Hollow Earth Read Free

like punishment. Unfortunately, no one at the National cared what Arthur thought, which was why he was so successful at keeping his secrets.
    At the lab doors, Arthur used his key-card again. This time he waited for the pad to flip open and reveal a fingerprint sensor. When it did, he wiped his sweating thumb across his trousers before pressing it to the pad.
    The doors slid open with a hiss, and he stepped into an enclosed glass chamber, an ante-room, where he waited for the first doors to seal and the air to be calibrated before a second set of doors opened.
    Just as the first doors locked, Arthur saw a cloaked and hooded person move from the stairwell and into the shadows of the hallway. When the second set of doors slid open, Arthur’s heart was pounding so fast, he thought he might hyperventilate.
    He dashed into his purgatory, the doors sealing behind him. The figure wouldn’t follow. It couldn’t . Could it?
    The lab was the size of a school gym. Despite the high-tech equipment spread around the room – portable imaging machines, scanners, microscopes, copiers and computers with huge flat-screen monitors – the worktables of the men and women who restored and repaired paintings in this room were covered in the more traditional media of paintbrushes and palettes. Row upon row of easels stood like sentinels against the walls. As Arthur marched down the aisle bisecting the room, he noticed a row of paintings being readied for the exhibition he was curating: ‘The Horror in Art’.
    When Arthur was about ten steps from his office door, the lights went out. Cursing under his breath, hands trembling, he fished a penlight from his inside pocket and continued onwards, glancing back now and again.
    He stopped short at the last painting in the room, his breath catching in his throat.
    Despite the relevance of the image, Arthur had most certainly not requested Witch with Changeling Child for his exhibition. In the painting, only the witch’s large pocked nose was visible from the shadows of a shabby, woollen shawl. Seated on her bony lap was a dwarfish demon child with a misshapen head, a bulbous nose, pale, waxy skin and eyes like tiny yellow marbles sunk into its fleshy forehead.
    What disturbed Arthur even more than the repulsive subject matter was the painting’s history. It had been linked to a number of grisly deaths that had occurred at the gallery when the painting had first been exhibited to the public in 1840. As a result, Witch with Changeling Child was said to be cursed and had been locked in storage, never to be displayed in public again.
    Until now. Who had put it here?
    Arthur swept his penlight across the witch’s gnarled hands and up and over to the horrible creature perched on her lap. When he reached the changeling’s face with his penlight, he froze in terror. He knew it wasn’t his imagination.
    The dwarfish demon was grinning at him.

FOUR
    T he twins had not been in a taxi in ages – they always travelled on the Tube with their mum. But as soon as the security guard had hustled them from the National Gallery and out on to Trafalgar Square, Sandie hurried them into a taxi. Giving the driver their address, she settled herself on to one of the flip-down seats facing the twins. She was so angry with them, she was almost speechless.
    ‘Seat belts fastened. Right now .’
    ‘Why are you so mad?’ asked Matt. ‘We didn’t do anything wrong.’
    ‘You know the rules! You know that what you did was dangerous.’
    ‘Your rules, not ours!’ Matt shouted back.
    ‘We’re sorry, Mum. We didn’t mean to make you angry,’ Em interjected before the two of them started fighting for real. Matt and their mum seemed to be doing more and more of that lately, ever since their dad had missed another of their birthdays without a call or an email. With every passing year, Matt was becoming more and more convinced that their mum had driven their dad away. Em could hardly remember what their dad looked like. She