Sgt. Joseph Bell adjusted the collar of his weather cape and pulled down his helmet against the biting wind that hurled itself down the hill from Allerdale.
Digging his frozen hands into the pockets of his coat, he cursed again the twist of fate that led him to be the only man to hand when the inspector decided he wanted the library gallery checked again. So many documents hidden away in corners and small spaces, tucked into books, mouldering from the damp in the house, some stained gorily crimson from the clay.
"Take care of it yourself, Joe - we don't want any more gossip about this case" The Inspector had said. Gossip, thought Joseph. If there was one thing you could guarantee about this situation, it would be gossip.
The house came into view across the moor. Once grand and imposing, it had lost none of its awe, but now it impressed for different reasons. The fact a place suffering such dilapidation was still standing was impressive in itself - it looked like some great broken beetle lurking there on the hill, waiting to devour its victims. And devour them it did, apparently.
Talk about cursed, Joseph thought. How many violent deaths, how many lost souls, did it take to make a place permanently living and evil. He wished he could turn around and let the bitter wind blow him back down the valley to the town.
The iron gates, hanging open now, squeaked as they swung a little in the wind. The gateway, with its crest above. A crest with two mottos. The first was a quote quote from Psalm 121 - I lift up mine eyes unto the hills. But the second read Mors Vincit Omnia . Death Conquers All, the inspector told him it said. What sort of motto is that for a family to live by? He trudged up the last remaining yards to the great doors that opened into what had, two hundred years ago, been one of the finest halls in the county, maybe in the country. Joseph's grandmother had worked at Allerdale Hall in the days of Sir Thomas' grandfather, Sir Edward, and had told stories of grand balls, where the public rooms had glowed with the light of a thousand candles and the beautiful Lady Elizabeth Sharpe had descended the great staircase like an angel coming down from heaven, with diamonds in her hair glittering like suns in the golden glow.
The house's grim influence had hit Lady Elizabeth hard, Joseph thought. She had given birth to a stillborn daughter two years after the marriage, and then a boy a year later that had died after a few days. Just three years after that she died in childbirth giving birth to James, Thomas and Lucille's father. Lady Elizabeth's husband Sir Edward had never recovered, closeting himself in the mine office, obsessed with mining the crimson clay of the hill. James had grown up strange and isolated, with his father's obsession with the red clay mines and a dangerously intractable and unforgiving nature. He did not, however have his father's business skills. That, combined with loss of trade with an unstable America, led to the dwindling of the family fortune and the loss of the mining business. This despite his marriage of convenience to Beatrice - wealthy heiress to a widowed father who thought a monied husband with a title would bring his elegant daughter the place she coveted in society. She had been sorely disappointed there, Joseph thought grimly.
Joseph had by now reached the doors, and fished in his pocket for the keys which until so recently had hung from the belt of Lady Lucille Sharpe. He had seen her once when she had come into the town. Beautiful and elegant in peacock blue velvet, with raven hair and porcelain skin like the French doll the Inspector's wife treasured so dearly. Lady Lucille was so beautiful, even with the small scars on her face. A legacy of her brutal father, and nothing to the huge livid scars across her back, if the coroner's assistant was to be believed.
The heavy door swung in, and he walked across the small ante-room to the open archway leading onto a room that still took his breath away, despite his having seen it so often this last few weeks. And it was a few weeks that would be indelibly etched on his mind. The memory sent an involuntary shudder through him, and raised a bead of sweat on his brow despite the cold.
The hall rose majestically through the height of the house, with the ornately carved staircase rising round the walls to galleries at the entrance to each floor. For a moment he imagined the hall full of light, and happy dancers, before a snowflake landed on his face, bringing him back to the present and the task in hand. His eyes took in the gaping hole in the roof, and the break in the rotted floor, where Lady Edith had landed after being pushed from an upper floor by the deranged Lady Lucille. The great fireplace faced him, cold and dark now. He momentarily thought he caught a wisp of black smoke drifting across the opening, but it must have been his imagination, or one of the fat brown moths that still infested the place despite the cold. The fire had not been lit since that chaotic day when they had come onto the scene to find Lady Edith and the American doctor badly injured, and the bodies of Lady Lucille by the mining machine and of Sir Thomas in Lucille's attic room. And that was just the fresh bodies.
He passed through into the long main room, with its two distinct halves echoing the siblings' personalities - Lucille's full of a ramshackle collection of furniture scavenged from the rest of the house, chaotic and busy, her piano somehow crammed into the cluttered space. Thomas' less cluttered, but still littered with drawings and models of his inventions. His library was in this half, lit by a tall window looking out over the mine workings and the bleak hills beyond.
Jacob climbed the small stair up to the gallery level of the library, and made his way to the very end. Here the light was poor and he went back and lit a lamp from Thomas' desk. Some paperwork lay beneath the lamp and he picked it up and looked at it in the purer light from the window. It was a letter from Lady Beatrice to her husband detailing the number of servants she had needed to get rid of. It was dated March 1880, some six months before Sir James' death. He put the letter back down and took the lamp up to the end of the gallery.
Starting at one end of the massive bookcase he pulled a thin volume 'Shibden Mine proceedings 1875-1876', but there was nothing hidden in there other than the minutiae of the clay mine at Shibden. This looked like being a riveting assignment.
He worked his way along the shelf, gradually becoming more interested in the volumes he found, becoming so engrossed that he could not say for certain at what point the sound had started. He gradually became aware of the noise as the hairs on the back of his neck rose. Such an ordinary sound really, and yet so much out of place in the supposedly deserted house. The sound of a waltz being played on the piano at the other end of the room - it hadn't just started, he was certain of that - it had sort of faded into being.
As he turned to walk along the gallery to a point where he could see the piano, the noise stopped abruptly. He quickened his pace and all but ran down the stair to the floor of the room - there was no one there, and he had neither seen nor heard anyone leave the room, just again that imaginary wisp of black smoke. Or maybe it was another of the dark moths. That was the explanation, surely.
He doubted, now. Doubted that he had heard anything at all, but doubted that his imagination could possibly have invented such a thing unbidden. He halfheartedly walked the length of the room, but did not really expect to find anything.
Satisfied, at last, that there was no-one else there, and that he had just let his imagination run away with him, he turned and walked back up the stair to the library gallery. He picked out a random volume, bored with his systematic working from the end of the shelf. Opening it, he dislodged a slim sheet which fluttered out to land at his feet. He picked it up and saw that it was a letter - from Sir Thomas' third wife Enola. A letter that was obviously never posted.
'My dearest Irena,' He read. 'I have not heard from you since my last to you on the 3rd. I have not improved, I am sorry to say. Indeed my cough has become more pronounced, and I coughed up blood last night. I do not see enough of Thomas, and I am very much afraid that Lucille is not as she seemed. In short, I fear that she does not wish me to improve. The last time I saw Thomas I told him that the firethorn tea Lucille gives me does not help me at all. He said that it is simply that the atmosphere in Yorkshire is so alien to me and that I will improve once I am acclimated. He has been very kind to me. I only wish that he would be more.. shall we say, demonstrative in his affections; every night he is off to his workshop with his models and generally does not come to me until after I am asleep.'
Joseph stopped reading - he felt like an intruder on this poor woman's thoughts and confessions to her intimate friend. Although the Inspector had wanted evidence, and this was evidence, Joseph felt like he was seeing things he should not, and did not want to. He wondered whether 'Irena' had ever heard again from the unfortunate Enola after her marriage to Sir Thomas and removal to Yorkshire.
Joseph suddenly realised that he could hear a piano again - not from the obscured other end of this room, but from further away into the house. He was confused. Where else would there be a piano?
Tucking the tragic letter into his tunic pocket, he descended to the floor of the room, taking the lit lamp with him. He again walked the length of the room, but the piano could still be heard, distinctly, drifting through from the hall. He suddenly found himself not wanting to enter the hall, despite it being, not only the way to the rest of the house, but also his way out of the house.
The hairs on the back of his neck raised again. There was no denying it. No blaming it on an overactive imagination, or one of Mr Dickens' 'undigested lump of cheese'. There was the unmistakable sound of a waltz being played on the piano. Played very well, but he felt that this was not the time to be appreciating music - especially music that had no business being there.
It's Her. The involuntary thought flitted through his mind. It's Lady Lucille. She played the piano, and played well by all accounts. Then his rational mind closed round the thought and smothered it. No. She is dead. Dead and gone and laid out quietly next to her brother in the family vault in the chapel. Dead, with her brains dashed out with a spade by a desperate Lady Edith in fear for her life. Not that that would ever get out. Not after everything they found at Allerdale Hall.
He edged out into the hall. Snow drifted lightly down through the gaping roof to settle softly on the broken boards beneath. Despite the chill, sweat started to bead his upper lip and forehead. The sound of the piano was more distinct here, brittle in the sharp air. It must be someone playing in one of the upper rooms. A real, living human being come into the house from the town to play a trick on him. His breath condensed into a cloud around his head as he worked his way carefully around the hall. The boards gave a little, but they were more than usually supported by the frozen clay beneath and only creaked occasionally.
He looked over towards the elevator, marvelling that such a contraption should be incorporated into a private house at all, let alone one in the wilds of Yorkshire. It seemed so out of place. He wondered if it would work. He edged towards it, and the sound of the piano became a little clearer. He realised now that the sound was coming not from the upper rooms, but from below, drifting up the elevator shaft.
Joseph thought better than to use the elevator. Too noisy. No need to give the prankster any warning that his game had been discovered. Joseph was still going with his theory that this was nothing more than a joke being played on him by one of his fellow policemen - probably drew lots to see who would have to come up to the Hall to scare him. The Sharpes probably had a phonograph that was being played down there to try to scare him.
He moved through to the hallway by the kitchen and made his way down the stairs there to the next level down. The cellar was cold and dank, and the walls dripped with the red clay making them look as though they were bleeding. The drift of black smoke caught his eye again, drawing him further down the cellar stairs to the next level.
On this level were settling tanks for the scarlet clay that the Sharpe family had mined for two hundred years. Where the Sharpe siblings had hidden their victims' bodies and dumped their belongings. Ahead of him, at the bottom of the stairs, were some of those belongings. A steamer trunk and other oddments, the pitiful remnants of lives taken by the Sharpes in their quest to preserve the family home and the mines. Joseph was never quite clear on whether Sir Thomas had had much of a hand in the actual killings - certainly one of his wives died while he was away from the Hall. His sister Lady Lucille had been 'sent away' for a while after the death of their father. But Sir Thomas had, apparently without any qualms or hesitation, assisted in the plan and in the disposal of bodies in these very settling pits. The memory of dredging up bodies and bones from the pits, all stained redder than they would have been when they went into the pits, made Joseph's stomach flip for a moment. The remains dripping gory crimson onto the tiled floor as piece after piece was pulled from the vats was an image that would stay with him for ever.
He could no longer hear the piano music. He did not know when it had stopped, but he had been sure it was coming from this floor. There was only silence now. He did not think there was any other way out of this room, other than by scaling the mining equipment to the surface. Surely not even the most dedicated joker would want to do that.
Joseph walked slowly the length of the room, looking behind each of the settling vats. There really was no-one there and now the first hints of actual fear began to make themselves felt. What the Hell was going on? No one could have passed him, so where had the music come from and where was the player. He turned, and there was the wisp of black smoke again, drifting across the width of the room about halfway down.
He stared at it, wondered for a second if there was a fire there, but it faded even as he watched. Then he saw it again. It materialised at the end of the row of tanks, seeming to grow out of the air itself. It drifted, but not quite like smoke. He was very frightened now, crossed himself, but was drawn towards it unwillingly.
'Our Father who art in ..' he began, in a small shaky voice that was barely his. His throat dried before he could finish the line, halting his voice.
He felt his legs moving forward, though he wanted to turn and run, climb the filthy mining equipment to the surface and freedom. The smoke ahead of him grew thicker as he drew closer, coalescing into a tall form, still smoke-like, like a reflection seen in a window in the dark. He could swear it was Lady Lucille's form!
His will regained the control of his body, and he turned and fled down the room, the mining machine now his door to freedom. He did not get far. He felt a push as he ran, and tipped headlong into one of the deep, gory vats, drawing in red liquid clay, coughing and spluttering with tears of pure terror now running from his eyes.
He fought to the surface of the sucking, sticky liquid - to look straight into the sunken eye sockets of a face he recognised as Lady Lucille Sharpe. Ravaged and red as the clay he floundered in, but the face he knew from that one sight of her. He opened his mouth to scream, but a bony scarlet hand pressed down on his head and he just sucked in clay instead. The hand pressed down harder, as Joseph Bell's struggles grew ever weaker, and weaker, and finally ceased.
In York, Edith Sharpe sat at a writing desk in the small hotel where she and Alan McMichael had taken rooms. Suddenly she sat bolt upright, fear etched on her face, as a piercing pain shot through her abdomen. She grabbed at the desk for support, shaking the inkwell. A drop of ink spilled onto her dress. Her face grew white, her vision filled with red - red as the clay of her recent home - as she saw that the stain on her dress had formed the familiar shape of one of the fat brown moths that infested Allerdale Hall.
Lucille drew herself up to her full height, revitalised by the life she had stolen from the policeman. This was her home. Hers and Thomas', and she would protect it from all comers. She made her way to her piano in the main room. Where was Thomas? She would find him. Find him and make him hers again. His body had been hers, his heart had been hers, his spirit would be hers, no matter what that weakling Edith had thought. Well Edith had lost. Lost Thomas, lost Allerdale, run away with her American Doctor. She would never return. Allerdale Hall belonged to the Sharpe siblings, and would do so for all time, until the sun grew cold and the stars went out.
Strains of a waltz drifted from the Hall, out of the doors and over the moor.