Authors: Scott G. Mariani
His own time might come. At least he’d know what to do.
Downstairs, the fire was nearly dead. Joel smashed up another chair and revived the blaze with the splintered pieces. Then he settled on the rug by the hearth and spent the next hour going through the things he’d found.
The books were mainly about old European folklore – witchcraft, Druidism, pagan ritual, early Christianity. His grandfather had made underlinings and notes here and there in the margins. Then there was a Romanian grammar and vocabulary book dating back to 1807, and a tatty volume on ancient Slavic languages. Nothing much there to go on.
Joel turned to the diary, and his heart sank when he realised he’d underestimated the extent of the damage that the ravages of time could inflict. Half the pages were stuck together and as fragile as moth wings, falling to bits when he tried to part them. The rest either had been nibbled away by rodents or were so heavily stained with mildew that large patches of his grandfather’s writing were virtually unreadable.
But there was enough to make his heart beat and his hands tremble with the knowledge that he’d found something important.
He’d had no idea just how deeply his grandfather had been into this stuff, or how much of his life he’d devoted to it. This was thirty years’ worth of his research, dating from after the war to the time when he’d become a recluse up here in the Highlands. Half diary, half notes, the pages were scrawled in a hand that would have been hard to read even if the paper hadn’t been virtually ruined. It charted travels that Joel had never known the old man had undertaken, long before he’d been born. Visits to libraries in Bucharest, Prague, Moscow, Jerusalem, Delhi, as well as other destinations that Joel couldn’t make out.
Several pages of the diary were devoted to a series of detailed sketches in pencil and ink, some of them faded away almost to nothing. Their subject was the same every time. It was a rugged stone cross.
‘The cross of Ardaich,’ Joel muttered to himself. So this was it.
A number of the drawings seemed to depict the artefact as being made of plain stone. In others it featured strange carvings, like runes, or the letters of some ancient alphabet. But what they all had in common was the Celtic design, the head of the cross intersecting with a circle, like the reticule of a rifle sight. One of the drawings depicted it alongside a human hand for scale. It wasn’t big, maybe fourteen inches long.
Joel’s fingers fluttered as he turned another page. Under a heading that he could just about make out as ‘Origin of the cross’, his grandfather seemed to have been piecing together the history of the strange artefact from the many sources he’d studied over the decades.
Joel grabbed his backpack and took out his map and a biro. He used the back of the map to copy down the bits of the text that he could make out.
ORIGIN OF THE CROSS
…
5th century…Ringan (N??) travels to Scotland on orders of…On hiy long journey he meets a holy…
…
gives Ringan a heavy sack. In the sack is a lump of rock, just larger than a man’s head. He tells Ringan it is a talisman that will protect against the Dearg-dhu.
…
In Scotland, Ringan builds his church. Is going to build the strange rock into the wall when he receives a visit…
…
…local village is being preyed on by a creature they call the Baobhan sith. He uses the rock to…
When he witnesses its power…master stonemason…sculpt it into a…
…known as the CROSS OF ARDAICH…
…resurfaces two centuries lat…
…disappeared from view…
There were many gaps – too damn many. And even the bits that Joel could read made maddeningly little sense. Who was this man called Ringan, and what was the significance of the bracketed letter N after his name? What were the
Dearg-dhu
and the
Baobhan sith?
The language looked like Gaelic. He spent a few minutes rooting through his grandfather’s books on ancient folklore, but could find nothing to explain the words. He returned to the diary. Nothing more was readable until the following page, where he could just about make out a few fragments of sentences.
…
963 A.D. cross believed sighted in…
…observed strange powers…
…blessed ability to ward off revenants and…
That was about it. Joel struggled on, but the lower he went down the page, the more unreadable the writing was. In some places his grandfather just seemed to have been jotting down random notes in a hurry, as if he’d been taking them from a book. A column of words stood out:
Vetalas
Moroi
Lamashtu
After a few more ruined pages was another diary entry. The date was 1975, the year the old man had moved to Scotland.
April 1975. Am travelling to Venice…
Looking forw…at last…staying at the hot…
…the location of the cr…
legend tells it was concealed…
church of…
…1631 the city was caught in the grip of the Black Death
…ANCHI…
…666
…
Salvation lies at the feet of the Virgin
That final line, the last piece of legible writing before the page ended in a ragged black stain, was striking. What was ‘salvation’? Joel quickly gave up on it and went on studying the rest. ‘Anchi’ was obviously half a word, written in capitals, its first letters obliterated by mould. When Joel tried to scrape it away, the paper just came apart. He gave up, and chewed his pen as he stared at the number underneath.
666. The biblical Number of the Beast. His skin crawled as he read it over and over.
But not as much as when he read the words overleaf.
15th April 1975.
I have destroyed one of THEM, but there are more.
…narrow escape. Who will believe what I’ve seen?
Now THEY will come looking for me. I must hide.
…my loved ones…not safe for them
God protect me.
Joel was stunned by the realisation as he read the entry over and over again, willing the faded writing to reveal more.
But it was enough. Now he knew why Crazy Nick had walked out on his family and tried to hide himself away as best he could all those years ago. He hadn’t been crazy at all. He’d been trying to protect them all from the horror he’d encountered back in Italy.
Knowing that one day the vampires might catch up with him again.
Jericho, Oxford
The next day, 12.33 p.m.
Joel had left his grandfather’s cottage at dawn, vowing for the second time in his life that he’d never return. His eyes were burning with fatigue as he parked the bike outside the Georgian house in Walton Well Road and wearily climbed the steps to the glass-panelled front door. Too tired to even strip off his bike leathers, he trudged up the passage towards the kitchen to brew himself a badly needed coffee. By the time he’d reached the kitchen door, he’d already unzipped his backpack and was flipping through his grandfather’s notebook like a man possessed. He walked into the kitchen on auto-pilot, his eyes glued to the faded writing. And almost fell over as his foot caught on something lying on the floor.
He looked down. The ceramic tiles were covered with debris. Drawers ripped out and upturned, shelves torn down, containers of utensils hurled across the room. Glancing through the open-plan archway into the living room beyond, he saw it had been taken apart too. His bookcase was collapsed on its face across the wreckage of his coffee table. The carpet was slashed to ribbons and half the floorboards had been prised up. The place looked as though a Panzer Division had gone through it.
Joel sensed a rapid movement out of the corner of his eye, then something silvery flashed down in front of his face. He realised it was a garrotte wire just in time to get his hands up to protect his throat. The wire closed in tight across his wrists, pulling back with maniacal force. Only the thick cuffs of Joel’s leather jacket saved his hands from being sliced clean off. He lashed out with a backwards headbutt and felt his skull connect with something solid. Out of the corner of his eye he could see the bald crown glistening under the kitchen light and the wizened face contorted in effort.
It was Seymour Finch, and this time he meant to kill.
As he struggled desperately to get free, Joel could feel the wire biting through the leather. Any second, it would be through – and then death would be an instant away. He kicked out with his right foot, found the edge of the kitchen worktop with his toe and pushed hard against it, hurling his weight backwards. They toppled over together and crashed to the floor, and he felt the impact of his weight drive the wind out of Finch’s lungs. For the shortest instant, the man’s grip on the garrotte went slack, and Joel was able to wrench the wire away from his neck and twist out from under it. He went to kick Finch in the ribs, but the man was already up on his feet. Joel saw the blur coming for his face too late to react. The heavy fist caught him on the jaw and sent him sprawling to the floor.
Lying there with the taste of blood filling his mouth and his vision flashing with white spots, Joel saw Finch spot the fallen notebook and snatch it up. He ripped through the pages and his eyes lit up in animal triumph.
Joel staggered to his feet, glanced around him for a weapon. The knife block was across the other side of the kitchen – he’d have to go through Finch to get to it. A cast-iron saucepan lay on the floor. Edge-on, it was as good as an axe. Joel was about to grab it when he remembered the uncomfortable lump of steel that was still shoved down the back of his jeans. He’d ridden so many miles with the old Webley in his belt that he’d no longer registered what it was.
He ripped it out and aimed it at Finch in the two-handed stance he’d been taught in his police firearms training. Lined the rusty sights up centre-of-mass on his target, thumbed back the hammer and yelled, ‘Down on your knees. Or I’ll kill you.’
Finch’s eyes widened in surprise, but he recovered quickly from the shock. Then he charged with a wild scream.
Joel didn’t have time to pray that the ancient weapon would still fire. Finch was just a yard away when he squeezed the trigger. The room filled with the huge noise of the gunshot, and the revolver kicked back against his palm.
Finch flew backwards as if he’d been jerked off his feet by an invisible cable. He hit the floor and slid across the tiles, thrashing and roaring, blood pumping from the hole in his chest. Then, incredibly, he sprang back up on his feet and made a mad dash for the hallway, still clutching the notebook. He burst through the front door with a crash of breaking glass and out into the street.
Stunned, Joel stood there for a moment, with the smoking revolver in his hand. Coming to his senses, he threw the empty weapon down and gave chase.
By the time he’d run out of his front gate, Finch was already twenty yards away, sprinting like a wild man down Walton Well Road and leaving a trail of bright blood splashes in his wake. Joel went after him, racing down the hill past the rows of red-brick houses. He was certain he could catch the man. He’d come first in every police athletics and running competition he’d ever entered, even done some weekend training in the Welsh hills with the boys from the Territorial SAS and not entirely disgraced himself. But after just a few yards he realised with a shock that this maniac, even with a large-calibre bullet in his chest, was outpacing him. He willed himself to run faster.
It quickly became clear where Finch was heading. At the bottom of Walton Well Road was an old stone hump bridge, and beyond it was Port Meadow, a vast expanse of open country protected from the developers by ancient common land laws, where the snaking river Thames became the Isis.
Finch reached the bridge and dropped out of sight. By the time Joel had got there, Finch was already sprinting across the grass, aiming for the river. Joel pressed on, forcing all the power he could muster from his legs. His racing feet ripped through the long grass as they neared the water.
Finch was nearly fifty yards ahead of him now. Joel saw him slither down the reedy bank and disappear – a moment later, he saw him again. Finch had boarded a small wooden boat. His muscular fists gripped the oars and his arms moved like pistons. He was covered in blood, more like some kind of fiendish machine than a man. Water foamed white as the boat surged forward. Joel caught a fleeting glimpse of the notebook lying in the bottom between Finch’s boots. He saw the twisted smile on the man’s lips.