“So what are they going to do then?” Merton asked.
“I’m not sure yet. But they may be able to catch him! They left it in the dining room, and they’re searching the castle for more.”
“We’d better watch what we talk about down there!”
Bryson noticed that they were already starting to turn silent.
Mortimer looked about him for something, and remembered something. “That camera is still out there!”
Bryson instantly froze! He had forgotten it.
“That’s right,” Merton answered, seeing his expression, “that intruder came through that tunnel last night.”
“He should show up on it!”
“But he went through there twice. Once to enter, and the second to leave.”
“And it would have filmed the reporter, and anyone that might have passed there.”
Merton and Mortimer rushed about setting up their equipment, at the exact positions that they had carefully thought out, and had done before.
“Let’s go and fetch it then,” Mortimer said, once he had finished something.
“It could snow!”
Chapter 55
The Forgotten Camera
The police had affected the others with their behavior, and searching all over the castle. Yet Bryson was positive that they did not suspect what they were doing.
Some of them even indicated to him that they had been checked by them, for some reason.
As they were about to leave through the front door, Inspector Bailey approached them.
He realized that they had some equipment brought in to detect the bugging devices better.
Bryson avoided asking any questions about their search, as he could not decide whether he should tell them that he had told Merton and Mortimer.
“Where are you going?” he inquired, searching his face, almost as if he suspected him of something, but was not quite sure what.
“We forgot that we also had a camera out there,” Bryson uttered. “It’s an infrared camera, and it might have captured that guy last night?”
“You had a camera filming something out there?”
Bryson saw an expression of astonishment, hidden beyond his weak smile expression. And he was sure that he now had some sort of plan to capture the person.
“It was filming the vault!”
He had left it there as long as he could, now it was time to check what it had captured.
“I’ll be extremely interested in that film,” he finally muttered, looking at the deep snow with contempt.
“We’ll bring it straight back,” Merton explained, following them to the wood.
“Wait!” he called out. “Take one of my officers with you. It’s too valuable!”
Inspector Bailey glanced at one of his officers, and he joined them.
He obviously was a good runner, and he had chosen him for it. And he was capable of helping them handle any trouble that they might encounter.
There was a chance that the person could do something – if he had heard them leave the castle, and spotted them collecting the camera.
But the detective had a gun, and he persistently showed that he had it, as he followed them into the wood. And they sensed that he was ready for action.
Yet there were no signs of anything about them.
Where was the person? Was he capable of reaching there? The police were covering the roads: he had overheard it, from the detective’s radio, under his outer jacket.
If he did something, and escaped, it would prove that he had a place in the outer radius of the estate.
Yet he could even be staying in a tent, like mountain and Arctic explores did. They only had a few days left, and he only needed to stay there that long.
Bryson realized that they would not have found the body if it had been a day later, as it and the prints would have been buried deep under the snow, and they would still be searching for the reporter.
His skeleton might even have been found years later, partially buried in the ground.
The wood could have many of them, from what those newspapers suggested about those things stalking there, over the centuries.
Once at the structure, Bryson and Mortimer went into it, while Merton remained outside with the detective.
They went down to the tombs. Then they carefully noted that the entrance to the tunnel had dirt over it. The person had covered it over after leaving it!
Bryson then climbed up the tree, and got the camera.
And, as they approached the castle, heavy snow started to fall, covering all their prints.
At the castle, it was almost dark, and the snow was whirling about them. And Inspector Bailey rushed out to meet them.
“Is there anything on it?” he uttered, affected by the wind and spinning snow.
“Let’s check it at our room!” Mortimer replied.
“We’ve not checked there yet, so try to remain as silent as possible.”
“Have you found more of them?” Bryson asked, realizing that Inspector Bailey took it for granted that he had told Merton and Mortimer about the bugs.
“We’ve found a great deal of them – all about the castle! – in places such as the dining room. Someone has gone to a considerable amount of trouble to listen to all of you. That’s not all – that one in the dining room is not working properly, and we believe that the person was either trying to see what was wrong with it or trying to fix it.”
“So what are you doing now?”
“I’m going to keep my men ready, in case he reappears.”
“You may have to do more than that!”
“What like?”
“What about sabotaging a few important bugs, to force him into reappearing?”
“We did that, earlier today!”
He nodded in agreement.
“We may acquire a faint image of him them,” Inspector Bailey muttered, examining the extraordinary look of the camera, Mortimer held.
The four of them rushed through the doorway, back into the now warm castle.
Bryson thought of what he could have overheard, and what had been the most important things that they had said, which they would not want him to hear (but it was almost hopeless, as they had even mentioned the tunnel at some places). And he could only make a guess at what he might know, and hope that they had not wrecked what might be their only opportunity to catch him.
Once in the room, Mortimer removed a laptop from a case, and Merton set it up on the bed. Then he wired the camera to it, and captured what it had collected.
The picture appeared, on the small screen, showing freak gusts of wind vigorously blowing branches about, with large amounts of snow falling from the tree.
Most of the scenes that it had filmed were empty, and usually powerful wind or snow movements, except for good views, after James’s friends had left, of the reporter.
Then a faint view of the back of someone appeared, at night, shifting through the snow, going into the vault, which Mortimer activated the infrared image of, to make clearer.
All of them knew that it was the killer, and, as it went fast forward, they waited in breathtaking silence for him to reappear.
Then his figure, in a blur of dim light, crept back out, like a deformed silhouette of a hunchback.
Chapter 56
The Source
Sounds from the shaft blared out into the night, as they headed away to the top floor.
They only delayed their progress to glance through the windows in the rooms, at the wildly falling snow.
It now was incredible that they had not recognized it at the start – that the sounds were mainly coming through a system of shafts.
“So,” Bryson muttered nervously, “this is it: we may finally find out what all this is about.”
They increased their progress at the stairs, while occasionally listening for the intruder.
Ghostly cries came from behind them, mingling with the howling winds. Frequent currents of air coming from places where it
had penetrated into the castle.
“We may find something,” Mortimer sighed, looking tired.
The top floor was exceedingly dark, but, instead of turning on the lights, Merton and Mortimer illuminated their path with torches.
The sounds were inconceivable, and they could not distinguish where they were coming from, or if they were as loud as below.
There were a few demon-like wails coming from somewhere in its blackness, as they approached the place.
It was astounding how far they had gone.
As they came to where the equipment was, it became obvious that there was something wrong. There definitely was not enough noise.
“It must be coming from below then,” Merton instantly explained, recognizing that they must have made a mistake.
The other scientists went around checking the equipment, to confirm it.
At the door, Bryson rested on a seat, and took a good look at his new surroundings. He could not even recall the room. The others had obviously keenly searched it.
“We don’t understand this ...” Merton spoke to him, after he had finished checking the results that the scientists had pointed out, on some of the equipment. “It has to be from below!”
“Perhaps we’re doing this all wrong!” Bryson replied.
Merton and Mortimer stopped what they were doing.
They sat on the bed, and considered the problem.
“We could climb up the vent in the room below?” Mortimer replied.
“But it will be virtually impossible to check it properly!” Merton spoke first.
“Do we have any more metal pegs with the climbing equipment to do it?” Bryson asked, as he stood, and glared at the expensive wallpaper.
“No!”
“Then we’ll just have to put a hole in that wall.”
It was their only option!
“There are some tools still at the entrance to that hidden passage,” Merton announced, standing.
Merton went straight along the corridor to it, and returned with a large hammer, chisel, and crowbar.
“That’s strange,” Merton muttered, as he put them on the bed. “That sheet of wood should have been covering the entrance!”
Bryson wondered how long it would take to enter the shaft.
Merton and Mortimer immediately started work on a stone that they had decided to remove.
It was further down the wall than the stones that they had removed in the other rooms. And it would allow them to obtain a better observation of beneath them, where they suspected it manifested.
Bryson did not know what Merton and Mortimer expected to find any more.
Was it really some sort of warp or something? He had never encountered anything like it, to compare it with.
But he continued searching for the source of the phenomenon, by listening.
The source could well be invisible. But was it possible for anything to fall into it?
He would not know what to do if he found himself in it, or stuck at the other side, where it could trap things for eternity, or to the end of the universe. Even though he did not understand it, the source could be capable of trapping them as entities, as forms of energy.
It could be flaw in reality causing time to pass at an immensely slow rate, suspending whatever fell in it. But why would he hear those things at the same time speed?
What was it doing there, trapped in a shaft in a castle? Had someone hidden it there for some reason? Perhaps it had trapped the relatives and friends of William Randall in it, and he had hidden it there, expecting them to return ...
But it should be somewhere near the bottom, so that if it collapsed they would not fall to the ground.
However, it might have moved there – proving that it was capable of escaping from its confines.
Bryson realized how tired he had become, and that his imagination had gone haywire. He sat just listening now, to Mortimer taking his turn at removing the stone, and then he heard it shifting out of the wall. And Merton started to help.
He rested a little longer though.
Merton and Mortimer would be famous if they found anything. They would be the only scientists to come up with hard evidence of anything, as far as he knew.
Bryson recalled his dream, the night before, and the vortex spinning about him.
He considered if he had received a vision of inside it. And if it had been, it would be more complex than he had so far imagined (and it might have connections to all of space and time – with things appearing in it from throughout all of creation).
But, seriously, it might have been hidden away for many reasons.
“It moved!” Merton called out, startling him.
In one glance, he saw him gripping the metal bar, wedged between the stones, and the stone coming out.
Could the source have an intelligence of its own? They might have thought that it had been a type of god.
Bryson watched them force it sideways, and pull it, trying to loosen it, and he attempted to help them.
But as they shoved it, the wall crumbled away, under the intense pressure, and as it fell, two heavy chunks of stone fell away behind the wall – plunging down the shaft.
The noise of them crashing below was tremendous, and everyone in the castle would have heard it.
Merton and Mortimer could only stare at each other, occasionally seeing the dust cloud in the shaft slowly shifting about, as though something might appear out of it, with the fury that they had subjected there.
“We’d better tell the police down there what happened,” Merton announced, moving away from the large hole.
Though Merton and Mortimer left, he was too keen to find out where the sounds were coming from to leave immediately.
The dust soon cleared, and he put his head into the shaft.
He had never realized how hard it was to find the location of some sounds, with an invisible source.
Yet, as he thought about collecting the rope from the room below, he recognized a shape just under him, at a damaged area of the shaft wall, where the boulders had smashed down, and he knew that it was an electrical cable, leading to where the sounds were emerging.
Chapter 57
The killer
At the secret passage, going down to the kitchen, Bryson heard scrambling movements and panic-stricken voices. The police clearly believed that they were chasing the killer, over to the vault.
He considered shouting that it was a false alarm, but it was too late.
A blue light flashed over the roof, and he went over to the window. It was worse than he had imagined. The police were rushing about outside, and two of them were in one of the cars, contacting the rest of the police force.
He hoped that Merton and Mortimer were moving there fast enough to prevent things escalating any further.
Then he realized that he might be able to arrive there before them, as they had walked down the stairs. So he rushed down the tunnel.
At the bottom, Inspector Bailey was talking to Merton and Mortimer, as Bryson pushed his way into the storeroom.
“They’re chasing him!” Mortimer declared, staring at him, across the dark kitchen storeroom.
“They heard him rush into the tunnel from somewhere,” Merton continued.
“Those boulders crashing down the shaft must have scared him.”
“We think that he went up through that hidden tunnel to the entrance at the top,” Merton announced. “Because they sabotaged two of the microphones on the second floor!”
“That guy was sneaking around up there!” Bryson gasped.
“If he escapes, we may never have a chance to capture him.”
“I’m going after him!” Bryson announced, checking his watch, and noticing that little time had actually passed since the boulders had crashed down the shaft.
He then swiftly led them into the tunnel, going to the vault.
He surely did not have that much of a head start. If they moved fast enough, they might catch him in the wood.
It was snowing heavily, and it could cover his trail in the wood. They had to be as fast as they could. This would be their only chance to catch him!
As he heard the police, not far ahead of them, he realized that they had not been through the tunnel before, and they were going slow, trying to see what was ahead.
Bryson regulated his breathing, blowing out steam, into the beam from the torch, and rushed on.
He started to recall where all the obstacles were, as he kept his eyes on everything in front.
He felt surprisingly awake now, with no need to sleep.
If things went well, he intended to increase their pace further.
The police were going slowly, and they allowed them to pass, almost not believing that they could capture him, probably put off by the length of the tunnel. And, as they continued, Bryson saw that they were following them, from just behind Mortimer, at the back.
But Bryson realized that he was now at the front, and that the killer could even be nearby. It was a hideous thought! It could be anyone, and be more different from what he had accepted, from what he had seen on the camera from the vault.
He definitely did not want to confront him in the tunnel, as he would shoot him, and it was better to wait until they were outside. Even in the vault!
His eyes stayed on the most distant part of the tunnel, searching for him, waiting for him to take a shot at them, or to attempt to ambush them.
When he recognized the steps, he sprinted there.
And, as he approached them, he considered all the options open to them. Yet he could easily be waiting for them to climb out of the tunnel.
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