Uprising

Chapter Forty-Eight

Ten miles from Dornoch, the Highlands of Scotland

10.41 p.m.

The Hayabusa’s trip meter read four hundred and thirty-five miles as Joel rode up the bumpy path through the trees. A fox darted away as his headlight cut through the overgrowth of thistles and brambles. Rounding the bend in the path, the semi-derelict cottage came into view up ahead. He fought the urge to turn the bike right around and ride back down the whole length of the country.

Joel parked the bike in what had once been the front yard, turned off the engine and peeled himself painfully out of the saddle, stiff and aching and frozen to the core from the long ride. But the chills running through his body weren’t only the effects of the cold. Just being here again had filled him with dread.

He lifted off his helmet and looked around. The last time he’d seen the cottage, it had stood in its own clearing. Now, after nearly twenty years of neglect, the woods had encroached on the building. The naked branches raked the roof and scraped against the walls to the sway of the cold wind. The whitewashed walls were thick with moss, and the ivy had grown over most of the windows. He stared for a long time at the front door, still splintered in half from where the vampire had smashed his way in all those years ago.

And as he stood there, memories flooding back to him, Joel thought about the strange, wonderful man who had been his grandfather.

The mystery of why Nicholas Solomon had suddenly, sometime during the mid-1970s, abandoned his respectable middle-class existence, left his wife for no apparent reason and disappeared virtually overnight to lead a reclusive life up here in the middle of nowhere had always been a contentious issue in the Solomon family.

Joel’s parents had brought him up to believe that his grandfather was selfish, obsessive, mad as a bag of snakes, someone for whom ‘eccentric’ was way too kind a word. ‘Crazy Nick’ was what they’d called him.

For years after his unexplained disappearance, the family had refused to have anything to do with him. Joel had been about five years old when his father had, for reasons that had never been discussed, decided to make contact with Crazy Nick again.

One of his early memories was of his father talking on the phone to a private detective he’d hired to track the old man down. Soon after that the family had tentatively made contact with him and paid their first visit to his Highland hideaway.

It hadn’t been a welcome one. Nicholas Solomon had seemed deeply unhappy about their presence, nervous and on edge and impatient for them to leave. His father had said the old man resented them — but young Joel had never believed that. It had seemed to him that he was the only one who could see the sadness in his grandfather’s eyes as they said their goodbyes. As the years passed and the visits to the isolated cottage became more frequent, Joel had always felt that the growing bond between him and his grandfather was the only thing holding the family together. He’d loved the old man dearly. Always would.

Technically, the abandoned cottage was Joel’s own property. The uncle and aunt who’d taken him in after the tragedy hadn’t wanted to know about the place, and it had passed to him when he’d turned eighteen. He hadn’t wanted to think about it, let alone renovate it for sale. Let it rot.

The broken door groaned loudly as he pushed it open and stepped inside, shining his torch into the entrance hall. Weeds had invaded the gaps between the stone tiles. The place smelled strongly of damp earth and rats and decay.

It smelled like a grave.

He walked into the mouldering shell that had been the living room, gazed for a few moments at the spot where his parents had lain dead. And the place he’d seen in a thousand nightmares…where he’d killed his grandfather. His right hand twitched. Even all these years later, he could still feel the impact of the blade up his arm as it sliced through flesh and bone.

He tore himself away from that spot, beginning to shiver badly now.

Remembering the flask of chicken soup he’d brought with him, he unslung his backpack. The soup was still warm, and he gulped two cups of it down gratefully.

He hated the thought of having to stay the night here, but the wind was building into a storm outside and he couldn’t face another single mile on the Suzuki. He screwed the half-empty Thermos shut and dug in his backpack for the firelighters, candles and matches he’d picked up in the eight-till-late shop near his house. By candlelight he dug the damp ash out of the fireplace and lit a couple of solid fuel firelighter cubes. After checking that the smoke was drawing up the chimney properly, he smashed a chair and used the wood to get a blaze going. When the warmth finally began to permeate the room, he stripped off his clammy leathers and changed into jeans and a thick jumper.

He sat by the fire to finish the rest of the chicken soup, trying to shut out the memories that kept returning.

When the flask was empty, it was time to explore the house. He reluctantly got to his feet.

The white circle of torchlight bobbed ahead of him as he climbed the stairs.

There were just two doors leading off the cottage’s poky landing. One lay ajar. Joel remembered it as the bedroom in which he and his parents had slept on their visits here. He didn’t look inside. He turned the handle of the other door and pushed.

His grandfather had called it his ‘sanctus sanctorum’, the hallowed space where he spent hours deeply immersed in his ‘work’. Joel’s father had never let him venture in there. Maybe because, for all the scornful remarks that he made about Crazy Nick’s bizarre obsession with the supernatural, he’d respected his wish not to be disturbed. Or maybe just because he didn’t want his son’s head to be filled with any more of that nonsense than it already was.

The young Joel had formed a vivid image in his mind of what the mysterious room must look like: his grandfather bent over his desk, surrounded by piles of ancient books, poring over abstruse manuscripts, written in ancient, forgotten languages, lost in his quest to discover the secrets of vampires. His child’s imagination had pictured every detail, down to the pipe rack on the desk, the pot full of rich-smelling tobacco from some exotic land, the inkwell and quill pen. Maybe a rumpled bunk in the corner where his grandfather would retire, exhausted, after his hours of study.

Joel opened the door, shone the torch inside, and saw for the first time that the room was nothing like he’d imagined. It was a plain, simple bedroom, nothing more. A single bed, a wooden chair, a dressing table and a big solid antique wardrobe that took up most of the opposite wall. No books, no desk, no rolled-up manuscripts, no vampire-killing paraphernalia to be seen.

So what had his grandfather been doing up here all those hours? Napping?

On the dressing table sat a picture frame. The photograph inside was mildewed and discoloured with age and damp. Joel picked it up and wiped away the cobwebs from the dusty glass. He swallowed as he gazed at the photo. He could remember the day it had been taken, with the self-timer on his father’s old camera. It showed the four of them sitting on the stone wall outside the cottage. Joel’s grandfather was smiling and had his arm around his grandson’s shoulder, squeezing him to his side.

Everyone looked so happy. Just a few hours later, three of the four would be dead.

Joel set the picture down and yanked open a drawer of the dressing table. There wasn’t much inside. A dusty pair of spectacles. An old mechanical day/date wristwatch that had stopped just before four o’clock on March 13. A tortoiseshell comb with a few white hairs snagged in its teeth. Joel touched them, feeling a wave of sadness rise up inside him.

He didn’t even know exactly what it was he was looking for. It seemed impossible that his grandfather hadn’t kept some record of his dark, mysterious ‘work’.

There had to be something here about vampires. Something about the cross of Ardaich that he’d talked about so often.

Joel heard his voice again in his mind.

‘It must be a very special cross, Grandfather.’

‘Oh it is, my boy. Very, very special, and quite unique. The ancients spoke of its incredible powers against the forces of evil. It is like no other cross.’

‘What does it do to a vampire?’

‘Even just to go near the cross would mean the most horrible end for them, Joel.’

‘It kills them?’

‘You can’t kill something that’s already dead. No, it destroys them. Completely and utterly, so they can never, ever come back.’

‘Where is it now?’

‘It was lost, Joel. Many, many years ago. Some people have thought it was just a myth, but I know it exists. The world will be a much safer place once it’s been rediscovered, believe me.’

Joel closed the dressing table drawer and went over to the wardrobe. Its door creaked on rusty hinges as he opened it to shine the light inside. Again, there was nothing, just a few old clothes. A cardigan he remembered his grandfather wearing, now thick with dust and mould. He shut the door and kept searching — but he was fast running out of places to look.

His heart jumped when he found two cardboard boxes under the bed. Kneeling in the dust, he dragged them out and started rooting through them. He found yellowed receipts, a warranty for a fridge-freezer, a rail ticket dated 1977, a tin full of old coins, a maintenance manual for a Series II Land Rover, a yellowed photo of his grandfather in naval uniform, standing in a leafy park with his arm around a pretty brunette Joel barely recognised as the grandmother he’d only ever known as a white-haired old woman.

Just then, a sound from behind him made his heart squirm with fear. He dropped the torch and the room went black.