Alex Van Helsing The Triumph of Death - By Jason Henderson Page 0,69
a patch of green earth fifty feet wide, and Astrid and Alex wandered through hurriedly after hiking across the fifty-acre island. Every few minutes, one or the other of them would stop to look out at the water and the dark shadow offshore, wondering if they would be discovered. They stopped in the middle of the graveyard—barely observable as it was, just a series of rectangles of worn low stones. A high Pictish slab stood at one end, before three long strips of stone in the grass.
There was a ruined church nearby, roofless and mostly destroyed, its walls made of flat stones. That was a more recent building, but even it would have lain in ruins when Polidori was here. Alex was lost again.
He threw Astrid a dismayed look. “All I see here are ancient stones. Is there any way we can do another incantation, something like what you did with the saltshaker?”
“I’m afraid it’s not a bag of tricks,” Astrid said. “You know, I’m sensitive sometimes to spirits? But, Alex, I don’t feel anything here. Maybe because it’s so old.”
“Wouldn’t you feel it?” he asked, searching. “In ghost stories a body that’s been moved always feels wronged because it’s not in its proper place.”
Astrid shrugged. “Could be. But I’m not sensing it.”
Alex backed up several yards from the circle, looking at the ruins as they cast their dark silhouettes against the gray sky.
He studied the grass, watching its dips and hills, thinking of the letter from Polidori. Something had to give them a stronger clue.
“The coarsest sensations of men,” he said.
“Yeah,” Astrid said.
“It’s a line that brings us to this island because it was used in the part of the book that was set on this island. But that’s not enough. You do the saltshaker magic and we get to this area, but that’s not enough.” He paused, thinking. “The coarsest sensations of men.”
She put her hand on her hip and looked back at him, waiting for him to make a point.
Once again Alex wished he had Sangster with him. He shook his head. Screw that. I can do this. “What is a coarse sensation?”
Astrid went along with him. “Something…rough? Like rubbing a cat the wrong way?”
“Yeah…” Alex trailed off. “Everything here is rough. Rough Viking ruins, rough ancient Pictish ruins, rough Christian ruins. So maybe something else, maybe rough like, rough, like nasty.”
“Vikings were pretty nasty,” Astrid said.
Alex nodded. He’d read about some of the ways Vikings slaughtered their enemies. “But sensation,” he went on. “That’s like a feeling—a coarse sensation, right? But sensation, what else does that make you think of?”
Astrid thought. “Something amazing, or impressive, like a…spectacle?”
“A sensation is a spectacle.” Alex nodded, circling again. “So what’s a coarse sensation?”
“An ugly spectacle,” Astrid said slowly. “A debased, big, ugly spectacle.”
“Polidori lived here,” Alex continued. “He had a hut here, which is gone now. But these ruins would have been here. He’s telling us to look for the place of an ugly spectacle. There’s only one thing I can think of that would fit that bill.”
“Human sacrifice.” Astrid’s eyes lit up.
“You said that pain leaves a mark on the world, is that right?”
“Yes. Absolutely.”
“Somewhere around here was a place of human sacrifice. Can you find that with your skills?”
Astrid nodded slowly. “I can try.”
“Do you have to…cut yourself again?”
“I don’t think so,” she said, a little distant. “I just have to be willing to…”
“What?”
“Feel it.”
Astrid stepped away from him a few paces, turning her back to him as she stood facing the sea. She bent and took off her shoes, and in her bare feet stood still in the grass, surrounded on all sides by the legacy of ancient peoples.
Alex thought he heard her whisper, Mother Gretel, open me up, let me feel, and then her whispers twisted into a language he couldn’t understand.
The wind off the ocean bit his ears as it picked up, and he felt his flesh crawl, his mind tingling with something like the static. She was setting him off but in a different way. She began to tremble as she brought her open hands to her sides, and then her right arm shot out and up to her hair, and she pulled away a ribbon in one of her pigtails. The ribbon whipped in the wind and extended with her arm, flipping and pulling her hand off to her right.
He heard her let out a tiny sob and let go of the ribbon, and it drifted, landing in the grass.