The Watcher in the Shadows (15 page)

The pipe slipped out of his arms and the two found themselves falling towards the large pond that ran along the edge of the west wing of Cravenmoore. They hit the ice-cold surface of the water hard and sank towards the slimy bottom of the lake. Irene felt the water fill her nostrils and her burning throat. A wave of panic engulfed her. She opened her eyes but all she could see under the water was darkness. A shape appeared next to her: Ismael. The boy grabbed hold of her. Together, they rose to the surface and emerged, spluttering, into the night air.

‘Hurry,’ Ismael urged her.

Irene noticed wounds on his hands and arms.

‘It’s nothing,’ he lied, jumping out of the pond.

She followed him. The cold breeze glued her sodden clothes to her body, like a painful layer of frost touching her skin. Ismael scanned the shadows around them.

‘Where is it?’ asked Irene.

‘Perhaps when it fell . . .’

Something moved in the bushes. Immediately they recognised two scarlet eyes. The angel was still there and it was not going to let them get away alive.

‘Run!’

They dashed towards the entrance to the forest, their wet clothes slowing their progress and chilling them to the bone. They could hear the sound of the angel moving through the undergrowth. Clutching Irene’s hand, Ismael headed for the deepest part of the wood, which was shrouded in fog.

‘Where are we going?’ Irene asked, aware that they were entering an unfamiliar part of the forest.

Ismael didn’t bother to reply; he just kept pulling her forward, desperately. Irene could feel the bushes scraping the skin round her ankles and she was weak with exhaustion. She couldn’t keep up this pace much longer. Soon the creature would catch up with them and tear them to pieces with its claws.

‘I can’t go on . . .’

‘Yes you can!’

Ismael’s head was spinning and he could hear the branches breaking only a few metres behind them. For a moment he thought he was going to faint, but a sharp stab of pain in his leg revived him: one of the angel’s claws had emerged from the bushes and slashed at his thigh. Irene screamed and tried to close her eyes, but she couldn’t look away from the nightmarish face of their predator.

At that very moment they stumbled on the entrance to a cave, half concealed by the vegetation. Ismael threw himself inside, pulling Irene with him. So this was where he was taking her. A cave. Didn’t Ismael think the angel would follow them inside? The only reply Irene heard was the sound of claws scratching against the rocky walls. Ismael dragged her along the narrow tunnel until they reached a hole in the ground, a vertical drop into a bottomless pit. A cold, salty breeze rose from the void and from somewhere down below came a powerful rumbling sound. The sea.

‘Jump!’ Ismael ordered.

Irene stared at the black hole. A direct entrance into hell would have seemed more inviting.

‘What’s down there?’

Ismael sighed. The angel could be heard close behind them. Very close.

‘It’s an entrance to the Cave of Bats.’

‘The second entrance? You said it was dangerous!’

‘We have no choice . . .’

Their eyes met in the gloom. Two metres away, the dark angel appeared, flexing its claws. Ismael gave a nod. Irene took his hand and they jumped into the void. Hurling itself after them, the angel tumbled through the hole into the Cave of Bats.

To Ismael and Irene, the fall through the dark seemed endless, and when their bodies finally plunged into the sea, they felt the cold water biting into every pore. As they floated up to the surface, the tide propelled them towards the sharp rocky walls.

‘Where is it?’ asked Irene, struggling to control her shivering.

For a few seconds, they embraced without saying a word, expecting the hellish apparition to emerge from the sea at any moment and end their lives in the darkness of the cave. But that moment never came. Ismael was the first to notice.

The angel’s scarlet eyes shone up from the depths; the creature’s enormous weight prevented it from floating to the surface. A roar of anger reached them through the water. Whatever was manipulating the angel was twisting about furiously, conscious that its puppet had fallen into a trap that rendered it useless. The huge mass of metal would never reach the surface and was condemned to remain at the bottom of the cave until the sea turned it into a pile of rusty scrap.

The two friends remained there, watching the glow of those eyes fade then disappear beneath the water for ever. Ismael let out a sigh of relief. Irene quietly wept.

‘It’s over,’ she said in a shaky voice. ‘It’s over.’

‘No,’ replied Ismael. ‘That was only a machine: it had no life or will of its own. Something was making it move and that something tried to kill us . . .’

‘But what is it?’

‘I don’t know . . .’

As they spoke, there was a sudden explosion at the bottom of the cave. A cloud of black bubbles rose to the surface, then morphed into a dark spectre that scaled the rock towards the roof of the cave. The shadow stopped and observed them from its perch.

‘Is it leaving?’ whispered Irene, terror-stricken.

Cruel laughter filled the grotto. Ismael shook his head.

‘It’s leaving us here . . .’ said the boy. ‘The tide will do the rest . . .’

The shadow vanished through the entrance hole in the roof.

Ismael led Irene to a small rock that jutted out above the water’s surface. There was just enough space for the two of them. He put his arms around her. They were wounded and shivering with cold, but for a few moments they just lay on the rock and took deep breaths, without saying a word. At some point, Ismael noticed that the sea seemed to be touching his feet again and realised that the tide was rising. It wasn’t the creature pursuing them that had fallen into a trap, but themselves.

The shadow had abandoned them to the mercy of a slow and terrible death.

The sea roared as it crashed against the mouth of the cave. The entrance hole above them was far away and unattainable, like the eye of a dome. In just a few minutes the sea level had already risen several centimetres. It wasn’t long before Irene noticed that the area of the rock they were sitting on, like castaways, was getting smaller.

‘The tide is rising,’ she said in a hushed voice.

All Ismael could do was nod dejectedly.

‘What will happen to us?’ She had already guessed the answer, but was hoping that Ismael, who seemed to possess an endless supply of surprises, might have something else up his sleeve.

He turned his eyes towards her gloomily. Irene’s hopes vanished in an instant.

‘As the tide rises, it blocks the main entrance to the cave,’ Ismael explained. ‘Then there’s no other exit except through that hole in the ceiling.’

He paused and buried his head in his hands.

The thought of waiting until they slowly drowned like rats in the rising tide made Irene’s blood run cold.

‘There has to be some other way of getting out of here,’ she said.

‘There isn’t.’

‘So what are we going to do?’

‘For the moment, just wait . . .’

Irene realised that she couldn’t keep expecting Ismael to come up with answers. He was probably even more frightened than she was, only too aware of the dangers of the cave. Come to think of it, changing the subject might not be a bad idea.

‘There’s something . . . While we were inside Cravenmoore,’ she began hesitantly. ‘When I went into that room, I saw something there. Something relating to Alma Maltisse . . .’

Ismael gave her a puzzled look.

‘I think . . . I think Alma Maltisse and Alexandra Jann are one and the same person. Alma Maltisse was Alexandra’s maiden name before she married Lazarus,’ Irene explained.

‘That’s impossible. Alma Maltisse drowned years ago,’ Ismael objected.

‘But nobody found her body . . .’

‘It’s impossible,’ Ismael insisted.

‘While I was in the room, I noticed her portrait and . . . there was somebody lying on the bed. A woman.’

Ismael rubbed his eyes, trying to put his thoughts in order.

‘Just a moment. Supposing you’re right. Suppose Alma Maltisse and Alexandra Jann are the same person. Then who is the woman you saw in Cravenmoore? Who is the woman who has been shut up there, all these years, pretending to be Lazarus’s sick wife?’

‘I don’t know . . . The more we find out, the less I understand what’s going on,’ said Irene. ‘And there’s something else that’s worrying me. What was that figure we saw in the toy factory? It looked like my mother. Just thinking about it makes my hair stand on end. Lazarus is building an automaton with my mother’s face . . .’

A surge of freezing water soaked their ankles. The sea level had risen at least twenty centimetres since they’d hauled themselves onto the rock. They exchanged a look of desperation. The sea roared again and a gush of water thundered through the entrance to the cave.

Midnight had left a wreath of fog over the cliffs that rose from the jetty to Seaview. The oil lamp was still swinging in the porch, its flame almost out. Apart from the rumour of the sea and the whisper of leaves in the forest, the silence was almost complete. Dorian was lying on his bed, holding a small glass with a lighted candle inside it. He didn’t want his mother to see that his light was still on, and besides, he didn’t trust the bedside lamp after what had happened before. The flame danced under his breath like some fiery spirit, revealing strange shapes and shadows in every corner. Dorian sighed. He wouldn’t be able to sleep a wink that night, not for all the gold in the world.

Shortly after saying goodbye to Lazarus, Simone had put her head round his bedroom door to make sure Dorian was all right. He had curled up under the sheets, fully dressed, pretending to sleep, and his mother had retired to her room to follow his example. That was hours ago now. In the seemingly endless wait for dawn to arrive, every glimmer of light, every creak, every shadow, threatened to set his heart racing.

Slowly, the flame died down until it was a tiny blue bubble, so faint it made barely any difference to the gloom. A moment later, darkness regained the room, little by little. Dorian could feel the drips of hot candle wax hardening in the glass. Only a few centimetres away, on the bedside table, the small angel Lazarus had given him was watching him in silence.

Dorian threw the bedclothes aside and got up. He decided not to put on any shoes, to avoid the tumult of creaking his feet seemed to make whenever he tried to move about quietly in Seaview. Then, gathering all the courage he could muster, he tiptoed across his bedroom to the door. Turning the doorknob and opening the door without the usual concert of rusty hinges took him ten long seconds, but was worth it. Dorian closed the door behind him and crept to the top of the staircase, past the entrance to Irene’s bedroom.

His sister had gone to bed hours ago, feigning a terrible headache, although Dorian suspected she was probably intending to read or write syrupy love letters to that sailor boyfriend of hers. She seemed to be spending more than twenty-four hours a day with him. Ever since he’d seen her wearing that dress of his mother’s, he’d known there was trouble ahead.

When he reached the ground floor, Dorian noticed that the house was encircled by a ring of fog. Coils of mist seemed to slither over it, searching for a way in. ‘Condensed water vapour,’ he told himself. ‘It’s only condensed vapour moving about. Basic chemistry.’ Having reassured himself with this scientific explanation, he ignored the wisps of fog filtering through the gaps in the windows and went into the kitchen. When he got there, he realised that the romance between Irene and Captain Fantastic had its positive side: since she’d started going out with him, his sister hadn’t touched the box of delicious Swiss chocolates Simone kept on the second shelf of the food cupboard. Dorian remembered his mother once joking that chocolate had all of the chemical benefits of love and none of its noxious side effects.

Licking his lips, Dorian attacked the first chocolate. An exquisite burst of truffle, almonds and cocoa numbed his senses. This was what Greta Garbo’s kisses must taste like. As far as he was concerned, after maps, chocolate was probably the finest invention the human race had come up with. Especially whole boxes of chocolates. ‘Clever people, the Swiss,’ thought Dorian. ‘Clocks and chocolates: the essential things in life.’ A sudden noise startled him away from such comforting thoughts. Dorian heard the noise again: paralysed with fear, he let the second chocolate slip through his fingers. Somebody was knocking on the door.

He tried to swallow, but his mouth was too dry. Two more sharp knocks. Dorian entered the living room, his eyes glued to the front door. Fog was seeping in under the door frame. Two more knocks. Dorian stopped, facing the door, hesitating for a moment.

‘Who is it?’ he asked, his voice faltering.

Two further knocks were his only reply. He went over to the window, but the blanket of fog blocked the view completely. He couldn’t hear any footsteps on the porch. Perhaps the stranger had left. ‘Probably someone who is lost,’ thought Dorian. He was about to return to the kitchen when the two knocks came again, but this time they were on the windowpane, ten centimetres away from his face. His heart missed a beat. Slowly, Dorian walked backwards, moving into the centre of the living room until he bumped into a chair. Instinctively, he grabbed hold of a metal candlestick and brandished it in front him.