by Sam Short
The leader relented with a frustrated sigh, which added an extra three inches to his barrel chest. “Okay,” he said, “hand it over.”
“Show us the entrance first,” said Granny. “I wasn’t born yesterday.”
The troll bared his teeth in a hideous smile. “I can see that,” he said. “You’re wrinklier than my family jewels will ever be.”
Boris growled again. “Don’t you speak to her like that,” he warned, saliva dripping from his teeth. “I’m feeling particularly fit today. I’ll make short work of ensuring none of you ever father another… troll-let.”
“Pups,” said the troll. “We call them pups, but I get the picture. There’s no need for threats of that magnitude. Come with us, we’ll show you the entrance, then we can get out of here for good. I’ll be glad to see the back of this place.”
The trolls turned around and led us along the last stretch of footpath, taking us into a valley, until we stood in the shadow of the spire. The stone work looked centuries old, and the ivy which shrouded it grew from vines as thick as a man’s arm. I craned my neck to look upwards, using a hand to shield my eyes from the low sun. “There’s the jewel,” I said, pointing at the baseball sized chunk of crystal at the tip of the tower. It glowed dimly, the light hardly visible in the beams of sunlight which poured through the tree canopy.
“You can hardly call it a light,” said Willow.
“It glows brighter at night,” said a troll. “Especially for the last week. We don’t work at nights, but whatever the boss has being doing over the last six nights has made the jewel glow so brightly I can see it from the mountain I live on.”
“What’s the spire for?” said Mum. “It seems odd, out here on its own.”
Barney pushed aside some foliage at the base of the spire. “This isn’t all of the spire,” he said, scooping some earth aside. “The rest of it is buried.”
“That’s not all that’s buried,” said a troll. “The spire is just one part of a whole mansion house, and there’s other buildings down there too, lost beneath the ground.”
“How do we get in?” said Granny, becoming impatient. “Show us the entrance or you won’t be getting your gold.”
The tall troll pointed at a large nondescript rock, its surface weather worn and smooth. “It’s right there.”
“Password?” said Granny, jingling the money pouch.
The troll opened his mouth to speak, but was silenced by his friend, who shook his head. “Whisper it to her,” he said. “Let her speak it. Maybe the boss man can tell who opened it — we don’t want the blame if these lot cause him problems.”
Granny held her nose as the troll placed his lips next to her ear. “No offence,” she said. “But have you heard of mouth hygiene?”
Th troll grunted and whispered a short sentence. Granny looked at him. “It sounds very vengeful,” she said.
“The boss seems like a vengeful man,” said the troll. He held his hand out. “Gold.”
“Not until I’ve seen it open with my own eyes,” said Granny, stepping forward and gazing down at the rock. She cleared her throat. “An eye for an eye,” she said, her voice loud and deliberate.
The rock trembled a little, the dry soil at its base shaking and a deep groan coming from within it — as if it had a voice. Granny took a step backwards as the rock twisted and turned, its hard form becoming soft and rubbery, until with a gentle hiss it slid to the side, revealing a gaping hole with a set of stone steps leading into the darkness.
“Amazing,” said Barney.
“Gold,” said a troll. “Now.”
“It’s a small entrance,” said Granny. “How on earth do you get all the lead down there? It must be a real struggle.”
“There is a river running below us,” said the troll, his hand making a grab for the money pouch, which Granny expertly side stepped. “He brings everything he requires in by boat. The entrance is hidden by a waterfall on the opposite edge of the city, near the mountains.”
“How do we close it after us?” I said.
“Repeat the password when you are inside and the entrance will close. Now give us the gold, or you will have a fight on your hands. I’m beginning to think your goat is all bleat and no bite.”
Granny handed over the coins, carefully counting out three pieces into each troll’s hand as they formed a queue before her. “Thank you,” she said, as the trolls headed into the trees, leaving us to gaze into the void.
“I’ll go first,” said Barney. “I can see flickering light at the bottom of the stairs. There must be torches down there.”
Cold creeping air rose from the entrance, musty and thick, and I swallowed hard. “It feels wrong,” I said. “It feels evil.”
“There’s dark magic here, no doubt,” said Mum. She licked her lips and frowned. “I can taste it.”
My skin crawled as a soft voice came from the air behind me, the sound itself brushing the nape of my neck with warmth. I turned to see a shimmering shape, struggling to take form, and surrounded by trails of red smoke, swirling in and out of existence. “Hear me,” came the voice again, distant and ethereal, with no real substance.
“Maeve?” I said. “Is that you?”
With everyone’s attention on the apparition, it spoke again, distant and haunted. “It is me, Maeve. I cannot take form here, there is dark magic blocking me. I barely found you. The signals from the stones I gave you is weak. As am I. I bring bad news of Eva, Gladys.”
“What news?” said Granny, her hand on her chest. “What’s happened to her? What’s happened to my sister?”
Maeve shimmered and faded, her shape barely visible, as if covered by a veil of muslin. “I went to Derek’s home, and Eva is not there. There has been a struggle, and I fear for her safety. Derek’s staff was tossed aside, the jewel which decorated it missing, as is he. I fear you were correct, I fear Derek has moved to the darkness. I fear for your safety, and I cannot help you… I cannot reach you.”
“A jewel missing from Derek’s staff, a jewel on top of the spire, and a jewel mentioned in the inscription near the castle you found, Maeve,” said Willow. “What does it mean?”
The air popped and crackled, electric swirling among us, and Maeve briefly took on her solid form, her eyes scared and her voice urgent. “I have no answers, but you are our only hope. All of you. I feel darkness approaching. I fear for The Haven and everyone in it, I sense you are in the presence of great danger, but you must hurry, you must —”
Her words were cut off by an abrupt puff of red smoke, and Maeve was gone, a final shimmering of faint light the only proof she’d been there.
“You heard her,” said Granny, rushing for the entrance into the depths. “My sister needs me.”
“She needs us,” I corrected, following her.
Chapter Fifteen
Barney had pushed his way past Granny, refusing to allow her to descend the steps before him, his face set with an urgency I’d never seen before. He was as nervous as the rest of us, and he had every right to be, without any magic of his own — although I’d felt my own magic draining from me with every step nearer to the spire we’d taken. We were unprotected, all of us mortal in a place where powerful and dark magic resided.
Barney led the way down the steps, and I followed him — so close that I could hear his breathing coming in heavy anxious puffs. Boris’s hooves clicked on the stone steps behind me, and the narrow corridor darkened as Willow repeated the password Granny had spoken, and the entrance closed with an ominous thud.
We spoke in hushed tones as we descended the long flight of steps, none of us with the magic available to conjure a light, and each of us holding tightly to the clothing of the person in front. Soon Barney spoke, his voice calmer and his breathing less laboured. “I can see the bottom,” he said. “There are torches.”
Barney stepped onto the dusty ground at the base of the steps, and relief flooded me as I stepped behind him. The passage was much wider than the staircase, and the clau
strophobia which had been building in me was washed away by the warm light emitted by the flaming torches which lined the walls of the passageway.
Musty air filled my nostrils, bringing to mind the smell of The Water Witch when I’d bought her; unloved and damp throughout. A cool breeze blew across my face and the nearest torch flickered. As my eyes adjusted to the darkness, crevices in the walls began to take shape, and as a torch burned bright as another breeze ran past it, the faded letters of a sign high on the wall came into focus. “It’s a shop,” I said. “A very old shop.”
“We’re in a buried street,” said Boris. “Not a corridor.”
Willow wiped her hand across a smooth part of the wall, and the surface below the dirt reflected the torchlight like a mirror. “Glass,” she said. “A window.”
Barney glanced above his head. “The tree roots are holding the roof up,” he said. “I’m surprised these buildings are still standing with all that weight on top of them.”
The tree roots were the roof. Gnarled and thick, and high above us, the old roots twisted into one another, forming a shelf on which the ground soil lay. Smaller roots hung in clusters like strands of long grey hair, and the occasional drop of water fell to the floor, pooling against the ancient walls of crumbling buildings. It must have taken centuries for nature to form the ceiling, and I wondered when the forgotten street had last seen daylight, or heard the singing of a bird.
“Which way?” said Mum, her head twisting left and right, ignoring Barney’s architectural concerns.
“I think we should head towards the spire,” I said. “I tried to estimate the distance we travelled along the steps. I’m guessing we’re thirty metres below ground level and the staircase was about two hundred metres in length.” I pointed to the right. “The house with the spire must be that way.”
Granny rushed ahead, taking a torch from an iron bracket on the wall. “Quickly,” she said. “Something tells me Eva is here. I can sense her. I always could, even without magic.”
Barney handed me a torch and took another for himself. Willow and Mum followed suit, and soon we resembled a mob of angry villagers walking the buried village streets. The only things missing were the pitchforks, and without magic we could have used them. Any weapon would have been better than nothing.
We cast long shadows as we walked, which dragged over the walls of derelict buildings and over the thick trunk of a long-rotted tree which stood in what had once been the front yard of a small cottage. The street widened and the cottages turned into larger houses. Smaller alleyways and streets led off the route we were following, and as we passed a turning to the left, my nose told me of a scent I was familiar with. “I smell the river,” I said, “and diesel fumes. Derek must be here, and if he’s got Eva, they must have come by boat. We should look.”
“So much for Derek using magic to transport himself everywhere,” Willow said. “Maeve was wrong about that, wasn’t she?”
“He’d have to use a boat,” said Mum. “It’s possible for him to transport another person with himself, but that person has to be a willing participant in the magic. Eva wouldn’t have come without a fight. He’d have had no choice but to bring her by boat. The same as the three witches the dwarfs saw tied up. I’m sure Derek would have liked to have magically transported his victims around The Haven, but no witch would have gone with him willingly.”
“Don’t use that word,” said Granny. “Victim. It makes it sound so final, like there’s already no hope for those poor people. No hope for my sister.”
We headed down the side street, walking toward the smell of river and fuel, the light from my torch showing a very different surface below our feet than the one we’d recently been walking on. “Look,” I said. “There’s footprints everywhere.”
“And gouges out of the ground as if heavy objects were dragged,” commented Boris, his nose close to the ground. “It smells of trolls too. This is the route they used to transport the lead and building equipment. I hear running water too; the boat must be nearby.”
He was right. The unmistakable sound of a fast running river was close. I took a few more steps and held my torch ahead of me. The red hull of a boat shone back at me, and we hurried toward it, not caring if anybody hostile was aboard the vessel, only caring about the safety of Eva and the other six witches. We reached the river quickly. The bank-side had obviously once been used as a docking point for boats, and rusty mooring posts dotted the stone quay — the red boat tied to one of them with a thick rope, looking out of place among the rotting dereliction of its surroundings. A rat slithered into the water as it heard us approach, its beady eyes reflecting the light of the torches, and its torpedoing body leaving a wake as it swam with the current.
“Only Derek and rats would feel at home down here,” said Granny, lifting a leg as she prepared to climb aboard the boat.
Barney stepped in front of her. “No, Gladys,” he said. “None of you have magic while we’re down here, my police training makes me the only one equipped for this situation.”
Granny gave him a smile and stepped aside. “Be careful, Barney,” she said, placing a hand on his forearm. “We all love you. You know that, don’t you?”
Barney nodded and squeezed Granny’s trembling hand. He leapt aboard with a smile in my direction, his long legs making easy work of climbing the hull wall, and his hair a vivid red under the torchlight. Granny was right. We did love him. I loved him, and the seriousness of our situation hit me in the gut with a surprise blow which made me gasp. “Please be careful,” I said, as Barney climbed the ladder to the upper deck where the entrance hatch to the hold stood proud.
He nodded and lifted the hatch, the hinges creaking and the boat rocking as dark water sped beneath it. The boat wasn’t big, but was large enough to carry the tonne weight of lead the dwarfs had sold Derek each time he had visited them. It was more than large enough to hide somebody in the shadows of the hold, though, but my senses told me the boat would be empty, they told me that we would find our answers below the spire with the jewel. In the long-buried house.
Barney held the torch above the hole, peering into the hold. “It looks empty,” he said. “I’ll make sure.” He lowered himself into the hull, and a thud from inside, followed by muffled footsteps, told me he was safe.
Flame-light flickered on the hull, and a curling shape of gold caught my eye — the sweeping tail of a letter. I’d thought the boat was unnamed, but it was apparent that Derek didn’t clean his hull very often. Layers of grime covered the boat’s moniker, but with a few vigorous wipes of my sleeve I exposed enough of the painted letters to make sense of them. “A Vision of Beauty,” I read aloud.
“He didn’t name it after himself then,” said Granny. “The Ugly Bastard would have been more appropriate.”
Barney’s movement through the boat was easily detectable by the sound of his footsteps, which echoed with an alien presence in the otherwise abandoned world we found ourselves in. Finally, his head emerged from the hatch, and he made his way slowly off the boat and onto the bank. “There’s nobody aboard,” he said, standing next to Granny, “but I did find this.”
Granny’s strangled whimper fed into the fear I already felt. The piece of fabric that Barney held was soaked in blood, the floral pattern typical of Aunt Eva’s fashion sense, and the discarded chains he held in his other hand, bundled next to his torch, spoke of imprisonment.
“Eva,” said Granny.
“There’s not much blood in the boat,” said Barney. “The fabric was caught on a nail, I think she cut herself as she pulled it free. I’d expect to see a lot more blood if somebody was… well… you know.”
“Murdered,” said Granny. “Just say what you mean.”
“Can witches be murdered?” said Boris, pushing himself against Granny’s leg in an attempt to comfort her.
“Of course,” said Granny. “Especially down here with no magic, but even with magic a witch can be killed. The Haven only protects us from death by natural
causes, not death at the hands of a psychopath.”
“We should go,” said Barney. “We’ll follow the footsteps from the boat — I’m certain they’ll lead us to the house with the spire.”
Chapter Sixteen
Barney was correct, as we’d all suspected he’d be. The footsteps and disturbed earth beneath our feet led us straight to the rusting gates of a large house, the hinges weakened by centuries of neglect, their wrought iron load tilted and twisted. The house loomed at the end of a driveway, our torches illuminating the old walls and roof. The spire we’d known we’d find thrust upward from the centre of the roof, vanishing into the tangle of tree roots which formed a dark, living sky.
“I feel Eva,” said Granny, stepping through the gateway. “I know she’s here.”
The house was large, and dead trees formed a splintered landscape in what would have once been an impressive garden. Barney led the way along the rubble strewn driveway, the light from his torch picking out an old sundial and an ornate birdbath, both of no use in the dark and lifeless underground world.
“A light,” said Barney, nearing the entrance, the wooden doors cracked and held open by rotted debris. “I see a light inside and I smell smoke too.”
“Look,” said Mum, taking a step backwards and lifting her torch.
Smoke drifted from a ruined chimney, torchlight turning it amber as gathered like a cloud amongst the roots, its tendrils spreading through the canopy.
“A fire,” I said. “That answers any questions about anybody being at home.”
“Maybe the kettle’s on too,” said Willow, the tremble in her voice betraying her attempt at seeming upbeat.
A floorboard creaked as Barney entered the house, and he glanced at us. “Be careful,” he warned. “Stay behind me, all of you.”
At the end of a long corridor, lined with stone sculptures and dusty furniture, the wall was painted a flickering orange from the light which poured from an open doorway. The fire. We ignored the sweeping marble staircase which loomed on our left, and followed Barney as he edged closer to the room, reaching down to pick up a length of wood and brandishing it as if it was his police nightstick. I grabbed a rusty length of metal, happy to feel its weight in my hand, and the rummaging scuffles behind me told me everyone else was arming themselves too. What I expected to do with a piece of metal against whatever dark magic Derek possessed, I didn’t know, but as I gripped it tighter, its solid reassurance gave me some hope.
