Uprising

Chapter Sixty-Six Crowmoor Hall

Midnight

Joel walked on through the dark passage, down and down, deep underneath the mansion. With every step he tensed a little more and the struggle against his instinct to run away became more difficult.

Nobody attacked him. No vampire was lying in wait for him in the many shadows that he desperately swung the torch into, left, right, and left again. The light beam flashed against bare grey stone and thick matted cobwebs.

But something was here. As he walked on in dread, he was aware of a worsening smell. It quickly grew to an overpowering rancid stench that made it hard to breathe and his stomach flip. Then, shining the torch beam upwards, he let out an involuntary cry.

The corpse of what had once been a young woman dangled like a side of meat from a butcher’s hook in the vaulted ceiling. The white silk bridal dress she’d been wearing when she died hung from her in tatters and was caked in dried blood. Her neck had been slashed open to the bone and her chest was ripped apart to expose shattered ribs and internal organs. She’d died with a look of the worst terror Joel had ever seen on a victim’s face.

She hadn’t been hanging here long enough to smell like this. There was something else down here, too, and it couldn’t be far away. He swallowed back the rising nausea and played the light around him. A few feet away was a raised stone block circle in the floor, a yard or so in diameter, that looked like a well. Its mouth was covered with a thick round slab. As Joel shone the beam on it, he noticed finger marks in the dust around its edge. Someone had moved it recently.

Laying down the cross for a moment and gripping the torch under his arm, he grabbed hold of the edge of the slab and tried to move it. It was incredibly heavy. Joel thought of Finch and the uncanny strength that the man had seemed to possess.

On the third attempt, the slab shifted a couple of inches with a grinding of stone on stone. Joel recoiled and almost fell back at the stench that burst out from the dark hole. He used his sleeve to cover his nose and mouth, and kicked wildly at the slab’s edge until he’d moved it far enough to shine the torch down there.

The hole might have been ten feet deep, or it might have been fifty. There was no way to tell how far down the pile of human remains went. In the snatched glimpse Joel caught before he staggered away to empty his guts out all over the floor, he saw dozens of grey, mottled dead faces peering up at him. Homeless people, runaways, illegal immigrants, people lost in the system or whom nobody would report missing.

Whoever they’d been, it would be a hard and terrible job identifying them. Among the dead, severed body parts lay scattered, flesh gnawed from bone.

As Joel stood there bent double, dry-retching and coughing now that his stomach was emptied, he already knew what was going to be the sight most indelibly seared into his memory, destined to haunt his dreams for the rest of his life. It was the shattered and limbless baby skeleton lying on the top of the grisly pile. The bones had been picked clean.

Tears of rage stung his eyes as he kicked the slab back into place over the hole.

He grabbed the cross and moved on.

At the end of a long, winding tunnel leading off the crypt he found a room that he immediately knew was Gabriel Stone’s private study. Clearly a vampire of taste and style, Joel thought as he looked around him at the sumptuous furnishings. But a vampire nonetheless, and this wouldn’t be over until he was sent back to hell where he belonged.

Still seething with anger and disgust and holding the cross of Ardaich out in front of him like a beacon as he stormed room after room, Joel systematically flushed out the rest of the mansion. His fear had completely dispersed. All he wanted was to find these bastards and watch them die. But with every new door he kicked in, half-expecting to see his torch beam land on a huddled cluster of terrified vampires inside, his hope diminished. It took a long time before he could admit it to himself, but in the end he had to face the truth. The unlocked gate, the open front door, the missing portrait, the empty rooms: it all added up to the conclusion that Crowmoor Hall’s occupants had abandoned the place.

How had they known? Could they have sensed the cross coming? Or had one of their contacts somehow tipped them off? Whatever the answer, they were gone. All that remained of them was the gruesome evidence left behind in the crypt.

Back down in Stone’s study, Joel ripped through the enormous antique desk for any possible clue as to where the vampires might have fled. There was nothing. Unless they returned, he’d lost them — and he had a strong feeling that they weren’t coming back, at least not for a long time.

It was raining as he trudged back up the gravel driveway with a heavy heart and the cross dangling limp at his side. So much effort had gone into finding the vampires’

nest, and now they’d simply upped and moved on somewhere else. Dec Maddon’s discovery had ultimately come to nothing.

Joel stopped. Dec Maddon. The kid had been right about everything so far: the spider tattoo on the dead girl’s neck; the sculpted birds on the gateposts; the hidden door to the crypt. Without him, he’d never have come this far. Was there anything else the teenager might have seen or overheard? Even just a tiny clue that could help track Stone and his entourage to their new lair? That thought drove Joel into a run. He leapt into the Mondeo, laid the cross back in its case and skidded away from Crowmoor Hall forever.

As he drove, he dialled Dec’s mobile but got no reply. He looked at his watch, only now realising how late it was. But he couldn’t waste precious hours waiting until morning to make a polite visit to the Maddon home.

On his way to Wallingford he stopped at a village and made an anonymous call to Thames Valley Police to alert them to the stash of dead bodies and human remains at the former residence of Gabriel Stone. Let Carter and the boys sort that out, he thought as he walked back to the car in the rain. He had more pressing business to take care of.