For a moment there was only the thick darkness and the thudding of the clock, but she forced herself to think back, to that day in Quire House when she had looked at the sketches and diagrams of Twygrist’s interior. All the levels had been neatly depicted, all the way down to the underground rooms: the garner floor, the chute for the grain, the kiln room where they used to light fires to dry grain spread out at the top of the chimney vent…
The chimney vent. Hope surged upwards, because if this really was the old furnace room–and Antonia thought it must be–then the air could be coming in through the chimney vent. Did that mean part of it had fallen in? And if so, might it be possible to get out by climbing up the chimney itself? Sanity teetered again, because it sounded like something out of a farce. Escaping up the flue. I don’t care how farcical it is if it gets me out, thought Antonia. And what a tale it would make–the kind of tale I could have told around a table with Richard and the friends we had all those years ago. For a moment an image of the big comfortable bungalow swam in front of her eyes, and the ache for Richard was as painful as it had ever been. She pushed it away angrily, got up, and began to feel her way along the wall again. After a few feet she stumbled over something lying on the ground, grazing her ankles, and making her head throb all over again with the impact. When she explored with her hands, she discovered she had fallen over a jumble of old bricks, and the thin curl of hope strengthened slightly. Had the bricks fallen out of the chimney wall? If so, it ought to be possible to knock more out; she could use one of her shoes as a hammer.
The surface of the wall suddenly changed under her hands: from being stone it became brick. The start of the chimney wall? Yes, surely it was; it jutted into the room exactly as most chimney walls did, and here, about three feet up from the ground, was an unmistakable oblong of metal–steel or iron? Antonia felt all round it; as far as she could make out it was an oblong door, about four feet wide and about three feet high.
Showers of rust broke away away as she pulled on the handle, but despite her efforts it refused to move. Despair gripped her. She took a firmer hold of it and this time something in the door’s mechanism yielded slightly. Antonia threw her entire weight onto the handle and, with a sound like human bones crunching, it turned and the door came partly open.
Light came in: a dull clogged kind of light which might have been daylight or evening, it was impossible to know. But to Antonia it was the most wonderful sight in the world.
She grasped the door’s edge and forced it back, and there was a slithering movement from within that made her jump backwards as if she had been burnt.
Clouds of evil-smelling dust billowed outwards, and with them came something that had been huddled against the oven door–something that was pale and brittle and infinitely sad. It tumbled onto the floor, and Antonia backed away, gasping and shuddering. A human skeleton. Stupid to mind about such a long-dead body, such a dried-out remnant of humanity, but she did mind. The skull was turned slightly towards her, so the empty eye-sockets stared beseechingly at her, and the finger bones seemed to be reaching towards her.
She finally managed to stop shaking, and when the clouds of dust began to settle, in the uncertain light, she could see it was the skeleton of a man. Her anatomy was rusty, but the human frame, once taught and understood, stayed with you. Yes, it had been a man, of quite large build, as well. Even in this light she could see that the femur bones were long, and the jawbone was unusually pronounced. Fragments of clothing adhered to the bones–the remains of leather shoes or boots were around the metatarsi, and there were wisps of hair on the skull.