We walked back through the tangled maze and past the slug-like vermin sitting on its boulder. Once again, it waved short stubby arms at us and made a gurgling roar. If the creature thought it was scary, it was sadly mistaken. Alice shook the mallet in its direction, and it gave a startled cry and fell silent.
"You should dispose of it, Ella." Alice's fingers curled tight around the mallet.
"It doesn't feel sporting to clamber up there and hit it from behind. Let's keep moving." I briefly considered seeing if it could play catch by tossing it a grenade. But the idea of raining vermin splatter on us stilled my hand. Instead, I tugged Alice along, but the vermin's black eyes tracked our movements as we pushed past its rock.
We ducked under the last skeletal tree barrier and emerged on the short strip of rock that ran from maze to water's edge. The opposite bank rippled, like ripe wheat moving with a faint breeze, but this was no quaint agricultural scene. We were confronted by a black hellish ocean that moaned and wailed.
Father had once read me Greek mythology about the river Styx. The water of the ancient river contained lost and condemned souls, trapped in eternal Hell. As a child, I used to imagine all those poor people crying out in agony. I no longer had to imagine it. It waited for me.
Elizabeth had implemented an old favourite torture of hers—false hope. I could get to the island, but not off it. A seething mass blanketed the other side of the shore. We had once spilled grain in the barn and the mice descended en masse to devour it. The sight was similar. Hundreds of bodies crammed tightly together so that they moved and heaved as one.
"Oh dear," Alice muttered.
"Slug vermin back there probably told her we were heading out," I said. I should have dispatched it on my way in so that it couldn't tell tales. Not that it would have made any difference. Louise sent me in this direction, and she would have told her mother I had crossed to the island. Then Elizabeth would have summoned her rats to lie in wait.
Somewhere beyond the plague covering the opposite shore were Seth and Frank, and we needed to make it to them. My gaze scanned over the vermin, piled highest around the other end of little bridge. Then I turned my attention beyond them, to the standing stones. Over there were Elizabeth's court and the men. So close, and yet so much lay between us. Or did it?
I turned to Alice. "I have an idea, but you might not like it."
"At this point, I would prefer anything that didn't involve wading into that lot." She gestured with the mallet and the moan from the blanket of creatures increased.
"Funny you should mention wading—"
I had no idea if the vermin could hear us or interpret our plans, but I figured better safe than sorry. I took Alice by the hand and we crept around the edge of the maze, avoiding twigs coated in razor sharp thorns. Around the other side of the island, closer to the cavern wall, I edged toward the silvery water.
"Oh, Ella. It looks awfully cold." Alice dug her heels in on the bank.
"I know. But Elizabeth assumes that because Louise and Charlotte can't swim, that we likewise can't swim." We’d spent many summer afternoons playing in the river by the old mill, when we could sneak off after father left with Henry. Alice wasn't the strongest swimmer, but if she remembered how to dog paddle and keep her head out, we could drift with the flow.
At a rough guess, two hundred feet of swimming would bring us close to where Elizabeth held Frank and Seth. We would be cold and wet when we crawled out of the river, but I couldn't do anything about that. Perhaps we could blow something up and warm ourselves on a funeral pyre of a hundred vermin?
In my mind, I imagined a Christmas tree made of their decrepit bodies, with Elizabeth and Louise tied together as the angel topper. Then I would set fire to the entire structure. Yes, that would make a most satisfying blaze to warm us. Except I had promised myself I would capture Louise for the War Office. I changed the image in my mind. Elizabeth roasted at the top of the tree on her own, and Louise was bound and gagged as a present underneath it.
A nudge shattered my merry Christmas scene and returned me to our current dire circumstances.
"I'm keeping the mallet," Alice said. Her fingers tightened on the weapon she refused to give it up.
I dug into my pockets and found a piece of string. We looped it through the hole in the end of the mallet's handle and then tied it around Alice's wrist. That way her hands were free, but the weapon was within reach.
"Ready?" I asked.
"As ready as I will ever be." She put on a plucky face, but the shake in her hands betrayed her words. The Grim War was never Alice's world but mine, and my incredible friend faced it the best she could.
I gave her a quick hug and then stepped off the low bank of the island into the water. With the muted light and surrounding stone, the water was opaque and I had no way of gauging the depth. It could be knee deep, or way over my head. Soon, I was waist deep and the water murmured gently as Alice slid in behind me. By the time I was half way across, the water was up to my chin and I was treading water.
At the point of no return when my feet no longer touched the solid bottom, my mind decided to ponder the existence of water vermin. While my active imagination made the helpful leap from vermin to bees, I wished it wasn't quite so active at times. I didn't need the idea of a sea-monster vermin pulling on my ankles as I swam.
"Do you think there are any in the water?" Alice whispered from behind me.
"No," I scoffed. No need to spread panic, I was worried enough for both of us.
"If something touches me, I will scream," she muttered.
So will I, I silently confessed.
The water was glacial, as though it tumbled from snow-covered mountains before seeping underground to form the lazy river. It soaked through my clothing and dug into my bones. My wool jacket would hold some warmth even when wet, but poor Alice wore only a lighter outfit. She had dressed for a picnic outing with Frank in the autumn sunshine, not swimming through the depths of Hell. The only sound she made behind me was the chattering of her teeth.
We floated downstream and away from the field of vermin. Thankfully the bank rose a foot above our heads and shielded us from view. Nobody, or no thing, would see us by the diffused light drifting down from the cavern ceiling. How long would they sit, mustered on the bank, before they realised we wouldn't trip across the stone walkway? Hours, I hoped. Long enough for us to enact the next step in our plan.
I had to guess when we would near the standing stones, trying to approximate the distance in the gloom with no landmarks to guide me. I squinted and looked for the tips of the rocks. They appeared as black smudges against the background, blotting out a few glow worms. I swam closer to the bank, until my hand touched the side. Alice crowded behind me.
"Let's go rescue our men," I whispered, and hauled myself half way up. I glanced left and right to check for any creatures in the immediate area. To one side loomed a large boulder, big enough to shelter two women while we considered our next move.
We hauled ourselves, sodden and shaking, from the water. It ran as liquid silver from our forms as we took a moment to catch our breath. We shivered behind the cold boulder as I glanced around and tried to spot Seth and Frank. Twenty feet in front of us was a ring of stones, like a much smaller version of ancient Stonehenge. Clustered around it were vermin. They filled the gaps between the stones, and a low wail rose and fell from them as though they attempted to sing.
Thinking of the similarity to Stonehenge and ancient druids made the familiar itch return to my mind. If I scratched at it, I would reveal the larger meaning to all of this. Everything was connected, from the spread of the original influenza pandemic to whatever agency created the walking dead. Then death roads and catacombs called the vermin to secret places. Elizabeth as a new queen with Louise at her right hand. But there was one more piece to this puzzle, the itch whispered.
Millicent deMage.
Was she a point of origin in all this? But three hundred years separated the first Duchess of Leithfield and the pandemic. Dark forces would be needed to breach such a distance of time—like those wielded by Aleister Crowley and his followers. Everything I learned created a tapestry of knowledge, and throughout this fabric was woven one particular thread—Serenity House. At least in Somerset, everything led back to the old house. What happened elsewhere in the world? We had been blinkered by our battle in this corner of England, but the time had come to step back and look at the larger picture to find other, similar patterns.
I wanted to throw up my hands, and as much as I most definitely didn't want to admit it, I was going to have to go through the duchess' private journals. She knew something, and she would surrender her secrets to me. I also needed to investigate the infamous Satanist.
"What do we do now?" Alice whispered.
I hadn't really thought about this part of my idea. We had no weapons apart from my sword and Alice's mallet. There was very little available cover apart the odd group of tortured tree trunks and boulders like the one sheltering us. I didn't expect to grab the men and make a run through Elizabeth's subjects. My escape hinged on stalling for long enough for the cavalry to arrive. All I needed was a distraction to get us past the vermin guards so we were all together again. Apart from Jake.
What I needed was a very bright, and very loud, distraction. Something to draw the vermin to one side so we could breach the circle. As I squirmed, a lump dug into my stomach and my distraction took form. I reached down and retrieved it from the pouch hanging from my belt, hoping it hadn’t been damaged by the swim.
"What we need right now is a hand grenade." I was glad I hadn't wasted the grenade Seth gave me on the vermin caterpillar.
I wished we had Henry with us, for he had a much better arm than me. It was all that time throwing cricket balls at father the summer before the war.
"What will you do with it?" Alice whispered.
I liked Seth's idea of stuffing it inside Louise's chest, but we needed to get close enough to do that, and I had sworn to capture her for the War Office. I pointed to a stand of hideous trees that stood next to the edge of the vermin carpet. "I'm going to aim for them and blow them up and hopefully take out the closest vermin as well."
"Will it start a fire? I'm ever so cold." Her voice wavered with the chatter in her teeth.
"Um … hopefully." Seth had explained to me that there were two types of grenades. One sort simply blew stuff up, but phosphorus grenades burned. What sort was I holding? Blasted things didn't have labels. Either way it should make a loud noise, and if it blew up vermin, then that made fewer to chase us through the catacombs.
I closed my eyes and recited Seth's instructions about hand grenades. I imagined his hand guiding mine as we talked through what to do and how to ensure my safety. Satisfied I wouldn't blow myself up, I opened my eyes and pulled the pin. A brief thought of, what the hell am I doing? flashed through my mind, and then I threw the object with all my might at the trees.
I strained my ears for the clunk of it hitting its target but couldn't hear over the low moan that filled the cavern.
"What happens now?" Alice whispered, her body pressed close to mine as we both peered around the boulder.
"It should blow up." I chewed my lip trying to count how many seconds it had been since I threw the grenade—three, five, or ten?
"Why hasn't it, then?" We both peered at the stand of twisted trunks.
The earth-shattering whump saved me from admitting I must have done something wrong. Bits of smoking, twisted tree rained down around us, and the low moan fell silent.
The trees now burned brightly, and I squinted against the glare. Orange flames reached upward and a number of nearby vermin were toasted. Seth must have given me a phosphorus grenade. The undead raised flaming limbs that echoed the shape of the trees and they continued to walk around, like mobile Roman candles.
The blaze was rather satisfying. I heaved a sigh and wished I had shoved more grenades in my pockets. The fire would warm us up, but we should probably run in the other direction. The vermin clustered around the stones drew closer to the fiery trees. As they moved, they created a gap, which was exactly what we needed.
"Come on." I prodded Alice and we ran across the cavern, bent over low and dodging from rock to rock. I'm not sure why we bothered; blowing up part of her world would probably tell Elizabeth I wasn't far away.
Behind us came the scuff of feet dragged in dirt and the drawn-out roll of kicked stones as the vermin shuffled toward the fire. They kicked over their charred brethren to encircle the bonfire and stood as though mesmerised. It would certainly make my job easier if they took the hint and threw themselves upon the conflagration. But they simply held place around it, swaying to the dance of the flames. Except for the ones whose clothing burned—those wandered around like walking lanterns, lighting the dark corners.
"How odd, like moths to the light," Alice whispered as we stood with our backs to a standing stone.
I stored another snippet of information away in my mind: vermin were drawn to fire. We could use that to our advantage, somehow. With the bulk of them temporarily distracted, and a few sent back to their Maker, I turned my attention to rescuing Seth and Frank. With the stone as a shield, I peered around the side to survey what lay beyond, before we made our next push.
On closer inspection, the standing stones were of irregular size, but each stood at least seven feet tall and three feet wide and provided ample room to hide both me and Alice. They also weren't in a true circle, nor were they regularly placed, but more scattered. Perhaps the ancient Britons who erected them had drunk too much mead. The clustered vermin had obscured the lack of pattern. Some stones were so close they butted one another, whereas others had a gap of several feet between them.
The more I stared at them, the more they resembled walls, but with no roof or windows. As though someone had attempted to create a smaller, more intimate space within the enormous cavern. Like a cottage built in one corner of a ballroom. There were even bits of furniture within the structure. Squat stones with timber planks stretched between them made rough seats. A large sea chest was used as an impromptu table for what looked like a chess set. A fire pit in the centre held a solitary lantern. Completely out of place, a fine Oriental screen to one side held clothing draped over the top, waiting for someone to change outfits. A battered and dirty chaise sat not far from the screen. Apart from being undead, soulless critters, the vermin were apparently also burglars.
The scene laid out before us bore some resemblance to what we had found in the burial mound. Flat stones were piled on their sides and made a shape eight feet long and three feet high, except unlike the burial mound this was no altar but a throne. Elizabeth was the focus within the space as she sat on the stone throne, her feet resting on a vermin lying prone in the dirt.
Elizabeth hadn't just Turned, she had embraced the change with both hands. Mrs Linton was a sad, reluctant queen, created by Somerset vermin. Elizabeth had always sought power, and now she had it. She was the embodiment of a dark queen. A long, black velvet dress covered her form. Her hair fell loose around her shoulders in a midnight cascade. Her hands were crossed in her lap, but her black gaze was fixed on the impromptu fire out in the cavern floor.
The bored expression dropped away from Louise's face as she rose from her place at Elizabeth's side. She peered into the distance as flaming vermin flitted in and out of view like monstrous butterflies. Frank and Seth knelt on the ground in front of Elizabeth, their gazes fixed on her, apparently unconcerned by events behind them.
A handful of vermin around them were an annoyance, but one I could dispatch. The creatures moaned and fidgeted. Some shambled around to see what was happening to their brethren. One wore its head backwards, so its body pointed to its queen but milky eyes watched the fire. I wondered if some event knocked its head around or if it were able to spin its orb freely.
The lads were stripped of their weapons, but they weren't far away. Claymore and machete rested on the stone next to step-mother. My hand found the hilt of the katana and I drew it from the scabbard. The metal sang its sweet tune and Elizabeth's gaze shot to the stone hiding us.
"Run to Seth and Frank," I said to Alice. Then I stepped into step-mother's court.