Page 22 of Monstrous Travels as Wicked as Sin

“Triple,” Percy responded, splaying out a thick wad of large banknotes.

The driver eyed the money in the rearview mirror, but all the show seemed to do was piss him off. He pulled a lever, clicked the boot open, and, mumbling about the wife and three childrenhe had waiting for him at home, yanked their suitcases out and into the dust before either could catch up with him.

Joe shot Percy a bewildered look, while Percy shoved a cigarette in his mouth and took up the unwieldy cardboard box of ‘essential supplies’ he had composed before they left Lerwick. He dropped a few paces back from the road to avoid the spray of dirt and gravel that went up with the departure of the taxi, then sighed out, “Every time.”

Joe remained where he was, in the middle of the road, head tilted at Percy in rather a cynical manner, Percy thought.

“What haven’t you told me this time?”

“What?” Percy’s handsome brow furrowed. “Nothing at all. You know Barmiston Hall’s a dangerous place. It’s hardly news.”

Joe wrenched his and Percy’s suitcases to the edge of the road, holding a handle out for Percy to take. “You didn’t tell me it terrifies burly Scottish men.”

“In the interest of searing honesty, you should know that Barmiston Hall terrifies burly Scottish women, too. Smoke.” He plumped his lips a little to draw attention to the unavoidable cigarette that was hanging out of his mouth.

With a particularly angry click of his thumb, Joe lit the cigarette for him, then, a second time, thrust the handle of a suitcase towards Percy. Percy’s reply was a shrug and consequent jingle of the bottles of brandy, wine, and whatever else he’d decided he needed to last a few days above a pub. He turned and commenced a leisurely descent down the hill, so Joe, with a clack of his tongue and a roll of his eyes, took a suitcase in each hand and followed, allowing Percy to commence his story. “Barmiston Hall is a place steeped in legend and myth for some eight hundred years now.”

“I didn’t realise it was that old.”

“It’s not. Not in its entirety. A good portion of the estate was built in the late-seventeenth century, with extensive additionsin the eighteenth. Nevertheless, the land it sits on bears the marks of bronze-age inhabitants, and god knows what it’s seen through the years. It probably picked up its most grisly rumours sometime during the eighteenth century. Bodies, dozens, at least, have been discovered in and around the premises over the years, in various states of mortal disarray.”

Joe jogged a few steps to keep up with Percy’s increasing pace down the hill. “Mortal disarray?”

“Well, all the usual signs of murder—heads smashed in and all that—but some… One woman was found in a remarkable state of preservation. They dated her death to some time around 1770, but she looks like she died yesterday. She was found with a brick between her teeth, hands and feet tied, inside a coffin bound with a locked metal cage.”

“Fuck,” said Joe.

“Quite right,” agreed Percy. “She’s in the museum if you’d like to see her?”

“Um… Maybe. But what else?”

“Witches’ wards, cats and dogs with stab wounds. Strange scrawls have all been found within the walls. A few babies under the stones at the entrances.” They reached the bottom of the slope, and Percy took a sharp left onto a gravel path, shoes crunching merrily as a light fog rolled off the lake and around their ankles. “Sacrifices, one imagines, and enchantments to keep something at bay.”

“Something ancient?” suggested Joe.

“Possibly,” said Percy. “The place was known for the slaughter of a local family in 1605, but when the same thing happened in eerily similar circumstances in 1855, well, people began to talk even more than usual. All the murders from all the years were conflated in the minds of the locals, and the place was abandoned. The blood from that last massacre wasn’t even touched. The bodies were given a Christian burial, of course, butthat was the last time anyone could bear to set foot inside. So for over a hundred years, it remained a grim, gore-ridden time capsule. Until the bolts that were nailed into the doorframe to keep people out rusted and fell free of their rotting wood. That’s when some local teenagers did the usual thing and dared each other to stay the night.”

Joe, sadly, said, “And they ended up brutally murdered too?”

“Quite the contrary.” Percy grinned. “One of those teenagers was my good friend Cleo.” Joe gave Percy one of his particular scowls, which Percy knew he would do, so Percy looked out across the lake instead of at Joe, and continued, “They spent the night. She adored the place. She left the next morning, back to Jordan, but she told me, even though she didn’t set eyes on the estate for another five years, she never forgot about it. She said it had a sad romance that she found so compelling she would dream of it almost every night.” Now he did survey Joe, who, he was pleased to see, seemed appropriately thoughtful.

Percy transferred his cardboard box to one hip, and took a suitcase from Joe in order to help him pass through a narrow divide between two hills—a passage that was paved underfoot and to twelve feet above with grey stone slabs. “Cleo wasn’t all bad. In fact, there was very little bad about her when I first knew her. She was…” Percy trailed off there, aware of Joe’s jealousy, and of the awful things that Cleo had since done that deserved no defence on his part. He shut off his fond feelings, explaining flatly, “Cleo, when she returned five years later, was even more in love with Barmiston Hall. She had been, by that time, married off to a rich husband, a prince, who she wanted to avoid at all costs, so she bought the place as a renovation project. Just as far away from the world as she could get, she said. It became both a refuge and an obsession. She rebuilt the thing, mostly with her own hands, and she saved every original part she could. You’ll feel it when you go in. She’s in the walls.”

Joe’s stomach spun out a queasy lurch with this latest statement, but before he could get a handle on what was a knee-jerk reaction to Percy’s admission of his closeness to a villainess (who, as far as Joe was concerned, was an ex-girlfriend of his), and what was a reasonable aversion to the increasingly unsettling story, Percy pulled up, extended his arm out long, and announced, “There it is.”

Across the lake, far off in the distance, mostly hidden by swirling mists and fog, arose the black and forbidding shape of a tall and terrifying mansion. Joe could see at first glance that what Percy had said of the age, of the architectural styles cobbled together over the years, must have been true. Here the roof rose smooth and slanted; there it was a jagged jumble of stone. On this side a tall, square turret; across the battlements, two small, squat round ones. The ailing sunlight, not helped by the darkening skies, weakly illuminated a patchwork of stone. Beige, grey, black, red brick, tiles… The place was a mess, but it was a beauty. It was all the wrong things compiled and shoved together disparately until they were exactly the right things. Scary but homely. Austere but cosy. A shelter, but one that screamed at Joe, viscerally, to stay the hell away. Yet he couldn’t quite say why.

He didn’t want to identify with Cleo—he refused to on every possible level. But something about the place grabbed him by the throat, just as it must have done to her. There was a pull, even as it repulsed him. It sparked a certain empathy in him that he immediately yearned to deny, so he was thankful when a curious Percy finished his silent assessment of Joe’s unspoken reaction, and said only, “The pub’s this way.”

Percy continued around the bend of the hill, then turned right to circumnavigate another. Just as the rise of that hillside fell from view, so a single building, sitting in a wide, desolate green field, surrounded on all sides by the undulations ofancient land, revealed itself. There was green, more green, and white sheep grazing about the place, and the inn in which they were to stay. No other sign of life was visible in that small valley, bar a church at the very top of a distant rise, nothing more than a white speck encumbered by a giant black cross that loomed bleakly over the otherwise rustic landscape.

But the inn…

From the inn drifted music and light and laughter, and Joe couldn't imagine where all the patrons had come from to fill the place with such mirth.

Percy was already halfway across the lawn, and Joe hurried to keep up, feeling himself physically relax at the thought of a warm pub with ales and potatoes (because he staunchly refused to eat anything fish-head-related) but he slowed his pace on approach to the bright red door.

Above it, displayed proudly on a golden rod, was the name of the place, accompanied by a grotesque illustration. A woman’s head, her mouth hanging open in a ghastly scream, her eyes staring in hatred and horror, a man’s hand in her tangle of stringy black hair, stared back at them in violent reproach. From her neck dangled the strings and sinew of the life-carrying matter that had once attached her head to her body, and from that sign, from the mess of her painted decapitated head, dripped red. Real red, which splished and splashed down into a blood-red puddle at their feet.

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