Brides Of The Impaler Read Free Page B

This area’s known for them—it’ll pass .
    The tremor didn’t pass; it magnified, and the rumbling grew to a grinding cacophony. All around him now the moon-tinged fortress began to visibly shake. The bench was vibrating.
    “Janice!” he yelled up at the rectory. “Come outside! We’re having an—”
    There was a grinding roar. The bench was lifting, and that’s when Fredrick noticed that a fissure was forming just a yard to his right, and nearly half of the inner courtyard was rising out of the ground. He jumped up, about to race to the center of the yard, but—
    “Jesus!”
    The grinding roar exploded. Another angle of theground he stood on levered upward. Fredrick lost his footing and fell…
    Right on his head.
    smack!
    He was unconscious before the fact could register, as the entire north wall collapsed…
       
    I’m dead , he seemed to think, but if so, how could he think at all? He floated through blocked-out darkness, and at the furthest fringes of his senses he thought he heard the faintest screams, layers of them, wavering like surf, and then another sound, like the noises of a butcher’s mart only on a grand scale. But gradually the sounds receded, to be replaced by something much more resolute:
    A hiss.
    Like a cracked steam pipe.
    It was actually hours later—just before dawn—when Professor Fredrick regained consciousness, to a blazing throb of pain at the side of his skull. He rose to hands and knees, blinking incognizance for full minutes before he realized what happened. An earthquake—a doozy …And what was that hissing?
    The rumbling had ceased. He wobbled, getting on his feet, and reached for the small flashlight in his pocket. When he switched it on—
    Good Lord …
    Steam, indeed, was hissing out of the fissure that all but bisected the quadrangle, the fissure being inches wide. This island must be sitting on a seismic plate …Several of the outer walls were rented, marked by great gaps ragged with stone rubble. But even more amazing…was the stream.
    When the plate had lifted—nearly a yard—it cut off the narrow stream’s flow; Fredrick now stood on a ledge, and below it on the other side, the spring now formed a meagerpool that spread nearly to the outer walls. His feet splashed when he stepped off the ledge.
    Then he stared at what existed at the end of his flashlight beam.
    Several feet below what used to be the stream’s bed, several casks jutted. When he reached over and tapped one, his knuckles came away rusted. Iron , he surmised. Each cask bore proportions similar to a five-gallon gasoline can.
    Dracula’s booty? something forced him to wonder.
    Then the rest of his awareness snapped on.
    My God! Janice!
    He splashed through more water, then moaned when he noticed half of the rectory had toppled.
    Damn it! “Janice!” he shouted. Please don’t be —His flashlight carved slices through the darkness inside the rectory’s vestibule. It appeared that the room he’d intended to sleep in had fallen through the ceiling, for he could see some of his belongings. But Janice had been in a closer room, hadn’t she?
    He wended through turned-over furniture and piles of bricks, to the stairwell—
    “Oh, no, Janice…” he groaned.
    Janice lay half-clothed amid the collapsed stairwell. A great swath of blood stained the bricks. Fredrick knelt to discern what he already knew. There was no pulse to be found at Janice Line’s throat. The avalanche of bricks had left her partially crushed.
    “Damn it all to hell,” he muttered.
    There was no retrieving any of his gear; what would be the point? And there’ll be no excavations now , he knew. The authorities would surely restrict the entire complex as a hazard perimeter. Fredrick cursed himself for his own selfishness: even as his loyal assistant lay dead at his feet, what he regretted foremost was the fact that he’d never get to find out once and for all just how early Roman influence had infiltrated this macabre