What a Ghoul Wants

by Victoria Laurie

  At last we rounded the curve of the moat to the south end of the castle, which appeared as foreboding as ever. I signaled to Heath at the point where I thought Clarence had stood next to me, and he pulled hard on the left oar, turning us right and directly toward the castle.

  I then got up and moved to the very front of the boat, holding on tightly to the bow and shifting my eyes from the water to the wall of the castle, then back again.

  At first as we came closer to the wall, I thought my hunch was completely wrong, but then, about ten yards away I felt my breath catch. “There!” I said, pointing to a crevice in the wall of the castle.

  Heath stopped rowing and twisted in his seat. “Whoa,” he said. “Would you look at that?”

  “It’s a false facade,” I said as the boat continued to glide forward and I was getting a better look. “The left side of the wall curves out and stops, creating a blind corner for another section set farther back to continue. If you didn’t know it was here, you’d never guess it existed.”

  “I’ve heard of these,” the inspector said, also eyeing the gap in the wall that was visible only when you were up close to it. “It would allow the castle’s lord and his family to escape should an invader breach the main gate. He could slip out in a small boat and make his way to the lake or to land if need be.”

  Heath took up rowing again and navigated around the curve of the false wall, bringing us into a large dark circular space at the opposite end of which was a set of stairs. “No way!” I heard Heath say softly.

  “Can you get us to the stairs?” I asked him.

  “No sweat.” Heath rowed us right to the center of the steps and I hopped out. Grabbing hold of the lead line, I searched for a place to tie it off. “Em!” Heath barked, and I looked up to see an angry look on his face. “Get back in the boat and let me go first!”

  I leveled a look at him; who did he think he was, ordering me around?

  Heath took a deep breath and tried again. “Please, Em?” he said, reaching out his hand to me.

  I hesitated. I’m the independent stubborn sort. Meanwhile Inspector Lumley also jumped out of the boat, took the lead line from me, and wound it around a rock jutting up out of the water. “Crisis averted,” he said smartly.

  Heath didn’t look pleased, but I ducked my chin to hide a smile. Soon enough the three of us were all safely on the stairs and staring up at the enormous crevice that seemed to go all the way up to the top of the castle. “Shall we go in?” the inspector asked, already beginning up the rest of the stairs.

  I reached out and grabbed hold of his arm. “Hang on,” I said. Then I reached into my messenger bag and pulled out several magnetic spikes, handing them off to the inspector and Heath while keeping a few for myself. I then motioned for the inspector to get behind us. He leveled a look at me similar to the one I’d given Heath, but complied, and we all moved up the steps slowly and carefully.

  As we inched our way to the top of the stairs—which totaled roughly twelve to fifteen—I could feel my heartbeat quicken. I was super nervous because I suspected this was the hidden section of the castle that the Widow used when she was alive to access the moat and kill her husband’s friends. I also believed this was the general location of the Widow’s portal, but where specifically it was I didn’t know, and that’s what made me incredibly wary about proceeding up those steps.

  None of us spoke as we climbed. Heath had his infrared camera out and recording, and I kept glancing his way, waiting for him to announce the appearance of something spectral on the viewfinder, but he didn’t and so we moved steadily on.

  At last we crested the top of the stairs and found ourselves in a very large cavernous space with what appeared to be a metal door at the far end. Heath motioned to it, but my eyes were moving all around and they settled on what my own intuition had suggested I’d find here. “There!” I whispered, pointing to what at first appeared to be a pile of old clothes.

  Heath pointed the viewfinder to it, his eyes squinting at the screen. “Is that. . . ?”

  “Is that what?” the inspector asked close to our ears. “What the devil is it?”

  I pulled a flashlight out of my pocket and clicked it on. Pointing it at the pile, I noticed something out of place; something that was a sort of creamy brown color was illuminated within the glow of my flashlight, and for a moment my brain struggled to make sense of what I was seeing.

  I heard the inspector’s breath catch. “It’s human remains!” he said, and started for them, but again I caught his arm.

  “We all go together, sir,” I said. “And we move slowly and quietly in here, understood?”

  The inspector nodded, albeit a bit stiffly, and I turned to Heath. “Keep the camera on that door, and if you see anything start coming out of it, let us know.”

  “Got it,” he said.

  I guided the men to the skeleton propped ghoulishly against the stone wall. Even given the damp environment, it and the clothes it was wearing were in remarkably good shape.

  The inspector bent down and lifted a bit of the dead man’s lapel. Clear as day there were three perfectly circular holes in the material. “Appears to have been shot,” the inspector said.

  That answered one question, but it also opened up several more. I had a theory going but still needed a few more clues to be able to resolve it. “No signs of identification,” the inspector continued as he probed the skeleton with his pen. “But the clothing appears to be quite old. At least a few decades.”

  I thought it was probably closer to thirty-five years by my guess. “I wonder who this poor chap was,” Lumley said, getting to his feet to wipe his hands.

  “His name was Clarence,” I said, watching the inspector closely. As expected, his head snapped up and he eyed me keenly.

  “Clarence?” he said, and I saw the light of recognition in his eyes, and also how he was quick to cover it. “How do you know what his name was?”

  “I met his ghost last night out on the moors. I watched him get into a rowboat much like the one we brought and come this way. I suspected there was something like a secret passageway leading into the castle here, and I also suspected that Clarence had been murdered near the spot where he disappeared from my view.”

  Lumley turned back to the skeleton and he stared at it for a long time without comment. I could only imagine what he was thinking.

  Just then Heath’s chin lifted and he turned to the large metal door at the far end of the castle. “Uh. . . oh,” he said softly.

  I felt it too. A bit of a ripple in the ether that gathered into a wave of negative energy, and it was coming right for us. “Guys!” I hissed. “We’ve gotta go!” The inspector was still focused intently on the skeleton, and I reached out to grab him by the shoulder and pull him backward. “Now!” I commanded. Heath had the viewfinder trained on the metal door and I could see the screen over his shoulder.

  One quick look showed me purple ooze starting to drip out of the seams around the doorframe and from the crack underneath the door. The rest happened a bit in slow motion. I let go of the inspector’s arm and put spikes in both my hands while I ran toward the stairs leading to the boat. Behind me I could feel a rush of cold air come into the cavern and surround us. My breath fogged in front of me as I panted and tried to run faster.

  I could tell just from the feel of the awful energy behind us that it wasn’t the Widow’s energy oozing into the area—it was the demon. “Get to the boat!” Heath shouted, and the three of us ran for our lives. The inspector was a bit slower than us, and as Heath and I reached the stairs and began to leap down them, I could hear Lumley’s footfalls several feet behind me.

  I was too focused on getting down the stairs to stop and see how far back he was, and inwardly I simply had to hope that he made it, because I didn’t think I’d survive a head-on
encounter with that demon, not even with all the magnets I was packing.

  Heath reached the boat first and grabbed for the lead line. He was so shaken that the rope slipped out of his fingers and into the water, and he simply left it and turned to grab my arm and practically hurl me into the boat before leaping aboard. Dashing to the oars, he took them up and I cried out to stop him, “The inspector!”

  Heath hesitated a few seconds, and only long enough for the inspector to also leap from the stairs toward the boat, which was starting to drift out away from the steps. I heard a terrible thud when the inspector’s leg hit the bow. I lunged for him, grabbing on to his shoulders to prevent him from going over the side. With effort I managed to drag him into the boat and then I shouted for Heath to row hard. The inspector and I were jostled a bit when Heath set the oars in the water and gave a tremendous pull.

  Lumley and I were half lying on our sides in the bottom of the boat and I couldn’t see above the rim of the boat to the stairs, and honestly I didn’t really want to. Heath’s face pretty much said it all as he pulled and pulled for all he was worth. I felt around next to me for one of the spare vests and shoved it closer to Heath, hoping that’d be enough to protect him. Just when I thought we were home free, the boat came to an abrupt stop so jolting that Heath lost his balance and fell forward nearly on top of me.

  Somehow he managed to clamber back into position and he dug his oars into the water and pulled hard, but the boat wouldn’t budge. In fact, it seemed to be moving backward. “What the. . . ?” I said, crawling my way to the seat and looking around. The bow felt like it was dipping lower into the water than the stern, and when I looked, I could see why. Our lead line was pulled taut by something holding on to it from underwater. I jumped to the front of the boat and tried to pull up on the line, but whatever had hold of it felt heavy enough to sink us and it wasn’t letting go. “I need a knife!” I said, looking desperately back at Heath, who was straining so hard against the oars the veins in his neck were bulging.

  “Back. . . pocket!” he grunted through gritted teeth.

  I pushed past the dazed and frightened inspector and ducked low so as not to interfere with Heath’s attempt to row. I then reached around to his back pocket and wormed my hand inside. Immediately I found his pocketknife, but it caught on the inside seam and for a moment, I couldn’t pull it free.

  “We’re moving back to the stairs!” the inspector shouted, as if he was only just now realizing what was happening.

  I clenched my jaw and turned my shoulder a bit to get a better angle, and finally freed Heath’s knife. As I was moving toward the bow with it, however, a tremendous thump banged against the underside of the boat. “Damn you!” I shouted at whatever was currently wreaking havoc upon the boat.

  I grabbed the other vest from the bottom of the boat and shoved past Lumley to the bow, where I laid the vest over the top section of the rope and began slicing away at it.

  Heath’s knife didn’t have a serrated edge, so cutting through the thick rope wasn’t easy or fast. While I worked, I heard Heath call out for Lumley to help him, and the shuffling behind me told me he was moving to do that. “I’m cutting as fast as I can!” I shouted to let them know that it was hard going. Slowly the rope fibers were giving way, and my arm hurt with the effort to slice through it as fast as I could. Underneath the boat came another very hard pounding and I was knocked slightly sideways, hitting my head against the side so hard I saw stars.

  “Em!” I heard Heath shout.

  I shook my head and got back up; moving quickly to the rope again, I sliced and pulled faster than ever. “Cut, you bastard! Cut!”

  “We’re getting close!” Lumley shouted.

  “Al-most. . . there!” I yelled back as I pressed hard on the knife to cut the last few strands. With a jolt the rope came free and I went sailing backward, landing on my back and striking my head again. “Dammit!” I swore. I’d get a concussion out of this for sure. Rolling to my side, I got to all fours and looked back at Heath and Lumley. Each of them had an oar and they were heaving as fast as they could while trying to keep in rhythm with each other. We sped backward through the water and away from the cavern and the stairs, but we still had to get across the moat.

  Taking a risk, I shrugged out of my vest and moved up close to Heath’s and Lumley’s feet, where I gathered the other two vests and made a magnetic quilt right underneath us. I huddled low and hoped all that magnetic interference would dissuade the Widow from using her energy to make us miserable by pounding on the underside.

  The trick seemed to work because we made it back across the moat without further incident and both Heath and Lumley were soaked through with sweat from the exertion. When Lumley paused because he was having a hard time catching his breath, Heath grabbed the oar and used both to propel us up onto the rocky ground. I jumped out first and held the boat steady while the boys wearily got to their feet and stumbled out. Once they were back on dry land again, both of them sank to the ground and lay there panting.

  At last Lumley sat up and eyed me curiously. “How did you know?” he asked.

  “About your father, Clarence?” I guessed.

  He nodded.

  “Some things you just know, Inspector. The question is, who killed him, and what the hell was he doing snooping around a secret entrance to the south wing thirty-five years ago?”

  Chapter 14

  The answer to my question came shortly after we returned from our harrowing experience. Bypassing our producer—whose first question to us was “Did you get anything good on film?”—I made a beeline for the war room and hoped that Gilley and Michel would be back. Luck was with me, as immediately after entering the dining hall (being trailed by Gopher, Heath, and Lumley), I discovered Gil and Michel there. Just as I got their attention, Gopher’s cell phone went off. “It’s Chris,” he said, retreating back out the door to give the update of our progress to Chris in private.

  “Thank God,” I muttered as I watched him walk away.

  Heath laughed softly next to me. “In my next contract I want a clause that says that I can punch Gopher in the arm every time he annoys us.”

  “He’d never be able to lift his arm again,” I said, focusing on Gil, whose expression told me that he had a whole lot of good intel to share. However, the minute he saw that the inspector was with us, he seemed to lose his enthusiasm. “It’s okay,” I told him, already knowing what he might’ve discovered. “The inspector knows.”

  “He does?” Gil asked.

  “Knows what?” Michel said.

  “That the ghost we ran into out on the moors last night was the spirit of Inspector Lumley’s father,” I replied. I eyed Lumley, who appeared dazed—likely as much by our narrow escape from the Widow as by the discovery of his father’s remains within the hidden section of the castle.

  “So it’s okay to tell you what I found out in front of him?” Gil asked.

  I looked again at the inspector, and he nodded. “What’ve you got, Gil?” I said.

  “Well!” Gil began, motioning for us to take a seat at the table while he went through his notes. “When you said to look up Clarence Lumley, I thought I wasn’t gonna come up with much, but as it turns out, there’s a bunch of local news stories related to his disappearance thirty-four years ago.”

  “I never knew he disappeared here in Penbigh,” the inspector said. “Mother has been light on the details of his departure. She would only say that he came home late one night drunk, after having spent the evening in a pub, and they had a terrible row, after which he stormed out and was never seen again.”

  Gilley was nodding his head like he knew all that. “There’s an article in the newspaper archives that quotes her as saying almost exactly that. The odd thing, according to the reporter, was that no one remembers seeing your dad in a pub that night. In
fact, no one remembers seeing him past five o’clock when he left his office.”

  I turned to Lumley, wondering what had led his father to the castle in the first place. “What was your father’s job, Inspector?”

  “He was an accountant,” Lumley said. “He worked for Inland Revenue.”

  “Inland Revenue?” Heath repeated. “Is that like the IRS?”

  “Yes,” Lumley replied. “It’s now called Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs, but back then, Inland Revenue was responsible for collecting the national income tax for all British citizens.”

  Gil was bouncing on the balls of his feet and I knew he had more to share. “What else did you find?” I asked him.

  He grinned. “Your dad wasn’t just an accountant, Inspector—he was a special investigator with the IR, and at the time of his disappearance, he was assigned to investigate the current dowager countess. Apparently, there were some discrepancies in the amount of income Lady Lydia claimed to be making off Kidwellah.”

  I sat back in my chair as all the pieces began sliding into place, my theory taking real shape now. “Inspector?”

  “Yes?”

  “I have a personal question to ask you, and I’m sorry to invade your privacy, but you said that after your mother had your father declared dead, you were able to live comfortably off the proceeds of a trust fund he set up for you and Ollie, is that right?”

  “It is,” he said.

  “How did your father come by his money?”

  The inspector seemed taken aback by my question, but he answered me anyway. “My father’s family was quite wealthy. He inherited it.”

  “I see, and if you’ll indulge me a few more personal questions?” I paused to see if he would and he nodded. “When did your mother’s drinking become an issue?”