Opens his eyes and feels a frozen, gauntleted hand close around his heart.
An inch away, beyond the mullioned glass, two eyes are staring straight back into him, glaring into his irises like infra-red beams through a magnifying glass. He staggers back, goosepimples rising on his skin.
Sees a face; all snout and teeth and leather; all tusks and meat.
Sees the thing smear breath and spit upon the glass.
He staggers backwards, his hand rising to the inked symbols on his chest. Clatters over the armchair and tumbles to the floor, the last of the red wine tumbling onto the carpet: the smear of red expanding like a bloodstain.
He moves towards the door and trips over his own feet. Tumbles to the floor and catches his head upon the edge of the table, pain exploding inside his head.
He looks up into the leather and the hair and the round yellow eyes: porcine teeth curving down like sword. He opens his mouth. Feels the sudden thudding impact of a fist, beating down upon his skull as if pounding in a nail.
Feels the cold and the darkness wash over him like silk.
42
Rowan wakes to pain. He feels as though hot iron is being pressed against his flesh. There is a pain in his shoulder joints; an agony so hot and perfect that for one delirious moment he feels as though wings have been stitched to his back.
He traces the source. Tries to make sense of himself. It’s almost as dark with his eyes open as closed. Away from the places where his skin seems to sizzle, he is cold. A sharp breeze lashes at his skin.
Icy cold water drips upon his face from above. He tastes something brackish and mineral. He spits, his tongue too big for his mouth. Something about the action feels wrong. Skin is touching his cheeks. His face feels as if it is being pushed into his sternum.
Panic blooms in his chest: fresh blood blotting funeral shroud. He realises he is not touching the ground. His arms are above his head. Something hard and metallic is chewing into the skin of his wrists, deep enough to touch bone. He’s dangling over nothingness. He jerks, instinctively. The parts of him that were numb come to life: a shriek of pain emanating through every part of him. He jerks and hears metal upon metal – feels the cold bindings at his wrist take another bite of his skin. He kicks out again, legs moving in ragged circles in the pitch dark, pumping his legs like a cyclist. The constriction in his throat suddenly the centre of his being. He is sinking into himself. The weight of his own body is pulling him down into a cold, dank darkness,.
He can’t speak. Can’t lift his head. Something is crusted to his face. He takes a choking breath and tastes blood. He begins to cough, each gasp seeming to pull the manacles deeper into his flesh. He stretches his neck. Reaches out with his fingertips and touches a link of metal with his middle fingers. They’re looped over a cold metal rod.
Handcuffs.
The rung of a ladder.
He tries again to speak. Forces his head out of his neck and stares upwards. Little droplets of water catch a faint, almost phosphorescent light. The darkness seems to shimmer.
A cave, he thinks. Underground. A shaft. One of the old copper shafts from when they built the house. ..
He hears the sound of distant running water.
He can feel his heart beating faster, responding to the desperate fight-or-flight burst of adrenaline that is rushing through his system. He tries to slow it down. To focus. And yet the pain and the fear are absolute. All he wants is for this horror to stop.
A voice drifts up from below. It echoes against the wall. It sounds like more than one voice. Sounds as if a dozen or more people are reading from the same script.
He kicks out again, trying to turn himself as if he is suspended in water. Bites back the hiss of pain that threatens to erupt from his bloodied, dry mouth.
He twists, suspended in the darkness: his arms two snakes joined at the mouth. He glares into the dark. Slowly, the shapes begin to come into focus.
A woman with pale skin is laid out on her back. She wears a light shift dress, filthy and ragged. She is little more than skin and bone. Streaks and swirls have been daubed upon her skin. Even in the darkness and after the desecration of her flesh, Rowan recognises her. It’s Violet.
He twists, desperately, and a fresh bu8rst of pain rips down his arms. He bites down upon the fat of his cheek to stop from screaming. Peers through the half light and tries to make sense of what lays below him.
There are bones scattered on the damp floor. Too many bones. Hundreds of bones. Rowan pictures a bear cave – the lair of something carnivorous and unstoppable.
He spins, helplessly. He feels as if something has broken in his head.
He hears movement, down there, in the shadows by the cave. He sees the thing that haunted Violet’s dreams. Sees Elrik. The Shaman. Cormac Pearl …
Rowan narrows his eyes.
The Shaman wears only the mask: eyes like saucers, gray white tusks; stitches jagged where the flesh has been pulled too tight.
The body beneath is female. Rounded-shoulders and motherly hips; a triangle of greying fire at her thighs.
Freya.
The girl nobody looked for, because she never really existed.
Despite the pain, despite the fear, Rowan suddenly understands. Thirty-five years ago, Mr Sixpence tried to help a troubled young boy called Cormac Pearl. He taught him how to meditate. To breathe. To channel his energies. He showed him how to journey into the next world and to return stronger than before. But Cormac had no interest in helping people. The darkness inside him swallowed the light. Sixpence cast him out and he returned home to the family that he had already sickened with his violence. They took him in, only for him to betray them. He fled Blackpool in the company of a young woman – a drifter; an alternative – somebody who had slipped through the cracks. He discarded her soon after, but he found a new world of willing victims. Found broken souls who allowed him to place his healing hands upon them. Who held their hand in the moment of their death and rode their dying spirit like a jockey.
Rowan glances down again. Violet is stirring. He can see from the terrible state of her that she has been here, in this place, for a long time. He watches as Freya nudges her with a naked, dirty foot. The nails are painted green.
Rowan closes his eyes. He feels as though his arms are going to come out of their sockets. He looks up, into the darkness and the tumbling rain of dirty water. Tastes metal on his tongue. Questions line up in his mind like bullets. What had happened to Sixpence? To Tunstall? To Cormac Pearl?
He swallows, his throat an agony. Then he yells her name.
“Freya!”
Below, the pig-face jerks upwards. Rowan spins: a moth twisting in a noose of spider-silk. She stares a hole through him – the eyes of the boar and the ones beneath drilling into him like twisted iron. Slowly, as if there is a thread connecting them, she turns her head towards the pile of rags and sticks than lays, scarecrow-like, amid a jagged outcrop of sparkling rocks.
“She did that,” shouts Freya, her voice echoing off the walls. She slides off the mask, glaring up, madness in her eyes but face as still as water. “Destroyed something beautiful. We would have let her go. Her and Catherine. But they had to fight him. He would have shown them such beautiful things, the way he showed me. His father never understood what he was trying to do. Just saw the darkness in him. I saw so much more. There’s a beauty In fire, don’t you think? It hurts, but it’s beautiful. I didn’t understand that until Mr Pearl asked me to help find him. He said he knew his son’s habits. That old copper with the dark hair – he’d found the route he liked to take. He was always going to come back to where it began. To where Sixpence showed him the truth of things. I still looked young enough toi pass for 14. That’s what people liked about me. That’s what the punters had liked. He took me off the streets and paid to pretty me up. Got me in to Silver Birch without anybody asking questions. I was just Freya. The new girl. And I went along with it because it was exciting, and because I didn’t really believe it, and because before Mr Pearl found me I was sleeping in doorways and sewers and letting men stick themselves in me for the price of a bag of chips. He told me what to be. How to behave. Who to make friends with. And he told me that all I had to do was keep watch for a drifted called Cormac.”