Will returned to the house, put the sabre back where it belonged and descended into the cellars. It was another hour before he felt that slight telltale prickling on his skin, warning him that the sun had struggled above the eastern horizon.
Now his imprisonment here was total, for the next eight hours or so anyway. He paced from cellar to cellar, trying and failing to take his mind off the needling hunger for blood that swept over him, carrying him along. It was a craving made even more unbearable by the recently rekindled memories of his many past victims.
Helen, whose name he had not known, had been taken in the late autumn of 1988, around the same time of year that he’d met Eloise. And her sacrifice had been made for what now seemed the most meagre of reasons, sustaining him only through the winter months and into the spring when he’d hibernated again.
Then he’d slept for twenty years, during which time a boy called Stephen Leonard had grown into a man, unknowingly preparing himself for the role of Will’s next victim. Nor did it ease Will’s mind to know that the boy, Jex as he’d become, had been chosen by other forces before Will had found him.
It was painful to think back on it, and worse to know that there would be an eight hundred and forty-fourth victim, that there had to be because Will’s own spirit seemed to be gnawing away at him, crying out for the sustenance it needed.
At some point during the morning hours, he heard someone in the house above, a man, whistling as he went about his business. Will’s hunger for blood intensified and it was a relief to hear the slamming of an outer door, the removal of a temptation he could only have resisted for so long.
It felt at times as if these daylight hours would never end, and he left the cellars and the house almost as soon as darkness had fallen. The moon was already above the horizon, approaching its full state and creating a small amount of discomfort on Will’s skin, but he didn’t care, such was the liberation of being out on the frozen landscape after being trapped since the beginning of the day.
He walked about the woods for a couple of hours and once night had firmly established itself, he strolled towards the school. He knew that Eloise was busy this evening, but he had to go, if only to see her from afar, to be near her.
Even as he came close to the school, he could hear music, but the hall it came from wasn’t visible from the outside. He returned to his usual spot, looking into the Dangrave House common room from a safe distance.
It was half empty tonight, but there was Marcus Jenkins, sitting at a table playing chess with his friend. Marcus picked up the black queen, hesitated for a moment and then used it to take one of his opponent’s pieces. His friend said something, shaking his head in irritation, but also acknowledging the skill of the move.
Marcus answered, smiling, but then turned and looked directly at Will, returning to the pattern that had been broken only the previous night outside his bedroom. It was unnerving, his eyes appearing to reach out beyond the window, and even if Marcus could only see his own reflection, Will wondered what it was exactly that he saw there.
Marcus turned away again, but it left Will uneasy, thinking back on the empty book, the sleepwalker’s stare. Marcus was Wyndham’s spy, but it was more than that, some mysterious quality that lay within the boy, something Will had sensed even the first time they’d met.
Will watched for a few moments more before heading off into the woods that bordered the drive, exploring them for anything that might explain the attack of the previous evening. He could hear crows roosting in the branches high above him now, but they seemed to pay no attention to him, just as they had failed to notice him the night before.
By the time he headed back to the school, the night was drawing on. He came within a hundred paces of a female teacher standing by one of the doors, huddled against the cold as she whispered into a phone, talking to a boyfriend. Will caught the scent of her on the crisp air and veered to the right to escape the ever-present temptation – she was young, and healthy.
The common room was empty now and as he stood there, a male teacher came in, did a quick check of the room and turned off the light before leaving again. There were some lights on upstairs, though not Marcus’s, and the evening was drawing to a close for Marland Abbey School, just as it was beginning for Will.
He remained for a minute longer, as if the common room was still full of people, but then got the uncomfortable sense once more that someone was watching him. He looked up – the same darkened window on the top floor – making a mental note of which room it was.
He took a few more backward steps, and a little while later, as more lights died in the windows and sleep descended, he accepted he wouldn’t see Eloise tonight. It was for the best – he worried that he was depriving her of sleep as it was. Reluctantly he turned and strolled back towards the new house, heading for the stand of trees that obscured each from the other.
And he’d almost reached the trees before he realised he was not walking alone. Silently and without ceremony, robed figures had appeared a little way to the left and right of him – two of the witches Eloise had asked about only the night before.
Will stopped and turned. Four more of the witches followed behind, but stopped now at a slight distance, their heads bowed, obscuring the absent faces.
“What do you want of me?”
At first there was no response, and when it did come, it was from behind him. “To do your duty, nothing more.”
He turned to see the seventh standing facing him, close to the trees he’d been approaching just a moment before. She alone showed her face, almost featureless, only darker shadows where her eyes and mouth had once been.
“My duty?”
“To protect.” The other six spirits had started walking towards her and left him behind now on the frosted park. “You need the girl, and the sorcerer knows it, which is why the girl needs you.” Will was about to speak when she raised her arm, pointing past him to the school, urgent as she said, “Now, William of Mercia, she needs you now!”
He felt a sudden surge of fear for Eloise and glanced over his shoulder at the school, an ominously dark outline against the moonlight.
“She’s in danger right now?”
But when he turned back again, the spirits had gone.
He ran at full speed across the parkland, his nerves torn, fearing what he might be running towards. The spirits hadn’t intervened the previous night, an attack that had been serious enough in itself, so what was happening to Eloise now that they had felt the need to come to him?
He entered through the side door Eloise had showed him, leaping up the stairs and along the corridors with little concern for being spotted or disturbing anyone. He reached Eloise’s door, opened it, turned on the light so as not to alarm her and closed the door again as his eyes smarted.
Even when he could see, he struggled to believe what he was looking at. Eloise lay on her back, asleep, wearing a long red cotton nightshirt – but she was not on her bed, she was floating above it and moving slowly as if drawn by a magnetic power. The window had been thrown wide open and Eloise was drifting towards it.
This wasn’t just an attempt to harm Eloise, but to kill her. If this was Wyndham’s determination, to kill Eloise, it meant that Will needed her alive to fulfil his destiny, whatever that destiny proved to be. He would not let Wyndham win, but he knew something else too, knew it in every fibre of his being – he would kill himself before he allowed any harm to come to Eloise.
This time at least he could keep her safe. He closed the window first, pulling hard, as if against another hand that was struggling to keep it open. He locked it and drew the curtains lest her light be seen from outside. Eloise seemed to stop moving as soon as the window was closed, but still she hovered shoulder-height above the bed.
Will moved his hands around her, trying to find signs of whichever force held her like that. There was nothing he could detect. He said her name quietly, moving his mouth close to her ear and saying it again, but she would not wake.
He needed to get her back on to the bed, so he placed one hand on top of her stomach, the other across her thighs and gently pressed down, once again fighting against some unseen force, but gradually winning. And all the while he was tormented, by her warmth, by the softness of her flesh through the thin material of the nightshirt. Nor was this a longing for blood, that hunger almost disappearing when he was with her, but a longing for that other life he dreamt of.
Finally she touched the bed and the force that had held her up seemed to subside, her weight easing into the mattress. At the same time, she opened her eyes, waking. She looked up, taking a moment to register his presence, then she smiled, puzzled and bemused.
“Will? What are you doing?”
“Forgive me,” he said, taking his hands from her body. “This is not what it seems.”
She laughed and said, “Sadly, I know that to be true, but … how weird. I’ve just realised I was dreaming about you. Sorry, forget that, what are you doing here?”
“The witches came to me. They told me that Wyndham knows I need you – that’s why he’s attacking you.”
Eloise sat up in the bed. “So it was him last night? And by the way, it’s been the talk of the school today – sixteen dead crows found on the drive. But …” She smiled again, saying, “But just now …?”
“The window was open and you were floating towards it.”
“Floating? You mean, like levitating?”
“Yes.”
She shuddered, and said, “I don’t believe it – that’s what I was dreaming. I dreamt you were calling from outside and I flew down to you.” She looked at the window as if finally taking in that his presence here was serious, that she had come close to being thrown to her death.
“Wyndham’s trying to kill me?” Her voice was small, laced with a fear that concerned Will because she had been so brave, so fearless until now, and he realised that he needed her bravery, even relied on it in some way.
“I won’t let that happen.” He looked around the room and took a small wind chime that she had pinned to a cork noticeboard. He tied it round the window handle and said, “Make sure you hang this here each evening. That way, if the window is opened, you’ll hear the chimes and wake.”
Eloise nodded as he walked back to her, but then he stopped, spotting a diagram of chalk markings on the wooden floor under the bed. She jumped from the bed and looked at it herself.
“Someone’s been in my room!” It seemed to outrage her more than the recent attempt on her life. She took a tissue and used it to rub away the chalk markings.
Once they’d gone, Will said, “Good, from now on you must check for marks like this, or for anything else in your room that seems out of place. You must consider yourself under attack at all times.”
“But I don’t get it. Why does he think killing me will stop you?”
“It seems Wyndham knows what we’ve only imagined till now, that my destiny can’t be achieved without you. It’s the only explanation.”
Eloise smiled playfully and said, “You’d better keep me alive then.”
She was teasing him, perhaps as a way of countering her own fear, but he said, “I would happily give up my destiny and this poor excuse for a life before I would see any harm come to you.”
“Don’t say that,” she said, touching him lightly on the arm. “I need you as well, remember. That’s what Jex said. So don’t ever say that.” She sat back on the bed and gestured for him to sit too.
As he sat down, he said, “I meant only to say that protecting you means everything to me.”
“I know that.” She smiled a little, but then said, “Isn’t it funny, there I was complaining about a lack of incident, and now I’ve been attacked by crows, nearly thrown out of a window, and you’ve seen the spirits again.”
Eloise seemed upbeat at these developments, but Will felt the need to bring her back down to earth, to make clear that with greater activity came greater danger.
“I saw more spirits last night.”
“What do you mean? Your brother again?”
“No, Edward will trouble me no more. This was the very late Reverend Fairburn, doing Wyndham’s bidding in death as he did in life. And Fairburn in turn introduced me to the ghosts of all my victims, and was even kind enough to count them – eight hundred and forty-three.” Will decided against mentioning their soulless eyes or the explanation he’d been given for it, not least because he still wanted to believe it wasn’t so. “Then there was the ghost of my mother, murdered when I was born, or so Fairburn told me.”
“You saw your mother?” She looked moved by the revelation and Will remembered that Eloise had been orphaned in infancy, that she also carried that longing and curiosity to know the woman who’d given birth to her. He nodded and she said, “But why? I mean, why would they murder her when you were born?”
“To ensure that I alone carry the bloodline of the four vampire kings. It relates to the wording of some ancient prophecy or other.” Again he stopped short of telling her about the painting on the chamber wall. Instead he said, “Of course, this was all related to me by Fairburn, speaking for Wyndham, so we don’t know how true it is.”
“It makes sense though. From four will come one – didn’t it say that in Jex’s notebook?”
“It signifies nothing.”
She shook her head, dismissing his comment. “No, Will, it does, whether we want it to or not.”
He heard a floorboard creak above, just someone shifting about in bed, but that in turn reminded him of the unseen watcher from the window.
“What’s on the top floor of the school?”
“Some of the teachers live up there, a few storerooms, I think. Why?”
He stood up. “I’ll be back shortly. I just want to check something.”
“Maybe I could –” He put his hand up to stop her, but smiled reassurance and she settled back against the pillows.
He moved swiftly, along the corridor, up two flights of stairs, then along a narrower staircase on to the top-floor landing. A couple of the rooms showed lights under the doors, though they hadn’t been visible from outside. He counted along, reaching what he thought was the room in question.
It was a storeroom. Will moved to the window and looked down, confident that this was where his watcher had been. But he had no way of knowing who had been up here, only that it hadn’t been Marcus Jenkins and that Wyndham had more than one spy in the school.
He was about to leave, but spotted a box of chalk, which looked as if it had been placed hurriedly on a shelf just inside the door. Will supposed a school was full of chalk, but he still wondered if the same person who’d spied from here had also drawn the diagram under Eloise’s bed.
He left, only hesitating near one of the lit rooms where he could hear a subdued conversation. It was two female teachers, one of them the young woman he’d seen talking on the phone earlier, whispering, laughing quietly, talking in gossipy tones about different teachers.
He listened in for a moment, hoping to hear something telling, but he found himself weakening again rapidly, the hunger pulling him into the void. He walked on, eager to get back to Eloise. The rest of the school was full of the swollen silence of sleep, all those young pulses, gently pumping the blood he so desperately needed.
It was a relief to get back into Eloise’s room where he noticed immediately that she was dressed. Before he could say anything though, she jumped from the bed and took hold of him by the arms, obviously worried. “Oh my God, Will, what’s up with you?”
“Nothing, I’m fine.” She pulled him across the room and they sat on the bed together.
“You look … it’s the blood, isn’t it? It’s horrible, I can’t stand seeing you like this.” She stroked his face, his hair, held his hands, as if trying to soothe the life back into him, tears beginning to form in her eyes. And ironically, her touch, her very presence, while not giving him what he needed, at least made the hunger ebb away again.
He smiled, trying to reassure her. “It looks worse than it feels. Trust me, I’m fine, and always better when I’m with you.”
She fixed her eyes on him, searching for any hint that he was lying, then said, “Can I give you a hug, just for a second? Would that make it worse? Of course it would – what a ridiculous thing to say.”
He shook his head and held her, the warmth of her body almost seeming to pass through him, and she nestled her head into his shoulder, exposing her warm, pale neck. As much as she soothed him normally, it was agonising to be so close to the richness of her blood, knowing how long it would sustain him, but he would not pull away, not until she was ready and comforted and reassured.
Eloise, almost as if she’d heard his thoughts, slowly eased away and sat back against the headboard of the bed. She nodded, looking a little embarrassed, acknowledging that intimacy was a trial for him, not a comfort.
He looked at her. “Why are you dressed?”
She smiled. “When I was cleaning away the chalk marks, it triggered something and when you went off just now, it came to me. Did you find anything by the way?”
“Nothing important.”
“OK. I remembered where I’d seen that bronze relief we found – the circle with the four swords around it. It might even be a boar’s head, but it’s not really visible any more.” Will gave her a questioning look. “Henry’s Maze. It’s here in Henry’s Maze, in a pentagonal clearing. So, OK, this might be a leap, but don’t you think it’s possible that the maze is a map …”
“Of the labyrinth.” Will laughed a little, remembering his one meeting with old Henry, long ago in the cathedral library, seeing now that he of all people, his brother’s distant descendant, might have been able to tell Will more than he’d ever realised. More than that, he thought back to the way Henry had looked at him, as if at a familiar ghost, and wondered if he’d recognised the likeness from the painting in the circular chamber. “So you want to explore the maze?”
“That’s why I’m dressed,” said Eloise. “Who knows what clues clever old Henry left for us. And if Wyndham’s trying to kill me, all the more reason to get a move on.”
Will nodded and stood. He’d explored the labyrinth and had found nothing new, but perhaps Henry, across his long life, had discovered its secrets, and had left clues to them in the maze as Eloise suggested.
But as they descended through the school in darkness, Will’s mind also raced back up to the top floor, to that storeroom, focusing on the box of chalk. It simply served to remind him that they were struggling to find out, clue by clue, things that Wyndham already knew.