Ash (78 page)

The dark bundle hung limply, but well within the web.

Delphine rushed forward to hold on to Louis – now naked apart from his white shorts and soft sneakers.

‘We’re not quite finished.’ He nodded at Louis’ transparent skin on which there were still a few black, scuttling things left. Delphine drew in a sharp breath, her hand up to her mouth. Ash grabbed the torch from her and backhanded the dazed spiders off the young prince’s flesh as gently as he could. It didn’t take long and the investigator was sorely relieved when it was over.

Except it wasn’t quite over.

Ash glanced down at Louis’ white boxer shorts and frowned. ‘I’m sorry, they’ll have to go too, Louis.’

‘But . . .’ His eyes looked appealingly into Delphine’s.

‘You can wrap my scarf around your waist,’ she said, sympathizing with her patient and friend’s shame and vulnerability.

Ash shrugged off his thigh-length field jacket and helped Louis to put it on. He thanked the investigator and smiled gratefully, even though the material must have felt almost unbearably rough to him. Meanwhile, Delphine did something clever with her scarf, turning it into a sarong that covered Louis’ exposed legs. Ash retrieved the Maglite from Delphine and shone the beam down the slanting tunnel ahead.

He tried to remember how far they still had to go but it was all a blur. It couldn’t be that far, surely? He didn’t think he’d climbed that far from the entrance cave when he’d been here before.

Delphine’s arms were enfolding Louis, supporting him. The prince was exhausted and shivering – on this side of the web the breeze had become almost a gale, funnelled up through the tunnel from the large cave below. At least the air with its tang of the sea was refreshing.

‘We’ll take Louis between us,’ he said to Delphine. ‘You take his left arm, I’ll take his right, so I can show the way with the torch’s wide beam. Delphine, you can still use the small Maglite, maybe keep its light low to the ground so we can watch where we tread.’

The chill made him shudder. Louis must be really freezing with only my battered jacket to keep off the worst of the cold, he thought.

‘Do we have much further to go, David?’ asked Delphine, more out of concern for Louis, although the deep chill ran through her as well.

‘I— uh . . . I don’t think so. Hard to remember.’

‘Any more nasty surprises?’

He shook his head, then paused.
Maybe
, he thought.

‘Come on,’ he said, ‘let’s just get out of here.’

Like every other guest at Comraich, Petra and Peter had been confined to quarters earlier that day. He’d sneaked along to her room, bringing with him the stash of drugs he’d bribed a guard to supply him with on a regular basis. If the nervous guard had ever been discovered in the transactions, the ex-military man had no illusions: he would have been summarily executed and his body thrown into the castle’s furnaces, so Peter had had to ensure the bribe was too big to ignore.

In his sister’s suite, they spent the rest of the day and what was to be the rest of the night naked in her four-poster bed, making drug-fuelled love as never before following their long period of enforced celibacy. By the evening they were in a pleasant haze in which they’d talked, explored each other’s bodies again, garbled profound inanities and finished the last of the cocaine Petra had brought with her to Comraich in the modified asthma inhaler. During all this, they’d kept their parched throats moist with three bottles of Chablis that Petra had liberated from one of the empty drawing-room bars.

At one stage they thought they’d heard the distant sound of running boots and someone giving the bedroom door a thump and shouting words neither of them understood. That made them laugh, anyway. Together, in each other’s arms, they dozed off to peaceful, then exciting, places, where dreams were reality and everything else was fiction. So senselessly stupefied were they by night-time, the muffled explosions meant little to them. Not even the great
boom
that shook her bedroom had any effect other than to disturb their faraway state of mind, causing Peter to turn over in bed and cover his ears with a pillow.

It was the smoke drifting in under the door that started to rouse Petra. In her surreal waking dream, the black smoke became demons with huge black, slanting eyes and hairy snouts for noses and sharp claws for hands. They circled the bed, those angled eyes on her and her sleeping lover. They grinned slyly and drooled from their rough lips, giving her lascivious looks, swirling claws pointing at her naked breasts as if to touch them. Yet these grotesques were made only of smoke and could have no real impact on her bare flesh.

Whatever sense she still had told her that, although the demons were imaginary, the smoke was real enough. For it raked her throat and reddened her eyes with its irritation.

From somewhere in the castle she thought she heard a scream. And then another. And the heat in the room was becoming overwhelming.

‘Peter!’ she cried, pushing vigorously at his shoulder.

He stirred but did not wake.

‘Peter!’ This time it was almost a scream and it half brought him to his senses. His survival instinct managed to cut through the murkiest of thoughts. Blearily he sat up, looking around at the drifting smoke. The bedroom was hot.

‘Oh, fuck,’ he croaked, ‘the castle’s on fire!’ He turned to his sister. ‘Why didn’t anyone come for us? Why aren’t there fire alarms?’

‘Maybe they’re not working,’ she said falteringly.

He glanced over at the door where the smoke was now billowing through.

‘Oh God, oh God!’ His eyes went towards the window, and Petra’s gaze followed his.

‘Why are all the fucking windows barred?’ he shouted, as if it were her fault.

‘You told me yourself. It’s to stop anyone on this floor getting out.’

‘Or throwing themselves out!’ He realized the bars in this case were for her; she’d tried suicide twice before.

He leapt from the bed, dragging the bedclothes with him, leaving his sister completely exposed. For a moment, his head whirled and he reached out for a bedpost to steady himself.

‘What are you going to do?’ wailed Petra, her knees drawn up, hands around her ankles.

‘I’m gonna see if we can get out!’ he hollered back, shuffling to the door, holding the dragging bedclothes to his waist.

‘No, Peter. Don’t! It’s too dangerous!’

‘Well, we can’t bloody well stay here, can we?’

It was rare for him to shout at her so angrily. Petra recognized the panic in his voice. He was scared for them both. He put his hand on the brass doorknob and jerked it back instantly.

‘It’s hot!’ he cried, backing away a little.
But there is no other way out
, his fervid mind told him. He wrapped the blanket around his hand and reached for the doorknob once more.

‘No, Peter, no!’

But it was too late. As he pulled the door open, the flames reached in like red-gold talons and grabbed hold of him, the bedclothes catching fire almost immediately. Then they swelled in, a rolling mass engulfing him completely.

His hair on fire, his flesh blistering, roasting and spitting as the juices ran, he turned back to his wailing sister, naked on the four-poster bed. Bizarrely, and perhaps because she was still in a drug haze, she could see his pale blue eyes as the fire lapped around his body. They stared straight at her. His mouth was open, and before he swallowed flames, she was sure he called her name.

His blazing arms, blackened in parts and red-raw in others, reached out to her, the one person he’d truly loved and who knew all his secrets, as he knew hers. He staggered to the bed and Petra realized what her beloved brother wanted.

Peter craved her comfort, for she was all he had –
had ever had
.

And she did not back away. Instead, she opened her arms as a mother would to console an injured child. Then, as a ball of fire with a blurred and blackened image of some creature within that might once have been a man, he fell upon his sister.

And, screaming with the pain of it, Petra wrapped her arms around her brother. And then her legs as she drew him in.

‘I could cheerfully shoot the guy who wrote those bloody horror books about rats,’ said Ash mildly.

‘Why did you read them, then?’ Delphine kept up the false tone of cheerfulness that Ash had adopted for the benefit of Louis, as all three stopped on the brink of the large cave.

‘They looked interesting.’

Louis was between Ash and Delphine and was visibly shaking as he took in what lay before them.

‘And were they?’

Ash could just discern the psychologist’s own anxiety in her reply.

‘Well,’ he replied, ‘kind of. But a little bit too much information about what rats are capable of, especially when they’re excited.’

The trio had left the giant cobweb behind, much to their relief, following the tunnel’s zig-zag turns without further mishap, finally finding themselves on the slippery stone steps that would take them to the sea cave. Delphine had wrinkled her nose at the foul acidic smell that came their way before they had reached the last step.

‘It’s only bat dung,’ Ash explained, ‘but the bats themselves won’t harm us. Anyway, they’re probably outside hunting. For insects, not humans,’ he added quickly. ‘No vampires here.’

However, as the three of them stood on the last step, Ash surveyed the cavern with horror. For this was the place the rodents had chosen for their own sanctuary, instinctively aware that the tide was washing into the sea cave, the waves too powerful to swim through. The nasty surprise that Ash had anticipated had materialized: the vermin – and there were thousands of them – filled the space before them, waiting out the storm and blocking their path.

Mostly, they appeared calm, but because of lack of space some snapped at those that tried to squirm over them. They made squealing noises like children at play, but soon the noise abated as the stiff-furred, grimy animals bedded down for the night. Soon, however, they would need to eat, and the only food available was of the two-legged variety.

‘David,’ Delphine whispered so as not to disturb the sea of vermin blocking their way. ‘What do we do?’

Louis peered round at the investigator as though expecting him to provide a solution. He cut a crazy-looking figure in Ash’s olive green field jacket, below which protruded his sticklike legs through which the shadows of his bones could be seen. He was shivering violently. The investigator, who was somewhat shaky himself, fervently hoped the shock would not bring on the prince’s epilepsy.

‘The only way is onwards,’ Ash answered resolutely. ‘Ever see that Hitchcock film,
The Birds
?’

Louis looked bemused, but Delphine nodded her head just once.

‘Remember the scene at the end?’

This time there was no reaction from Delphine.

‘It’s a beautiful scene,’ Ash continued. ‘The hero opens his mother’s front door. It’s a great shot full of quietened birds, the town in the near-distance, and gulls and crows as far as you could see. The hero has no choice but to get his family and girlfriend far away from there before the birds attack again. It was full of tension, because although the enemy, the birds, appear to be dormant for the moment, the menace is still there.’

‘David . . .’ Delphine was becoming impatient in her anxiety.

‘Okay. So the hero has to get his mother, girlfriend, and a young girl – his niece, I think – to walk through the birds to reach his waiting car. They get into the car and very carefully drive off, expecting to be attacked at any moment.’

He paused.

‘What happened to them?’ Delphine asked eagerly.

Ash shrugged his shoulders. ‘I don’t know. That was when the credits rolled.’

Delphine groaned. ‘That’s not funny, David. What are we going to do now? How much longer before they turn on us?’

I wish I knew
, thought Ash.

A few of the rodents looked their way uninterestedly. Most had hunkered down, apparently content for the moment. Yet Ash could feel the frisson in the air, as though aggression could break through at any time.

In reply to Delphine, Ash said quietly, ‘We’ll do what the characters in the movie did, only without the car: we’ll just walk through them. Unless you can think of a better plan.’

Delphine could think of no other plan, so nodded her assent once more, but this time with an audible sigh. Ash reached around Louis and drew the psychologist to him and she came willingly, aching for his comforting embrace, wishing she had his determination.

As for Ash, he held her tightly, pushing his cheek into the comfort of her hair. He would not lose this one. He would not lose this woman he loved and who he knew, beyond doubt, loved him in return. Past heartaches, tragedies, had to be pushed back to the furthest corner of his mind lest he endangered her without thinking. He would not allow anyone or anything to take her from him. Ash kissed her cheek and tasted a tear that had trickled from her eye.

‘I promise we’ll get through this together. You, me and Louis. We’ve come a long, difficult way, and this last hurdle is all that lies between us and the sea cave. Just trust in me, okay?’

Her lips were trembling, and her smile was unconvincing, though she was obviously trying hard.

‘I do trust you, David. You know that.’

‘Good. I needed the encouragement.’

Reluctantly, he let go of her and looked at Louis, whose peculiar face was not easy to read.

‘I trust you, too, Mr Ash,’ he said in his strangely high, melodious voice. ‘I’ll do anything you say, sir.’

Mr Ash? Sir? My God
, thought the investigator,
Louis is a prince of the realm
.

‘I’ve said before, how about you call me David?’ Ash said, smiling, the only response he could think of.

‘All right . . . David.’

‘That’s better.’ Ash realized they had to make a move. It was frigidly cold and the wind coming in off the sea was whistling harshly through the tunnel on the other side of the cavern. Even if the rats left them alone, he wasn’t sure that Louis would survive the night in such conditions. He remembered the narrow passageway he’d had to negotiate to reach their present position from the cave, the rock ceiling low and sagging. There was always a chance that the explosions in the castle above had created more subsidence, or even triggered a rockfall, trapping them there. Still, they would have to face that problem when they reached it. For now, the rats were bad enough.