The Blade in the Mist

At the edge of Greyfriars, the spire of an abandoned church loomed in the fog, like a tombstone pointing to despair. Alison gripped the steering wheel tightly, her knuckles white from the effort, and the sound of the wheels crushing the gravel road was like a blunt knife cutting through the silence. In the rearview mirror, two headlights pierced the fog like bloodthirsty animal eyes.

"They're still back there," Ethan whispered, the barrel of his gun pressed against the window, the touch of his fingertip on the trigger giving away his unspoken fear.

Alison didn't respond. Her mind flashed back and forth to the scrawl on the last page of Sarah's diary-**"Blue door to the basement of the estate, key in Jackson's watch chain." **The words were like poison ivy around the heart, and now the roar of the chasing engine was driving them deeper into the darkness.

The car swerved violently into a narrow wooded lane, and with a sharp whine of branches scraping against the car, Ethan suddenly reached out and squeezed her wrist. "Stop," he breathed, "there's a cliff ahead, a trap they've set."

The tires spun on the slippery dirt as the rear of the car swept over the edge of the cliff, the hollow echo of falling debris making Allison's stomach clench. The headlights of her pursuers had closed to within a hundred meters, and she caught a glimpse of the metal box glinting coldly under the passenger seat-the file stolen from the secret compartment in Jackson's study this morning, stained with dried, bloody fingerprints.

"Split up," Ethan said, shoving the pistol into her palm with a determination she'd never seen before, "take the evidence to the old pit, there's a secret passageway that leads out of town."

"Are you crazy?" She pinched her nails into his arm, "They'll kill you!"

He laughed bitterly and pulled a silver chain from his collar, and embedded in the pendant was a yellowed photograph of fifteen-year-old Jackson laughing with him against the backdrop of the Greystone River in the middle of summer. "I owe it to him," the crisp sound of the chain snapping was drowned out by the gunshot, "and to you."

Allison was about to say something else when Ethan pushed the door of the car open. As the cold wind swirled into the foggy interior of the car, she heard her own ripping screams mingling with the crack of a bullet shattering the glass.

She tumbled through the brambles, the pain of the box's sharp corners piercing her ribs far less than the glimpse she got back at Ethan standing on the roof of the car, his backside silhouetted by the firelight as he opened fire on his pursuers, like an unfinished elegiac song.

The tunnel is narrower and more humid than I remember, and a flashlight beam sweeps across a peeling poster on the wall: 1978 Miners' Strike. Jackson's grandfather's face smiles on the yellowed photo paper, while a ledger in a metal box contains the names of dozens of miners who died in "accidents," a mixture of ink and bloodstains.

Alison gripped her gun at the sound of footsteps at the end of the tunnel. But it was a bloodstained Ethan who emerged from the halo, stumbling to his knees and pulling a half-dozen twisted watch-chain keys from his pocket. "Behind the blue door lies the truth you seek," he coughed out as blood dripped onto the ledger, staining Sarah's name, "but promise me ... you won't become them."

A siren wailed in the distance, and the sound of approaching footsteps was accompanied by a familiar low chuckle-Jackson. Ethan pushed her into the off-ramp with the last of his strength, and in the moment of the explosion, Allison saw how the face, always gentle, shattered into eternal silence in the firelight.

She ran until the smell of gasoline and blood was swallowed by the fog. The key in her palm stabbed into flesh and blood, and the keyhole in the blue door of the basement was waiting to turn under the oak desk in the mayor's office.

Translated with DeepL.com (free version)