Chapter 1
“It’s not as bad as everyone made out,” Jane said, wincing against the sideways assault of icy rain.
Hellen frowned up at the ruins, seemingly immune to the constant smack of stinging droplets. “It’s not exactly sturdy either. That wall looks like it’s just waiting to fall on someone’s head.” She radioed to base camp, “Dr. Henman to base. Hard hats mandatory. Over.”
The radio crackled before a disjointed reply came through. “Copy that. Will pass the message on. Over.”
The team had stayed back at the only bay on the rugged coastline where boats could safely dock, thwarted by towering cliffs and rocky inlets.
Any path to the castle via land was completely inaccessible by car and would’ve taken hours on foot from the nearest parking lot.
Just walking up from the bay had been a struggle, making Jane think about the monumental efforts to come, everyone strapped up with as much equipment as they could carry.
The castle seemed to have been built with that in mind, hidden in the shadow of the mountains behind with the sea ahead, nestled on a pockmarked terrain of inlets, lochs, and tarns. The ideal spot for defense.
If the position of the castle wasn’t enough to prove it, the seabirds were.
The creatures had clearly taken offense to the human invasion, divebombing the team when they’d tried to land at a closer inlet, forcing them to turn the boats around.
Protecting the castle long after the last person who needed protecting had gone.
Even now, their shrill screams filled the air.
“Sounds like a stupid question,” Jane said, walking into the crumbling echo of what might once have been a Great Hall, “but why would anyone build any sort of settlement all the way out here? It’s miles away from anything.
Not exactly good land or weather for sustaining a population either, unless they really liked fish and nothing but fish. ”
Hellen’s expression darkened delightedly. “Piracy, lass. That’s the only reason anyone would build something like this, so far out of sight of everything else. Piracy or agoraphobia, and I don’t think the latter was invented back then.” She paused. “Or exile, I suppose.”
“Piracy?” Jane considered the possibility. “Would fit his reputation.”
“Whose reputation?”
Jane gestured toward the weatherbeaten husk of the castle. “The Beast.”
“Don’t make assumptions,” Hellen chided. “A few bits of old graffiti don’t make a monster, Jane. We don’t know anything about the people who lived here or who ruled them.”
Jane shrugged. “I suppose not.”
“Sure, we see a ruined castle like this in Scotland, and we immediately think ‘Laird,’ but like you said, who’d be mad enough to build a castle or any kind of civilization on an inhospitable bit of land like this?
It’s not a very ‘Lairdly’ place. Could’ve been a jumped-up pirate who fancied himself a castle, purchased with his ill-gotten gains.
” Hellen wandered through an archway into another destroyed room, where a seagull screeched at her.
“I thought the last place was desolate,” Jane said, more to herself than to Hellen. “But this is… something else.”
Hellen poked her head through the stone frame of an old window, the glass long gone. “Oi, I told you, no more thinking about the skeleton lovers. We’re at the mercy of other specialists with that, but this is all ours.”
“I was just saying,” Jane muttered, unable to forget about that strange tomb where the lovers had been buried intertwined, the engraving on the side—the bittersweetness of it all.
She set off through the shell of the castle, which protruded from the grim landscape like jagged teeth. Pausing in a sheltered spot, she turned on the voice recorder on her phone, tucked the device into the safety of her sleeve, and began to describe what she was seeing.
“Small annex off a larger hall—could’ve been a Great Hall or a chapel of some kind, though the ‘Beast’ doesn’t sound like he was a particularly godly man,” she said, theorizing as she went, despite Hellen’s warning not to.
“Structures to the west, away from the main building. Stables or barracks would be my guess. They’re in better shape than the castle. Newer additions, maybe.”
“We’ve got arched windows, possibly stained-glass once. Hard to date, though I’d guess 17th or 18th century. The style is similar,” she continued. “There’s a tower up ahead, through the remains of a cloistered walkway. Only the eastern side and part of the southern side are still standing.”
She stared up at the shard of stone and seagull nests. “Forty or fifty feet high, by the looks of it, though there could be more of it missing than it seems.”
For a moment, she closed her eyes and imagined the castle bustling with people.
The sights, the sounds, the smells, the energy.
But after Hellen had put thoughts of piracy in her mind, all she could picture were hordes of gruff, grizzled men smoking and drinking in the darkened corners of the castle.
She smiled, thinking of a parrot squawking on the shoulder of a salty seadog in a tricorn hat.
Not that kind of pirate.
An hour later, drenched from the rain, she’d circled and explored the castle three times, while Hellen did the same.
Both of them were interested in different things, their areas of expertise guiding them.
Hellen had already taken some samples from the stone, while Jane focused on architecture and anthropology.
Guesswork, mainly.
“We should be heading back,” Hellen called from the pile of rubble that could’ve been the main entrance, once upon a time. “Someone needs to deliver the bad news.”
Jane arched an eyebrow. “What bad news?”
“That this is going to take a hell of a lot of work to be ready for visitors, and they’re going to have to start with making a road,” Hellen replied, groaning. “I can already feel the funding slipping through my fingers. A financial lost cause.”
Panic ripped through Jane. They’d only just arrived.
What if they were told to pack up and go home before they’d even broken ground?
What if they never found out who had lived here, and who the man behind the mask might be?
She could still see that glinting eye in her mind.
No way was she giving up before they’d begun.
She pulled a face. “Just five more minutes. I think there’s a doorway over here.”
“And we don’t have any safety equipment,” Hellen reminded her. “Hard hats mandatory, remember?”
Jane waved the warning away, approaching a narrow gap in one of the more intact parts of the castle.
The northern wing, just to the left of the tower.
On her first three inspections, she’d assumed it was just where some of the walls had crumbled.
But, at the very end of her third inspection, she’d caught sight of a faint arching at the top, suggesting it was a deliberate entryway.
“Jane!” Hellen called.
But Jane couldn’t help herself. Turning sideways, she slipped through the gap…
and found herself in a dark, enclosed space.
A shaft of gray light snuck in from a hole in the opposite wall, but the rest was intact.
She was in a perfect cube of a room that had withstood decades, if not centuries, of storms and assaults and who knew what else.
Excitedly pulling out her phone, she switched on the flashlight and swept it around.
A few paces ahead of her, a large square grate, rusted brown, glinted in the bright light. She racked her brains, sifting through the notes from 2004.
There’d been a mention of a room like this, and she’d been searching for it, but when she hadn’t found it, she’d assumed it had collapsed in the twenty years that had passed since the last archaeologists were here.
“I think I found the dungeons!” Jane shouted, her heart leaping. She loved dungeons. Loved the macabre.
“Jane, come out of there!” Hellen called, sounding far away.
But the curiosity bug had bitten Jane hard. She approached the grate, finding an old strip of material tied to the handle that pulled it up. Words in permanent marker confirmed her suspicions.
One of the archaeologists from twenty years ago had labeled it Dungeons. Proceed with caution.
She knew she should turn back and wait until she had a hard hat on, but her hand reached for the handle anyway. Huffing and puffing, she heaved the grate up, the corroded metal squealing in indignation.
A gaping mouth yawned up at her, releasing the stench of stale air and saltwater.
“Smugglers?” Jane whispered, wondering if these might not be dungeons at all. The castle was well situated to be some kind of smugglers’ den.
A spiral staircase wound down from the grate, and despite every alarm bell going off in her head, Jane put a foot on the first step. She did a funny, little bounce to check the sturdiness and slipperiness.
Satisfied that she wasn’t going to plummet to her doom, she continued her descent, grateful that the last people who’d been here had decided to put up a rope. It had swollen up over the years, and bits of it were rotting away, but it made her feel a little bit safer.
“Jane!” she heard Hellen shout, followed by the scuff of footsteps above.
“I’ll be five minutes!” Jane shouted back, her voice echoing all around her.
“Jane, I swear on my mother’s life, if you don’t get out of that hole right now, I’m going to—” Hellen’s voice stopped abruptly.
“You’re going to what?” Jane asked, chuckling as she continued downward, clinging onto the shoddy old rope for dear life.
Hellen didn’t respond. Or maybe she did, but Jane couldn’t hear it.
The stairwell had filled with a strange, thudding sound, like an enormous heartbeat pounding in her ears.
It might have been her own, as she realized just how stupid it was to venture underground in a crumbling castle without at least a hard hat on her head.
She stumbled as she reached the bottom of the stairwell, not realizing she’d reached it. There, she stood for a moment to catch her breath, inhaling the salty, sour scent of the dungeons. It was bitterly cold, reminding her of a tomb.
“It looks pretty sturdy!” she called up to Hellen.
Silence, and that thudding, echoed back.
We’re close to the sea. It’s just waves crashing somewhere.
Shining her flashlight ahead of her, she made her way through a tall, narrow tunnel until she came to a door. The wood was rotten and splintering away, and a heavy bolt was drawn across.
Covering her hands with her sleeves, and holding her phone between her teeth, she gripped the bolt and pulled it back. It slid with surprising ease… so surprising, in fact, that it threw her off balance.
The phone dropped from her mouth, landing with a worrying clatter on the damp stone. As it hit the ground, the flashlight went out, plunging her into darkness.
Cursing under her breath, she fumbled desperately for the phone, that thudding noise getting louder and louder, like something was coming.
It’s all in your head, it’s all in your head.
Her hand closed over the smooth body of her phone, and she hurried to turn the flashlight on again, breathing a sigh of relief when it flared back to life.
“Hellen!” she shouted, to make herself feel better. Less alone. “Hellen?”
She shone the flashlight on the door, a frown creasing her brow. It didn’t look as old as it had a moment ago, the wood dry and freshly varnished, the rusty bolt and studs looking almost brand new. And the air around her smelled of woodsmoke and salt, the stale, tomb-like smell gone.
Puzzled, she pushed the door, open. The hinges barely creaked. And beyond, lighting up a narrow tunnel, torches flickered. Torches that couldn’t possibly still be blazing after so many years.
The thudding sound faded, but another sound drifted to her ears as she stared down the impossible, torchlit passageway. Gentle snores and soft murmurs spilled out of an open doorway a short way ahead.
Someone was asleep down here. Someone was still living here.
Jane wasn’t alone.