The Evil at Monteine by Brian Ball

Author:Brian Ball
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: horror, dark fantasy, urban fantasy, grimm, witch
ISBN: 9781434448385
Publisher: Wildside Press LLC
Published: 2012-07-22T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER TWELVE

Charles Schofield had suggested that I could pick up a visitors’ visa at the American Embassy next day—he told me how it could be arranged—and I could be in New York within a few hours. A Transworld mid-afternoon flight was the first one available; it would get me to Kennedy Airport at five-thirty local time. I booked the night-flight back to Heathrow, allowing myself some eight hours to see John de Vito. It would have to be enough time.

The effort of making a decision had helped. Schofield had been right: it was altogether better to rely on oneself, and, full of a quite real sense of hopeful determination, I had set out for the Fens. I would persuade the unknown Ruane to give me what help he could, and then make a rapid visit to the New York policeman de Vito.

Monk Alston is a cluster of thatched houses and a redbrick pub huddled around a large duck-pond; the most prominent of its features is a thirteenth-century church on a small hill half a mile from the centre. I reached the village by a roundabout route, since that’s the way the roads are in the Fen country.

The day was pleasant, warm, and with enough cloud cover to make driving easy as I drove across the wide sweeps of flat farmland. It looked so pleasant. They’d started with the harvest: there was a gold warmth across the fields; there wasn’t a hint of the grimness I shall always associate with the North-East coast of England. Monteine Castle was a part of a different world.

It was about ten when I reached Monk Alston. I stopped by the pub, where a few teenage boys were trying to ingratiate themselves with a pair of girls about their own age; they were all glad of a diversion. I was the stranger, unifying their little gathering. “Is that church St. Adelburgh’s, please?” I asked.

Two of the boys guffawed, and the girls laughed at my dismay.

“Naoww!!” one of the boys said. “That’s the place where they have the—”

He couldn’t finish for laughing, and I felt that familiar apprehension that had been so much a part of my life in the past few days. Charles Schofield had given me something to hope for.

But the boy’s inane laughter was to shatter my composure. His contempt for St. Adelburgh’s indicated that I must cease hoping.

“Can I help?” asked a middle-aged woman.

She had come out and watched, and I had been almost unaware of her. She was thin and small, well-dressed in a careless sort of way as if she had once liked clothes very much but now considered dress-sense irrelevant. “You mentioned St. Adelburgh’s, I think?”

“Yes, I am looking for St. Adelburgh’s. I’ve just come from London.”

“It’s about a mile along the Bixtry road,” the woman said. I looked at her and saw thin, strong features and dark, sad eyes. “I could show you, if you wish.”

“I don’t want to take you out of your way,” I said, for she was offering to accompany me in the car.

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