Ordinarily, anyone who made such a remark to my face would go to the top of my short list for strychnine. A few grains in the victim’s lunch pail—probably mixed with the mustard in his Spam sandwich, which would neatly hide both the taste and the texture …
But wait! Hadn’t he said “we”? Who was “we”?
I knew, from hanging round the church, that Mr. Haskins usually worked alone. He called in a helper only when there was heavy lifting to be done, such as shifting fallen tombstones—at least the heavier ones, or burying someone who—
“Saint Tancred!” I said, and made a dash for the door.
“Hang on—” Mr. Haskins protested. “Don’t go down there!”
But his voice was already fading behind me as I clattered down the winding stairs.
Saint Tancred! They were opening Saint Tancred’s tomb in the crypt, and they didn’t want me butting in. That’s why the vicar had shunted me off so abruptly. Since he had directed me straight to Mr. Haskins in the tower, it didn’t make any sense, but then he hadn’t really had time to think.
Floral baskets, indeed! Somewhere below, they were already breaking open the tomb of Saint Tancred!
The vestibule, when I reached it, was empty. The vicar and the white-haired stranger had vanished.
To my left was the entry to the crypt, a heavy, wooden door in the Gothic style, its curved frame an arched, disapproving eyebrow of stone. I pushed it open and made my way quietly down the stairs.
At the bottom, a string of small, bare electric bulbs, which had been strung temporarily from the low roof, led off in the distance toward the front of the church, their feeble yellowish gleam only making the surrounding shadows darker.
I had been down here just once before, upon the occasion of a winter’s evening game of hide-and-seek with the St. Tancred’s Girl Guides. That, of course, had been before my dishonorable discharge from the troop. Still, even after all this time, I couldn’t help thinking of Delorna Higginson, and how long it had taken them to make her stop screaming and foaming at the mouth.
Ahead of me now, lurking in the darkness, crouched the hulking heap of scrap metal that was the church’s furnace.
I edged uneasily round it, not willing to turn my back to the thing.
Manufactured by Deacon and Bromwell in 1851 and shown at the Great Exhibition, this famously unpredictable monstrosity squatted in the bowels of St. Tancred’s like the giant squid that attacked Captain Nemo’s submarine, Nautilus, in 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, the tin tentacles of its ducts snaking off in all directions, its two round windows of isinglass in the cast-iron door glowing like a pair of savage red eyes.
Dick Plews, the village plumber, had for years been having what the vicar called “an affair of the heart” with the brute, but even I knew that to be sadly optimistic. Dick was afraid of the thing, and everybody in Bishop’s Lacey knew it.
Sometimes, during services, especially in the long silences as we settled for the sermon, a stream of four-letter words would come drifting up through the hot-air ducts—words that we all knew, but pretended not to.
I shuddered and moved on.
On both sides of me now were bricked-up arches. Behind them—stacked like cordwood, according to Mr. Haskins—were the crumbling coffins of those villagers who had gone before us into death, including a good many defunct de Luces.
I must admit that there were times when I wished I could hoist those dry, papery ancestors of mine out of their niches for a good old face-to-face—not just to see how they compared with their darkened oil portraits which still hung at Buckshaw, but also to satisfy my private pleasure in confronting the occasional corpse.
Only Dogger was aware of this unusual enthusiasm of mine, and he had assured me that it was because in tackling the dead, the pleasure of learning outweighs the pain.
Aristotle, he assured me, had shared my keenness for cadavers.
Dear old Dogger! How he sets my mind at ease.
Now I could hear voices. I was directly underneath the apse.
“Easy!” someone was saying in the gloom ahead of me. “Easy now, Tommy lad.”
A dark shadow leapt across the wall as if someone had switched on a torch.
“Steady on! Steady on! Where’s Haskins with that bloody rope? Pardon my French, Vicar.”
The vicar was silhouetted in an open archway, his back to me. I craned my neck to peer round him.
On the far wall of the small chamber, a large, rectangular stone had been pried from the wall and pivoted outward. One end of it was now being supported on a wooden sawhorse, while the other still rested on the lip of the stone below. Behind the stone were visible a couple of inches of cold darkness.
Four workmen—all of them strangers, except for George Battle—stood at the ready.
As I moved in for a closer look, I bumped against the vicar’s elbow.
“Good heavens, Flavia!” the vicar exclaimed with a start, his eyes huge in the strange light. “I almost leaped out of my skin, dear girl. I didn’t know you were there. You oughtn’t to be down here. Far too dangerous. If your father hears of it, he’ll have my head on a platter.”
Saint John the Baptist flashed into my mind.
“Sorry, Vicar,” I said. “I didn’t mean to startle you. It’s just that, since Saint Tancred is my namesake, I wanted to be the first to see his blessed old bones.”
The vicar stared at me blankly.
“Flavia Tancreda de Luce,” I reminded him, injecting a dollop of fake reverence into my voice, folding my hands modestly across my chest, and casting my eyes downward, a trick I had picked up by watching Feely at her devotions.
The vicar was silent for a long moment—and then he chuckled. “You’re having a game with me,” he said. “I remember distinctly officiating at your baptism. Flavia Sabina de Luce was the name we bestowed upon you, in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost, amen, and Flavia Sabina de Luce you shall remain—until such time, of course, as you choose to change it by entering into a state of Holy Matrimony, like your sister Ophelia.”
My jaw fell open like a bread box.
“Feely?”
“Oh, dear,” the vicar said. “I’m afraid I’ve let the cat out of the bag.”
Feely? My sister, Feely? Entering into a state of Holy Matrimony?
I could scarcely believe it!
Who was it to be? Ned Cropper, the potboy from the Thirteen Drakes, whose idea of courtship was to leave offerings of moldy sweets at our kitchen doorstep? Carl Pendracka, the American serviceman who wanted to show Feely the sights of St. Louis, Missouri? (“Carl’s going to take me to watch Stan Musial knock one out of the park.”) Or was it to be Dieter Schrantz, the former German prisoner of war who had elected to stay behind in England as a farm laborer until such time as he could qualify to teach Pride and Prejudice to English schoolboys? And then, of course, there was Detective Sergeant Graves, the young policeman who always became tongue-tied and furiously red in the presence of my dopey sister.
But before I could question the vicar further, Mr. Haskins, rope in hand, his torch producing weird, swaying shadows, came pushing into the already crowded space.
“Make way! Make way!” he muttered, and the workmen fell back, pressing themselves tightly against the walls.
Rather than moving out of the chamber, I used the opportunity to squirm my way farther into it, so that by the time Mr. Haskins had fixed the rope round the outer end of the stone, I had wedged myself into the farthest corner. From here, I would have a front-row seat for whatever was going to happen.
I glanced across at the vicar, who seemed to have forgotten my presence. His face was strained in the light of the small, swaying bulbs.
What was it that Marmaduke, the man in the dark suit, had said? “You must stop it. You must put a stop to it at once.”
It was obvious that, in spite of Marmaduke, whoever he may be, the work was going ahead.
The vicar was now gnawing distractedly at his lower lip.
“Where’s your friend, then?” Mr. Haskins asked suddenly, turning from his work, his words echoing oddly from the crypt’s curved arches. “I thought he wanted to be here for the main event?”
“Mr. Sowerby?” the vicar said. “I don’t know. It’s most unlike him to be tardy. Perhaps we should wait a while.”
“This here stone’s waitin’ on nobody,” Mr. Haskins said. “This here stone’s got a mind of her own, and she’s comin’ out whether we likes it or not.”
He gave the heavy block a familiar pat, and it made a most awful groan, as if it were in pain.
“She’s hangin’ by her toenails, and no more. Besides, Norman and Tommy need to get back to Malden Fenwick, don’t you, lads? They’re here to work, and work they shall.”
He waved grandly toward his workers, one exceedingly tall, the other quite unremarkable.
Down here, in the depths of the crypt, Mr. Haskins was the ruler of his own dark kingdom, and nobody dared raise a voice against him.
“Besides,” he added. “This here’s only the wall. We won’t get to the sarcophagus till we’re through it. Fetch the rope, Tommy.”
As Tommy worked the rope up and round an overhanging shelf of masonry, Mr. Haskins turned his attention full upon me. For an awful moment, I thought he was going to tell me to leave. But he had his audience.
“Sarcophagus,” he said. “Sarcoph-a-gus. Now there’s a rare old word for you. Bet you don’t know what it means, do you, miss?”
“It comes from two Greek words meaning ‘eater of flesh,’ ” I said. “The ancient Greeks used to make them of a special stone brought from Assos, in Turkey, because it was said to consume the entire body, except the teeth, in forty days.”
Although I didn’t do it often, I offered up a little prayer of thanks to my sister Daffy, who had read this fascinating snippet aloud to me from one of the volumes of a coffin-black encyclopedia in Buckshaw’s library.
“Aha!” said Mr. Haskins, as if he had known it all along. “Well, there we have it then, straight from the horse’s mouth,” he said, meaning me.
Before I could protest what I took to be an insult, he had given the rope a fierce tug.
Nothing happened.
“Lend a hand, Norman. Tommy, give the other end a nudge—see if we can swing ’er out.”
But in spite of their hauling and pushing, the stone wouldn’t budge.
“Seems to be stuck fast,” the vicar said.
“Stuck ain’t the word for it,” Mr. Haskins said. “Well and truly bloody—”
“Little pitchers, Mr. Haskins, little pitchers,” the vicar said, putting a forefinger to his lips and giving an almost imperceptible nod in my direction.
“Something jammin’ it up, like. Let’s have a dekko.”
Mr. Haskins dropped the end of the rope and snatched the torch away from Tommy.
Holding the lamp just behind its lens, he shoved his face against the crack.
“No good,” he announced at last. “Wants more of an opening.”
“Here—let me,” I said, taking the torch from his hands. “My head’s smaller than yours. I’ll tell you what I can see.”
They were all so astonished, I think, that nobody tried to stop me.
My head went easily in through the gaping crack, and, like a contortionist, I maneuvered the light until it was beaming into the tomb from over my head.
A cold, dank draft brushed at my face, and I wrinkled my nose at the sharp, brackish stink of ancient decay.
I was looking into a small stone chamber of perhaps seven feet long and three wide. The first thing I saw was a human hand, its dried fingers tightly clutching a bit of broken glass tubing. And then the face—a ghastly, inhuman mask with enormous, staring acetate eyes and a piggish rubber snout.
Beneath it was a white ruffle, not quite covering the ink-black vessels of the neck and throat. Above the eyes was a shock of curly golden choirboy hair.
This was most definitely not the body of Saint Tancred.
I turned off the torch, withdrew my head, and turned slowly to the vicar.
“I believe we’ve found Mr. Collicutt,” I said.