Uprising

Chapter Eighty

The mountain wind stripped Joel like a knife as he struggled up the cliff. His hands were raw, every muscle in his body screaming at him to stop. But there was nowhere to stop when you were clinging to a steep rock face with only a few narrow ledges and the occasional clump of protruding vegetation between you and the valley floor a thousand feet below. Risking a glance downwards, he could see how far he’d come. A few more minutes, and he’d reach the base of the wall.

He climbed on, glued like a spider to the sheer slope, relying more on feel than the dim moonlight as he worked his painstaking way from handhold to handhold, foothold to foothold. Climbing was a game of strategy. Beating the mountain was all about planning your route; pick the wrong one, and the mountain beat you.

So far, Joel was winning. But then a small ledge of rock that had looked like a good left foothold suddenly gave way with a crack. The sudden weight transfer tore Joel’s left hand from its grip, and he felt himself going. Faster and faster, scrabbling desperately for a hold. He didn’t scream or cry out — everything happened too fast in that moment of eerie silence, as surprise gave way to denial and then to shock. By then it was too late and the long drop was inevitable. Joel felt himself spinning downwards.

Something raked the side of his face. With a terrible splintering and crackling, his fall was arrested. A lancing pain in his right shoulder, and he felt the flesh rip. Then the waist girth of his rucksack was yanked brutally against his lower ribs, squeezing the air out of his chest. His legs kicked in open air as he hung helplessly from whatever it was that had broken his descent. The pine-studded valley was a very long way down below him.

He twisted his head painfully upwards and saw that a protruding dead tree, growing out of an overhang that he’d avoided on the way up, had speared through the right strap of his rucksack, tearing away some of his shoulder with it. Blood was already spreading through his sweatshirt. He was caught like a fish on a hook.

He tried swinging his legs to move his body so that he could regain a hold on the rock face. The dead tree gave an ominous crack and he felt himself lurch half an inch.

Bad idea, he thought as he dangled there in space. The tree cracked again, then a long creaking groan became a ripping, splintering crackle.

And a second later, it gave. This time Joel had time to cry out ‘Shiiiit!’ as he felt himself going. Falling, he closed his eyes.

He hit the rocks face down with a grunt of pain.

Slowly, he dared to open his eyes again. He wasn’t spread out in a quivering pool of spattered flesh and burst entrails over the valley floor. He was still remarkably alive, and a reassuringly long way up with the mountain wind still whistling over him.

Even more reassuring was the solid slab of rock he was lying on. Wincing at the pain in his torn shoulder, he scrabbled to his feet and whacked his head painfully against something hard above him.

At that moment, he understood what had happened. When the dead tree had broken, it hadn’t snapped clean off but had lowered him into what seemed to be a cave entrance that he’d missed in the darkness. He rubbed his bruised head and felt his way around inside the mouth of the cave. There must be some way to clamber back out to the rock face and continue his climb.

Something crunched underfoot. He reached down and felt brittle fragments –

then his groping fingers found the rest of the skull and he fell backwards.

He sat there panting against the wall of the cave. The empty eye sockets of the human skull seemed to watch him. They weren’t alone. As his vision adjusted to the darkness he could see dozens of other skulls heaped in piles. No, not dozens, hundreds.

And he realised fully where he was. At one time this must have been an escape tunnel leading out of the castle — or maybe an invasion tunnel leading in. Whatever steps or bridge had been built there had long since eroded or rotted away. In the centuries since, the tunnel had been used for another purpose.

He was standing in the dump where the vampires threw away the remains of their victims.

It wasn’t hundreds of skulls that Joel passed on his stumbling way through the dark passage. It was thousands. After a while he stopped trying to even count. The tunnel led sharply upwards, with crude steps cut into the rock. He followed them up and up to the sound of the steady drip of water and the rasping echo of his own breathing. The steps kept spiralling upwards until his legs felt ready to collapse under him. More skulls littered the ground, and ribcages and scattered limbs. He soon became as numb to them as he was to the pain in his shoulder and the blood still seeping through his shirt.

And then he came to the manhole cover. It was two feet above his head, a concreted circular hole with iron rungs for access in and out. He hesitated, then gripped the rusted handles of the lid, mustered his strength and scraped the cast-iron plate a few inches sideways. Powdery snow showered down onto his face. Very slowly, he eased the cover all the way aside and poked his head up through the hole.

He was inside the castle courtyard.

The snow had intensified while he’d been in the tunnel, covering up the cobblestones and drifting against the inner sides of the walls. Rapid flurries of snowflakes swirled and spun through the strong beams of the floodlights that illuminated the castle grounds. A layer of white had settled on the two battered four-wheel-drive vehicles parked up just inside the gates. Joel knew Gabriel Stone liked cars, but these didn’t seem quite the vampire’s style. They had to belong to the men he paid to guard and carry out tasks for him.

Joel squeezed up out of the manhole. Moving fast, he shrugged off the rucksack, took out the cross and shoved it diagonally into his belt. He dumped the empty rucksack back in the hole and then, as quietly as he could, grated the iron cover back into place.

A few yards off was a narrow archway, beyond it a passage with doorways either side. There wasn’t much he could do about his footprints in the snow as he sneaked away towards the passage. He had to hope they’d be covered over before anyone spotted them.

With one hand on the shaft of the cross, ready to draw it from his belt like a dagger, he moved furtively through the castle. From outside, the place had looked enormous and imposing; inside, it was like a fortified town, a maze of streets and winding lanes and squares. Many of its buildings still bore signs of their original purpose: an old smithy still had its forge and anvil, disused for centuries, and there were remnants of ancient straw on the cobbled floor of the stable block. Pitted stone staircases spiralled up to the sentry watchtowers along the battlements, and he passed a long barracks where two hundred or more troops might have been stationed. A thousand years ago, the self-contained castle community would have been a hive of bustle and industry.

Before the vampires had come to claim it.

Looking up, Joel could see the upper sections of the castle dominating the town.

Like the bridge of an old sailing ship where only the captain and senior officers were allowed to stand, he guessed the grand towers and lofty halls would have been the exclusive domain of the castle’s lords and masters. That was where he would find Gabriel Stone.

Joel heard voices and shrank back against a wall as a group of shadowy figures appeared under an archway, heading towards him. He ducked into a building and watched through a craggy porthole, straining to see the figures more clearly. They were thirty yards away; then twenty-five. As they came closer, Joel gripped the cross and tried to calculate how close Alex had been to it in Venice before she’d started showing signs of distress. But nothing happened. The cross remained cold and lifeless in his hand.

The figures passed through the light of one of the flood-lamps. They were wearing heavy greatcoats and fur hats, cradling rifles and talking to each other in a language that could have been Romanian, or some kind of dialect version of it. From their swarthy features Joel guessed they must be rustic locals, maybe gypsies. They were completely oblivious of the cross’s presence and that worried him as much as the rifles they were carrying. Against these guys, he was completely unarmed.

Joel watched the men walk by and wondered whether they had even an inkling of who their employer really was. Did they know they were protecting a vampire? Did Gabriel Stone pay such men in money, or did he have other ways of holding their allegiance?

He waited until the patrol had passed by, then stepped out of his hiding place and started to move tentatively away. Ducking through the arch the men had come through, he glanced back over his shoulder to check nobody had spotted him.

And froze to the sharp snick-snack of a rifle bolt.