by David Wood
He pulled, but it was stuck fast, not budging even fractionally. Crowley brushed at the block, blew dust away, then held the flashlight in his teeth as he worked more at the surface. Either side of the devil carving were two circles, only about half an inch in diameter. They looked to be a slightly different shade to the rest of the block. He dug into them with his knife point and the same sandy mortar drifted down.
Crowley switched from the knife to a small screwdriver tool and dug into the circles, quickly revealing a deep hole in the stone. He worked his way in and the screwdriver tip slipped through and there was a sound like a popping cork. Crowley grinned and quickly cleared the second hole. He’d read about this kind of method and discussed it while teaching his ancient history classes. The Egyptians used similar techniques in the pyramids. The stone had been set in place, the holes used to suction air out of the space beyond until the block was set tight, hermetically sealed, and then the holes plugged with mortar. Now that he had broken through, the pressure equalized and the block shifted in its seat.
Crowley put his tools away, held the flashlight in one hand and used the fingertips of his other hand in the groove atop the block. He pulled and the block slid easily free. The one below it moved against the first and Crowley pulled that aside too. Each block was heavy, hard to manhandle, but he was strong enough to lift each free and put them on the floor. The opening he had made was just big enough for him to crawl through.
He shone his light inside first, but it was difficult to lean in and see. Gonna have to simply go in and see where this goes, he told himself, steeling his jittering nerves. Excitement and fear in roughly equal measure made his blood run fast. He wriggled into the opening, torch in his teeth again, until his hands found the cold hard stone of the floor on the other side. He walked his hands forwards, pulling his body through, until his legs were in and he dropped his feet to the ground. He sat back in a crouch and took his flashlight from his teeth to pan it around.
The space was much bigger than the cell he had come from, easily twenty paces or more square with a high stone ceiling. Old wooden cupboards and a rickety desk occupied one wall. On the desk was a book stand, big enough to hold a large tome, and candles had burned down to trickling, lumpy stubs. A human skull and a dusty dagger sat next to the book rest. Marks on the floor seemed to depict strange sigils, angular characters and the point of at least part of a pentacle.
Crowley slowly twisted, playing the light around the walls and gasped, his heart slamming into his ribs, when the beam of brightness revealed a hideous face, looking right back at him.
Chapter 23
Beneath Dalibor Tower
Crowley sat back hard on the cold stone but took deep, steadying breaths. The face was huge, and ugly, but made of stone. Or some kind of pressed clay maybe. Moving in for a closer look, Crowley grinned at the revelation. This giant was clearly the golem of the stories they had heard. Or at the very least, a copy of it. The thing had been broken in two, the stomach section smashed open. Just the upper torso, from somewhere around the sternum up, was big enough that as it sat on the floor, it was eye-level with Crowley, and he was not a short man. The face had wide-set eyes, deep and almost thoughtful. Its nose was short and slightly flattened, above a wide, lipless mouth that seemed set in a grimace of anger or pain. Or maybe frustration.
Large chunks of the midsection lay scattered around the room, angular and irregular, the result of some cataclysmic shattering strike. The legs, still joined together by large, ragged sections of pelvis, were each at least as long as Crowley was tall. When this thing was whole it would have been terrifyingly massive. Crowley ran a hand over the smooth, brown stony shoulder, wondering if it really was the golem of the legend, hundreds of years old. Once animate, now broken and inert, could this thing really have walked with a magical shem in its mouth?
But it didn’t answer the biggest and most pressing question in his mind, which was the location of the original Devil’s Bible, or what might have happened to it. Crowley stalked around the room, looking more closely at the cupboards, all annoyingly empty. The desk was equally unforthcoming, but he pocketed the dagger for later. It had a leather-wrapped hilt, shiny and smooth with age and use, and a slightly curved blade about six inches long. The metal of the blade bore pit marks and some chinks in its sharpened edge, but was in surprisingly good condition. The hermetic sealing of the chamber had preserved it against time well.
Crowley looked at the skull for a moment, wondering who it might have been. What unfortunate soul had their head interred in this creepy occult cave, sealed in presumably forever until Crowley had arrived to disturb its rest? But he couldn’t bring himself to touch it.
He looked once more around the room, once again frustrated. To have found a secret chamber, but have it tell him nothing was perhaps more galling than having never found it in the first place.
He returned to the golem, staring at its agonized face. His brows knitted as it occurred to him that the Codex Gigas could easily have been hidden inside the monster, with ample room to spare. It was more than big enough.
He shone his light into the bottom half, kneeling to look down each leg, but saw nothing. Returning to the top half, he carefully tipped it over onto its side, grunting with the effort of managing the enormous weight. When he shone his torch inside the capacious torso, it revealed a kind of shelf set into the creature’s back. The shelf had a lip along the front and some half a meter above it, a leather strap hung limp. A node of clay in line with the strap seemed perfectly set to anchor the leather in place. It was all too convenient to ignore. The size and placement was perfect for the Devil’s Bible to sit on the shelf and be held in tight by the leather strap secured across it about halfway up.
“The golem didn't consume the bible,” Crowley said to himself in a whisper. “It housed it.”
The smile of discovery fell off his face at the sudden emergence of hushed voices, drifting to him from far away. But not that far. Had some tour guide or other employee discovered the grill he had removed, his rope hanging down into the oubliette?
The sound of feet slapping gently on the floor caused his already racing heart to double-time. Whoever it was had used his rope and descended into the lower dungeon. He quickly doused his light and peered out through the opening, into the tiny cell and the oubliette beyond.
A man stood beside Crowley’s rope, illuminated by the light falling from above. In one hand, he held a gun, light glinting off the gray metal of its barrel as he pointed it around the empty space. In the man’s other hand was a flashlight, which he lifted and flicked on. It had a red filter and light like spilled blood danced around the pale stones.
The man looked slowly about himself, pausing at each of the four cells to shine his light in. His face was shadowed, but Crowley easily saw his focus and concentration. This was not a castle employee.
There was no way Crowley could worm his way through the small opening from the secret room and into the cell to jump the armed man. He’d be trapped like a lobster in a pot. As he sat back, wondering how on earth he would avoid the man’s attention, the red light spilled into the small cell outside his hiding place. The man saw the dark square of the removed bricks and grunted in satisfaction.
“Found something,” he called up into the light, and moved forward.
Crowley stood beside the gap, mind racing with possibilities. If the man looked inside before he came through and Crowley was close enough to jump him, the man would easily shoot at point blank range. If Crowley waited across the room, the man was sure to see him and get a shot off before Crowley had a chance to cover the distance. In an enclosed space with nowhere to run, the man with the automatic pistol had all the advantages.
As the gunman hurried toward the opening, Crowley looked frantically around. His time was almost up.
Chapter 24
Beneath Dalibor Tower
Rob Jeffries crouched outside the small cell and shone his red light on the two large stones, sat b
eside the hole they had been removed from. He frowned. Landvik sure had him do some unsavory things, and crawling around creepy dungeons was definitely high on that list. He should have sent Dean Patterson down after all, but the guy was constantly complaining about his injured knee. Jeffries wondered again if the loser was overplaying the hurt to get out of the tough jobs. Surely that Rose Black woman hadn’t kicked him hard enough to do the kind of damage Patterson complained about. Then again, Jeffries had to respect her skill if she had. Tough woman.
He moved into the small cell and shined his flashlight into the space beyond the removed blocks. The room was large, but seemed empty. He considered firing a round or two into the room ahead of himself, but thought better of it when he considered the noise and the potential ricochets.
Instead, he put his arm with the light through the hole, then the other hand with the gun, and played both around inside, looking over the top as best he could. Nothing. And no one made a grab for him. He leaned his head in, groaning with the tightness of the fit, and checked again. Nothing. A desk, a cupboard. He looked to his left and saw a massive statue, broken and lying around all over one side of the room.
With a grunt of effort he wriggled and pushed his way through, fell unceremoniously onto the cold flagstones, and quickly gained his feet. He turned in a full circle, light and gun aligned as he tracked every inch of the room. No one. He looked closely at the floor looking for trapdoors, scanned the ceiling for other openings, the wall for ladders. Nothing. He kicked at the large statue and a couple of pieces lying around. “Ugly damn thing,” he muttered.
It looked as though someone had been here before them, no doubt Rose Black and the man she had dragged along with her, but they appeared to have missed them. So close, it was infuriating.
He crawled back out through the tight access gap and went back into the pool of light and the rope. “There's no one down here,” he called up to Patterson.
“The girl's not there?”
Jeffries rolled his eyes, ground his teeth. “What do you think ‘no one’ means?”
“You checked thoroughly.”
“Yes, I did! If the girl and her friend were here, they’ve gone now.”
“Why did they leave the rope? Leave evidence they were here?”
Jeffries shook his head, bit down on an abusive response and said instead, “I guess they were in a hurry. Or maybe they just didn’t care.”
“What are we gonna tell Landvik?” Patterson called down.
Jeffries barked a derisive laugh. “Landvik? Nothing right now. We’ll have to decide what’s next before we tell him anything. Now, either come down here and check for yourself or pull me up. It’s creepy as hell in this hole.”
“All right, all right, keep your hair on.”
Jeffries pocketed the gun and flashlight, wrapped the end of the rope around one ankle, and gripped on. “Pull!” he called as he began to climb and he heard Patterson’s grunts of effort as the man finally started doing something useful.
Crowley kicked away a large slab of clay and scooted out of the golem’s large torso. The hiding place he had crawled into was cramped and uncomfortable, and the two chunks of broken golem pelvis he’d used to conceal himself had been a sloppy effort, but the man with the gun hadn’t looked very hard, despite what Crowley had heard him calling up to his friend.
Crowley stood and dusted himself off, taking deep breaths to settle his racing nerves. That had been way too close for comfort and only the fact that the gunman hadn’t realized the golem was hollow had saved him from a dangerous, almost certainly deadly confrontation.
Urgency pressed at Crowley’s heart and mind as he mentally kicked himself for leaving Rose alone. He’d gotten so caught up in the search for the bible that he hadn’t considered the people who were after Rose might have caught up with them already. Or at all, for that matter.
He had become sloppy thinking their flight from the country had bought them all the time they would need. His mind flickered to the archivist, to the introduction Rose’s boss at the museum had made for them, and realization washed over him in a cold flood. Their pursuers had obviously been to Rose’s workplace and got the information from Professor Phelps. Crowley desperately hoped that man was okay. He needed to get back to Rose, get on the move again, and put some new distance between them and their pursuers.
Cautiously, he made his way back through the tight gap, out of the small cell and into the oubliette. He couldn’t get out of this miserable place soon enough.
A chill shot up his spine as he emerged into the larger space and looked to the pool of light falling from the access hole high above. Light was all that fell down.
His rope was gone.
Chapter 25
Dalibor Tower
Crowley stood, fingers linked together atop his head, staring into the column of wan light from above. Trapped in an oubliette. His heart hammered, ice washed through his gut. It was a nightmare made real. The opening high above, designed specifically to thwart escape, mocked him with its brightness.
He took a deep breath. He wouldn’t rot down here. At worst he would have to yell for help like a recalcitrant child and keep yelling until he was hoarse. Eventually some official employee would hear, they would come and help him out. But he would be in a lot of trouble, maybe even arrested. And then where would that leave Rose. He couldn’t allow that to happen.
He turned to the walls, curving slowly up to the exit. Maybe he was fit and strong enough, his military regime of fitness maintained, at least to some degree. He certainly wasn’t the wasted prisoner who might have been thrown into this dungeon in days past. He found a wall with what appeared to be the widest trails of mortar and began to scratch it out, make a hand hold. He got a toe into one mortar course, reached up and wedged his fingers into the highest he could reach, and hauled. The stone was hard, sharp edges scraping at the skin of his fingers, dragging against his nails. His muscles strained as he pulled and managed to get a meter or so off the ground. He reached up again, scraped a patch of sandy mortar free and pulled again. Teeth gritted, grunting with the effort, he gained another meter. He allowed himself a moment’s congratulation, ignored the nagging thought of how he might get across the ceiling even if he scaled the wall, and slipped.
He yelped, skin barking off one knee and each fingertip as he slid down. He gouged his hands in and managed to arrest the fall. Two meters up, one back. This would take a while.
He glanced down, the flagstone floor still insultingly close, and began to climb again. He made it up another couple of meters, then craned his neck to see back over his shoulder. Could he get high enough, then brace his legs against the wall and push back, leap across the space to grab the edge of the hole high above?
His brow creased in concentration, and despair. Who did he think he was? Spider-Man? Regardless, he pushed on, reached up for another handhold, and fell.
For a moment he seemed weightless, then air rushed past, whipping at his hair and jacket, and the hard stone floor slammed into his back. The breath was hammered from his lungs, his bones flexed and flesh howled as he curled into a fetal ball and groaned. He dragged air into his battered body, squinted against the hurt and dragged air in again. He let his panic settle as he mentally searched for any specific pain, any broken bones.
Bloody idiot, he thought to himself. Could have smashed your stupid skull.
He might be less use to Rose if he were arrested, but he’d be no use to her at all if he was dead. He climbed slowly to his feet, testing every limb, thankful he wasn’t more than bruised. Lucky. Frowning, he scoured the dungeon, looking for anything else. A trapdoor, a bricked up entrance to some other tunnel that he could maybe clear with enough time and some improvised tools. Anything. But there was nothing to be found.
Accepting his fate, he walked back to the middle of the space and looked up through the light to the hole high above. He would have to call for help after all. Maybe he could tell them that he’d been intrigued by the
grill covering the oubliette and had leaned on it for a better look inside and it had given way. But that was clearly not the case, given its position from where he had removed it earlier. So maybe he should tell them he had lifted it aside for a better look, but fallen in like a clumsy fool. Then how would he explain his lack of injuries from a fall that far onto stone? But there was no rope in evidence after all, nothing to show his premeditation in accessing the dungeon. Perhaps they would believe he had been both uncommonly foolish and lucky.
He jumped as a shadow appeared above, a human shape in silhouette blocking out most of the light. “Hey,” a voice called down. “Need a lift?”
Chapter 26
Leaving Dalibor Tower
A grin broke out across Crowley’s face. “Rose!”
“You appear to be in a bind.”
She busied herself for a moment, then Crowley’s rope dropped back down into the oubliette. He’d never been more glad to see an inanimate object in his life. He climbed up hand over hand, quicker than a monkey up a fresh banana tree. Once back out into the tower, they worked quickly, removing the rope, replacing the grill over the dungeon entrance, then hurried from the dungeons. Checking for any guards, thankful to see none, they jogged away and were soon strolling back along Golden Lane.
Crowley kept alert, scanning constantly for the bad guys. His body ached all over like he’d not only been hit by a bus, but that it had reversed and had a second go to make sure. “How did you know to come for me?” he asked, finally relaxed enough in their safety to talk again.
“Not long after we left the tower, I spotted those guys.” She winced. “I recognized them, of course. I’ll never forget those faces since they attacked me.” She flashed him a grin. “One of them is limping pretty badly though. Looks like I got him good with that kick.”