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.The owners, he thought, were either naive or had little fear of being invaded, probably both.He pushed the door open slowly, listening carefully.But he heard no response to his approach, and went inside, pushing the door closed behind him.The light passing through the grimy windows that looked out onto the inner ward gave the room a twilight glow.It was a kitchen, and the old sinks and cupboards made it obvious that it had last been renovated in the 1940s.An icebox, its cooling coils on its top, stood silently in the corner.Outlets on the walls showed the place had been wired for electricity.There was no food anywhere in the large room.Tony moved through a wide doorway into what he supposed was a great hall, used for dining.A long table sat against the outside wall, and chairs were placed randomly against the wall opposite.He turned a corner and found a row of sleeping apartments, with an unmade bed in each.The mattresses were made of straw and ticking.When he lifted them, he saw there were no box springs.Each mattress rested on a web of ropes that crossed the wooden frames of the bed.The only other things in each room were a small chest of drawers, a clothes tree, and a wooden chair.There were six such rooms on the ground floor, and six more above, with a bathroom on each floor.Twelve rooms.Twelve Templars?Tony tried every door he came across.Most were closets, empty or nearly so.But on the side of the castle beyond the kitchen and opposite the bedrooms, in what seemed to be a storage room, was a closet filled wall to wall and nearly to the high ceiling with old cardboard boxes.Tony, curious as to what might be inside them, tried to lift one, marked Bovril in faded letters, from the top of the pile, and was surprised to find that it was empty.So was the one beneath it.Why, he wondered, have a large closet filled with empty cardboard boxes, unless to disguise the fact that it was more than a mere closet?He removed enough of the boxes to reach the back wall, and discovered that it was a pocket door.He slid it open, and found himself looking down a narrow, circular staircase that wound into darkness.There was a light switch on the wall, but nothing happened when he flicked it.The power was probably off everywhere but in the cottage.Taking a bright flashlight from his backpack, he turned it on and started down the stairs.The stairs were steep, and there were fifty of them, so that Tony suspected he was thirty or forty feet beneath ground level when they ended in front of a door.He opened it and shone his light into the darkness.The room was vast, and he suspected it sat under most of the castle.Rows of great stone pillars ran the length and breadth of the room.Tony could count twenty-four of them, and there seemed to be more stretching back into the deeper darkness beyond his flashlight's beam.Three broad slate steps took him down to the level of the room, where a long oak table stood.Five massive chairs sat on each side, with one more at each end.The table was bare, and there was nothing else in the room except for a large wooden crest affixed to the stone wall near the table.It appeared to be a coat of arms, and showed a fist clenching an upright dirk, the source, perhaps, of the castle's name.Two words framed the heraldic device, but the letters were too worn for Tony to decipher.He stepped closer to the crest, but it was so high up on the wall that he could not quite reach it.He walked around the room, looking into the dark corners and behind every pillar, but there was nothing else to be seen.The place was surprisingly dust free, and he figured there was no breeze to stir it.With the door shut, the chamber might be literally sealed.He turned off his flashlight to see if any light was coming into the room at all, but he found himself in pitch blackness and turned it back on.Tony was only a few feet from the door, ready to go back upstairs, when he heard the sound.It was a high-pitched, machine-like hum, but unlike a turbine's whir, or any machine he had ever heard before.The sound seemed to be coming from behind him, and he wondered for a second if there were a generator down there that he had somehow overlooked.If so, perhaps the caretaker had returned and started it.The thought made him tense, but when he looked over his shoulder, the tension grew into something as close to panic as Tony had ever felt.There in the subterranean room, less than ten feet away from him, something was glowing in the darkness.It was a vertical shape, seven feet high, and seemed to hover in the stagnant air of the cellar two feet above the stone floor.Chapter 12Tony Luciano wasn't afraid of anything human, but what he saw before him didn't fit any mortal parameters.He didn't move.He never even thought of reaching for the weapon beneath his jacket.He could only stand and watch, fascinated and afraid, as his eyes adjusted to the manifestation's light, and defined its features more clearly.It appeared to be a shrouded, slightly bent figure, as Lazarus might have looked, risen from his grave.Near the top there was a face, but a blank face, devoid of features, that was more frightening than any hollow eyes and gaping mouth.On this empty canvas of a face, one saw what one's own mind projected, and Tony saw it soften into the soft lines and gentle features of Miriam Dominick.A smaller column of light broke away from the whole, but remained connected near the top.It was as though Miriam's arm was coming up, reaching out for him, and he had the chilling sensation that this woman who had loved him enough to die for him was now asking him to reciprocate, to take her hand and join her in death.Then he made himself blink, and the face was gone, blank again [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]