She tries to scream, but can’t. The wounds that killed them gape in their grey flesh, dried crusted and black. Long dead. Long dead. One rises, turns to face her. He wears an army uniform and is dark-haired, with a drinker’s reddened, puffy face and oyster eyes. His eyes are sad, not cruel. In all of this, he’s the first thing she’s seen to strike her with sorrow rather than fear.
But the man in the suit is turning. Shadow falls across his face and stays there as he climbs the stairs towards her, limping as he comes, and she knows she needs to run, especially when the others, the dead ones, rise from their seats in all their ruined finery – evening dress and cocktail gowns, because it had been a fine night out they’d died on – and follow. But she can’t move.
He comes into the light, and she knows him. He wears full evening dress. His lips are loose and wet. Of course, he was younger then. They’re thinner now. And his hair’s fair, not grey, and his face is unlined. But the hair is swept into the same side-parting, falling almost over the eye, and the thin face, the sharp nose – and the eyes, the dark eyes, cold and pitiless now as a shark’s – it’s John, but of course, his name isn’t really John at all.
And finally she breaks free of the spell and turns to run but as she reaches for the doors they fly open and hands lunge out to seize her.
And then Dani is waking; waking to another bad dream.
Waking to find John standing over her, bringing a reeking cloth down towards her face.
5
D
ANI YELLED AND
lashed out at him, knocking the cloth aside. He grabbed at her hair, pulling her head back, and brought the cloth down again. She twisted her head side to side; the cloth missed her face and his long thin fingers struggled to get a proper grip on her hair. She got free, bit at the wrist holding the cloth. He shouted in pain; she tasted blood and threw a punch straight at his groin. John yelled and doubled up, but kept trying to shove the cloth in her face. She kicked out; he fell, rolled away, started scrambling to his feet.
Jesus. He was supposed to be old and decrepit. But he was standing now, flicking his head to throw his hair back into place, passing the cloth to his free hand and reaching under his coat to draw a knife: something nearly a foot long with serrated edges.
Dani wasn’t getting into a fight like that in a space like this. She jumped off the bed and ran. She made a token grab for her rucksack, but missed and didn’t stop to try again. He lunged at her, but he missed too. She yanked the door open and ran outside, blindly.
Which way? Everything was tilting in different directions. She grabbed a wall for support. Had to keep moving. She ran on, nearly falling. Keep going.
Doors. Rooms. Offices. Shapes. Standing in the rooms. One, wearing army uniform, stood, head bowed, before a trestle table on which a row of masks were laid out. Very lifelike masks, like the one the thing in the chair had worn in her dream. The man reached out and fumbled blindly across the table, touching mask after mask and discarding them. A muffled, distorted wailing came from him. Then he found a mask and lifted it, with a cry of joy that was almost as bad as the wailing, and put it to his face. He looked and stared at her. The mask studied her. Its eyes were black, empty holes. And then she was running again.
Couldn’t think clearly. She’d felt tired before. Her drink. John had put something in her drink. Drugged her. Obviously hadn’t thought it was working. Something had woken her.
Figures in smocks and uniforms all around, watching her. Their faces. No, she mustn’t look. She had to keep moving. Had to run.
But which way was out? Which way was out?
Didn’t matter. Long as she kept moving. Burn off the drug; she could think straight again then. Just keep out of John’s reach long enough to–
Her legs buckled; she clutched at the walls again, but she couldn’t get a grip. And then hands caught her, turned her round. John smirked down at her. Her knife – but before she could put a hand in her jacket pocket he punched her, hard in the solar plexus. Air whooshed out of her; she fought for breath. Pain. Couldn’t fight.
The cloth was pressed to her face. “Shh,” he whispered.
A cold surgical smell; the darkness coming down. Masked figures appeared behind John as he let out that high, childish titter.
Dad, I’m sorry.
Then black.
6
W
AKING.
A
DULL
throb in her stomach. Head pounding. The taste of blood in her mouth; the smell of it in her nostrils. Metal digging into her back. Light all around her, bright even through her eyelids. Squinting against it. Trying to move away, but something biting into her ankles and wrists.
“Ah, you’re once more in the land of the living, if we can so dignify this place. Welcome back, Dani.”
She opened her eyes. John stood over her, holding the knife.
“Gideon,” she said. Her voice was a raw, ragged croak, a gallows-bird’s caw. Her head throbbed and spun; she struggled to focus her eyes. Whatever he’d given her was still in her system. “You’re Gideon Dace.”
He clapped silently. “Just so, my dear.”
She gritted her teeth. She wanted to scream, cry, beg, but that wouldn’t help. Not with his history. Assuming any of it was the truth. “Aren’t you supposed to be a bit dead?”
“I told a little white lie, I must admit,” he said. “The part about the fire was true. However, I got out in time. Lost my family home and pretty much all else, but I survived.” He gestured about them. “This was all I had left.”
Dani looked around. They were in a large, empty room. Candles burned all about them. Christ, what the hell was she lying on? She looked down the length of her body and saw it was a metal bedframe. Like the one she’d dreamt about. Complete with leather restraints at the corners, which were fastened around her wrists and ankles. On the floor around the bed, he’d drawn weird symbols in charcoal. “This?”
“Ash Fell. The land belonged to my family, remember? I’d managed to win back control of it, but I couldn’t sell it. And after a while, there was no point trying.”
“What do you mean?”
“Oh, come on, Dani. In Ash Fell, you’re never really alone. You can’t stay here, even as briefly as you have, without knowing that.”
“Yeah,” she said at last.
“A lot of patients lived and died here over the years. Even the ones who were still alive when the place closed... seem to have left something of themselves behind. And they were... displeased with me. They’ve made my life hell for the last thirty-two years. Ever since I was forced to move in here.”
Dani felt a smile twist her mouth. “Nowhere else to go, eh?”
He sighed. “Let’s not make this any more unpleasant than it has to be. It’s not just that. I
can’t
leave. Oh, I can venture as far as one of the nearby farms to trade something from here – you’d be surprised what odds and ends are still lying around, even now – for bread, milk, eggs, bacon and the like. They wouldn’t want me to die too early, after all. They’d rather prolong my suffering. But they’ve... affected me in some way. I can’t go far from here. Barely make it as far as Kempforth. Otherwise I experience pain, nausea, disorientation. Blinding headaches, vomiting. And they only stop when I come back here. They’ve trapped me, you see. And I’ve found things here. Enough that I could spend my remaining years in some degree of comfort. If I can only get out of here.”
He took the knife away, tapped it against his chin. “The thing is, you see, it’s becoming quite urgent that I get away.” He turned, paced a little; Dani pulled at the restraints. The one securing her right hand gave, just a little.
“Age hasn’t been too unkind to me,” Gideon said, “as you can see, but even so I’m hardly young.”
She looked at her wrist. There was the tiniest crack or split in the leather strap. She pulled at it, glancing from it to Gideon.
“My days are numbered,” he went on. “And as far as I’m concerned, I’ve suffered enough.” He turned; she stopped pulling at the strap. He looked at her in silence for a moment. Had he seen? But after a moment, he blinked and went on. “You’ll find this hard to believe, I’m sure, but I bear you no malice, Dani. I’m no sadist.”
“Yeah, right.” She’d seen him in the dream, heard his titter. His jaw clenched for a moment, but then he seemed to relax.
“All that seems almost like a dream to me now,” he said. “It’s funny to look back and realise that was me. At first... at first, I just genuinely wanted to get back what was mine. Not just mine. The family’s. It was my chance, almost. My father had always considered me a disappointment. Partly because of this–” he tapped his game leg “–but also because of my character. I was somewhat, well, dissipated, was the polite term. Wine, women, song, games of chance. You know the sort of thing.”
She could hazard a guess.
Gideon’s eyes lost their focus; he wasn’t seeing her anymore. “Not the sort of thing an officer and a gentleman did. St. John, on the other hand – he was exactly what my father had in mind. But when my father died and we found out what he’d done –
that
part of it was absolutely true – my brother was utterly at a loss.”
Dani raised her right hand slowly and pulled on the strap. No sudden moves, just steady pressure.
“On the other hand, I wasn’t. I knew what it was like to get stabbed in the back. And I knew how to fight battles with guile and wit, rather than with my fists. So I set out to reverse what my father had done to my family.” He smiled; Dani tensed, held her breath, but Gideon kept on gazing into the past. “He would have been furious. At first I just planned to siphon off the money and run the hospital down over a few years. I hated this place. It was a monument to my father’s arrogance and vanity. Destroying it... destroying it was a kind of pleasure in itself.”
She kept pulling on the strap. She felt something give. Careful. Not too sudden. Get a hand free and you’ve a chance. But only one. Got to catch him by surprise. Time it just right.
“But the amount of money a place like Ash Fell
eats
over time has to be seen to be believed. And so I hit on the idea of the tours. And as I went on, thinking of newer and more ways of recouping the money he’d deprived his family of, I lost sight of everything else. And I did terrible things. I admit that.” Gideon blinked; his eyes refocused. Dani let her arm sink back. He looked down at her. “But I’ve paid for what I’ve done, Danielle. It’s been nearly forty years since Ash Fell closed down. Thirty-two of them in here, surrounded by ghosts, tormented night and day. And if I die here, I’ll be trapped in Ash Fell for eternity. And there’ll be no limit to their vengeance then. They can only do so much now, you see, without killing me. When I’m dead, my punishment doesn’t end; it just moves on to another level. And as far as I’m concerned, enough is enough. I’ve paid and paid for my sins.”
Gideon tugged something out from under his sweater; a medallion of some kind, fastened on a piece of string or cord. There was a symbol on it.
“I haven’t been idle,” he said. “My father had an interest in the occult. I retained a few of his books. I managed to find this talisman.” He tucked it back inside his sweater. “While I’m wearing this, I’m protected from the worst the dead can do to me. Not completely. I can still see them, and I still can’t leave. But it’s enough. Enough to do this.”
“What?” How much had she weakened the strap? Enough to break free with her next attempt? She’d only have one chance. She could see a loop of the string poking out of his collar. If she could get to that, get the talisman off him, there might be a chance.
“There’s a ritual I discovered,” Gideon said. “One that would lift all constraints upon me. I’d be able to leave this and wander freely. Spend the last few years of my life at liberty. And more importantly, avoid being trapped here after death. Unfortunately, it requires a sacrifice. I’ve had to wait for a suitable candidate to turn up. And I’m afraid you were the first.”
“No,” she said. Trying to sound helpless, pleading, scared. Actually, that wasn’t hard. “Please.”
“As I said,” he told her, “it’s nothing personal. But it won’t be so bad for you. They won’t torment your spirit; they’ve no quarrel with you. And–” he raised the knife high “–it should be quick and painless.”
His smile was sad. No, he wasn’t enjoying it. But he was going to do it anyway.
“It might be better if you close your eyes,” he said.
7
T
HE KNIFE WENT
up. Now. All or nothing. It all depended on–
She yanked hard at the restraint, and she felt the leather tear.
Gideon blinked, looked down, hesitated–
She yanked again, and the restraint broke. He grabbed at her wrist, but she punched him in the groin. It’d worked before, and it worked again. He doubled up with a yelp, and the knife missed her ear by an inch, plunged down among the springs and stuck there. He yanked at it, clutched at her throat with his free hand.
Dani got hold of the loose loop of string and pulled. The medallion flopped out into view. She grabbed hold of it, the metal edges digging into her palm, and then yanked.
Gideon grunted, his head jerking forward as the string refused to break. And then he realised, and he was grabbing at her hand. “No. You bitch. No.” The knife rose again.
She spat in his eyes; he flinched, stumbling back, and her hand twisted from his grip. She yanked again, and the string broke.
Gideon shouted, lunged at her with the knife–
And suddenly someone was standing between them. Someone in an army uniform.
“No,” said a voice.
The room was getting darker; looking around, Dani could see the candles were flickering out. The dark beyond the dwindling light was moving, the shadows shifting and forming shapes. She looked away from them; she knew what they’d look like.
“Get out of my way, St. John,” Gideon said. He tried to dodge past the newcomer to reach her, trying to snatch the talisman from her hand. She pulled her hand back, folded it to her chest. More candles flickered out. Dark shapes advanced.