The Deeds of the Disturber - Elizabeth Peters [146]
I reached the moss-encrusted wall of the old wing without incident or alarm, and was congratulating myself on my good fortune when I received my first check. The structure, which had appeared from the outside to be on the verge of collapse, was not so vulnerable as I had hoped. Every window was boarded up; the boards were new, thick, and fixed with stout nails. I could not get so much as a fingernail into a crack. The door, on the short end of the wing, was as immovable as stone, and when I tried the handle the rust flaked off like a shower of dry raindrops.
I was about to try one of the other wings, hoping a window had been left unlatched (and fully prepared to break a pane if I had to) when I saw a faint glow of light, which appeared to emanate from the ground next to my feet. It faded almost at once, but it had given me the clue I needed. Someone had walked through a subterranean room carrying a lamp or lantern, betraying the existence of apertures which I might not otherwise have suspected – small windows at ground level, opening into the cellars.
At one time they had been closed with bars or grilles of iron, but the long passage of years had corroded the metal to a thin shell and I was able to wrench the remaining bars from their sockets. The apertures were so narrow only a child – or a small woman – could have passed through, which is probably why the bars had never been replaced.
I got through, though not without a struggle and some rather painful pressure on a certain portion of my anatomy which has inconvenienced me before. I went in feet-first, and lowered myself to the farthest extremity of my arms, but still could feel nothing but air under my stretching toes. The darkness was impenetrable, the moment one of considerable anxiety. How far below me was the floor? What, other than the presumed floor, might be there? If I fell heavily or knocked over some breakable object, the noise would announce my presence. Someone was in the house, I had seen the light.
There was no use worrying about it, so I let go my grip on the ledge and dropped – a few feet only, as it proved, but it felt like a greater distance. I landed with knees bent, and did not lose my balance.
The place was black as pitch and smelled like a grave. Risky as it was to strike a light – which was why I had not brought the dark lantern I normally wore attached to my belt – I dared not move until I knew what obstacles lay ahead. I took every possible precaution before I struck the match, shielding it with hand and body.
Almost instantly I put it out. I had seen enough – a narrow empty room, with walls and floor of stone smeared sickeningly with lichen and containing nothing except a few scraps of wood. On both side walls, dark openings gaped.
Which direction? I tried to remember the fleeting glimpse of light, and decided it had moved from right to left across the window. Sure-footed in the darkness, and holding my tools to my side to prevent them from jingling, I followed the direction the lantern-holder had taken.
No sooner had I entered the next room than I saw light ahead. Proceeding with the utmost caution, I passed through a door that hung askew on broken hinges into a stony corridor as low-ceilinged and as dank as the room I had just left. The light was straight ahead; it came from an opening at the top of a flight of narrow stairs.
Wrapping my cloak tightly around me and pulling the hood low over my face, I went up the stairs. They did not creak underfoot; they were of stone, worn by the passage of centuries. At the top I paused and peered cautiously around the edge of the opening.
What I saw astonished me so that I straightened up and hit my head a smart blow on the low stone lintel of the archway.
Directly in front of me was a group of statuary, life-sized,