“Charlie isn’t scared of anything,” said Marlowe.
Komako lifted the lantern. It cast her face into crooked shadow, it darkened the hollows of her eyes. “Is that right, Charlie?” she said softly. “You’re not afraid of anything?”
Charlie swallowed.
“There’s another way in, Charlie,” came Ribs’s voice, out of the gloom of the nave. “A proper door, like, just round the front. But it’s locked.”
“Dr. Berghast has the key,” Oskar explained.
“Rrrh,” mumbled his giant, sounding distinctly unimpressed, still holding the trapdoor.
“Let me guess,” muttered Charlie. “This way leads to the crypt?”
“Through it,” corrected Komako.
Ribs poked Charlie in the arm. “Hey, what’d the skeleton say to his sick neighbor? Stop your bloody coffin.”
Oskar giggled, a nervous high-pitched giggle that echoed off away into the crypt.
“Oh my God,” muttered Komako. “I’m here with a bunch of children.” She looked back at Marlowe, suddenly abashed. “No offense.”
But Charlie was still staring down into the darkness. “Tell me again, whose idea was this?”
“Ribs’s,” said Komako.
“Ko’s,” said Ribs.
Marlowe reached up and took Charlie’s hand. “Mine,” he said, his voice almost a whisper.
* * *
They left the flesh giant in the apse of the ruined monastery, shreds of fog drifting past. Ribs suggested in her salty way that maybe the smell of it might put off the Spider from talking to them; when Oskar protested, Ribs suggested they put it to a vote. All hands went up.
And so they went down, into the catacombs, the five of them, ghostly and pale in their robes while the dim light of the lantern played off the stone walls and the dripping of the darkness reached their ears. Charlie kept Marlowe close, his hand on the back of the little boy’s neck, steering him gently in the blackness. The stairs came out onto a narrow passageway, with little windows cut into the rock, and bones piled up crosswise with skulls laid out on top. Those were the monks of an age long passed, eye sockets hollow and dark.
As they went, Charlie peered around: the ceiling was lost in shadow, and there were more passages opening both to the left and the right. On the walls now he saw the mummified remains of monks, shriveled to the size of children, suspended somehow in their robes on the stone walls. But the floor was dry, and scraped softly as they went; the air was cold; the dark was quieter than any quiet Charlie had ever known, so quiet it seemed almost to make a sound, like a bell, in his ears.
They walked on for five minutes, ten. Soon Charlie noticed the passage had narrowed, the ceiling lowering so that he had to dip his head as he went. But the bones of the dead were no longer; there was only the long darkness of the tunnel. A thick tree root emerged out of one wall, near his elbow, snaking alongside them like a kind of marker, guiding the way. It was joined by a second, and then underfoot a third, until soon the floor and walls of the tunnel were strewn with roots, roots breaking through the stones and mortar and the soft collapsed coffins of the ancient monks. The deeper they went the more roots they had to clamber over, and dip their heads to avoid, until it seemed a tunnel of root and not stone at all, as if they were descending into the heart of a monstrous tree. Charlie felt Marlowe fumble for him, grip his hand hard.
“It’s okay,” he muttered.
But whether he spoke to the boy or to himself did not matter; it convinced neither.
A few feet ahead, Komako stopped short. Charlie could see stones and rocks and a great tangle of tree roots blocking the way. There’d been a cave-in.
Komako just stood with the lantern lifted high, as if perplexed. Charlie didn’t understand her hesitation; it wasn’t such a big job as that; he’d worked at harder hauling when he was half as big, back in Mississippi.
He strode past, reached for the biggest root blocking the way. It felt soft, almost furred, in his fingers. He yanked hard at it.
“Charlie, don’t!” Ribs cried out.
But he nearly had it free. He leaned into it and pulled. Suddenly the walls and ceiling trembled. Dust sifted down around his face, got into the neck of his robe. A deep inhuman groan rippled through the tunnel, as if the blackness was a living thing.
Charlie stumbled back.
Komako grabbed him by the shoulders, spun him around. “Don’t hurt the roots!” Her braid whipped angrily from side to side. “What’s the matter with you? You’ll bring the whole tunnel down on us. Just stand over there. No, there. Touch nothing.” She said something then to herself, in a sharp angry Japanese; it sounded less than polite.
Charlie, staggering back to the others, could guess its meaning. He rubbed at his shoulder. “She doesn’t like me much, does she?”
Ribs, her robe floating beside him, paused. “I like you,” she said.
But he was only half listening, instead watching Komako hook the lantern on a tendril for light, and in her pale nightgown work to clear the rocks without hurting the tree; and he didn’t take his eyes off her until the way was clear, and they could squeeze through, and go on.
At last they came to a chamber. It was very dark. When Komako lifted the lantern Charlie saw the floor and walls and low ceiling were completely covered in the rootlike tentacles of the wych elm, so that it felt like they had come to the hollow core of the tree itself. A musky scent of earth and wood filled his nostrils.
He stopped with the others just inside. Marlowe picked his careful way forward, at the edge of the pool of light, clambering over the lumpen roots. In the half-light of Komako’s lantern, Charlie could just make out, suspended from the low ceiling, in a vast tangled knot of tree roots and clumps of dirt and dangling moss, a kind of thing—a figure—so ancient, it seemed to have grown into the very roots of the tree.
Komako lifted the lantern higher. Hanging in the center of that tangled gnarl was a face, a face that could have been carved from wood, elongated and strange and with a strange gaping mouth, except that its yellow eyes were open, and glittering, and intelligent.
Charlie caught his breath. Marlowe was standing directly under it, small enough that he could look up into its eyes without crouching.
It was the glyphic, of course. The Spider.
“You … should not … be here,” it said, in a voice like a slow rumble, a voice as cold as the dark places of the earth.
Oskar let out a whimper; a moment later Charlie felt something too, a tightening at his ankle. One of the roots had snaked around his shoe and pinned him into place. The others too were ensnarled, all except Marlowe. A second, a third root wrapped up around Charlie’s legs, over his waist, his chest, holding him fast. The more he struggled, the more the roots squeezed, impossibly powerful. They were coming out of the walls, out of the ceiling.
“Uh, Ribs?” called Komako, nervous.
But it was little Marlowe, standing directly in front of the glyphic, who spoke to the creature.
“We didn’t want to come here uninvited,” he said. “But we need your help, please. We have questions.”
“They … want to know … about the missing…”
Charlie watched Marlowe step even closer, his black hair stark against his pallid face. But it wasn’t the missing children he asked about, not first. “I’m afraid for someone. A person. Can you see, can you tell me, is she okay? Her name is—”
“Alice Quicke … is not … a talent.”
Marlowe half turned, peered back at Charlie through the darkness. Charlie could see a faint light in his eyes, like twin stars. “No,” said Marlowe. “But she’s our friend, mine and Charlie’s, and she brought us here to you. But she’s gone now down to London with Mrs. Harrogate, and they’re going to find Jacob Marber.”
The glyphic focused its eerie yellow eyes on Marlowe. Its face looked all of wood but the eyes were bright, wet, reptilian. “We know … you. We have seen … you. In the Dreaming.”