The Evil at Monteine. Brian Ball
BORGO PRESS BOOKS BY BRIAN BALL
The Evil at Monteine: A Novel of Horror (Ruane #2)
Mark of the Beast: A Novel of Horror (Ruane #1)
THE EVIL AT MONTEINE
A NOVEL OF HORROR: RUANE THE WITCHFINDER, BOOK TWO
BRIAN BALL
COPYRIGHT INFORMATION
Copyright © 1977, 2012 by Brian Ball
Published by Wildside Press LLC
www.wildsidebooks.com
DEDICATION
For Elisabeth
CHAPTER ONE
I had decided to drive on to Monteine. I wanted to speak to Richard Ulrome at Monteine Castle, International Marine Oils Promotion, Research and Projects Division.
“You’re demeaning yourself, girl,” I told myself. “You’re chasing him. If he can’t take the trouble to ring every day, the hell with him.”
The visit was to have been a pleasant surprise for him. It showed I cared about the sponsorship he was after. I had worked out what I’d tell him.
I’d be calm and polite when I told Richard I’d arrived to talk about us, and what the hell was I supposed to do when he sailed away for the Three-Oceans Race. “You think I’m going to sit at home waiting?” I intended to say. “Not me. You can’t ask me to stay home knitting sweaters for twelve whole months, can you?” Then I’d tell him he wasn’t the only man around, and what did he think of that? I was going to tell him that I couldn’t wait around for a winter and a spring and a summer and an autumn. Who can? Not me, I told myself. Not Anne Blackwell.
I was as mixed up as it’s possible to be by the time I saw the North Sea. On the North Yorkshire coast you have to drive along the tops of six-hundred-foot cliffs, and the sea fills your horizon, stretching out with a grey insistence to the Arctic. Thick cloud covered the sky. The coast, the cliffs, and the sea weren’t the cheeriest of sights, nor was Monteine Castle.
It reared up on a colossal shelf of grey stone on the highest promontory for miles. The Castle had been built around and into this grey pinnacle. Two enormous turrets surmounted a massive keep, built on three levels, each with its crenellated and castellated curtain walls. There was no sign of ruin or decay: the Castle was intact, a forbidding mass that dominated the sweep of Monteine Bay and the small fishing town six hundred feet below.
Monteine Castle was ugly and menacing, in the way that some old buildings can be. By the time I drove up the newly asphalted road that led to the lodge gates, I felt like turning back to the little town in the bay.
Not two miles from the Castle was Monteine Landing, the little town that got some sort of a living from a couple of pubs with summer accommodation and what’s left of the inshore fish. I’d seen fishing-cobbles, and red-faced men shaking with laughter as they finished their beer when I’d driven up the long, winding road to the Castle.
If I couldn’t get a bed at Monteine Landing, I’d have tea and drive back to finish my Harrogate assignment, then ring through to my son’s Aunt Gloria to have her tell him that Mummy would be back that night. I didn’t want to face Richard.
Would you believe it, he spotted my Fiat as I turned.
“Anne!” he mouthed. I didn’t hear him for I over-revved the engine the way I’d been told not to by a succession of men from Tony’s father onwards. “Anne!”
I saw him waving in the mirror. Richard has a tanned, clear skin. There’s no sign of a wrinkle though he’s in his mid-thirties. His frame has the deceptive slimness of an athlete. I thought he was undernourished when I first met him, which was at one of Freda Langdon’s parties just after he’d raced in what yachtsmen call the South Atlantic Triangle. He came in second because he’d been blown off-course by a fierce January storm. He wasn’t exactly a household word, but he was one of the top dozen of his kind.
I remember staring at him and deciding in the same instant I wanted him. A nice Scottish electronics engineer I’d been with for a month or two without any real commitment on my part saw the look I gave Richard; he said something to me about leaving, but he must have suspected at once that our affair was over.
A week after the party, the Scot conceded defeat and Richard and I had a marvellous five months. I knew I was in love with him when he said he’d entered another race, one that would take him away for the best part of a year. I tried very hard not to show my sheer dismay, then in the morning it hit me that I wouldn’t see him for weeks, then months, then a whole year,
The trouble was that I’d got used to being hurt till Richard, then I didn’t want the kicks any more. I came from a miserable home. My parents were grocers who sold out a prime site to a supermarket chain and went to live in Majorca when I was sixteen. They didn’t like me, never had; they didn’t like one another much either. My father was fifty-one when he married my mother, who herself was in her late thirties. She’d been his shop assistant. I think of them in that grocer’s shop knowing one another too well and getting married for no other reason than that I was on the way. They didn’t want me in Majorca because I was into mild drugs at fourteen and experimenting with acid at sixteen, which was when I dropped out of school, home, and everything else I’d known. I got pregnant soon afterwards and yelled for help. My parents wanted me aborted; Tony’s father agreed with them: I’d been horrified.
Yet soon after that I began to learn how to earn my living. Tony did that for me—you have the child and you accept that you have to provide. I’d managed, because I have a small talent for the design business. Life wasn’t easy, but I managed. I thought I was in love a few times, but nothing lasted, nothing mattered. I was hardened. But not invulnerable.
For the first time since Tony’s father asked me to have an abortion as the price of his marrying me, I was absolutely desolated. A year without Richard? No, I’d yelled. I did the whole feminine thing, the yelling and the bawling, then the outrage.
Richard had been firm. The race was the culmination of his life’s work. He said he was leaving in the morning for Monteine Castle to talk over the sponsorship International Marine Oil had offered. His yacht would fly International’s house flag. If he won, they’d get marvellous publicity; and they were a large, generous combine. I told Richard they could have him.
I sulked when he left in the morning. He rang that evening, but I said the kind of stupid things that one is ashamed of even before they’re out of one’s mouth. He didn’t ring Tuesday or Wednesday; on Thursday I panicked.
I’d intended visiting my Northern contacts—that’s what I told Gloria, Tony’s father’s sister, who loves my boy as much as I do—and I rang around making appointments and began my Lincolnshire—Yorkshire—Cheshire—Lancashire circuit, which normally takes three days. I held out till Friday afternoon, when I finished buying in Harrogate, before setting off to see Richard.
When I saw him waving, I began to laugh aloud. The Fiat’s tyres squealed as I braked.
“Anne!” he called again. “I love you!”
I let out the clutch at once, the Fiat stalled, and he had the car door open in a moment.
“If I hadn’t seen the way you came along the drive I’d have said I was dreaming, Anne.” He flicked the seatbelt release and disengaged me from the straps. I was out of the car and in his arms without any effort on my part. He kissed me and I knew I’d wait a year or whatever he said.
“I tried to get in touch this morning, Anne—I didn’t want to ring until I was fairly sure I’d do for the job.”
“Job!”
So far as I knew, Richard was visiting Monteine Castle to arrange some kind of sponsorship deal with a multinational oil combine. Richard was a good bet to win the Three Oceans Race, and whatever happened they’d got their money’s worth.
Over his shoulder I saw a tall, blonde-haired woman of maybe forty-five or so regarding us with some interest. She pretended to be