More spirits surrounded me until I was running in the middle of the largest crowd of spooks I’d ever witnessed. My senses were abuzz with all the energy and I felt a surge of courage course through my veins. The phantom was still behind us, but it was held back by the brave ghosts buffering me and seeing me to safety.
Ahead, Ranald led the way before he disappeared around a corner, and I dug deep for more speed. When I rounded the edge of the stone wall, I saw the door open and inviting just fifty yards ahead.
But the snarling and growling behind me increased and the phantom saw that I was close to reaching the safe haven. I could feel it pushing at the back of the large crowd of spirits surrounding me, and one by one my brave ghosts began to fall away.
I heard cries and shrieks and painful shouts. Ranald’s expression changed from victorious to one of shock and horror in a heartbeat. “Run, lass!” he shouted at me.
I was panting so hard that I could barely take in a breath. And then, an unexpected and horribly nightmarish image burst into my mind with such suddenness that it caused me to trip. I went sprawling to the ground, and the spirits around me scattered. Somewhere nearby I heard Dunnyvale shout, “To all who have sworn fealty to me, I order you to attack! Attack the phantom!”
At first, nothing happened except that the phantom came racing toward me and I was powerless against it. I put my arm up to shield my head, waiting for the full weight of that terrible thing to hit me, when out of nowhere the ghost of Ranald leaped over my head and landed between me and the phantom.
“Attack!” he shouted again, waving a silver sword. Immediately a group of guards surrounded him and together they pushed the phantom back.
I lay sprawled on the ground, completely speechless for several moments, when I heard Ranald yell, “Malachi! Help her to the church!”
In the blink of an eye the young lad who’d been running beside me earlier appeared. He said nothing but offered me a shy smile.
I scrambled to my feet and he took off. I chased after him and we reached the sanctuary at last. Dashing through the door, I took several more strides until I finally collapsed right next to the stone tomb.
It took me several minutes to collect myself. Outside the battle raged on for a bit before fading away into silence.
When I felt able to, I got up and hedged toward the door. I looked outside but saw nothing. No ghost or phantom was about. Still, my sixth sense indicated that the phantom was nearby, waiting and watching for any attempt of my escape.
My heart sagged a little at the prospect, because there was no way I could use the hidden stairwell in the church again; the manhole was sealed tight. My only choice was to find the talisman.
I waited until I’d caught my breath to pull the crowbar from my messenger bag, and still, it was a moment before I could work up the nerve to squat down next to the young boy’s tomb and wedge the tool into the crevice. “Lord Dunnyvale,” I said to the empty church. “If you’re around, I want you to know how sorry I am for disturbing your son’s final resting place.”
There was no reply, which left me a bit sad, but I was a woman on a mission, and after working the crowbar into the crevice and giving it a few good heaves, I was finally able to push the top of the tomb aside several inches.
Shining my flashlight inside, I gasped when I took hold of the contents.
There, lying peacefully on a huge mound of gold bullion, lay the remains of Malachi Dunnyvale, the true love of his father’s heart.
I couldn’t help it; I sat back on my heels and shed a tear or two for the heartbreak that not even gold could heal.
With a final sniffle, I leaned in again and squinted into the stone coffin. There, lying against the opposite side from me, as if it had been slipped carefully inside, was the stone Incan disk, its gold stopper removed. “Gotcha,” I said, and worked my hand and arm in to retrieve it. Taking it out to inspect it, I marveled at how simple it was, and how powerful. My intuitive sense felt the waves of energy emanating off it, but its design was so simple that it could have passed for just another flat stone.
About the size of a saucer, it was round, just like Alex described, with a hole drilled into the middle. I was guessing that was where the gold stopper had once been, only what’d happened to it was anyone’s guess. Still, the hole wasn’t much bigger than the coins inside the coffin, and I wondered if one would fit.
Reaching back into Malachi’s tomb, I pulled out one gold coin and hovered it over the top of the hole in the disk. It would certainly work in a pinch, I thought.
Outside the interior door of the church there was a sudden loud hissing sound, and I jumped. Looking in the direction of the noise, I saw that the phantom had decided to make its reappearance, and it was closer than I’d ever seen it to the sanctuary, right on the edge of the doorway, and to say that it appeared furious is to understate its mood dramatically.
I stared at it in stunned disbelief for a moment, shocked by the nearness of it, and that was when it lunged forward into the church, where it curled into a small ball as if it was in great pain. I got up and edged away from the tomb, so scared I could barely breathe. There weren’t any nightmarish images filling my mind, and I assumed the church was buffering the power of the phantom’s control over me, but watching the raging demon was enough of a nightmare to scare me down to my toes.
The phantom continued to curl in on itself, then unfurl an spin around wildly, like a small and deadly tornado. In an instant I realized that I’d likely done the worst thing possible by retrieving the disk. I also realized I had no idea how to get the genie back inside its bottle.
At that moment there was a loud noise right behind me. Startled, I looked over my shoulder to see Heath and Gilley emerging from the secret passage. Heath was panting hard and hunched over in pain, and Gilley was carrying a set of bolt cutters.
“M. J.!” Gilley cried when he saw me. “You’re not dead!”
The phantom shrieked, unfolded itself from its ball, and lunged forward again, coming to within ten feet of me.
“Ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh!!!!”
Gilley screamed, before fleeing back down the steps.
Heath remained where he was and shouted to get my attention. “M. J.! Come over here! We can get down the stairs where it can’t follow us!”
But I knew that as long as I held the disk, the phantom would follow me. I set the disk down on the ground and slid it over the floor in the direction of the phantom. The ball of dark shadow and growling fury tumbled this way and that, darting toward the disk only to curl up in a ball again, as if fighting off unseen attackers.
With a feeling of dread I realized that it wouldn’t be able to enter the disk within the confines of the church. The protective energy of the place was simply overwhelming it.
I looked at Heath and bit my lower lip. He was urgently waving at me to come to him, but I knew what I had to do.
Calling upon every ounce of courage I possessed, I darted forward to the disk, snatched it up off the ground, and bolted for the back door.
Behind me Heath yelled,
“Don’t!”
but I ignored him and ran as if my life depended on it, which—let’s face it—it did.
Behind me I heard the fury of the phantom increase to a deafening crescendo of noise, and if I hadn’t been so focused on my mission, I might have been scared witless.
Once I was free of the church, I dug in for ten long strides, took the gold coin out of the hole, bent low, and dropped the disk in the grass before getting the hell out of there. I made it another yard when something hit me like a freight train, and I went tumbling head over heels in the grass, and my mind filled with a dizzying array of noise, horrible images, and a dread so deep I could not breathe. Worse still, my body was being pummeled by unseen fists, and even curling into a tight ball did not relieve me of the attacks to my stomach, sides, and back.
The torture was so intense that I knew my mind would snap if it continued, and just when I thought I couldn’t take one more second of it, I heard a whoosh and
BANG!
The end of the attack was so immediate that it took me quite a few seconds to realize it had stopped, and as I lay there panting and wheezing, I listened intently to the eerie silence that followed. I rolled to my knees, battered and sore and picked my head up, chancing a glance up and then all around, but saw nothing out of the ordinary. No trace of the phantom remained.
With some difficulty I got to my feet and walked over to the talisman lying peacefully in the grass. With a grunt I bent double, literally trembling with relief.
“M. J.!” Heath shouted again. I looked up and saw him leaving the doorway of the church, attempting to run to me.
I held up my hand, knowing he had to be in great pain from the wound in his back, and managed to say, “I’m fine! Stay there and I’ll come to you.”
Heath slowed and pulled out two spikes from his back pocket. He held them warily and looked around, as if he thought at any moment the phantom would attack.
But I knew better. Placing the coin I still clutched in my hand in the center, I carefully lifted the talisman, and carried it with me over to Heath. “You can put those away,” I told him, referring to the spikes.
“Where’d it go?” he asked, still eyeing the surrounding terrain suspiciously.
“In here,” I said, lifting the disk so that he could see.
“You found the talisman?”
I nodded.
“Can it get out of there?”
“Not as long as the gold’s in place,” I told him.
Heath let out a heavy sigh of relief. “Thank you, God.”
“Come on,” I told him. “Now that the genie’s back in its bottle, we’ve got to get Alex to a doctor, and then we’ve got a kidnapper and a thief to catch.”
Chapter 14
I figured we had about eight hours of darkness left to work with, and I just hoped it was enough time to do what we had to do to save Gopher.
Gilley and I managed to help Alex down the church’s spiral staircase and back through the underground tunnel. When we emerged from the manhole, I noticed with satisfaction that the night had turned cloudy, and it was nice and dark on the beach. I’d told everyone to turn off their flashlights right before moving through the manhole exit, and also ordered my friends to be quiet lest our talking reach suspicious ears.
As quickly as we dared, given Alex’s woozy condition, we got to the van, loaded her inside, and drove directly to the hospital. Once she was taken down the hall for a CT scan, Gil and I sneaked over to a nurses’ station, and while I created a distraction, Gilley did a search of the hospital’s records using one of their computers.
When I saw him nod triumphantly and hold up a paper he’d printed, he and I made a hasty exit, leaving Heath to look after Alex.
Once Gilley and I were back in the van, we drove to the inn, and for the next few hours Gil did his covert hacking into old records and files till we had what we needed. We then drove an hour and a half to an all-night hardware store, where we got our supplies, and just before dawn, when Heath called to say that Alex had only a minor concussion, Gilley and I hustled our butts back to the castle, once again using the underground tunnel, but making sure to park our van much farther down the beach and well out of sight of the causeway.
Convincing my partner that the phantom was securely locked inside the disk had been a challenge, and as I carried it through the tunnel and up the stairs to the church, he kept glancing fearfully at it.
“You’re
sure
it can’t get out?” he asked for the hundredth time.
I sighed. “If you ask me again, I’ll remove the gold stopper and let it out just to get you to keep quiet.”
“You’re not very nice when you’re sleep deprived,” he muttered.
I pointedly ignored him and kept climbing the stairs.
“M. J.?”
I gritted my teeth. “Yeah?”
“Got any food on you?”
“If you promise not to ask me any more questions, I’ll give you the Snickers bar in my bag when we get to the church.”
That worked like a charm. Gilley said not one word more. Of course, we had only about twelve more steps to the top, but I was taking my victories where I could.
Once we were there, and Gilley was happily munching on his snack, I moved to the tomb where Malachi was buried and got out my supplies, lining them up on the ground by the tomb.
Gilley came over to stare sadly down at me, his eyes roving to the interior of the sarcophagus with envy. “Do we really have to leave
all
the gold?” he whimpered.
I smiled up at him and sighed. “It’s not our treasure, Gilley. It’s Ranald’s, and now that I know him, I’m finding it kind of hard to take what isn’t rightfully mine. Plus, I think enough of it has already been stolen, and we need to prevent the rest of it from disappearing.”
“But, M. J.,” Gilley pressed, “wouldn’t Dunnyvale want you to have even a little bit of it after all you’ve done to rid the castle of the phantom?”