A light burned in the depths of the house, but when I knocked no one came. I tried the door and it opened easily, revealing a wooden hallway leading to a kitchen straight ahead, with a flight of stairs to the right and a doorway to the left into a living room.
“Mr. Fell?” I called, but there was no reply. In the kitchen, some bread lay on a plate covered by a napkin, a jug of buttermilk beside it. Upstairs, both bedrooms were empty. One was tidy, with spare blankets laid out carefully at the base of a newly made bed, but the other bedroom was strewn with clothes and half-eaten food. The sheets upon the bed did not appear to have been laundered in some time, and there was a smell from them, as of an old man’s unwashed body. There were cobwebs on the windows, and mouse droppings upon the floor.
Yet it was the writing desk that drew my attention, for it, and what lay upon it, had obviously been the focus of Mr. Fell’s interest for some time. I cleared some stained shirts from the chair and sat down to examine his labors. Under ordinary circumstances, I would not have intruded upon another man’s privacy in such a way, but my duty here was to the bishop, not to Mr. Fell. His cause was already lost. I did not want mine to join it.
Three old manuscripts, so yellow and worn that the writing had almost faded away, occupied pride of place at the center of a storm of papers. The language was Latin, but the script was in no way ornate. Instead, it was neat, almost businesslike. At the end, beside an illegible signature, was a darker stain. It looked like old, dried blood.
The documents appeared to be incomplete, with sections missing or unintelligible, but Mr. Fell had made a considerable job of translating what remained. In his neat script he had recorded three extended sections, the first of which related to the foundation of the original church at the end of the last millennium. The second appeared to describe the location of a particular stone formation on the floor, originally marked by a tomb of some kind. Beside it was a rubbing on thin paper, revealing a date-976 A.D.-and a simple cross, behind which was a design of some kind. I could make out an eye at either side of the vertical trunk of the cross, and a great mouth segmented by the lower, as though the cross were resting upon the face beneath. Long hair streamed from its skull, and its eyes were huge with fury, but the features were not human. It reminded me of a gargoyle, but the impishness of such creatures was absent, and a grave malevolence appeared in its place.
I turned to the third part of Mr. Fell’s ongoing work. He had obviously encountered the greatest difficulty with this section. The translation was littered with gaps, or guessed words indicated by question marks, but he had underlined the terms of which he was certain. They included “entombed” and “malefic.” But there was one that had been repeated again and again throughout the text, and which Mr. Fell had in turn emphasized in his translation.
That word was dæmon.
I left my bag in the second, uncluttered bedroom and looked out of the window. It faced toward the chapel, and there I saw that a light burned. I watched it flicker for a time, then went downstairs and, remembering Mr. Fell’s reported habit of locking the church, searched until I found a set of dusty keys in a small cabinet. These in hand, I took an umbrella from the stand beside the door and made my way to the house of God.
The front entrance was locked, and through a gap in the door I could see that a bar had been raised across it from within. I knocked hard and called Mr. Fell’s name, but there was no reply. I was walking to the rear of the church when, close by the east wall, but low, almost as if it came from beneath the ground, I heard a slight noise. It was the sound of someone tunneling slowly, inch by inch. And yet, listen though I might, I could not discern the use of any tool. It was as if all the work were being done by hand. I continued quickly to the back door and tried each key in turn until the lock clicked, and I found myself standing in an alcove of the chapel, with carved heads on the cornices above me. And as I stood, the sound of digging came again to me.
“Mr. Fell?” I called, and I was surprised to find my voice catching in my throat, so that the words came out as almost a croak. I tried again, louder this time.
“Mr. Fell?”
The digging from below stopped. I swallowed hard and moved toward a lamp that burned in a small nook, my feet echoing softly on the stone floor. Rainwater and sweat mingled upon my face. The moisture tasted like blood upon my tongue.
The first thing I saw was the hole in the floor, beside which stood a second oil lamp, its fuel almost depleted, so that the flame was tiny and flickering. A number of stones had been removed and placed against the wall, leaving a gap big enough for a man to squeeze through. One of the stones, I noticed, was the model for the rubbing on Mr. Fell’s desk. Now, although the stone was worn, the face behind the cross could be more clearly discerned, and what I had taken to be flowing hair now appeared to be flames and smoke issuing from the features of the creature, so that the cross seemed to be branding it.
The hole itself was dark and dropped gently down, but I thought that I could discern another light deeper within. I was about to call again when the digging resumed, this time with greater urgency, and the sound made me stumble back in fright.
On the floor, the oil lamp was almost sputtering its last. I took the second lamp from the nook and knelt at the opening. I caught the smell that came from within, faint but definite, the stench of waste matter. I took my handkerchief from my pocket and wrapped it around my nose and mouth. Then I sat on the lip of the hole and gently lowered myself down.
The tunnel was narrow and sloped, and I felt myself sliding on stone and loose earth for a few feet, the lamp held low before me in case it might break upon the roof. For a moment, I feared that I might fall into some great chasm, with only darkness around me as I plummeted, never to be found again. Instead, I landed on stone, and found myself in a low tunnel, perhaps only four feet at its highest point, which curved ahead of me and to the right. Behind me, there was only a blank wall.
It was intensely cold in the tunnel. The sound of digging was stronger and more noticeable now, but so too was the smell of excrement. Holding my lamp ahead of me, I walked, crouching along the stone flags of the tunnel, following it as it sloped down, ever down. Where old supports had decayed, someone-I guessed that it was Mr. Fell-had made improvements, adding new braces to hold the roof.
One support in particular caught my eye: it was larger than the others, and covered in carvings of writhing serpents, with the face of a beast at its highest point, tusks sprouting from either side of a snouted mouth, its eyes hidden beneath a thick, wrinkled brow. The face was reminiscent of that on the marker stone in the chapel, although better preserved and far more detailed in its depiction, for I had noticed no tusks before. Two heavy ropes snaked from either side of the brace, with a knot at each end. When I looked closely, I found them connected to a pair of iron rods hammered into a gap in the stone. The ropes were new, the rods old. From the looks of them, if these ropes were pulled then the stones would collapse, taking the brace with them. And I wondered why this tunnel had ever been built, and why someone had taken the precaution of contriving a mechanism to destroy it if the need arose.
The digging grew closer and closer, the tunnel ever cooler. It was narrower now, and far more difficult to negotiate, but I found myself hurrying, my curiosity briefly overcoming my unease. I was crouched almost double, and the stench was becoming unbearable, when I rounded a corner and my foot touched something soft. I looked down and heard myself moan.