by E. G. Foley
By E.G. Foley
The Gryphon Chronicles
Book 1: THE LOST HEIR
Book 2: JAKE & THE GIANT
Book 3: THE DARK PORTAL
The United States of Ahhhh!-merica: 50 States of Fear
ALABAMA
E.G. FOLEY
THE GRYPHON CHRONICLES, BOOK THREE:
THE DARK PORTAL
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Cover
Also by this Author
PART I
Prologue: The Sorcerer’s Tomb
Chapter 1. Welcome to Wales
Chapter 2. Master of the Mine
Chapter 3. All That Glitters
Chapter 4. A Goblin Mystery
PART II
Chapter 5. The Secret Archive
Chapter 6. The Headless Monk
Chapter 7. The Unicorn Hunt
Chapter 8. A Visit to Town
Chapter 9. The Haunted School
Chapter 10. The Souling Song
PART III
Chapter 11. Waterfall Village
Chapter 12. Just a Legend
Chapter 13. The Séance
Chapter 14. Visions of Darkness
Chapter 15. Sweet Petunia
Chapter 16. Pixie Mischief
PART IV
Chapter 17. Into the Dark
Chapter 18. Monsters in the Mine
Chapter 19. The Black Wand
Chapter 20. Trapped
Chapter 21. Through
PART V
Chapter 22. A Hero’s Welcome
Chapter 23. Reunited
Chapter 24. Harsh Lessons
Chapter 25. Keeper of the Unicorns
Chapter 26. A Cruel Trade
Chapter 27. Light in a Dark Place
Epilogue: First Snow
Coming Soon
About the Authors
About the Illustrator
Copyright & Credits
At the door of life by the gate of breath,
There are worse things waiting for men than death.
~ Algernon Charles Swinburne
PART I
PROLOGUE
The Sorcerer’s Tomb
A hundred and fifty feet underground in perfect darkness, a labyrinth of black, twisty tunnels snaked beneath the mountains of Wales. And in one such little-explored passage of the Harris Mine, a simple man called Barney had just discovered a curious phenomenon.
He angled his handheld wedge against a big, tough knuckle of coal and gave it a whack with his hammer to show his fellow miners. “See what I mean? Got a funny sound just there, ain’t it?” He tapped again, harder. “Sounds…I dunno, hollow.”
“Yer head’s hollow,” grumbled crew chief Martin. Nevertheless, to Mr. Martin’s experienced eye, the problem was plain: They’d hit a stubborn section of the coal seam. He gave his men a nod. “Let’s blast it.”
Crawling about awkwardly in the narrow, claustrophobic space barely four feet tall, the men fetched the heavy hand-cranked drill and started churning it.
The tip of the drill slowly pierced a thin hole into the rock face, where they would soon pour in the blasting powder. Cranking the drill was backbreaking labor, just like every other job in the coalmine and its sister company, the Harris Ironworks. But coal made the steam that forged the iron that ran the British Empire, which, in turn, ruled the world. And so these rough, rugged miners saw themselves as unsung heroes of a sort. To be sure, not a one of them was ever afraid of the dark.
Even when they should be.
At length, the skinny hole into the bedrock was drilled, the blasting powder carefully poured in.
Daredevil Collins volunteered to light it—always a dangerous job. Cocky as ever, he held the squib carelessly between his teeth and lit it as if it were a cigar instead of a type of firecracker. Swiping it quickly out of his mouth, Collins shoved it into the hole the men had drilled.
As it burned its way toward the little pile of blasting powder, he scrambled after his crew, who had already scuttled out of range to wait for the explosion.
All four men held their ears and opened their mouths slightly, waiting for the shift in air pressure.
BOOM!
“Ha, ha!” The miners cheered out of habit at the blast. “That’ll teach her!” said Martin.
With pickaxes and hammers at the ready, the men crawled back to harvest the chunks of coal that had been knocked loose from the mountain’s grip by the explosion.
As they approached, the air was so thick with dust and smoke that it blackened their faces until all they could see of their mates was the whites of each other’s eyes. As the men pressed on, the tiny oil lanterns on their hats glowed like four lonely lighthouses in that thickest type of fog, known as a London Peculiar.
Martin whistled for Jones to bring the coal cart so they could load up their fresh haul and carry it topside.
The more coal they brought up to the surface each day, the more money they made for their families. Of course, their pay went right back to the Company through the rent on their houses, owned by the Harris Mine, or through the goods they bought at the Harris Company Store.
The Company, in short, was more powerful around here than Queen Victoria.
“Look!” Barney suddenly burst out with a gasp. “I don’t believe it! I-I was right! It was hollow!” He pointed as the smoke cleared to a hole they had blasted in the underground wall.
It should not have been there.
Indeed, it was impossible. There shouldn’t be a hollow space left after their controlled blast, just an indentation exposing deeper layers of the earth’s solid bedrock holding up the mountain.
“Well, beggar me,” he murmured, marveling at it.
Bending forward to shine his headlamp in, Barney peered through the hole that opened into a darkness ten times blacker than even the rest of the mine. Then he waved his crewmates over. “Fellas, come and see!”
“What is it now?” Martin grumbled, coming up behind him.
“You got to see for yourself. There’s some kind of room in there!” Barney said in wonder, pointing.
“Don’t be daft. A room? Underground cavern, maybe…”
But as the others crowded round, even stern Mr. Martin had to admit that it was, indeed, an ancient-looking room with smooth, chiseled walls.
Smith squinted into the midnight darkness beyond the hole. “What’s a room doing all the way down here?”
“How should I know,” Martin said. An uneasy chill ran down his spine, for Wales was not just the land of coal and mist and unexpected spellings. It was also a place of legend. The sacred homeland of countless bards and sorcerers of old; the birthplace of Merlin himself, according to some; a land of ancient magic, mighty castles, and time-forgotten kings.
Collins had that daredevil gleam in his eyes once again as he glanced around at the others. “Fancy a look, boys? C’mon, let’s go in!”
“I’m not so sure that’s such a good idea,” Barney warned him, but coalminers as a rule were not afraid of much.
Even when they really should be.
“C’mon, leave it. We’ve got to cut our support timbers to prop up that hole,” Martin said. “It ain’t stable.”
“Ah, just for a moment.” With a laugh, Collins vaulted through the hole, and so was the first to see the ancient, heavy table in the center of the mysterious chamber and the chair…
With a skeleton sitting in it.
A skeleton decked in strange jewelry and wearing the floppy hat and moldy velvet robes of a Renaissance-era scholar.
Collins stopped in his tracks when he saw it and pointed, aghast. “Bones!”
Barney, wh
o was following right behind him, ran into Collins’s back on account of not watching where he was going. He was too busy staring all around at the strange subterranean chamber, his eyes wide.
The rest followed, and when they all saw the skeleton, they let out exclamations of wonder and shock; the four big, fearless coalminers unconsciously started huddling together with a creeping, superstitious sense of doom.
For they now realized that they had just disturbed the dead.
“This is no ordinary chamber, my lads,” Martin said in a hushed voice, taking control of the situation, as their leader. He looked around at all the odd things inside the chamber, and the bones. “It’s a tomb.”
“But whose?” Smith murmured, while Barney just gulped.
“His,” Collins whispered, staring at the skeleton. “Whoever he is.”
The skull’s empty eyes stared right back at them from the darkness, giving them no answers.
Sitting upright, as if he had died right where he sat, whatever soul had once owned those bones had left this life surrounded by his books and papers.
This seemed odd to Barney. “But surely not a tomb, Mr. Martin. I mean, folk ain’t usually buried at their desks, is they?”
“Well, you do have a point there,” the crew chief admitted, growing ever more aware of some unseen evil lurking in this place.
“Maybe he died alone down ’ere and nobody ever noticed,” Collins opined.
“Likely so,” Martin quickly agreed, but Smith shook his head and whispered, “Maybe he couldn’t get out.”
Somebody gulped in the inky darkness.
“Maybe we’d better leave,” Barney squeaked, but unfortunately, Collins had now recovered his nerve.
“Wonder who he was, poor bleeder.” As he ventured closer, his hat-lamp shone on the long-dead occupant of the crypt.
Strange jewelry hung around the scholar-skeleton’s neck, an intricate metalwork necklace with all sorts of arcane insignia. They had no idea what all the strange little symbols meant.
A chunky ring hung loosely off the skeleton’s bony finger. The thick band was probably made from locally mined gold, but none of the men recognized the unusual black rock in the center, though they unearthed gems and semi-precious stones in the Harris Mine nearly every day.
None of them could explain it, either, when the black stone took on a cloudy green glow.
“Why’s it doing that?” Smith asked.
“Probably oxidation,” Mr. Martin said sagely. As foreman, he was well aware that lots of the minerals buried in the earth changed color when the air touched them. “Lord, it’s dank!” he added with a cough.
Air from the mine’s ventilation system had begun seeping into the chamber, which had apparently been sealed off for centuries.
The draft poured in, stirring the ancient cobwebs that hung off everything; a puff of breath in the dust, as if the room itself sucked in a deep, agonizing gasp for air.
Smith nodded at the walls around them. “Look at all the quartz.”
Giant crystals of glowing, colored quartz poked out of the natural cave walls everywhere. Milky white, candy pink, glassy cornflower blue.
The weird spiritualist lady in town, Madam Sylvia, who claimed to be a medium, sold crystals, Barney thought. The sign on her shop window advertised such stones as having mystical properties. But she had nothing in her shop like these ones, big as railroad ties.
“You know,” Collins said abruptly, “there could be something valuable down here. Maybe treasure.” He gave Smith a sudden, jolly punch in the arm. “We could be rich, man! Let’s have a look around.”
Martin harrumphed. “Anything we find will belong to Mr. Harris and the Company,” he sternly reminded his crew.
“Ha! We’re the ones who risked our necks for it,” Collins muttered. “Finders keepers. What they don’t know won’t hurt ’em. Everyone, spread out! Let’s see what we got down ’ere.”
Martin still grumbled, but couldn’t resist joining in their perusal of the chamber. The miners’ hat-lamps shone in all directions as they moved off to explore the strange, sealed room.
Smith went to examine the giant crystals.
Collins poked around the skeleton’s desk with considerable caution, frowning at the grinning stone statue of a little gargoyle crouched atop a pile of old books.
Martin went reluctantly to look on the shelves that edged the chamber. These were piled with parchments, drawings, and designs. Haphazardly strewn along the shelves, also, were odd weapons; ancient instruments of science; vials and bottles of potions that had long since dried up. And a crooked stick that Martin feared looked very much like a wand. He got a chill down his spine and started sweating.
Barney, meanwhile, stared down at the strange shapes carved into the stone floor. Astrological signs, alchemy symbols or something.
Then he gazed apprehensively at the large gargoyle statues that posed in all four corners of the room. Silent stone guardians, they resembled a hideous mix of apes, frogs, lizards, and hideous, giant bulldogs with horns and tails. Their fanged, ugly faces were frozen in mid-snarl. He grimaced and backed away. Horrible beasties.
The oxidation Martin had mentioned must be the reason that some of the gray stone the gargoyles were carved from had started flaking off their muscular bodies.
Indeed, when he glanced over at the desk, he saw that the oxidation was making the skeleton’s ring glow ever brighter. The strange stone on the ring was turning a ghastly shade of malevolent green.
Hold on. Was it a trick of his imagination or was there some kind of black cloud floating up out of that ring? Lovely, now I’m seeing things. With a slight shudder, Barney turned away and headed back toward the center of the chamber, when something growled behind him.
He stopped and turned around slowly, looking back at the nearest gargoyle statue. What? Had he inhaled too many fumes, or had that thing just moved?
Suddenly, on the far end of the chamber, Collins laughed aloud in the gloom. “Gold! I knew it!” He had opened the small wooden cask on the skeleton’s desk. “Look at this, boys! Didn’t I tell you there’d be treasure here? Come and see! This box is filled with gold and jewels! We’re rich, I tell ye, rich!”
Barney put the gargoyle out of his mind and rushed over to see the gold.
“We’re rich, rich, rich!” Collins was laughing like a lunatic. He scooped two handfuls of gold together and buried his nose in them, like he was splashing his face with water. “Ha, ha! Mother always said I was born lucky!”
“Put that down!” Martin scolded. “You know it isn’t yours!”
Just then, Smith, who was out of sight, called to them from a lower level of the chamber. He had ventured down some black stairs carved into a distant corner of the tomb, and now yelled up to them: “You have got to see this, lads!”
They could barely drag themselves away from the gleaming beauty of the gold horde in the little wooden chest, but Martin called back to him. “What did you find?”
“Some sort o’ doorway!”
They ran to see it, but no one was prepared for what they found.
Carved into the rock was a huge skull, and the door Smith had found waited inside its open mouth.
“Crikey,” Martin said.
Barney frowned, nervously bringing up the rear. “I-I don’t think I want to go in there.” But he didn’t want to be left behind either, so he followed his companions.
They all went cautiously creeping down the few steps into the lower cave.
It was one strange door. Peering into the stone-carved skull’s gaping mouth, they saw that massive slabs of gray rock framed the dark portal, like a subterranean Stonehenge. The thick door itself was made of ancient hawthorn wood and covered in strange locks and bolts of intricate, swirling metalwork, like intertwined serpents.
“What on earth?” Martin murmured, squinting at it in disbelief.
“I knew it. It’s a vault,” Collins said. “That must be where Boney up there hid the rest of his go
ld! The full stash!”
“I don’t think so.” Martin shook his head, staring at it.
“Why else would he have it locked up like a bloody bank vault?”
“What should we do?” Smith asked breathlessly.
Then he and Collins looked at each other and shouted the answer simultaneously: “Blasting powder!”
“Are you mad?” Martin cried. “You can’t set off an explosion in here! It could cause a cave-in. Use your heads! We haven’t even put up any support beams yet!”
But gold fever had taken hold. Smith and Collins ignored him, racing to set everything up so they could blow the weird, formidable door off its hinges and get to the treasure inside.
They weren’t listening to their foreman, nor to Barney, who tried to help Martin convince them for a moment, before he became transfixed by the eyes of the great skull.
He gazed up into them. There was a layer of transparent quartz fitted into each eye socket, like windows made of thick block glass. But he could swear the eyes glowed a little, as though lit from within by burning torches.
Too weird. Unnerved, he glanced around at the corners of the chamber, tingling with ever-increasing terror. “Fellas, I got a bad feeling about this place. I think we need to get out of here…”
They ignored him, Smith and Collins busily working to set up the blast, Martin scolding them in a halfhearted manner—for, in truth, he was just as curious as they were to see if there was a horde of treasure in there.
“Did you hear that?”
As Barney froze, the others stopped and turned to him.
“Hear what?” Smith grunted.
Grrrrrrrr…
The sound came from a foot or two behind Barney.
He saw Smith’s jaw drop, but he knew they were really in trouble when even Collins turned white.
“Aw, drat,” Barney mumbled in terrified dismay. “There’s something horrible behind me, ain’t there?”
“Run!” Mr. Martin bellowed, his voice echoing off the chamber’s stone walls.
