‘Sally Walker, talk to me. Calm down and talk to me. I can’t help you otherwise.’
Walker, that was the thing that did it. Calling her Sally Walker. Reminding her of Nick, of Maeve, of who she was. The wind changed direction and Sally appeared again, stalking towards her with it, her face still a snarl of pain.
‘My daughter! My little girl! My Maeve! You have to do something!’
‘She’s with Nick and your mother. She’s safe.’
‘No, she isn’t. She wandered off again. They have her. He’ll kill her. Please. I’ll do anything. I’ll give you whatever you want, de Wilde. Please!’
‘What do you mean, she wandered off? Where is she?’
The wind started up again. More books came off the shelves, flying through the air, and all around the Hall, Alex heard the sound of doors slamming.
‘This isn’t helping! Show me the way. You have to know.’
The room shook, the floor, the ceiling. The walls…
And then a panel in the wall to the of the desk, one of the few areas of wall not covered with bookcases, opened with a long slow creak. A secret door. Of course, there was a secret door.
The wind died down and all was quiet.
‘Go,’said Sally. It was no more than a whisper, a sigh. All the strength she had garnered together was gone with the effort she’d needed to do that.
The passage beyond was unlit, impossibly dark and heavy with cobwebs. Because of course it was. Of course, the stupid haunted house had a lightless secret passageway leading down as if descending to the pits of hell itself.
Gabe would wet himself in delight.
Gabe! She’d been talking to him and the phone had died. She grabbed the laptop, which was thankfully still plugged in, and fired off an email.
Tell me how to lay it to rest.
Wind buffeted at her again and the door slammed back against the wall. Sally was getting impatient and Maeve was in danger. She didn’t have time to waste.
‘Nick!’ she yelled. No answer. Not from the house anyway.
She heard a faint shout and spun around. He was on the drive outside, waving at her, miming opening the window. Patricia stood beside him, pale with concern. Alex fumbled at the latch on the bay window of the study, but it was wedged closed as if the wood had warped.
‘I can’t open it. I have to go after Maeve. There’s a passageway.’
He shook his head, and lifted his hand to his ear. He couldn’t hear her. Damn it.
Maeve, she mouthed at him and pointed to the secret doorway and then down. It had to be down, didn’t it? Under the house.
Daphne had talked about something under the house reaching up out of the earth and the stones, out of the darkness. And Alex had felt it, when she fell, when she lay there half-conscious on the floor at the foot of the stairs. She had felt it reaching up for her.
And people had always said Blaise Chambers had done his most evil acts in a temple under the house….
A temple. A place of power. A broken god of lost places, waiting beneath her. Daphne had said that when she was attacked.
The cellar, surely. But the cellar was small and only occupied the space under the kitchen. It didn’t extend to this part of the building. And this looked older. A lot older. Where was this going to take her?
Alex fought to catch her breath. She was running out of time.
An email blinked at her on the laptop. Three words. Gabe must have typed them as quickly as he could and sent it back.
Prayer. Salt. Silver.
Great, she thought. Prayer. What did she know about prayer? She didn’t believe in anything. But yes, salt had to work. It was the oldest way to banish evil, in so many religions from Christianity to Buddhism, and older. And silver…silver was a pure metal. It warded off evil spirits and protected againstpossession. Daphne wore half a ton of the stuff on investigations. Where was she going to find…
