WARDSBY 15 MILES
CHICHESTER 18 MILES
Donna instructed Julie to take the left-hand fork in the road.
Sixty-One
The ferocity of the assault lifted Peter Farrell off his feet.
He was slammed into the wall with crushing force and enough power to knock the wind from him. Reeling from the onslaught, he toppled forward but managed to keep his feet until a second attack pinned him to the wall and held him there.
‘You said you would get the book,’ snarled Francis Dashwood, gripping Farrell by the collar. ‘We relied on you and you failed.’
Farrell recoiled, not from the verbal tirade but from the rank stench that wafted over him every time Dashwood spoke. It was a smell like rotting meat, a rancid, cloying odour that made him nauseous.
‘I’m sorry,’ he said breathlessly, trying to inhale as little of the fetid air as possible.
‘Your apologies are no good to us,’ roared Richard Parsons. ‘We need the book, not your pathetic excuses.’
Dashwood let out a howl of frustration and hurled Farrell across the room. He crashed into a table, somersaulted over it and landed heavily on the carpet. He lay there for a moment before rolling over and getting to his knees.
The other two men advanced upon him.
‘It has kept us alive for over two hundred years,’ Dashwood told him. ‘Get it.’
Farrell clambered to his feet, breathing heavily, forced to inhale the reeking smell. He looked at the other two men. There was a yellow tinge to their skin. Parsons’ eyes looked sunken, with blue-black rings around them making him look badly bruised. The flesh of his hands appeared loose, as if it didn’t fit his bones.
The skin beneath his chin hung in thick folds that swayed back and forth as he walked.
Dashwood looked even worse. A sticky, pus-like fluid dribbled from the corners of both his eyes. The orbs themselves were bulging in sunken sockets, criss-crossed by hundreds of tiny red veins, each one of which looked on the point of bursting. Like Parsons, his skin was sagging in places like an ill-fitting suit. In others it had begun to peel away in long coils. One of these coils hung from his left cheek like a spiral, frozen tear.
The stench inside the room was practically intolerable.
‘Your men failed at the house and then on the train,’ Dashwood reminded him.
‘We will not tolerate another failure. You must get the book and bring it to us personally,’ Parsons told him. ‘Do you have any idea how important it is? Not just to us, but to everyone connected with this organisation?’
‘If the contents were to be known, as Ward wanted them to be known, the results would be catastrophic,’ Dashwood reminded him. ‘Get the book.’
He shoved Farrell, who fell backwards, colliding with a chair and almost falling again.
‘It isn’t at the house,’ he said, looking at each of the men in turn. ‘We’ve already checked. She didn’t have it with her ...’
Dashwood cut him short.
‘Are you sure of that?’ he snapped.
‘I’m not
sure
, but . . .’
Farrell was interrupted by a powerful blow across the face. As it landed he felt the repulsively soft feel of Dashwood’s skin against his own.
‘You know what will happen to us if the book is not found,’ snarled Dashwood. ‘You can see what is already happening.’
He grabbed Farrell again and pushed his face within inches. ‘Look.’ He touched the coil of rotting flesh with his free hand, pulling it slowly free. The skin tore slightly, leaving a red mark. Dashwood pushed it towards Farrell’s lips, jamming the length of putrid flesh into the other man’s mouth.
Farrell closed his eyes as he tasted the rotting matter on his tongue.
‘Taste our pain,’ hissed Dashwood, gripping Farrell’s chin, forcing him to chew on the strand of flesh. As he spoke his foul breath swept over Farrell in a noxious cloud. ‘Smell our suffering.’
Farrell knew he was going to be sick.
He felt Dashwood’s index finger inside his mouth, pushing the slippery piece of skin further into the moist orifice.
‘Swallow it,’ Dashwood demanded.
Farrell did as he was told and retched violently, falling away from Dashwood, feeling his stomach churn, eager to be rid of the disgusting matter inside it. He bent double and vomited, falling to his knees in the puddle of his own regurgitated stomach contents. The bitter stench mingled with the odour of putrescent flesh and he almost retched again but found that there was nothing left to bring up. His muscles contracted but could force nothing else out.
He sucked in deep, racking breaths and looked up at the two men.
Could the word be accurately applied to these two apparitions?
‘Where is the woman now?’ Parsons wanted to know.
‘She hasn’t been back to her house,’ Farrell said. ‘Someone picked her up at King’s Cross. Another woman.’ He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. ‘They could be anywhere.’
Dashwood took a menacing step towards him.
‘My guess is they’ve gone to the other house,’ he said quickly. ‘The one Connelly mentioned before he died. If they have, we’ll find them.
And
the book.’
‘If you don’t, it will mean
your
death as well as ours,’ Dashwood told him. ‘Now go.’
The stench of death hung in the air like an odorous, invisible cloud.
Sixty-Two
The cottage stood about two hundred yards back from the road, accessible only by a narrow drive flanked on both sides by stone walls. The walls extended round not only the front garden but the entire property, stark grey against the white walls of the cottage. The slate roof was mildewed in places and the guttering shaky, but otherwise the place was in a good state of repair.
Ward had bought it four years earlier with part of the advance on one of his books. He and Donna used it during the summer, making frequent weekend trips; Ward himself had written at least two books there. The cottage had no phone, something he had insisted on to prevent interruption when he was working. The nearest neighbour, a farmer well into his seventies, was more than five miles and a range of low hills away.
Donna guessed that it was more than two months since she had been to the cottage.
She wondered if he had ever brought Suzanne Regan here and found it more than usually difficult to wipe the thought from her mind. Even the stress of the past few hours had not removed the memories of his betrayal.
She stood in the small sitting-room and ran her finger along the top of a sideboard, drawing a line in the dust that had accumulated. The room was about twelve feet square, furnished with old, antique oak merchandise they’d bought from a shop in Chichester during their first visit to the place. It had few ornaments: a vase or two, an ashtray and a couple of ceramic figures. The windows were leaded.
The ground floor consisted of just the sitting-room and a large kitchen. The entrance hall seemed disproportionately large. There was a trap-door in the centre of the kitchen floor, which led down to a deep cellar. Ward kept old manuscripts down there. He also kept a substantial store of wine in the subterranean room. He had never been a great wine drinker, but on every visit to the Mayfair Hotel in London (which he used often) he was presented with a complimentary bottle of wine. He never drank them but always brought them home with him to add to the array in the cellar.
The floor of the lower ground room was of earth. Donna rarely ventured down the wooden ladder into it; it was not well lit and, despite Ward’s attempts to convince her otherwise, she was certain that the entire cellar was seething with spiders, creatures she was frightened of.
A bare wood staircase led up to the first floor, which comprised a bathroom and two bedrooms. In the first bedroom a door opened onto a short flight of rickety steps that led to an attic. Ward had often threatened to have it converted into a work room but, as is the case with most attics, it remained nothing more than a storehouse for junk that wasn’t wanted elsewhere in the cottage.
The obvious thing seemed to be to retire to bed; both women felt crushing exhaustion. But they seemed to have reached that point where they could not sleep despite their tiredness. Donna took a hurried bath, Julie made them some tea and, as the hands on the clock above the open fireplace crawled round to 3.56, they both sat down, one on either side of the table in the centre of the room.
In the centre of the table were two aluminium boxes resembling metal attaché cases.
Donna flipped the first one open and lifted the lid.
In the half-light cast by the lamps the metal of the Smith and Wesson .38 and the Beretta 92s gleamed.
Donna took each weapon from the case in turn, checked it and replaced it. She then opened the second case and performed a similar ritual with the .357 and the Charter Arms .22.
She flipped the cylinders from the revolvers and checked the firing actions, listening to the metallic click of the hammers on empty chambers. She worked the slide of the Beretta, then took fifteen rounds from the box of 9mm ammunition. She thumbed them into the magazine before placing it carefully back in the box with the weapon.
She loaded the revolvers, too, leaving the chamber beneath the hammer empty. Those two she replaced, then carried upstairs.
‘I hope to God you know what you’re doing,’ said Julie when her sister returned.
‘This is life and death, Julie,’ she said solemnly.
‘Then why don’t you just call the police?’ the younger woman said, agitated.
Donna didn’t answer; she merely sipped her tea.
‘I think you want it to come to this, don’t you?’ Julie snapped. ‘You don’t care if you kill them.’
‘They tried to kill
me.’
‘And if you do kill anyone,
you’ll
be the one who’ll go to prison.’
‘I’ll take that chance.’
‘Let’s just hope it doesn’t go that far.’
‘It already has.’
They regarded each other for long moments, then Julie reached into her handbag for the envelope. She handed it to Donna, who turned it over in her hands, seeing Ward’s handwriting on the front. She smiled thinly and ran her index finger over the Biro scribble.
I miss you.
‘It can wait until morning,’ she said quietly. ‘We should get some sleep.’
Julie agreed.
Donna took the envelope upstairs with her and laid it on the bedside table. Before she got into bed she touched it once, running her fingertips over the smooth manilla package. Then, naked, she slipped between the sheets.
Her last waking thought was of her dead husband. As she drifted off to sleep, a single tear rolled from her eye.
I miss you.
Sixty-Three
The book is called Domus Vitae, which is translated as ‘The House of Life’. It was written by a man called Edward Chardell in 1753. Only one hundred copies were printed. The copy I discovered is, as far as I know, the only one in existence. It is vital to the members of The Sons of Midnight. Vital to their survival and also to their protection.
Every member of the club, from its formation back in 1721 right up until the present day, is forced to write his name in the book. I have those names. I know those names. That is why I stole the book and that is why they want me dead and why they need the book back. If its contents were released then they would be destroyed; but also the repercussions would be enormous.
The actual content of the book itself consists of a series of spells and invocations designed to be used at meetings of the club, just as similar books were used at meetings of The Hell Fire Club all over Britain and Ireland. Each club had one of these books which they called Grimoires, and the loss or destruction of these Grimoires has accounted for the disappearance of other branches of The Hell Fire Club over the years. The Sons of Midnight are the only remaining group I know of, still linked to the original Hell Fire Club. I have researched everything about them, their customs, their members and their motives. They trusted me enough to allow me into their ranks, but when I saw what they were planning I knew that the only answer was to destroy them, expose them.