Sepulchre

  Card seven was Le Diable. Her hand hovered over the card a moment, watching while the malevolent features of Asmodeus took shape before her eyes. The demon, the personification of the terrors and mountain hauntings related by Audric S. Baillard in his book. Stories of evil, past and present.

  Meredith knew now, from the sequence she had drawn, what the last card would be. Each of the dramatis personae were here, portrayed in the cards Léonie had painted, yet modified or somehow transformed to tell a specific story.

  With the smell of the incense in her nose and the colours of the past fixed in her imagination, Meredith felt time slipping away. A continuous present, everything that had come before and everything that was yet to come, joined in this act of the laying out of the cards.

  Things slipping between past and present.

  She touched the final card with the tips of her fingers and, without even turning it over, Meredith felt Léonie step out of the shadows.

  Card VIII: La Force.

  Leaving it still unturned, she sat back on the ground, not feeling the cold or the wet, and looked at the octave of cards laid out on the box. Then she realised the images were starting to shift. She found her eye drawn to Le Mat. At first it was just a spot of colour that had not been there before. A speck of blood, almost too small to see, growing larger, blossoming, red against the white of Anatole’s suit. Covering his heart. For a moment, the painted eyes seemed to hold her in his gaze.

  Meredith caught her breath, appalled yet unable to tear herself away, as she realised she was watching Anatole Vernier die. The figure slipped slowly to the bottom of the painted ground, revealing the mountains of Soularac and Bézu visible in the background.

  Desperate not to see more, yet at the same time feeling she had no choice, a movement on the adjacent card drew her. Meredith turned to La Prêtresse. To start with, the beautiful face of Isolde Vernier looked calmly up at her from card II, serene in a long blue dress and white gloves that emphasised her long, elegant fingers, her slim arms. Then her features started to change, the colour shifting from pink to blue. Her eyes widened, her arms seemed to glide above her head, as if she was swimming, floating.

  Drowning.

  The echo of Meredith’s own mother’s death.

  The card seemed to become darker, as Isolde’s skirts billowed in the water around stockinged legs, shimmering silk in the opaque green underwater world, slimy fingers slipping the ivory shoes from her feet.

  Isolde’s eyes fell shut, but as they did, Meredith saw that the expression shining out of them was release, not fear, not the horror of drowning. How could that be? Had her life become such a burden to her that she wanted to die?

  She glanced to the end of the row, at Le Diable, and smiled. The two figures imprisoned at the feet of the demon were no longer there. The chains hung empty around the base of the plinth. Asmodeus was alone.

  Meredith gave a deep breath. If the cards could speak the story of what had happened, what of Léonie? She reached out, but still could not bring herself to turn the last card. She was desperate to know the truth. At the same time, she feared the story she might see in the shifting images.

  She tucked her nail under the corner of the card, closed her eyes and counted to three. Then she looked.

  The face of the card was blank.

  Meredith rose up on her knees, not trusting the evidence of her own eyes. She picked it up and turned it over, then back again.

  The card was still blank, completely white; not even the greens and blues of the Midi landscape remained.

  At that moment, a sound broke into her reflections. A broken twig, the crunch of stones knocked out of place on the path, the sudden beating of a bird on the wing as it flew up out of the tree.

  Meredith stood up, half glancing behind her, but could see nothing.

  ‘Hal?’

  A hundred thoughts flashed into her mind, none of them reassuring. She pushed them out. It had to be Hal. She’d told him where she was going. No one else knew she was here.

  ‘Hal? Is that you?’

  The footsteps were getting nearer. Someone walking fast through the woods, the swish of displaced leaves, the crack of twigs underfoot.

  If it was him, why wasn’t he answering? ‘Hal? This isn’t funny.’

  Meredith didn’t know what to do. The smart thing would be to run, not stick about waiting to figure out what the person wanted.

  No, the smart thing is not to over-react.

  She tried to tell herself it was just another guest out for a walk in the woods, like her. All the same, she moved quickly to pack away the cards. Now she noticed that several others were blank. The second card she’d drawn, La Tour, and Le Pagad was empty too.

  With fingers made clumsy by nerves and the cold, she snatched at the cards to pick them up. She had the sensation of a spider running over her bare skin. She flicked at her wrist to get it off but there was nothing there, although she could still feel it.

  There was a different smell now too. No longer the scent of fallen leaves and damp stone or the incense she’d imagined a few minutes earlier, but the stink of rotten fish or the sea on some stagnant estuary. And the smell of fire; not the familiar autumn bonfires down in the valley, but hot ash and acrid smoke and burning stone.

  The moment passed. Meredith blinked, suddenly pulled herself back. Then, out of the corner of her eye, she noticed a movement. There was some kind of animal, its fur black and matted, moving low through the undergrowth. Circling the glade. Meredith froze. It looked the size of a wolf or a wild boar, even though she didn’t know if they still even had wolves in France. It seemed to spring from leg to leg. Meredith clutched the box tighter. Now she could make out obscenely misshapen front legs, and leathery, blistered skin. For a second, the creature turned its piercing blue gaze on her. She felt a sharp pain in her chest, as if the point of a knife had been jabbed into her, then the creature turned away and the pressure on her heart was released.

  Meredith heard a loud noise. She looked down and saw the scales of justice slip from the hand of the figure on card XI. She heard the clatter as the brass dishes and iron weights fell to the stone floor of the painting and scattered.

  Coming to get you.

  The two stories had merged, as Laura had predicted they would. The past and the present, brought together by the cards.

  Meredith felt the short hairs on the back of her neck stand on end, and realised that while she had been staring into the woods, trying to see what was out there in the gloom of the forest, she had forgotten the threat from the opposite direction.

  It was too late to run.

  Someone - something - was already behind her.

  CHAPTER 100

  ‘Give me the cards,’ he said.

  Meredith’s heart leapt into her mouth at the sound of his voice.

  She spun round, clutching the cards tight, then instantly recoiled. Always immaculate whenever she had seen him before, in Rennes-les-Bains and in the hotel, now Julian Lawrence looked wrecked. His shirt was open at the neck and he was sweating heavily. There was the sour smell of brandy on his breath.

  ‘There’s something out there,’ she said, the words bursting out of her mouth before she had a chance to think. ‘A wolf or something, I’m telling you. I saw it. Outside the walls.’

  He stopped, confusion clouding his desperate eyes. ‘Walls? What walls? What are you talking about?’

  Meredith glanced. The candles were still flickering, sending shadows outlining the shape of the Visigoth tomb.

  ‘Can’t you see them?’ she asked. ‘It’s so clear. The lights shining where the sepulchre used to be?’

  A sly smile moved across his lips. ‘Ah, I see what you’re doing,’ he said, ‘but it won’t work. Wolves, animals, ghosts, all highly diverting, but you’re not going to stop me from getting what I want.’ He took another step closer. ‘Give me the cards.’

  Meredith stumbled back a pace. For a moment, though, she was tempted. She was on his property,
she was digging up his grounds without permission. She was the one in the wrong, not him. But the look on his face turned her blood cold. Piercing blue eyes, his pupils dilated. Fear trickled down her spine when she thought of how isolated they were, miles from anywhere, in the woods.

  She needed to keep some kind of leverage. She watched cautiously as he glanced around the clearing.

  ‘Did you find the deck here?’ he said. ‘No, I dug here. It wasn’t here.’

  Until now, Meredith hadn’t bought into Hal’s theories about his uncle. Even if Dr O’Donnell was right, and it had been Julian Lawrence’s blue car on the road just after the accident, she could just about believe he might not have stopped to help. But now none of it seemed so crazy.

  Meredith took a step back. ‘Hal will be here any moment,’ she said.

  ‘And what difference does that make?’

  She glanced around, trying to figure out if she could run. She was much younger, much fitter than him. But she didn’t want to abandon Léonie’s workbox on the ground. And even if Julian Lawrence thought she was just trying to scare him with talk of wolves, she knew she had seen something, some predator, skulking around the edges of the clearing just before he had arrived.

  ‘Give me the cards and I won’t hurt you,’ he said.

  Meredith took another step back. ‘I don’t believe you.’

  ‘I don’t think it matters whether you believe me or not,’ he said, then, like a light being switched, he suddenly lost his temper and roared, ‘Give them to me!’

  Meredith stumbled further back, clutching the cards to her. Then she smelt it again. Stronger than before, a stomach-churning stench of rotting fish and an even more pervasive smell of fire.

  But Lawrence was completely oblivious to everything but the cards she was holding. He just kept walking towards her, getting closer and closer, holding out his hand.

  ‘Get away from her!’

  Both Meredith and Lawrence spun round in the direction of the voice, as Hal came running out of the woods, shouting, heading straight for his uncle.

  Lawrence twisted round and charged to meet him, drew back his arm and caught him under the jaw with his right fist. Taken by surprise, Hal went down, blood exploding from his mouth and nose.

  ‘Hal!’

  He kicked out at his uncle, striking him on the side of the knee. Lawrence stumbled, but he didn’t go down. Hal struggled to get up, but although Julian was older and much heavier, he knew how to fight and had used his fists more often than Hal. His reactions were quicker. He gripped his hands together and brought them down with combined force on the back of Hal’s neck.

  Meredith dashed to the workbox, threw the cards inside, slammed the lid, then ran back to where Hal lay unconscious on the ground.

  Julian has nothing to lose.

  ‘Pass me the cards, Ms Martin.’

  There was another gust of wind, carrying the smell of burning. This time, Lawrence smelt it too. Confusion flared briefly in his eyes.

  ‘I’ll kill you if I have to,’ he said, in so casual a tone that it made the threat all the more believable. Meredith didn’t reply. Now the flickering candlelight she had imagined on the walls of the sepulchre was turning to leaping orange and gold and black flames. The sepulchre was starting to burn. Black smoke was enveloping the clearing, licking over the stones. Meredith imagined she could hear the crackle and spit of the paint on the plaster saints as they started to scorch. The glass in the windows exploded outwards as the metal frames buckled.

  ‘Can’t you see it?’ she shouted. ‘Can’t you see what’s happening? ’

  She saw alarm flood across Lawrence’s face, then a look of pure horror leap into his eyes. Meredith turned round, but she was too slow to see it clearly. Something rushed past her, some kind of animal with black, matted fur, a strange jerking movement, and leapt.

  Lawrence screamed.

  Meredith watched in horror as he fell, trying to propel himself backwards on the ground, and then arching his back like a grotesque crab. He threw up his arms, as if wrestling with some invisible creature, striking out at the empty air, screaming that there was something ripping at his face, his eyes, his mouth. His hands were clawing at his own throat, tearing at the skin, as if trying to free himself from the grasp of a hand.

  And Meredith heard the whispering, a different voice, deeper and louder than Léonie’s, reverberating inside her head. She didn’t recognise the words, but she understood the meaning.

  Fujhi, poudes; Escapa, non.

  Flee you may, escape you cannot.

  She saw the fight go out of Lawrence and he fell back to the ground.

  Silence immediately descended on the glade. She looked around. She was standing on a bare patch of grass. No flames, no walls, no smell of the grave.

  Hal was stirring, raising himself up on one elbow. He put his hand to his face, then held out his palm, sticky with blood.

  ‘What the hell happened?’

  Meredith ran over and put her arms around him. ‘He hit you. Put you out for a while.’

  Hal blinked, then turned his head to where his uncle lay on the ground. His eyes widened. ‘Did you . . . ?’

  ‘No,’ she said quickly. ‘I didn’t touch him. I don’t know what happened. One minute he was . . .’ She stopped, not knowing how she could possibly describe to Hal what she’d seen.

  ‘Heart attack?’

  Meredith bent down beside Julian. His face was chalk white, tinged with blue around his lips and nose.

  ‘He’s still alive,’ she said, pulling her cell phone from her pocket and tossing it to Hal. ‘Call. If the paramedics are fast.’

  He caught it but made no move to dial. She saw the look in his eye and knew what he was thinking.

  ‘No,’ she said softly. ‘Not like this.’

  He held her gaze for a moment, his blue eyes flickering with hurt and the possibility of paying his uncle back for what he’d done. A magician, with power over life and death.

  ‘Make the call, Hal.’

  For a moment more, the decision hung in the balance. Then she saw his eyes cloud over and he came back to himself. Justice, not revenge. He began to punch in the number.

  Meredith crouched down beside Julian, no longer terrifying, but pathetic. His palms lay exposed to the air. There was a strange red mark on each, much like a figure of eight. She put her hand on his chest, then she realised. He was no longer breathing.

  Slowly, she straightened up. ‘Hal.’

  He glanced over at her. Meredith just shook her head. ‘It’s too late.’

  CHAPTER 101

  SUNDAY 11TH NOVEMBER

  Eleven days later, Meredith stood on the promontory overlooking the lake, watching as a small wooden casket was lowered into the ground.

  It was a small party. Herself and Hal, now the legal owner of the Domaine de la Cade, together with Shelagh O’Donnell, still bearing the evidence of Julian’s attack on her. There was also the local priest and a representative from the Mairie. After some persuasion, the town hall had given permission for the service to go ahead on the grounds that the site could be identified as the place where Anatole and Isolde Vernier were buried. Julian Lawrence had plundered the graves, but not disturbed the bones.

  Now, after more than a hundred years, Léonie could finally be laid to rest beside the bodies of her beloved brother and his wife.

  Emotion caught in Meredith’s throat.

  In the hours after Julian’s death, Léonie’s remains had been unearthed in a shallow grave beneath the ruins of the sepulchre. It looked, almost, as if she had simply lain down on the ground to rest. No one could account for the fact she had not been found before, given the extensive excavations that had been carried out on the site. Nor why her bones had not been scattered in all that time by wild animals.

  But Meredith had stood at the foot of the grave and seen how the colours of the earth beneath Léonie’s sleeping body, the copper hues of the leaves above her and the faded fragments of material
that still clothed her body and kept her warm, matched the illustration on one of the Tarot cards. Not the replica deck, but the original. Card VIII: La Force. And, for an instant, Meredith imagined she saw the echo of tears upon her cold cheek.

  Earth, air, fire, water.

  Caught up in the formalities and endless French red tape, it had so far been impossible to find out precisely what had happened to Léonie on the night of 31st October 1897. There had been a fire at the Domaine de la Cade, that much was on record. It had broken out around dusk and, in the course of a few hours, destroyed part of the main house. The library and the study were the worst damaged. There was also evidence that the fire had been started deliberately.