“We’re opening a ruddy big door,” Timothy explained.
“Well, hurry up,” Martin insisted, “or I’m going back up. I can’t breathe.”
Reggie turned the key and they heard the clunk of a mechanism. He pressed his palm against the cool wooden surface but the door wouldn’t move. It resisted his efforts until he put the full weight of his shoulder into it.
It slowly creaked open.
They shuffled through as if they were on a chain gang, and all of them started sweeping the new space with their beams.
This room was larger than the first, much larger.
Their minds assembled the scrambled stroboscopic images into something cohesive, but seeing wasn’t tantamount to believing, at least at first.
No one dared to speak.
They were in a high-domed chamber the size of a conference hall or a small theater. The air was cool, dry and stale. The floor and walls were fashioned from large blocks of stones. Atwood took note of these structural features, but it was a long wooden table and bench that jolted him. He moved his light over it from left to right and estimated that the table was over twenty feet long. He moved closer until his thighs touched it. He shone his light on its surface. There was an earthenware pot, the size of a teacup, with a black residue. Further down the bench there was a second pot, a third, a fourth.
Could it be?
It occurred to Atwood to cast his beam beyond the table.
There was another table. And behind it another. And another. And another.
His mind reeled. “I believe I know what this is.”
“I’m all ears, Prof,” Reggie said in a low voice. “What the bloody hell is it?”
“It’s a scriptorium. An underground scriptorium. Simply amazing.”
“If I knew what that meant,” Reggie said, sounding irritated, “I’d know what this is, wouldn’t I.”
Beatrice explained with awe, “It’s where monks copied manuscripts. If I’m not mistaken, it’s the first subterranean one ever discovered.”
“You are not mistaken,” Atwood said.
Dennis was reaching for an ink pot but Atwood stopped him. “Don’t touch. Everything must be photographed in situ, exactly as we find it.”
“Sorry,” Dennis said. “Do you think we’ll find any manuscripts down here?”
“Wouldn’t that be marvelous,” Atwood said, his voice trailing off. “But I wouldn’t count on it.”
They decided to split into two parties to explore the boundaries of the chamber. Ernest took the three undergraduates to the right, and Atwood led Reggie and Beatrice to the left. “Careful as you go,” Atwood warned.
He counted each row of tables as he passed, and when he’d counted fifteen, saw that Reggie was casting his light on another large door at the rear of the room. “Fancy going through there?” Reggie asked.
“Why not?” Atwood answered. “However, nothing can top this.”
“It’s probably the bloody water closet,” Beatrice joked nervously.
They were practically pressing against Reggie as he lifted the weighty latch and pulled the door open.
All at once they shone their flashlights in.
Atwood gasped.
He felt faint and literally had to sit down on the stone floor. His eyes began to well up.
Reggie and Beatrice held onto each other for support, two opposites attracting for the first time.
From a distant corner they heard the others urgently shouting, “Professor, come here. We’ve found a catacombs!”
“There’s hundreds of skeletons, maybe thousands!”
“Goes on forever!”
Atwood couldn’t answer. Reggie took a few steps back to make sure his boss was all right. He leaned over, helped the older man to his feet and boomed out in his loudest military baritone, “Sod the skeletons, you lot! You’d all better come over here ’cause you’re not going to believe what we’ve got ourselves into.”
Atwood’s first thought was that he was dead, that he had inhaled some toxic vapors and died. He wasn’t a religious man but this had to be some sort of otherworldly experience.
No, this was real. If the first chamber was the size of a theater, the second was the size of an airline hangar. To his left, a mere ten feet from the door, was a vast wooden case, filled with enormous leather-bound volumes. To his right was an identical stack, and in between the two was a corridor just wide enough for a man to pass. Atwood recovered his senses and traced one stack with his flashlight to understand its dimensions. It was about fifty feet long, some thirty feet high, and consisted of twenty shelves. He did a rapid count of the number of books on just one shelf: about 150.
All of his nerve endings tingled as he wandered into the central corridor. To both sides were huge bookcases, identical to the first pair, and they seemed to go on and on into the darkness.
“Shitload of books in here,” Reggie said.
Somehow, Atwood had hoped that the first words spoken on the occasion of one of the great discoveries in the history of archaeology might have been more profound. Had Carter, at the mouth of Tutankhamen’s tomb heard, “Shitload of stuff in here, mate?” Nevertheless, he had to agree.
“I should say so.”
He violated his own no-touch rule and put his pointer finger softly against the spine of one book on an eye-level shelf at the end of the third stack. The leather was firm and in excellent preservation. He carefully wiggled it out.
It was heavy, at least the heft of a five-pound bag of flour, about eighteen inches long, twelve inches wide, five inches thick. The leather was cool, shiny, unadorned by any markings on the covers but in the spine he saw a large, clear number deeply tooled into the leather: 833. The parchments were rough-cut, slightly uneven. There had to be two thousand pages.
Reggie and Beatrice were by his side. Both aimed their lights on the book he cradled in the crook of his arm. He gently opened it to a random page.
It was a list. Names, by the look of the three columns across a page, some sixty names per column. In front of each name was a date, all of them 231833. Following each name was the word Mors or Natus. “It’s some kind of registry,” Atwood whispered. He turned the page-more of the same. An endless list. “Have you any thoughts on this, Bea?” he asked.
“Looks like it’s a record of births and deaths, like any medieval parish church might keep,” she replied.
“Rather a lot of them, wouldn’t you say?” Atwood said, sending his beam down the long central corridor.
The others had caught up and were murmuring at the library entrance. Atwood called back to them to stay put for the moment. He failed to notice that Reggie had started down the corridor, deeper into the chamber.
“How old would you say this vault is?” Atwood asked Beatrice.
“Well, judging from the stone work, the door construction, and the lock hardware, I’d have to say eleventh, maybe twelfth century. I’d hazard a guess we’re the first living souls to breathe this air in about eight hundred years.”
From a hundred feet away Reggie’s voice echoed out to them. “If bossy-boots is so bloody smart then how come I’ve got a book here what got dates in it for the sixth of May 1467?”
They needed a generator. Despite their fevered excitement, Atwood decided it was too hazardous to do further exploration in the dark. They retraced their steps and emerged into the late afternoon glare, then hurriedly covered the opening to the spiral stairs with planks and a tarp, then an inch of dirt so the casual observer like Abbot Lawlor would notice nothing. Atwood admonished them. “No one is to speak a word of this to anyone. Anyone!”
They returned to their camp and Reggie took a couple of the lads to find a generator somewhere on the island. Atwood holed up in his caravan to furiously make an entry into his notebook, and the rest of them talked among themselves in hushed tones over a simmering lamb stew.
After sundown, the van returned. They had found a builder in Newport who hired them a portable generator. They also procured several hundred feet of electrical line and a crate of lightbulbs.