When the coast was clear, Ben, Wolf and Jeff slipped out of the car. Wolf and Jeff were each carrying an MPX submachine gun from Dudley’s place. Ben was armed with one of the pistols, fitted with a silencer and tactical weapon light mounted in front of the trigger guard. The three of them hurried across to a side entrance into Karswell Hall. This was the moment when they’d discover the truth of Dudley’s claim that there were no CCTV cameras surveilling the house itself.

As they pushed deeper into the house, it seemed as though Dudley had been right. They moved stealthily, keeping an eye out but meeting no resistance. Ben had been inside a lot of fine old homes in his life, but Karswell Hall wasn’t like any of them. The corridors and passageways were dark and dusty and smelled of damp and rats and other peculiar earthy, sickly-sweetish odours that he couldn’t identify. Strange paintings hung on the walls: cobwebbed portraits of odd-looking people with distorted faces and haunting eyes that seemed to peer into your soul and track you as you walked past. Weird, surreal abstracts that were creepily unsettling to the mind, as if some kind of madness lurked behind the fringe.

Ben was getting an eerie, shivery feeling that couldn’t be explained by just the mildewy dankness in the air or his imagination of the things that had happened here since the days of Aleister Crowley, the Great Beast 666. There was something horribly wrong with this place. He had never known anything quite like it before. It was like feeling the touch of evil brush against your skin, making you want to shudder in revulsion and push it away – except it was everywhere, like spores of some alien disease suspended in the very air that you were breathing. He had to fight the urge to turn around and run back outside to empty his lungs of the taint of it. He knew that if he were to leave now, he’d never want to come back.

‘Gives me the frigging creeps, this place does,’ Wolf muttered. Jeff just nodded, too spooked to say anything.

They’d been pushing through the interior for nearly eight minutes when they came across the dressing rooms that Dudley had mentioned. A whole section of the building devoted to them, just the way he’d described it, like a small hotel-within-a-house, rows of close-set doors each marked with a tarnished brass number.

Ben, Jeff and Wolf had already planned what they’d do when they found the changing rooms. Before too long the members would be summoned here to don their garb for the evening. And when they did, three unlucky winners would find someone there waiting for them.