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"You ever find any ghosts?" he asked.
"Cold spots, but never any strange apparitions or anything. And a lot of weird
stories that seemed pretty genuine when you considered the sources."
"No kidding," he answered absently.
She was quiet for a moment as Culhane explored the upper surface of the altar.
"Yecch what's this?"
Culhane looked down to where she knelt beside the altar stone.
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"Rat droppings, most likely."
She looked up at him, then got to her feet in the most fluidly graceful move
he'd ever seen her make and stepped back two steps. "Ohh...yeah, that's what I
thought it was."
Culhane went back to examining the altar.
Mulrooney was talking. "Sometimes in those old houses, you'd be looking for a
secret panel because you knew where the door was or where the passage ran, but
you couldn't find the "
There was the audible sound of her sucking in her breath, a grating sound, and
then a low rumble as Culhane looked up, feeling the stone beneath his feet
the lip of the altar stone moving.
He looked at Mulrooney. She was staring at the stem of the baptismal font. She
had been leaning against it while she was talking. Then their eyes met.
"Pretty smart of me, huh?" she said, her eyes sparkling.
Culhane nodded, looking from her eyes to the hole beneath him where the altar
stone had slid away.
Stone steps led downward into blackness.
"So that's beneath the altar stone.... "
"It's probably a crypt for burying the dead."
Mulrooney's nervous cough echoed around them in the old stone church at the
center of the monastery.
Her hands were against her thighs, her fingers splayed as she followed Culhane
down the stone steps, followed the beam of his flashlight as it led beneath
the altar.
She could hear scratching sounds in the darkness, and her bare arms and legs
suddenly felt cold.
"What's that noise those little scratchy noises?"
"Rats maybe bats. Watch the floor. Could be kind of slimy underfoot."
"And I hadda wear sandals...."
He didn't answer her. She moved her hand, extending it out into the darkness
until it contacted his shoulder under the knit shirt he wore. It felt better
holding on to him. She kept walking down the steps, not taking her eyes off
the beam of his flashlight, once seeing something scurry out of the light
across the steps ahead.
"What the hell was that?"
"A rat, I guess. Relax," he told her.
"You get a rat coming up to bite your big toe, he's got a running shoe to go
through. With me, all the little sucker's got is nail polish."
"Hope it's chip-proof."
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She dug her nails into his shoulder until she heard him murmur "Ouch, Fanny,"
and she eased the pressure a little but not much.
He stopped moving and she didn't, crashing into him. "Why'd you stop?"
"Ran out of steps."
Mulrooney looked at the flashlight beam and watched as it played across a
floor. Parts of the floor seemed alive with dark, moving spots. "Just
roaches," she heard Culhane whisper.
"I almost had a landlord once who told me the same thing," she answered, still
watching the beam of the flashlight.
The flashlight stopped. She felt her jaw drop. A stone coffin, the lid half
off, a skeleton's hand reaching out the side. She figured the hell with it it
was scream or faint, and the floor was too horrible to fall on. She screamed.
* * *
"RELAX."
"I hate that word!"
"All right, don't relax," Culhane muttered, shining the flashlight over the
coffin. It wasn't stone but of hewn wood covered with mud. Part of the mud had
cracked away.
Culhane shone the flashlight beyond the coffin into the chamber. Rats scurried
over other coffins.
"You know what you're looking for?" she asked him.
"Yeah. When Chillingsworth talked about hiding the Log under the altar stone,
he mentioned this monk one of the monks had been especially kind to him when
he was first found dying suddenly of some illness where his chest seemed to
tighten."
"Heart attack. I know the feeling."
"Yeah, but if you were a kid hiding something, who would you hide it with? Who
would you trust?"
"A friend," he heard her answer through the darkness, her hand in his.
"And which one of these coffins would you open up? One full of rotted flesh
and bones strangers or maybe one that had a relatively fresh body in it?"
"Neither if I had a choice but I see what you mean."
"The names of the monks are on little plaques on the coffin lids."
"So we gotta read all the names until "
"Brother Diego that's the coffin we want."
"Brother Diego right," he heard her repeat.
He stopped beside a coffin, and a rat scurried across the lid. He felt her
squeeze his hand. The dust was too thick for him to read the name, and he set
the flashlight on the coffin lid so he didn't have to let go of her hand, then
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brushed the dirt away.
The name there was Felippe.
"Next coffin," he told her.
She didn't say anything. Culhane figured she was either getting used to it or
was too frightened to keep talking.
"Watch it," he said as he stepped across a swarm of cockroaches.
"Ick," he heard her whisper from the darkness. "I think one just ran across my
foot."
"Probably a foot fetishist. Relax."
"I really hate that word, Josh."
He stopped beside the next coffin.
Again he set down the light to dust the nameplate. He read the name out loud.
"Diego."
He shone the light toward Mulrooney. "You hold this. I'll pry open the lid."
"With what?"
"My fingers, I hope."
"I'll hold the light."
He handed the flashlight to her. "Shine it over here around the edge."
A rat ran across the lid, almost brushing his hand. He would have said
something, but he didn't want to frighten Mulrooney. His fingers felt along
the mating point of the coffin lid to the coffin box, a paper-thin gap.
There was his knife, but despite the Bali-Song's strength, it might break if
used as a lever. "Shine that light around the floor. Look for something I can
use like a crowbar."
"Only if I don't have to pick it up."
There was darkness on the lid of the mud-encrusted timber coffin as Culhane
tried prying at it with his fingers. Tiny red dots eyes of rats were visible
at the outer edges of the flashlight beam as he glanced behind him. And then
Mulrooney was saying, "I hate to use this and I even picked it up," and she
handed him a simple metal cross. "It was on one of the other coffins, just
resting on top."
Culhane took it from her. "Shine the light over here," he said. "Where the lid
meets the box."
The cross seemed to be made of iron. Holding the shorter end above the
crossbar, he edged the longer end between the coffin lid and the box, chipping
with it at the wood of the lid. Some of the wood fell away, and white, antlike
creatures crawled over it.
"What are those? Termites?" Mulrooney asked.
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Culhane didn't speak. He was working on enlarging a chink in the coffin lid.
He pried away a six or seven-inch-long section and wedged the cross under the
lid.
"Sure it isn't sacrilegious to use a cross?"
"It's in a good cause, anyway." Culhane kept prying, hearing a creaking sound,
feeling the lid starting to give. He rammed the cross forward between the lid
and the box of the coffin itself, using the cross in his right hand as a
lever, his left hand going under the lid and pushing up. Mulrooney was beside
him, also pushing. "Watch out!" Culhane pushed her back, stepping away, the
coffin lid sliding from the box portion, Mulrooney's flashlight beam catching
it as the coffin lid skidded off the near side and the bottom, coming to rest
inches from their feet.
The sounds of the rats were loud now, the rodents disturbed by the movement of
the coffin lid. Mulrooney's flashlight beam swept up from the floor and
settled on the upper interior of the coffin, on empty eye sockets, on
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