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She shifted farther ahead, and then exclaimed, “Yes! Solid! Thank God one of us is thinking — I believe I would have killed myself going down headfirst.”

Crawford nodded in agreement, though there was no way she could see it. Sweat rolled down into his eyes.

He heard her shift forward in stages, and then it was just her heels skidding on stone and he heard her panting outside the narrow tunnel; after a few moments he heard her boots clunking on iron — they ascended a few rungs, and then descended, echoing in some bigger space.

“I’m below you now,” came her voice. “Roll over and slide out.”

Crawford was bigger around than she was, but he managed to get onto his side and push his way forward until his head and arms were projecting out of the tunnel, though there was still no light at all.

The wet-clay draft was now palpably coming from below him, chilling his wet shirt, and the noise of his breathing echoed away in a big volume of air. He could hear McKee’s boots scraping on metal some yards below him, and beyond that he now heard a low, many-toned humming — and he remembered McKee’s description of the vox cloacarum, the sound caused by pressure differences in the infinite old sewers. This seemed different.

He groped upward with one hand and found a metal rod — he tugged it, and it didn’t give, so he pulled himself farther out and was able to roll more and get his other hand on it too.

He pulled himself farther out into the black abyss and had to push with his heels to get his shins out past the top edge of the tunnel, but at last he was able to set his feet on the bottom edge of it, and then up onto the rungs.

Then he was following McKee in her audibly slow descent, past the tunnel mouth and farther down into the well.

After climbing down a few more rungs, he said, “That wasn’t ‘oranges and lemons.’”

“It was Latin for ‘I know thee as the god of the temple,’” she said. “Now hush.”

Crawford was too sore and tired to do more than twitch at the first touch of the insect wings, and after the surprise of the first flutter at his cheek, he ignored their feather touches on his face and hands. The work of moving one hand and one foot, and then the other hand and the other foot, and the rhythmic chuff of his breath against the stone wall in front of his ever-flexing knuckles, became nearly automatic, and he tried to imagine the long-lost people who must have built this well. Into his mind swam images of Roman soldiers battling men who fought naked with crude black-iron swords.

“Again there’s a drop,” came McKee’s voice from below him, jarring him out of the insistent daydreams. “I can’t see a thing below, but — Johanna did it, so we can.”

Crawford’s first thought was that if he heard McKee fall a long way he could climb up the ladder and make his way back through the tunnel to the open air — but he couldn’t permit that.

“I’ve,” he said, “got a new watch. Let me drop it and we can listen and see how long it takes to hit something.”

“A capital notion, my dear,” she said, and he heard a shiver of exhaustion and relief in her voice. “I owe you a lot of time.”

He pulled his watch out of his waistcoat pocket and fumbled one-handed at the little bar on the end of the chain; it was tucked through a waistcoat buttonhole, and when he finally poked it free, he lost his grip on the watch.

“There it goes,” he said hastily.

He waited several seconds, but heard nothing.

His belly was suddenly icy and tingling at the thought of a vast drop below them, and he gripped the rung he was holding on to tightly and tried to flatten himself against the wall.

“Climb … back … up,” he said distinctly through clenched teeth.

McKee’s quavering voice said, “But — she must have come this way—”

And then another voice, a little girl’s, spoke hesitantly from not far below them: “I caught it before it could fly away. And you must fall too.”

Crawford didn’t like the sound of must fall, but he said to McKee, “I’ll climb down and drop as soon as I hear you land and step aside.”

THE FOUR BURLY GRAVEDIGGERS in their rough corduroy trousers and jackets had slung a pair of ropes under the gleaming black coffin, and now they came forward out of the tree shadows and lifted it off the bier and plodded across the grass toward Christina, with the coffin swinging between them. She stepped back hastily, and two of them moved to each side of the grave and then began lowering the coffin into the hole.

The mourners shuffled closer, with the white-haired old priest leading the way; Christina wondered what the old cleric would do if he knew what was in the grave. And Gabriel looked ready, Christina thought with sudden agonized sympathy, to jump into the grave himself. And this is all my fault, she thought; and Papa’s too, and Papa’s too, for bringing the hellish thing back from Italy and then giving it to me.

The ropes went slack, and two of the gravediggers rapidly drew them up and coiled them, and then all four stepped back.

Christina’s face went icy cold — for her uncle’s attention was still a quivering shadow on her mind; desperately she steered her thoughts toward her father’s old headstone and away from the panicky realization that her uncle’s identity was not fragmented now that Lizzie’s doctored coffin sat on top of her father’s.

The priest shook more holy water down into the grave and said, “‘We therefore commit her body to the ground; earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust; in the sure and certain hope of the Resurrection to eternal life.’”

Christina made the sign of the cross, though she wasn’t Catholic. He is paying such exclusive attention to me, she thought, because I’m still physically close to his petrified body. The terrible attention will wane as I drive away.

And she knew that Polidori had caught that thought and ruefully agreed with it; though his intrusive identity seemed to promise a more lasting intimacy someday soon.

Gabriel stepped forward and crouched beside the shovelful of dirt beside the grave, and he picked up a handful and scattered it gently into the grave.

CRAWFORD HAD HEARD MCKEE splash into mud when she dropped from the last rung, and so he was not surprised when his boots plunged into viscous muck; and he had landed with bent knees and managed to stay upright.

The humming he had heard earlier was louder now and sounded even less organic.

“Johanna!” called McKee. “Where are you?”

Crawford jumped as a chorus of harsh voices, all speaking in unison, echoed in reply, “She is here with me. Come in.” The voices seemed to reverberate from another chamber than the space in which Crawford and McKee stood.

Crawford didn’t move now, and from the silence that followed the echoes of the voices, he knew McKee didn’t either; then he heard a rustle of clothing and a faint metallic scrape, and his nostrils caught the pungent smell of garlic. Hastily he dug his own little bottle out of his waistcoat pocket, though he didn’t unscrew its lid yet.

He heard her step forward in the mud to his left, in the direction the voices had seemed to come from; and, though his face was icy with sweat and his knees were shaking so badly that he feared he might fall down, Crawford made himself lift one foot and swing it ahead and then put it down in the unseen mud and set his weight on it, and then lift the other. His free hand was extended out in front of himself, and when he heard McKee slap some surface, he found no obstacle, though through his boot toe he felt a rounded shelf to step up onto.

Her whisper came to him from a yard away to his left: “A sort of bent pillar, here.”

“An opening here,” he muttered. “And a step.”