Prologue
The Tomb
“So you want to be scared, eh? Really scared? Then it’s darker, deeper, into the bowels of the earth!” the tour guide exclaimed, dramatically sweeping a section of his black cloak over his shoulder. He had a pleasant, cultured Edinburgh accent. R s that rolled. Clean enunciation. “Yes. Deeper. For those of you who scoff at the ghosts of simple murderers, at the haunting mewlings of their victims, we will go onward.”
“Can’t hardly wait!” intoned Jeff Dean, a dark-haired, good-looking college kid.
“Yes, onward, lead us onward, for heaven’s sake—I’m just shaking in my pants!” his date, Sally Adams, added. She was a pretty blonde who managed to ruin the effect of her youth and beauty with a skintight blouse and short, short skirt. Her lipstick was way too red for her coloring and covered more of her face than just her lips. She pretended to be bored, but she was hanging on to Jeff’s arm.
“For heaven’s sake, yes, please do something scary!”
That came from another of their companions, a tall, skinny, red-haired boy-man named Sam Spinder.
His attitude was bored and taunting as well.
Jade MacGregor had come with the three of them and six other college-age visitors. She had met up with the group earlier while touring the castle; they had suggested the night excursion. Though they were a younger group— rich kids visiting Europe on their folks’ money—and she was a brand-new publisher and writer, working on a travel piece about medieval lifestyles, she had found the thought of the tour intriguing, and important to her work, so she had joined the group. She had come to Scotland on her own, something she had wanted to do, but touring a foreign country alone could be quite lonely. The young people in the group were twenty-one and twenty-two to her twenty-five—not such a great distance in age—but she was already feeling as if she were fifty and they were living in a perpetual realm of adolescent football, fraternities, drugs, and rock and roll. She’d been dismayed to discover the extent of this group’s recreational drug taking—they had come with an arsenal of pills and a variety of things to smoke. That they took such chances in a foreign country seemed exceptionally worrisome to her, and they had razzed her about not joining in.
Still, the tour was proving to be fun and entertaining. The night was beautiful, a full moon rising. It was fall, and the commercial significance of Halloween had touched Edinburgh along with ancient superstitions. The streets were dressed for autumn and for Halloween; ghoulies and ghosties adorned shop windows. It was a good night to be out.
Her companions, however, were somewhat wild.
They were proving to be rude as well.
She wasn’t quite sure what they were on tonight, but it was making them bold and brash—and insultingly cruel.
They were enjoying heckling the tour guide, who seemed to have the ability to take it all in stride.
“I’m shaking in my boots already!” Jeff said, faking a shiver. “Where did you get that spiel, that accent—that look? High school drama? Ooh, I do shake!”
The sarcasm directed at the hardworking tour guide was unfair, Jade thought. Their guide was good—thirtyish, tall, lean, and yes, dramatic, perhaps a would-be Hamlet who had found his living as a tour historian, adding pathos to his recitations about the long-ago evil that had plagued the streets of Scotland. He had taken great relish and delight in extolling the inhumanity of man, explaining deaths by plague, by execution, and by murder most foul. They had gone underground, where the modern city had grown up over ancient closes, roadways that once housed homes, shops, taverns, and the everyday life of a people. No more. Now, by night, the underground was empty— except for the tours. Ghosts were introduced in different rooms; grisly murders were described in detail. This was, after all, the city of Hare and Burke, royal murder and espionage, and the utmost butchery imaginable—and unimaginable—in the medieval world. The tour guide’s grasp of history was very good, Jade knew, because she had studied much of it.
The guide had led them from the rear of Saint Giles— where children were hanged once upon a time for so much as stealing a loaf of bread—around dark and shadowy streets, and then down into the closes.
An older couple with them had appreciably oohed and aahed at the proper places; a young couple with boys of about nine and ten had asked questions and received answers, totally enjoying the tour. There was a single man on the tour, older than the college crowd, but by how much, Jade couldn’t exactly say.
He was extremely good-looking, with fascinating dark eyes, the kind that could seem ebony one minute, then suddenly lighter the next, a curious brown shade, even ... red. He was tall, very tall, perhaps six-foot-three, and because of his height, he appeared lean, but having stood behind or near him at various stops along the tour, Jade knew that his shoulders were very broad and that beneath the fabric of his well-cut suit coat, he was probably nicely muscled. He watched the tour guide with interest. He hadn’t jumped at all, or oohed or aahed, but he had listened to all the tour guide had to say with a respectful silence. He had kept somewhat to the rear of the group, in the shadows, never speaking.
Actually, only the college crowd—nine in the group—had hissed and mocked and heckled. The young couple and their children had been totally intrigued.
“Where are we going?” Tony, another of the boys, asked. He’d been among the worst of the hecklers, a football player with a shaved head and shoulders the size of Cleveland and no neck between them. He seemed to consider himself too tough for the concept of fear. He and Jeff had already agreed to be volunteers. Pretending to be men branded as traitors, they had been lightly flogged with the guide’s cat-o‘-nine-tails, and had turned their backs on the crowd for a pretend disembowelment and hanging.
They had made a huge joke of the proceedings, but the guide had gone along with all their foolery.
“Maybe we’re not supposed to ask,” Marianne, Tony’s girlfriend and, oddly enough, the shyest and sweetest in the group, suggested hesitantly.
“Don’t be ridiculous,” said Ann, a tall, thin redhead with the impatient air of a bored scholar. “If you don’t ask ...” Her voice trailed; she lifted her palms.
“You don’t get to find out,” Marianne said.
“And know if you really want to go or not,” Ann said sagely.