Mitchell, D. M.

by crime The King of Terrors (a psychological thriller combining mystery

  Tremain shouted, ‘Give yourselves up!’

  More shots rang out, whether from his men or from the direction of the car he couldn’t be sure; the noise was bouncing around the rocks making it difficult to tell where anything was coming from. He’d instructed them to fire high, not to hit them – they were worth far, far less dead – but they were panicking under fire.

  Gareth rose to his feet, dazed. He could not believe that Lambert-Chide had died right in front of him. Two more bullets whizzed over his head. Erica dashed out of the car and went over to him, raising the gun as she came to a halt and letting off three rounds, firing blindly towards Tremain and his men. She dashed in front of Gareth, pushed him towards the car.

  ‘In heaven’s name, Gareth, get inside!’

  Then a volley of shots rang out and Erica lurched into Gareth, almost knocking him over. She groaned and slumped against him.

  ‘Erica!’ he said, grabbing hold of her, trying to support her dead weight. He put his arms around her and immediately felt the warm pulse of blood course over his fingers.

  ‘No! Stop it, you idiot!’ cried Tremain, dashing from out of the cover of the boulder to the man who had fired the shots. ‘Stop firing – you’ll hit them!’

  Gareth saw the plum-dark silhouette bound from behind the rock. He prised the gun out of Erica’s tight grasp. As he backed away towards the car, half-carrying, half-dragging Erica with him, he raised the gun and let off a quick succession of rounds, firing wildly towards to where the shots had come from, surprised at the gun’s recoil. More shots flashed out of the dark in return and he heard a bullet strike the car with a dull, metallic ring. Caroline opened the passenger door and together they heaved Erica onto the seat.

  ‘Inside, quick!’ she demanded, thumping him between the shoulder blades with something like fury.

  Caroline threw herself behind the steering wheel, ramming home the gear stick and jamming her foot hard onto the gas pedal. The car careered away in a cloud of dust, spraying pebbles far behind it. Gareth struggled to reach out and close the passenger door, almost being thrown out in the process. The car sped towards a barely visible opening in the trees which he hadn’t been aware of, and he closed his eyes briefly when he thought they might lurch headlong into a cliff wall or a boulder or straight into a tree trunk. He wrapped his arms protectively around Erica to prevent her being bounced around as the car hit a series of deep ruts, rattling the suspension.

  ‘You’ll kill us!’ he shouted as branches rapped the windows.

  ‘I didn’t want to feel left out!’ she said, wrenching the wheel this way and that. Finally the car burst out of the undergrowth in a veritable storm of leaves and twigs and onto hard tarmac. She slid the vehicle round and hit the gas again, forcing Gareth back in his seat. With a squeal of tyres the car raced down the black road.

  Randall Tremain lay on his back, gasping for breath like a fish out of water, and every inhalation sent searing shards of pain spearing into his chest. He knew he had taken one of the bullets fired randomly by Davies; perhaps it was even the last one. He had been shot through the lung. He could even hear the sound of blood filling it up, or thought he could. He coughed, spewing up blood, and he screwed his eyes in pain. He suspected the bullet had gone on to lodge in his spine, because he could not feel his legs anymore. The two men came to his side, one of them chattering excitedly on the phone, the other bending down to him, unfastening his coat to check the wound by the dim light of a torch.

  ‘How bad is he?’ said the man with the phone.

  ‘Bad,’ returned the other, putting his gun away. He checked for a pulse. ‘He’s losing a lot of blood by the looks, getting weaker. I reckon he’s only just this side of alive.’

  Randall Tremain winced as the words from over thirty years ago came back to peck at him like hungry crows attacking carrion. But the irony wasn’t lost on him.

  Soon, very soon, he knew he would be just this side of dead.

  * * * *

  44

  Sprites

  A life. That’s what all this represented, he thought. His life. In the end, as with his grandfather before him, it all came down to the impermanence of physical things. This room, filled with an accumulation of the worthless, the seminal, purposeful and inconsequential. Drawn to people like iron filings to a magnet, and when that magnet is removed they will all fall away and be dispersed again.

  A life.

  Charles Rayne grabbed another armful of books and papers, carried them to a wheelbarrow by the back door and tossed them onto a similar mound of books and papers. When the wheelbarrow was full to overflowing he trundled it into the garden and tipped it onto a large pile of wood, books, files, sheaves of paper and cardboard storage boxes. He returned again and again, filling the wheelbarrow, tipping it onto the steadily growing pile in the dark garden, his actions lit only by the light of stars.

  It felt sacrilegious to burn books, he thought. Some had been companions since his youth, staunch friends when friends were in short supply. But he knew he had to destroy everything that held even the slightest clue. There must be nothing left after he had gone, nothing that could be pieced together as he had laboured for a lifetime to piece things together. Nothing that would lead Doradus to them. He must protect them at all costs. He must continue to watch over them even after he was dead.

  He stripped everything out of bedrooms, cellars, lofts, living room, kitchen, and his eyes were hot with tears as he did so. He knew this time would come. It was inevitable. He’d rather expected it sooner rather than later. But even so, it was difficult, in the end, to relinquish a life long-lived.

  He paused only once, and this was over his grandfather’s old trunk. The catalyst to his life’s work. He allowed himself the indulgence of poring over the dusty old notebooks and journals one last time, the copious hand-written text and scribbled notes the results of many years of research and speculation. In them he found the connection between the young boy he’d been, disfigured by disease, and the old man he’d become, disfigured by duty.

  He scooped out the contents piece by piece, as if scraping out a living thing’s insides, and gradually took it all down to the pyre. He placed the contents of the trunk carefully onto the pile, picked up a container of petrol and doused everything as thoroughly as he could. Pages of books fluttered helplessly in a thin breeze, the mound appearing strangely alive with their movement. He lit a match and flicked it onto the mound, watched the first bloom of blue flame spread across the fuel-sodden paper till the flames roared in triumph and raced across his life’s work.

  He waited till he was certain it was being properly consumed, poking it with a long stick and letting air into it, sparks and tiny flares of burning paper spiralling into the night air like unearthly sprites.

  He went back to the house and put his toolbox on the now empty table, separating out hammer, chisels and screwdrivers. He set about carefully dismantling his computers, his laptops and notebooks, removing hard-drives where possible. He carried them outside and set them on the stone flags, sending the hefty hammer smashing into them. Sweeping up the mangled remains he threw them into the centre of the raging blaze, the heat causing the skin of his face to prickle, the smoke to sting his eyes.

  He stood staring at the white heat of the bonfire, listening to the cracking banners of flame striking the night, feeling that his very soul had been hollowed out; everything he’d ever been eaten away by the crackling, mocking flames.

  He went back to the house, now looking curiously empty, almost unrecognisable as his home, and sat in a chair by the coffee table. He contemplated the memory of his Lunar Club colleagues all those years ago. Like yesterday but over thirty years away now. Howard Baxter the excitable archivist; Carl Wood, the thoroughly decent chap that never had a wrong word to say about anyone. He remembered everyone’s excitement when she first came through that very door the next morning. Remembered how she glanced from one to the other of them, her eyes heavy with suspicion. They fixed her s
omething to eat, which she barely ate, answered a number of her questions, how it had started with Evelyn Carter’s strange disappearance and Thomas Rayne the police officer who had used his detective skills to trace her mysterious life history back – further back than he ever thought possible, till he finally had to admit he was dealing with a woman who had possibly lived many, many years. More than that, how he had uncovered the truth about the strange symbol and the Church of Everlasting Bliss; how Evelyn’s kind had been hunted down by them and destroyed, one by one; how his grandson Charles Rayne had taken up the challenge, had taken it upon himself to trace this Evelyn Carter and to help her; and how Charles had persuaded the Lunar Club members to join him in his search. A search that ended with her rescue from Lambert-Chide’s lab. The reason she sat before them now.

  A full three hours passed in this way. She appeared disturbed at first that they seemed to know so much about her but she settled down gradually. And he remembered the chill in her voice when, to everyone’s quiet delight, the woman they had known as Evelyn Carter began to relate her life story in her own words.

  ‘It begins with a young yeoman farmer called Simon freeman,’ she said, her voice flat. ‘He came from the village of Crewkerne in Somerset. He married in the year 1630. But the marriage was not blessed with children, which pained them both. Yet they thought God smiled upon them, for nine years later they took an orphan girl as their own, whom they named Elizabeth. And so this Elizabeth remained their only child. Simon would have preferred a son, because a daughter brought only problems to resolve, not least in eventually marrying her off. But though her dowry was poor, her good looks went some way in making up the difference and Elizabeth was given away in marriage at the age of fifteen to a man of reasonable means, a rope maker called Robert Franklin from the same area. Robert had a son, also called Robert, by his first wife, who had died in childbirth. The marriage was something of a convenience for them both. But even marriages of convenience can be run through with love and in the early years Robert doted on his young wife.

  ‘Twenty years passed in the blink of an eye and the son grew to manhood. He married, and he brought his new wife into the house to live, as was sometimes the custom. In an age when all were devout, none were more so than the woman her son had chosen to be his bride. She followed her mother’s example of continued fasting to demonstrate her profound godliness; the fiercer the hunger the fiercer God’s divine presence resided within her, and she insisted that the only meat she desired was that of God’s Holy Crown. She would fall into a semi-trance and praise times past when images, statues and the brilliant colours of stained glass windows were shattered, the country purged of its sin just as her body was being purged of sin.

  ‘It was on one of these occasions, when she had been in the grip of a lengthy fast, that her eyes rolled into her head and her finger pointed out accusingly at Elizabeth…’

  ‘The Devil walks amongst men!’ the words gurgled in her throat, and her voice deepened so that it no longer sounded like her at all. ‘His unholy familiar rendered in many guises the better to trick men and thus tempt him down the path of evil…’

  Both father and son followed the path of the woman’s outstretched arm; the index finger trembled as it hovered six inches or so from Elizabeth’s chest. She backed away and both men watched her closely, their faces deadly serious.

  ‘What can she mean?’ said Elizabeth.

  ‘She is God’s holy vessel,’ said the young man reverentially. ‘Why do you back away? There is nothing to fear in God’s pure truth. Unless there is good reason to fear.’ His eyes lingered just a little too long on Elizabeth’s face to prove comfortable.

  ‘I must leave,’ said Elizabeth.

  ‘You must stay!’ her husband ordered in a tone of voice she had never heard him use before.

  She looked from him to his son; they shared the same grave expression. ‘Art thou afraid, Elizabeth?’ he asked. ‘Pray, why is that?’

  ‘I am as afraid of God as anyone,’ she admitted.

  ‘But more fearful today,’ he noticed.

  ‘Because the finger points at me,’ she said, ‘and for what reason I cannot know.’

  The woman sat on a wooden stool, rocking back and forth, the arm still rigidly outstretched, but the hand now a tightly balled fist that made the knuckles glow white and fierce. ‘See, but a single kiss from the Devil’s mouth breathes evil into the body, to course through the body and to consume the soul. See standing before you the Devil’s handicraft, for behold, why, in the face of time’s passing is her beauty undimmed? Why hast not time chipped away at the thin shell of youth to reveal the ageing woman beneath?’

  ‘Please do not say such things!’ Elizabeth begged, her hand to her chest. ‘Son, make your wife stop!’

  ‘When God so wills it so will she stop,’ he said. ‘And I am no true son of yours.’

  ‘What is it you say?’ she asked.

  ‘What she says is true,’ said her husband. ‘Thou art still young, unchanged. Many remark upon it behind their hands, behind closed doors. Where are the lines of old age? Where is the skin that sags and hairs of grey?’ he put a hand to his own head.

  ‘Wouldst thou have me haggard and bent?’

  ‘I would have thee free from possession.’

  She gasped. ‘Possession? I am no more possessed than thee!’

  ‘Look! Look!’ cried the young woman. ‘She grows horns!’ She covered her eyes with both her arms.

  ‘That is not true!’ Elizabeth defended.

  ‘She sees a vision,’ said the young man. ‘A vision sent by God to unmask thy true self.’

  Elizabeth rushed forward and put her hands on the woman’s shoulders, shaking her wildly. ‘Stop this! Stop this blasphemy at once!’ she demanded.

  It was the young man who struck her. A glancing blow with his fist to her head that saw her reel groggily backwards, her hand to her throbbing cheek. ‘Robert!’ she said, shocked. ‘What is it that you do? Thou wilt strike one that looks upon thee as thine own mother?’

  ‘I strike the Devil!’ he said breathlessly, standing between Elizabeth and his wife. ‘And I would do the same again if you once more lay your vile hands upon this the godliest of women!’

  ‘You will leave this house at once,’ said Elizabeth’s husband, ‘for thou hast brought shame upon it.’

  ‘It is my home!’ she cried, tears beginning to fall. ‘Please, Robert, think upon what it is you do! Have I not been a dutiful wife and mother?’

  ‘To enter my heart and corrupt it thou hast done many things.’ He grabbed her by the hair and dragged her over to a tiny looking glass, forcing her to gaze upon her smeared reflection. ‘See? See? The Devil grows not old and you grow not old. It has been the talk in the village for a long while and I have refused to believe the evidence of mine own eyes. But it was all along a trick and finally you have been unmasked by my son’s wife.’

  ‘She grows scales! She grows scales as those of a fish!’ moaned the young woman in the chair as if in response.

  He released her as though frightened, wiping his hands on his tunic as if to remove dirt. ‘Leave!’ he demanded. ‘Leave now, Elizabeth. I will delay denouncing you till first light tomorrow, but no longer.’ She stood immobile before him, her eyes beseeching. He appeared to soften. ‘Elizabeth, do as I say, for your own good. I appeal to the last dregs of the woman that used to be my wife.’

  ‘I am your wife! I am the woman who has loved thee since first we met.’

  ‘I do not recognise thee as such anymore,’ he said flatly and turned his back on her. ‘Thou art the Devil’s vessel and my true dear wife is now dead to me.’

  She was bundled out onto the street and the door slammed closed behind her. She fell to her knees her hands clasped before her, and begged them to reconsider. Then a stone hit her between the shoulder blades and she yelped in pain. When she rose to her feet and turned she saw a small number of villagers scowling at her, keeping their distance, people she had known
all her life. She held out her hands imploringly, but they bent and picked up more stones and pelted her with them till she could take the hail no more and ran from the village covering her head. She ran till she was beyond the village boundary and took shelter in a wood, collapsing in grief and exhaustion by a stagnant pool of water. She eventually lifted her head, peered into the pool with her hand poised to dip into it so that she could drink. But she saw her reflection and screamed, pounding the mocking image into a thousand sparkling pieces with her balled fist. But it settled and the image came back. It would always come back and it would never change.

  The memory was painful; Charles Rayne could read it in her eyes, in her heavy words. They all could. Baxter and Wood were hanging onto her every breath, Baxter’s mouth hanging open fractionally. Time had not diminished the impact, diluted the sting of the tale, and the room was heavy with its implications. She took a sip from a glass of water, a pause in which her gaze played on some far memory, before she started again.

  ‘I was taken in by a convent eventually,’ she said. ‘And here I thought I might find peace. I might dedicate my life to God’s work, to put to rights the wrongs that I had obviously done to incur His displeasure. But it was not to be. As others grew old so I stayed young and I was forced to run away before I was denounced as a witch, sent by the Devil to corrupt the women of the convent. Only then did I truly realise I had been cursed. I do not know what I would have done if it had not been for Stephen de Bailleul finding me.

  ‘He shared my curse. He did not grow old. He had already seen two hundred winters. He had fought as a knight in the Holy Wars against the Moors; told me that as penance for the many he sins committed abroad he had been forced to wander the earth for all time. He told me that there were others like us, too. But time had given him the skills needed to survive and he taught me how to live life like he had done, in short bursts, moving from place to place, creating a different identity, carrying our wealth with us only in the form of gold and silver. But he also taught me about the Church of Everlasting Bliss and to be forever wary of them. He taught all of us. At first there were ten people. Ten immortals. We would never come together all at once, but Stephen was to become our leader of sorts. We knew we were not alone. We had each other and we had Stephen to lead the way. But one by one, over many years, we were hunted down by Doradus, till all that remained of the ten were Stephen and me.