The Dark Portal (The Gryphon Chronicles, Book 3) (2 page)

Hold on.
Was it a trick of his imagination or was there some kind of black cloud floating up out of that ring?
Lovely, now I’m seeing things.
With a slight shudder, Barney turned away and headed back toward the center of the chamber, when something growled behind him.

He stopped and turned around slowly, looking back at the nearest gargoyle statue.
What?
Had he inhaled too many fumes, or had that thing just
moved?

Suddenly, on the far end of the chamber, Collins laughed aloud in the gloom. “Gold! I knew it!” He had opened the small wooden cask on the skeleton’s desk. “Look at this, boys! Didn’t I tell you there’d be treasure
here? Come and see! This box is filled with gold and jewels! We’re rich, I tell ye, rich!”

Barney put the gargoyle out of his mind and rushed over to
see the gold.

“We’re rich, rich, rich!” Collins was laughing like a lunatic. He scooped two handfuls of gold together and buried his nose in them, like he was splashing his face with water. “Ha, ha! Mother always said I was born lucky!”

“Put that down!” Martin scolded. “You know it isn’t yours!”

Just then,
Smith, who was out of sight, called to them from a lower level of the chamber. He had ventured down some black stairs carved into a distant corner of the tomb, and now yelled up to them: “You have
got
to see this, lads!”

They could barely drag themselves away from the gleaming beauty of the gold horde in the little wooden chest, but Martin called back to him. “What did you find?”

“Some sort o’ doorway!”

They ran to see it
, but no one was prepared for what they found.

Carved into the rock was a huge skull, and the door Smith had found waited in
side its open mouth.

“Crikey,” Martin said.

Barney frowned, nervously bringing up the rear. “I-I don’t think I want to go in there.” But he didn’t want to be left behind either, so he followed his companions.

They all went
cautiously creeping down the few steps into the lower cave.

It was one strange door.
Peering into the stone-carved skull’s gaping mouth, they saw that massive slabs of gray rock framed the dark portal, like a subterranean Stonehenge. The thick door itself was made of ancient hawthorn wood and covered in strange locks and bolts of intricate, swirling metalwork, like intertwined serpents.

“What on earth?” Martin murmured, squinting at it in disbelief.

“I knew it. It’s a vault,” Collins said. “That must be where Boney up there hid the rest of his gold! The full stash!”

“I don’t think so
.” Martin shook his head, staring at it.

“Why else would he have it locked up like a bloody bank vault?”

“What should we do?” Smith asked breathlessly.

Then he and Collin
s looked at each other and shouted the answer simultaneously: “Blasting powder!”

“Are you mad?” Martin cried. “You can’t set off an explosion in here! It could ca
use a cave-in. Use your heads! We haven’t even put up any support beams yet!”

But gold fever had taken hold.
Smith and Collins ignored him, racing to set everything up so they could blow the weird, formidable door off its hinges and get to the treasure inside.

They weren’t listening to their foreman
, nor to Barney, who tried to help Martin convince them for a moment, before he became transfixed by the eyes of the great skull.

He gazed up into them. There was a layer of transparent quartz fitted into each eye socket, l
ike windows made of thick block glass. But he could swear the eyes glowed a little, as though lit from within by burning torches.

Too weird.
Unnerved, he glanced around at the corners of the chamber, tingling with ever-increasing terror. “Fellas, I got a bad feeling about this place. I think we need to get out of here…”

They ignored him, Smith and Collins busily working to set up the blast,
Martin scolding them in a halfhearted manner—for, in truth, he was just as curious as they were to see if there was a horde of treasure in there.

“Did you hear that?”

As Barney froze, the others stopped and turned to him.

“Hear what?” Smith grunted.

Grrrrrrrr…

The sound ca
me from a foot or two behind Barney.

H
e saw Smith’s jaw drop, but he knew they were really in trouble when even Collins turned white.

“Aw,
drat,” Barney mumbled in terrified dismay. “There’s something horrible behind me, ain’t there?”

“Run!”
Mr. Martin bellowed, his voice echoing off the chamber’s stone walls.

But
unfortunately, they were too late.

Awful sounds echoed out of the chamber at the bottom of the mine. Bloodcurdling screams, ferocious snarls.

And a low, sinister laugh that grew and grew, until it reverberated throughout the hollow stone chamber.

“
FREE! Free at last! Feed, my children, and I shall do the same.”

With that, a mysterious black vapor that seemed no more than a puff of smoke floated up from the skeleton’s ring and headed for the hole the men had blasted in the wall.
It whooshed out of the chamber into the mining tunnel beyond, then headed for the world above.

The
hated world of light, and happy living things.

CHAPTER ONE

Welcome to Wales

Two Days Later

It is a well-known fact that too many hours of travel can make a person silly. Especially if he is twelve and confined in a vehicle with three of his closest friends, one dog, and of course, his pet Gryphon.

Thus, it was not surprising that after
the past couple of days—including five carriage changes, a long steam-train ride chugging over the border from England into Wales, and their present slow, plodding slog, rumbling along in the coach sent from Jake’s Welsh estate in the mountains of Snowdonia to collect them—the passengers were very silly indeed.

Boisterous laughter and the clamor of four young friends in a state of merriment came from inside the
heavy coach winding its way up a hill through the forest.

W
hen the coach abruptly stopped, however, so did all the noise.

“Hoy
! Shush, you lot!” ordered Jake, the twelve-year-old in question. “Why are we stopping?”

“Are we
there?” a piping voice exclaimed.

“Dunno! Let’s see.”

Four young faces, still shining with humor, promptly peered through the windows of the sturdy coach to find it had just emerged from the jewel-toned autumn woods.

Now they were
surrounded by broad open fields, beyond which lay breathtaking valleys and misty mountain vistas. But when the high-spirited travelers saw what had halted their progress up the road, their eager smiles faded.

“Well, that’s grim,” decl
ared Archie, Jake’s cousin, the boy genius, age eleven.

The two girls
, Dani and Isabelle, exchanged a startled glance. Then they, too, stared at the ominous scene ahead.

A long, elaborate funeral procession was crossing the road in front of them, making its way toward the
nearby cemetery that covered the bleak brow of a windy hill.

Hundreds of people dressed in black marched slowly
on foot all around the coal-black hearse, a solemn, stately carriage drawn by four black horses with ebony plumes on their heads.

Under the
cloudy October sky, the slow-moving funeral procession inched by in morbid quiet. Professional hired keeners followed the coffins, moaning and wailing in sorrow. Some slowly beat funeral drums.

Unsmiling men in top hats walked by with clusters of crying women, their faces hidden by long black veils. In this sea of midnight, only the priest had some white on, his long cassock flapping in the breeze like a shroud.

“Gracious, I wonder what’s happened,” murmured Isabelle, Archie’s sister. She was the eldest, at fourteen.

“Derek will find out.” Jake nodded through the window at their escort on this journey, Guardian Derek Stone.

Even now, the big, dark-haired warrior rode his powerful black horse ahead, reining in at the edge of the funeral parade. He dismounted and took off his hat in a show of respect for the dead.

Meanwhile, Miss Helena, their half-French governess, looked on from her perch up on the driver’s seat of the carriage, where she had fled when the children had grown sillier than she could stand.

To be sure, the grim sight before them quickly put a damper on their fun, especially when still
more
hearses came into view as the procession moved along.

“Sweet Bacon!” Archie murmured. “One, two, three—
four
coffins! What the deuce do you suppose happened here?”

“I hope
there isn’t a fever in the town.” Dani O’Dell hugged her little brown Norwich terrier a bit closer. Teddy went everywhere with her, even on holiday.

As for
his own pet, Jake quickly turned to his Gryphon. The lion-sized beast was lying peaceably on his belly in the center of the carriage between the children’s seats, his scarlet wings folded against his sides.

“Stay down, Red
.” Jake threw his discarded greatcoat over the Gryphon’s feathered head, hiding at least part of his large, unusual pet from the hundreds of people streaming past. “Sorry, boy,” he added when a low, indignant “caw” came from underneath his coat. “You know we can’t let you be seen.”

With Red safely hidden, Jake
rose from his seat and opened the door, leaning out with one foot braced on the metal carriage step. The brisk wind riffled through his dark blond forelock as he scanned their surroundings.

Hmm.
On the hill opposite the cemetery stood a decidedly spooky-looking, old institution building. With its redbrick towers, it was designed to look like a castle, but to him, it looked more like a jail. Or maybe a madhouse. A wrought-iron fence wrapped around the property, with tall gates closed across the entrance to the long drive that led up to the place. Then Jake spotted the sign planted outside the gates:
The Harris Mine School
.

Well, t
hat explained the presence of the few dozen children he now noticed milling around up by the building. The students must have been at recess, but most had stopped playing and stood motionless, watching the funeral procession in silence.

It
was odd to see so many kids in one place and yet hear so little noise, he mused. Then a robed figure caught his eye, walking back and forth along the school’s porch—a teacher or headmaster in long black robes and a tasseled cap. He seemed to be in charge.

But when the teacher
suddenly dissolved into thin air, Jake’s eyebrows shot up.
Oh, a ghost.

Right.
First one he’d seen today. He had had his abilities for six months now; seeing spirits rarely startled him anymore. Still, he couldn’t help but smile wryly to himself. Those kids must love going to a haunted school, he thought. But although the headmaster ghost was his first apparition of the day, it wouldn’t be his last.

Across the way,
scores of them were floating around the cemetery—transparent, bluish versions of who they had been in life. It was a busy day up there, all right.

A
t least a dozen spirits wandered among the headstones. Some sat idly on their gravestones, chatting as they leaned against Celtic crosses or sculpted stone angels while they watched the living crowd into the cemetery to bury the new arrivals.

I
t wasn’t as though they had much else to do.

For a moment, Jake
watched a couple of child ghosts chasing each other in circles around one of the fancy white marble mausoleums where the richer folk were laid to rest.

As he scanned the row of miniature mansions for the dead, he barely noticed the
little gargoyle statue peering down from atop the roof of one, watching the proceedings with a sinister grin.

Or maybe he had just imagined it,
because when he looked again, it was gone.

Jake frowned,
ducked his head back into the carriage, and sat down in his seat again.

Archie was right. This was
an altogether grim way to start a holiday.

They had
been so jolly a moment ago, but now a vague, creepy feeling had silenced all four. Of course, the grand funeral was a tad depressing, but it was more than that.

Something just felt…off.

An ominous undercurrent of something very wrong in this place.

He conceded, however
, that it could be just his own private dread of their upcoming tour of the goldmine that he (a former pickpocket, of all people!) had inherited from his parents.

H
e looked askance at Isabelle.

Unusual talents ran
in their family, and if the eerie atmosphere around here—the presence of evil he felt—was real, then surely his cousin the empath would sense it, too.

I
nstead, her delicate face betrayed the fact that all the sadness at the funeral was starting to affect her sensitive soul like a contagion. Her porcelain-doll complexion looked even paler than usual; her golden curls drooped with sorrow that did not quite belong to her.

Ja
ke realized she was picking up on the grief of all those hundreds of mourners.
We need to get her out of here,
he thought, but the road ahead was still clogged.

H
e gave her a light, fond kick from across the carriage to distract her. “Hey! Come back to us, Izzy. They’re them, you’re you. Now block out their emotions like Aunt Ramona taught you.”

“Easy for you to say,” she mumbled.

Dani put her arm around the older girl’s shoulders and Archie, sitting beside Jake, pulled faces at his sister until she finally smiled.

When
the whole funeral procession had finally crowded into the cemetery for the burial and the road was clear once more, Derek swung back up onto his horse and trotted over, coming alongside the carriage.

“Everyone ready to move on?” he rumbled, skimming
the four of them with his usual protective glance.

“More than ready. What happened?” Jake asked, while Archie helpfully pulled the
coat off the Gryphon’s head. Red snuffled and shook himself, happy to be rid of it.

“Some sort of
accident at the Harris Coalmine,” the fierce-eyed warrior said.

Isabelle fl
inched at this news and turned her morose stare out the window.

Archie shook his head sagely.
“Dangerous business, mining. Explosive gases, cave-ins, collapses. Long hours, fires, floods in the tunnels. Dangerous machines. Fantastic machines, of course,” he added with a grin, “but dangerous.”

“Did y
ou say Harris?” Jake asked, trying not to ponder the list of underground dangers Archie had just rattled off, for they only intensified the, er,
slight
phobia he already had about descending into the mine. “That’s the same name as that school over there. Which is haunted, by the way.”

Derek glanc
ed in the direction Jake had nodded and saw the sign by the wrought-iron fence. “Must be a Company school, for the miners’ children.”

“How much farther, Derek?” Dani asked wistfully, petting Teddy on her lap. The
little brown terrier wagged his tail as if he, too, couldn’t wait to get out of the coach.

Derek
squinted toward the road. He alone of their party had been to Plas-y-Fforest before, the Everton family’s Welsh cottage, having come here on holiday long ago with Jake’s father when the two were only boys themselves.

“
No more than twenty minutes, I should think. Good thing, too.” He glanced at the sun to judge the hour. “We don’t want to be late for our tour. The dwarves are a prompt people. They’ll be offended if we’re late. Best get moving.”

So, they did, a
nd as usual, Derek was right.

Only a
nother two more miles up and down the winding country road, the coachman turned in at a narrow dirt driveway that disappeared up into the woods. Beside the drive entrance sat a quaint, old, mossy sign that read:
Plas-y-Fforest
.

Which
, in Welsh, meant
Mansion in the Forest
—so Jake had been told.

Up the
long, bumpy drive the horses climbed, passing through a deep, mysterious pine wood that Jake was sure was full of magic. He could feel it in the air and could almost swear he saw some tiny people in the trees. Not fairies—about that size, but no wings or sparkly trails, and clad in bits of leather and colorful autumn leaves.