips in anticipation of a big meal. Elizabeth-Maria, meanwhile, set down a dish of stewed meat.
"Faster! Move your ass, bugger!" the pipsqueak hurried her along, fidgeting on the chair in impatience. After receiving a plate, he sniffed at it, poked the meat with a table knife and cringed: "Rat poison!"
"Come off it!" I demanded, but he had no intention of calming down.
"Bugger! Leo, this is rat poison!" the leprechaun repeated, tearing the napkin from his neck before he scurried away, grabbing a wine bottle off the table in passing.
Elizabeth-Maria looked angrily after him, then said in a sweet little voice:
"Rat poison in the meat? Not at all! There is rat poison in one of the wine bottles, though. And which one that is, only I know!"
The leprechaun turned in the door frame, puffed out his cheeks indignantly and cursed out:
"Shrew!"
"Bon appétit," the girl smiled, no less sweetly than before.
She was in rare form today.
I, on the other hand, was feeling somewhat low, so I slogged through dinner in silence and asked my butler to bring tea to my quarters.
"As you say, Viscount," Theodor nodded as he cleared the table.
"Leo!" Elizabeth-Maria called out to me before I managed to leave the room. "How is this possible?"
I turned around in incom
prehension.
"What exactly are you surprised at?"
"The leprechaun. He's too real to be from your imagination. What is giving him his power?"
"Treasure!" Theodor immediately called back. "Where there's a leprechaun, there must be treasure. It's all in the treasure!"
The girl nodded in contemplation:
"Maybe it is a treasure. What then? It will be a glorious hunt."
"Just don't tear the whole house down," I demanded, having no doubt that I would soon discover the surreptitious allies rapping away at the walls, or perhaps digging up the garden.
And why not? I then, with a calm heart, headed into the bedroom.
To my extremely great relief, there was no leprechaun in the room. The only trace of his recent presence had been an empty bottle, cigarette butts and wax on the arm of the chair and those had already been cleaned up by my butler, who couldn't bear the mess.
The portrait of Elizabeth-Maria von Nalz was lying on the desk; I looked at it until the aching pain in my chest became unbearable, then laid down in bed. I didn't even put out the light, just closed my eyes for a second in anticipation of my evening tea. Next thing I knew, Elizabeth-Maria was nudging me awake in the morning.
"Leo, the police have come for you!" she said, relaying some extremely unpleasant news.
I shot up like I'd been stung, but immediately remembered Ramon and the car and laid back down.
"I'll be right down," I promised the girl, and she left the room, wrapped up tight in a long, warm robe.
My sleepiness cast off, I took my jacket, threw it on as I walked and trudged down to the first floor, fostering the hope that my derby hat and boots had managed to at least slightly dry out overnight.
Theodor really had thought to dry them out, but there was a gusty wind blowing outside sprinkling down a fine, miserable rain. Putting up my jacket collar did little to help, if not to say it did nothing to help at all. The rain just flowed right down past the collar. I hurried through the dead garden, still more homely and frightening than before, jumped past the gates and vanished into the armored vehicle, taking shelter from the bad weather.