All Through the Night by M. P. Wright

Author:M. P. Wright [Wright, M. P.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Black & White Publishing
Published: 2016-02-29T05:00:00+00:00

21

I was in a daze as I walked back through the bar to head towards my room. I needed a moment to get my head together, to think straight about Truth and about what I had to do to protect her. The ten thirty deadline that Paxton had fixed loomed over my thoughts like a vulture hanging over a rotting corpse. It was Lazarus who broke my morbid, trance-like state by calling down to me from the top of the hall stairs. I found him stood on the top step, resting against the side of the banister, chewing on a bright-red apple. His right arm hung lazily at his side: in his hand he held a 9mm Beretta semi-automatic pistol. The bluing of the dark metal on the barrel glistened as it was caught by the thin rays of early evening sunlight that shone through the small window next to him.

The clock on the wall behind Lazarus said it was just after a quarter to six. I climbed the twelve steps, stood next to him and glanced down at the gun resting against his thigh. Anxiety had crept into every fibre of my being; my heart felt like it was about to burst out of my chest, my guts fit to spew. I headed for the bedroom, stuck my head around the door and saw it was empty, then glanced back out along the landing, looking for Truth. I turned back to Lazarus.

“Where is she, Lazarus, where’s Truth?”

“Will you calm down, son, the child’s fine. Come with me.”

I followed Lazarus along the short hallway into his bedroom and watched as he walked across the room towards a large walnut chest of drawers stood on top of a threadbare Persian rug. He took the corner of the antique dresser in his hand and pulled it across the wooden floorboards away from the wall to reveal a small hatch door.

Lazarus knelt down and put the Beretta into the waistband of his trousers then looked over towards me, a big smile etched on his face. He jabbed at the secret trapdoor in the floor with his finger as I walked across the room to join him.

“Priest’s hole. It goes into the cellar, then if you need to you can climb down into Hunter’s Hole and the caves. Take you out as far as the edges of Cheddar Gorge, it will. Come take a look.”

Lazarus hooked two fingers through a brass-looped handle on the hatch door and lifted it up. Stale air drifted up out of the hole into the bedroom as I nervously peered down the steep stone steps into the small candle-lit underground room below us, realising as I did the horror of what I was staring down at.

“Jesus Christ, Truth is down there?”

“Yeah, course she is, it’s the safest damn place in the pub for her to be. Why, what’s the matter, did I do something wrong?”

I rubbed at my mouth with the tips of my fingers, struggling to find the words to explain.

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