Black Hearts Rising (Wardens of the Black Heart Book 2)

by Rob Campbell

  “Or maybe he does know but wanted to keep that part from us. Or maybe he’s testing us.”

  Monkey let out a long sigh. “This stuff is hard, isn’t it? Remembering what you’ve told one person, keeping it secret from someone else.” I could read my friend’s face like a book; he looked like he’d rather be climbing a tree or wading into a stream at this point. “Do you think that Dylan’s telling the truth?”

  “Hard to tell. His story lines up with what Lester told us. To a point.” Even if Dylan was telling us the truth, there was still a five-year period after the two parted ways that neither we nor Lester could possibly know about. It made me uneasy. “Same rule as always: keep what we know under wraps. If he doesn’t know about Charles Gooch, it’s best that we keep it to ourselves. Agreed?”

  “Agreed.”

  * * *

  The first face that I saw when I pushed open the Recorder office door was that of Ramón Blanco. It looked odd seeing him in Neil Martin’s seat, but I guessed that Neil wouldn’t be back anytime soon. Certainly not whilst Mick was still the editor.

  “Do you work here now?” I asked Ramón by way of greeting.

  “No. Mick's been kind enough to offer me the use of the desk while I'm in town.”

  “You're staying in town? I thought with the stuff about the plane crash and the lecture being old news, you’d be heading back to London.”

  “It seems that I've found a reason to keep me here a little longer,” he replied, smiling across at Anja. “I'm sure that I can write my album reviews just as well at this desk, and maybe I can help out around here for a while.”

  I didn’t know for sure that Anja and Ramón were an item, but just watching the playful smiles they threw at each other told me everything I needed to know.

  “So, what are you kids up to these days? Climbed any buildings recently, Monkey?”

  I rolled my eyes at that. The last thing that I needed to hear was more about Monkey’s exploits. Don’t get me wrong; I was in awe of my friend’s abilities, and I could watch him climb all day, but seeing people feeding his ego somehow irritated me. “Do you still help out Lester Hawkstone?” Ramón asked when Monkey had finished regaling the Spaniard with a potted history of his tree-climbing exploits.

  “Sometimes,” Monkey replied, not as keen to expand on this subject as he would have been had there been any clambering up walls involved.

  “What exactly do you do for him again?”

  “This and that,” I replied, cutting in ahead of Monkey. He’d stuck to the plan of not giving too much away so far, but I didn’t want him saying too much about Lester in front of Ramón. Ramón seemed like a nice guy, but we didn’t know too much about him, and it was best to play it safe for now. “It’s pretty boring stuff really. We do some charity work for his foundation,” I added, silently thanking Dylan for giving me this piece of extra knowledge that I could now toss into the conversation when the occasion demanded.

  Ramón nodded slowly as if absorbing my answer. “It’s good to see kids doing something worthwhile, no?” He turned to Anja, who nodded in agreement. “Maybe I could interview you? Do a lifestyle piece for my magazine.”

  “I thought you wrote album reviews.”

  “Well, of course, but we like to broaden the minds of our readers from time to time.”

  “We’ll set something up when we get time, but right now, we’re both a bit busy on a school project that we’re working on.”

  “Sounds fascinating.”

  “Yeah, I’m doing a project on the artist, Josiah Abram, and Monkey here is doing a piece on emigration in the early twentieth century.”

  Monkey seemed genuinely puzzled. “I am?”

  “You know. People who left England for a new life in Australia or America.”

  Monkey took a deep breath as if delivering an important piece of dialogue in a school play. “That’s right. I wanted to look into passenger lists on a ship that sailed for New York.”

  I allowed a moment to pass before appearing to come up with an idea out of the blue. “Anja, don’t you have an account with the National Archives?”

  “Hmmm?” Anja replied, looking up from whatever she was working on.

  “The National Archives. You’ve got an online account. Remember when you wanted to trace that family who left for South Africa before the First World War?”

  As simple as that, we had our way in. Anja logged into her account, and we were ready to go. “What year are you looking for?”

  “Nineteen twelve, wasn’t it, Monkey?” I asked, turning to my left where my friend sat, leaning on Anja’s desk.

  “Yep,” he confirmed. “The ship was called the… Mori… errrr, just a minute.”

  There was no acting going on here; I should have known that he wouldn’t remember the name. “It was the Mauretania, wasn’t it?”

  “That’s right,” he said.

  “The Mauretania. Didn’t that sail around the same time as the Titanic?” Anja asked. I shrugged my shoulders. Anja’s hands moved across the keyboard with practised efficiency. She hit the return key, and we all waited with bated breath. Monkey leaned towards the screen, and Ramón made his way to stare between mine and Anja’s shoulders.

  “You’re in luck,” Anja said when a list of names appeared on the screen. “The complete passenger manifest is here. Who was it you were looking for?”

  “Daniel Turnbull,” I said, not waiting for Monkey to respond.

  It took Anja a few minutes to scroll through the names, but eventually, we found the name that we were looking for. “There we are,” she said triumphantly. “Daniel Turnbull is there.”

  Ramón patted Anja on the back and smiled at Monkey.

  So, there was one piece of Dylan Fogg’s story that turned out to be true. Maybe the rest of his info was good too. I was just about to thank Anja when I spied another name on the screen that caused my heart to leap.

  There, four names above Daniel Turnbull’s, was another familiar name: Charles Gooch. I wasn’t the only one who had seen it.

  “Hah! That’s a coincidence,” Anja commented. “Charles Gooch! That’s the name of that guy who came in here claiming the coin was his.” A black look crossed her face. “And supplied Neil with all that rubbish that ended up in the paper.”

  “Charles is a popular name,” I replied, keeping my increasing distrust of coincidences to myself.

  When Ramón acted puzzled, Anja gave a brief account of our discovery of Lester’s coin in the stream and explained how the mysterious Charles Gooch had falsely claimed that the coin was his.

  “Some people have – how you say in English – no morals,” Ramón commented.

  He was right there, even though he didn’t know the half of it as far as Charles Gooch was concerned.

  “I didn’t expect all of this intrigue lying below the surface of a sleepy town,” the Spaniard added. Mick, silent until now, piped up from the back of the office that he’d been making the same comment since last summer.

  Chapter 18

  The longer that Gooch sat idle, the more time he had to think. The more time he had to think, the more regrets he had. It was a vicious circle that he’d previously been able to escape by collecting lucky objects and putting them back into circulation, reaping the terrible benefits whilst his unwitting victims suffered.

  But for some reason, he didn’t feel the urge. He tried to shake himself out of his current stupor yet felt shackled by his inability to act, and so the cycle repeated.

  He felt that his luck was running out.

  --- Charles Gooch, 1930 ---

  “You’re a lucky man, Charles,” Turnbull explained. “Lucky that I knew a surgeon who could help you.”

  Three weeks after the incident, Gooch was once again in the card room that seemed to serve as Turnbull’s headquarters. “Lucky! You call that lucky?” Gooch raged, holding up his ruined hand in front of Turnbull.

  “Well, you can still move it, can’t you? Still pick things up?”

>   “Barely,” Gooch grumbled, pulling a leather glove on, glad to have the thing removed from sight.

  “The last person that did that…” Turnbull said, puffing out his cheeks. “Well, let’s just say that he wasn’t so lucky.”

  Gooch barely remembered the first week following the visit that he and Sal had paid to Jimmy Kuznetsov – drifting in and out of consciousness, dimly aware that somebody was tending to his hand. “Isn’t it about time that you told me what’s going on, Daniel?”

  Turnbull flicked idly at a couple of playing cards that rested on the surface of the table. “I suppose you’ve earned that right,” he admitted. “But where to start?”

  “How about why you’ve got Sal and me running around town buying up random objects. Watches, pens, ornaments, a violin. There doesn’t seem to be any rhyme nor reason,” Gooch said, waving his hand across the table.

  Turnbull picked up a dice and turned it in his hand whilst leaning back into his chair.

  “Do you believe in fate, Charles?”

  “Fate?”

  “You know, that something is bound to happen, whatever you try to do to avoid it?”

  “Can’t say I’ve ever thought about it,” Gooch admitted.

  “What about when you found my wallet on the docks in Liverpool? Because of that, we became friends, and now that you’re in trouble, I’m here to help. Does it not feel like part of some great plan?”

  Gooch shifted uncomfortably in his seat. There was a perverse logic to what Turnbull was saying, but still… “I don’t know,” he answered, keeping his expression neutral.

  “I didn’t believe in fate. I didn’t believe in the tooth fairy or the bogeyman.”

  Gooch was tired, the painkillers he was taking to stave off the pain making him drowsy. He hadn’t come here to listen to Turnbull ramble on. “Where is this all leading, Daniel?”

  Turnbull fixed him with one of his cold stares. “When I was a lecturer at Durham University, I read some text on Satanic rituals and witchcraft.”

  “Witchcraft?”

  “I organised a séance. It started out as a bit of a jape.” Turnbull leaned across the table towards him. “I won’t bore you with the details, but something happened, Charles,” he hissed. There was an excitement in his voice that made Gooch snap out of his drowsiness. “A colleague of mine, John Abernathy. Shortly after the séance, he began to experience visions, or so he claimed – visions that spoke of holy words, a feeling of great love and wellbeing, and he retreated to his art studio, where he was inspired to create some wonderful pieces of art.”

  “It doesn’t sound like anything to get too overexcited about,” Gooch deadpanned. “You know how these artistic types are.”

  “It’s not what happened to Abernathy that I’m concerned about. A few days later, I began hearing voices!”

  “Voices?”

  A look crossed Turnbull’s face that suggested a momentary sadness as if he was picturing something in his mind that was once clear but had long since faded from memory. “The only way I can explain it is that if Abernathy had overdosed on this good stuff, whatever it was and wherever it was coming from, then I got the black to his white.”

  Gooch shook his head. “You’re not making much sense, Daniel.”

  Turnbull’s voice, usually so rich and confident, wavered as if he was speaking through a dry throat.

  “I’ve done a terrible thing, Charles.”

  If Gooch had felt any discomfort over the past few months – his fading business, his shady dealings with Daniel’s group, the terrible injury that he’d suffered to his hand – the next five minutes were to prove equally uncomfortable in their own way. He listened in horror as the man before him reeled off the countless crimes and grisly murders that he’d committed across Northern England for a period of more than fifty years. The tale began with the slaying of a respectable doctor on the streets of Durham, after which Turnbull stole the briefcase that Gooch now carried. Gooch feared that the meal he’d recently eaten would be making a return appearance all over the card table when Turnbull explained what he’d put in the briefcase. He barely managed to suppress a series of retches as Turnbull finished the story by detailing the spree of arson and ritual murder days before his departure from Liverpool in the company of Gooch himself.

  “Why?” was all Gooch could manage when his friend eventually fell silent.

  “The voice told me!” Turnbull responded. “Why do you think that I was escaping to a new life in America?”

  “The voice told you?” Gooch repeated incredulously. “Do you realise how you sound? They have special rooms in dark places for people who talk like that!”

  “You don’t understand, Charles. I’ve been guided by this voice for more than half a century now.” There was a fevered righteousness to Turnbull’s voice that made Gooch think that the meagre table that separated them wasn’t enough.

  “The voice is in your head, Daniel. For God’s sake, man!”

  Turnbull didn’t speak for several seconds, choosing instead to stare at him, a look that made Gooch want to turn away.

  “You remember the voice in the cellar?” Turnbull said coldly.

  How could he forget? The mere mention of it made the hairs on his arm stand on end, and he felt a sudden urge to scratch under the edge of his glove.

  “That’s different,” he replied eventually, but it sounded weak even to him.

  “Really? So, you think that was some trick? You think it was me projecting my voice?” Turnbull pressed.

  “I don’t know,” Gooch replied, trying to shut down this line of questioning.

  Turnbull gave a slow, dry cackle. “You’ll understand… eventually. The longer you carry the briefcase, the clearer it will become.”

  “What am I doing with… that thing in the bag?” Gooch asked, sickened by what he had heard and distinctly uncomfortable with everything that his supposed friend had told him.

  “The best way I can explain it is to say that it’s all part of some plan.” Whether this was the sound of Turnbull trying to convince himself, or to explain it to Gooch, was open for debate. “Abernathy was convinced that he was creating objects that had the power to shape the fortunes of mankind. The voice that I heard – the voice I am still guided by today – compels me to even the balance. I have to suck the good fortune out of the world, Charles. It’s like some energy balance thing: the cosmos trying to even things out. For every bit of good, there is a price to pay.”

  “It makes no sense,” Gooch protested. “What’s so special about Jimmy Kuznetsov’s gold watch, for example?”

  Turnbull laughed again. “It’s a lucky watch. Helped him win a fortune in my casinos.”

  “So it’s some kind of retribution?”

  “No! It’s a lucky watch,” Turnbull repeated as if saying it a second time would help Gooch understand. “All that stuff about a lucky rabbit's foot or cursed amulets, or ancient relics with dark powers or cursed coins – it’s all real, Charles!”

  Gooch shook his head slowly. He felt like he was back in school, trying to figure out some complex mathematical equation after it had been explained for the third time.

  Turnbull stood up and made his way around the table to stand by Gooch.

  “That briefcase you carry. I don’t profess to know how it works, but I need you to carry it for me, Charles. To take up the burden.” Turnbull sighed and pulled up a chair so that he could meet Gooch at eye-level. “Look at me, Charles. How old would you say I was?”

  Gooch looked at Turnbull as if truly seeing him for the first time. Although it had been nearly twenty years, the man who stood before him looked almost identical to the image in his mind’s eye of the Daniel Turnbull who had stepped on to the Mauretania with him. “Fifty, give or take,” he guessed.

  “I’ve hardly aged in nearly seventy years. I was forty-two when I held the séance. In 1861.” He let the words sink in.

  That’s impossible, Gooch wanted to say, but not only was he tired of argui
ng, something deep down inside of him told him that everything he’d heard was true.

  “Keep the briefcase near,” was all Turnbull said before he left the room.

  * * *

  A few days later, he was once again asked to accompany Big Sal on yet another moonlight mission.

  “Isn’t this the place we visited last week?” he asked Sal when they arrived outside the sandstone building. Sal shot him a look that didn’t need any explanation.

  It was an old building that served as the headquarters of some finance company. Of course, at this time of night, all the windows were dark, and you’d be more likely to find some hobo sleeping in the doorway than you would any office staff.

  Sal glanced both ways down the street, and when he was sure that they were unobserved, jammed some metal object in the lock before forcing the door inwards.

  “Would you mind telling me what—”

  Gooch didn’t get to finish the question as Sal grabbed his coat and hauled him through the door, shutting it afterwards. “Up the stairs,” the big Italian ordered.

  “I don’t understand,” Gooch protested. “We broke in here last week, swiped some paperweight from an office and we’re back here again…”

  “Got it in one,” Sal responded without providing clarification. He moved up the wide staircase with nimble steps, displaying a dexterity that belied his bulky frame. Gooch had to move quickly to keep up.

  “Have you got somewhere to be?” he panted, feeling the strain of the climb in his lungs, but as usual, Sal wasn’t one for humour. He stopped on the seventh floor, outside the glass door that Gooch recognised from last week’s mission, ‘Randolph Capital’ stencilled on the glass. So, they were going to steal something else from the same office? That was a first.

  Removing a second metal tool from his pocket, Sal slipped it between door and doorframe and, with a rapid snap of the wrist, managed to pop the door open.

  “Nice,” Gooch commented. “Couldn’t we just knock?”