Faerie (24 page)

The scene that confronted them left them both too stunned to react for a some moments.

They were staring at a bed chamber, like the one they had just left, furnished beautifully with wall hangings, elegant furniture and plush upholstery, lit more brightly than there room had been, with torches set in sconce around the walls, casting a sickly yellow light over everything. There was a huge bed in the centre of the room, littered with silk cushions and finest linen sheets. There a terrible stink of dried blood, old sweat, excrement and urine as they opened the door. It slammed into them as they walked in, a solid wall of vile stenches.

What they found inside made everything else pale to insignificance.

Chained in the middle was a strikingly handsome young man, naked, bloody, and groaning in pain. Lily let her gaze travel around the room at the vast array of torture instruments, lying scattered over the floor, most of them crusted with dried blood, and felt her bladder weaken.

“Oh my God,” Lily said, moving to the bed and bending over the man to see just how bad his wounds were. He tried to open his eyes, but seemed too exhausted, in too much pain to even have the strength for that, He feebly tried to pull away, but the chains restrained him, and after just scant seconds, he dropped back, exhausted by even that tiny effort.

“No more, please, no more,” he begged, wincing as Lily gently touched his forehead to give him healing.

“It’s all right, we’re here to help,” she whispered, rather foolishly, because she had no idea what they could do to help apart from giving him a little of his strength back. She poured as much power as she could spare into him, and she actually saw some of the wounds on his face and neck begin to visibly fade. He stared up at her with vacant eyes, blinded by his own blood. Lily wiped his face gently on the edge of the sheet, and he focused on her.

“My brother,” he said, his voice hoarse, Lily guessed from screaming so much. “Where’s my brother?”

“I don’t know, perhaps in one of the other rooms,” Lily said. “We’ll find him. Who did this to you?” she asked, although, of course, she already knew the answer.

“Virginia.” The words came out as a gravelly croak from the man’s dry lips.

Connor’s face was thunderous.

“Of course, why should we expect less? She’s a Korrigan after all and that’s what they do.”

His rage frightened Lily a little; she could feel the rage roiling from him in great black waves.

“Connor, we need to stay calm… losing our tempers will only get us killed.”

She could see the battle raging inside Connor, but after a few moments, he calmed down enough for her to settle. She looked back at the young man, examining his body to see how bad his wounds were. He was covered in cuts and bruises, and what looked like burns. His ankles were tied with a thin wire that was cutting deep into his flesh, his hands chained. There were ligature marks around his neck which were deep and raw. His genitals especially were fiercely inflamed and were covered in cuts and burns, runnels of dried candle wax littered his body, like a lepers scabs.

Connor closed his hands over the chains that held the man imprisoned and muttered a spell under his breath. It didn’t work. They too were enchanted.

“Lily, I need your help. We have to move fast before she finds us.”

Lily didn’t argue, but laid her hand over Connor’s and again that same feeling of power flooded through her. The chains crumbled under their touch, as did the wire at his ankles.

“My brother,” the man said again.

“We’ll find him. What’s your name?” Connor asked.

“Billy,” he said. “Find my brother, please. He’s got tattoos on both arms… flames. You can’t miss them.”

“Can you walk?” Lily asked.

“I’ll bloody well walk if it gets me out of this fucking place,” he said, in a strong a Cornish accent. Connor got him to his feet, and helped him walk a few steps; he tottered and almost fell, but eventually managed to stay on his feet. Lily was desperately afraid, for him, for them, because if Virginia found them, this man would not be able to run, he could barely stay conscious.

“Try to get the feeling back into your legs, you need to be stronger. I’ll find your brother and come back for you.” Connor said. “I promise we’ll come back, but I need to take Lily with me in case I need her help to free your brother. “What’s his name?”

“Chris.”

“Can you tell me something I can say to him that will make him trust us?”

“Yeah, tell him that he owes me a pint. He’ll understand.”

They left Billy propped against the door, barely able to keep his legs under him, Connor and Lily went to the next door along – the most obvious place for Billy’s brother to have been imprisoned, if he was still alive. As before, the lock gave under their joint power and they cautiously pushed open the door. A terrible stench spewed out of the door, making Lily gag. It was unmistakable – it was the smell of death.

Inside was absolute darkness – there were no windows.

“If Chris is in there, then I don’t hold up much hope for him,” Connor said, gagging. Lily felt her own bile rising, and retched, covering her face with her hand.

“We have to check,” she said.

Connor led the way into the room and threw a light ball in the air, casting a soft silver glow over the room. They moved forward, slowly, fearfully, but even before they got to the bed, they realised that the occupant had been dead quite some time. It was obvious that he’d been tortured to death. His eyes had been gouged out and his mouth was a gaping dark hole; it looked as if his tongue had been removed. His whole body was covered in terrible wounds. Lily didn’t even want to contemplate what the poor man had suffered before he died.

“That’s not Chris. No tattoos.”

“We need to keep looking,” Connor said, forcing her bodily from the room, and shutting the door.

“How could any human being do that to another?” Lily asked.

Connor gave a bitter smile.

“She’s not human, remember?”

Lily was feeling terribly sick, her legs shaking, her brain strangely befuddled. Perhaps it was simply shock from what she had just witnessed, or perhaps there was some enchantment about this place that dulled the senses and took away a person’s will to resist Virginia’s magic. Either way, she knew that she wasn’t at all herself.

They moved along to the next room and opened the door with trepidation. Lily let out her pent up breath when she saw that it was empty, but the set-up was the same as the other rooms, just mercifully free of any occupant, alive or dead.

“Try the room opposite Billy’s room,” Lily said. They could hear no sound of life inside, but as they opened the door a crack they could see that the room was lit by torches, set in sconce around the room, just as Billy’s was.

The figure on the bed half roused as he saw movement at the door.

“No, please, no more,” he whimpered as they got closer to the bed, trying to pull back.

“Is your name Chris?”  Connor asked, bending over into the man’s field of vision.

The man looked up then, focusing, his face contorted with pain. He had been tortured just as badly as Billy had, his cheek opened up in a great bloody welt, the rest of his body a battle field of wounds and scars.

“Yeah. Who are you?” The words struggled from his lips, his throat working hard to force them out.

Connor reassured him with a smile.

“Friends. We’ve found Billy and he’s okay – he said to tell you that you owe him a pint.”

Chris broke into near hysterical laughter and then let out a cry of pain as the effort almost tore his body apart. Connor pushed him gently back onto the blood and urine soaked bed; there was all manner of bodily fluids crusting it; he probably been left there for days, without food, without water, lying in his own body waste. Lily felt such overwhelming pity for him in that moment, that it even blocked out the rage she felt for Virginia for a few scant seconds.

“Take it easy, Chris. We’re going to get you and Billy out of here. Can you walk?” Connor asked.

“I think so.”

Lily didn’t think so, but they helped him to his feet and out into the passage, supporting most of his weight. Connor cast a glance across at Lily, his concern more than obvious. So far they had been lucky, they’d managed to escape detection, but Lily didn’t expect their luck to last forever. They helped Chris along to his brother’s room and when the two men saw one another, their reaction was first utter shock at the state the other was in and then profound relief and happiness. Billy had found some clothes from somewhere and had somehow managed to dress. They fell into one another’s arms, clinging on, weeping their relief at seeing the other alive, if only barely.

“I found some clothes behind the curtain,” Billy said, “Piles of it, that must have come from all the other poor sods that bitch has murdered.”

Lily pulled back the curtain and what she saw there made the blood chill in her veins. Behind the curtain was an annexe, and it was almost full of discarded men’s clothing: shirts, trousers, jackets, underwear, shoes. There must have been the cast offs from a hundred or more men here. It reminded her of the heaps of clothing she had seen in old footage and photos of the death camps, like Auschwitz. How many men had this creature killed over the years? Some of the clothes looked dated, jackets that Lily recognised as being fashionable in the 70s, some even older. How long had Virginia been doing this? Billy helped his brother to dress, with trembling hands.

“We’re not out of trouble yet,” Connor said. “Stay here, there’s one more room to check and we can’t leave without making sure there are no other prisoners. We won’t be more than a few minutes. Just hang on in there.”

Lily and Connor made their way along to the very last door in the passage and opened the door into profound darkness. As the room blossomed into silver light, the sight that confronted them was worse than anything they had yet encountered, worse than their wildest imaginings. It was a trophy room. There were shelves upon shelves of body parts, mementoes of all of Virginia’s hundreds, if not thousands, of victims. They hung in mid air, suspended in globes of blue arcane energy, bubbles of magic, keeping the parts fresh and preserved for all eternity.

“That creature has to die,” Connor said, his voice violent.

“Connor, no, we have to get out of here while we can,” Lily protested.

“And leave her here to do this to others? No. We have to take a stand.”

He sounded so determined, so sure of himself, she knew that she could never change his mind, but she had to try.

“And what about the kids, what about the Black King? What if we are the only ones that can kill him? The prophecy says that it has to be us. If we get killed now, how can we do that?”

Connor looked thoughtful for a moment, his anger seeming to ebb momentarily as he considered what she’d said. He finally gave a soft, half smile and said:

“If the prophecy’s right, then we aren’t in any danger here, are we? We have to live through this to kill the Black King.”

She couldn’t argue with his logic as much as she wanted to.

“Smart arse,” Lily said, but she realised that he was right. “But what about Billy and Chris? If we fail, then they’re going to die. Let’s try and get them out of here first and come back for the bitch.”

Connor gave a reluctant nod.

“We need to pick up our things, we can’t go anywhere like this,” he said. They were both only half dressed, both shoeless and Connor shirtless.

They went back to their room, Lily thankful that she hadn’t unpacked her belongings. She was still astonished that no-one had discovered their escape attempt yet. She had expected someone to have set up the alarm, for someone to have noticed that they had broken the spells that Virginia had put on their door, but nothing. She wasn’t complaining, but she was almost more disquieted by the fact that no-one had discovered them than if they had.

They grabbed their things and finished dressing hurriedly, making their way back to Billy and Chris. The two men seemed to have recovered a little, strengthened by the prospect of escape and were waiting by the door for them.

“Stay close and we’ll try and get you out of here,” Connor said.

“Could we have that sentence again, without the ‘try’? Chris asked, managing an anaemic smile.

“Just stay close and keep quiet. And we’ll get you out of here, or die trying.”

“I can’t understand why no-one has noticed that we’re doing this? Do you think it’s a trick of some kind?” Lily asked.

“If it is there’s nothing we can do about it,” Conner said, moving along the corridor. “We have to move forward.”

Lily really had no idea of how they could find their way out of here, but she followed in Connor’s footsteps, praying that the Powers That Be would help them. She called on Hecate to guide them to the exit, because she couldn’t remember which way they had come in as hard as she tried. Hecate had helped her before, surely she would help her again.

“This way,” Connor said. And Lily realised that he was right. She could feel that some buzz, that tingle that told her that they were going the right way. Her heart was thumping so hard that she was sure that someone would hear it, the blood pounding in her temples, flashes of red popping in front of her eyes. Breathe, she had to breathe or she would hyperventilate.