Read Online Doctor Illuminatus by Martin Booth - Free Book Online Page B

pursuit of evil.”
    “Can’t we come?” Tim asked.
    “No,” Sebastian said firmly. “This I must do alone for there is much danger and you are not yet ready to face it.”
    “Is there anything we can do while you’re away?” Pip offered.
    “Just be on your guard,” Sebastian replied, “and,” he smiled at Pip, “tend my garden well.”
    At that, he picked up the cup, put it to his lips, drained it in one swallow and snapped his fingers.
    “Yoh! What the . . . !” Tim exclaimed.
    The next thing he knew, he found himself standing, holding the bottle of vodka, by the pond in the field, with Pip looking into the water. Of Sebastian there was no sign. However, when Tim looked at the vodka bottle, he noticed that although the top was still on and the seal was unbroken, it was empty.

Four
    The Edge of Darkness
    T he following morning, Tim found himself alone in the house. His father, who sometimes worked from a study at home, had gone to London on business. Tim’s mother and Pip had departed shortly after him, heading for the county town on what his father termed “a jolly girls’ retail-therapy outing,” which meant traipsing around department stores trying on clothes that neither of them, in a million years, would dream of buying, never mind wearing.
    When he was quite sure everyone had left, Tim went out to the stable block and entered the garage. On a shelf against the back wall was a row of three blue metal toolboxes. Tim searched through them: the first held household tools such as screwdrivers, hammers and chisels, the second electric tools, the third car tools. This he opened wide and started to rummage, lifting out the trays of spanners and wrenches. In the bottom of the box was what he was searching for — a rubber mallet used to knock out dents in the bodywork of cars.
    Closing the garage door, he walked towards the coach house, testing the hammer against the palm of his hand as he went. The head was black, solid and heavy, yet it would, Tim knew, serve his purpose ideally. Unlike a metal hammer, whatever he hit with this one would leave no mark.
    As he edged himself through the broken door, Tim felt more than a little guilty. He knew he was betraying Sebastian’s trust, yet he simply had to know where the allegedly nonexistent shaft was situated.
    The coach house looked just as it had when they had entered it the day before, the flagstones littered with leaves, straw and fragments of wood fallen from the floor of the hay loft above. There seemed to be not one flag that had even the faintest sign of having been swept, never mind descending into the bowels of the earth.
    Trying hard to remember where they had stood, Tim narrowed it down to one of four large slabs in the center of the coach house. Going down on his hands and knees, he took a deep breath, cast aside his guilty conscience and thumped the hammer on to the flag-stone with all his strength. It bounced off. Tim did it again, not so hard, and listened for any sign of an echo, of a dull resonance that might imply a hollow beneath the floor. All that came back was a solid
thonk!
    It was the same with the other three stones. They were, he was sure, set onto bare earth without so much as a drainpipe running beneath them.
    Remembering that Sebastian had stood on one flag and tapped two others, Tim tried the same thing, determining that if the stone he was on began to move, he would promptly jump off. That way, he excused himself, he would not upset Sebastian. It was, after all, not as if he wanted to find the chamber, just be assured of the way into it.
    Whichever combination he followed, however, nothing happened.
    “A virtual shaft,” he said out loud to himself. “That’s impossible. We went down it. It’s not like a computer game. That’s virtual. This was . . .” he hated to admit it “. . . actual.”
    Without disturbing the rubbish lying about unduly, Tim worked his way methodically right across the coach-house floor. Not a single