Spellbinders Collection

by Molly Cochran

  After a quick look through the funhouse, he followed the tracks on foot. They led through the woods toward a high rolling meadow almost a thousand meters away. At the crest of the hill, he found himself looking down into a verdant valley at the center of which, another mile away, was a ramshackle old stone manor house. The house looked as if it had been built in stages because it spread over four different levels, following the natural contours of the land. A large willow tree sat in front in the middle of a stone-walled goldfish pond, empty now except for piles of rotting leaves. There were no lights on, and no cars parked near the main entrance.

  Still, it had to be the place, Candy thought. There were no other buildings nearby, except for a large barn. Candy moved closer. He found some fresh horse droppings and heard the neighing of horses from the barn.

  He had them. Even if none of the kidnappers were present, he would at least be able to get the boy. He hoped that was the case. One against six were bad odds. When he called in the reinforcement officers, they could take care of the men. The only thing that mattered now was the child.

  He went around behind the barn and waited for someone to come out of the house. No one did. Either he hadn't been spotted in the tall unkempt grass, or no one was home. Good. There was a chance. The house would probably be locked, but he could find a way in. He just hoped the boy was still alive.

  Candy stepped cautiously onto the gravel. He was nearly at the house when he heard the barn doors swing open and saw two men on Arabian stallions ride out, screaming a high, keening wail. They charged at him, drawing long curved swords as their horses raced toward him.

  "Police!" he shouted, reaching for his identification.

  The men did not stop. Candy felt himself break into a sweat as the animals pounded closer. He could see their flaring nostrils and the eyes of the black-clothed horsemen as they swung their curious weapons in the air above their heads, preparing to strike.

  At the last moment, Candy's nerve failed him. He dived to the ground and rolled just as the horse's hooves came down on the spot where he had been standing. While the horsemen reined the animals in to come at him again, Candy saw in an upstairs window of the house the face of a tall thin man with jet black hair and a beard and recognized him as the maniac he had arrested four years before and sent to Maplebrook.

  "You son of a bitch," he whispered, and the man answered with a slight inclination of his head. His eyes were smiling.

  Candy ran, but there was no place to run. He had only gone a few steps when the horsemen were on him. The first blow cut deeply into his throat. Candy felt the searing pain of it, felt his head thrown wildly back. He was even able to see the unbelievable gush of blood shoot out of his neck before the second sword smashed against the side of his head, breaking the thin bone over his right temple.

  He crumpled to the ground, dead before his body touched the gravel.

  CHAPTER FORTY-NINE

  The pain in Arthur's side abated with time. He had been brought back from the basement to the upstairs sitting room where he had spent the night; the tall man himself had ordered the boy out of his sight after Arthur's rejection of him. There he had waited, wondering about the strange phenomenon that he'd experienced. He had been someone else, had actually lived as another person once, long ago, and for a time—for the briefest time, during the nonsensical half-dream that had come upon him in his imagined pain—he had remembered that faraway life.

  I was Arthur of England, he thought. He knew that if it had happened to anyone else, he would have found the story laughable. Everyone wanted to be a king, right? Even girls. But his recollection had not been that of a king; only of a man on the verge of death. He remembered only the pain and the delirious vision of a vanishing Christ as he felt the life ebb out of his body.

  Now he was no longer a king, or even a man. He was just a scared ten-year-old boy. He wrapped his arms around his knees to ward off the fear, but the fear only grew.

  You could have said yes to him, a voice inside him said. You could have told him you'd side with him. He would have made you a king, or at least somebody important—

  No. No, he could never have agreed. After seeing the face in the vision, it was all too clear what Saladin was.

  It was better to die.

  He just wished he weren't so afraid.

  "Help me," he whispered. Saladin had told him to call on the wizard. That was Merlin in the stories. "Merlin . . ."

  He felt foolish. The story had seemed real in the eerie setting of the basement filled with treasures, but now . . .

  "Merlin," he tried again.

  There was no answer. He lay his head against his knees.

  Now I lay me down to sleep, he thought. I pray the Lord my soul to keep. If I should die . . .

  Suddenly the frayed cord of a lamp caught his eye. Holding his breath, he went around the room and turned on all the lamps, then watched them.

  They flickered.

  Old wiring.

  The house had been built before the advent of electricity; the wiring had probably been put in later. He could picture the beautiful Victorian mansion then, illuminated by the modern miracle of electric lights.

  He doubted that it had been replaced since then. All of the fixtures in the place seemed so old, as if whoever owned the house had not wanted to change them.

  A short in one of the circuits might be enough to knock out most of the electricity in the house.

  Arthur went quickly into the bathroom to look for a razor blade, but there was nothing in the medicine cabinet except for an old glass bottle of moldy aspirin. Working quickly, muffling the noise with a towel, He rapped the aspirin bottle against the cabinet sink until it broke. Then he took a shard of the broken glass back into the parlor.

  He unplugged one of the old lamps and cut off its cord, then sliced it lengthwise to separate the two wires inside and shaved the insulation from them with small, careful strokes. When he was done, there was an inch and a half of bright bare copper showing at the end of each wire.

  With one eye on the door, Arthur folded back the ends of the wires to double them up and make them thicker, then jammed them into the slots of a wall socket. He dropped the other end of the cord, the end with the plug on it, behind the small covered table where the lamp sat. The plug was live now, and touching it would give anyone a nasty shock.

  Later, when the time was right, he would push the plug into yet another socket. If he was correct, the twisted surge of power created would short out the whole circuit. Maybe the whole building.

  He hoped so. It was his last chance.

  He heard someone at the door and ran across the room back to the sofa. He hid the piece of glass under a cushion.

  One of Saladin's men looked in on him silently, then withdrew at once.

  Arthur closed his eyes and waited.

  It was 6:55. More than two hours had passed since Hal spoke with Candy's assistant, and Candy still had not arrived back at the police van.

  Hal tracked the inspector as far as the empty house on Abelard Street. Several of the people who lived on the street told Hal that they had spoken with the Scotland Yard man earlier, but none of them knew where Candy might have been heading next.

  Where had the bastard gone? In the Bureau, the head of an investigation would be suspended for taking off without letting anyone know where he was going. But then, Hal thought more kindly, Candy was probably used to working alone. Higgins and Chastain would hardly be the Inspector's idea of great backup. And who else did he have? Constable Nubbit?

  Hal finally resigned himself to the knowledge that, in Candy's place, he would have done the same.

  There was one more thing he could do without Candy's assistance. He took out a crude map he had drawn after speaking with Matilda Grimes. It showed the location of the old house behind the amusement park grounds.

  It was right. From where it stood, if the map was accurate, the house was close enough to the remains of the castle for an easy attack through the
woods. He drove to the spot where Higgins and Chastain had found the horses' hoofprints, then walked through the two-mile stretch of trees and brush.

  Beyond it was a rolling meadow shaped like an enormous bowl surrounding the manse. The amusement park would be to the west, he reasoned, behind another fortification of trees.

  There were no people in sight at the house, but two large horses grazed in the meadow. Hal tried to remember if they were the same horses involved in the attack on the castle grounds, but he knew too little about horses to tell one from another.

  He waited nearly a half hour on his belly for someone to come out of the house. No one did, and he was not about to approach the place alone and unarmed. Finally he retraced his steps back to the car and drove to the inn.

  "I think I know where the kidnappers are," he pleaded with Higgins on the telephone. "With ten or fifteen men from Scotland Yard or the SAS, we could storm the place before the trade."

  Higgins nearly choked. "The Special Air Service? Surely you're not serious, Mr. Woczniak."

  "Damn it, these men are dangerous."

  "I assure you, Inspector Candy has things well in hand."

  "Candy's missing!" Hal shouted into the telephone. "For all we know, he's in trouble. He might even be in the house with Arthur."

  "That hardly seems likely," Higgins said dryly.

  Hal knew he was grasping at straws and tried to sound more reasonable. "Okay, maybe," he said. "But wherever he is, we can't wait for him any longer. Scotland Yard could helicopter some men down here—"

  "The Inspector never intended to call in men from Metropolitan," Higgins corrected him. "Officers from local constabularies will be used. That is, if the Inspector deems it necessary to bring in any outside help. As it stands, however, that hardly seems to be the case."

  "What?" Hal couldn't believe his ears.

  "This house you claim to have located. Have you been there yourself?"

  "Yes. There were horses outside."

  "What sort of horses?"

  "I don't know, for God's sake. Big horses."

  Higgins sighed. "Big horses," he repeated. "Did you see any of the men you encountered in the meadow by the hill fort?"

  Hal was stuck. "No," he said finally. "They must have all been in the house."

  "Mr. Woczniak, do be reasonable. Other people besides kidnappers live in this area. They own horses. Big horses."

  Hal had reached the bursting point. "Look," he said. "We need cops with weapons to get Arthur out of that place. If you don't give me the cops, at least give me a gun, and I'll go in myself."

  "That would be highly imprudent."

  "I want a gun," Hal insisted.

  "We don't use guns, Mr. Woczniak. I've told you that. And if we did, we would hardly issue them to irate civilians."

  "What about Candy? Aren't you even worried about him?"

  "No, I am not," Higgins said. His patience was evidently strained, since he was speaking almost loud enough to be heard in normal conversation. "The inspector has no doubt come across a more viable lead than yours, and is pursuing it."

  "Right. Or maybe he's dead," Hal said.

  "Mr. Woczniak . . ."

  "Go scratch your ass." Hal slammed down the phone.

  He dialed Scotland Yard next. After a quarter hour of being shunted from one disembodied voice to another, he was again told, gently but firmly, to stay out of Inspector Candy's business.

  His panic rising, he tried a long-distance call to the FBI in Washington. The chief had brought Scotland Yard into the investigation in the first place; the chief would be able to kick them into action now.

  The chief was aboard an airplane en route to California.

  Hal hung up in despair. There was only one other man who might possibly be able to bring in enough police officers to storm the kidnappers' hideout.

  "Constable Nubbit, I'm asking you to consider the possibility that something may have happened to Inspector Candy," Hal said as humbly as he could.

  Nubbit chuckled. "You're an odd one. Droll. Very droll, I must say."

  "May I ask what makes my request for additional policemen so very humorous?" Hal asked, feeling the air grow hot inside his nostrils.

  Nubbit leaned forward earnestly. "Sir, Scotland Yard's already denied that request. I can't go over their heads."

  "That's not Scotland Yard in that van outside," Hal said. "They're two scientists who wouldn't know how to stop a pack of kidnappers if they had a howitzer."

  "Officers Higgins and Chastain are detectives in the Metropolitan Police," the Constable said archly. "And damn nice chaps, I might add."

  "What about Candy?" Hal shouted, unable to control himself any longer. No one seemed to be interested in the fact that the primary officer in the case had been missing for hours.

  "Never got to know him as well as the others," Nubbit confessed. "Seemed all right. Socks didn't match. One gets to notice little things like that in this line of work, you know."

  "Jesus!" He felt like strangling the man. "What I'm saying is that Candy might not be in a position to call out the extra police officers we're going to need."

  "Oh, I wouldn't jump to any conclusions, Mr. ah . . . what was your name again?"

  Hal closed his eyes. "Woczniak."

  "Bugger to pronounce, that."

  "If the Inspector weren't in trouble, he'd have called."

  "Oh, no, no, no. Not necessarily."

  "It's after nine o'clock! The kidnappers want me to meet them at midnight. Constable Nubbit, what I'm saying is that with Candy or without him, we're going to have to pull some officers together, or those men are going to kill the boy. Can you get the word out to the other villages and towns in the area?"

  "Oh, my, no." He shook his head briskly. "I'm just a P.C. Wouldn't do to have me going over the head of Scotland Yard."

  "But I've explained . . ." Hal cut himself off. It was no use. He'd gone full circle with the man. Nubbit's brain simply could not tolerate any deviation from the standard routine, for any reason. "Thank you," Hal said wearily, and stood up.

  "Glad to be of help," Nubbit called as Hal left the station.

  Emily had heard no word from the kidnappers.

  "What's taking them so long?" she asked.

  "I don't know," Hal said, stretching out in an overstuffed chair in her room. He felt tired to his bones. Tired, disgusted, and hopeless. "I've talked to everyone I could, even that thickheaded imbecile at the police station. If I could only—"

  At that moment, the glass in the window shattered and something sailed into the room, landing with a wet thud in the middle of the rug.

  Hal jumped to his feet and ran immediately to the window. A motorcycle was zooming away down the street. He didn't need to check the license plate to know that it was the same man who had shot out the windshield in the Morris.

  "Don't touch it," he said.

  Together they stared at the strange package. It was vaguely spherical. The heavy brown paper had been wrapped around it hastily.

  "It's . . . It's bloody," Emily said, her face white.

  One side of the package was stained red. The stain was growing, oozing down onto the rug.

  "You'd better get out of here," Hal said, but Emily stood frozen where she was.

  "Open it," she whispered.

  He knelt down beside it, tore off a strip of tape, then looked up at Emily. She nodded.

  "It might be . . . something that belongs to Arthur," Hal said, trying to prepare her for the shock.

  "Open it." Her voice was harsh and raspy. "Goddamnit, open it, or I will."

  With a deep breath, Hal pulled aside the soggy brown paper.

  It was Inspector Candy's head.

  "Oh, Christ," Hal said.

  Whether from shock or relief, Emily fainted. Her head hit the floor with a bang. Quickly Hal started to rewrap the grisly thing, but then he noticed that someone had written on the inside of the paper.

  Come alone to the gristmill on Pembroke Lane, fi
ve miles south. No more police, please, or you'll find the boy's head in the next package. You must know by now that I am quite serious.

  It was signed with a large florid S.

  CHAPTER FIFTY

  Hal wiped Emily's face with a cold washcloth. Then, when she started to come around, before she was fully conscious, he made her swallow one of Arthur's Seconal tablets. If she were awake, he knew, she would insist on meeting Saladin herself, and he was not about to permit that.

  He set her on the bed with her head resting on the pillow. Then he went into his own room to find the sheet of ingenious instructions Arthur had written to assure Emily a safe life in the event of his own death. Hal attached his own note to Arthur's.

  Emily,

  Don't wait for anyone to find us. Just follow these instructions, and you'll be safe. It's what Arthur wanted most for you. Me, too.

  Hal

  He wanted to say more. He wanted to say that he missed her already, that for a moment it had seemed as if he'd finally found some purpose in his life. That there might be such a thing as happiness, somewhere, and that maybe, just maybe, they could find it together, the three of them.

  But he knew Emily had been right. It was too late for all of that. A few words would change nothing.

  He looked at his watch. Ten-thirty. He would walk to the rendezvous. There would be no point in using a car to get away in any case.

  Saladin's message had said five miles south. South of what? Of town? Of the castle?

  No, he realized. Saladin had been talking about the inn. He knew exactly where Hal was. He had known about Candy, and he probably knew that without the inspector, Hal would not be able to muster enough manpower to fight.

  Hal would die, of course. Saladin would never let him live with his knowledge. And Arthur would die, too, if he wasn't dead already. After tonight, only Emily would have a chance of getting out alive. It was rotten, rotten for the kid, but what had anyone expected with Hal Woczniak on the job? He had failed again. All he could hope for was to take a few of the bastards down with him.