• THIRTEEN •
CLANG! IT WENT, THE sound chillingly loud in the darkness.
I held my breath.
The insect buzzing of voices stopped instantly.
I strained my ears, but the only sound I could hear was the beating of my own heart.
And then a grinding noise—a grating of stone, echoing from wall to wall. I crawled forward and touched my fingers to the block.
It was moving!
They were shoving the stone inward—toward me!
I scrabbled for the torch but my fingers could not locate it in the darkness. I was clutching uselessly at bits of rubble, my nails tearing at the hard stone floor.
The block was still moving. I could not see it, but I could hear it grating. In less than a minute they would be climbing through the opening.
If only there were some way to stop the stone: a stout length of timber, for instance, to wedge against the opposite wall.
But there was nothing in this echoing chamber.
Nothing but Flavia de Luce.
The thought came out of nowhere—or so it seemed at the time.
Later, I would realize that my mind had vomited up a sudden memory of snooping through Feely’s unmentionables drawer in search of her diary. Having given up, I was annoyed to find that the drawer would not close completely. No matter how hard I pushed it would not budge.
When I slid it forward and off the tracks, I found the diary taped to the back with strips of sticking plaster. A lesson learned.
I threw myself down onto my back, my feet against the moving stone, and jammed my shoulders against the opposite side of the chamber.
I stiffened every muscle of my body and made myself into a human wedge.
The stone stopped moving.
There was a moment of silence, and then renewed effort from the other side.
Again the stone began inching inward.
Had they brought a lever? I wondered.
Perhaps they were now both shoving.
My knees were beginning to bend. I tried to keep them straight but they were quivering like bowstrings.
Daffy had once read me a story in which the victim was tortured with a device called the Scavenger’s Daughter which, rather than stretching the body like the rack, compressed it into a ball until its fluids caused it to burst like an enormous pimple.
I stretched out both arms full length, trying desperately to grip onto the floor. Anything to increase the resistance.
A sliver of light appeared. The stone was almost clear of the wall.
Now I could hear their voices.
“Bloody thing’s stuck,” one of them said. “Give me the crowbar.”
There was a metallic clanking and I felt the stone move even more powerfully against my feet. I couldn’t hold out much longer.
And then the light went out—and, a few seconds later, came back on again.
“Someone’s coming!” a voice hissed, and the stone grated to a stop.
“Someone’s at the top of the stairs,” another voice said. “They’ve turned the switch off and on.”
“Let’s get out of here!” the first voice whispered, frantically.
“Go round back of the furnace. Use the coalhole.” There was a scuffling, and then absolute silence.
I knew that they were gone.
I counted slowly to a hundred.
No point in crawling like a Commando all the way back through the Cottlestone tomb, I thought, when I was so close to freedom.
I seized the iron handles of the stone and gave it a hard tug. It might have moved a quarter of an inch.
I sat down on the floor so that the stone was between my knees, planted my feet against the wall, and pulled again. Perhaps half an inch, this time, or a little more.
If I concentrated on pulling at one end, it would swing in like a door, just far enough, if I were lucky, to allow me to squeeze past.
At last I had made a gap of about four inches: not wide enough to pass through, but enough to have a look outside. I dropped to my hands and knees and peered out into the crypt. The crowbar was lying where they had dropped it, about two feet from the opening.
I got down onto my stomach and shoved an arm through the opening as far as it would go. My face was crushed so tightly against the stone that I must have looked like something from the ocean depths.
My fingers found the beveled end of the crowbar, but just barely. I didn’t want to shove the thing completely away.
A fraction of an inch at a time, I hooked my fingernails onto the crowbar’s edge and pulled it ever so slowly toward me.
Feely had been nagging me about biting my nails since I was in a pram, and quite recently I had decided she was right. A chemist who is going to be photographed by The Illustrated London News holding up a test tube and peering into it intently needed half-decent hands.
My nails were not yet as long as I liked, but they were enough to do the job.
The crowbar crept toward me. When it was safely within reach, I hauled it in through the opening and gave thanks to the good Saint Tancred who lay somewhere just a few feet below me.
From there on, levering the stone all the way into the chamber was a piece of cake.
A piece of rock cake, I thought, with what was probably a silly grin.
There was now light enough to spot the torch, which had rolled away into a far corner. I flicked the switch to see if it was still working—which it was—then crawled through the wall and into the crypt.
As I stood up straight I realized for the first time how stiff and sore my body had become. My hands and knees were scratched and scraped.
I was quite proud of myself. I understood how the veterans felt who had suffered war wounds.
Before moving on into the main part of the crypt, I stopped to listen.
Not a sound.
Whoever had been in the crypt was gone. There could be no doubt about it. The place was filled with that special stillness that is found where all the occupants are dead.
Still, I’ll admit that, as I crept past the furnace, the hair on the back of my neck bristled—but only a little.
Now I was at the bottom of the steps that led up to the church. Was there anything else to worry about? Would the crypt’s midnight visitors be lying in wait for me outside the church?
They needed only to hide behind the tombstone where Gladys was parked and pounce on me as soon as I appeared—abducting a girl in a churchyard in the middle of the night would not be difficult.
Perhaps I’d better stay in the church: Curl up in a pew, catch forty winks, and race home just as the sun was coming up. No one would even know I’d been away.
Yes, that’s what I’d do.
Up the stone staircase I trudged—one slow step at a time.
In the porch, the outer door was closed, but unlocked, as it probably had been since the time of Henry VIII when the churches of England were looted and vandalized.
To my left, illuminated only by the light which shone down through the stained-glass windows, the carpet of the center aisle was a ribbon of red in the moonlight.
I thought again of the poem, and of the Highwayman, who had, at the end, been shot down like a dog on the highway.