Not one fiber in my being wanted to find out where the staircase led, but fond thoughts of Peter and his parents enabled me to override every particle of my common sense and a significant percentage of my terror. I pointed first at Damian, then at myself, and finally at the chasm, insistently.
He understood, although he didn’t approve. He tried to convince me, through mime, to wait in the church while he explored the dark passage, but the notion of huddling alone in the ruins while he descended to his doom must have ignited lightning bolts of dread in my eyes, because he soon gave up. I could go with him, he gestured, but only if he went first. I nodded my heartfelt assent.
Damian slung his lanyard around his neck and threaded it through the snaps on his rain jacket, until only the tip of the hooded flashlight protruded, pointing downward. The staircase was so steep at any rate that he had to descend it facing inward, as if it were a ladder, so the light was further shielded by his body.
I quickly arranged my flashlight in the same fashion, turned it on, and followed him onto the staircase. It was like climbing into a coffin-shaped manhole, though the passage became rounder and more constricted as we descended. A fat man would have had great difficulty following us—he would have gotten stuck like a cork in a bottle less than halfway down.
The stone steps were deep, evenly spaced, and smoothly carved, but there were a lot of them. My knees were complaining, and I was beginning to think we’d end up treading the seabed when Damian tapped my boot to signal that he’d reached the bottom.
I descended the last few steps, and he caught me around the waist as my feet touched the ground, as if he expected my knees to buckle. When they did, he eased me into a sitting position on what felt like a soft mound of sand.
I could hear the far-off boom of crashing surf and smell a mingled scent of brine and seaweed, but I couldn’t see a thing beyond the small circle of light in my lap, where my flashlight was pointing. My hands were so cold that I had difficulty disentangling the lanyard from the snaps on my rain jacket, but Damian retrieved his light easily and proceeded to check out our surroundings.
“We seem to have the place to ourselves. There’s no sign of—” He stopped short on a swift intake of breath.
“See something?” I whispered, still tugging on the lanyard.
“Oh,” he said softly. “Oh, dear.”
An odd note in his voice made me look up.
“What is it?” I asked.
He said nothing. His light was traveling in a wide arc around the floor, sliding slowly over a group of curious rock formations that seemed strangely familiar to me. I stared at them intently, turning my head to follow the path of the circling beam, until my brain finally caught up with my widening eyes.
Goose bumps rippled all up and down my arms. If my hair hadn’t been tucked into a stocking cap, it would have stood on end. My aching knees twitched, as though willing me to flee back up the stairs, but my legs refused to move. I uttered a quavering moan, released the tangled lanyard, and pressed both of my hands to my mouth.
The staircase had deposited us in what appeared to be a natural cavern, roughly circular in shape, with a sand-covered floor and a vaulted roof. There were three low, irregular openings in the chamber’s jagged walls, leading to further passages or perhaps to other caves. I didn’t particularly care where they went. My mind was wholly focused on the skeletons.
They lay on their backs with their heads to the walls and their feet pointing inward, as if stretched out for a communal snooze—hollow-eyed skulls, knobbly vertebrae, the diminutive bones of fingers and toes, all in their proper order and tidily arranged, as if awaiting the arrival of an anatomist. By the time Damian had finished turning a complete circle, the beam of light had played over the grisly remains of some forty human beings.
While I sat rigid with horror, Damian squatted to inspect a set of bones. He rolled a skull onto its side, touched a finger to a rib, a femur, a scapula. He did the same thing with the next skeleton and the next, until he’d worked his way around the charnel house. Then he stood and shone his light in my direction.
“You were right, Lori,” he remarked mildly. “The monks did run and hide.”
“It’s the monks?” I exclaimed, sending echoes reverberating through the cavern. “Oh, thank heavens. ” I breathed a shuddering sigh of relief and leaned my forehead on my hand. “I mean, it’s dreadful and I feel sorry for the poor guys, may they rest in peace, but they died a long time ago. I was afraid we’d found evidence of a . . . a more recent mass murder. Are you sure it’s the monks?”