There was a man, sitting in a wooden chair opposite her, facing the door. She hadn’t noticed him at first because he was in shadow, between two of the torches. He was dressed like a monk with a long, dirty brown habit that went all the way down to his bare feet. He was wearing sandals, and a hood over his head. He was slumped forward with his face towards the floor. Scarlett had already decided to turn round and go back the way she had come, but before she could move, he suddenly looked up. The hood fell back. She gasped.
He was one of the ugliest men she had ever seen. He was completely bald, the skin stretched over a skull that was utterly white and dead. His head was the wrong shape – narrow, with part of it caved in on one side, like an egg that has been hit with a spoon. His eyes were black and sunken and he had horrible teeth which revealed themselves as he smiled at her, his thin lips sliding back like a knife wound. What had he been doing, sitting there? She looked left and right but they were on their own. The boy called Matt – if it had even been him – had gone.
The man spoke. The words cracked in his throat and Scarlett didn’t understand any of them. He could have been speaking Russian or Polish
… whatever it was, it wasn’t English. She backed away towards the door.
“I’m very sorry,” she said. “I think I’ve come the wrong way.”
She turned round and scrambled for the handle. But she never made it. The monk had moved very quickly. She felt his hands grab hold of her shoulders and drag her backwards, away from the door. He was very strong. His fingers dug into her like steel pincers.
“Let go!” she shouted.
His arm sneaked over her shoulder and around her throat. He was holding her with incredible force. She could feel the bone, cutting into her windpipe, blocking the air supply. And he was screaming out more words that she couldn’t understand, his voice high-pitched and animal. Another monk appeared at the end of the corridor. Scarlett didn’t really see him. She was just aware of him rushing towards them, the long robes flapping.
Still she fought back. She reached with both hands, clawing for the monk’s eyes. She kicked back with one foot, then tried to elbow him in his stomach. But she couldn’t reach him. And then the second monk threw himself onto her.
The next thing she knew, she was on her back, her arms stretched out above her head. Her legs had been knocked out from underneath her. The two men had grabbed hold of her and there was nothing she could do. She twisted and writhed, her hair falling over her face. The monks just laughed.
Scarlett felt her heels bumping over the stone cold floor as the two men dragged her away.
FATHER GREGORY
The cell was tiny – less than ten metres square – and there was nothing in it at all, not even a chair or a bench. The walls were brick with a few traces of flaking paint, suggesting they might have been decorated at some time. The door had been fashioned out of three slabs of wood, fastened together with metal bands. There was a single window, barred and set high up so that even for someone taller than Scarlett, there wouldn’t be any chance of a view. From where she was sitting, slumped miserably on the stone floor, she could just make out a narrow strip of sky. But even that was enough to send a shiver down her spine.
It was dark. Not quite night, but very nearly. She realized that it would be pitch black in the cell in just a couple of hours as they hadn’t left her a candle or an electric light. But how was that possible? It had been around two o’clock when she had entered St Meredith’s and the sun had been shining. Suddenly it was early evening. So what had happened to the time in between?
Scarlett was shivering – and not just because of the shock of what she had been through. It was freezing in the cell. There was no glass in the window and no heating. The bare brickwork only made it worse. Fortunately she had been wearing her winter coat when she set off on the school trip and she drew it around her, trying to bury herself in its folds. She had never been so cold. She could actually feel the bones in her arms and legs. They were so hard and brittle that she thought they might shatter at any time.
Desperately, she tried to work out what had happened. For no reason that she could even begin to imagine, a man she had never met had grabbed her and thrown her into a cell. Could she have strayed into a secret wing of St Meredith’s, somewhere that no one was meant to go? The single strip of sky told her otherwise. That and the freezing weather. She remembered that the monk had spoken in a foreign language.
She was no longer in London.
It seemed crazy but she had to accept it. Maybe she had blacked out at the moment she had been seized. Maybe they had drugged her and she had been unconscious without even knowing it. Everything told her that this wasn’t England. Somehow she had been spirited away.
With a spurt of anger, she scrambled to her feet and went over to the door. She wasn’t just going to sit here and wait for them to come back. Suppose they never did come back? She might die in this place. But she quickly saw that there was no way through the door – not unless it was unlocked from the other side. It was massive and solid, with a single keyhole built for an antique key. She tried to squint through it but there was nothing to see. She straightened up, then hammered her fists against the wood.
“Hey! Come back! Let me out of here!”
But nobody came. She wasn’t even sure if her voice could be heard outside the cell.
That left the window. Could she possibly climb up, using the rough edges of the brickwork to support herself? Scarlett tried but her fingertips couldn’t get enough grip, and anyway the bars at the top were too close to squeeze through, even assuming she could drop down on the other side. No. She was in a solid box with no trapdoors, no secret passages, no magic way out. She would just have to stay here until somebody came.
She sank back into a corner, trying to preserve what little body warmth she had left by curling herself into a ball. The strange thing was, she should have been terrified. She was completely helpless, a prisoner. This was an evil place. But she still couldn’t accept the reality of what had happened to her and because of that it was difficult to feel scared. This was all like some bad dream. Once she had worked out how she had got here, then maybe she could start worrying about what was going to happen next.
An hour passed, or maybe two. Finally there was a rattle of a key in the lock, the door swung open again and two monks came into the cell. Scarlett couldn’t say if they were the ones who had grabbed her in the corridor as all these people were dressed the same way. Their hoods were up and they were skeleton-thin. Even if you stood them up against a wall, it would have been difficult to tell them apart.
One of them barked out a command in the strange, harsh language she had heard before and when he saw that she didn’t understand, made a rough gesture, telling her to stand up. Scarlett did as she was instructed. Her face gave nothing away but she was already thinking. If they took her out of here, maybe she would be able to break away. She would run back down the corridor and find the nearest exit. Whatever country she was in, there would have to be a policeman or someone else around. She would make herself understood, somehow find her way home.
But right now, the two monks were watching her too closely. They led her out with one standing next to her and the other directly behind, so close that she could actually smell them. Neither man had washed, not for a long time. As they reached the corridor, Scarlett hesitated and felt a hand pushing her roughly forward. She turned left. The three of them set off together.
Where was she? The place had the feel of an old palace or a monastery, but one thing was certain – it had been abandoned long ago. Everything about it was broken down and neglected, from the peeling walls to the paved floor, which was slanting and uneven with some sort of mould growing through the cracks. Naked light bulbs hung on single wires (so at least there was electricity) but they were dull and flickering, barely able to light the way. The air was damp and there was a faint smell of sewage.