Chapter 26
ALEX
Of course the call was a disaster. Alex had known what Gabe would say long before she actually tried to tell them what was going on. Not that she told them everything.
They definitely didn’t need to know about the incident in the study for one thing. Or about anything resembling orgies. The sounds could be explained… somehow.
‘We’ll come over!’ Gabe told her, eyes shining. ‘We can sort out flights and be there before you know it. I’ll make the calls—’
‘No,’ she told him as firmly as possible. ‘Besides, you have contracts in place. You can’t afford to piss off the network, Gabe, and you know it.’
He gave her that plaintive puppy look. Once upon a time it might have even worked.
‘But Alex, it’s a breakout opportunity. They’ll understand, hell, they’ll love it, and besides—’
‘There is no besides. I’m here. I’m on site. And I don’t want you all here. If the stories about this place are true, it’s too risky anyway.’
Daphne sucked in a breath which almost sounded delighted and Alex frowned at her. ‘I don’t believe it.’
‘Believe what?’
‘You. You’re starting to come around at last.’
‘No, I am not. I’m talking about practicality. Parts of the Hall are unsafe. I can’t have you lot tramping around wherever and getting hurt. I don’t even think there are enough bedrooms in a fit state to be used.’ That was her excuse and she was going to stick to it.
‘It’s a castle, Alex,’ Gabe chided.
‘You have a vastly inflated opinion of what that means around here. This isn’t a fairy tale. There’s, like, six habitable rooms. You’re not coming over and that’s that.’
‘Besides,’ said Daphne with a wicked grin which boded nothing good, ‘she wants to keep the Sasquatch to herself.’
Alex suppressed a growl. ‘Don’t call him that. Leave Nick alone.’
‘Oh?’ Daphne purred the sound with one of those shit-eating grins. She was a born matchmaker that one. Not always successfully. She’d fixed Alex and Gabe up after all.
Gabe’s tone was a lot more suspicious. ‘And what exactly do you know about this Nick guy, other than your brother gave him a free ride?’
Alex wasn’t about to let him start in on that. ‘Enough,’ she growled. ‘Or I’ll end this call and just sort it out myself.’
It was like wrangling small children. Maeve was better behaved than these lot. Alex took a deep breath, trying to centre herself.
‘I did turn up some more information,’ Arnold said in that soft voice. He always waited for a lull to chime in.
‘What?’ asked Gabe.
Arnold cleared his throat as if in preparation to deliver a lecture.
‘Okay, so, Blaise Chambers, the Master of the Revels, was killed by Richard de Wilde, the sixteenth baron. That’s Hugh’s son, right?
The report says in late August 1826 he lay in wait in the kitchen and shot Chambers through the heart as he came out of the cellar.
He was the only one of his immediate family left alive and blamed Chambers for their deaths.
’ She heard him clicking on his keyboard, looking for a reference in his notes.
‘That’s possibly where the whole curse of the de Wildes story starts.
Difficult to say because the records before this are patchy and a lot of it’s just hearsay.
The curse was meant to be hardest on their daughters.
Marry young, one of them wrote to her sisters, whoever will have you, leave as soon as you can. Never look back.’
‘And there you are back again,’ said Gabe. ‘You don’t listen, do you?’
Alex glared at the screen and he just shrugged. Water off a duck’s back.
‘So if the house is cursed,’ Eduardo asked, ‘why not just burn it down and walk away? It sounds like they wanted to, your ancestors.’
‘Well first of all, arson,’ she told him. ‘Pretty sure that’s illegal.’
Ed grinned back. ‘Only if you claim on the insurance.’
‘People have tried,’ Arnold went on before Alex could come up with another smart answer.
‘During the 1920s, there was a campaign to drive out the local aristocracy by burning the houses, part of the war of independence, and the civil war that followed. When it came to Wildewood Hall, a Republican brigade arrived. Alex’s great-grandfather faced them down apparently, but so too did the people of Kilfayne, standing side by side with him.
His wife was one of them, you know. The brigade fell back to the woods and…
only one of them made it out alive. He’d lost his mind.
He said the house is a prison and the trees are the guardians.
That they’d taken the lives of those who wanted to destroy it because if anyone destroyed the Hall, a monstrous spirit trapped there would have escaped. ’
‘Chambers?’
‘Must be. Chambers ran a Hellfire Club there. Allegedly they worshipped the devil, or something older, linked to the house.’
‘Oh, come on,’ Gabe exclaimed. ‘You have a Hellfire Club connection? Alex, why have you never told us any of this?’ He sounded genuinely outraged. Or maybe just annoyed at being kept out of the loop. She hadn’t told him for this very reason. And she had never planned to come back here.
‘Not one of the famous ones,’ she corrected him.
It was unknown compared to Wharton’s or Dashwood’s Hellfire Clubs in the UK.
Or the one connected to Montpelier Hill in Dublin.
She definitely didn’t want to tell him they’d been child’s play in comparison to everything Chambers was meant to have got up to here.
She wasn’t mentioning ritual sacrifice and secret temples dedicated to eldritch gods and whatever else the tale had spiralled into.
Beyond Kilfayne people didn’t actually know about that.
She did not need Gabe telling the world about the sordid history of her family.
‘Lots of places had Hellfire Clubs in the eighteenth century. It was the college frat house equivalent of the day, Gabe. Overprivileged dickheads who wanted an excuse for excessive partying. You would have fitted right in.’
He was still grumbling but she ignored him. If he kept it up, she’d just put him on mute. Shame it didn’t work in real life.
‘Can I finish?’ Arnold said softly into the strained silence. ‘Chambers’ actions cursed the family.’
‘If they weren’t already cursed,’ Alex muttered.
‘Maybe. But look, the things he did there, the things the family allowed to happen there, all the deaths on their hands, that kind of thing soaks into a place, into the stones and the earth. It didn’t end with his death either.
They could have helped people and they did nothing, just feasted and partied on while people died in Kilfayne.
And the locals never forgot that. Nor did the land, or so the story says.
All the family bar Richard died, accidents and the like, but there’s an implication that Chambers murdered them and covered it up. Children as young as—’
Enough, Alex thought. She was tired and fed up.
Her family tree was filled with terrible people and they were still paying for that.
Chambers might have been the worst thing to happen to Wildewood Hall and Kilfayne, but the de Wildes had done nothing to restrain him.
Maybe they were worse. Maybe they deserved to be cursed.
All the dead daughters, all the miserable lives, all those they had failed, all the shit she was still dealing with.
She really needed to wind this call up. It was getting her nowhere.
All she needed was equipment. Not more tall tales.
‘Look, guys, I’m not even sure there’s anything really going on.
’ Well, that was a lie. Something was definitely going on but there was no way she was going to admit that.
Not to them. Not after so long as the non-believer.
She would have to get into far too much excruciating detail.
Gabe would gloat. She knew that. ‘It’s more…
a feeling, okay? And I want to put Nick’s mind at ease. ’
‘Oh well, as it’s all about Nick,’ Gabe drawled.
She was about to tell him where to go but hesitated. Last night could have ended very differently in just a few more minutes had she not regained sanity. And all the things that could have happened… her breath caught in her throat and something warm and wicked pooled in the pit of her stomach.
‘Stop it, Gabe,’ she told him, as irritated with her own wandering thoughts as with him.
She managed to steer the conversation around to Eduardo and the various pieces of tech she would need.
She sketched out a floorplan and identified the main areas to cover.
The study, obviously, given what had happened there.
The bedroom. She didn’t say it was where she was sleeping.
And the main hall and grand staircase. That was a start.
If they needed more later on, she could revise it.
She decided on fixed cameras, EMF meters and a couple of digital recorders she could carry with her.
She had her camera equipment with her and the software she would need on her laptop anyway.
Keep it simple and above all keep it scientific.
At least she wouldn’t have to put up with those bloody spirit boxes which just spewed out random words on demand which Gabe adored.
Utter nonsense which occasionally made for spectacular television.
‘I’ll reach out too,’ said Daphne. ‘I know I’m not there, but perhaps my spirits will be able to help. I’ll do everything I can. Send me photos. I can use them as a touchstone to start off.’
‘Thank you,’ Alex said because while she didn’t quite believe herself, Daphne was her friend.
She meant well, and sometimes she did subconsciously pick up on things the rest of them missed.
Daphne might appear to be nothing more than a loveable flake, but she was clever and intuitive behind the facade.
She spotted patterns that other people missed, picked up on emotions and subtext, that was all.
Alex just figured she didn’t realise what she was doing.
So she thought ghosts had told her. Alex had always dismissed it outright, but…
well, now it was starting to take on a different hue, wasn’t it?
‘I’ll get it all shipped to you asap,’ Eduardo told her, interrupting her strained logic as she tried to explain everything that happened to her rationally.
Again. ‘I can find a local supplier, I’m sure.
But Alex, you’ll be careful, won’t you? We don’t investigate alone, remember?
That’s not just for correlation of the experience.
There are safety concerns too. You’re in an old building.
You said parts of it are structurally unsound. ’
She gave him a smile. She could always rely on Ed. ‘I’ll be careful, I promise. And Nick’s here too.’
Gabe grumbled. She ignored him. Daphne was looking decidedly smug. Alex ignored that too. Just as well they were on the other side of the Atlantic. Otherwise, she might be tempted to strangle the two of them.
‘Send me your findings,’ Eduardo told her. ‘Any recordings, photos and such like. I’ll run them through my system here as well to double check.’
‘That’s great, thanks.’
‘There’s something else,’ Arnold said. He sounded a little less sure of himself now, which was unusual. ‘Those men that vanished in the woods. In the 1920s? Look, it’s probably just a coincidence, but…’ He chewed on his lower lip. ‘One of them was called Nicholas Walker.’
Alex pulled back, staring. It had to be a coincidence. But it was a weird one.
‘Okay,’ she murmured. ‘Well, I don’t think he’s over a hundred years old, Arnold. If he is, he’s remarkably well preserved.’ She expected a laugh, but none came.
There was a long pause, and no one made eye contact with her. Gabe cleared his throat awkwardly. Damn, she probably could have put it better than that.
‘I just thought…’ Arnold stalled and tried again. ‘I thought I should mention it, that’s all. I looked at the family. I thought your Nick Walker might be a descendent.’
There was another awkward silence. ‘He’s not my Nick Walker,’ Alex said numbly.
But maybe she wanted him to be. And that unsettled her more than she could say. She barely knew the man. Her face had heated up again. She was probably scarlet and they were all looking at her right now as if daring her to deny it any further.
Arnold cleared his throat and carried on.
‘Remember that thing in France with the archaeologist, Ariadne Walker? She found the lost city and married that hot millionaire? Her brother Jason has a podcast now, about folktales and the supernatural. I met him at a convention a couple of years back. I think they might be related to him. I’ll see what else I can find out.
I could reach out to them, the Walkers?’
‘Alex,’ Gabe interrupted yet again, but this time he sounded more solemn than before. Not jealous. Just concerned. ‘I have a really bad feeling about this. Be careful, okay?’