I climbed up and peered into the chamber. It was surprisingly roomy.
I boosted myself into the darkness, clicked on the torch, and began scraping along on hands and knees. I thought for a moment of Howard Carter crawling through those puzzling passages in the pyramids.
Hadn’t he died by ignoring a curse?
In the cramped stone passageway I could hear the beating of my own heart.
Tancred, Tancred, Tancred, Tancred …
Had the saint, like Shakespeare, put a curse on his own grave? Curs’t be he that moves these bones, and so forth?
Is that what had happened to poor Mr. Collicutt?
It seemed unlikely. Even if the spirits of the dead were capable of killing, I doubted that they were able to strap gas masks onto the faces of their victims.
A shiver shook my shoulders at the thought of Mr. Collicutt, who, if my theory was correct, had been dragged, dead or alive, through this very passageway.
I tied a mental string onto my forefinger. I would remember to pray for him properly on Easter Sunday.
And now, quite abruptly, the narrow crawl space branched, and I found myself peering down from above into a large chamber. As with the outer room, someone had piled broken stones handily below the opening, and I was easily able to scramble down onto the rubble-covered floor.
This part of the passage went no farther: This was the end.
I let the torch’s beam sweep slowly round the room, but aside from more names and initials scratched into the stone of the walls, there was little to see.
The place was empty.
Empty, that is, except for a pair of iron brackets that projected from the wall.
Two handgrips had been drilled into opposite ends of a single stone; they could have no purpose other than to shift it.
A quick examination showed that I was right: A razor-thin gap ran across the top of the stone and down both sides. Unlike the other stones in the wall, this one, although it was snug-fitting, had no mortar.
It was meant to come out.
As I traced out the gap, I could feel the draft on my fingertips: the same draft—I was sure of it!—I had felt in the crypt.
Unless I was sadly mistaken, I was now directly behind the wall of the chamber in which Mr. Collicutt’s body had been hidden.
This was how his killer—or killers, more likely—had maneuvered him into an unopened tomb.
The sound came at first as no more than a stirring of the air about my ears. The acute sense of hearing I had inherited from Harriet was like that: imperceptible at first, a kind of audible silence.
Only when I acknowledged its presence did it fully take form, as it now did.
Someone was talking.
The voice was that of a fly in a bottle—a hollow tinny buzzing that rose and fell … rose and fell.
I could not make out the words, only the drone of the insect voice.
My immediate reaction was to switch off the torch.
Which left me in darkness.
I could see instantly that there were beads of light coming through the cracks.
Had they seen the light from my torch? It seemed unlikely: They were in a crypt illuminated by a string of bulbs. Little enough of my torchlight would have been visible.
But who would be in the crypt in the middle of the night? I decided that there must be at least two of them, since one would hardly be talking to himself.
I pressed an ear against the crack and tried to make out the words.
But it was no use. The narrow slit between the stones had a strange filtering effect: It was as if I were hearing only a thin slice of the speaker’s voice—not quite enough to make out the words.
After half a minute or so, I gave it up and, using only my fingertips, began a closer examination of the stone itself.
It was about eighteen inches wide and about a foot high. The depth, I knew, must be the thickness of the wall, which I guessed to be another eighteen inches.
One and a half times one and a half times one equaled two and a quarter cubic feet. How much would it weigh?
That, of course, depended upon its specific gravity. From the tables in Uncle Tar’s handbooks, I knew that gold had a specific gravity of more than twelve hundred, and lead about seven hundred.
St. Tancred’s was famous for the beauty of its sandstone, which, if I remembered correctly, had a specific gravity of somewhere between two and three, and weighed about a hundred and fifty pounds per cubic foot.
The whole stone, then, would weigh somewhere between three and four hundred pounds.
Would I be able to shift it? Obviously, with someone on the other side, now was not the time.
But still, I needed to know, without a doubt, that this tunnel and this stone connected directly with the cavity in which I had found Mr. Collicutt’s corpse.
I didn’t dare pull on the iron handles for fear of being heard.
Perhaps I would have to sit here in darkness and wait until the light went out on the other side of the stone.
How long would it take? I wondered. What on earth could they be doing in there?
I might as well make myself comfortable. I would press my back against the wall behind me and slide down it until I was seated on the floor.
Then, in darkness, I would wait.
I was halfway through this simple maneuver when my feet slipped on a pebble.
I dropped down heavily upon my behind.
Worse, I dropped the torch.