Timeline - Michael Crichton [172]
“That’s right, so many paces from the giant’s feet. Or gigantic feet.”
“From the giant’s feet,” Chris repeated. He pointed to the sarcophagus, where the feet of the carved knight were two rounded stumps. “Do you suppose it means these feet?”
Kate frowned. “Not exactly giant.”
“No. . ..”
“Let’s try it,” she said. She stood at the foot of the sarcophagus, turned right, and went five paces. Then she turned left, and went four paces. She turned right again, and took three paces before she came up against the wall.
“Guess not,” Chris said.
They both turned away and began to search in earnest. Almost immediately, Kate made an encouraging discovery: half a dozen torches, stacked in a corner, where they would stay dry. The torches were crudely made, but serviceable enough.
“The passage has to be here somewhere,” she said. “It has to be.”
Chris didn’t answer. They searched in silence for the next half hour, wiping mold off the walls and floor, looking at the corroded carvings, trying to decide if one or another might represent a giant’s feet.
Finally, Chris said, “Did the thing say the feet were inside the chapel, or at the chapel?”
“I don’t know,” Kate said. “André read it to me. He translated the text.”
“Because maybe we should be looking outside.”
“The torches were in here.”
“True.”
Chris turned, frustrated, looking.
“If Marcel made a key that took off from a landmark,” Kate said, “he wouldn’t use a coffin or sarcophagus, because that could be moved. He would use something fixed. Something on the walls.”
“Or the floor.”
“Yes, or the floor.”
She was standing by the far wall, which had a little niche cut into the stone. At first she thought these were little altars, but they were too small, and she saw bits of wax; evidently, they had been made to hold a candle. She saw several of these candle niches in the walls of the crypt. The inner surfaces of this niche were beautifully carved, she noticed, with a symmetrical design of bird’s wings going up each side. And the carving had not been touched, perhaps because the heat of the candles had suppressed the growth of mold.
She thought, Symmetrical.
Excited, she went quickly to the next candle niche. The carvings depicted two leafy vines. The next niche: two hands clasped in prayer. She went all around the room in this way, checking each one.
None had feet.
Chris was sweeping his toe in big arcs across the floor, scraping away the mold from the underlying stone. He was muttering, “Big feet, big feet.”
She looked over at Chris and said, “I feel really stupid.”
“Why?”
She pointed to the doorway behind him—the doorway that they had passed through when they first came down the stairs. The doorway that had once been elaborately carved but was now eroded.
It was possible to see, even now, what the original design of the carving had been. On both left and right, the doorway had been carved into a series of lumps. Five lumps, with the largest at the top of the door and the smallest at the bottom. The large lump had a sort of flat indentation on its surface, leaving no doubt what all the lumps were meant to represent.
Five toes, on either side of the door.
“Oh my God,” Chris said. “It’s the whole damned door.”
She nodded. “Giant feet.”
“Why would they do that?”
She shrugged. “Sometimes they put hideous and demonic images at entrances and exits. To symbolize the flight or banishment of evil spirits.”
They went quickly to the door, and then Kate paced off five steps, then four, then nine. She was now facing a rusty iron ring mounted on the wall. They were both excited by this discovery, but when they tugged at it, the ring broke loose in their hands, crumbling in red fragments.
“We must have done something wrong.”
“Pace it again.”
She went back and tried smaller steps. Right, left, right again. She was now facing a different section of wall. But it was just wall, featureless stone. She sighed.
“I don’t know, Chris,” she said. “We must be doing something wrong. But I don’t know what.” Discouraged, she