Ash (40 page)

In truth, there really weren’t enough instruments to spread around such an enormous building and he probably needed much more sophisticated equipment than he’d been able to carry in his big but limited suitcase: frequency change detectors, closed-circuit television monitors, electric field measuring devices, thermal heat scanners, anemometers, ventimeters and air meters (he’d the latter three, but needed more), and so on. But what he required most was a team of psychic investigators with walkie-talkie radio transmitters and receivers so that they could report back to him, enabling him to be situated at a central monitoring base controlling the searches.

Ghost hunting had moved on significantly since the time it took one lone investigator with minimal apparatus such as powder tape, greenhouse thermometers and the like, to do the job. But Kate and he had underestimated both the seriousness and the enormity of the problem at Comraich.

He retrieved one other item from the battered case; the flask of absinthe which he pushed into an inside pocket of his jacket. Ash couldn’t resist taking a good swallow first. He rattled it beside his ear: it was almost empty.

Ash checked the luminous dial of his wristwatch: 11.15 p.m. Everything in Comraich Castle was quiet and still.

As he’d been setting up a movement detector camera in the west corridor, one of the guards had informed him that security patrols would be monitoring the halls and passageways of the lower floors throughout the night.

Earlier, Haelstrom had shown Ash the devastation in the dining room. Even as they climbed the broad stairway, the investigator had heard what sounded like a hundred vacuum cleaners in use and had felt sea air gusting down from open windows somewhere above. Ash guessed that all the long windows must have been thrown open to try to rid the place of the fetid smell he could still detect. He’d shivered from the cold coming from inside the room and his eyes had widened as he’d taken in the scene.

All the tables and chairs had been moved to one side and ten kitchen staff were using industrial-sized vacuum cleaners – that was why the sound had been so loud – to sweep the floor clean of what looked like volcanic sand.

Ignoring the stench, Ash knelt down and collected a handful of the dark grey grains, more like dust than sand, he thought as he let it sift through his fingers.

‘
They were flies before!
’ Haelstrom had had to raise his voice to be heard over the din of the vacuums.

Ash had stood, looking at Haelstrom in bewilderment.

‘
One minute they were flying around the room
,’ Haelstrom had told him, his mouth close to Ash’s ear, ‘
attacking people’s faces, getting into their eyes and ears, and into their mouths!
’

He’d taken the investigator by the elbow. ‘
Let’s get out of here so we can talk. Best let the staff get on with their job.
’

On the way to the lounge bar, Haelstrom had told Ash about the calamitous invasion of maggots –
crawling through the very food the diners were eating!
– and then hundreds –
thousands
– of flies that swarmed through the room attacking –
attacking!
– the castle guests. Ash was glad he’d thrown out his own infested food before the maggots had metamorphosed. Despite his experiences with the unnatural, he’d never come across a manifestation of this magnitude before and he was left almost breathless by the shock of it.

Now, as Ash continued his vigil in the long gallery, one painting in particular caught his eye: a bloodthirsty altercation between brutal-looking kilted warriors, some of whom waved claymores over their heads or stabbed into the exposed bellies of red-coated English soldiers while others slashed at their enemies with vicious-looking blades. He rose from his chair to examine it more closely. The head of one unfortunate Englishman had been almost severed, the wild-eyed terror on the poor victim’s face brutally displayed in fine detail. Smoke fouled the sky, darkening the clouds as if to reflect the carnage below. Ash found the picture’s realism almost too gruesome to contemplate for long and he moved onwards, hoping to find a subject that was mellower, more reassuring.

He soon found one, a depiction of three fine bewigged ladies peacefully concentrating on the lace-work lying across their laps while they chattered among themselves, perhaps waiting for their menfolk to return from a day’s hunting – or even a savage battle in some faraway glen. Their skin was almost as white as their flouncy dresses, although their cheeks were crudely rouged, stained dark against the whiteness of their skin.

His musings were interrupted by the sound of soft footsteps in the long, draughty hallway. Ash peered in the gloom as the steps grew louder and a strangely familiar figure emerged from the darkness.

Cedric Twigg, whose vision was as sharp as ever despite the onset of Parkinson’s disease, recognized the man standing alone in the moonlit corridor. He immediately straightened up and tried to walk normally, although he didn’t entirely succeed: his left leg felt heavier than the right one, and tended to drag a little. The deep canvas bag he carried in one hand was feeling increasingly heavy. Before reaching the investigator, he wiped the drool from his chin with the back of his trembling free hand. His steps were still short, though, and his head continued to nod forward slightly, the muscles of his face visibly stiffened. The neurologist he’d consulted had warned him this might happen, and Twigg had realized he was to be one of those unlucky victims of Parkinson’s for whom the onset of symptoms was rapid, barely affected by the Pergolide he was taking.

The other man – he recalled Ash was his name, supposedly some kind of ghost hunter – waited for Twigg to come to him. The assassin hoped the slight tremors that ran through his thin body were not too noticeable.

‘Mr Twigg, isn’t it?’ Ash said as the killer drew near.

Twigg said nothing, noting Ash’s glance towards the bag he was carrying.

‘I’m David Ash,’ the investigator tried again. ‘We met on the plane, remember?’

Twigg, who had now reached Ash, nodded his head, a deliberate movement this time. ‘We weren’t actually introduced,’ he said.

‘May I ask what you’ve got there?’ Ash pointed at the tight-zipped canvas bag, which Twigg was cradling protectively.

Before the assassin answered the question, he took a moment to appraise the ghost hunter, wondering how a man could become involved in such trivial nonsense. ‘A package. I’m delivering it to someone,’ he said softly. ‘I’m sorry, Mr Ash,’ he continued, ‘but I don’t have time to chat. If you’d just step aside, please . . .’

The other man opened his mouth as if to protest, but a sound from outside the castle caused them both to pause.

The noise was like . . . no, Ash didn’t want to guess until he heard it more clearly. Stepping away from the galleried wall, he went across the hallway and opened one of the corridor’s tall windows.

Twigg moved to join him, and both men stood and listened.

Ash remembered Gordon Dalzell, the chauffeur, remarking on the eerie sound that sometimes came from the woods at night since the wildcats had gained entry into the estate: like the babble of babies wailing. Caterwauling.

That must be what they were hearing now. Sometimes the pitch changed, became hissing snarls, nasty, vicious shrilling, and Ash thought he could hear the screeches of other, terrified, animals, even the agonized barking of deer. By the light of the full moon he saw black shapes rising from the trees in great flurries of wings as if the birds themselves were under attack. Growls, squeals, shrieking, animals baying, other creatures howling, all in the distance. He couldn’t shake the dreadfulness from his mind. It sounded like a massacre was taking place in the darkly veiled woods.

He turned to see that Twigg was walking away, continuing down the hallway.

‘Just the wildcats,’ the shabby little man mumbled over his shoulder to Ash. ‘Just cats hunting, doing what they do best.’

Ash closed the window against the gruesome, piteous racket. But even thus deadened, the sounds of slaughter troubled him more than he could say.

All-night vigils were usually boring affairs: no ghostly manifestations, no mysterious knocking, no unaccountable footsteps, no instrument malfunction. It was why parapsychology was so often ridiculed as a pseudoscience. Still, progress was being made. The discipline had been acknowledged by several academic bodies in the UK, and there was at least one parapsychology unit, at a university in Edinburgh, and other institutions offered parapsychology courses as well as conducting research into paranormal activity.

However, Ash knew that to most people the concepts of black streams (ley lines of negative influence), stage-one apparitions (those that could be caught on camera while being invisible to the naked eye) and EVP (electronic voice phenomena) were little more than gobbledegook. Haelstrom had been too shaken to ridicule Ash’s theories outright during their earlier exchange, but the investigator was still unsure whether the CEO was yet ready to accept his notion that some kind of psychic epicentre existed beneath Comraich.

The man, and his executive board of the Inner Court, whoever they might be, were, not surprisingly, unfamiliar with unearthly matters and discarnate forces: why else would they have approached the Institute in the first place? Equally, however, they seemed to be overestimating just how much it was possible for Ash to achieve.

Ash found himself all but blaming Kate for not explaining the limitations of a psychic investigator to Simon Maseby at the very start. The huge fee on offer had perhaps blinded her to the reality of the situation. Or maybe she was just putting too much faith in her chief investigator’s ability to solve such problems. Yet he couldn’t find it in himself honestly to resent her, for he knew he was as important to her as she was to him. And clearly the true gravity of the situation here hadn’t been adequately conveyed to her by Simon Maseby. He felt certain Kate would be trying to contact him by now, and probably worrying herself sick because there was no way she could do so.

The awful noise from the woods had ceased by the time Ash decided to make another inspection of his equipment sites, his hard boots echoing through stone halls. If a ghost were waiting, it wouldn’t bother to hide: where would be the fun in that?

He strode down a passageway into yet another corridor; he checked rooms as he went, opening doors and looking in, avoiding the suites belonging to Haelstrom, as well as the area whose entrance was so much grander than any others, with giltwood, red-cushioned chairs with high backs on either side of the closed double doors, where beautiful paintings and skilful statuary abounded. Thick carpet here softened his footfalls and he hoped he wasn’t spoiling Lord Edgar Shawcroft-Draker’s neighbourhood with his working clothes.

Where the funny little man with the somewhat off-putting eyes had disappeared to, Ash had no idea; but this level was as complex and many-roomed as those below it, and no door bore a number or nameplate.

What a long and emotional day it had been. It was less than twenty-four hours since he’d left London, but it seemed like a week, so many things had occurred. Thankfully, nothing out of the ordinary was happening right now. He hoped. He wandered on, his route already mapped out in his head, for he’d studied the plans of Comraich beforehand. As insurance, in his gilet pocket he carried a nifty little gadget that acted as an electronic ball of string, plotting his course. To return to his starting point, he merely had to tap a key and the route would reverse so that he could follow it back to base. It was perfect for complexly structured buildings, or even on a walk through the streets of an unknown city.

In a broad stone passageway somewhere near the labyrinthine castle’s centre he came upon a large arched doorway with hinges and scrollwork of black iron and nail-head ornamentation in the shape of a crucifix. A plain architrave of venerable thick wood bordered the door. He assumed this was the castle’s chapel. Ash thought he heard movement from inside and he stopped for a moment to listen.

A low continuous murmuring came to him. It sounded like an incantation, and he guessed the bishop and his acolyte were at their devotions. He hoped they were praying for deliverance from the evil that had assailed Comraich these past weeks. Deciding not to disturb them, Ash moved on.

He reached a narrow marble-topped console table on top of which was a delicately adorned vase filled with dead, sagging flowers. He stopped to examine the talcum powder he’d sprinkled around the base of the vase earlier to show whether the container had moved. It hadn’t. A further sprinkling along the top of the console was similarly undisturbed.

Ash had set many such markers around the fifth floor, as well as all manner of other apparatus including motion-sensitive cameras, self-registering thermographs, sensitive static sound recorders, anemometers, ventimeters and air meters.

He checked them all, but nothing had changed. The thermometers confirmed something that had been puzzling him since he arrived: the castle was bone-numbingly cold, despite the fierce heat emanating from the many radiators he passed. Maybe it was always this way in the upper reaches of Comraich. On the other hand, maybe the ‘uninvited’, the uncanny entities, had stolen all the energy they could plunder and used it for themselves, gaining power from it. To the layman, it would sound absurd, but Ash was experienced enough to know this was an indication of a genuine haunting. Still he roamed, examining and testing instruments and devices, discouraged but steadfast, determined to find the epicentre of the paranormal activity. In his heart, and his senses, he knew it was there, beneath the castle. He resolved that the following day he would investigate the caves below the cliffs that formed the promontory on which Comraich was built. They were the key to all this, he was sure.

Strangely enough, Ash didn’t feel tired. Far from it: the day’s thrills, both welcome and otherwise, had stimulated his mind and body. He knew it was a trait that made him good at his job. He mightn’t exactly appreciate all the problems that came his way, but he did enjoy solving them.