In her daze Nina saw the damage her collapse was causing to the wall-lined bookcases and file cabinets, but she was on the verge of oblivion. In her ears the sound of thunder rumbled, but she soon noticed that it was not the voice of the cloudy heavens outside. Toppling the cabinet had caused the wall behind it to collapse just about when she did. By the time Nina hit the ground she knew that the cacophony she heard was her doing.
Knocked out momentarily, Dr. Nina Gould stopped coughing and the cardigan she’d used to shield the bloody mess of her malady fell from her grasp. The rumbling of the crumbling wall eventually ceased, as if it were waiting patiently for Nina to wake up. For a moment she lay motionless on the floor, never having reached the panic button for help, but her pain revived her. Nina groaned weakly as she tried to prop herself back up to a seated position.
Noticing that nobody has come running to the archive room, Nina was surprised. To her it had sounded like an explosion or an earth-shattering quake.
“How could they not have heard that?” she asked herself as her eyes found the debris of hundreds of years of masonry at the foot of a black chasm in the wall. Blurry sight impaired her scrutiny of what she saw in the large hollowed-out wall, but there was no mistaking what it looked like. Even the blind could see that whatever was in the wall was supposed to remain hidden. What slept inside had been carefully concealed by double walling, as the exterior of the two walls was clearly built decades, even centuries, later than the first. Nina squinted her eyes to better discern the details, but soon wished she hadn’t.
“Jesus!” she shouted in shock, slapping her hand over her mouth two syllables too late. Her big brown eyes stared, wide, for a moment before she stumbled to her feet and wiped the blood from her nose. It left an ugly smudge of scarlet across her cheek, but she had no time for grooming now. Slowly Nina approached the gaping hole that had split the wall about seven feet from the floor, trying to dismiss the thing she saw inside.
“Oh God, please don’t be a corpse. Please don’t be a fucking dead body,” she murmured as she came closer through the floating curtain of dust. Suddenly she saw it. Gasping, she pinched her eyes shut. “I saw it. I saw it. I saw it and it is a fucking dead body…” she whispered in terror, freaked out by her discovery. In her life Nina had seen her fair share of creepy things and even saw people getting killed a few unfortunate times, but to know that she was alone with this corpse in an ancient chamber just exacerbated her repulsion. But much as she felt repulsed, Nina felt a natural compulsion urging her to get closer and investigate her find.
Above her the wild weather exhibited its fury, lending an air of macabre apprehension to the whole affair. “Like being in a goddamned horror flick,” Nina muttered, praying that the storm over this part of Hampshire would not knock out the power and leave her in the company of the dead thing under the floor of the main building in the pitch darkness.
Upon reaching the foot of the tear in the masonry the small historian held her breath. In the stuffy ark, reeking of old mud and decay, the figure sat. It had been a full-grown man, from what she could tell by the moldy clothing it was wearing, and it was sitting with its face buried between its knees. Its arms, however, were tied behind its back. The most horrific part of it was that a plate of food had been placed next to a bottle of water — out of reach.
“Christ! How cruel!” Nina exclaimed. Upon closer investigation she noticed that the back of his skull was crushed inside of the skin. It denoted suicide, from the evidence of bone fragments embedded in the wall behind him where his head would have rested. Nina could take no more. Violently she vomited from the grisly and malevolent way in which the man had met his end. “This is sick!” she moaned in between spewing fits. “So fucking sick!”
“You have no idea how sick we can get, Dr. Gould,” Dr. Christa Smith said from the staircase. Nina started so that she lost her footing and fell against the ghastly paper-skinned skeleton. She let out a gritty scream, but her true worry was coming down the steps to corral her in. Behind Christa, Clara followed, saying, “I told you she would be snooping, didn’t I?”
“Yes, you did, love. Now shut up and let me think,” Christa said.
As Clara descended the stairs she pulled down a leather strap, which covered the entrance by trap door.
“And I thought the place had no door,” Nina muttered to herself as Christa approached her from the bottom landing. “You could have just denied this, you know,” Nina told her, staying in the tight tomb of the ill-fated man to keep distance between her and Christa. Nina saw the gun in Christa’s hand and knew that she couldn’t escape a bullet with so little space to move in. She knew she was cornered.
“Why would we bother to deny it? They could identify him by dental records and by the timeline of when his wife reported him missing,” Christa replied.
“As if she doesn’t still hound us to this day,” Clara rolled her eyes, getting a deadly look from her friend for it.
“Why don’t you shut your mouth and close the trap door, Clara? Make yourself useful!”
“You just love patronizing Clara, don’t you? Pity not all people allow you to treat them like shit. Must be hard to find such a loyal door mat,” Nina said loudly for Clara to hear.
“Don’t attempt to drive a wedge between us, Nina. You’ll just embarrass yourself all the more when you know why she is loyal to me,” Christa smiled. “You were not supposed to be drained before that fucking nicotine in your blood stream fell considerably, but I guess dirty blood is better than none at all.”
“Wow! You’re a vampire too?”
Nina felt her feisty nature possess her, just like in the old days when she’d had to take shit from the misogynistic Prof. Matlock at the University every day as fellow in Edinburgh. “No wonder you’re such a raging bitch.”
Clara and Christa laughed together as Clara pulled a concealed lever that separated the wall opposite that of the tomb where Nina stood. A hidden compartment opened with a deep rumble, the size of a doorway in the rocky wall.
“You don’t really believe in vampires, do you, Dr. Gould?” Christa giggled. “Still, you’re not very far off in your assumptions.”
“Ready!” Clara called from inside the wall. Christa raised the silver barrel. Its Cyclops eye stared Nina straight in the face and she could almost feel the power of the slug splitting her head open. But Christa had far more nefarious ideas. “Move!” she told Nina, cocking the hammer back. With the gun she ushered Nina toward the obscure entrance Clara had opened.
“So, are you going to wall me up as well? What is your problem with historians?” Nina asked sternly, maintaining her condescending sarcasm and hiding that fact that she was terrified.
“Not yet. You see, Dr. Cotswald did not have what you have,” Christa said, pushing Nina violently into the doorway.
“If he did, he would have been a girl. Genius!” Nina kept mocking. She imagined all the things Sam Cleave would have spat at his captors. That way she was assured that she would piss Christa off. After all, that was one supremely effective trait of Sam’s.
“Don’t make me gag you, Dr. Gould,” Christa threatened, grinding her perfect teeth. It had always astonished her how cocky her female captives behaved as opposed to the, dare it be said, stronger males.
They walked down a small offshoot with a concrete floor that quickly flowed out into an average-sized room, tiled from wall to wall. Even the floor was decked out with white tiling, which was what scared Nina the most.