A Wicked Deed (51 page)

‘What is it?’ asked Bartholomew, glancing down at the pitch darkness with a distinct lack of enthusiasm.

‘It is the old crypt, where the lords of Barchester and their families were buried before the plague ended their line,’ said Eltisley cheerfully. ‘They will reward me handsomely when they rise from the dead to reclaim their manor.’

‘Is that why you are doing all this?’ asked Bartholomew, looking around at the phials and bottles that lined the room. ‘You want to be rewarded for your efforts by the dead?’

‘I will be the richest man alive,’ said Eltisley gleefully. ‘And all those who have helped me will also reap the benefits. I can be a very generous man.’

‘And who has helped you?’ asked Bartholomew. ‘Tuddenham? Grosnold? Hamon?’

Eltisley smiled. ‘You can work that out while you wait. It will give you something to do.’

‘We cannot go into a tomb with victims of the plague,’ said Bartholomew, aghast. ‘Even opening this vault might cause the disease to spread again. Are you totally insane?’

Eltisley regarded him coldly. ‘I am not in the slightest insane. And no one who died of the plague is down there. Mad Megin buried all of those in a pit in the churchyard. Now, hurry up. Do not be afraid if you hear rustlings and voices, by the way. I have given the corpses several doses of my potions, and I anticipate some of them will show signs of life soon.’

Sceptical though he was about Eltisley’s talents in that area, sitting in a tomb with long-dead corpses that were expected soon to come alive was not the way Bartholomew fancied spending his morning.

‘No,’ he said firmly, folding his arms.

Bartholomew looked around him, straining his eyes in the pitch black to try to make out what kind of place they were in. He could see nothing at all, and could not even hear the voices of Eltisley and his friends in the church above. It was indeed as silent as the grave. He shivered. It was cold, too, and smelled of wet bones, worms and rotting grave-clothes. He heard a faint rustle, and leapt to his feet, banging his head on the roof as he did so.

‘What was that?’ whispered Cynric shakily.

The rustle came again, slightly louder, and then something ran across Bartholomew’s foot. He forced himself not to shout, and scrambled up the steps to where he thought Cynric was sitting.

‘Just a mouse.’ He coughed. ‘We will suffocate in here.’

‘No,’ said Cynric. ‘I can see daylight around the edges of the slab. We will not lack fresh air.’

‘This is horrible,’ said Bartholomew, trying to move further up the stairs, away from the ominous scrabbling that came from the floor of the vault. ‘I am sorry, Cynric. I have dragged you into something dreadful yet again.’

‘You certainly have,’ agreed Cynric. ‘More dreadful than anything I could have imagined. How are we going to escape?’

Bartholomew glanced to the thin rectangle of light that outlined the trap-door. ‘We could open that.’

‘That mad landlord intends to use us for his vile experiments,’ he said in a low voice. ‘He will kill us, and then try to raise us from the dead. I do not know which I fear more.’

Bartholomew could think of nothing to say. He sat quietly, listening to the rustling growing louder, closer and more confident, and once he thought he heard a squeak. He thought about what Eltisley had told him, and tried to make sense of it all. Some details became clearer, but he was certain Eltisley was not the sole power behind the evil dealings at Grundisburgh, and that someone was leading him, encouraging him and providing him with the funds to continue his work.

Although it felt like an age, not much time had passed before there was a rumble from above, and they heard someone struggling to lift the slab once again. Cynric tensed, and flung himself out of the vault the moment the gap was large enough. He was so fast, that he had overpowered Eltisley before the landlord realised what was happening. Bartholomew reached out and seized the foot of one of the henchmen, pulling him off balance, and clambered quickly out of the hole to help Cynric wrestle with another. To one side he heard a yell, and saw Michael struggling between another two of Eltisley’s surly customers.

‘That was lucky,’ said Michael, sitting up. ‘You broke my fall.’

‘And you broke my legs,’ mumbled Bartholomew, squirming to free himself of the monk’s immense weight. ‘Stand up, Brother. I cannot breathe!’

Cynric darted back to the steps, to sit as far away from the floor of the vault as he could. Michael picked himself up, and peered around him.

‘Now what?’ he asked.

‘We cannot escape,’ said Cynric gloomily from his perch. ‘What you just saw was our only chance. They will not allow us to take them by surprise again. We are doomed.’

‘We are not,’ said Michael firmly. ‘I will not be dispatched by a loathsome maniac like Eltisley. If I am to die because another takes my life, it will be a worthy adversary, and not some madman who believes he can bring people back from the dead.’

‘He told you all that, did he?’ asked Bartholomew. ‘All about the riches he hopes to gain from granting dead people an unexpected new lease of life?’

Michael made a dismissive sound. ‘The man is a fool! The dead do not keep their earthly riches after they die – that is all inherited by the next of kin. What he will have is a lot of paupers, with nothing to give him but the rags in which they were buried.’

‘Did you explain that to him?’ asked Bartholomew. He started backward when he touched Michael’s hand in the darkness. It was cold and clammy, and felt like that of a corpse.

‘We should be thinking about how we can escape, not speculating on points of law,’ said Bartholomew, moving up the steps as the rustling began again.

‘What was that?’ demanded Michael, looking about him wildly. ‘I heard something. Is there someone in here with us? Has Eltisley succeeded in his ambitions, and raised Barchester’s dead?’

‘Do not be ridiculous, Brother,’ said Bartholomew, sitting with Cynric as far as possible up the steps. ‘Eltisley will never make the dead walk again. It is beyond the laws of nature.’

‘That man is beyond the laws of nature.’ Michael suddenly shot up the steps with an impressive spurt of speed for a man of his size. ‘Something touched my foot,’ he explained shakily.

‘Just a mouse,’ said Bartholomew.

‘A rat, boy,’ said Cynric ominously. ‘Rats live in tombs, not mice.’

Michael bowled Bartholomew and Cynric out of the way, and began heaving at the trap-door. It moved very slightly. Encouraged, Bartholomew helped, but although they could raise the slab the width of a finger, whatever was placed over the top of it was simply too heavy to move. Michael sat down, disheartened.

‘Did you manage to tell Tuddenham about Stoate?’ asked Bartholomew, to take his mind off a situation that was growing more alarming by the moment.

‘I met William by the church, and sent
him
to tell Tuddenham, because I was anxious about you. Then I ran into a couple of those loutish brutes who are always hunched over their ale at the Half Moon, and they brought me here.’

Bartholomew sat on one of the cold, damp steps. ‘Eltisley is threatening to kill William. But he will not get the students – I sent them away yesterday morning.’

‘Thank God!’ said Michael. ‘I wish you had sent William away, too. I suspect Eltisley will kill him, whether we comply with his wishes or not.’

‘So there is no hope of rescue, then?’ asked Cynric, stricken. ‘You sent William to Tuddenham with a message to chase Stoate, but no one knows we are here?’

‘I thought Stoate was all we needed to worry about,’ protested Michael. ‘He confessed to killing Unwin, and I was not anticipating being abducted by another murderer this morning.’

‘Do you have your candle?’ Bartholomew asked Cynric, trying to think of something he could do, other than wait for the mad landlord to kill the rest of the deputation from Michaelhouse. ‘There may be another way out of here.’

Michael chuckled humourlessly in the dark. ‘Church-builders always put an alternative exit in vaults,’ he said. ‘The dead do not like to feel trapped.’

Cynric produced his stub, and fiddled about with a tinder until the wick was alight. Hot wax spilled on to Bartholomew’s fingers as he eased his way down the steps. The ground moved, and Bartholomew saw with horror that there were dozens of rats there, large brown ones with scaly tails and glittering eyes. He hesitated.

‘Go on,’ encouraged Michael. ‘They will not bite you as long as you keep moving.’

‘You go, then,’ said Bartholomew, thrusting the candle at him and climbing back up the steps.

Michael gave a long-suffering sigh and walked down to the floor. The rats inched away, and he began to pick his way to the back of the chamber. It comprised an elongated room with three shelves along each side and a tiny altar at the far end. Four bodies were placed end to end along each shelf, so that there were twelve on the left and twelve on the right. With the rats scurrying about his bare ankles, Michael moved forward, peering at the shrouded figures in their niches.

‘Nothing,’ he said, returning a few moments later. ‘The whole thing is made of solid stone.’

‘What about the altar?’ asked Bartholomew. ‘Perhaps there is something behind that.’

‘Be my guest,’ said Michael, handing him the stub. ‘Those vermin are beginning to lose their nervousness, and it will not be long before they want to try sinking those sharp yellow teeth into something a little fresher than their usual fare.’

Before he could think too much about what he was doing, Bartholomew strode briskly to the back of the vault, sending furry bodies scattering in alarm. The altar was a simple wooden table, covered with an ancient cloth that was thick with dust. He pulled it off and peered underneath. The floor was solidly paved with slabs of stone sealed with mortar, while the wall behind the altar was made of unevenly hewn lumps of rock. He pushed at a few of them, but they were the foundation stones for the church, and the builders had intended them to last. When the building collapsed, as Bartholomew sensed it would do soon, the vault would remain intact.

He began to walk back toward the steps, breaking into a run when he trod on one of the rats and made it scream. He felt its sharp teeth dig into his boot, and was grateful he was not wearing sandals like Michael. When he reached the stairs again, his hand was shaking. He dropped the light, and the chamber was plunged into darkness.

‘I do not have another candle,’ said Cynric in the dark vault. Michael simply sighed. After a moment, their eyes grew used to the gloom again.

‘We will have to try to overpower Eltisley when he comes,’ said Bartholomew, trying to think positively.

‘With what?’ asked Cynric. ‘We have no weapons, and you do not even have your bag with you to take a swing at them with.’

‘Go and fetch it, then,’ said Michael. ‘And retrieve the candle while you are at it.’

That idea did not much appeal to Bartholomew while rats milled about on the floor. He tried to think of a better idea, but failed. ‘All right, then. But if we all go, you two can drive them off while I feel around on the floor.’

It was not a plan that filled anyone with much enthusiasm, but in the absence of an alternative, they inched down the stairs and stepped gingerly on the floor. Feeling that caution was the wrong approach, Michael suddenly began stamping his feet and spinning around like some crazed Oriental dancer. While Cynric did likewise, Bartholomew dropped to his hands and knees and began groping around for the quarrel, trying to ignore the cold, wet patches and mysterious lumps that his fingers encountered.

Michael’s breath came in laboured gasps from the vigour of his exercise, and Cynric was already edging toward the steps. Bartholomew knew they would not maintain their rat-scaring act for much longer, and his search became more erratic. Just when he thought he would have to think of something else, he found the bolt. He snatched it up with a triumphant yell, and vied with the others to be first up the stairs.

‘Give it to me,’ said Cynric, feeling for it in the darkness. He nodded. ‘It will do. Did you find the candle?’

There was a disappointed silence when Bartholomew did not reply.

‘We should try to think out answers to all this,’ said Michael, after a moment. ‘It might give us some kind of bargaining power, if Cynric’s attempt to free us fails.’

‘Eltisley said we have all the facts,’ said Bartholomew. ‘So we should be able to work out at least part of it. I have been thinking hard, and I think I know the identity of the hanged man.’