by Jason Foss
George was directed to unlock the gate to the staff car park, which meant they would enter through the rearmost turret. The structure was under repair, scaffolding covered the whole back of the building and the group was lost to sight. Within the watcher, emotions ran cold; there was a time to act and a time to wait.
*
George Carlyle unlocked the staff door, then moved sharply to disable the alarm, muttering imprecations as he did so. The museum was dark and silent. It was still light outside, though an overcast sky would bring night early. George found the light switch.
Quickly, the three bounded up the stairs, past the shadowed Buddha, into the corner turret where the curator’s office lay. The door was locked and anxious moments passed as they waited for George to catch up with the keys.
No curator lay slumbering below the desk. To Flint, the office looked as it had before. The desk was perhaps tidier; cleared now of a pile of papers which had lain on the left hand side. Flint scanned the bookcase. Perhaps there had been an extra box-file before. A gap in a row of journals caught his eye. The familiar green-jacketed tomes were entitled The Transactions of the Darkewater Valley Antiquarian Society.
It was a full set, running from 1879 to the previous year, with hiccups during the world wars. Two issues were missing: 1932 and 1964.
Archaeologists love rubbish, so Tyrone moved straight for the waste paper bin and emptied it onto the desk, unravelling balls of paper and screwed-up envelopes, but finding no reward.
Vikki searched the desk, drawer by drawer, sifting through every pile of documents.
‘Does he have a file for his letters?’ She stopped mid-action to ask George.
The attendant stood in the doorway, hands clasped behind his back, resolution fading. ‘I couldn’t say, miss.’
‘Thanks – you’re a great help.’ She continued to search.
Flint tapped the green volumes on the shelves, bringing attention to the dust-free voids where the two missing books had stood. ‘Do we know what was in the 1932 and 1964 editions of the Transactions?’ he asked idly.
‘Something worth coming back for?’ Tyrone replied with another question, ‘We can check at college tomorrow.’
‘Yeah.’
‘Does the new woman use this office?’ Vikki asked George.
‘No, miss, she’s taken over the Assistant Curator’s room; that’s the usual procedure.’
‘And how often is this bin emptied?’ Vikki pointed to the mess created by Tyrone.
‘Every day, I think. Carol does it.’
‘Pretty careless, isn’t he?’ Tyrone commented.
Flint swept his thoughts around the office. Careless, yes. Plant had ceased to care; perhaps all he truly cared about was Lucy. Now he was risking discovery to collect his mail.
‘So he comes in at night, looks at the mail and uses his library.’ Flint thought aloud. ‘From the way the dust is disturbed, I’d estimate he’s been here during the past twenty-four hours.’
‘So… he could still be here.’ Tyrone stated.
On reflex, all three glanced towards the open doorway, as if expecting to see the twitching face of the curator staring back. Tyrone’s hypothesis possessed enough crazy sense to be true.
‘George – when we were at your place, you said that Plant virtually lived here. Could he do just that? Forget sneaking in and out or kipping here at night – could he actually live here?’
‘We’re not far from the river,’ Vikki said. ‘His mother could have been coming here the other night. We’ll have to look in every room, just to make sure.’
Flint and Tyrone both looked at her with disquiet, whilst George seemed fascinated by his own feet.
‘Come on!’ she urged. ‘Now we’re here, it won’t hurt.’
‘Negative evidence,’ said Flint to Tyrone, ‘lateral thinking: rule out the stupidest possibilities first.’
‘You’re so bloody smart, Doctor Jeffrey Flint,’ Vikki snapped. ‘Why don’t you go across the road to the pub, and I’ll look round on my own?’
Lecturer and student exchanged looks. The reporter had left them no choice.
Outside, the sky had clouded over and night had fallen early. Inside, the museum could have been the work of a Hammer set designer, with enough blind corners and doorways to hide a legion of undead. In the silence, it was hard not to whisper, not to tiptoe across the creaking floors, not to open doors with care. A melodramatic tension fell upon the four moving through alcoves and galleries in semi-darkness. A stuffed polecat’s eyes glinted from the shadows. A mummy losing its shroud to age bared its remaining teeth. Each room searched decreased the number in which the curator could hide. Each minute, Vikki talked up the chance of making a discovery.
Two floors were searched, as were the turrets, the attic over the main building, the north wing annexe. Galleries, offices, half-forgotten junk rooms, broom cupboards and dummy walls between display cases all had to be unlocked and checked by tapping and prying. On the ground floor of the north wing, two suits of armour stood guard at a doorway. One was armed with a mace.
The student went over to the armour and poked his finger through an open grasp. ‘What does that other suit of armour normally carry?’ Tyrone asked George.
At first George seemed not to understand, then said, ‘A sword, a big one.’ He mimicked a fisherman boasting of a three-foot catch.
Tyrone slipped the mace from the grip of the dead hand. ‘Treasure hunting?’ Flint challenged
Tyrone waved the mace at Vikki’s ever-present biro. ‘The sword is mightier than the pen. This Piers Plant sounds like a total loony, Doc; you won’t be able to stop him just with sarcastic remarks.’
George unlocked the door of the cellar. Plant would not be found reclining in a mock Regency chaise-longue, or strolling round the archaeology gallery, but the chance of finding him huddled in a corner of the cellar was very real. If he could do to Lucy half the things Vikki had suggested, if he was indeed armed with a medieval broadsword, then they were crossing a threshold into danger. Never courageous, Flint’s thoughts turned to fear. George turned a switch at the top of a narrow stairway. Tyrone’s mace went first, Flint last.
The smell of dust and concrete pervaded the cellar. Old wooden racking held splitting seed-boxes, overflowing with forgotten relics. A dust-laden model galleon, a militia drum with its skin torn, a pile of architectural fragments salvaged from a local priory. In the ceiling above this pile was a smoke hatch. Tyrone climbed on to the stones and could easily reach upwards and push the hatch open.
‘It shouldn’t do that,’ George commented. He stepped forward and pointed. ‘It should be bolted from the inside.’
Indeed, there was a bolt, rusty due to long closure. Now it was drawn back, scraped with silver lines betraying recent use. The hatch opened at the edge of an ornamental shrubbery.
‘So we know how he gets in.’ Tyrone brushed dust from the knees of his cords.
‘He really is mad if he thinks he can burgle his own museum nightly without getting caught,’ Vikki said.
‘But it means he isn’t here.’ Tyrone sounded disappointed, relaxing his grip on the mace.
‘But he’s close.’ Vikki wanted the options for a scoop left open. ‘We could mount a watch and catch him coming in.’
The adventurers looked at each other for a minute or so, experiencing the anti-climax. Dissatisfied, they made for the exit, George turning off lights and locking doors as they went. By the plastic dinosaurs, Flint noticed a postcard of the museum and picked it up, frowning immediately. The postcard showed an oblique view of the building from the south-east. High on the roof of the annexe was a skylight. Flint’s memory flashed an image of the first-floor room in the north wing: tall and airy, with a random collection of ethnic artefacts displayed along one side and tall picture windows down the other, facing south. A war-canoe was the central focus of attention. The room was high walled, with just a suggestion of the ceiling closing in to form the roof. There had been no
skylight.
He turned the card so George could see it. ‘George – where is this skylight?’
George shrugged. ‘You can’t get up there.’
‘I bet my life that someone can. You said that Plant and Lucy spent a lot of time upstairs, in that room with all the ethnic junk.’
‘The Woggery, yes.’
‘Please don’t call it that!’ Flint gasped. ‘Where exactly did they used to go?’
‘Into the little room beyond the W... You looked in there; it’s full of rubbish. I once offered to clear it out, but Mr Plant said not to.’
Flint recalled the room, high but not deep, piled with empty picture frames and furniture under dust sheets. ‘He’s still here.’ He jabbed a finger at George. ‘Phone the police; we’ve got him.’
‘Police, sir?’
‘People in pointy blue hats, flashing lights, you know?’
‘But why? What has Mr Plant done?’
All three stared at the attendant. Flint realised he had caught the enthusiasm of the other two and allowed it to carry him away.
‘Look, the station is just round the corner, five minutes’ walk. Go and find someone, get them to come here.’
George was going to object again, but free will had been drilled out of him many years before.
‘They want to take a statement from him, okay? Go find a bored copper. Please.’
‘Fine, sir – but you take care with the exhibits, won’t you? I don’t want to come back and find you’ve burnt the place down.’
Bemused, George unlocked the front door, then passed the keys to Flint.
Flint turned to Vikki. ‘This will make your scoop exclusive.’
Vikki would not have heard his last words, as she was already running up the staircase. Flint bounded after her, catching up just beyond the top of the stairs. She stopped. The museum was dark. Only the main corridors were lit, and from below came the sound of Tyrone, slow off the mark, coming up the stairs.
‘Shh!’ Vikki held up a hand for silence.
Flint felt his senses prickle, searching for something that lay below the sound of footsteps. Tyrone broke the spell.
‘There you are!’
They waved him to hush, Flint tried to attune his ears to that extra, undefined sound, but no floorboards echoed above, no door creaked from behind. No raging eyes stared from the blackness.
‘What is it?’ Tyrone hissed.
‘Nothing,’ said Flint.
‘I heard something,’ Vikki insisted.
The gothic atmosphere was getting to her, Flint thought. It was getting to him, too, as he followed Vikki into the Victoriana gallery, then unlocked two very solid doors. Finally, they were within the north wing, in the ethnographic collection. Vikki stood beside the Balinese war-canoe, looking around at the haphazard assemblage of native head-dresses, war clubs and shields plundered from around the world by eccentric Victorian travellers. Myriad images of fear, hate, love and devotion dangled from the walls, bringing the reporter to an open-mouthed silence.
Flint was less impressed, thinking it all passé. Checking upwards, he examined the symmetry of the room in the abstract. The idiosyncratic architecture held the clue.
‘There has to be another attic. Thirty feet long, fifteen wide, perhaps eight or ten feet of head room at the centre.’
Tyrone was craning his neck upwards and he nodded at the logic. Vikki moved along the near wall, checking whether the display cases would move easily. At the far end of the gallery, towards the rear of the museum, was a short corridor which led to the store room. Years of looking round churches and planning ruins had trained Flint’s eye to spot an architectural flaw.
‘This corridor shouldn’t be here; it doesn’t make sense!’
It was some twelve feet long, leading from the corner of the room. He pulled out the postcard. The store room was above a minor post-war extension added at the rear of the building to hold the toilets. He began to bang the inside wall of the passageway.
‘Looking for a secret door?’ Tyrone asked, standing with his hands on his hips.
‘Why not? Let’s be really silly.’
The wall was hollow, echoes bounced back from the cavity beyond, but there was no longer a door. ‘There was a door here, once,’ Flint was certain, ‘it led to a staircase which ran through the thickness of the rear wall.’
‘Which explains why it’s so thick.’ Tyrone finished the logic, also banging the wall. ‘Or could this wall be a false one, built over an open staircase?’
‘Maybe.’
Vikki had come to their side now. Flint fumbled for the key to the store, found it, and went cautiously inside. Room barely existed for the threesome to stand without kicking each other’s ankles. The rest of the floor space was taken up by a pile of furniture covered with grey dust sheets. Cheap plywood panels formed the front of a set of sliding storage cabinets along the interior wall. All were locked and the bundle of keys proved useless.
‘Getting warmer,’ Flint said.
Tyrone went back into the gallery and returned with a Zulu assegai. Flint winced as the spear point was pushed between panel and frame, but the door was easily forced open. Revealed within was a cupboard two feet deep. Vikki squeezed inside and in moments had found the locked panel which led to the goal. This offered no convenient leverage point for the assegai, had no keyhole and no bolts to shift.
‘What now?’ Vikki asked.
‘We get sued by the County Council,’ Flint quipped, thinking of Doctor Woodfine and her total lack of a sense of humour.
Tyrone raised his mace to strike the panel. ‘Okay if I test this mace?’ he asked.
‘Do it!’
No option remained but to destroy the panel with mace and feet. It may have taken as long as five minutes to crash their way through and by that time, they had long abandoned any idea of stealth.
Flint helped Vikki clear the debris, then stopped Tyrone from entering the void. ‘He’ll have heard us by now.’
Tyrone brandished the mace and handed the assegai to Flint. ‘Well, he’s not going anywhere, is he?’
‘Let’s not do anything stupid, folks. George should have reached the cop shop by now, they’ll be here in a minute.’
The wall shook as the door to the gallery slammed closed.
‘What!’ Flint’s exclamation matched a yelp by Vikki.
Echoes reverberated around the tiny room. All three were too stunned to act for a few moments, then made for the door in a rush, only to hear the lock turn and a bolt slide into place. The door was mock original; heavy, solid oak. Six fists, then a mace battered upon it.
‘Bugger,’ Vikki cursed, ‘bugger, bugger, bugger.’
‘Double bugger.’ Flint stepped back, stumbling on an ankle-level obstruction.
Vikki began to clamber up the furniture pile towards a tiny square window high in the end wall.
‘I can shout for help,’ she said, setting a picture frame sliding towards them.
The others could do nothing but duck the pieces she dislodged on her way up. Balancing precariously she peeked through.
‘Is there any chance of getting out?’ Tyrone asked.
‘No, forget it; we’re right at the back, and much too high. I can’t even see the street.’
Flint put an ear to the door. He heard a further door slam, the one to the ethno room, then another, more muffled still. To escape, they would have to hack through at least three doors before making the main staircase. By that time, pursuit would be futile.
‘That’s him away,’ Tyrone said, helping Vikki down. ‘So we just sit here and wait for the Feds to let us out.’
‘Never put your faith in authority,’ Flint muttered, squeezing past him towards the concealed door. ‘Leave it to the police and we’ll be here all night. Well, folks, as we can’t get out, we might as well find out what’s up here.’
A staircase lay within the wall void, possibly blocked and forgotten in one of the museum’s many remodellings, possibly
deliberately obscured by a curator whose mind had long been bending towards the bizarre. A system existed for unlocking and lifting out the panel, but this was only obvious from behind.
A Bakelite light switch still functioned, and Vikki snapped it on. She ventured up the staircase first, snatching up the assegai and advancing in a cautious crouch. Tyrone followed with the mace. Flint went last, feeling naked.
The room at the top was still lit, although a black curtain prevented light escaping from the tell-tale skylight. The roof void had been converted into a second study, ripe to pillage for information whilst waiting for the police. Along all the available wall space was Piers Plant’s impressive library. Two to three hundred books covered every aspect of the paranormal. It was immediately obvious that the curator had an unhealthy keenness for the macabre and arcane: voodoo, astrology, witchcraft, herb lore, parapsychology, cryptozoology, out-of-body experience, demonology and worse.
Here was the source of those red eyes, Flint now knew. Secretive studies in the depth of night had turned Plant into that ghostly wreck. All the rumour and innuendo about his state of mind were finally confirmed.
An improvised bed and a pile of food packets lay on the floor.
‘So he was here all the time,’ Vikki triumphed. ‘I was right.’
Plant had managed to squeeze a small desk up that narrow staircase and handwritten notes were scattered on its surface. Another pile covered a stack of obscure books with damp-foxed covers. Latin verse, probably chants, Flint noted.
Vikki ferreted amongst the papers, pulling out a fistful of letters with a whoop. ‘It’s all here,’ she declared. ‘We can wrap this up in half an hour.’
On the wall above the desk was an array of pictures that drew Flint’s attention. In his imagination, Flint had expected a shrine to Satan, but instead, Plant maintained a shrine to Lucy. Two dozen photographs included strips of photo-booth origin, an old school photo, one of Lucy as some kind of May Queen, and a poor watercolour painting of her standing in a white gown, arms outstretched. Dried flowers decked the scene as if in macabre tribute.
