by James Becker
For a few moments, he wondered if Angela might be held captive inside the building, and if he should tap on the glass or the door, to attract her attention. But something stopped him – some visceral feeling that told him whatever was imprisoned in the shed was not human. His heart thumping, he stepped backwards, away from the door.
Instead, he switched his attention to the grey stone house and the ruins behind it. Choosing his path carefully, every sense attuned to any signs of life, he walked as quietly as he could towards the stone wall that marked the end of the tumbledown building.
As he approached, he realized that his earlier guess had been correct. It was a small church. A few of the roof trusses were still in place, but the battens, tiles and joists had long since vanished. What was left were the four stone walls, a couple of windows and the original door. The windows were above his eye-line, and the door closed, so he was unable to see what was inside.
Bronson did a full circuit of the building before pausing beside the door, the only entrance to the ruined interior. He checked all around him, looking and listening, but the night was dark and silent, the only sound the distant lapping of waves against the shore. Lights twinkled all around, principally from the city of Venice itself in the north-east, and from the mainland, which extended in an arc around to the north, but none of the other islands at this end of the lagoon appeared to be inhabited.
He made a final check, then took hold of the ring that formed the handle of the old church door and very slowly turned it. There was a faint squeak as the old metal moved, and then he felt the door give slightly. He pushed gently against it, and the door swung inwards almost silently. Looking round again, he stepped through the opening into the ancient building.
Dotted here and there across the old stone floor were piles of stones and lumps of wood. Grass and other plants were starting to grow in the cracks between the paving slabs that composed the floor. There had clearly been no attempt made to restore the building. Whoever owned the island was apparently quite happy to let the place fall apart, and for nature to reclaim the site. And yet Bronson felt uneasy. Why had the entrance door opened so easily? It was almost as though the hinges were kept lubricated, and that the door itself was well used.
Then he heard a door opening and closing somewhere beyond the ruined building. Footsteps, of at least two people, sounded from outside, heading towards him, and Bronson knew that he didn’t have time to get out of the church.
He was trapped inside the building.
69
Before Angela could reply, the cellar lights clicked on and she was able to look at her prison for the first time. Seconds later, a guard strode down the stairs and walked across the stone floor to Marietta’s cell. He was carrying towels, two buckets of warm water and a pair of white robes.
‘It’s time,’ he ordered. ‘Get ready; and be quick about it. The first members have already arrived, and we don’t want to keep them waiting.’
He tossed a towel and a robe on to the bed, gave Marietta a malicious grin, and left her to wash. Next, he stood at the entrance to Angela’s cell. Stepping forward, he threw the robe and towel on to her bed, said something to her in Italian, then turned and left the cellar.
‘What did he say to me?’ Angela asked, once the cellar door had rumbled closed.
For a few moments, Marietta didn’t respond. Then she gave a heavy sigh. ‘He told you that the show was about to start,’ she replied, ‘and we’d both have starring roles. I think they’re going to kill us both.’
The girl’s voice sounded flat and resigned, as if she’d somehow managed to come to terms with the inevitability of her fate.
‘I know,’ Angela replied, her voice choked with emotion. ‘They told me we’d die together tonight.’
For a minute or so there was silence in the cellar, then Angela spoke again.
‘What are you going to do?’ she asked. ‘Will you cooperate with them?’
Marietta’s voice broke into sobs. ‘I’m going to do exactly what they tell me,’ she said finally, and Angela could hear her starting to wash in the adjacent cell. ‘What else can I do? If I don’t obey their instructions, that bastard guard will send a couple of his men down here to rape or beat me. If I do as I’m told, I’ll only get raped during the ceremony itself. And I’ve seen what happens down here, so I suggest you cooperate as well. In the end, it’ll make it easier for you.’
‘Dear God,’ Angela murmured, as the appalling inevitability of their situation hit home.
70
Bronson knew that if he tried to leave, they would certainly see him. He had to stay where he was.
He ran towards the door, his trainers making almost no sound on the stone floor, and flattened himself against the wall beside it. Pulling the Browning pistol out of the belt holster, he held it in a two-handed grip, the muzzle pointing down towards the floor. He clicked off the safety catch, and waited.
But the footsteps didn’t stop at the door. Instead, Bronson heard the two men – and he guessed from the snatches of conversation that there were only two of them – walk past the church and on – or so he guessed – to the wooden stable.
Easing the door open a crack, he peered out and crept forward to the corner of the wall where he could see the stable. Two shadowy figures were standing beside the door, both apparently looking down. One held a torch, the beam shining downwards to illuminate the padlock while the other man unlocked it. There was a faint metallic clicking, then they opened the door and stepped inside.
For a few moments, Bronson didn’t move. If Angela was in the stable, he would be able to tackle the two men with his Browning, get her into the boat, and return to Venice before anybody could stop him. But this seemed way too easy. No, wherever Angela was, she’d be in a much less accessible location.
On the other hand, whatever was in the shed was clearly of some importance, otherwise why would the door be kept locked?
He turned back, intending to walk around the opposite side of the ruins of the church, where he would be invisible to the men in the stable, but he’d only taken three or four paces when an unearthly howl tore through the night.
He froze instantly. It sounded like a huge dog, and for a brief, terrifying moment, Bronson thought that the island might be protected by attack dogs. If it was, the dogs would pick up his scent wherever he went and whatever he did. The Browning would dispose of them – he wasn’t worried about that – but the men in the house would know immediately that they had an intruder, and he would stand no chance against half a dozen armed men. He’d be lucky to get off the island alive, and there’d be no chance of finding and rescuing Angela.
Then he relaxed slightly. Guard dogs, or those trained to attack intruders, either worked silently or would bark or growl. The sound he had just heard was neither. It had been more like an animal in pain, and it had sounded close by. Bronson’s thoughts spun back to the wooden stable. There had definitely been something alive inside it.
And that was where the two men had gone.
Bronson ran swiftly around the old stone walls of the church, a moving shadow in the deeper blackness of the night. Before he’d covered more than a few feet, he heard the howl again, echoing from the stones around him, and filling the air with a sense of mournful and impending doom. He reached the end of the ruined building and crouched down beside a bush. The door of the stable was open and a dim glow came from the window that he’d tried to look through before.
Keeping well to one side of the building, Bronson made his way stealthily back towards where he’d left the boat, then circled around to approach the stable from behind. As he did so, the animal howled again, the sound dying away to a threatening growl. Then there was silence broken only by a faint whimpering noise. Bronson edged his way along the rear wall of the stable, turned the corner and stopped beside the window. For a few seconds he just listened, relying on his ears to warn him of the approach of anyone through the darkness. But apart from the noises emanating from the sh
ed, the night was silent.
Slowly, carefully, Bronson looked through the small window. Inside, the walls were unadorned, just plain wood. The men were still out of sight, somewhere over to his left, but beside the door, which was wide open, he saw a long wooden table, a number of tins and packets placed on it, together with several metal bowls, a handful of forks and spoons, and a couple of metal jugs that possibly contained water. It was fairly obvious what he was looking at: the table was where they prepared food for the dog.
Bronson moved slowly, infinitesimally slowly, to the right, steadily bringing more and more of the interior of the stable into view. until at last he could see the whole building. Breathing in sharply in shock, he stepped back. The occupant of the stable was not the dog he’d expected. And what the men were doing to the animal made no sense at all.
71
Bronson shrank back into the undergrowth beside the old church and waited. About fifteen minutes had passed, and the men had just left the stable and were walking back towards the ruins. For an instant, he thought they might have seen him, but their posture was wrong: they were too relaxed, too casual.
They were still talking together as they passed him, and then, stepping slightly in front of the other, one of the men seized the ring handle on the church door and pushed it open. They both stepped through into the ruins and disappeared, leaving the door wide open behind them.
Bronson stood up slowly. For a few seconds there was total silence, and then he heard a distant rumbling that seemed to come from somewhere close by. It sounded like one heavy stone being moved across another.
Bronson reached the open door, looked inside – and shook his head in astonishment. The two men had simply disappeared. He’d walked around the entire interior of the building, just half an hour before, checking for any other way out, and had found nothing. But now, as he stared across the weed-strewn interior, piles of stone and wood faintly illuminated in the moonlight, he realized that there had to be a hidden door, or trapdoor, or something, somewhere in the building, and he had obviously missed it.
And wherever that door was, and whatever space it gave access to, it had to be the most likely place for Angela to be imprisoned.
If he’d seen where the two men had gone, he would have been able to wait outside and tackle them. One man armed with a semi-automatic pistol facing two unarmed men was no contest. He’d missed that chance but, he rationalized, sooner or later they would have to come out. And when they did, he’d be ready.
It was a simple enough plan, and almost immediately it started going wrong.
Marietta looked up when she heard the cellar door swinging open. ‘Not so soon, please, no,’ she whispered.
Shaking with fear, she looked with terrified eyes towards the stairs, and almost wept with relief when she realized that she still had a little time left. The two men were dressed in normal street clothes, not the hooded robes they would wear for the ceremony itself. One of them was carrying a small metal jug, which he placed on a ledge on the wall behind the stone table. Then they walked across the stone floor and peered at both Marietta and Angela, presumably making sure that they had obeyed their instructions and were wearing their robes in preparation for the ritual.
One of the men nodded towards Marietta and smiled, then they both turned and walked back to the spiral staircase.
Bronson stepped silently into the ruined church. Most of the debris littering the floor comprised individual lumps of stone and lengths of wood or small piles of rubbish, far too small for him to use for concealment. The only option he could see was about halfway down the wall to his left, where somebody had made an effort to clear some of the timber and building materials. The result was a heap of debris about two feet high and eight feet long, positioned quite close to the wall. It was just about big enough for him to hide behind, at least lying down, and would keep him invisible to anyone entering through the church door, though if somebody stepped across to the side wall of the building, they would see him immediately. It was a chance he was going to have to take.
The Browning in his hand, he crouched down behind the collection of old timbers. The only sound he could hear was the wind sighing through the branches of the handful of trees on the island, the branches creaking and groaning faintly as they moved. Even the animal imprisoned in the shed seemed to have fallen silent.
Then there was a click and a faint rumble, and a black oblong shape appeared at the far end of the church. Beyond it he could see electric lights illuminating the top of a staircase that was set into the wall. It was obviously a door which led down to a cellar.
Two figures – the men he’d seen in the stable – stepped out and into the church. Bronson tensed, as he prepared to run towards the hidden door and down the steps. But then he relaxed again. The men had left the cellar door wide open, which meant that they could be going back down again. It would be better to wait until they’d left the church completely, and then make his entrance.
But then he realized there was another possibility. They could have left the door open to allow other people to enter the cellar, and this changed the odds once again.
As the two men reached the main entrance to the church, Bronson heard another noise. From over to his right, from the house itself, he heard the sound of shoes on gravel. It was clear that several people were now approaching the old church.
By now, the two men were still clearly visible at the church doorway, presumably waiting for the arrival of the approaching people. Bronson glanced over at the secret door, but knew that if he left his hiding place, he’d be seen well before he reached it. He would have to wait, and pick his moment.
There was a brief instant of silence, and then the first of the new arrivals stepped into the church. Bronson stared across at the figure, disbelief clouding his mind.
The man – and Bronson knew the figure was male simply by the way he walked – was clad in a dark, possibly black, hooded robe, his face completely hidden. He looked like a caricature of a monk, though without any doubt Christian thoughts and prayers were a long way from his mind. Bronson had guessed from the few clues he had been able to find that the deaths of the girls might well have involved some kind of ritual. What he hadn’t anticipated was that the ritual might involve a quasi-religious ceremony. But this was what seemed to be about to take place, because the hooded man was followed by others, all clad in the same all-enveloping robes.
The figures made their way in single file across the old stone floor, the hems of their robes just brushing the ground. Bronson counted eleven, plus the first man who appeared to be the leader of the group. He seemed to remember that thirteen was supposed to be the number of witches in a coven, and wondered if that was significant, if there was another man already waiting down in the cellar.
Then he heard a faint click, and saw that the lights on the stone staircase had been extinguished. A new light, faint and flickering, had sprung to life just inside the hidden doorway. Obviously the leader of the group had lit a candle.
As the man started to walk slowly down the staircase, Bronson heard something else: a single scream of anguish from deep within the chamber below. Could it have been Angela? One way or another, he was going to find out.
Bronson knew he was heavily outnumbered, and he had no idea if any of the group were carrying weapons under their robes, or if there were firearms stored in the cellar. Whatever the case, he had to get down to that cellar.
And suddenly he saw a way of achieving just that. The men filing down the stairs were walking slowly, but they were too close together for him to tackle one without the person in front seeing what was happening. Each man paused inside the secret doorway to light a candle before descending out of sight, which meant several of them were now clustered outside the doorway, waiting their turn. But then the last man in the group stopped and turned back to the church entrance. One of the two men outside the ruined building had said something – Bronson didn’t catch what – and had attracted his attention.
>
The man walked swiftly back to the church entrance, muttered something to the men outside, and closed the door. Then he turned and walked back towards the hidden doorway, through which the last of his companions had just disappeared. At that moment Bronson holstered the Browning and made his move.
He ran across the debris-strewn stone floor after his target. The moment he did so, the hooded man turned towards him, obviously having seen some movement in his peripheral vision. When he saw Bronson, a sudden expression of panic clouded his features, and he opened his mouth to shout.
But Bronson didn’t give him the chance, as he dived forward and slammed his left shoulder into the man’s chest. The impact drove every vestige of breath from his target’s body, and he fell backwards, gasping for air.
The two men tumbled to the ground together, Bronson cushioned by the body that had fallen beneath him. The other man caught his breath and started to rise, but Bronson had anticipated his movement. He punched him – hard – in his solar plexus, and followed it up with a vicious short-arm jab to the chin. The man’s head snapped backwards, the rear of his skull crunching on to one of the flagstones. His eyes rolled backwards and his body went limp.
Bronson stood up and looked all round him. He knew he had only seconds to act before somebody in the group noticed that the last man hadn’t appeared.
He seized the man’s right arm and pulled him into a sitting position, then wrapped his arms around his chest and lifted him upright across his body, like a bulky sack. Moving awkwardly across the ground to the pile of debris behind which he’d hidden before, he simply let go. The man’s limp body crashed to the ground, his head again cracking on to the old stones. At best, Bronson guessed that he would have a concussion and a blinding headache for a few days. At worst, he might already be dying from cranial bleeding. Either way, he didn’t care.