The Crone's Stone

by S E Holmes

progress a short distance along the alleyway, the cats streaking ahead, before their images simply faded. I blinked in confusion. Rain pelted down, whipped in gusts funnelled by the buildings. Maybe the summer storm had tricked my senses.

  “Did you see that?” I asked Smith. “They just sort of vanished.”

  My qualms returned. Maybe Mrs Paget had actually tricked me with some type of optical illusion? It was a desperate grab at a last splinter of reason. I was unable to submit entirely to the truth Hugo had told me to seek in my heart. Yet now my hyper-aware perceptions: sight, and hearing, and navigating easily in a pitch-black warren of hallways made sense.

  Hugo had known what I was. The … Keeper. That fact had probably put him in terrible danger when he’d gone searching for me. I could not deal with the consequences – whatever foul thing happened to him was my fault. Even worse, my reckless disobedience had compelled my guardians to follow him out onto the forbidding streets.

  Smithy nodded in reply without breaking focus, irritably pushing blond strands from his eyes. I yearned to be more like him, sitting there assessing the situation, ready for action without obsessing over matters he could not change. Shadows seethed in the falling gloom. The relief my guardians had at least made it safely from whoever had triggered the alert was short-lived. The more I squinted, the more alive the abnormal blackness became. It was as though a fist unfurled and flexed at the extremity of my vision.

  Smith stiffened. “That’s the silhouette of a person!”

  He pointed, tracing an outline on the screen. The smoky blob was tricky to make out in the grey drear, but could have been a hooded individual hovering at the edge of the camera’s range.

  “It’s a tad warm for winter sweats at this time of year. We’re stressed out and imagining things,” I reasoned, frantic in my opposition.

  Smithy swivelled to me in his chair. This was not the carefree boy I’d come to know, whose characteristic response used to be an indifferent shrug.

  “Why are you making this so hard, Bear? Whoever’s out there, they aren’t known to us and shouldn’t be loitering around your front door. Do you really believe the timing is a coincidence? I think we’re in deep trouble.”

  I agreed with him, but said instead. “You don’t want to know what I believe.” I didn’t want to believe it, either.

  As soon as Smithy’s attention left the blurred image, it immediately clarified. A face stared up at me from the display, more distinct in this instant than the first time I’d seen him crashing to a halt on the floor of Raphaela’s study. In the actual flesh, he was even more rapturously beautiful. Time stretched again, suspending the second until it seemed like minutes.

  “Seth!” I breathed.

  “I am coming for you, Keeper,” he sneered. A yell of shock strangled in my throat. How could he possibly know where we lived?

  His arctic blue eyes entranced. His gaze probed my deepest secrets until a blush crept the length of my body. With it came goosebumps, most obvious through my stretched t-shirt. I reflexively crossed my arms over my incriminating chest. Slithery fingers fondled and taunted, a furnace inside blazing against my will. If Smith was sensuous lay-me-down-in-a-big-brass-feather-bed, Seth was brute passion take-me-against-the-wall-of-an-alley. And then he was gone as suddenly as he appeared, his image replaced by true static. Time snapped back like elastic.

  Grabbing me by the shoulders, Smithy loomed close. “Him?” I nodded weakly. “How does he know where you are?” He echoed my silent question, his jaw clenched. “I knew we shouldn’t have trusted that bastard Hugo! We need weapons.”

  “Seth sided with Raphaela! Finesse tortured him. Surely he’s not a threat to us?”

  “Maybe not us.” Smith looked at me with loaded urgency. “You. Where do your guardians sleep?”

  He yanked me from my seat and carted me physically out the door, one arm wrapping my waist. I was rapidly tiring of this mode of transport. But Smith’s concern also triggered deep shame, weakening any resistance I could muster.

  Seth touched me in ways he shouldn’t, yet how was I to blame? How could I fight him when he hadn’t even been in the room? His weapon was lust from a distance and he wielded it with perfect precision. The occasion to read that diary had long since passed. I needed to get hold of it and find out exactly who or what we were dealing with.

  The passage we negotiated housed Fortescue and Mrs Paget’s rooms, jutting towards the front of our building at a right angle from the entrance below. “Straight ahead, the third and fourth doors along.”

  While we trundled past two storage rooms, sealed doors keeping the worst of Bea’s gruesome collection safely hidden, Smithy fumbled through the Velcro pocket of his board shorts, wrenching out my mobile phone.

  “Is that where they keep their guns?”

  “What?” I yelped. “Before today, I didn’t even know my guardians had any. And do you know how to use one without accidentally shooting a kneecap?”

  A thought nagged just beyond my awareness. Something to do with weapons, but what? He propelled me along, waving the phone up high like the Statue of Liberty.

  “I’m calling Aunt Bea. She has to know he’s here.” He banged the mobile against his thigh, waving it angrily about some more. “No signal,” he muttered. “The same as last time at the studio.” Smithy shoved the phone back in his pocket. “We’re on our own.”

  “It could be the storm?” I said with slim hope.

  “Have you ever been in your minders’ rooms?” We stopped outside Fortescue’s thick wooden door, shut fast, and he peered down at me.

  “Uh-uh. When I was seven years old, I accidentally got locked in the portable sensory deprivation chamber and almost suffocated. It’s why I’m claustrophobic. So ever since we’ve had rooms that I’m restricted from because they contain dangerous items.” And other rooms I refused to visit because of my fear of enclosed spaces beneath tonnes of crushing earth.

  Smithy nodded triumphantly. “That’s exactly where they keep their guns.”

  Thoughts scrambled in my head, a single desperate hope popping to the forefront. “Seth can’t get in here. We’re okay if we stay inside.”

  “I’m not taking any chances. And there’s definitely one place Fortescue told me to go to if we were ever threatened. But I’m not hiding you down there unarmed.” Down? My tummy constricted. He smiled grimly and flourished his hand like a game show host. “Lead the way, sulky-pants.”

  I turned the knob, reefing open the door with false bravado. “I’ll show you sulky-pants.”

  “Not your best outfit. I prefer the pink lacy version.”

  “Funny!” I said.

  “Not trying to be funny, just honest.”

  I offered a disparaging “Hmph!” to cover my blush. We stepped through into the gloom, delaying in the doorway as our vision adjusted. My curiosity ignited, temporarily overriding any worries about wolves on my porch, or loved ones at risk, or descents below ground.

  Fortescue’s apartment made a lie of every opinion I’d ever formed about him. Instead of monk-like austerity, my butler favoured visual overload. His rooms were decorated with intricately embroidered tapestries lining three walls; utterly astounding copies of famous paintings, finely wrought in richly coloured thread.

  Smithy gaped as he circled the hangings, barely pausing long enough in his search to check off their titles. I knew the artist in him was craving a chance to linger. The fact he didn’t was a more telling sign of our dire situation than anything else.

  “Rubens, The Rape of the Daughters of Leucippus. Titian, Sacred and Profane Love. Michelangelo, The Creation of Adam. Delacroix, Algerian Women. Others I don’t recognise. Who could have done these? They’re masterpieces!”

  Encased manuscripts of unknown origin adorned the fourth wall, in languages and scripts I’d never seen. University testamurs lined one side. Two were post-doctoral degrees from Oxford – Ancient Languages and Medieval History – and one from MIT in Metallurgy.

  “Smart
,” Smith said. “Massachusetts Institute of Technology is one of the best in the world. I have a couple of friends on scholarship there.”

  The furniture was old, of dark cherry wood, the cushions and covers in maroon velvet. Smith pulled out drawers, rifling the contents. Ancient books lay open on the floor and scattered across bedside tables. A violin rested on a stand with notations for a complex composition I could not identify next to it. A sitting room and bathroom led off from the main living area.

  “Winnie, behind the walls.”

  Smith pressed his face against a narrow strip of plaster next to an ornate armoire. The tapestries hung out from the wall on brackets, making a cavity at the rear of Fortescue’s bedhead. I tentatively peeked behind an arras. The beauty shielded the viciousness hidden at their backs. Double-edged axes, barbed spears, razored discuses, swords, daggers and blades of infinite description competed for the prize of most barbaric.

  “Will one of these do?” I asked.

  Smith lifted an eyebrow, moving to rummage hastily through the wardrobe. “You expect me to hack Seth to death with an axe?”

  “No!” Of course it was a spectacularly stupid question. “I don’t know what to expect. I’m new at this.” And that thought about weaponry tried to resurface again, stubbornly just out of mental reach.

  “Ditto. His cupboard is full of old military uniforms in vacuum wrapping.”

  I joined Smith. Some were so antique, they looked as