Free The Lost Child by Ann Troup Page B

totality what she had glimpsed through the missing lathes in the door. A staircase of roughhewn stone led down into the darkness of what she was sure had to be a crypt. Switching on the torch she shone it down, leaning back lest a flurry of bats should emerge in a furious glut to tangle her hair and scare her witless. Just to be sure, she banged the stick on the stonework hoping to disturb anything that might be lurking. Years of watching horror films had made her cautious (and people said you didn’t learn anything from TV) and even though she knew it would take little effort to break through the rotten wood of the door, she wedged a stone against the hinge just in case. Ready to face whatever was below, she began to descend, one slippery step at a time – the stick held in one hand, the torch in the other.
    At the bottom of the steps she played the beam of her torch across the walls, gratified to find that she was indeed in a small crypt. A room of about twenty feet square with a low vaulted ceiling. She was disappointed to find a distinct lack of sarcophagi, and even more dismayed to find that she was not the first to have discovered the hidden chamber.
    Several beer cans lay around her feet, and someone had spray painted a crude pentagram on the floor. The room had a distinctive smell of stale urine mingled with mould; an acrid combination, which stung her nose and made her want to sneeze. Pulling her T-shirt up to cover the lower part of her face, so that the smell of washing powder would mask the other stench, she explored further, quickly realising that there were bodies in the walls.
    Heart beating with excitement, she moved closer and tried to read the inscriptions. Various dead Gardiner-Hallows had been entombed beneath the chapel, the duration of their often brief lives had been engraved on slabs of marble which were mortared into place.
    ‘Cool,’ she whispered. The sound set off an eerie echo around the room, as if the dead were mimicking her voice. Her fascination with the deceased gentry was brought to an abrupt end when she heard something above.
    Whirling round, torch beam swinging wildly and her heart seeming to leap into her throat, she screamed, just as a torrent of small stones tumbled down the steps. A moment later she got a grip, there was no way she was getting stuck in that place without a fight.
    With arms that shook like branches in a high wind, she took a better grip on the stick and raised the torch to illuminate the steps. ‘Who’s there?’ she yelled, ‘you’d better get back because I’m coming up swinging!’ She thwacked the stick against the stonework for good measure. Mustering up her battle cry she flung herself at the steps, howling and yelling like a thing demented. Taking them two at a time, she leaped out at the top like a demonic jack-in-the-box, whirling the stick above her head in a dervish-like frenzy. It met nothing, and her arm sagged as the movement ebbed away along with her adrenaline.
    It took a few moments for her eyes to adjust to the sudden influx of light, so initially the grizzling heap hadn’t appeared to be human. For a split-second she had been half convinced that she was about to be attacked by a huge bear, or more likely a wild boar as she had read somewhere that Britain was full of them. Breathing heavily and braced to use the stick if she had to, she squinted at the now whimpering thing.
    It was a man, a giant one, crouching on the floor with one hand over his head and the other waving wildly to ward her off. ‘Whoa! What the fuck…?’ she said, all the fight seeping out of her. ‘You scared the bloody bejaysus out of me!’
    She recognised the man as Derry, the village idiot as Miriam called him. She knew that Elaine had met him and had said that he was a gentle, sweet thing even if he was a few biscuits short of a barrel. ‘What are you doing scaring me like that?’ she demanded, righteously indignant. She stared at him angrily then started