Nailed by the Heart by Simon Clark Read Free Book Online

earnest blue eyes. "Tell me about it later.
Now ... Come on, let's have a look around before it gets too dark. Do
you remember the gun?"

    "A
real gun?"

    "A
real one, kidda. Come on, let's go find it."

    David
ran to the door as Chris fished the key from his pocket. One of the
first things the last owner of the place had done was substitute a
user-friendly Yale for the old clunking Victorian lock. It opened
easily (no Frankenstein castle creak, he thought). Father and son
stepped inside into the gloom.

    The
smell ... Chris breathed in deeply through his nostrils. A little
musty. All the place needed was ventilation. Let the sea breezes blow
through the dusty corridors for a day or two and the place would
smell almost sweet.

    They
were standing in a hallway with three corridors running off-one to
the left, one to the right; another straight ahead to a staircase.
This would be the entrance lobby with the hotel reception desk in one
corner. The light from the windows amply revealed the mounds of
builder's rubble against the walls. There were rusty iron bed-frames
(probably abandoned when the Army moved out), and a neat stack of
breeze blocks that must have been abandoned ten years before when the
builder quit work on the conversion.

    "Come
on. Let's explore."

    They
began a tour of the long, dusty corridors. Some had been plastered
during the conversion attempt ten years ago, but many were still bare
stone, the shoe-box-size blocks of rock so expertly cut and fitted
together you couldn't have put a knife-blade between them.

    The
first room they reached must have been used as a rubbish dump. Old
drinks cans, bottles (one whiskey, most beer-the military certainly
knew how to unwind), broken chairs and, along the far wall under the
window, a dozen olive-green metal boxes, bearing white stencilled
letters. AMMUNITION. They moved on, David at a trot now, wanting to
see the gun.

    "Hang
on, David. Not so fast." This was still a dangerous place.
Cables hung down at intervals; part of the unfinished wiring job.
They shouldn't be live, but you never could tell. The other rooms on
the ground floor were largely a repeat of the first. Clearing these
alone would be like one of the labors of Hercules. Maybe he should
hire some help.

    They
reached another room. Empty apart from an old dining table and three
ill-matching chairs.

    "I
suppose this is where the builders had their break room."

    "Look,
there's some playing cards," said David, walking across the
room, his feet echoing slightly. "Can I have them?"

    "Best
leave them." Chris noticed that they had been dealt out into two
hands. Ten years ago the players had been interrupted. There was also
a packet of dusty-looking Polo mints. Half were gone. The others
looked like circular yellowing bones in the cylinder of crinkled
foil. A box of matches. And open on the table, a newspaper. The
twentieth of April. Ten years old to the very week.

    He
shivered. It made him think of the Marie Celeste. The builders had
simply stopped whatever they were doing and had gone, leaving jobs
half done. Bankruptcy hits you like that. It raised a phantom in
Chris's mind. What happened if their plan did not come off? They were
going to sink every penny they had in the world into this place. If
it failed...

    "David
... Come on, son, time to move on."

    "I've
found something weird," David replied, looking through a door
that Chris had taken to be a cupboard.

    "What
is it?"

    "God
knows."

    "Language."
The reprimand came automatically, but he was more interested in what
lay behind the wooden door.

    David
frowned and swung the door backwards. "Steps, but going down.
And we're already on the ground floor."

    Chris
laughed. "It's a cellar. It was probably used for storage."

    But
a cellar on an island? The building was only a yard or two above the
high-tide level anyway. That meant the cellar was below sea level.
That was impossible. Unless it flooded at every high tide.

    Chris
peered into the black pit of