As he lifted the mask to eye level, the buckle on the chin-strap made a muted tinkling sound, and the mask’s shadow suddenly reared up on the wall behind him. For a moment Catrin felt she was back there again in that room, in the shuttered half-light, the web of the mask over her eyes. She saw the two perching shapes on either side, their feathers shifting, spreading. She felt a sweat over her neck, down her back. Her nerves were tingling, alert to the slightest move in the air.
She gripped the scythe tight. The pain focused her, she clung on, waves of anger coursing through her. She let it burn in her now, screwed up her eyes, tried to see what was ahead.
As the beam edged hesitantly forward it picked out another door. Again she thought she could smell Huw’s cologne, fainter this time. She closed her fingers over the scythe and tried to make out any movements or sounds further in, but there was nothing. As the light spread again she got a glimpse of a large cavernous space. From far within she thought she heard the low whining call of ravens. If there are birds here, there must be another route in from outside, she thought, but peering ahead she could see only more blackness.
‘This must be the place the locals used to think was a mouth to hell,’ the old man whispered.
She took a coin from her pocket and threw it out in front of them. There was a dull clattering sound, then absolute silence.
Catrin moved forward slowly now, feeling the ground ahead with her scythe before putting her feet down. On either side the space had broadened significantly and it was impossible to tell how far it extended around them. The beam spun upwards and caught a ceiling covered with tapestries woven with images of the planets and constellations, their colours faded, and the tattered linings hanging down.
Then it illuminated a wall painting, about twenty feet high. In the centre was an oak. On the upper branches were the stars and the planets and a woman with long golden hair.
‘This must be where the occult order met,’ the old man whispered. ‘This is all ancient Celtic imagery. That’s the tree of life, the figure at the top must be the Great Earth Mother Goddess.’ He moved the beam down over the moon and stars. ‘This is the Upper World, realm of stars, celestial beings, the dwelling place of the spirits of the air.’
As the light moved down, abruptly the imagery changed. Catrin saw black tangled roots and flames and strange, distorted faces. Sitting in the centre was a giant with the head of a stag and long curved horns. At his feet were horned beetles and snakes, and on his shoulder a large raven with a crooked beak.
The old man kept the beam on the image of the raven. ‘That figure is the Lord of the Lower World, where much of our imagery for the devil comes from. The raven is his servant, the spirit of the dead.’
The beam moved over the giant horned figure, down to his cloven feet. In the low light she could make out some huddled shapes over against the far wall. The old man was bending over something under the horned figure. It looked at first like a low wooden altar, or shrine. On it were tall vessels resembling censers in a church, their silver dulled by the years.
Catrin ran her hand along the back of the altar. At the bottom of the hollow, her fingers touched pieces of card, some slick and bending, others hard, slightly grainy. She reached in further, and lifted them out.
She nudged Tudor to keep a watch, as she drew them into the light. They were photographs, several dozen of them, and she spread them out in a semicircle on the ground. Most were of figures wearing long, flowing robes, similar to those in the photographs from Rhys’s source. They had joined hands and were dancing in wide circles. All wore hoods, deep hanging cowls that half hid their faces.
Holding the torch closer, she could make out a boy with long curling hair down to his shoulders, his eyes shadowed with kohl. She recognised him immediately as one of the boys in the photographs in Pryce’s room. Another showed a girl of about fifteen squinting in strong summer sunlight. She had long, jet-black hair, just like another of the fans in Pryce’s room.
Catrin pointed at another photo of a young girl, the side of her face emerging from deep shadows. ‘This is one of the nineteen mispers. Her bones were found on rocks up the coast. She also looks like one of the fans in the scene around Owen Face.’ This confirmed to her what she’d already suspected. The early Face fans who’d gone missing and the nineteen youngsters who’d gone missing from the area over the years were all one and the same group of people. The common element was the cult, that’s where the young missing persons had disappeared.
She took the torch from the old man and looked more closely at each of the pictures, shifting them into different combinations, bringing some together then moving them apart. She was seeing echoes between some of the younger faces and those of the figures in robes. It was not the echoes between two ages of the same face, but something vaguer, more like a mirroring of certain inflections in the same features across different faces and ages.
Many of the faces had the same high cheekbones, the same heavy arched eyebrows, which the older girls had tried to pluck and disguise, the same high noble-looking foreheads, like Face’s. The same large brown eyes. Catrin put down the torch and closed her eyes. The faces were swirling, spinning, but merging in the darkness into a single compound face. She knew now what it was she was seeing, but part of her mind was telling her that this was something too unnatural to be possible.
It looked as if the missing persons might all be related by blood. They had features in common, but with all their different backgrounds she knew this couldn’t be. She felt her mind groping for explanations, but none made sense. Tudor was shifting his place behind her. He looked anxious to get out now. Quickly Catrin reached her hand in, pulled out the remaining photos. In these ones the people looked older than those she had already seen. She recognised some of the same figures, but as younger children.
One showed a girl in a tie-dye T-shirt and broad-rimmed sunglasses sitting on a bench by a pier. A boy on a tricycle, staring at something out of shot. At the bottom a girl of about seven. She stood on a coastal path, huddled against the cold, looking away. Behind her was the black, glassy surface of the sea, bathed in a muted winter light. Her thin dress gave little protection against the wind. Her feet protruded beyond the swoop of her skirt, sockless. For a moment Catrin felt again the whip of the wind against her face, her toes in the icy grass.
She tried to focus on the picture, but couldn’t. Her fingers had gone clammy, and the photo slipped to the floor. She took deep breaths, but the air felt close, stale, like the air in a tomb. She didn’t remember the picture being taken. That meant it had been taken without her knowledge, by someone watching her. She looked at the other pictures: all had been taken from a distance. The other youngsters had disappeared, their bones washing up years later along the coast. She wondered why they had all been chosen, why she had been chosen. A part of her wondered now if she’d live to find out.
Catrin picked up the photo and put it with the rest in her pocket. The old man had crouched beside her. She felt him pulling her down behind the altar. He was pointing deeper into the cave.
She could see little at first, just the flickering of tapers. Far down in the darkness were a dozen or more figures, wearing long robes and hooded. She thought she recognised the gait of some regulars from the bar and the older men who had smoked their pipes out on the rocks. All carried burning tapers that threw long shadows over the ground.
Gradually in the feeble light she made out more figures. Some were short, barely waist-height to those on either side and some were holding hands. These must be the children, the ones she had seen down in the woods. Their eyes glimmered in the dimness.
At the edge of the group something was being drawn along the ground. It was a man’s body, the hands and legs tied, and it was masked and hooded. Over it a cloak seemed to shudder and long coloured ribbons hung down on either side. Something about the outline of the body reminded her of Huw, the broadness of the shoulders, the long thin legs.
Then as the body moved
into the circle of tapers she saw the cloak was made up of the wings of ravens, and the ribbons were trails of bloody flesh, and suddenly the caves were filled with the birds’ screeching. The hood over the eyes was dark and wet with blood. The body jerked in the rush of beaks and claws, then disappeared into the blackness.
She felt a rush of anger mixed with crushing fear. The place was closing around her like a curse. She tried to think rationally, logically. All those little moments she’d shared with Huw – his tenderness, his vulnerabilities, that sense she’d had that he’d needed her, that she’d needed him as much, maybe more if she’d let herself. If she survived she knew these thoughts would never let her go. She prayed death had come to him quickly.
The tapers receded quickly into the cave. One of the men seemed to turn, beckon to her. His head was featureless under his mask, then she could no longer see him. The central space was empty again.
Hesitantly she edged forwards, Tudor close behind her with the torch. He moved the weakening beam over what lay around them. The space was made up of large rough boulders coated in moss. On the walls were elaborate carvings, warped faces and ancient horned gods. This was the area she’d seen on the screen. In the centre was the bed, sheeted in black plastic. Deeper in, the space was lit with candles, as it had been in the two films.
She turned to check they were alone. It was impossible to tell. The shaft further in was covered with lines of small bones, glowing in the light. At the end between torches stood a stone statue with cloven feet and a stag’s head. The bones were too small to be adult and had been cleaned, as unnaturally white as those in an exhibit. Heaped under the statue were feathers and smaller animal bones that might have been those of birds or rodents. A sense of death clung to the place.
Tudor had moved further in. On the far side the wall was higher, made up of more rough stones coated in moss. Between the stones were metal rings from which chains hung down, and below them piles of old mattresses. From somewhere among them came a rustling, that might have been the sound of a small animal. A shape slipped away into the darkness. For an instant, Catrin caught sight of a human head, its forehead a sickly pallid colour. Whoever it was seemed in a daze like a sleepwalker, staggering this way and that in the gloom.
She saw the veins on the person’s arms were covered with black scabs and abscesses. It looked like a young woman; for a moment her eyelids fluttered, diaphanous against the torchlight like trapped moths, her pupils staring blindly up into her skull.
Tudor drew the girl gently back by her shoulders, wedging the torch into the brickwork. One of her wrists was attached to a metal chain. Her face was slack, saliva running down onto her breasts. He cupped his hands and brought water from a drip above to her lips.
The girl looked like the one Catrin had seen on the bed from the monitoring room, but she couldn’t be sure. Her face reminded Catrin of some of the faces of the children in robes. She took the pictures from her pocket, looked at them under the beam. Then the pictures of the same children at earlier ages, taken from a distance. Among them was the picture of herself by the sea: she watched Tudor as she put it under the light. He didn’t react. She moved her fingers from one similar feature to the next and peered up at him, waiting for a reaction.
‘They’re all his,’ he said quietly, ‘all of them. They’re all his children.’
She took this in, shivering now, trying to shut away one part of what it meant so she could still think clearly. It fitted with the rest of the dismal picture. Jones or whoever he was had had children with various women in the area. Then when the women had drifted away, he’d stalked the children. Later he’d drawn them back into the scene around Seerland. It would have been a good cover, the band had a reputation for attracting drifters, lost souls, suicides waiting to happen. When they’d started going missing, no one would have been that surprised.
The old man was still smiling his cracked smile. She’d expected him to be nervous but he seemed calm, almost serene. She touched the girl’s wrist where the metal had chafed it. Along the forearm, under the scabs and dried mud were the lines of an old tattoo, a long, hooked beak. It looked like something half buried under the skin, she thought, something that had scratched its way in and was waiting to be woken.
Gently she put the girl’s arm down and looked up at Tudor. He was staring into the centre of the room where there was nothing but dust and the shadows. He nodded slowly, looking at her as if she must already understand. ‘To gain favours from his master, the witch believes he has to make the greatest sacrifice of all. He must sacrifice to him his own children.’
Catrin was feeling faint. Through her mind spun images of the elaborate crucifix carved above Huw’s door, the crucifixes in Face’s grandmother’s house. She sensed they must have already known some of the horror of it.
The old man had stepped back into the dimness. She could no longer see him clearly. Around her the wind was rustling through something hanging near her; what, she couldn’t tell. Then the old voice, or an echo. Each time Tudor’s words began again she felt the horror closing in around her, a sudden vacuum, shutting away her breath. She was shaking her head, trying to make the words stop, but they wouldn’t.
She couldn’t hear his words now. Though he was near, only a few feet away, his voice seemed at a distance. There was only one thought in her mind, one question which everything seemed to have been leading up to, a question that seemed to be at the black heart of it all. She knew it was one of the most ancient human beliefs: the greater the sacrifice, the greater the power that emanated from it. This was the law Jones had lived by, he had sacrificed more than his soul, he had sacrificed something far more precious, the souls of his own children. He had always known they would die. But what did he believe he had received in return for such a sacrifice? What could have been worth such a price? Immortality, a secret power too terrible to name. She wondered if she’d ever live to know what it was.
She looked for the beam of Tudor’s torch but could no longer see it. The girl had gone too. She heard a low rasping sound then muffled screams. Picking up the scythe, holding the blade out ahead, Catrin inched forward.
There was a shuffling noise behind her, and when she looked up she saw a man with his face hidden behind the long hair of a wig. Slowly he peeled it off and put it down. She thought she could hear Jones laughing to himself. As she was about to cry out, he put his fingers gently to his lips.
‘Nothing’s what it seems,’ he said quietly.
He looked tired, his eyes bruised and reddened. He pointed at a chair opposite. ‘I’ve been waiting for you,’ he said.
She said nothing at first, reached over with the scythe, held the blade against his neck. But he didn’t move, he seemed almost oblivious to her presence. ‘Where’s the old man,’ she said. ‘And the girl?’
He looked blankly at her as if he didn’t know what she was talking about and then he smiled.
He’d put his head in his hands, his fingers pushing up the thick grey hair so that she could no longer see his face. ‘I’m not who you think I am. I’m a friend.’ The weak, cracked voice was hardly recognisable. ‘But not a very useful one, I’m afraid.’
‘You killed Rhys because he finally got too close to you, didn’t you?’
‘Rhys was a good cop, a good man.’ His shook his head, his hands still covering his face. ‘He was not long for this world, he was in the last throes of addiction. He knew he only had a few months left to break the case that had haunted him all his life.’
‘The case of those nineteen young people who had disappeared.’
‘Twenty if you count Face.’
‘Twenty-one if you count Caris, Old Tudor’s girl. Yes, Face was just part of a much larger pattern of disappearances. But his fame obscured that fact, and there were those who wanted to keep it that way.’
‘Face was never Rhys’s main interest. Face was just a way of getting finance from Powell for tracking down the man behind the disappearances.’
?
??You, Angel Jones.’
Past the frames along the wall she got a brief glimpse into a further stretch of the tunnel, lit by low-watt strip lights. Rows of narrow bunk beds lined the walls.
‘I’m a very bad man, Catrin.’ He hesitated. ‘But not as bad as you think I am.’
‘So you tricked Rhys. You knew he was obsessed with the case. You gave him a lead, but you wanted something in return. You wanted your freedom.’
‘He perjured himself, yes, made it look as if my conviction had been unsafe. So I got out. But it wasn’t a trick.’
She pushed the blade tight up against his neck. ‘Of course it was, you were able to give him a lead in the case because you yourself were the man behind it all. But what you gave him, it was too much. It led him to you, so you killed him before he could expose you.’
‘No,’ he said. ‘You’re looking at everything the wrong way up.’
She waited but he said nothing further. He’d begun to play his thick hair through his fingers, staring out into space, his face blank.
‘You see,’ he said, ‘it was Rhys who came to me, not me to him.’
‘Why?’
‘Because he’d heard something, something vague but to him tangible enough to make him take the risk of releasing me. It was just a rumour really,’ he said quietly. ‘Almost a legend, going around the scene. He must’ve picked it up on the streets.’
‘That was?’
‘About this girl I knew, an underground figure, hardcore, into extreme edge play. How one night she’d got high on meth and told a strange story about being a member of a cult. About how they wore masks, went on heavy trips and how all the members had disappeared, one by one.’
‘So Rhys wanted you to find this girl. He saw her as a lead in the case, that was why he got you out.’
He was nodding, peering out at her from between his fingers.
‘Rhys owned me, he gave me back my life, a chance to do something good, but he could also have taken it away again. I was his man, I got the job here because this was where the girl was. I got close to her again. That was how I found those photos.’