Dark Embers

by R. L. Giddings

  Macrory was wearing the same suit he’d worn the previous evening but I had made a real effort. Having seen how well turned out Daniel Cardoza had been previously, I wasn’t about to make the mistake of turning up looking under-dressed. I’d gone to the effort of having my nails done and I’d even asked Millie if I could wear her Ted Baker floral dress. She’d surprised me by agreeing straightaway. She’d found some of Macrory’s washing draped over the side of the bath and had been horrified. I think that she would have agreed to anything so long as it got him out of the flat for the night.

  I was also wearing heels. This almost proved to be my un-doing on the slate tiles so I grabbed hold of Macrory’s arm and hung on.

  I had expected a house maid, at the very least, to answer the door but we were met by Cardoza’s son. He was the very image of his father and there was every suggestion that he would grow up to be just as handsome, if not more so. He had a rangy, athletic build which made it difficult to guess how old he was. With the right clothes he could easily pass for a twenty one year one but he lacked the easy authority an adult would display around their own home.

  I found myself wondering, and not for the last time that night, how Macrory had managed to secure this invitation. Either I had under-estimated Macrory’s standing in the antiques world or Cardoza really was an old friend.

  The young man introduced himself as Michael and showed us through to the sitting room. It was large enough to accommodate three sofas with ease. There was lots of chrome and glass and two mini-chandeliers. What captivated me most about the room was that there was a floor to ceiling mirror on the far wall which gave the impression that the room was twice as long as it actually was.

  “My father will be along in a minute. He’s upstairs taking a call. Can I get either of you a drink?”

  I was trying to decide between tea or coffee when Macrory said:

  “Brandy sour, please.”

  I gave him a quizzical look. Macrory was no good to me drunk.

  “You know how to make one of those, don’t you, Michael?” Macrory asked.

  “Don’t worry. I’m not the one making it.”

  He looked at me and arched his eyebrows.

  “Er, gin and tonic, please.”

  Once he’d gone, Macrory mimicked me ruthlessly, repeating: “Gin and tonic, please. Gin and tonic.”

  “What’s wrong with that?”

  “Look where we are. He’s got his own chef. You could have any cocktail you could think of and what do you come up with: ‘Gin and tonic.’”

  We heard Cardoza before we saw him. He was coming down the stairs talking on the phone, loud enough to hear what he was saying. Obviously a business call. He appeared at the doorway extended an arm in greeting, gave us both a blast of his incredible smile and kept on walking. Michael passed him carrying our drinks, rolling his eyes at his father’s crassness. I found it all rather charming.

  I took my drink, which came with a little coaster. I placed the coaster down on the glass coffee table and sat on the nearest sofa. Macrory remained standing as did Michael.

  “So, Michael,” I said. “Where do you go to school?”

  As facile comments went it was one up from ‘My! You’re tall for your age!’ I was clearly struggling. But Michael was very friendly. He was currently in the Sixth Form. He didn’t specify which school but I had a hunch that it wasn’t the local comprehensive. He told me that he played rugby but his real passion was basketball. His best subject was Spanish but his favourite subject was Art. He told me about the project he was doing about graffiti artists who had made the switch to becoming studio artists. He told me a lot of things. In the end, he even sat down. The evening had morphed into something I hadn’t expected.

  When he asked if I’d like another drink, I was shocked to see that I’d already finished my first.

  “Better not,” I said looking over at a disapproving Macrory. Then, “But on second thoughts, that would be lovely.”

  When he’d gone, Macrory gave me a hard stare. I stared right back.

  I was about to say something when Daniel Cardoza walked in.

  “Sorry about that. Just trying to re-assure a customer about a delivery. It used to be that you could guarantee delivery right across Europe. Not any longer. My costs have gone up seven percent this year alone. On some transactions I’m struggling to make a profit.”

  I admired his twin chandeliers.

  “Come on,” he said. “Let me give you the Grand Tour before supper.”

  *

  Cardoza wasn’t just a dealer, he was also a collector.

  He had a room labelled Medieval Armour. It actually said that on the door.

  This was clearly Macrory’s thing. He couldn’t stop talking about it and Cardoza - the perfect host once you’d got him off his phone - was keen to oblige.

  “This vambrace was modelled on one worn by Henry VIII.”

  “Pity it’s not the original,” Macrory would say.

  “Funny you should say that. The original’s over here.”

  I might have been able to handle it better with a glass in my hand, but Michael was still to catch up with us to refresh our drinks.

  After that we went to the Sword Cutlers and Blademakers’ Room. This was more to my tastes and held my attention for a good fifteen minutes. The trouble was that we stayed there for forty five.

  At one point I actually said, “So, how did you two meet?”

  Cardoza looked at Macrory as if to say, can she be trusted?

  “That’s quite an embarrassing story,” Cardoza said. “It doesn’t show us in the best possible light.”

  Macrory warned me off with an arch of his eyebrows.

  When we left that room we had to pause while Cardoza carefully reset the alarms.

  “What’s down there?” I asked.

  Cardoza consulted Macrory before saying, “The basement.”

  It was down a short flight of steps. There was a door at the bottom with a window set at head height. The room beyond was shrouded in darkness.

  “What’s in there?”

  “Are you sure you want to know?”

  *

  It was weird. Being inside the basement felt like being inside a completely different building. A much older building. The temperature dropped markedly as soon as we were through the door. It made a pleasant change from the warmth of the main house but you wouldn’t want to stay down there for too long.

  Like, overnight.

  Macrory elected to stay back. He made some weak joke about us all getting locked in.

  It was very dark down there. The illumination coming through the sky-light pooled around the doorway and it was only as we ventured further out that I realised how far the actual basement extended. We were standing in a wide corridor spanning east to west. In the gloom, it was impossible to work out how far back it went back but my feeling was that it went back a very long way.

  “Are there no lights down here?” I asked.

  “Sure, we’ve got lights,” Cardoza said.

  You had to strain to see them. They were set high in the ceiling, indented into the brickwork so that you had to be standing almost directly beneath them to get any benefit. Even then, it wasn’t particularly bright. You’d struggle to tell the time by it.

  I took a few steps down the east path. The floor was slightly uneven and made up of bare brick. Further along, I could see recessed compartments in the walls and I was struck with an odd thought.

  “Is this a crypt?”

  Cardoza walked towards me. Looking me up and down as if appraising me. “Built by the Victorians at a time when London’s grave-yards were over-flowing. This was built for those people who were willing to pay for a private resting place.

  I looked straight up. “And you had your house built on top of it?”

  Cardoza walked past me, the slope of his shoulders the only thing visible in the gloom.

  “I have a number of investments scattered around the world. But the most val
uable I like to keep close at hand.”

  There were crypts every few metres, one stacked on top of the other. Each one was sealed with a wooden hatch marked on either side by stone roses.

  “Are these family crypts?”

  “Some. Not all. Most contain two coffins but some have as many as five.”

  As we moved deeper into the basement, I checked behind me. Was that a rustle or a sigh that I’d heard? I couldn’t rule out the possibility of rats. What could he possibly be keeping down there? Surely this was a front for something far more sinister. Nazi gold? Stolen art treasures? It seemed an unlikely place to store anything of real value.

  I followed close behind him, reluctant to be left on my own. Each light that we came across seemed dimmer than the one preceding it. I had my phone in my pocket and I toyed with the idea of using the light app. I decided against it in the end. If this was some kind of test of my tenacity then it wasn’t one that I wanted to fail. Cardoza had brought me down here for a reason and I was starting to think that he was merely trying to unnerve me. To test my resolve.

  Or had Macrory double-crossed me again? Had I stumbled into the fox’s lair? Did Cardoza see me as little more than a baby rabbit that he could play with until I squealed for help? If that was his plan, then he was going to be disappointed. But my determination to see this through did nothing to make my heart beat any slower.

  It was getting darker now, of that I was in no doubt. I closed and re-opened my eyes, hoping to improve the clarity of vision but I was to be disappointed. I fancied that I heard voices from back the way we’d come and so picked up my pace, almost walking into Cardoza’s back in my eagerness. I came so close to him that I got a good whiff of his cologne which stood out like bitter oranges in the all-pervading gloom.

  “Is it much further?” I asked hearing the tension in my voice.

  “No, nearly there.”

  When we finally stopped I imagined that we were a good half a mile from where we’d started off, even though common sense dictated that we’d walked barely thirty metres. He was standing in front of a particularly decrepit series of six crypts. The wooden hatches were in a poor state of repair. Some sections were missing the odd wooden cross-brace but others looked as though they’d been staved in.

  “The Carpathian section,” Cardoza’s smile flashed in the half-light.

  I didn’t know what he was talking about. “Are these people all related?”

  “In a way,” his hand brushed against the wall.

  There was an inscription there but it was too dim for me to read it.

  “Is that Latin?”

  Cardoza squatted down and craned his head forward.

  “Mortuus est autem Nosferatu. Vivat Nosferatu.”

  It felt as though something had slithered past me in the dark.

  Nosferatu?

  Cardoza looked up at me.

  “Nosferatu is dead. Long live Nosferatu.”

  My first reaction was to run. I didn’t want to be there any longer. I wanted desperately to be home in bed.

  I worked hard to keep the fear from my voice. “What are you trying to say? Are these … vampires?”

  “Wampyrri is the accepted pronunciation,” he stood up eager to gauge my reaction.

  Because of my background, I have been exposed to a lot of supernatural nonsense in my time. But if what Cardoza was saying were true I still couldn’t grasp it. Could such a thing be possible?

  “And there are six of them?” I said.

  “That’s right.”

  “How do you know that they’re … well, real?”

  He laid is hand on the crypt above me, the way a father might touch his son’s bed.

  “One of the Van Helsing’s does a little private work. He helped with the verification. All six of them - two men and four women - were killed by having a stake driven through their hearts.”

  “And the stakes?”

  “Still in place, so you needn’t worry. Each one made from rowan wood, another part of the authentification. As the police would say: that’s a detail that’s routinely kept from the general public.”

  “To dissuade copy-cat attacks.”

  “Exactly. Then, just to be sure, each one was beheaded.”

  The first re-assurance he’d offered.

  “So, the heads? They aren’t in there, are they?”

  “That’s the odd thing. They are – well, five of them – sealed in separate jars.”

  “But just because they were killed in this way doesn’t mean that they are vampires.”

  Cardoza flashed his teeth at me.

  “Shall we pull out one of the stakes and see what happens?”

  My knees were rubbing together with anxiety.

  “I think I’d like to go back now.”

  CHAPTER NINE

  I wanted to leave straightaway but Macrory begged me to stay while Cardoza secured the door. When he was finished he turned to me, looking mighty pleased with himself. He led the way back up to the main house and then pointed us in the general direction of the dining room. He made an excuse about having to freshen up before disappearing upstairs.

  The dining room was even more impressive than the living room with a grey marble topped table beneath two full sized chandeliers. There were two displays of pure white flowers on the table. At the far end of the room was a set of folding doors which looked out onto the Games Room beyond.

  The dining table was set out for four.

  “You knew, didn’t you?” I kept my voice just above a whisper but I was angry. Very angry.

  “Yes,” Macrory was shame-faced.

  “Is that why you stayed back?”

  “He told me not to come down. I’ve seen it before. What could I do?”

  “You could have come with me. Was he trying to frighten me to death?”

  Macrory pulled out one of the chairs but I was too angry to sit.

  “That was his way of deciding whether he could trust you,” he said soothingly.

  “I don’t care whether he trusts me or not.”

  “We need him to trust us if we’re to have any chance of getting our hands on the blade.”

  I pointed back up the staircase. “He isn’t going to give us anything. He’s a businessman who keeps vampires in the same house his son sleeps in.”

  “It’s fine though. Did you see how thick that door was?”

  I aimed a punch at Macrory’s chest and only just managed to stop myself in time. “Why are those things even down there?”

  “I don’t know!” Macrory threw his hands in the air. “He likes to show off, I suppose.”

  “No. That’s not the reason. He keeps those things down there because he intends to sell them one day, along with everything else in this place. He calls himself a collector but that’s not true. This whole house is one vast saleroom with everything in it up for sale for the right price. You’re not seriously trying to tell me that he’s going to just give the blade to us for nothing.”

  But Macrory wasn’t listening. And I could see from the reflection in the glass doors, that we were no longer alone.

  “Hello Michael.”

  *

  Michael’s presence diluted some of the animosity I felt towards his father. Plus, I was hungry and the smells that were emanating from the kitchen were making my stomach ache. Michael was surprisingly normal considering his background and, after he’d gone to get us some more drinks he entertained us by showing us clips on his phone of him and his friends attempting various basketball trick shots. One of the clips involved him clashing heads with another player as they both went for the same ball. He’d then re-edited the clip with music so that the head-clash co-ordinated with the beat. I found the fact that he didn’t take himself too seriously rather endearing.

  By the time we’d finished watching that, his father had returned. Cardoza had changed into an open necked shirt that was deep claret in colour and had some interesting embroidery across one half of his chest. He smelled as if he�
�d also had a shower and I resented him for that. I’d have quite liked a shower as well, if only to wash the smell of death away before dinner.

  A maid served the food. Suffice to say that it was incredible. When Cardoza told me that the starter was a rabbit ragu I said I didn’t want any. I’d never tasted rabbit before and didn’t think that I was missing much. But after a little coaxing from Michael, I relented and was glad that I did. It was the tastiest dish of the night - which was saying something.

  We had wine with dinner which went some way towards relaxing me after my earlier fright. After dinner, Michael produced a deck of cards and insisted on teaching us “Texas Hold ‘Em”, a variation of poker. I had too many things spinning round in my head to fully concentrate so ended up having to cheat just to stay in the game It was a lot of fun.

  “How are you two getting home,” Cardoza asked as he prepared to deal.

  I shot a look to Macrory. “Oh, we’re going to have to be getting off pretty soon.”

  “No, I asked how you were getting home. I believe you arrived in a taxi.”

  “Macrory’s going to order one in a minute, aren’t you Macrory.”

  “Nonsense, I’ll get Carl to drive you.”

  “Who’s Carl?”

  “My driver,” Cardoza waggled his fingers in what I took to be the direction of the garage. “He just lives over the way. It’ll be no problem. It always takes forever to get a cab out here.”

  We played another hand of cards and then, when Michael was out of the room, Cardoza said, “I thought that you might be a little better at cards.”

  To be fair, I had lost every game, though I had come second twice.

  “I’m rubbish at cards.”

  “So you don’t have any premonitions as far as cards are concerned?”

  He rubbed his finger and thumb together and smiled knowingly.

  “What has Macrory been telling you?”

  “Only the truth,” Macrory said. “About how you can read things. Items. Objects.”

  I didn’t like the way that the conversation was going but I decided to just keep playing the game regardless.

  “Cards are too flimsy. Even nice cards like these. You need something more substantial to get a decent reading.”