Mort Read online

  Three people, one large, two smaller, had come this way recently.

  From the size of one set of prints, Sir David knew one of them was certainly Khan. The others were those of a man and a woman. Sir David had no idea who they might be or where they were now.

  Sir David looked down at his wrist. According to his monitor Smiler was heading directly towards him.

  He swallowed hard and checked the gun once more.

  As he did so he heard a rumbling growl from up ahead and, despite the cool of the ventilation shaft, Sir David felt a single bead of sweat trickle down his forehead.

  ‘Once more unto the breach, old boy,’ he whispered, wiping his brow. He thumbed the safety catch to ‘off’.

  Ahead there was now dead silence. Sir David’s torch beam didn’t penetrate for more than twenty paces. He turned it off and pulled on the night-vision goggles. The goggles might make the difference, although Sir David had a nagging feeling that sabre-toothed tigers came fully equipped with built-in night vision.

  For a few moments the only sound Sir David could hear was the beating of his heart and he began to realise that, armed or not, a fully grown sabre-tooth would be hard to stop in a confined space like this. It might be better to return with some real back-up.

  Like a thermo-nuclear missile.

  ‘No need to be silly about this,’ Sir David murmured. He took out his mobile and dialled Mort.

  ‘It’s about Smiler,’ began Sir David as he lowered the barrel of the gun.

  And there, quite suddenly, less than half a metre from his face, was the sabre-tooth, his long fangs glowing ghostly green through the night-vision goggles. Sir David’s legs almost buckled and the phone dropped from his hand.

  ‘Sir David? Sir David? Hello?’ Mort’s voice, tinny through the tiny phone speaker, went unanswered. ‘What was that about Smiler?’

  Sir David opened his mouth to scream and his finger scrabbled for the trigger of the tranquiliser gun but it was too late. Much too late.

  With Trish and Nigel safely stowed in the storage cupboard in the ballroom, Khan headed for a supply store in the basement that Mort had thought was secret.

  But Khan had known about the store for years. Not only that, safely stuffed down the front of his grimy Mongolian underwear, he had an electronic universal key card that he’d swiped from Mort’s desk. You didn’t get to be ruler of the known world just by being big and mean. Sneaky also helped.

  As he waited for the lift to the basement, Khan glanced through a window. He could see the last of the afternoon light fading as the eclipse reached completion.

  Khan reached out a thick grimy finger and jabbed the lift button impatiently.

  Ten seconds later the lift arrived and Khan reached the store a minute after that. He slid the card into the electronic reader mounted on the wall and the heavy door opened to reveal a long storeroom lined with neatly arranged shelves of weapons and supplies. Everything looked clean and new and expensive because that’s exactly what it was.

  Khan was inside for less than forty seconds.

  From the shelves he selected a German-made hand-held rocket launcher and a set of US Marine-issue night-vision goggles. Ever since he’d found the store, Khan had dreamed about the fun he could have if he ever managed to get rid of his shock collar. He’d been practising with the equipment in the storeroom for years (although until now he’d never actually risked firing anything). If Khan had anything to do with it, that was going to change today. He slipped the goggles around his beefy neck and left, the door sliding shut behind him.

  Taking a set of stairs, Khan dropped down another two levels and turned into another long corridor. He walked fifty metres before stopping outside another steel door, from behind which came a deep electronic hum.

  A slow smile spread across the Mongolian’s face.

  He was standing outside the very heart of Festering Hall: the main generator room that fed the building’s always-hungry power needs.

  There was, of course, a back-up power supply in a secondary power room, but that would take an hour or more to be primed, and had never been called into action.

  What Khan had in mind was going to take much less than an hour.

  He again swiped the stolen card through the security reader.

  Once inside, his beard vibrated as he stood on a wire-mesh walkway that encircled the massive generator housed in its protective cage. Here the noise was much louder and very much more intense. The generator was concreted into the granite floor, almost two full storeys below where Khan was standing. Nothing short of a nuclear explosion would destroy it.

  But this didn’t matter to Khan. He wasn’t interested in destroying the generator. If things didn’t work out as planned he’d be stuck on the island, and he had no intention of being stuck there without electricity for however long it took to fix. How would he watch American Idol?

  Khan clanked across the grille towards a wall-mounted metal box containing the main circuit board and fuses. He swung open the door and located the ‘on/off’ lever. Khan placed the night-vision goggles over his eyes and reached out a huge hand. With a grim smile, he pulled the lever to ‘off’.

  The generator gave a long slow moan like a dying animal and, for the first time in nine hundred years, Festering Hall was plunged into complete darkness.

  Agnetha lay back, arms folded, on her big black-quilted bed.

  She sighed and looked out of the long window. Great gloomy clouds hung low over an ebony sea, leaving a thin ribbon of paler sky on the horizon. As Agnetha watched, that ribbon too began to merge with the darkness as the eclipse enveloped the island. She looked at her watch. Almost three-thirty.

  Agnetha had no desire to venture outside. Not with Mort’s stupid Smiler roaming around the place.

  She was sure that both Trish and Nigel would have been eaten by now and was glad that most of her collection were tucked up safe and sound in their compounds, the only exception being H.G.

  As far as she was concerned, H.G. could take his chances in Mort’s silly little lab. She could probably make a new copy later if he was unfortunate enough to run into Smiler. There was bound to be some of H.G.’s DNA hanging around somewhere.

  ‘Serve him right if he does get eaten, the silly old fool,’ Agnetha muttered.

  She reached for her book, First Bite, the 24th in a series of 66 vampire books by a writer called Ursula Moon. The cover showed a teenage girl, dressed in black, looking at the camera. A thin trickle of blood ran from the side of her mouth. All of Ursula Moon’s books featured teenage girls with blood dripping from their mouths.

  Agnetha sighed.

  She was pretty sure that in First Bite the heroine, Beula Swill, would finally get to kiss the hero, dashing vampire Josh Blackshade.

  Agnetha had been waiting for that kiss for 23 books.

  She started reading. Thirty minutes later, after a great deal of talking and a chase by werewolves through a graveyard, Beula finally kissed Josh.

  Which was the precise moment when all the lights went out in Festering Hall.

  Festering Hall had never had a power cut before; not once since they’d electrified the compounds in 1164 …

  Agnetha froze.

  A series of images ran through her mind like a flash-frame montage in a movie: the pulsing generator, the central fuse box, the thick snakes of wiring and fibre-optic cables spiralling through Festering; the technical wizardry keeping everything in the compounds running smoothly; keeping the heat and light operating.

  Keeping the compound gates locked!

  Agnetha jumped up and banged her head sharply on her bookshelf. Ignoring the pain, she fumbled frantically in her bedside cabinet for her torch, found it and pressed the switch.

  It was time for action.

  Agnetha rushed around the room, cramming equipment into a black nylon backpack.

  Spare torch batteries, her mobile phone, some rope, chocolate, all the usual stuff.

  And a stainless steel Weiner & Missen
hand-held multi-shot dart gun loaded with silver ammunition, a baseball bat, a crucifix and an economy-sized can of garlic spray.

  Mort wasn’t the only one with secrets tucked away in the darkest corners of Festering Hall.

  Trish was wriggling so much that Nigel was developing a painful rash between the shoulder blades. She hadn’t stopped since Khan had closed the door to the storage cupboard.

  What on earth was she doing?

  Nigel would have asked her but with Khan’s filthy rag stuffed in his mouth, that was impossible. In fact Khan had tied them up so tightly that the only way to get free would be if one of them could bend their leg over their shoulder and untie the ropes using their toes.

  Trish bent her leg back over her shoulder and untied the ropes using her toes. With his hands free, Nigel pulled the rag from his mouth.

  ‘How …?’

  Trish stood up and straightened her skirt. She picked up her shoe and put it back on.

  ‘Yoga,’ she replied. ‘Six years advanced classes. Tuesday evenings, Unk Shire Institute.’

  Nigel shook his head. He was beginning to think Trish was an android.

  Trish opened the door and looked out carefully. The ballroom appeared to be empty. She stepped inside, her gaze stopping at the open hatchway.

  ‘That’s odd,’ she said, moving towards the opening to the ventilation shaft, Nigel close behind.

  ‘Look,’ she said, pointing at two objects lying just inside the open hatchway.

  She leaned inside and picked them up. As she did so, a familiar roar came echoing up the tunnel towards them.

  Nigel, his face sheet-white, made a sound like a baby seal looking for its mother.

  As Smiler roared once more, filling Nigel’s head with images of curving fangs and razor claws, his jelly legs buckled from under him. He slumped to the ballroom floor like a dropped sock, hitting the boards with a dull thud. At exactly the same time, all the lights went off, and everything went black.

  ‘Oh great,’ said Trish. ‘Perfect.’

  ‘I’m not hangin’ around long, skip. Not with this blasted eclipse comin’ on.’

  ‘No-one’s asking you to, Roy. Just tie us up and we’ll give them another two minutes, no more.’

  The skipper of the Unk ferry checked his watch: 4.08 pm and the skies already close to black. The boat bumped against the Unk Island jetty, its engines churning against a sea as grim as the captain’s thoughts.

  Captain Burns was anxious not to be there any longer than absolutely necessary. He’d already waited twenty minutes longer on this blasted island than he felt comfortable with.

  Everyone had heard the rumours about Unk.

  If you were a local you couldn’t avoid growing up hearing stories. And as well as hearing them, you quickly learned not to ask too many questions about the mysterious DeVere family, not to poke your nose in where it wasn’t wanted. Noses that did poke their way in had a habit of being pushed right back out again.

  The only certainty was that, despite the DeVeres owning almost all the land in Unk Shire, hardly anyone on the mainland ever saw anyone from the island. His grandfather had once told the captain some nonsense about some sort of human zoo on the island, and there had been rumours about the DeVeres being witches, but Burns had dismissed it all as idle village chat.

  All the captain knew for sure was that Unk Island was a damned spooky place to be in the dark.

  He gave an impatient toot on the ferry horn, but wasn’t hopeful. The education woman and her assistant would have been here by now if they were coming back tonight.

  Or ever.

  ‘Where do you think they are?’ said Roy, his eyes scanning the cliffs. Captain Burns could hear the trace of panic in Roy’s voice and hoped his own didn’t sound as nervy.

  ‘How would I know?’ he snapped. He looked at his watch once again and frowned at Roy as if he was to blame. ‘Now cast off! Those two will have to take their chances!’

  Then, as Roy gratefully lifted the rope from the dockside davit, they heard it: a sound like nothing either man had ever heard before and one which they were very sure they never wanted to hear again.

  ‘What was that?’ Roy squeaked.

  ‘What was what?’ said Captain Burns. ‘Let’s go!’

  Then, before Roy could suggest anything so stupid as going to look for the missing passengers, Captain Burns thrust the engine levers forward and the ferry surged into the open water.

  Mort couldn’t believe how difficult today was turning out to be.

  He’d been halfway to the lab with the eclipse closing in when he’d got the call from Sir David. Mort swung the buggy one hundred and eighty degrees and headed for the ballroom.

  As he drove he checked his wrist monitor.

  Sir David – or his dot – was inside the ventilation shaft leading to the ballroom. Mort looked closely at the display screen and frowned. Unless he was mistaken, so was Smiler.

  What on earth was Sir David doing?

  Mort could only guess that Sir David had found the sabre-tooth and, for reasons known only to Sir David, was now bringing Smiler’s collar back to Festering via the ventilation shaft.

  A minute later Mort arrived at the ballroom. He could hear voices coming from inside. Slowly Mort pushed open the door.

  There, about twenty metres from where he was standing, were the two unwelcome visitors. Both of them were standing looking in at the ventilation shaft. Mort saw the woman reach inside the shaft and pick up an object.

  Mort walked slowly towards them, trying to decide how to handle the situation. Perhaps he could pretend to be someone else? Whatever the story was it was about time he got this sorted out one way or another.

  He had reached a spot about ten metres away when two things happened at almost exactly the same time.

  First, and to Mort’s complete surprise, he heard an almighty roar from the clearly not-dead Smiler from somewhere in the ventilation shaft. The man who had been peering into the shaft stepped backwards and fainted.

  Second – and this was almost as surprising as hearing the sabre-tooth come back from the dead – all the lights went out.

  Mort wasted no time wondering why Smiler wasn’t still lying out on the island. Instead he selected the most powerful setting on his wrist monitor ‘stun’ control and began slowly and silently backing towards the door.

  It had been a shock hearing the beast but not as big as the one he would give the sabre-tooth if he came into the ballroom. Mort knew from the wrist monitor that Smiler still had his collar firmly in place. A full blast should do the trick but Mort knew he’d have to get it right first time. Smiler was a tough enough proposition normally, but wounded, he would be twice as dangerous.

  Mort steadied his finger over the controls.

  Then, from the darkness ahead, Smiler let out a howl and flew out of the ventilation shaft, clear over the heads of Trish and the prone Nigel.

  Of course, in the darkness, Mort had no way of knowing this. All he knew was that he was in the ballroom with a sabre-toothed tiger with a grudge.

  A long time ago Mort had spent eight years studying at the Shaolin Monastery overlooking Kathmandu. The experience had left him with some very useful skills, one of them being the ability to ‘feel’ an attacker coming towards you. He could hear Smiler padding around the ballroom, before stopping.

  In the nick of time Mort sensed Smiler coming at him. He dived hard to his left, his shoulder slamming painfully into the wall of the ballroom.

  He only just made it.

  With another roar loud enough to wake the dead, Smiler pounced again but found only empty space. Mort, his shoulder throbbing from the impact with the wall, staggered back into the centre of the ballroom. He slipped on the shiny wooden floor under his boots and fell sideways – something which probably saved his life – just as Smiler flew over his head, his trailing leg catching Mort on the back and sending him flying clear across the room.

  Even as he was cartwheeling through the air,
Mort was estimating the sabre-tooth’s position. He twisted his body and sprang to his feet. The second his toes touched the floor he flexed his knees and bounced upwards as Smiler attacked again. Using all his Shaolin expertise, Mort hung in the air for as long as he could. Feeling the beast pass under him, Mort stabbed a finger down onto his wristband. If the thing was operational, that jolt should have sent Smiler to sleep.

  It didn’t.

  The power outage must be preventing the radio signal that the device needed to function.

  Mort landed once more, this time twisting and rolling sideways until he was wedged into the angle where the ballroom wall met the floor. It made him a less conspicuous target.

  Smiler paced the room, growling. Mort became aware that, like himself, the Molyneux woman was trying very hard not to breathe. And then, quite suddenly, the man with her woke up.

  ‘Where am I?’ he said. ‘Mummy?’

  ‘Shh!’ hissed Trish, clamping her hand over Nigel’s mouth, but it was too late.

  Mort sensed Smiler moving in the darkness. He didn’t know exactly how sensitive Smiler’s sense of smell was, but he did know it was better than his own. There was also nothing wrong with his hearing, so Mort, with nothing he could do to disguise his smell, lay as quietly as possibly.

  Smiler moved in the direction of the sounds. He knew fear when he heard it.

  And fear meant food.

  Smiler moved in on Trish and Nigel.

  As soon as the lights had gone out, Trish reached down to grab Nigel’s collar and haul him as far away from the entrance as possible. As she did so, Smiler exploded into the ballroom and flew over their heads, landing with a crash against the far wall. Then, in rapid succession came a series of blood-curdling roars.

  One of the objects Trish had found was a pair of night-vision goggles.

  Quickly, she put them on and the ballroom became visible.

  She almost wished it hadn’t.