Uprising

Kate was fuming as she reached the road and kept walking. No way she was getting back in that car. She’d walk all the way back home to Wallingford if she had to.

If she was angry with Dec Maddon, she was even angrier with herself for having accepted the boy next door’s invitation to go out for a drive. She liked him, she really did. But when he’d suddenly produced the little white pills and offered her one, she’d got scared. Scared of getting into trouble. Scared that he was trying to get her into a state where she’d have sex with him.

And scared that she’d give in. He was a few months older than her, not far off his eighteenth birthday. Better looking than any of the boys at school, and he drove a Golf GTI. He was exciting and wild. Maybe a little too wild. Kate drew the line at taking drugs.

She walked on as fast as her wobbly heels would let her. Shivering now, feeling the dampness of the mist and wishing she’d put on something heavier than the flimsy cotton top – but refusing to regret that she’d got out of the car.

It was a couple of minutes later when she saw the headlights coming up behind her. She turned and put out her thumb. The car sounded its horn at her and drove on. She did the V’s at the disappearing taillights. ‘Wanker!’

She kept walking. The dark empty road was spooky, but she didn’t care. So what if it was Hallowe’en? She wasn’t a kid any more. She was more concerned about the cold. Really getting to her now.

Then, a little further up the road, she saw another car approaching. She was about to put her thumb out again when it signalled and pulled up. She trotted over to it. Big square headlights, the luxuriant purr of a very expensive car. She noticed the Rolls-Royce radiator grille as she walked up close. The driver’s window whirred down.

Kate peered inside. ‘Thanks for stopping,’ she said.

Dec Maddon sat there muttering angrily to himself and slapping his forehead with his palm. What an eejit, blowing it like that. His dad was gonna kill him if this got back. The ecstasy pills were a new thing – in fact he’d never even touched the stuff in his life before deciding it would be a cool thing to try tonight with Kate – but of course nobody would believe him. He was in the deepest shit imaginable. Kate probably wouldn’t want to talk to him again, and her stuck-up bitch of a mother would have a field day.

He’d been crazy about Kate Hawthorne ever since his family had bought the house next door. She was beautiful, with china-blue eyes, tumbling red curls that looked like something out of an old painting and a smile that made his day – and up until now he’d been pretty sure the signals she’d been putting out meant she kind of liked him too. Trust him to go and fuck it all up.

He sat there fulminating for a few minutes before he decided to follow her. He’d explain. She’d understand…he hoped.

He started the car and bumped over the verge onto the country road, turning right to head back towards home. The mist drifted in his headlights. He was certain he’d spot her pretty quickly.

And he did. But she wasn’t alone. She was just getting into a black Rolls that was pulled over at the side of the road. She shut the door behind her, and the big car moved off.

Dec followed it for a few miles. The mist was rapidly thickening, and he was so focused on tailing the Rolls that he began to lose all sense of direction. They were deep into the winding country lanes now, way off his normal routes. After a while, the Rolls indicated left and glided through a tall gateway. Automatic gates closed behind it, blocking him out.

He parked the Golf at the side of the road. His breath was misting in the cool night air as he walked up to the gates and ran his hand down the cold wrought iron bars. He looked up.

Two giant birds were peering down at him out of the drifting fog. He stared up at their curved beaks and great wings, and it was a moment before he realised he was looking at stone statues perched on the gateposts. The way their eyes seemed to bore into him made him strangely uneasy. He looked away from them, and that was when he noticed the tarnished bronze plaque on the craggy wall. He had to pull away some of the moss sprouting over the stonework to read it.

CROWMOOR HALL.

What was this place? Some kind of stately home, he thought. Some rich guy’s place. What was Kate doing here?

Face it, Dec. You’re just not her class. She’s a solicitor’s daughter and you’re just a mechanic like your dad.

He was about to walk away, but then felt a powerful urge to go in there and have it out with her. He couldn’t let things end like this.

He started climbing the high wall.

Chapter Four (#ulink_cbb1adde-b16d-5be3-b601-e1134714fa02)

Jericho, North Oxford

Joel Solomon awoke with a gasp and jerked bolt upright in his bed. For a moment the night terror still gripped him, before he remembered where he was. This wasn’t eighteen years ago. This was here and now, and he was home in his ground-floor flat in the peaceful street on the edge of the city. Everything was all right.

The luminous hands of his bedside clock told him it was 12.34 a.m. He rubbed his face, blinking to clear away the remnants of his nightmare. When his heart eventually stopped thudding, he sank his head back into the pillow and closed his eyes, inviting sleep to return.

But it wouldn’t. He knew it couldn’t, not now.

I’ll turn. His grandfather’s voice still rang inside his head.

He’d never wanted to relive those memories again. Since the age of fifteen, after three years of counselling, psychotherapy, hypnosis, he’d thought he was free of them for good. Suddenly, the nightmare was back. Twice now, within the space of just a few days.

His fingers clenched into fists under the bedcovers as the images returned once again. The years hadn’t dulled their awful vividness. Seeing the sabre blade come whooshing down and sideways. Feeling that awful crunch as the sharpened steel went slicing through cartilage and bone.

He took a deep breath. It didn’t happen, he willed himself to believe. You imagined it. You were in shock. The brain plays strange tricks. Imagining all kinds of things that aren’t real.

That was what the doctors had persuaded him to believe – that there weren’t monsters out there, lurking and watching in the dark. That the only evil in this world was human. Like the psychopathic murderer who’d broken into the remote cottage that night and done those terrible things. That the only time Joel had ever touched the sabre was when the old man had let him play with it.

And that the rest was just the figment of a deeply traumatised child’s imagination.

It had taken a long time, but he’d eventually learned to trust the words of logic and reason repeatedly drummed into his head like a mantra by the men and women in the white coats.

At this moment, though, he wasn’t so sure. He swung his legs out of bed and looked out of the window at the mist in the streetlights outside. So much for grabbing a decent night’s sleep before his early morning start. He knew what he had to do to clear his mind.

He walked to the bathroom, took a quick shower, and then pulled on his motorcycle leathers and left the flat. Out in the misty street, he swung his leg astride the Suzuki Hayabusa sportsbike, thumbed the starter and rode off.

Chapter Five (#ulink_0656915a-44d0-5535-a9a0-164bac4ac1f7)

What a place, Dec thought as he crept through the manor house grounds and the turrets and towers loomed up through the mist. The cars outside were all Aston Martins and Bentleys and Rollers. He made his way to the brightly lit windows where the music was coming from, and peered through.

What he saw inside was a huge, glittering ballroom. There had to be a couple of hundred people in there, dancing, drinking, partying. The women were all in long dresses, and the men wore tuxedos and strange black cloaks. Every face in the room was hidden by a mask.

He skirted the outside wall and peeped around the corner. The front entrance was at the top of a flight of steps and the door stood open. He trotted inside, just in time to avoid being spotted by an old guy in a butler’s uniform. Finding himself in a huge hallway, he ducked down a corridor. A door was ajar, and through it was the biggest washroom he’d ever seen. On a chair by the door was someone’s discarded cloak and a black mask; Dec grabbed them and darted away.

With the cloak over his shoulders and the mask over his face, he wandered through the ballroom and scanned the crowd for Kate. He felt desperately out of place and hoped he didn’t too obviously look it. A string quartet were playing, and dancing couples spun across the polished floor. Waiters sifted through the crowd with champagne glasses on silver trays.

Then, through a gap between the dancers at the far end of the ballroom, he caught a glimpse of Kate’s unmistakable red hair. She had her back to him, but it was definitely her. She was walking with a man towards a curtained exit. His hand was pressed to the small of her back, as though guiding her gently but firmly. Was he the guy in the Rolls, Dec wondered. He looked like the moneyed type. Expensive suit, fancy haircut. Dec couldn’t see his face, but there was something vaguely familiar about the guy. Nothing especially distinctive – he wasn’t fat, wasn’t thin, not short, not tall. But Dec was sure he knew him from somewhere. He thought he could see a certain nervousness in the man’s step as he escorted Kate through the room.

Dec suddenly realised that Kate and Rolls-Royce man were part of a larger group all heading in the same direction. Six of them in all, three men and three women, including Kate. He couldn’t help but notice how hot the other two women looked, both dressed in revealing outfits and high heels. The blonde was like something out of a magazine and the other one with wild, tousled raven hair, was just stunning even with her mask on. Her slinky crimson dress showed off the toned muscles of her shoulders and arms. Gold bracelets on honey skin. She and Rolls-Royce man seemed to know each other. When she turned to smile at him he seemed to shrink away a little from her, as though wary of her, and she gave a seductive giggle.

The two other guys in the group were eye-catching for different reasons. One looked like a tree. He was black and massive, six foot six of solid muscle under a tuxedo that looked ready to split if he moved too brusquely. The other guy’s head barely came up to his chest. Wiry, stoat-like, with eyes that darted behind his black mask.

Dec watched as they all filed through the curtained doorway. None of the other partygoers seemed to pay them any attention as they left the ballroom.

Dec pushed his way through the crowd to the doorway. He discreetly pulled the curtain aside and followed. Keeping well back, he followed the strange group through corridors and hallways. Every so often he could see Kate, still being ushered along by Rolls-Royce man. What was wrong with her? She seemed to be walking strangely, as if dazed, or in a trance of some kind.

The group of six passed through another doorway. Dec waited a moment, then crept to the door and inched it open to see a flight of stone steps spiralling downwards into shadow. He swallowed hard, and followed, hanging back to stay out of sight.

He could hear the people’s steps echoing up towards him.

Then nothing. He trotted faster down the steps and found himself on a landing that branched out in several directions, leading to more stairs. Which way had they gone?

He kept going, wandering through the maze. It was dark down here, and he was beginning to get disorientated. He bumped up against a rough wooden door and his fingers felt the cold iron ring handle. He turned it and the door creaked open.

He was in what looked like a vault or crypt beneath the manor house. It seemed to run the whole length of the building, stretching far ahead into darkness, lit only by flaming torches that cast flickering shadows across the stone floor and the forest of pillars that held up the ceiling.