The flames finally went out and Harold bent in agony. He had never dreamed his own body could hurt him so much. His fingers were gone!
Bent in fear, he cast an eye at the wooden chest. The white light was beginning to fade but to one side of it Harold's worst nightmare had appeared. The Imp stood watching him. Fire was dancing on the glistening lips, deep red flaming eyes were terror itself.
Harold stepped back. He lifted the stump of his arm and held it across his eyes to fend off the terrible stare. Slowly he walked backwards. The pain was unrelenting, great waves of it running up his arm and wracking his body.
The Imp followed him. It made no attempt to attack him. It was watching his pain and the forked tongue moved across parted lips.
Harold fell to his knees. He was beaten. If dying was the price of escaping further pain it was best to die.
The Imp approached and looked down at him. The fearsome eyes held Harold's gaze and Harold could not look away. He saw Cherie in those eyes, naked, seductive and beckoning to him as he whimpered in fear. This dreadful emanation from Hell knew everything that Harold had planned for her.
It reached forward and took his head between its clawed hands and held it tightly, the claws slowly penetrating into his scalp. He could feel them scraping at the bone of his skull; peeling his tissue away.
Harold screamed but he could not move as the thing lowered its awful mouth and sank long sharp teeth deep into his neck. It drank for some time before it straightened up again. Harold's blood dripped from its chin.
“Cursed you are!” It spoke with a voice that was awful to hear. Harold knew whose voice that really was.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
THE HORROR OF ILSHAM CHAPEL
When we got back to Torquay we dropped Ann Taylor at the Station where she wanted to start some enquiries of her own. She didn't elucidate and we didn't ask. Our confidence in her was total. She, like the rest of us had been very quiet on the journey back. We'd had our beliefs examined and none of us was quite sure where we stood. None of us really wanted to talk about it.
The rest of us went on to Ilsham Chapel passing the Police activity at Kents Cavern on the way but not stopping. Derek Smith was there and the ‘old boy's’ network would be a more reliable source of news than even the Constabulary one. If there was anything there I knew Derek would tell me without delay.
A thousand years old the Chapel stands today in the grounds of a Convent school. A very highly respected local educational facility.
Calling it a Chapel is misleading as it's a simple stone tower of small dimensions and contains a single room on the ground floor, a room above reached by an external stone staircase and a roof that's reminiscent of ancient farm buildings.
It's nonetheless impressive because anything that's survived a thousand years is worth venerating. It's a valuable part of the history of Torbay. It was built like Torre Abbey by Premonstranean Monks sometime around the end of the twelfth century to be a place that the Monks of Torre Abbey could retire to meditate or recover from illness. It is thought to have also served a purpose as a watch tower keeping watch for foreign war ships in the Channel.
It has one aspect that would have been of immense value to Hainsley-Sihl: Very few local people are aware of its existence. It's been completely forgotten.
David Cooper, still in his dust coated uniform and looking tired and weary met me as we parked in the School courtyard. He was surrounded by all the paraphernalia and many talented people that attend the scene of a murder.
“School is keeping the resident girls indoors or sending them off on trips.” he said, knowing full well that they would be my first concern, typical of him not to waste any time on fripperies.
“The dog handlers decided off their own bat to research the house again and found a panel behind which a tunnel led us here. Hainsley-Sihl obviously found it and used it to enable him and his cronies to move from here to the mansion unobserved after dark. I spoke to the School Governess and she told me that he rented the place for storage and in exchange had promised to donate the funds to have it completely restored. Hainsley-Sihl had paid for a fence to be put around it, ostensibly for its protection but no doubt to keep prying eyes away. It's been off limits to the students since more than two years ago.”
He was leading us across to the strange old building, threading our way through parked Police cars and vans. A cordon was in operation around the entire place.
“We followed the tunnel and came up inside. There are other tunnels to which it is connected being explored now that might lead us to Hainsley-Sihl himself. In the original tunnels you were in yourself we've found nothing at all. Not a single usable item of evidence. The rock fall blocked several of them so they’ve become dead ends now, a complete waste of time. It looks to me as though they were searching for a way into Kents Cavern from this end or something. I've called the teams out until they can be inspected and declared safe but we haven’t missed anything - they are empty.”
We followed him up the few small steps and into the lower room. It had two small arched windows and otherwise was just a bare stone walled room. Scant accommodation for pious Monks used to hardened conditions.
It was different now though. Several inverted Crucifixes hung from the walls and a simple wooden Altar stood against the far wall on which stood two very tall black candles. On the wall behind it Leon, Juliet and I recognised the painted symbol of the Tarot card that had identified Joplin as a member of Hainsley-Sihl's Coven; the same symbols that had been on the body that came from the sea just a few thousand metres away. Elsewhere on the walls other Tarot cards had been drawn in a sequence.
The floor was covered in dried blood, gruesome and chilling. There was no doubt in my mind whatsoever that we were standing in the room in which a young woman had lost her life.
They had cut her throat here and then carried her body and simply thrown it into the sea from the cliff tops a couple of hundred yards away, callous and cruel to the bitter end; as cold blooded as it gets.
I remembered what the Navy had told me. She hadn't floated far, out with the tide and back in again. They had been absolutely spot on!
Juliet was white faced and I knew she was seeing the end to which Cherie might now be headed. Leon also, was thinking those dark thoughts. He looked sober and drawn but he refrained from saying anything in front of Juliet. He looked at me and nodded towards the door. We weren't needed here and our priority now was to speed the search for Cherie.
I led the way out and having thanked him for an outstanding effort I told David to go home. He protested but I wanted him back when we did catch up with Hainsley-Sihl. I explained that to him and reluctantly he agreed to go and clean up having first handed us over to the Inspector who was running the search of the newly discovered tunnels.
They were the same as the ones we had seen in the morning, all modern cut tunnels made with modern equipment. I felt sure that Hainsley-Sihl would be somewhere in the tunnels the Monks had cut so long before. Not until they found a link between the two would we have any chance of going after our quarry. That would be the signal that would start the chase for Cherie Leclerc’s life.
David Cooper came over to say good bye, his reluctance to leave obvious with the girl not found and safe. It was whilst I was talking to him that we heard the first scream. It was so utterly chilling that for a moment none of us moved.
It had come from within the empty Chapel and Leon looked at me shocked and said, “There isn't anyone in there is there? I said “no!” But as the screams persisted we all ran that way.
Harold as I learned later he was called, was struggling to emerge from a hole in the floor. The flagstone he had forced upwards lay beside it, the second entrance to a tunnel within the small area of the Chapel. No one had looked for a second as there was hardly space for the first!
He was a shocking sight! Blood ran from gaping wounds in his skull and neck and one arm ended in a gruesome burnt mess of bubbled flesh.
; Graeme Dee bent and physically lifted him from the hole. Quite a physical feat as Harold was a big man. He was laid on the floor and already an ambulance man had come in behind us. I had seen an ambulance outside and assumed it was waiting for Cherie Leclerc if we got lucky enough to find her alive.
The man was screaming uncontrollably and obviously in an advanced state of shock. He had flaming red hair but that didn't help to hide the copious bleeding from his skull. Large pieces of tissue were hanging from his head. I had no idea what sort of accident could cause such a horrendous injury.
That he would be lucky to live was obvious to us all. We stood to one side and let the ambulance crew get to work on him. He was struggling, making the most awful noise and it was getting to my nerves. I'd never heard anyone scream like that before.
“Somebody get hold of him!” the leading ambulance man said and Graeme and Leon tried to control his legs whilst they attended to the wound in his neck. It looked ghastly. A huge piece of the side of his neck was missing.
I was watching his face, mesmerised by the way his emotions were chasing each other across it. He was contorting horribly and I soon realised he wasn't with us. I'd never seen anyone so demonstrably insane in my life. Whatever had happened to him had broken his mind.
Juliet crouched down the other side of him and gently lifted the damaged arm to allow the other ambulance man to attend to the burned hand but to all our horrors as she did so the lower part of his arm came away in her hand. She jerked back shocked and dropped it to the floor and as we watched it turned into a pile of maggots.
The effect on us was shocking! Everyone drew back even the man attending his neck. Juliet rushed past me and started to vomit outside and she probably had from her profession the strongest stomach in the room.
We looked on in horror and disbelief as the rest of him slowly collapsed and started to writhe. Only his damaged head was untouched by it. His face settled into a grimace of unbearable pain.
The Ambulance men did the same as Juliet and ran outside to empty their stomachs, Graeme was so pale I though he was going to collapse. He turned away, put one arm out and leaned against the wall.
I was totally unable to rationalise what I had just witnessed. I stood stock still and Leon had to clasp my arm to get my attention. “Go to Juliet.” he said quietly. “Go on! Get out of here.”
I walked outside and the light and air started to make me settle. I was aware that I was shocked, I mean medically shocked. My hands were shaking.
One of the Ambulance crew was throwing up again.
I watched Leon and Graeme come out. Leon was searching for cigarettes and when he found them he had no shortage of takers, even I took one!
Graeme looked at me. “We're out of our depth here, man. That was bloody awful!
I was watching Juliet. She had gone to stand alone and look out over the playing fields, recovering as best she could.
I walked over and stood beside her quietly and she said, “That's what nearly happened to me Michael. Hainsley-Sihl's 'familiar’ did that to him. The gashes in his head were put there by the ungodly things claws.”
She looked at me, not fully recovered from the shock and unaware that she had just shocked me again. I wasn't about to question an experienced Pathologist on the origin of wounds and anyway I knew she had made an intuitive leap that none of the rest of us could have made. She was the only one who had seen the source of those injuries.
More than anything I wanted to get her away from this case but I knew she wouldn't leave without Cherie. It was after all Cherie's bravery that had allowed Juliet to escape precisely that awful fate. When Juliet digs her heels in volcanoes move!
Leon Henry's cigarette was making me feel ill. I threw it away.
The four of us stood to one side and watched as the Press, who had turned up some hours before, tried to find out what all the fuss was about. We would eventually have to tell them something as they had heard Harold's screaming for themselves. There were some aspects of this case that were going to test our powers of deception to the full.
We were stood there letting the fresh air work on our battered nerves when there was a sudden exodus of uniformed men from the Chapel. I wondered where the hell everyone had come from until I remembered that David Cooper had men searching the new tunnels.
There had been another tunnel collapse. But this time we were told that it had been caused by a small explosion. We had heard and felt nothing on the surface.
Hainsley-Sihl had closed the back door on us!
“Leon was quick to reassess our situation. “He still has to get out himself so there is still a way in!”
After a discussion we decided that it was up to Derek Smith and Ivor Martin now. Either they could find us a way in through Kents Cavern or we were beaten. If there was some other exit around us here at the School we could only leave a team in place and hope to spot them as they left. A tunnel could come up anywhere and it was obvious that Hainsley-Sihl would have been particularly careful about hiding his final escape route.
Graeme drove and we returned to Kents Cavern. It was a hive of activity with a lot of uniformed men and women participating in a very close scrutiny of every inch of the extensive cave system.
Others were going through the paperwork that had been found in the offices, they had nothing to report but unpaid bills. Hainsley-Sihl had obviously decided he was not going to pay up before he disappeared to whatever lair he had planned with the greatest treasure on Earth.
Leon spent a solid hour on the phone to Ann Taylor and then to Brussels. She had been searching for records of other known occult practitioners and was going to try to find any bookings for them in the major local hotels. Leon was instigating the same enquiries across Europe. Passport details would be quickly checked as we tried to trace any movements of such people in the United Kingdom, It was a forlorn hope but it was worth a try.
Whatever Hainsley-Sihl was going to do tonight it was a major event in the satanic calendar and it was just possible that he had invited other Satanists of his own rank to participate or watch as he became the most powerful Adept in a thousand years. According to Juliet he was a man possessed of an enormous ego. It did fit in with his profile as we knew it.
The Inspector that David Cooper had handed the tunnel search beneath the Chapel called and asked if I wanted his men to re-enter them but I knew that Hainsley-Sihl had sealed them against us. It was not worth the risk. They already had the unpleasant task of cleaning away what remained of Harold.
I asked him to organise a watch for anyone appearing out of thickets or woodland or anywhere that an undiscovered tunnel might exit. He knew what I wanted and assured me no one was popping up out of any rabbit hole and walking away. It would get much more difficult as the light faded. There was a long night ahead for a lot of people; it was already three O’clock.
Alan Bolt was still on duty, another tired disappointed officer but he was cheerful enough as he beckoned me over to receive a call from the Chief Constable.
She had been here at Kents Cavern for hours but returned to the Station just before we turned up so I had missed her.
“I've just reviewed the case with Ann Taylor” she told me. “You've got a right handful to manage” she said. “I've never heard of anything like it and we are going to have to put some sort of cover story over the top of it is my guess so stay away from the Press please.” She didn't have to tell me that and I knew that she knew that but I guess some things are best on the record.
“I had a quiet read through everything and the only thing I can see that you might have overlooked is the curator Joplin.”
`I couldn't think of anything we'd missed about him and told her so.
“Have you searched his home and his offices at the Museum?”
“Bugger!” I said and she laughed. “Warrants on the way to you, glad I could help.” She put the phone down.
Ann Taylor turned up warrants in hand and we went racing through the late afternoon st
reets with the sirens blaring. The traffic on the sea front parted in front of us as we dashed along it. Berry Head clear across the water in the late afternoon sunshine and a beautiful twin mast Sail Training Ship out by Napoleon's old anchorage.
Joplin lived in the village of Cockington, one of the loveliest parts of Torquay.
His home turned out to be on Cockington Lane itself, a smart modernised, all mod affair that had cost a small fortune. We broke the door open and I walked in.
“Right! Turn the bloody place upside down!”
We were there half an hour before Ann Taylor found a safe hidden behind a glass cabinet. We would need expert help to get that sorted. I didn't hesitate I wanted fast action so I rang the Chief Inspector.
Provided with an escort the locksmith tuned up an hour later; a good journey time through the rush hour traffic from Exeter.
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