T
ony Luciano wasn't afraid of anything human, but what he saw before him didn't fit any mortal parameters. He didn't move. He never even thought of reaching for the weapon beneath his jacket. He could only stand and watch, fascinated and afraid, as his eyes adjusted to the manifestation's light, and defined its features more clearly.
It appeared to be a shrouded, slightly bent figure, as Lazarus might have looked, risen from his grave. Near the top there was a face, but a blank face, devoid of features, that was more frightening than any hollow eyes and gaping mouth. On this empty canvas of a face, one saw what one's own mind projected, and Tony saw it soften into the soft lines and gentle features of Miriam Dominick.
A smaller column of light broke away from the whole, but remained connected near the top. It was as though Miriam's arm was coming up, reaching out for him, and he had the chilling sensation that this woman who had loved him enough to die for him was now asking him to reciprocate, to take her hand and join her in death.
Then he made himself blink, and the face was gone, blank again. And in another second the vision itself blinked out entirely, leaving the pupils of Tony's staring eyes to widen as he stood in only the light of his flashlight hanging forgotten in his hand. The sound that had accompanied the glowing form had ceased as well, and Tony could hear only the pounding of his own heart, and his stifled, shallow breaths.
Somehow he managed to lift the flashlight and shine it around the room, but it illuminated only those things he had seen before the glowing shape had appeared: chairs, table, pillars, walls. He crossed the short distance to the door by stepping backward, the flashlight held in front of him as though it were a cross warding off a vampire. Then he ran up the stairs, and at the top, closed the door behind him with a sigh of relief.
But as he leaned against that door in the back of the closet, he heard the unmistakable sound of someone moving in another part of the castle. There were several sets of footsteps echoing down the stone halls, and soft voices. When he crossed to just inside the door to the hall and listened, they seemed to come from the kitchen.
Tony thought about running, but instead he decided to replace the cardboard boxes that had hidden the cellar door. That way, those in the castle would not know that someone had found the meeting room below.
It took him only a minute, and the voices sounded no closer. He assumed that the caretaker and someone else had driven the car through the inner gatehouse and into the open inner ward, where they were bringing supplies into the kitchen. Perhaps the master of the castle was returning.
Tony had shut and locked the door through which he had come, so the caretaker would not know anyone had entered, but he had also disengaged the alarm system, and unless he enabled it once again, the traces of his handiwork would be evident to anyone who looked. Before he left the castle, he would have to remove the small clips that had intercepted the electric signal that probably ran to the caretaker's cottage.
And that meant he had to find a place to hide until whoever was in the kitchen had gone. The storage room was no good, as they might come in to retrieve some of the furniture stored there.
Tony took a small mirror and held it at floor level so that only a half inch protruded into the hall. He could see three different people moving through the kitchen door at the end of the hall. He waited until all three had moved toward the inner ward, and then he dashed silently out of the room and down the hall away from the kitchen.
He followed a stairway upward to the top of the inner curtain. Crouching so that he would not be seen from below, Tony moved down the walkway until it passed by the northeast tower of the castle. Looking down he saw, in a small, open area between the buildings and the tower, a stone well ten feet across, covered with wooden planks cut and joined in the shape of a large disc.
Another stairway wound down the inside of the tower, and he followed it down to the well. A short, narrow passageway led from there to the inner ward, but halfway down it was another door, slightly ajar.
Tony could open it without being seen from the cars, so he slipped inside. From the two anvils and stone fire pit, he assumed that he was inside a blacksmith shop, and thought the likelihood of them bringing any new horseshoes into it was slim. The fact that it was unlocked proved its uselessness, and from it he could easily hear the vehicles when they left.
If they left
, he thought grimly. They would eventually discover that the alarm had been turned off, but not necessarily today. If they remained in the castle, there was a chance that he could restore it anyway, long after dark.
As he sat on the earth floor and waited, he thought with a shudder about what he had seen. Tony could not say that he believed in ghosts, but neither was he a complete disbeliever, as Joseph was, or perhaps "had been." The experiences that they had gone through, the things they had seen and learned, would have convinced Carl Sagan, God rest him, of the existence of something beyond science.
Of course, Joseph still held out for the theory that science had to be at the bottom of all they had seen, a science that was merely beyond their current powers of understanding. And maybe that was true.
But Tony didn't know what kind of science could make what he had seen in the cellar appear to him, or what kind of science could enable a being like the Prisoner to send his thoughts across hundreds of miles, make people kill each other, or bring them back from the dead afterward, as he had with Ezekiel Swain.
He understood all too well, however, how Miriam had achieved her psychic miracles: through subterfuge, hoaxes, and tricks. And at the end, her love for her twisted image of God had made her send him to what she thought was certain death.
But her love for Tony had made her come with him, and she was the one who had died, not him. She had met death, beyond any reason for lies, loving him.
He pushed the thoughts away and settled into the mode he had rested in so many times before, waiting. Waiting for the time to be right, to steal or flee or kill.
"T
hey were screwing around in there for another half hour,"
Tony told Laika and Joseph. "And then they left. I rewired the alarm and went out the way I'd come in, over the top. But I couldn't go back the way I came, so I found a steep stairway down to the beach. Then I headed south, and when I figured I was out of sight of the cottage, I climbed back up to the Stones." He sat back in the lumpy old easy chair in their cottage's living room and sipped his tea.
Laika scowled. "First of all, that wasn't smart. You should've waited for us before you tried a recon like that. What if they'd had a dog with them? It might've found you and you would have had to fight your way out. Oh, I have no doubt you'd have made it, but our cards would have been spread out all over the table."
"Along with your bowels," said Joseph, "if there were a
number
of doggies."
Laika gestured him to silence. "There's no denying, though, that you may have come across something here. Let's look at the Templar connections first. All we have is an old priest's word, and the French are pretty Templar crazy. The whole Merovingian dynasty connection came out of France, along with its Templar connections."
"But we
know
there were twelve Templars following the Prisoner's influence," Tony said.
"Twelve is a pretty common number," said Joseph. "Most large dining tables seat either ten or twelve."
"What about the twelve bedrooms?" Tony asked. "And they were austere, just as plain and sparsely furnished as the room that MacAndrews guy lived in. And we know
he
was a Templar."
Joseph shrugged. "Along with being homes, castles were also military barracks. Frankly, I'd feel a lot more convinced if that coat of arms you saw on the wall had been the Templar symbol." They had all seen that symbol—two knights riding a single horse—branded on the dead MacAndrews' chest.
"It more than bears looking into, though," Laika said. "We'll try and find out what we can about the castle's history, who this Scobie is who's supposed to be its owner, and who the previous owners were. I doubt we'll get much help from the locals. What I'm really
more
concerned with is this thing you saw in the cellar, Tony. You can think of no possible explanation?"
"Light shining down from the stairway?" Joseph suggested.
"The stairway was black as hell," Tony said. "The only light down there was from my flashlight. I turned it off for a few seconds to make sure, before I saw the thing."
"From what you said," said Laika, "it could have been identified as a ghost, a saint, a vision, even an alien, right?"
"It could've been Jesus, for that matter. I had the feeling that anybody could've seen anything in it, a dead father, or wife, or . . . anything," Tony finished quietly.
"We have to assume, then, that you've seen what a lot of other people have been seeing . . ."
"But that nobody wants to talk about," Joseph added. "I saw one of the things myself last night." Laika and Tony looked hard at him. "Don't sweat it, it wasn't real, just a dream."
Laika, relieved, turned her thoughts back to the castle. "It looks like the caretaker and a few others are getting ready for some occupation," she said. "The MacLunie land extends slightly beyond that ridge that overlooks the castle. So tomorrow we'll start another dig up near there, give us some camouflage so that we can keep an eye on the castle. After we get the site prepared, Tony, I'd like you to do the surveillance, since you're the only one who's been inside it.
"Joseph, you and I will check out the libraries, historical societies, museum holdings, and whatever else we can find, to try and find out more about the castle. Frankly, I'd like to rule it out as a possibility of any connection with the Prisoner. If we find no Templar connection, all well and good. If we do, well, we'll see where it takes us."
"One thing bothers me, Laika," Tony said. "Since the inception of our team, every single thing that would have been otherwise inexplicable—and most of it still is—has been connected to the Prisoner. And what I saw in that cellar, as far as I'm concerned, was pretty damned inexplicable, along with being pretty damned scary. I think he's here. I think that somehow he's behind what's going on, all these sightings of ghosts and demons and aliens.
"So I guess what I want to know is, are we following him, or is he following us?"
T
he following morning, they drove the van further up the hill and parked it just on the other side of the ridge from the castle. They began digging again, an area ten feet by ten feet square, removing the turf and sifting through the topsoil. Then they ran ribbons across the site, and dug up several of the square foot areas that resulted. They expected to find nothing but stones, and their expectations were fulfilled.
At noon, Joseph and Tony stopped for lunch, but Laika wanted to finish the small piece of earth on which she was working. The two men went over the ridge to watch the waters of the Minch as they ate, leaving Laika alone.
She saw a car pull off the road down below, and a woman started to walk up the hill toward her. There was nothing threatening about her, so Laika didn't call the others. When the woman was fifty feet away, she waved a hand, and Laika waved back. "Hi," the woman said, coming up to Laika. "I'm Molly Fraser." She had a Scots accent, but one less broad than most, and Laika guessed that she had spent some years in England. "I'm with the Edinburgh U. team over at the Mellangaun Stones. Thought I'd come over and give our counterparts from the States a welcome."
"Nice to meet you," Laika said, wiping off her hand before she shook Molly Fraser's offered one. "I'm Frances Brown. We're from Princeton."
"So I've heard," said Molly. "We were a wee bit curious as to why you're doing a dig here at the MacLunie Stones."
"Well, it's pretty much virgin territory. Just sort of a shot in the dark, you know? We probably won't spend much more than a few weeks here."
"And why so far from the stones themselves?"
"Oh, this one's just a sampling, really. Dr. Witherup, one of my colleagues, theorized that this would have been a likely place to have set a watch while the measurements were taken and the stones were being set in place. And the watchmen are more likely than the workers and planners to engage in . . . well, in activities that might empty their pockets."
"Gambling," Molly Fraser said. "It's possible. But I'm puzzled as to why you'd use a Flannery subsurface before you did a magnetometer survey."