We ran to the doors, opened them – and stopped dead. There on the step, framed against the lightening sky, stood three familiar figures in silver-grey jackets. Bobby Vernon, Kat Godwin, big Ned Shaw: the small, blonde and menacing members of Quill Kipps’s team. Not Kipps himself, though. They froze in the act of reaching for the door-knocker. We gazed at them.
‘Where’s Quill?’ Kat Godwin snapped. ‘What’s going on?’
‘What have you done with him?’ Ned Shaw loomed in close. ‘No nonsense today, Lockwood. Speak up right now.’
Lockwood shook his head. ‘Sorry, we haven’t got time for this. It’s an emergency. We think George is in trouble.’
Kat Godwin’s jaw clenched; there was doubt as well as hostility in her eyes. She spoke abruptly. ‘We think Kipps is too.’
‘He called us an hour ago,’ Bobby Vernon piped up, ‘to say he’d been following your friend Cubbins. He’d seen him go into the cemetery with someone. Told us to join him here. We’ve been looking everywhere, but there’s no sign of him.’
‘Still spying on us, was he?’ I sneered. ‘Shame.’
‘Better than skulking around with criminals like you seem to be doing,’ Godwin spat.
‘All that’s irrelevant now,’ Lockwood said. ‘If Kipps is with George, they’re both at risk. Kat, Bobby, Ned: we need your help, and you need ours, so let’s get on with it.’ He spoke calmly and authoritatively; and though I saw Ned Shaw’s fingers twitch, none of them challenged him. ‘We think they’re in the catacombs under the chapel,’ Lockwood went on. ‘The access doors are locked, and we need to get down. Bobby, you’d know this sort of thing. Victorian catafalques, used for lowering bodies beneath the church. How were they operated? From above, from below?’
‘From above,’ Vernon said. ‘The minister lowered the coffin during the service.’
‘OK, so there must be a lever. We were right, Luce. So where—’ He broke off, staring out across the twilit graveyard. ‘Kat, Ned – did you bring anyone else with you?’
‘No,’ Ned Shaw scowled. ‘Why?’
Lockwood took a deep breath. ‘Because,’ he said slowly, ‘it looks like we’ve got company.’
His eyes were better than mine; I hadn’t noticed the little movements out among the gravestones, the swift dark shapes flitting up the grassy aisles. They converged upon the excavation camp, and now passed out into the greyly open space between the sheds and diggers. A group of men, purposeful and silent; men used to being out at night. They carried sticks and cudgels in their hands.
‘Hey, this is exciting,’ the skull’s voice whispered in my ear. ‘I’m so enjoying this night out. Now I get to see you all killed. We must do this more often.’
‘Not friends of yours, then, Lockwood?’ Kat Godwin said.
‘Acquaintances, perhaps . . .’ He looked sidelong at me. ‘Lucy, I think these fellows come from Winkman. That one on the end was at the auction, I’m almost sure. Lord knows how they’ve followed us, but I need you to do something for me now without arguing.’
‘OK.’
‘Go back into the chapel, find the lever, go down and get George. I’ll follow as soon as I can.’
‘Yes, but Lockwood—’
‘Without arguing would be nice.’
When he uses that tone, arguing with Lockwood isn’t an option. I stepped backwards into the chapel. The first men had reached the bottom of the steps. Between them they possessed a fair combination of features you wouldn’t want to see approaching on a dark night: bald heads and broken noses, bared teeth and low-slung brows . . . The clubs they held weren’t too appealing, either.
‘What do we do?’ Bobby Vernon stammered.
‘Right now, Bobby,’ Lockwood said, ‘I think you need to draw your sword.’ He glanced back at me over his shoulder. ‘Lucy – go!’
Men came rushing up the steps; I slammed the door. From outside came the sound of ringing steel, thuds and crashing. Someone screamed.
I ran into the centre of the chapel, stood by the marble catafalque. What had Vernon said? The minister would lower it down. OK, so where would the minister have been standing? Where on earth would he be?
‘Ooh, so tough,’ the whispering voice said. ‘Shows how often you go to church.’
And then, all at once, I knew. The pulpit. The plain wooden pulpit, its top carved in the shape of an opened book, standing quiet and forgotten a few feet from the catafalque. I strode across to it, trying to ignore the noises from outside. I stepped up onto its foot-rest, looked down, and saw the hidden shelf cut into the wood just below the top.
There on the shelf: the simple metal switch.
I pressed it. At first I thought it had done nothing; then, smoothly and almost silently – there was only the faintest hum – the catafalque began to sink. The metal plate it rested on was descending through the floor. I jumped down from the pulpit, ran across and sprang onto the top of the black stone.
Outside the chapel, something heavy thudded against the doors. I did not look up. I drew my rapier and stood ready, feet apart and breathing steadily. Past flagstones, away from light and into darkness, I was carried down into the earth.
‘Don’t be frightened.’ From the rucksack, a wicked whispering brushed my ear. ‘You’re not alone. You’ve still got me.’
A shaft of brick had opened out into realms of solid space, and still I was going down. I could feel the gap around me, the sudden suck and cling of cold, dry air. Yet I could see nothing. I knew that I was spot-lit in a column of light that deadened my senses and made me vulnerable. Anything could be waiting there, close by, and I would not know it until I landed right beside them. My hackles rose; all my instincts told me I needed to get away. The feeling of danger overwhelmed me. I tensed, ready to jump—
And the mechanism stopped.
With a hop and a scramble I was off the catafalque and out of that column of light. Then I forced myself to halt. I went very still; I stood in the dark and listened to the racing of my heart and, beyond that, to the silence of this place.
But it was not silent, at least not to my inner senses. From unknown distances came little sounds – soft rustlings and sighings, faint peals of laughter that ended in a sudden sob. I heard whispering too, in cut-off snatches; and somewhere, most horribly, the stupid, repetitive clicking of somebody’s wet tongue.
None of it came from mortal throats.
I was in the realm of the dead.
The psychic silence was also broken, more obviously, by a cheery whistling sound from the ghost-jar in my rucksack. Occasionally it stopped, but only to start up a banal and tuneless hum.
‘Will you pack that in?’ I said. ‘I need to listen.’
‘Why? I’m happy. This is my kind of place.’
‘It’s a place you’ll stay for ever, if you don’t co-operate with me,’ I snarled. ‘I’ll brick you up behind a wall.’
The whistling abruptly ceased.
Always, when you’re alone and vulnerable, emotions seek to undermine you. Mine went haywire now. I thought of Lockwood, fighting for his life upstairs. I thought of George – and the haunted, yearning expression on his face after glancing at the mirror five nights before. I thought about how easily everything I cared about could be destroyed. I thought of the emptiness of my work-belt. I thought of Edmund Bickerstaff’s terrible Spectre rising high against the moon . . .
I compressed those emotions. I boxed them in, and stored them in a cubby-hole in the attic of my mind. Time enough to open that box later. Right now I had to stay alert – and stay alive.
The ground was rough underfoot: I sensed brickwork, worn and uneven, loose stones and pebbles, and untold years of dust. On all sides, soft, dry coldness stretched away. I could still see nothing at all. Around the shaft of light, everything was so black I might have been in a narrow corridor or a massive void; there was no way of telling. It seemed inconceivable that anyone would deliberately come down here.