Siege of Stone (11 page)

As he looked at the castle, he knew that something was different. Then he had it—the rusted Ford was missing from beside the caretaker's cottage.

Had Tony been in his normal, cautious state of mind, he would not have even considered going to the castle alone. But losing Miriam Dominick had made him ravenous for action and involvement. When he was merely digging a trench, there was too much opportunity for memories and regrets to come to him. If he did not keep his mind constantly busy, the sight of Miriam's face, the sound of her voice, the touch of her hand haunted him.

Here at last was a chance to banish her for at least as long as it would take to enter the castle and see what might be found. There was no denying that it was a long shot to take on the casual word of a wandering priest, but priests had proved to be effective guides before, both spiritual guides through his life, and guides to the mystery in which he and his colleagues were immersed.

He jogged back to the van, stuffed what equipment he thought he might need in a backpack, and trotted back over the hill and down toward the castle.

J
oseph had never seen a town as much on edge as Gairloch seemed to be. As he and Laika entered the grocer's shop, the man looked startled and forced a smile at the strangers. When they took their selections to the register, he avoided eye contact as he tallied up the bill.

"Beautiful day," Laika observed. He glanced up and nodded, then went back to his sums. "Is there a pub in town you might recommend?" He would have to talk now, Joseph thought.

"Black Bear," he said, not looking up.

"Is anything wrong?" Laika asked.

"Wrong?" Still he looked down.

"When we came in, you looked as though you expected to . . . see a ghost."

Now he looked up, gave a sickly smile, and forced a laugh. "Oh no, not
me
." The implication was obvious.

"Others have, then, eh?" Laika said, as though she knew.

"I wouldna know anything about that." He straightened up. "That's thirty-three pounds and forty-seven pence."

Laika paid, and they picked up the bags and walked out. The grocer kept his gaze fixed firmly on the floor.

"There's a man who's hiding something," Laika said outside, as they put the groceries into the trunk.

"Or maybe it's just a bad case of acid reflux," said Joseph.

Laika speedread the newspaper she had bought in the shop. "Nothing much in here except births, weddings, and deaths, jumble sales, auction records, crop yields, and the weather."

"I was expecting newsboys to be on every corner, shouting 'Ghosts haunt peninsula! Citizens panic!'"

"Let's try the Black Bear," said Laika. "Maybe people will be more talkative there."

"Great. I've been dying for a lukewarm beer."

The Black Bear was only a few storefronts away. On one side was a bar with small tables for drinkers along the opposite wall. A door led to a dining room. Laika and Joseph chose a table near one occupied by three men in work clothes who, Joseph guessed, worked on a croft. He got two glasses of lager at the bar, and he and Laika sat and drank and chatted of nothing, trying to overhear the conversation of the crofters.

But the men spoke in low voices, and when Joseph tried to make conversation, they were polite but unresponsive. Laika and Joseph finished their beers and left.

"I think we need to find the local shoeshine guy-slash-informant and slip him a twenty. Or maybe a cabbie—'You know where we can get some good ghosts around here?'"

"No. Let's pay a visit to the
Gairloch Gazette
," she said.

The newspaper office was housed in a Victorian building complete with a comer tower. Inside, a round-faced man and a thin woman, approximately the same age, were working at two desks. The man got up, introduced himself as Samuel Trotter, and asked how he could help them. Though he seemed affable enough, there was a sense of guardedness about him.

Laika told him that they were archeologists from Princeton digging at the MacLunie Stones. "Since, as a newspaperman, you're certainly familiar with the area and the people," she said, "I wonder if you could think of anyone who might recall any of the other digging on the MacLunie site."

"Well, there's surely a lot of digging about these days," he said, his face momentarily sour. "But as for the MacLunie Stones, I doubt there's anyone living who'd recall the last time there were any archeologists up there. I believe it was back in the 1890s—I'm interested in local history, you see. As far as I know, they didn't find a thing."

"Well," said Joseph, "our methods are a bit more advanced now, and you never know what might have been missed. There is one thing that I'd like to ask you about, though. Some rumors we've heard."

"Rumors?" Trotter looked ready. The man was dreadfully inept at hiding his emotions.

"We've heard people have been seeing . . . well,
things
. Ghosts or visions or . . ." He chuckled. "I guess some folks even said aliens. True?"

"I, I don't know anything about any ghosts."

"That's a relief," Joseph went on. "We were concerned because a lot of the older people, not just in Scotland, but in other countries in which we've worked, are a little . . . superstitious about archeologists. They seem to feel that we dig up things that are better left undisturbed. My colleagues and I have had our share of blame for raising plenty of ghosts, and I just wanted to see if there was any of that feeling here."

"Not that I know of, sir. No." He said nothing more, and from his expression, Joseph didn't expect him to.

"We're sorry to have disturbed you," Laika said. "Thanks for the information."

Trotter nodded, looking at them apprehensively, as though he couldn't wait for them to leave, and they obliged him.

"This town is scared shitless," Joseph said, "and I don't think it's of ghosts."

"Ghosts, or what
look
like ghosts," Laika said, "have got to be part of it. Skye's intelligence told us that much. And it's obvious that Trotter wasn't telling all he knew. He was covering up, but I don't know why."

"Maybe there's something they're scared of
more
than ghosts," Joseph suggested.

"Publicity?"

"Oh yeah, the paparazzi are just swarming, aren't they?"

"No, and the cover-up may be why. But you can't tell me a whole town would cover up multiple sightings on their own, just to keep busybodies out."

"You thinking the government?"

"I don't know what I'm thinking. But I do know that I'd like to find out a little more about our fellow archeologists up at the Mellangaun Stones."

T
ony Luciano went to the door of the caretaker's cottage and knocked. He didn't expect a response, and received none. The car was gone, so why wouldn't the caretaker be gone? If anyone had answered, Tony had a story ready, but it wasn't necessary.

What was left of the outer wall of the castle lay in ruins, and he passed through the opening and walked up to the inner gatehouse. The giant door was visible from the cottage, and he didn't want to have to open it when the caretaker returned, so he went around the back. Near one of the towers, the wall had crumbled enough so that he could clamber up the rubble and climb the remaining ten feet up the angled wall by using the cracks in the mortar that held the stones in place.

After only a few minutes, Tony pulled himself up onto the inner curtain wall of the castle. A stairway was close by, and he descended it into the inner ward, the open area around which the rooms of the castle had been built. It seemed the owners had foreseen that intruders might enter over the wall, for all the inner doors were securely locked, and Tony saw the traces of an old-fashioned wire-based alarm system around the door frames.

With the alarm evasion kit in his backpack, it took him only a minute to incapacitate it. He was delighted to see that the lock on the nearest door was not even a pin-tumbler, but a decades-old warded lock, which yielded quickly to his skeleton keys. The owners, he thought, were either naive or had little fear of being invaded, probably both.

He pushed the door open slowly, listening carefully. But he heard no response to his approach, and went inside, pushing the door closed behind him. The light passing through the grimy windows that looked out onto the inner ward gave the room a twilight glow. It was a kitchen, and the old sinks and cupboards made it obvious that it had last been renovated in the 1940s. An icebox, its cooling coils on its top, stood silently in the corner. Outlets on the walls showed the place had been wired for electricity. There was no food anywhere in the large room.

Tony moved through a wide doorway into what he supposed was a great hall, used for dining. A long table sat against the outside wall, and chairs were placed randomly against the wall opposite. He turned a corner and found a row of sleeping apartments, with an unmade bed in each. The mattresses were made of straw and ticking. When he lifted them, he saw there were no box springs. Each mattress rested on a web of ropes that crossed the wooden frames of the bed. The only other things in each room were a small chest of drawers, a clothes tree, and a wooden chair. There were six such rooms on the ground floor, and six more above, with a bathroom on each floor.

Twelve rooms. Twelve Templars?

Tony tried every door he came across. Most were closets, empty or nearly so. But on the side of the castle beyond the kitchen and opposite the bedrooms, in what seemed to be a storage room, was a closet filled wall to wall and nearly to the high ceiling with old cardboard boxes.

Tony, curious as to what might be inside them, tried to lift one, marked
Bovril
in faded letters, from the top of the pile, and was surprised to find that it was empty. So was the one beneath it. Why, he wondered, have a large closet filled with empty cardboard boxes, unless to disguise the fact that it was more than a mere closet?

He removed enough of the boxes to reach the back wall, and discovered that it was a pocket door. He slid it open, and found himself looking down a narrow, circular staircase that wound into darkness. There was a light switch on the wall, but nothing happened when he flicked it. The power was probably off everywhere but in the cottage. Taking a bright flashlight from his backpack, he turned it on and started down the stairs.

The stairs were steep, and there were fifty of them, so that Tony suspected he was thirty or forty feet beneath ground level when they ended in front of a door. He opened it and shone his light into the darkness.

The room was vast, and he suspected it sat under most of the castle. Rows of great stone pillars ran the length and breadth of the room. Tony could count twenty-four of them, and there seemed to be more stretching back into the deeper darkness beyond his flashlight's beam.

Three broad slate steps took him down to the level of the room, where a long oak table stood. Five massive chairs sat on each side, with one more at each end. The table was bare, and there was nothing else in the room except for a large wooden crest affixed to the stone wall near the table.

It appeared to be a coat of arms, and showed a fist clenching an upright dirk, the source, perhaps, of the castle's name. Two words framed the heraldic device, but the letters were too worn for Tony to decipher. He stepped closer to the crest, but it was so high up on the wall that he could not quite reach it.

He walked around the room, looking into the dark corners and behind every pillar, but there was nothing else to be seen. The place was surprisingly dust free, and he figured there was no breeze to stir it. With the door shut, the chamber might be literally sealed. He turned off his flashlight to see if any light was coming into the room at all, but he found himself in pitch blackness and turned it back on.

Tony was only a few feet from the door, ready to go back upstairs, when he heard the sound. It was a high-pitched, machine-like hum, but unlike a turbine's whir, or any machine he had ever heard before. The sound seemed to be coming from behind him, and he wondered for a second if there were a generator down there that he had somehow overlooked. If so, perhaps the caretaker had returned and started it. The thought made him tense, but when he looked over his shoulder, the tension grew into something as close to panic as Tony had ever felt.

There in the subterranean room, less than ten feet away from him, something was glowing in the darkness. It was a vertical shape, seven feet high, and seemed to hover in the stagnant air of the cellar two feet above the stone floor.