Without warning, the statue reached out with its one good hand and seized Lucy by the arm. Courtney swung at it with his mallet, but the statue lashed out with its pointed stump and sent him flying back against the wall.
John tried to tug Lucy out of the statue’s grip, but it was far too strong. It pulled her right up against its charred chest, with its forearm tight across her throat. Lucy gagged and kicked her legs.
Courtney got up again, and swung the mallet around and around. Mr Vane retreated behind the statue’s back. “It’s no good, you know. You can’t hit either of us without hitting Lucy, and if you don’t put the hammer down I shall ask my friend here to break her neck.”
John said, “Leave her alone … I’m warning you. Leave her alone.”
He bent down and grabbed the pickaxe.
“And what are you going to do with that?” Mr Vane taunted him. “You’re such a child you can hardly lift it.”
Courtney tried to feint around the statue, but it shuffled to one side with its arm still around Lucy’s throat, and Mr Vane still hovering right behind it.
John said, “It’s no good, Courtney. We’re going to have to give in.”
“What? We’ve got rid of most of his spirit friends. How long do you think he can keep this up?”
“It’s no good, Courtney. You’ve seen what he’s like. He’ll tell the statue to kill Lucy and we won’t be able to stop him.”
John stepped forward and stood only half a metre away from the statue. It stared back at him with its burned, twisted face.
“I don’t know what kind of spirit lives inside you,” he said, “but I’m asking you not to hurt this girl, and to let her go.”
“I want your solemn promise not to damage any more runestones,” said Mr Vane.
John nodded, and said, “All right. I promise. We all promise.”
“Good,” smiled Mr Vane. “And to make sure you keep it, I’m going to ask Aedd Mawr to strangle young Lucy right in front of your eyes. No Druid promise can ever be binding without a sacrifice.”
“No!” John shouted, and tried again to pull at Lucy’s arm, but the statue waved his pointed stump at her and squeezed Lucy’s throat so tightly that she let out a high, cackling gargle. John was frightened, but he was frustrated and enraged too. “You promised to set her free!”
“And so I shall. Free from her mortal body. Free to roam along the ley lines with the other spirits.”
“You even bruise her, I’ll break every bone in your body!” Courtney yelled.
Mr Vane threw back his head and laughed even louder. “After all these years, after all these hundreds of sacrifices, what do you think one more life means to me?”
John hesitated for a moment. But then the statue grasped Lucy’s throat even more tightly, and she began to turn pink. John ducked his head down and rolled forward on the floor, in the same way that he’d seen cops on American TV shows do. He ended up right behind Mr Vane, back on his feet again, the pickaxe clutched in both hands.
It seemed to happen in slow motion. John had never imagined that he would be able to do anything like this and he wasn’t sure that he could do it even now. He saw Mr Vane turning his head, his yellow teeth bared in surprise. He heard Lucy choking again. He lifted the pickaxe sideways and swung it behind his head.
“Nooo!” cried Mr Vane. But John whacked the point of the pickaxe right into his back. It pierced his chest and drove deep into the statue. Crunch – thud. Mr Vane said nothing more than “Uggh!” and tried to reach behind him with one bandaged hand to pull the pickaxe out of his back.
But the statue threw back its arms and let out a roar of pain and fury that sounded like a thousand voices all roaring at once. Courtney snatched Lucy well away from it as it staggered around the living-room with Mr Vane pinned to its back, his feet scrabbling helplessly on the floor.
The statue gave one last bellow and then he and Mr Vane toppled sideways with a deafening crash.
Mr Vane lay with one hand resting on the statue’s charred shoulder. A thin stream of blood ran from the side of his mouth.
Courtney knelt beside him and said, “Hold still – I’m going to try to get the pickaxe out.”
“No, no … don’t do that. It’s too late now, and I don’t want any more pain.” He looked up at them with dimming eyes. “I’m glad it’s over,” he whispered.
Lucy turned away and John held her very tight. Courtney got to his feet and said, “Blowing up the house was bad enough. How are we going to explain this one?”
But even as they watched, it looked as if the statue were beginning to sink into the floor, and Mr Vane with it. Gradually its pointed stump disappeared, and then its shoulder. Within a few minutes there was nothing left of either of them except two arms, one wooden and one human, lying side by side on the floorboards.
Then, without a sound, they were gone.
John said, “We broke the stone. How come they could still be sucked into the floor?”
“Ah – look. We broke it in half, but the lettering’s still intact. That’s a lesson we need to learn when we go around and get rid of all the rest of them.”
“Right now,” said Lucy, “all I want to do is to go home.”
They finished the job two weeks later, knocking the Druidic runestone from a large family house overlooking the Derbyshire Dales. Courtney gave it to Lucy and said, “Make sure you break it up as small as you can.” Lucy took it out into the garden while John and Courtney took a last look around the house.
“Well, I’m glad this is all over,” said John, unconsciously echoing Mr Vane’s last words.
Courtney clapped him on the back and said, “Come on, let’s get out of here. I could do with some lunch.”
It was a warm, breezy afternoon as they closed the garden gate behind them and walked back to Courtney’s car. Lucy was already waiting for them.
“Well, what are we going to do now?” asked Courtney. “Now that we’ve stopped being saviours of the world as we know it, all we are is three out-of-work estate agents.”
“Perhaps we should start our own agency,” Lucy suggested. “The three of us could get together and rent an office, surely?”
“I can see it now,” said Courtney. “Tulloch, Mears and French. The slickest estate agents ever. Glossy colour brochures, weekly ads in Country Life…”
“No,” said John. “I’ve got a better idea. ‘Gaffs’… the estate agents who tell you exactly what’s wrong with a house before they sell it to you. Noisy neighbours? Subsidence? Dry rot? We don’t hide anything.”
“What about skeletons in the wall?” said Lucy.
A large cloud passed over the sun and suddenly the afternoon seemed chilly. They climbed into the car and they were well on their way home again before it began to brighten up.
The following afternoon, Lucy went round to see Uncle Robin. He was out in the garden, shaking nuts and raisins on to his birdtable. A little red-and-green windmill whirred in the afternoon wind.
“Did you get it for me?” Uncle Robin asked her.
She handed him the padded postal bag, and he hefted it in his hand to feel its weight. “Well done, Lucy. You’re a very good girl. You always were.
“Do you know something?” he said, turning away from the birdtable. “The Druids were cruel, and merciless, but they were the greatest magicians that this country has ever known, or ever will know.”
Once inside the kitchen, he reached inside the bag and took out the stone, with its runic inscriptions. He turned it this way and that, examining it from all sides, and finally put it down.
“It won’t cause any trouble, will it?” asked Lucy. “You only need it for research. I mean, there won’t be any more sacrifices, or anything like that, will there?”
“Of course not,” said Uncle Robin, his eyes bright with anticipation. “But now I can study the Druidic spirits directly … at first hand. Now I have a way to communicate with them. This is like finding a way to talk to the Ancient Greeks, or the los
t people of Atlantis. It would have been a disaster to lose such a civilization completely.”
“I have to go now,” Lucy told him. “I’m meeting John this evening. He’s taking me to a club.”
“Nice chap, John,” said Uncle Robin. “But you won’t tell him about this, will you?”
Lucy shook her head.
“Good,” Uncle Robin said. “This can be our little secret…”
A Note on the Author
Graham Masterton (born 1946, Edinburgh) is a British horror author. Originally editor of Mayfair and the British edition of Penthouse, Graham Masterton’s first novel The Manitou was published in 1976 and adapted for the film in 1978.
Further works garnered critical acclaim, including a Special Edgar award by the Mystery Writers of America for Charnel House and a Silver Medal by the West Coast Review of Books for Mirror. He is also the only non-French winner of the prestigious Prix Julia Verlanger for his novel Family Portrait, an imaginative reworking of the Oscar Wilde novel The Picture of Dorian Gray.
Masterton’s novels often contain visceral sex and horror. In addition to his novels, Masterton has written a number of sex instruction books, including How to Drive Your Man Wild in Bed and Wild Sex for New Lovers.
Discover books by Graham Masterton published by Bloomsbury Reader at
www.bloomsbury.com/Graham Masterton
Burial
Corroboree
Feelings of Fear
Holy Terror
House of Bones
Lady of Fortune
The Hell Candidate
For copyright reasons, any images not belonging to the original author have been
removed from this book. The text has not been changed, and may still contain
references to missing images.
This electronic edition published in 2012 by Bloomsbury Reader
Bloomsbury Reader is a division of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc, 50 Bedford Square,
London WC1B 3DP
First published in Great Britain 1998 by Scholastic Ltd
Copyright © 1998 Graham Masterton
All rights reserved
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make available this publication (or any part of it) in any form, or by any means
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publisher. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication
may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.
The moral right of the author is asserted.
eISBN: 9781448210572
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