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  Janice had found an obscure article in an old CP wire story about a warehouse building that had burned down just outside the town of Winterburn, which was about an hour north of Westhill. The story had been originally reported in the now-defunct local town newspaper, but had made the wire because two people had perished in the fire. One was a local man who was out on bail awaiting trial for stealing $200,000 worth of copper wire from a nearby factory. The other was a homeless man whose identity was unknown.

  The article had caught Janice’s attention because one of the tenants of the building at the time it had burned down was an organization calling itself the ‘Brotherhood of the Holy Thorn’. According to the article, it wasn’t known if the premises were in use at the time of the fire. The rest of the details were vague. There was no mention of whether or not any member of the so-called brotherhood had been contacted for comment or even any speculation as to what the organization might do.

  That wasn’t surprising, in Colin’s opinion. CP had thousands of stories coming in every day. A warehouse fire in the middle of nowhere wouldn’t raise an eyebrow in the rest of the country and would barely merit more than two paragraphs. The original article may have been longer and contained more valuable detail, but both it and the paper that printed it were now long gone. The building had burned down seven years ago and the Winterburn Weekly News had ceased operation only two years after that, just another casualty of corporate consolidation.

  There were no photos and no follow-up articles to indicate what else may have happened on the site or what additional investigation might have been done. Janice figured that the only way to find out what was going on was to drive up there and take a look at it for themselves. Not having any other leads to pursue at the moment she called, Colin had agreed to go along for the ride.

  The car was scrupulously tidy, which Colin liked. The only things in the backseat were her laptop and her backpack. Colin was grateful that she was using a GPS and hadn’t asked him to navigate as his sense of direction was notoriously terrible. In his hands, they would probably have been coming up on the American border around about now.

  He liked her choice of music, too. Monk and Coltrane live at Carnegie Hall. Colin’s last girlfriend had liked horrible, thumping club music. It was, in his opinion, one of the key reasons that the relationship had lasted less than three months.

  “Nice tunes,” he commented.

  “Thanks,” Janice said. “I’m kind of an aggressive driver by nature, but I find it almost impossible to get mad when I’m listening to Coltrane. Almost.”

  Colin chuckled. “You seem to be doing fine so far.”

  “That’s because we’re in the middle of the country,” she said. “Back when I was living with my parents in Scarborough and commuting to U of T every day, not so much. A taxi cut me off on the DVP once. I followed him for 15 clicks past my exit and practically ran him into a guardrail.”

  Colin laughed. He had a hard time imagining the mousy girl who barely said a word to be anyone that had done anything of the kind. “Right. So if we find any links to these guys in midtown Manhattan, we’ll just look at them with Google street view.”

  “I love cities,” Janice said defensively. “I just hate driving in them. There’s something so nullifying about being stuck for ages in some stupid traffic jam. You just sit there for what feels like forever and then you get to the front of it and you realize that the reason you just lost the last two hours of your life was because the parade of morons in front of you kept slowing down to look at a cherry picker stringing cable for a cell phone tower. I can’t wait until they invent teleportation. I’ll be one of the first ones to sign up.”

  “Even if a mosquito sneaks in with you and the machine ends up blending your DNA, and you come out the other side with a strange new desire to suck the blood out of your friends when they’re just trying to have a beer on the back porch?”

  Janice smiled. “Yes. Even then.”

  Colin looked out the window at a seemingly endless line of red and yellow and orange trees. “You know, you never did answer my other question.” Colin had an excellent memory for unanswered questions.

  Janice was ahead of him. “How does somebody who hates picking up the phone and talking to strangers end up taking journalism?”

  “Exactly.”

  She took a deep breath and let it out slowly. “I don’t know. My parents wanted me to go to teacher’s college, but I don’t think I would have been cut out for that, either. Facing a room full of hormonally manic teenagers every day? No thanks. Besides, it’s like going to law school these days. There just aren’t any jobs out there.”

  “If it’s a job you’re looking for, then journalism isn’t exactly blue chip stock at the moment, either.”

  “I know,” she said. “I figured I could sort of make my own jobs. Online. Freelance assignments. Things like that. One thing I got studying history was a real desire to see all the places I was reading about. That sort of gave me the idea of becoming a travel writer. There are a tonne of books out there that have restaurant and hotel recommendations, but treat the history of the place as just a sidebar. I’d like to put the history more front and centre.”

  “Interesting,” Colin said. “How did your parents like that idea?”

  “They hate it,” Janice said. “They think I’m wasting my time.”

  “And what do they do?”

  “My father’s an investment manager and my mother’s a real estate agent,” Janice said. “My father’s originally from Shanghai. To him, everything’s just another asset waiting to be monetized. He thinks travel is a waste because it has what he calls a low ROI. You spend all that money and don’t get any of it back. If you want a vacation, it’s much better to buy a cottage, he thinks. Then fix it up and rent it out. Then do it again. And again. Which is where my mother comes in. For me, life is about the accumulation of experiences, not equity. I could give a shit about money.”

  “It does come in handy when it’s time to pay the rent,” Colin joked.

  “True,” Janice said. “But I don’t want it to rule my life. If that means I’m not in the top one per cent, then so be it. I’d rather see the pyramids than a killer IPO.” She turned on the windshield wipers as a soft rain had started to fall. “Shit. I don’t think I remembered my umbrella.”

  -25-

  “Is that it?” Colin asked.

  They had pulled up alongside a blackened hulk of rubble that reminded him of some of the ruined castle sites he had seen on a tour of Scotland when he was five. The stones rose up to the west like a wave that was never going to break, reaching a maximum height of maybe eight feet. He could make out the bottom outline of what might have been a couple of windows and a door, but the rest was gone.

  “I think so,” Janice said, peering through the foggy windshield. “According to the GPS, the town is about two clicks east.”

  “It looks like Dresden after an air raid,” Colin observed. “What else used to be in there?”

  “As far as I can tell, it was originally owned by an appliance company that went broke,” Janice said. “After that, they couldn’t generate much interest in the place. The main floor was supposedly rented by a hat company, but I couldn’t find any record of them at all. The church was in the basement.”

  Colin shifted his gaze from the charred hulk looming up out of the ground to the equally grey sky overhead. The rain had momentarily slowed from a steady thrum to an intermittent trickle, but the clouds looked like they were ready to let loose at any moment. If they were going to go exploring, he figured, there was no time like the present.

  “Well, we did come all this way,” he said, throwing open his door and stepping out onto the soggy ground.

  “Colin, wait!” Janice said. “What are you doing?”

  “Might as well take a look,” Colin said, peering down the road in both directions. The last thing they had passed was a custom trailer business that looked like it hadn’t seen a customer since Caes
ar crossed the Rubicon. He doubted that there was much chance they would be observed out here. He pulled open the back door and grabbed the flashlight that Janice had brought along. It was a clunky white one with a square bulb that looked like it had come out of a road emergency kit from the seventies, but at least it seemed to work.

  “Are you crazy?” Janice said. “That place burned down almost ten years ago! It’s probably not safe!”

  Colin shrugged. “Well, it’s not getting any safer. Come on. Let’s go.”

  He closed the door and trudged up the hill without waiting for Janice to follow. His legs were stiff from sitting so long in the passenger seat and it was nice to stretch them a bit, even if they were carrying him towards what looked like a cave-in in the making. He heard a thunk as Janice got out and closed her door, running up the hill behind him. He didn’t blame her for not wanting to be left alone behind the wheel. To somebody used to the city, this was as close to Deliverance country as they probably liked to get.

  Colin stepped over the rusted metal fence with the faded ‘Danger’ and ‘No Entry’ signs attached.

  “Pretty good starter space for a cult,” he said. “But I don’t know. If you’ve been around for almost a thousand years, you’d think they’d be in the market for something a little more grand. You know, like the Vatican or maybe even Westminster Abbey.”

  Janice scanned the ground and saw a few dozen broken beer bottles and a few used condoms.

  “Ugh,” she said. “Who’d want to have sex in a place like this?”

  “Well, it does have a certain rustic charm,” Colin said. “Add a few more broken beer bottles and some people in period costume and it’s just like colonial Williamsburg. All that’s missing is a few hundred stores selling butter churns and Quaker hats.”

  “I have a friend who did her thesis on period recreations,” Janice said. “She specialized in those wild west shows. You know, like the OK Corral and all that stuff? She would probably have shared your low opinion of the historical value of re-enactments.”

  Colin looked at his watch. It was coming up on 5 p.m. The sky was already dark and getting darker by the minute. If they were going to try and get a good look at this place, they were going to have to do it soon. He didn’t want to be stuck in the basement in the dark if the battery on the flashlight suddenly decided to cut out.

  He did a clockwise circuit of the building. All of the second floor appeared to be gone with the exception of a few old crossbeams that were lying at angles against the floor. The first floor was surprisingly intact, although it had been taken over by a wide variety of wildlife, plants and garbage over the years since the fire. At the back of the building was an old stone staircase that led down to a darkened entrance into the basement. Colin examined it carefully. A large number of loose stones and timbers had fallen over it, but it still looked more or less passable.

  “You said they were in the basement?” he said.

  Janice nodded. Just looking at the dark and forbidding staircase was enough to extinguish any desire she had to see what was down there. “Uh huh.”

  Colin took a deep breath and then started making his way carefully down the stairs, stepping over the fallen beams as he went. The stones weren’t going anywhere, but the beams had been exposed to the elements for a long time and were probably as brittle as driftwood.

  “I don’t think this is a good idea,” Janice said nervously as she followed him. She was careful to step exactly where he stepped, like a soldier following a trail of footprints through a minefield.

  “Hey, this was your idea,” Colin said. “Anything happens to us, I’m blaming you.”

  Colin swerved around the largest of the support beams and reached the door at the bottom. At one time, it had been closed off with a large sheet of plywood, but that had long since been pried away and was now lying mostly on the ground, covered in graffiti. He turned on the flashlight and stepped through the opening.

  “This could all come down any time,” Janice whispered as she followed.

  “It’s been standing like this for the last seven years,” Colin observed. “I think it’ll last another seven minutes.”

  The inside was dark, chilly, and smelled strongly of stagnant water. Rain dripped down constantly between the cracks in the ceiling. The flashlight didn’t provide much in the way of illumination. As far as Colin could see, he might as well have walked in with a candle.

  On his left were a couple of rows of wooden benches. One of the side panels had come loose on the first row and it had tumbled forward onto the stone floor. Colin stepped forward and examined them more closely. Janice followed close behind.

  “Is it my imagination,” he said, “or do these look more like church pews than ordinary benches?”

  “I think you’re right, Janice said, pointing to a slot built onto the back of the front bench. “Look at those. They look like they’re designed to hold hymnals or something like that.”

  Colin turned towards the front of the room, where there was a raised wooden platform that looked vaguely like a stage.

  Or an altar, he thought.

  It was three steps, which made it about two feet high. He stepped carefully up. The wood groaned and sagged under his feet. He tried to only stand where he thought there might be a crossbeam. That might have a better chance of supporting his weight and keep him from dropping right through. Just looking at it was probably enough to require a tetanus shot.

  One of the roof beams had fallen down over the centre. Colin shone the flashlight down on what looked like a circular metal grate that was built into the centre of the platform.

  “What the hell is this?” he wondered out loud, kneeling down to examine it.

  “I don’t know,” Janice whispered, circling around so that she was standing next to him. “Look, there’s some sort of cross.”

  She was right. Colin realized that he had missed it because it blended in with all the other fallen pieces of wood. It was lying underneath the roof beam. He played the flashlight from one end to the other. It was tough to estimate, but he guessed it was probably seven or eight feet high and six feet wide. He could see the remains of some sort of metal framework that had held it in place.

  “Looks too big to have mounted on the wall,” he said, looking at the wall behind the altar, which, because of the raised height of the platform, was only about six feet.

  “I don’t think it was,” Janice said. “Look there.” She pointed at a spot where the metal frame appeared to have twisted and snapped loose from the platform. “I think it was mounted right here on the floor.”

  “Why would you mount a cross on the floor where no one in the congregation can see it?” Colin asked.

  Janice didn’t reply. She was circling around to the back of the platform. She motioned Colin to follow her with the flashlight. They found a pipe leading out the back of the platform and into a hole cut into the ground. To Colin, it looked to be about the same size as one that a builder would cut for a sump pump. The hole was full of debris and black, muddy water. It was impossible to tell how deep it was.

  “What is this?” Colin asked, mystified.

  Janice reached over and took the flashlight out of his hand, pointing it back up at the altar, panning slowly across each item as she spoke.

  “Well, say something makes a mess up there…it falls down through the metal grate…goes along the pipe…and then empties into this.”

  Colin took a moment to process this. “So we’re talking what? Human sacrifices?”

  Janice nodded. “I’d call that a fair working hypothesis.”

  Colin looked back at the altar and then up at the ceiling. “I don’t know about you, but if that were me up there, I’d make a hell of a lot of noise. What about the people on the main floor?”

  “There may not have been anyone on the main floor,” Janice said. “Or they may have performed their rituals late at night when there was no one else around. We’re almost a mile from the town. They could do just ab
out anything short of a rock concert down here and no one else would hear it.”

  Colin looked back at the makeshift well, which suddenly appeared a lot more ominous than it had a moment before. The urge to leave was also getting stronger by the minute. A thousand-year-old murderous cult was one thing. But this was a murderous cult that had been in operation less than two hours from where he lived right now. And seven years didn’t relegate their activities to the foggy mists of ancient history, either.

  Janice handed the flashlight back to Colin, then took her camera out of her backpack and started to take pictures. Colin caught a flicker of an image as the flash went off and went over to the wall to examine it more closely. It was hard to see at first because the wall was covered with so much dust, debris and mould, but it was there.

  “Hey Janice,” he said. “Come check this out.”

  Janice stopped taking pictures and walked over to where Colin was standing at the back of the platform. When she saw what he was looking at, her breath got stuck in her throat.

  It was the symbol of the order: a Templar-style cross surrounded by two intertwining ropes of thorns. Somebody had carved it into the back wall of the basement. The outer ring was about the same circumference as a car tire.

  “Oh my God,” she gasped. “I was right! They really were here!”

  Colin moved closer to examine the detail of the carving job. Despite all the dirt and debris, he could see that it was a remarkably skilled job. Whoever had done it had known what they were doing and had taken their time. It hadn’t just been chipped out by somebody with a hammer and chisel and a few hours to spare.

  “Based on the quality of the engraving, I’m guessing they were here for quite a while,” he said. “Or they were planning to be. We should probably try to find out more about that fire. Do you know how old this building is?”

  Janice took a step back to try to get some pictures of the image. It was hard to do because so much of it was obscured. “No. But I plan to find out.”