Elliot grasped Knight’s hand, excited like a teenager before a One Direction concert. “May we see it now?”
Knight glanced beyond the gargoyle, to the wooden panels that were over two hundred years old, and while they got somewhat moldy over time they still guarded the secret entrance to the cellar.
“Yeah. If you can open it,” he teased, approaching the wall.
Elliot let go of Knight’s hand, as rapidly as he had grabbed it, and ran up to the door, touching the wood as if he were caressing a lover. It was a freaky thing to witness, and when Elliot pressed his body tightly against the panels he looked as if he was about to make love to them. Knight wasn’t sure if he wanted to know what was going through Elliot’s head.
“That’s fucked up,” Knight said as he joined Elliot and pressed on a tulip-shaped carving. It dipped under his touch, releasing the mechanism of the secret door.
Cool, mildewy air blew from the cellar below, and he cleared his throat, illuminating the narrow stairs that seemed to lead into hell itself. Somehow, being here with Elliot made the whole experience more eerie.
“What is?” Elliot glanced back at him, but was quick to make his way down the stairs. “That secret door is such a crafty idea. And to think that he came up with it two hundred years ago!”
“It used to have a coded lock, but that was replaced by one of the later owners. He could create a combination as he locked it, so only he could access the cellar without damaging the door,” Knight said, begrudgingly thinking that it had been a smart choice of Fane’s, even though he’d likely commissioned someone to produce the special lock anyway.
Every time Elliot looked back into the white beam of Knight’s flashlight, his eyes seemed to hold more madness. “No wonder he could continue for years without being discovered. When you think about it, he was never truly discovered. He was murdered and only then people found out about his secret.”
Knight bumped the side of his head against the brick wall in frustration. “For the last time, he wasn’t murdered. Laurent killed him in self-defense, and you can only speak of murder when it’s deliberate and planned.”
Elliot shook his head as they slowly reached the end of the downward corridor where three doors loomed—two were open and filled with some junk, but the door to the last one on the left remained shut. The space was so narrow and cramped they needed to keep their heads low to not injure themselves. “You don’t know what happened. Who knows what we may find once we start methodically searching this house. But was Laurent defending himself? I doubt it. William was known to be a handsome man, so no reason to reject him.”
He pressed on the handle of the door leading into the room where Fane used to keep his victims, but it wouldn’t budge. The pleading look of frustration on Elliot’s face made Knight toy with the idea of asking for a blowjob first, but the white paint was too much of a turn off.
“Are you saying that being handsome excuses everything else? Or makes rape somehow impossible? Laurent wasn’t known for violence before he killed Fane, and the creepy memorabilia Fane kept of his other victims was proof that he attacked people. You can’t deny facts,” Knight said and opened the door with a key.
It screeched as it moved, revealing a room that had always creeped Knight out. First because of a satanic sigil hidden under the floor, now because he knew what really happened here to all the blameless men who had been assaulted and murdered by their captor. Built on a plan of a trapezoid, it had struck Knight as very odd since he first visited the clubhouse as a young teenager. With walls stripped of wallpaper that likely used to decorate them and empty, with the exception of an ancient fireplace, it hadn’t changed much since it had been crafted for the Fanes.
Elliot swanned in as if carried on clouds. “I can’t deny that, but just think about it. Mementos. Keepsakes. Even after they died, William still wanted to keep a part of them with him. I think that’s why he progressed to cannibalism. Jeffrey Dahmer didn’t start out by eating his victims either.” Elliot took slow steps and ran his fingertips over the bare walls.
“Oh, for fuck’s sake,” Knight hissed as he placed the flashlight on the dusty mantelpiece. “There’s no evidence he was a cannibal. Zero. Null. None of the bones identified have any knife marks consistent with removing meat.”
Elliot wandered around the room in circles, as if there was something new for him to find here if he just walked for long enough. “What about the missing arm? What about all the victims that have not been found?”
“You can’t make assumptions about stuff without any clues to go on. That’s not how science works.”
Elliot sat in a dark corner of the room despite the chill that had to be getting to his skinny body even more than it did to Knight’s. “It’s true, I’m not a scientist, but I know what I feel.”
Knight barked out a laugh. “Oh, so you’re a medium now? Maybe you should summon him?”
Knight didn’t like the long silence that followed.
“Just imagine if his soul could speak to us. He could reveal the truth about himself. Was he a cold-hearted killer, or was he misunderstood by history?”
Knight huffed. “We already know the truth. It’s a damn luck he’s not here, because he’d have used you like he had all those innocent men.”
Knight hated the way Elliot’s eyes seemed to glaze over at the thought. “He’d keep me forever,” Elliot whispered.
Knight was frozen to the floor, so still he could hear the rhythm of his own heart. This was madness if he ever saw it. “He would have tossed you away and buried you so that everyone forgot you ever existed.”
“He wouldn’t have, because unlike all those other men, I’d have been there with him willingly.” The way Elliot melted into the darkness in the far corner was unnerving at best.
“Go on then. Ask him. That’s where he died. I’m pretty sure he’ll answer his superfan,” Knight mocked, but he hated the cold tremors running down his arms like ghostly fingers.
Instead of coming back with yet another made-up argument, Elliot looked around with eyes wide as saucers. The flashlight made his shadow dance over the wall like a giant spider. “Mr. Fane? William? Can you hear us?”
Knight’s skin crawled when some rodent moved close by, scratching the floor with its claws, but he leaned against the wall and just watched Elliot. “Yeah, William Fane, we’re waiting!”
Elliot looked like a ghost himself with the wig and white makeup exaggerated by pale light. Seeing him like this, walking the floor that obscured the devil’s sigil, made Knight imagine William Fane pacing between those walls and thinking of new ways to torment others.
“You have to excuse my friend’s rudeness, Mr. Fane, but I assure you he and I are nothing alike. All we want is some answers.”
“Come out, come out,” called out Knight, blowing vapor out of his lips.
Elliot closed the door quietly, as if there was a baby napping somewhere that he didn’t want to wake up. “Just in case,” he whispered. “We invite you back, Mr. Fane.”
Another scratch had Knight looking toward the corner, but it was followed by another, coming from the same direction even though there was nothing to see there. Had rats made a nest under the floor? But before he could seriously consider that possibility, his mind registered a pattern in the noises, one that didn’t make any sense at all.
Footsteps.
Elliot glanced toward the door but the sounds weren’t coming from the staircase. They were inside. As if the room were much bigger and the person was approaching from afar, from beyond the wall across from Knight. Though it was surely rats, or someone’s footsteps echoing from the floor above.
The empty chamber felt like a walk-in fridge, and Knight wasn’t sure if it had been that cold when they first entered. His skin was crawling with goose bumps, and he itched to leave, but how would that have looked like in front of Elliot? If Knight proposed they leave so soon he’d have surely think Knight was a scaredy cat panicking over ghost stories at midnight.
“Is that you, Mr. Fane?” Elliot asked, and Knight wished he’d just shut up. No, he wished he hadn’t teased Elliot. The silence thudded in his ears, so complete as if there was a vacuum around the room. And then, a voice.
Coming from behind his back.
“Guests. How delightful.”
With his joints stiff as rusty cogs Knight turned around, and his stomach sank all the way to the bare floor.
William Fane stood between him and the only exit. The portraits hadn’t done justice to his features, which were firmer and more masculine than it was strictly fashionable for a man of his position in the early 1800s, but it was him. Knight had so little doubts about the man’s identity that his head was already spinning with uncertainty. Was he going mad?
The burgundy suit Fane wore was as immaculate as it could possibly be, but the spots of a matching color on the fine vest of cream silk told a story very different from the way William Fane used to present himself in public. His hair was on the shorter side and styled into shaggy waves, his lips redder than they should be on a man, and so were his cheeks, stained with some kind of rouge.
Knight could barely breathe.
Elliot stood equally frozen, staring at the solid presence with his lips parted. “Is this for real?”
Fane turned his attention to Elliot, pale eyes moving slowly, emotionless as if he were a reptile. “Oh, it is very real, my dear boy. You wouldn’t revoke your invitation after all, now would you?”
“Never,” Elliot whispered, already taking a step toward the apparition.
“I would,” Knight hissed in a frenzy. He should have known this could happen. The devil himself had dominion over this place. What had he been thinking to ask a ghost back into the world of the living? “I revoke the invitation.”
“Don’t!” Elliot shoved Knight without much strength.
Fane cocked his head to the side and laughed out loud. His voice carried as if there was an echo in the room when nothing like that happened to Knight’s and Elliot’s speech. “Don’t be ridiculous. You cannot revoke an invitation to my own house!” He frowned and bared his teeth at Knight.
“Mr. Fane, please, he meant no harm,” Elliot was quick to say.
Knight took a deep breath and exploded with anger. “I don’t need your protection from this maniac! He’s dead. His bones are rotting in the ground somewhere, and this is just a shadow of him. Look. He can’t even appear without you calling him.”
Fane’s handsome features twisted into a mask so distorted it could barely be called a face at all. Opening his mouth so wide the darkness of his throat seemed like a black hole, he dashed at Knight, ready to claw his eyes out.
Bravado ceased to mean anything in the moment when such a monstrous yet shockingly material being attacked, and Knight’s knees went soft. Mindlessly, he grabbed the flashlight off the mantelpiece and swung it at the apparition’s head. Only nothing happened when the two of them clashed. Knight’s hand sank into Fane as if he were a cloud, and even though his fingers felt icy cold where he couldn’t see them, there was no pain.
He stepped back, holding the flashlight to his chest, and watched Fane touch himself in the place where Knight pierced through just a second ago. His smooth hands clenched and slowly, very slowly Fane looked at Elliot, no longer a beast but the handsome man he first appeared as.
“W-what happened to me?” he uttered.
Elliot took two steps closer, as if he wasn’t freaked out by a fucking ghost. “A terrible thing, Mr. Fane. You are best off not thinking about it. Do you not remember?” He glanced back at Knight, seeking help as if they were assisting someone hit by a car not talking to a long-dead serial killer.
Knight rubbed his face, still hoping this was all a bad dream. He shouldn’t have clowned around. He should have known that in a place so ripe with the supernatural this kind of thing could have happened. “You are a murderer. You killed thirty men, and one of your victims got the upper hand, finally. No one is sorry for you. Everyone hates you. You are rotten to the core. Go back to the maggots, where you belong.” He didn’t even notice when he approached, or when his voice became louder, but there was no denying the pure hatred leaking out of Fane’s gaze. If he could, he would have charged at Knight again.
Elliot sneered at Knight, of all people. “Stop freaking him out.” He reached out to Fane’s ghost, as if he wanted to stroke a favorite pet.
Knight grabbed him by the arm and pulled him back, so that he stood between Fane and the reckless idiot. “Do not touch him. You don’t know what could happen!”
Fane took a step closer, and a cane almost identical to Elliot’s appeared in his hand out of thin air. “Why did you call me then if you claim to know all about who I am?”
“We-we wanted to learn about you, Mr. Fane. About your motives, about the pain you must have suffered,” Elliot said in a soft voice but stayed put behind Knight.
Knight fought the tightness in his chest and spoke, “He wants to say we wanted to know if you ate people.”
Fane blinked. “What utter nonsense! I am no barbarian!”
“Told you,” hissed Knight and pulled on Elliot’s hand. “Now, let’s go.”
Elliot resisted, but Knight wasn’t having it anymore. They needed to get out of here before things got any more dangerous.
“I’m sorry, Mr. Fane. I meant no disrespect. It made sense to me at the time,” Elliot stumbled over words, all of his attention on the ghost.
They would close the door, forget any of this ever happened and make sure no one ever came down here again. Especially Laurent.
Knight was out of breath by the time he reached the threshold, but his heart trembled with unspeakable fear when Fane darted after them, eager to leave this room, to haunt the whole clubhouse, to turn someone’s life into constant misery.
And it would be all Knight’s fault.
Chapter 9
Knight stumbled and crashed against the wall of the hallway outside of Fane’s chamber of horrors, bringing Elliot down with him. But as Fane put his foot just inches away and braced himself to run up the stairs, the air around the door frame shuddered, and Fane fell back, as if he’d hit a barrier of bulletproof glass that wouldn’t even budge under his weight. The inhuman scream of fury that followed resonated in Elliot’s bones.
He pressed himself tightly against Knight but watched William’s every move as the ghost ran his fingers over some force in the doorway that was impenetrable to him. William Fane was somehow anchored to his place of death and unable to leave the room.
“Mr. Fane…” Elliot pulled away slightly, struck by the impossibility of William’s position, but Knight still held his arm in a steel grip. “You are so much more handsome than in your portraits.”
William looked at him for several seconds, then nodded, sliding his palms off the barrier and adjusting his bloodstained waistcoat. “Thank you. That is very kind of you.”
Something happened between Elliot and him. A connection, an understanding. Their eyes locked, and they stared at one another like long-lost family seeing each other for the first time in years.
Knight abruptly stood up, smashing the door shut right in front of Fane’s nose. “Right. That’s it. You know what you wanted to know. You found out I was right all along. This tour ends here.”
“But he could still tell us so much…” Elliot’s went breathing frantic as he tried to understand what had just happened.
Knight fumbled with the bundle of keys and pushed one into the lock. “New rule. This room is off-limits. And in fact, no one will know we ever came down here. Is that clear?”
Elliot finally looked up into Knight’s eyes, clenching his jaw in determination. “I understand. This is better kept a secret. Knight… he’s there. Can you believe it?” Elliot could barely comprehend his luck. Ghosts didn’t exist, or so he’d believed all his life, and so he’d have been willing to consider this a hallucination brought on by excitement, but Knight had seen William too!
Knight growled and pulled Elliot up the stairs, tense as a bull about to charge at its opponent. “Maybe he’ll disappear if we take some shrooms. You know, like a reverse hallucination.”
“We both saw him, Knight. He’s there. He’s trapped. Just imagine the horror of solitary confinement for two hundred years.” Elliot was feeling sick just thinking about it.
“Shut it for now. We can’t have someone overhearing this conversation,” hissed Knight, all but running up the narrow stairs. Elliot took a moment to glance over his shoulder, at the locked door that hid William Fane’s personal hell.
Elliot didn’t know how or when, but he would talk to William again. Just feeling the raw energy the forgotten soul had exuded in the room still made Elliot shiver. For so long he’d wanted to enter the mansion, to walk its corridors for even a few hours, and now he got so much more. Maybe that was why he’d become so obsessed with William? Maybe William’s soul had been calling out to him helplessly all this time. The tiny thread that existed between them kept pulling Elliot closer to this place even at the risk of death.
He’d been chosen. He’d been granted the power to invite Fane’s soul back to the world of the living, and now the opening between two dimensions has been made. Nothing would close that door, no matter how much Knight wanted that to happen. Elliot needed to play his cards right, to avoid Knight’s suspicion, but once Knight was lulled into a false sense of security, Elliot would find a way talk to William Fane again.
His thoughts came to a halt when instead of leading Elliot back down the familiar route to the bare room, Knight rushed past the gargoyle statue and started a climb up the grand circular staircase. He took two steps in one stride, marching up the magnificent structure as if its intricate decoration or age meant nothing.
Elliot followed close behind, deciding not to ask questions. Instead, he took in their surroundings with his heart rattling from both the encounter with the ghost and climbing so fast. They passed a massive grandfather clock that looked out of place at the landing of the stairs, and Elliot yelped when two dark figures came at them out of nowhere.
My Dark Knight (gay biker romance) (Kings of Hell MC Book 2) Page 10
