Uprising

Chapter Fifty

Joel heard the sound again.

It was coming from the wardrobe. A strange scuffling, scratching noise.

He fought back the terror and groped for the torch. He tried the switch and to his relief the beam cut through the darkness. He aimed it at the wardrobe. The sound had stopped. Heart thudding, he stepped over and pulled open the wardrobe door.

A sudden movement from inside startled him. A large rat clawed its way out from among the clothing and dropped down to the floor with a soft thump. Joel followed it with the torch beam as it scuttled away to escape under the bed.

Where had the animal come from? The wardrobe had been empty just moments ago.

Joel shone the light back inside the wardrobe and saw the small hole in the back panel. The rat must have come from there.

But that didn’t make sense. There should have been solid wall on the other side.

He put his fingers to the hole and felt a draught coming from somewhere.

Joel stepped inside the wardrobe and pushed gently against the back panel. It didn’t budge at first, but with a little more pressure it gave with a crack and hinged away from him like a door. He brushed away the thick matting of cobwebs and stepped through the hidden doorway.

And now he knew where his grandfather had spent all those private hours.

The secret study was cramped and windowless. The torchlight picked out a desk and chair, piles of old books, scattered heaps of notes. Joel ran his hand excitedly over the desktop and opened the middle drawer.

The first thing he saw in the drawer, lying on its side among the dust and mouse droppings, was a revolver. He hesitated for an instant, then picked it up. It was heavy in his hand, an old-fashioned lump of steel, its blued finish pocked with corrosion. He recognised the antiquated design as a 1940s service Webley.455, the type of gun that had flooded post-war Britain and found its way into a lot of illegal arms caches.

Obviously one had managed to fall into his grandfather’s hands, too. Joel broke open the action and saw that there was just one tarnished brass cartridge in the cylinder.

The rest of the chambers were empty.

Joel wondered about the gun. It didn’t make sense for his grandfather to have kept one as defence against vampires — especially not one with only a single bullet in it.

There was only one answer. It was simple and brutal, and when it hit him it filled him with sadness. The gun hadn’t been meant for defence against vampires at all. The old man had intended to use it on himself, if they ever caught up with him. One shot to the head, to save himself from a fate worse than death. Only, when that day had finally come, the gun had been out of reach. Joel stared at the weapon in his hand and his vision was clouded by sudden tears. He blinked them away.

The only other item in the drawer was an old notebook. He laid down the revolver and flicked through it. It was badly damaged with damp, half chewed by mice, but he recognised his grandfather’s handwriting on the mouldy pages. He quickly slipped it into his back pocket, then scooped up an armful of books and papers. He was halfway to the door when an afterthought made him go back to pick up the old gun. He stuck it in the back of his jeans.

His own time might come. At least he’d know what to do.

Downstairs, the fire was nearly dead. Joel smashed up another chair and revived the blaze with the splintered pieces. Then he settled on the rug by the hearth and spent the next hour going through the things he’d found.

The books were mainly about old European folklore — witchcraft, Druidism, pagan ritual, early Christianity. His grandfather had made underlinings and notes here and there in the margins. Then there was a Romanian grammar and vocabulary book dating back to 1807, and a tatty volume on ancient Slavic languages. Nothing much there to go on.

Joel turned to the diary, and his heart sank when he realised he’d underestimated the extent of the damage that the ravages of time could inflict. Half the pages were stuck together and as fragile as moth wings, falling to bits when he tried to part them. The rest either had been nibbled away by rodents or were so heavily stained with mildew that large patches of his grandfather’s writing were virtually unreadable.

But there was enough to make his heart beat and his hands tremble with the knowledge that he’d found something important.

He’d had no idea just how deeply his grandfather had been into this stuff, or how much of his life he’d devoted to it. This was thirty years’ worth of his research, dating from after the war to the time when he’d become a recluse up here in the Highlands. Half diary, half notes, the pages were scrawled in a hand that would have been hard to read even if the paper hadn’t been virtually ruined. It charted travels that Joel had never known the old man had undertaken, long before he’d been born. Visits to libraries in Bucharest, Prague, Moscow, Jerusalem, Delhi, as well as other destinations that Joel couldn’t make out.

Several pages of the diary were devoted to a series of detailed sketches in pencil and ink, some of them faded away almost to nothing. Their subject was the same every time. It was a rugged stone cross.

‘The cross of Ardaich,’ Joel muttered to himself. So this was it.

A number of the drawings seemed to depict the artefact as being made of plain stone. In others it featured strange carvings, like runes, or the letters of some ancient alphabet. But what they all had in common was the Celtic design, the head of the cross intersecting with a circle, like the reticule of a rifle sight. One of the drawings depicted it alongside a human hand for scale. It wasn’t big, maybe fourteen inches long.

Joel’s fingers fluttered as he turned another page. Under a heading that he could just about make out as ‘Origin of the cross’, his grandfather seemed to have been piecing together the history of the strange artefact from the many sources he’d studied over the decades.

Joel grabbed his backpack and took out his map and a biro. He used the back of the map to copy down the bits of the text that he could make out.ORIGIN OF THE

CROSS…5th century…Ringan (N??) travels to Scotland on orders of…On hiy long journey he meets a holy……gives Ringan a heavy sack. In the sack is a lump of rock, just larger than a man’s head. He tells Ringan it is a talisman that will protect against the Dearg-dhu.…In Scotland, Ringan builds his church. Is going to build the strange rock into the wall when he receives a visit………local village is being preyed on by a creature they call the Baobhan sith. He uses the rock to…When he witnesses its power…master stonemason…sculpt it into a……known as the CROSS OF

ARDAICH……resurfaces two centuries lat……disappeared from view…

There were many gaps — too damn many. And even the bits that Joel could read made maddeningly little sense. Who was this man called Ringan, and what was the significance of the bracketed letter N after his name? What were the Dearg-dhu and the Baobhan sith? The language looked like Gaelic. He spent a few minutes rooting through his grandfather’s books on ancient folklore, but could find nothing to explain the words.

He returned to the diary. Nothing more was readable until the following page, where he could just about make out a few fragments of sentences.…963 A.D. cross believed sighted in……observed strange powers……blessed ability to ward off revenants and…

That was about it. Joel struggled on, but the lower he went down the page, the more unreadable the writing was. In some places his grandfather just seemed to have been jotting down random notes in a hurry, as if he’d been taking them from a book. A column of words stood out: VetalasMoroiLamashtu

After a few more ruined pages was another diary entry. The date was 1975, the year the old man had moved to Scotland.April 1975. Am travelling to Venice…Looking forw…at last…staying at the hot……the location of the cr…legend tells it was concealed…church of……1631 the city was caught in the grip of the Black Death…ANCHI……666…Salvation lies at the feet of the Virgin That final line, the last piece of legible writing before the page ended in a ragged black stain, was striking. What was ‘salvation’? Joel quickly gave up on it and went on studying the rest. ‘Anchi’ was obviously half a word, written in capitals, its first letters obliterated by mould. When Joel tried to scrape it away, the paper just came apart. He gave up, and chewed his pen as he stared at the number underneath.

666. The biblical Number of the Beast. His skin crawled as he read it over and over.

But not as much as when he read the words overleaf.15th April 1975.I have destroyed one of THEM, but there are more.…narrow escape. Who will believe what I’ve seen?Now THEY will come looking for me. I must hide.…my loved ones…not safe for themGod protect me.

Joel was stunned by the realisation as he read the entry over and over again, willing the faded writing to reveal more.

But it was enough. Now he knew why Crazy Nick had walked out on his family and tried to hide himself away as best he could all those years ago. He hadn’t been crazy at all. He’d been trying to protect them all from the horror he’d encountered back in Italy.

Knowing that one day the vampires might catch up with him again.