by Jenna Grey
Polly finally managed to drag her eyes away from the terrible sight in front of her and looked down. There on the floor in front of the table was a sigil, identical to the one that was under her bed.
“Interesting,” Bert said. “If I’m not mistaken in my orientation, this sigil is directly below the one in your bedroom.”
“I think I’m beginning to understand things a bit better now,” Polly said. “Hel has been trapped in Helheim for thousands of years, probably since she was first put there; she had no way of getting out, no way of doing any real harm in this world. Like it said in the book, not even powerful creatures like her can escape from it, not on their own. My Uncle summoned her, and he used blood sacrifices to do it. That’s really the only way to summon such powerful spirit creatures, isn’t it? Now she can come and go, at least in spirit, if not in the flesh and she can use her power to do terrible things here on earth. That’s right, isn’t it?”
Bert gave a resigned nod.
“I’m afraid that’s exactly right. Your uncle used the Hellstone to perform the ritual; the stone’s power and the blood sacrifices were enough to give her at least partial freedom.”
“And the final blood sacrifice is me – that will finish the job,” Polly said.
“That is not going to happen. I promise that is never going to happen,” Bert said.
Polly gave a lacklustre nod.
“I still don’t understand why they took me to the warehouse to perform the ceremony when they had everything they needed here,” Polly said, unable to take her eyes off the terrible design in front of her.
“That, my dear, is something I intend to find out,” Bert said. “There must have been a reason, and it could well be that reason is the key to everything.”
CHAPTER SEVEN
Polly was still shaking when she arrived back at the Magic Emporium.
“That was just like something from a really bad horror movie,” she said, clutching the brandy that Bert had thrust into her hand.
“I don’t think any horror movie could live up to what we just saw,” Finn replied, picking up the remains of the bottle of brandy and chugging from it.
“I need a bath,” Polly said. “I stink of death.”
“Oh, sweetheart. As if you haven’t been through enough already. I’m sure you could have done without this. Finn, help Polly upstairs and take care of her. It’s all going to be all right sweetheart.”
Polly let Finn help her to stand, her legs rebelling. She clung onto him as he led her towards the stairs, trying to avoid the minefield of obstacles in her path. He half carried her up to her tiny attic room, her leg’s still refusing to take her weight, and dumped her unceremoniously on the bed. The brandy had kicked in with a vengeance now, but it brought with it a glorious numbness that made it impossible for her to be too afraid any more.
“I’ll run you a nice bath, and you’ll feel much better,” Finn said.
His words floated over her, and she let them.
The bathroom was directly opposite, and Polly could see Finn through the open door, fussing around, as traumatised as she was, but manfully trying to cover it. For a moment, just a brief moment, she saw Liam, not Finn standing there. She suddenly realised how nerve janglingly cold she was, cold right through to the marrow. Her teeth were chattering so much that she had bit her lip and she tasted copper in her mouth. All she could see were the bodies of those children, lost souls, sacrificed to a malicious goddess. If she hadn’t truly hated Hel before, then she bloody well did now. It filled her head and wouldn’t let any other thoughts in.
Finn came through then and steered her across to the bathroom and helped her undress, peeling off her sweat-soaked clothes with difficulty. He helped her into the water, and she sank into it with a sigh of gratitude. It was too hot and scalded her a little, but she didn’t care, she needed that purging heat.
She lay back and closed her eyes, sinking into the steaming water and letting out a long sigh.
“I’ll sit here on the loo if you like, just in case you need anything,” Finn said. “Just relax and, well... just relax. Dad and I shouldn’t have let you go down there; we should have known they’d be something there.”
“You can’t protect me, Finn. I’m at the centre of all this misery, and you can’t shield me from it.”
Finn raised an eyebrow.
“Yeah, I can see you’re dealing with it really well.” Polly gave him the look that deserved; she was coping with it well. Finn looked a little shame-faced. “I just want to keep you safe.”
He came and knelt beside the bath and let her soak his tee-shirt with her bubble covered arms as she closed them around his neck.
“I am terrified, of course I am, but I can’t let you protect me all the time. I have to face that bitch, have to be the one to put her down if I can. I owe her real pain, and I intend to make sure she gets it.”
Polly stayed in the bath until her skin had turned into blubber, and the water was almost cold; Finn sat patiently on the toilet, resting back against the cistern with his eyes closed. He was so pale, the skin under his eyes almost translucent. He smiled at her every so often, but it was a ghost of a thing, hardly there at all. She finally dragged herself out of the bath and Finn wrapped her in the biggest towel he could find, gently rubbing her dry. She unpacked one of the dresses she had brought from home; it was her grandmother’s favourite, pale blue with little pink flowers. She put it back in the case and pulled out a tee shirt and jeans. Laura Ashley and rotting corpses really didn’t go together that well.
Back downstairs Bert was already making tea. Polly had to smile. She felt better now, not good, but better, washed clean of the terrible cloying smell of decay and death.
The shop bell rang.
“Damn, I must have forgotten to put the catch on,” Bert grumbled, as he went through to try and get rid of whoever had intruded on their misery as quickly as possible. Polly couldn’t help but wonder if it was the Goth back, but when she heard the voices drifting through, she knew that it wasn’t. Whoever the visitor was, he had a Scottish accent.
Bert came back just a few moments later with a stranger in tow, giving Finn an anxious look as he led him through into the back room.
Polly regarded the intruder with some curiosity. He was probably in his late thirties, perhaps early forties and filled up most of the doorway – at least six three or four with more than enough width to go with it. His wild mane of dark hair and scrappy beard should have made him look feral, but his face was open and attractive, his soft grey eyes giving him an air of gentleness. He had what Polly called ‘an intelligent face’, the sort of man that could coax people into trusting him. Right at that moment, Polly did not trust him, and every molecule of her body was telling her that this man was a serious threat.
“Hi, Jack Blaine – I’m sorry to intrude – you must be sick to death of answering questions, but I just need to clear a few things up. I promise it won’t take long.”
He seemed affable enough, a bit too affable and Polly felt Finn tense beside her.
“Who are you, exactly?” Finn asked, not even attempting to keep his voice pleasant.
“Homeland Security – this is only routine, I promise.”
Why on earth would Homeland Security want to talk to them? Of course – they hadn’t ruled out the possibility that terrorists were responsible for the attack at the warehouse yet. She was pretty certain that it wasn’t the bodies dressed in black robes that had set the alarm bells ringing, but the armed mercenaries who were carrying highly illegal hardware. Polly glanced across at Bert, and he didn’t seem in the least bit perturbed by the turn of events; he kept his usual sweet smile plastered on his face. She supposed that after you’d faced demons and beaten them into the ground, not much phased you.
“We’ve told the police everything we know, but if we can help, of course, we will. Please make yourself comfortable. I’ve just put the kettle on for a nice cup of tea,” Bert said, with impressive joviality under
the circumstances.
Blaine negotiated his way further into the roon stepping over a miscellany of clutter to reach the chair. There was hardly an inch of floor or wall space; it was literally a minefield of boxes and piles of junk, most of it completely useless. There was a box of old kettles; teachests full of books; piles of old newspapers – even the ceiling was littered with dangling things: an old drum, some deer antler and ropes that held a festoon of glass fishing floats – a real live hidden object game. Polly had asked Finn why they kept all of this junk, and he had told her that some of the items were cursed or bespelled and they just hadn’t had time to sort them out, so they just hung onto them, in case some unfortunate soul got their hands on them.
“Yeah, that would be great, I’m parched. No sugar, thanks,” Blaine said, as he cautiously lowered himself into the old saggy armchair, giving it a rather distrustful look as he did so. He fitted into it, just about, his large frame overspilling it somewhat. “Comfy,” he concluded, settling in.
Finn stood, knees locked, arms folded across his chest in an overt act of defiance; Polly perched on the hard-backed wooden chair with her hands trapped between her knees so that Blaine couldn’t see how badly she was shaking.
“I know I’m about as welcome as a boil, but I do have to tidy up some loose ends,” Blaine continued. “I can show you my credentials if you want.”
Blaine made to reach for his inside pocket, but Bert flapped a hand at him not to bother. Polly had already guessed that he wasn’t police. He was wearing jeans and a tight white tee-shirt with a well-worn leather jacket over the top. Not exactly James Bond, but he had a look about him that made you think MI5 rather than PC Plod. As Polly digested the full implications of what he’d just said, her chest tightened into the onset of a panic attack. She was finding it hard to breathe, her heart thumping. She couldn’t do this; she knew she couldn’t lie to this man, because he was going to see straight through her. Then she remembered what she had just witnessed in those tunnels beneath her house, and she steeled herself. Why should she be afraid of this man? She was working for a higher power, and no human, from any agency on earth, ranked above that.
Polly suddenly realised that Blaine wasn’t paying any attention to her or anyone else in the room. He had plucked an old pocket watch from a box full of junk next to the chair and was trying to read the inscription on the back.
“Oh, sorry. I’m a fiddler,” He said, giving an awkward laugh and dropping it back into the box. “Anyway, I’m from an agency that deals with... well, unusual cases like this, events that can’t be explained away by conventional means. Things that go bump in the night.”
Polly knew precisely what that meant – even the British government, as entrenched in its ways as it was, were astute enough to realise that there were things that didn’t fit into their neat little boxes.
“You mean the government actually has a department to deal with the supernatural?” Bert asked, looking highly amused.
“Well, not so much a department as me. I don’t work that well with others, but yes, I deal with any cases that touch on the supernatural. As soon as they saw the black robes and the sacrificial altar, they called me in.”
Bert gave Blaine a sideways glance and twitched a smile at him, as if he and Blaine were in on some private joke.
“It sounds as if you’re a very open-minded kind of fellow,” Bert said, just a hint of sarcasm in his voice. If Blaine had picked up on it, he covered it well.
“Let’s just say I’m aware that there’s another reality that most people never encounter. I believe that anything and everything is possible.”
“Well, we’ll do our best to help you. It all sounds rather intriguing,” Bert said, “Very cloak and dagger.” Bert handed Blaine the cup of tea, and he balanced it precariously on the arm of the chair.
“The government are still treating it as a possible terrorist attack, because of the type of firearms they found there,” Blaine said. “They’re not the sort you buy from your friendly neighbourhood arms dealer. Their first thoughts were that they were testing some kind of new nerve gas. They haven’t ruled it out, but we both know that what happened there was nothing to do with terrorists, don’t we?”
Bert still seemed to find the conversation amusing. Polly did not.
“You’re suggesting that the deaths might have been caused by some kind of supernatural force,” Bert said.
Blaine stared Bert straight in the face and said:
“I know they were.”
“And you think that Polly, Finn and I know something about it,” Bert said, with a twinkle in his eye. “Are we in trouble, Mr Blaine?”
“I’m not here to cause trouble for you, trust me on that,” Blaine said, with obvious sincerity. “I just need to get some answers. I know you’re good people.”
“Glad we meet with your approval,” Finn said, his voice definitely on the wrong side of polite, his arms still reef-knotted across his chest.
“Finn, Mr Blaine is just doing his job...” Bert protested.
“It’s okay, I’ve rarely had the welcome mat laid out for me,” Blaine replied, with a grin. “Great shop, by the way. I loved this sort of stuff when I was a kid – I’ve got my eye on one of those dragons out front, the big green one that looks as if it’s ready to take your head off any minute.”
“He’s yours,” Bert said. “Remind me before you go and have him with my blessing. Stormwing has been looking for a good home for simply ages. Now, what exactly can we do for you, Mr Blaine?”
“Well, you can call me Jack to start with. Is it okay to call you by your first names?”
“Just don’t call me Herbert,” Bert said with a grimace. “I still have never forgiven my parents for giving me that name. Herbert Fountain, whatever possessed them.”
Blaine laughed. Polly got the idea that Jack Blaine was a man who was used to laughing. The fine lines at the corner of his eyes and mouth told her that they spent more time smiling than frowning. She glanced across at Bert, who just stood there, as if he didn’t have a care in the world.
“Bert it is.” He hesitated then, thinking through his words, but Polly had a feeling it was more than that. He was deciding how much he should open up to them. “Okay. First things first. Like I said, I’m not here to cause trouble for you. All I’m concerned about is whether or not there is a threat to national security. I’m just hoping I can convince you to trust me and tell me if you think that this – or any other country – is in imminent danger as a result of what happened at the warehouse.
Bert gave him a surprised look.
“Oh, I have no doubts about your integrity, Jack, and I’m certainly glad that you’re not here to cause trouble for us, but trust has to be earned. The fact is that I have very little faith in bureaucrats, and whatever your views on the matter, you are under obligation to report back to your superiors.”
Jack put up his hands in surrender.
“I get it. I don’t expect you to say anything to incriminate yourself. I’m just hoping that eventually, I can win your trust.”
“Off you go then,” Bert said with a devilish grin, “start winning it.”
Blaine laughed.
“You’re a canny man, Bert Fountain. Okay. Here’s what I can tell you without giving away official secrets. I’ve had my eye on Elias Gaunt for a lot of years now, and I know what he’s done and what he’s capable of. I’ve linked him to a number of missing person cases, but have never been able to prove anything against him. I think he was responsible for the death of a young lad just a few days ago, but again I couldn’t find any proof. When I got the news through that he was dead, I opened up a beer to celebrate. The world is a damn sight better place now he’s out of the way. I would have been happy to put a bullet through his head myself.”
Polly was shocked at his candour, and she didn’t believe for a moment that it was some kind of ploy to get them to open up and trust him. He really meant it.
“Believe me, you don’t have
to tell me how evil my uncle is,” Polly said, tentatively. “I didn’t want anything to do with him or his friend Dalbert Winchard. Winchard tried to rape me. I stuck a fork in his neck to get away from him, and came to stay here.” Finn glared at her, his eyes darting warning glances at her, willing her not to say anything else. Polly blushed furiously and stared down at the floor.
“Oh, right, I did wonder. I saw the marks on his neck – nice work,” Blaine said. “And I don’t blame you for wanting to get out of that place. You were smart to get out.”
“I didn’t have anywhere else to go,” Polly mumbled.
There was a dreadful silence for what seemed like hours, each of them waiting for the other to speak. It was Blaine that finally broke the silence.
“Look. I know you had something to do with those deaths, in fact, I’m pretty certain you were the one that killed those scumbags, Bert, with or without Finn’s help, but that is of supreme indifference to me. Like I said, I probably would have done it myself if I’d had the wherewithals. All I care about is whether or not the danger is over. I don’t think it is. I just need to know if you know anything that will prevent more innocent people from dying. Other than that, I’m happy never to mention any of this ever again.”
Bert dipped the biscuit in his tea and sucked on it, a thoughtful frown on his face.