The newspaper office was housed in a Victorian building complete with a comer tower. Inside, a round-faced man and a thin woman, approximately the same age, were working at two desks. The man got up, introduced himself as Samuel Trotter, and asked how he could help them. Though he seemed affable enough, there was a sense of guardedness about him.
Laika told him that they were archeologists from Princeton digging at the MacLunie Stones. "Since, as a newspaperman, you're certainly familiar with the area and the people," she said, "I wonder if you could think of anyone who might recall any of the other digging on the MacLunie site."
"Well, there's surely a lot of digging about these days," he said, his face momentarily sour. "But as for the MacLunie Stones, I doubt there's anyone living who'd recall the last time there were any archeologists up there. I believe it was back in the 1890s—I'm interested in local history, you see. As far as I know, they didn't find a thing."
"Well," said Joseph, "our methods are a bit more advanced now, and you never know what might have been missed. There is one thing that I'd like to ask you about, though. Some rumors we've heard."
"Rumors?" Trotter looked ready. The man was dreadfully inept at hiding his emotions.
"We've heard people have been seeing . . . well, things. Ghosts or visions or . . ." He chuckled. "I guess some folks even said aliens. True?"
"I, I don't know anything about any ghosts."
"That's a relief," Joseph went on. "We were concerned because a lot of the older people, not just in Scotland, but in other countries in which we've worked, are a little . . . superstitious about archeologists. They seem to feel that we dig up things that are better left undisturbed. My colleagues and I have had our share of blame for raising plenty of ghosts, and I just wanted to see if there was any of that feeling here."
"Not that I know of, sir. No." He said nothing more, and from his expression, Joseph didn't expect him to.
"We're sorry to have disturbed you," Laika said. "Thanks for the information."
Trotter nodded, looking at them apprehensively, as though he couldn't wait for them to leave, and they obliged him.
"This town is scared shitless," Joseph said, "and I don't think it's of ghosts."
"Ghosts, or what look like ghosts," Laika said, "have got to be part of it. Skye's intelligence told us that much. And it's obvious that Trotter wasn't telling all he knew. He was covering up, but I don't know why."
"Maybe there's something they're scared of more than ghosts," Joseph suggested.
"Publicity?"
"Oh yeah, the paparazzi are just swarming, aren't they?"
"No, and the cover-up may be why. But you can't tell me a whole town would cover up multiple sightings on their own, just to keep busybodies out."
"You thinking the government?"
"I don't know what I'm thinking. But I do know that I'd like to find out a little more about our fellow archeologists up at the Mellangaun Stones."
Tony Luciano went to the door of the caretaker's cottage and knocked. He didn't expect a response, and received none. The car was gone, so why wouldn't the caretaker be gone? If anyone had answered, Tony had a story ready, but it wasn't necessary.
What was left of the outer wall of the castle lay in ruins, and he passed through the opening and walked up to the inner gatehouse. The giant door was visible from the cottage, and he didn't want to have to open it when the caretaker returned, so he went around the back. Near one of the towers, the wall had crumbled enough so that he could clamber up the rubble and climb the remaining ten feet up the angled wall by using the cracks in the mortar that held the stones in place.
After only a few minutes, Tony pulled himself up onto the inner curtain wall of the castle. A stairway was close by, and he descended it into the inner ward, the open area around which the rooms of the castle had been built. It seemed the owners had foreseen that intruders might enter over the wall, for all the inner doors were securely locked, and Tony saw the traces of an old-fashioned wire-based alarm system around the door frames.
With the alarm evasion kit in his backpack, it took him only a minute to incapacitate it. He was delighted to see that the lock on the nearest door was not even a pin-tumbler, but a decades-old warded lock, which yielded quickly to his skeleton keys. The owners, he thought, were either naive or had little fear of being invaded, probably both.
He pushed the door open slowly, listening carefully. But he heard no response to his approach, and went inside, pushing the door closed behind him. The light passing through the grimy windows that looked out onto the inner ward gave the room a twilight glow. It was a kitchen, and the old sinks and cupboards made it obvious that it had last been renovated in the 1940s. An icebox, its cooling coils on its top, stood silently in the corner. Outlets on the walls showed the place had been wired for electricity. There was no food anywhere in the large room.
Tony moved through a wide doorway into what he supposed was a great hall, used for dining. A long table sat against the outside wall, and chairs were placed randomly against the wall opposite. He turned a corner and found a row of sleeping apartments, with an unmade bed in each. The mattresses were made of straw and ticking. When he lifted them, he saw there were no box springs. Each mattress rested on a web of ropes that crossed the wooden frames of the bed. The only other things in each room were a small chest of drawers, a clothes tree, and a wooden chair. There were six such rooms on the ground floor, and six more above, with a bathroom on each floor.
Twelve rooms. Twelve Templars?
Tony tried every door he came across. Most were closets, empty or nearly so. But on the side of the castle beyond the kitchen and opposite the bedrooms, in what seemed to be a storage room, was a closet filled wall to wall and nearly to the high ceiling with old cardboard boxes.
Tony, curious as to what might be inside them, tried to lift one, marked Bovril in faded letters, from the top of the pile, and was surprised to find that it was empty. So was the one beneath it. Why, he wondered, have a large closet filled with empty cardboard boxes, unless to disguise the fact that it was more than a mere closet?
He removed enough of the boxes to reach the back wall, and discovered that it was a pocket door. He slid it open, and found himself looking down a narrow, circular staircase that wound into darkness. There was a light switch on the wall, but nothing happened when he flicked it. The power was probably off everywhere but in the cottage. Taking a bright flashlight from his backpack, he turned it on and started down the stairs.
The stairs were steep, and there were fifty of them, so that Tony suspected he was thirty or forty feet beneath ground level when they ended in front of a door. He opened it and shone his light into the darkness.
The room was vast, and he suspected it sat under most of the castle. Rows of great stone pillars ran the length and breadth of the room. Tony could count twenty-four of them, and there seemed to be more stretching back into the deeper darkness beyond his flashlight's beam.
Three broad slate steps took him down to the level of the room, where a long oak table stood. Five massive chairs sat on each side, with one more at each end. The table was bare, and there was nothing else in the room except for a large wooden crest affixed to the stone wall near the table.
It appeared to be a coat of arms, and showed a fist clenching an upright dirk, the source, perhaps, of the castle's name. Two words framed the heraldic device, but the letters were too worn for Tony to decipher. He stepped closer to the crest, but it was so high up on the wall that he could not quite reach it.
He walked around the room, looking into the dark corners and behind every pillar, but there was nothing else to be seen. The place was surprisingly dust free, and he figured there was no breeze to stir it. With the door shut, the chamber might be literally sealed. He turned off his flashlight to see if any light was coming into the room at all, but he found himself in pitch blackness and turned it back on.
Tony was only a few feet from the door, ready to go back upstairs, w
hen he heard the sound. It was a high-pitched, machine-like hum, but unlike a turbine's whir, or any machine he had ever heard before. The sound seemed to be coming from behind him, and he wondered for a second if there were a generator down there that he had somehow overlooked. If so, perhaps the caretaker had returned and started it. The thought made him tense, but when he looked over his shoulder, the tension grew into something as close to panic as Tony had ever felt.
There in the subterranean room, less than ten feet away from him, something was glowing in the darkness. It was a vertical shape, seven feet high, and seemed to hover in the stagnant air of the cellar two feet above the stone floor.
Chapter 12
Tony Luciano wasn't afraid of anything human, but what he saw before him didn't fit any mortal parameters. He didn't move. He never even thought of reaching for the weapon beneath his jacket. He could only stand and watch, fascinated and afraid, as his eyes adjusted to the manifestation's light, and defined its features more clearly.
It appeared to be a shrouded, slightly bent figure, as Lazarus might have looked, risen from his grave. Near the top there was a face, but a blank face, devoid of features, that was more frightening than any hollow eyes and gaping mouth. On this empty canvas of a face, one saw what one's own mind projected, and Tony saw it soften into the soft lines and gentle features of Miriam Dominick.
A smaller column of light broke away from the whole, but remained connected near the top. It was as though Miriam's arm was coming up, reaching out for him, and he had the chilling sensation that this woman who had loved him enough to die for him was now asking him to reciprocate, to take her hand and join her in death.
Then he made himself blink, and the face was gone, blank again. And in another second the vision itself blinked out entirely, leaving the pupils of Tony's staring eyes to widen as he stood in only the light of his flashlight hanging forgotten in his hand. The sound that had accompanied the glowing form had ceased as well, and Tony could hear only the pounding of his own heart, and his stifled, shallow breaths.
Somehow he managed to lift the flashlight and shine it around the room, but it illuminated only those things he had seen before the glowing shape had appeared: chairs, table, pillars, walls. He crossed the short distance to the door by stepping backward, the flashlight held in front of him as though it were a cross warding off a vampire. Then he ran up the stairs, and at the top, closed the door behind him with a sigh of relief.
But as he leaned against that door in the back of the closet, he heard the unmistakable sound of someone moving in another part of the castle. There were several sets of footsteps echoing down the stone halls, and soft voices. When he crossed to just inside the door to the hall and listened, they seemed to come from the kitchen.
Tony thought about running, but instead he decided to replace the cardboard boxes that had hidden the cellar door. That way, those in the castle would not know that someone had found the meeting room below.
It took him only a minute, and the voices sounded no closer. He assumed that the caretaker and someone else had driven the car through the inner gatehouse and into the open inner ward, where they were bringing supplies into the kitchen. Perhaps the master of the castle was returning.
Tony had shut and locked the door through which he had come, so the caretaker would not know anyone had entered, but he had also disengaged the alarm system, and unless he enabled it once again, the traces of his handiwork would be evident to anyone who looked. Before he left the castle, he would have to remove the small clips that had intercepted the electric signal that probably ran to the caretaker's cottage.
And that meant he had to find a place to hide until whoever was in the kitchen had gone. The storage room was no good, as they might come in to retrieve some of the furniture stored there.
Tony took a small mirror and held it at floor level so that only a half inch protruded into the hall. He could see three different people moving through the kitchen door at the end of the hall. He waited until all three had moved toward the inner ward, and then he dashed silently out of the room and down the hall away from the kitchen.
He followed a stairway upward to the top of the inner curtain. Crouching so that he would not be seen from below, Tony moved down the walkway until it passed by the northeast tower of the castle. Looking down he saw, in a small, open area between the buildings and the tower, a stone well ten feet across, covered with wooden planks cut and joined in the shape of a large disc.
Another stairway wound down the inside of the tower, and he followed it down to the well. A short, narrow passageway led from there to the inner ward, but halfway down it was another door, slightly ajar.
Tony could open it without being seen from the cars, so he slipped inside. From the two anvils and stone fire pit, he assumed that he was inside a blacksmith shop, and thought the likelihood of them bringing any new horseshoes into it was slim. The fact that it was unlocked proved its uselessness, and from it he could easily hear the vehicles when they left.
If they left, he thought grimly. They would eventually discover that the alarm had been turned off, but not necessarily today. If they remained in the castle, there was a chance that he could restore it anyway, long after dark.
As he sat on the earth floor and waited, he thought with a shudder about what he had seen. Tony could not say that he believed in ghosts, but neither was he a complete disbeliever, as Joseph was, or perhaps "had been." The experiences that they had gone through, the things they had seen and learned, would have convinced Carl Sagan, God rest him, of the existence of something beyond science.
Of course, Joseph still held out for the theory that science had to be at the bottom of all they had seen, a science that was merely beyond their current powers of understanding. And maybe that was true.
But Tony didn't know what kind of science could make what he had seen in the cellar appear to him, or what kind of science could enable a being like the Prisoner to send his thoughts across hundreds of miles, make people kill each other, or bring them back from the dead afterward, as he had with Ezekiel Swain.
He understood all too well, however, how Miriam had achieved her psychic miracles: through subterfuge, hoaxes, and tricks. And at the end, her love for her twisted image of God had made her send him to what she thought was certain death.
But her love for Tony had made her come with him, and she was the one who had died, not him. She had met death, beyond any reason for lies, loving him.
He pushed the thoughts away and settled into the mode he had rested in so many times before, waiting. Waiting for the time to be right, to steal or flee or kill.
Chapter 13
"They were screwing around in there for another half hour,"
Tony told Laika and Joseph. "And then they left. I rewired the alarm and went out the way I'd come in, over the top. But I couldn't go back the way I came, so I found a steep stairway down to the beach. Then I headed south, and when I figured I was out of sight of the cottage, I climbed back up to the Stones." He sat back in the lumpy old easy chair in their cottage's living room and sipped his tea.
Laika scowled. "First of all, that wasn't smart. You should've waited for us before you tried a recon like that. What if they'd had a dog with them? It might've found you and you would have had to fight your way out. Oh, I have no doubt you'd have made it, but our cards would have been spread out all over the table."
"Along with your bowels," said Joseph, "if there were a number of doggies."
Laika gestured him to silence. "There's no denying, though, that you may have come across something here. Let's look at the Templar connections first. All we have is an old priest's word, and the French are pretty Templar crazy. The whole Merovingian dynasty connection came out of France, along with its Templar connections."
"But we know there were twelve Templars following the Prisoner's influence," Tony said.
"Twelve is a pretty common number," said Joseph. "Most large dining tables seat either ten or twelve."
Joseph shrugged. "Along with being homes, castles were also military barracks. Frankly, I'd feel a lot more convinced if that coat of arms you saw on the wall had been the Templar symbol." They had all seen that symbol—two knights riding a single horse—branded on the dead MacAndrews' chest.
"It more than bears looking into, though," Laika said. "We'll try and find out what we can about the castle's history, who this Scobie is who's supposed to be its owner, and who the previous owners were. I doubt we'll get much help from the locals. What I'm really more concerned with is this thing you saw in the cellar, Tony. You can think of no possible explanation?"
"Light shining down from the stairway?" Joseph suggested.
"The stairway was black as hell," Tony said. "The only light down there was from my flashlight. I turned it off for a few seconds to make sure, before I saw the thing."
"From what you said," said Laika, "it could have been identified as a ghost, a saint, a vision, even an alien, right?"
"It could've been Jesus, for that matter. I had the feeling that anybody could've seen anything in it, a dead father, or wife, or . . . anything," Tony finished quietly.
"We have to assume, then, that you've seen what a lot of other people have been seeing . . ."
"But that nobody wants to talk about," Joseph added. "I saw one of the things myself last night." Laika and Tony looked hard at him. "Don't sweat it, it wasn't real, just a dream."
Laika, relieved, turned her thoughts back to the castle. "It looks like the caretaker and a few others are getting ready for some occupation," she said. "The MacLunie land extends slightly beyond that ridge that overlooks the castle. So tomorrow we'll start another dig up near there, give us some camouflage so that we can keep an eye on the castle. After we get the site prepared, Tony, I'd like you to do the surveillance, since you're the only one who's been inside it.
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