The Rain-Soaked Bride (27 page)

‘What the hell’s going on?’ asked Clive King, having stepped out of the conference room, followed by the rest of the delegates.

‘I’ve found our assassin,’ said Shining, ‘and we’ve got him on the run.’

‘What’s that?’ Rowlands asked, entering from the front door. ‘I’ve had my men covering the grounds all morning but
you’ve
found him?’

‘Yes,’ Shining agreed. ‘It was Bill Fratfield.’

‘Bill?’ April couldn’t believe it. ‘But he’s …’

‘In a hospital miles away,’ said Rowlands. ‘The codger’s finally flipped.’

‘I wish I had,’ Shining replied, looking around the room. ‘Is it just me or is it getting dark in here?’

The windows began to darken and Shining thought back to what Toby had told him about his experience in the car coming back from Stratford. ‘We need to stay close together,’ he said, ‘things are about to get very dangerous indeed.’

Slowly, inevitably, the room was plunged into total darkness.

a) Lufford Hall, Alcester, Warwickshire

Barry Steelhorn had been working private security for eight years and while it had its ups and downs, it beat the prison service hands down. These days he was paid decent cash to keep an eye on men in suits. They didn’t kick off when the mood took them. They had nothing to say on the sexual habits of your wife. They didn’t try and score points off you as you went about your duties. They just sat in their little meetings, and acted like you didn’t exist. That was fine as far as Barry was concerned. He had no real interest in them either. They were just the people who signed his cheques. If they were in trouble then he’d do his bit, that was the job and he wasn’t afraid to throw his weight around if the need arose. Most of the time, though, it was about sitting around, keeping your eyes peeled and your mind alert.

Sat in the guardhouse at the perimeter of Lufford Hall, he poured himself a cup of tea from his flask and sat sipping it while keeping his eye on the CCTV monitors.

There was nothing to see. Just an empty road and open fields. As the camera feeds rotated, the screens featured footage of the Hall itself from the three cameras placed in trees surrounding the property. They were no more eventful as a rule. This morning they had offered him pairs of security officers wandering around the garden in a bored grump.

Barry wasn’t bored. That was the key to a job like this. Boredom got you in trouble, it made you sloppy. He kept his mind active by thinking through the plot of an adventure novel he kept planning to write. It was going to be about a brilliant young soldier who solved an international conspiracy by shooting things. One day he’d write it. Until then he kept working over different chapters in his head, adding more car chases and explosions. It was going to be the best book ever.

He had finished his tea and was rooting around in his backpack for a packet of chocolate biscuits when he noticed one of the monitors go blank. Then another. Then one more. They were the feeds for the Hall itself. Everything on the wall was fine but he could bring up no footage of inside the building.

Giving up on the chocolate biscuits, he reached for his walkie-talkie and tried to contact someone in the Hall. There was no reply. The SIS boys were supposed to be the click of a call button away. He knew they looked down on the private staff but couldn’t believe they would be so stupid as to ignore him. Something must be going on.

‘Oi,’ he shouted through the window to his shift partner, Luis, who was walking up and down the road outside because he’d got a bit stir crazy from sitting in the guardhouse all morning. ‘Something’s up.’

Luis came jogging over, a look of excitement on his face. He was only a kid, Barry thought, barely out of school. One day he’d learn that you didn’t get excited about trouble.

‘What is it?’

‘Cameras on the house have all gone down. I need you to sit here and mind the gate while I go and have a look.’

‘Shit, can’t I go?’

‘No, you bloody can’t. Do as you’re told.’

Luis slunk inside and dumped himself on the chair in front of the monitors.

Barry didn’t blame him for wanting to go but the kid was too wet behind the ears. If there was something wrong up there then he wasn’t going to be the one to send him running off into it.

‘I’ll keep in touch on the radio,’ he told Luis. ‘It’s probably just a technical problem.’

He didn’t believe that for a moment, but it would keep Luis happy. If it had only been one camera that had packed up, then fine, maybe a loose wire or something, but all three?

He jogged up the road, trying to think of a reasonable explanation for the outage. He couldn’t see how someone had got past the wall in order to interfere with the cameras. He’d been on the ball and had seen nothing on the perimeter footage. Nor had any of the alarms tripped. Maybe it was a technical fault somehow – did all three feeds join at some point? Maybe that was where the problem lay?

As he crested the hill so that he could look down on the Hall itself, such simple thoughts as a severed cable vanished. He stood there for a moment, staring ahead, not having the first idea what to think.

His walkie-talkie crackled. ‘Barry?’ came Luis’ voice. ‘See anything yet?’

Barry pulled the walkie-talkie out of its holster and wondered exactly how to explain what his eyes were telling him in a way that didn’t sound completely mental.

There was nothing wrong with the cameras. The black screens in the guardhouse were only showing precisely what lay in front of them. The entire Hall was covered in a dome of darkness. Like an uneven, black pudding bowl had been flipped upside down and placed over the building.

‘Just hold on a minute, Luis,’ he said. ‘I’m still checking.’

He began to make his way down towards the front of the Hall. As he drew closer, he could see that the surface of the darkness wasn’t smooth. It rippled as if it were made of smoke. Maybe the whole thing was some kind of gas?

He approached via the front lawn. From close up, the darkness appeared like a liquid wall, bubbling and shifting. It cut right through the large urn water feature at the centre of the lawn.

He walked right up to it, holding his hand in front of his mouth in case it was something poisonous. It didn’t smell. He didn’t taste anything as he breathed. Neither of which meant much, he knew, but it didn’t look like gas. It was too thick, too glutinous.

He looked around for some sort of tool, snapping a branch off a bush from one of the flower beds.

He stepped up towards the wall of darkness and slowly poked at it with the branch. As the tip entered the darkness, his walkie-talkie barked into life once more, Luis’ voice coming out through the speaker.

‘You must be there by now, Barry. What’s up?’

Barry dropped the stick in surprise, swearing and yanking the walkie-talkie free.

‘I’m there, Luis,’ he said, ‘and it’s really weird so bear with me for a minute, will you?’

‘Weird how?’

‘Jesus …’ Barry reached down to retrieve the dropped stick. ‘Weird as in … I don’t know, “weird”.’

He picked the stick up and carefully stirred the surface of the darkness. Tendrils of it seemed to chase the tip of the stick around.

‘Fuck it,’ said Barry, pressing down the call button on the walkie-talkie. ‘Just get over here, will you? I need you to see this.’

b) Lufford Hall, Alcester, Warwickshire

‘What the hell is going on?’ Clive King shouted, his voice echoing around the darkness of the entrance hall. ‘I can’t see a thing.’

‘Just stay calm,’ said Shining. ‘We need to keep our heads.’

‘Says the man who is out of his.’ This was Rowlands, somewhere off to Shining’s left.

‘There’s no time for arguing,’ Shining insisted. ‘You’re not an idiot. Stop pretending to be one.’ He turned towards where he thought Rowlands was standing. ‘This is obviously something from outside your experience so let me do my damn job.’

He tried to move towards where he thought Rowlands had been standing. It was so disorientating, nothing but panicked voices in the dark.

‘Rubbish,’ Rowlands replied. ‘There’s a perfectly rational explanation for this.’

‘I wish someone would tell me what it is,’ said Tae-young.

‘This is not rational,’ Jae-sung added, his voice close to Shining. The old man reached out a hand, hoping to touch the Korean.

‘I think you’re right next to me, Jae-sung,’ he said. ‘Keep talking.’

‘I can’t believe you’re all playing into this!’ shouted Rowlands. ‘Wandering around like idiots. We need to find the door and get out of here.’

There was a crackle of static from Rowlands’ walkie-talkie as he tried to contact the rest of his men. ‘No signal,’ he muttered. ‘Something must be jamming it.’

‘No shit,’ whined Spang. ‘As far as we know, the whole world’s vanished. We’re probably on Mars!’

‘We’re exactly where we were,’ Shining said, ‘more or less. Just try and stay calm.’

Shining heard Rowland’s footsteps on the tiles, some distance away, the man pacing up and down in frustration and panic.

‘I’m here,’ said Jae-sung, doing as Shining had asked. ‘You are close. I can hear you moving. Very close.’

Shining swung his arms around, hoping to connect with the man.

There was a crashing sound as Rowlands tripped over something. ‘Jesus,’ the SIS man shouted. ‘Ridiculous. Utterly ridiculous.’

‘I have a light,’ said April, and there was the sound of her Zippo bursting into life. ‘There. It’s not really helping … I can see the flame but it’s not lighting up the room.’

‘I can’t see any flame,’ said King. ‘I can hear your voice, I know you’re close. But I can’t see any flame!’

‘Please try not to panic!’ said Shining. ‘If we panic then we’re lost. We need to find one another.’

‘How can we find one another when we can’t see?’ said King. ‘What’s happened to us? Have we all gone blind?’

‘No,’ said April. ‘I can see the flame, I’m not blind, it’s just that …’

‘We can’t see it,’ said Tae-young. ‘It’s like we’re all in our own darkness.’

‘Rubbish,’ said Rowlands. ‘Some sort of chemical agent. A nerve gas, maybe.’

‘Mars!’ Spang shouted.

‘That doesn’t even make sense,’ insisted April. ‘Please listen to August.’

‘Not a chance,’ Rowlands replied, banging around at the far end of the room. ‘The man’s mad. If we listened to him, we’d be – the door! I’ve got the door.’

‘Don’t open it!’ Shining shouted, not really knowing why, just a gut instinct that overtook him.

‘Oh shut up,’ Rowlands replied. There was the sound of a door opening and then silence.

‘Rowlands?’ King shouted. ‘Rowlands?’

Silence.

‘Where has he gone?’ asked Jae-sung, his voice almost right in Shining’s ear. He reached out and put his hands on the man’s shoulders.

‘I’ve got you,’ he said.

‘Who?’ Tae-young asked.

‘Jae-sung,’ said Shining.

‘Yes?’ Jae-sung’s voice was now some distance away. Shining held on to the pair of shoulders in front of him and squeezed.

‘Who am I touching?’ he asked. ‘I have my hands on your shoulders. Who is it?’

‘I’ll give you three guesses,’ came Fratfield’s voice in his ear.

c) Lufford Hall, Alcester, Warwickshire

Toby cut across the sculpture park aiming for the rear wall.

How far was far enough to be safe? Nothing seemed out to kill him right now. His balance was steady, his footing sound. Most importantly: there was no rain. He was soaked to the skin but the air around him was now dry. Surely that meant he was beyond the curse’s range?

He looked back over his shoulder and what he saw stopped him for a moment. The entirety of Lufford Hall had vanished from view, a wall of darkness surrounding it. It was the same as he had experienced in the car. What horror show would be playing out for those inside even now? Shouldn’t he try and get them out?

‘Oi!’ a voice shouted and he looked over towards the left-hand side of the wall and saw one of Rowlands’ men, obviously working his way around the perimeter, trying to understand what had happened.
Good luck on that one
, Toby thought,
I’ve seen my fair share of the impossible, and all of this is beyond me.

‘Keep your distance,’ Toby shouted, moving back towards the Hall and the security officer. ‘Don’t cross the threshold.’

Then he felt the air change. The faint sound of thunder. A couple of raindrops fell on his head and, to his right, moving amongst the metal sculptures, he saw the Bride.

Too close, he was still too close.

A shot rang out and Toby let himself fall backwards. The security officer was firing at him! Why the hell was he firing at him?

Because you’re cursed, he thought, and because it wants you dead.

He scrambled to his feet, turned back in the direction he had been aiming and made a zig-zagged run towards the far wall.

Another shot. Toby moved into the cover of the forest, taking the opportunity to turn and look.

He saw the officer, aiming towards him, but that wasn’t all. Behind the officer, stepping out of the darkness, like a man rising up through marshy water, Fratfield appeared.

The rogue agent reached for the security officer who was completely unaware that there was someone behind him.

‘Behind you!’ Toby shouted but the officer just took another badly aimed shot in his direction.

Fratfield grabbed the officer. He gripped the hand that was holding the gun and threw the man down onto the ground, wrestling the gun from his grip.

The man turned to try and defend himself but Fratfield shot him at point-blank range and then continued to walk away from the Hall, in Toby’s direction.

The sound of thunder increased and Toby saw the Bride, still moving amongst the sculptures, her white dress flitting in and out from between the sharp iron structures.

‘You said it yourself,’ Fratfield shouted. ‘Doppelgänger contract. There can be as many of me as I like. One to play with the old man and one to play with you. So, let’s have a little fun. I’ll give you a head start.’ He held his hands up to his face covering his eyes, the gun barrel sticking up like a strange antenna. ‘A count of twenty. One … two …’