Speaking From Among the Bones

by Alan Bradley

The answer came to me almost as quickly as the question.

  There is an unsaturated hydrocarbon with the molecular formula of C30H50 and the unlovely name of “squalene,” which is found in yeast, olive oil, fish eggs, the liver of certain sharks, and the skin of the human nose.

  Because of its extremely high viscosity, it has been used by clockmakers to oil cogs, by butlers to polish ebony, by burglars to lubricate revolvers, and by smokers to baby the bowls of their favorite pipes.

  Good old, jolly old everyday nose oil to unstick a good old, jolly old everyday mortise lock.

  The door itself had been banged together from heavy planks and I could still see the marks of the chisel with which the lock had been roughly installed. It was of the warded type, which opens with a skeleton key.

  A piece of cake.

  I raked a thumbnail across the side of my nose and wiped the oily deposit onto one end of my mangled braces. Holding the torch between a hunched shoulder and my chin, I inserted the hooked end of the wire into the keyhole and jiggered it about until I judged the wards and levers had been sufficiently lubricated.

  Then, after pushing and pulling the hooked end of my improvised lock-pick in and out until it was lined up with the levers, I gave it a sudden twist.

  At first … nothing. Resistance. And then … a satisfying click!

  I turned the knob and the door swung open with a hollow groan.

  I stepped over the rough wooden sill and into the tunnel.

  Dank and acrid are the two words that best describe the smell of the place. I was now about five or six feet beneath the surface, and from this point onward, the tunnel sloped downwards toward the church. Whoever had dug it, I supposed, had wanted to get well below the graveyard’s grisly contents.

  I was well aware, as I moved slowly along, that the earth above my head and on both sides contained all that remained of Bishop’s Lacey’s dead, most of whose bones had long ago leached and whose fluids had seeped over the centuries into the spongy soil.

  One of the vicar’s sermons popped unexpectedly into my mind: the one about how we are the clay and the Lord our potter—a lesson that only now was coming vividly to life here in this country churchyard. Everywhere I looked, bone fragments of the dead, like broken bits of kitchen crockery, reflected whitely in the beam of my torch.

  It was as astonishing a display as any of the three-dimensional geological exhibits in the Science Museum.

  Hold on, Flavia, I thought: This is not the time to be thinking about the wonders of putrefaction.

  I made my way slowly along the tunnel, going deeper with every step into the earth. Underground, the distance seemed much farther than it did in the churchyard above. Surely by now I must be close to the foundation of the church.

  Perhaps the tunnel didn’t lead to the church—perhaps it was taking me off in a different direction altogether.

  But no—I had been moving in a straight line, at least, as far as I could tell.

  Now the tunnel’s floor began rising quite steeply. Ahead was what looked like a stone archway.

  And another locked door.

  This lock was older and much more difficult to pick. The mechanism was more massive—heavier—more stiff—and almost impossible to move with the thin wire of my braces.

  I congratulated myself on bringing the pickle fork as a backup.

  A bit more squalene from my nose, a bit of twiddling the lock’s wards with my mouthware, a couple of deft twists with the cutlery and—Bob’s your uncle!—the levers lifted and the door swung inward.

  I was no longer in the tunnel.

  Now, I found myself in a low stone chamber which was obviously part of the crypt.

  Iron sconces on the walls had once held torches: massive blotches of black soot on the ceiling, probably hundreds of years old, showed that flaming brands had once been used.

  The walls were scratched with names and initials: D.C., R.O.; Playfayre; Madrigall, Wenlock: some of them ancestors of families who still lived in Bishop’s Lacey.

  Not a de Luce among the lot.

  At the back of the chamber was what I took at first to be a hole: a rectangle of darkness about five feet above the floor. I shone the torch into it, but could not see far. I wasn’t tall enough.

  Luckily, someone had made a makeshift stepping-stone of broken granite—old tombstones, perhaps—directly beneath the opening.

  Even without the footprints which were everywhere in the dust, it was clear that this opening had been used quite recently.

  I climbed up and peered into the chamber. It was surprisingly roomy.

  I boosted myself into the darkness, clicked on the torch, and began scraping along on hands and knees. I thought for a moment of Howard Carter crawling through those puzzling passageways in the pyramids.

  Hadn’t he died by ignoring a curse?

  In the cramped stone passageway I could hear the beating of my own heart.

  Tanc-red, Tanc-red, Tanc-red, Tanc-red …

  Had the saint, like Shakespeare, put a curse on his own grave? Curs’t be he that moves these bones, and so forth?

  Is that what had happened to poor Mr. Collicutt?

  It seemed unlikely. Even if the spirits of the dead were capable of killing, I doubted that they were able to strap gas masks onto the faces of their victims.

  A shiver shook my shoulders at the thought of Mr. Collicott, who, if my theory was correct, had been dragged, dead or alive, through this very passageway.

  I tied a mental string onto my forefinger. I would remember to pray for him properly on Easter Sunday.

  And now, quite abruptly, the narrow crawl space branched, and I found myself peering down from above into a large chamber. As with the outer room, someone had piled broken stones handily below the opening, and I was easily able to scramble down onto the rubble-covered floor.

  This part of the passage went no further: This was the end.

  I let the torch’s beam sweep slowly round the room, but aside from more names and initials scratched into the stone of the walls, there was little to see.

  The place was empty.

  Empty, that is, except for a pair of iron brackets that projected from the wall.

  Two hand grips had been drilled into opposite ends of a single stone; they could have no purpose other than to shift it.

  A quick examination showed that I was right: A razor-thin gap ran across the top of the stone and down both sides. Unlike the other stones in the wall, this one, although it was snug-fitting, had no mortar.

  It was meant to come out.

  As I traced out the gap, I could feel the draft on my fingertips: the same draft—I was sure of it!—I had felt in the crypt.

  Unless I was sadly mistaken, I was now directly behind the wall of the chamber in which Mr. Collicutt’s body had been hidden.

  This was how his killer—or killers, more likely—had maneuvered him into an unopened tomb.

  The sound came at first as no more than a stirring of the air about my ears. The acute sense of hearing I had inherited from Harriet was like that: imperceptible at first, a kind of audible silence.

  Only when I acknowledged its presence did it fully take form, as it now did.

  Someone was talking.

  The voice was that of a fly in a bottle—a hollow tinny buzzing that rose and fell … rose and fell.

  I could not make out the words, only the drone of the insect voice.

  My immediate reaction was to switch off the torch.

  Which left me in darkness.

  I could see instantly that there were beads of light coming through the cracks.

  Had they seen the light from my torch? It seemed unlikely: They were in a crypt illuminated by a string of bulbs. Little enough of my torchlight would have been visible.

  But who would be in the crypt in the middle of the night? I decided that there must be at least two of them, since one would hardly be talking to himself.

  I pressed an ear against the crack and tried to make out t
he words.

  But it was no use. The narrow slit between the stones had a strange filtering effect: It was as if I were hearing only a thin slice of the speaker’s voice—not quite enough to make out the words.

  After half a minute or so, I gave it up and, using only my fingertips, began a closer examination of the stone itself.

  It was about eighteen inches wide and about a foot high. The depth, I knew, must be the thickness of the wall, which I guessed to be another eighteen inches.

  One and a half times one and a half times one equaled two and a quarter cubic feet. How much would it weigh?

  That, of course, depended upon its specific gravity. From the tables in Uncle Tar’s handbooks, I knew that gold had a specific gravity of more than twelve hundred, and lead about seven hundred.

  St. Tancred’s was famous for the beauty of its sandstone, which, if I remembered correctly, had a specific gravity of somewhere between two and three, and weighed about a hundred and fifty pounds per cubic foot.

  The whole stone then, would weigh somewhere between three and four hundred pounds.

  Would I be able to shift it? Obviously, with someone on the other side, now was not the time.

  But still, I needed to know, without a doubt, that this tunnel and this stone connected directly with the cavity in which I had found Mr. Collicutt’s corpse.

  I didn’t dare pull on the iron handles for fear of being heard.

  Perhaps I would have to sit here in darkness and wait until the light went out on the other side of the stone.

  How long would it take? I wondered. What on earth could they be doing in there?

  I might as well make myself comfortable. I would press my back against the wall behind me and slide down it until I was seated on the floor.

  Then, in darkness, I would wait.

  I was halfway through this simple maneuvre when my feet slipped on a pebble.

  I dropped down heavily upon my behind.

  Worse, I dropped the torch.

  •THIRTEEN•

  Clang! it went, the sound chillingly loud in the darkness.

  I held my breath.

  The insect buzzing of voices stopped instant.

  I strained my ears, but the only sound I could hear was the beating of my own heart.

  And then a grinding noise—a grating of stone, echoing from wall to wall. I crawled forward and touched my fingers to the block.

  It was moving!

  They were shoving the stone inwards—toward me!

  I scrabbled for the torch but my fingers could not locate it in the darkness. I was clutching uselessly at bits of rubble, my nails tearing at the hard stone floor.

  The block was still moving. I could not see it, but it could hear it grating. In less than a minute they would be climbing through the opening.

  If only there were some way to stop the stone: a stout length of timber, for instance, to wedge against the opposite wall.

  But there was nothing in this echoing chamber.

  Nothing but Flavia de Luce.

  The thought came out of nowhere—or so it seemed at the time.

  Later, I would realize that my mind had vomited up a sudden memory of snooping through Feely’s unmentionables drawer in search of her diary. Having given up, I was annoyed to find that the drawer would not close completely. No matter how hard I pushed it would not budge.

  When I slid it forward and off the tracks, I found the diary taped to the back with strips of sticking plaster. A lesson learned.

  I threw myself down onto my back, my feet against the moving stone, and jammed my shoulders against the opposite side of the chamber.

  I stiffened every muscle of my body and made myself into a human wedge.

  The stone stopped moving.

  There was a moment of silence, and then renewed effort from the other side.

  Again the stone began inching inwards.

  Had they brought a lever? I wondered.

  Perhaps they were now both shoving.

  My knees were beginning to bend. I tried to keep them straight but they were quivering like bowstrings.

  Daffy had once read me a story in which the victim was tortured with a device called the Scavenger’s Daughter which, rather than stretching the body like the rack, compressed it into a ball until its fluids caused it to burst like an enormous pimple.

  I stretched out both arms full length, trying desperately to grip onto the floor. Anything to increase the resistance.

  A sliver of light appeared. The stone was almost clear of the wall.

  Now I could hear their voices.

  “Bloody thing’s stuck,” one of them said. “Give me the crowbar.”

  There was a metallic clanking and I felt the stone move even more powerfully against my feet. I couldn’t hold out much longer.

  And then the light went out—and, a few seconds later, came back on again.

  “Someone’s coming!” a voice hissed, and the stone grated to a stop.

  “Someone’s at the top of the stairs,” another voice said. “They’ve turned the switch off and on.”

  “Let’s get out of here!” the first voice whispered, frantically.

  “Go round back of the furnace. Use the coalhole.”

  There was a scuffling, and then absolute silence.

  I knew that they were gone.

  I counted slowly to a hundred.

  No point in crawling like a Commando all the way back through the Cottlestone tomb, I thought, when I was so close to freedom.

  I seized the iron handles of the stone and gave it a hard tug. It might have moved a quarter of an inch.

  I sat down on the floor so that the stone was between my knees, planted my feet against the wall, and pulled again. Perhaps half an inch, this time, or a little more.

  If I concentrated on pulling at one end, it would swing in like a door, just far enough, if I were lucky, to allow me to squeeze past.

  At last I had made a gap of about four inches: not wide enough to pass through, but enough to have a look outside. I dropped to my hands and knees and peered out into the crypt. The crowbar was lying where they had dropped it, about two feet from the opening.

  I got down onto my stomach and shoved an arm through the opening as far as it would go. My face was crushed so tightly against the stone that I must have looked like something from the ocean depths.

  My fingers found the beveled end of the crowbar, but just barely. I didn’t want to shove the thing completely away.

  A fraction of an inch at a time, I hooked my fingernails onto the crowbar’s edge and pulled it ever so slowly towards me.

  Feely had been nagging me about biting my nails since I was in a pram, and quite recently I had decided she was right. A chemist who is going to be photographed by The Illustrated London News holding up a test tube and peering into it intently needed half-decent hands.

  My nails were not yet as long as I liked, but they were enough to do the job.

  The crowbar crept toward me. When it was safely within reach, I hauled it in through the opening and gave thanks to the good Saint Tancred who lay somewhere just a few feet below me.

  From there on, levering the stone all the way into the chamber was a piece of cake.

  A piece of rock cake, I thought, with what was probably a silly grin.

  There was now light enough to spot the torch, which had rolled away into a far corner. I flicked the switch to see if it was still working—which it was—then crawled through the wall and into the crypt.

  As I stood up straight I realized for the first time how stiff and sore my body had become. My hands and knees were scratched and scraped.

  I was quite proud of myself. I understood how the veterans felt who had suffered war wounds.

  Before moving on into the main part of the crypt, I stopped to listen.

  Not a sound.

  Whoever had been in the crypt was gone. There could be no doubt about it. The place was filled with that special stillness that is found where all the
occupants are dead.

  Still, I’ll admit that, as I crept past the furnace, the hair on the back of my neck bristled—but only a little.

  Now I was at the bottom of the steps that led up to the church. Was there anything else to worry about? Would the crypt’s midnight visitors be lying in wait for me outside the church?

  They needed only to hide behind the tombstone where Gladys was parked and pounce on me as soon as I appeared—abducting a girl in a churchyard in the middle of the night would not be difficult.

  Perhaps I’d better stay in the church: Curl up in a pew, catch forty winks, and race home just as the sun was coming up. No one would even know I’d been away.

  Yes, that’s what I’d do.

  Up the stone staircase I trudged—one slow step at a time.

  In the porch, the outer door was closed, but unlocked, as it probably had been since the time of Henry VIII when the churches of England were looted and vandalized.

  To my left, illuminated only by the light which shone down through the stained-glass windows, the carpet of the center aisle was a ribbon of red in the moonlight.

  I thought again of the poem, and of the Highwayman, who had, at the end, been shot down like a dog on the highway.

  And I thought—for some peculiar reason—of the dead Mr. Collicutt.

  Mr. Collicutt, of course, had not lain in his blood on the highway with a bunch of lace at his throat—but he might as well have.

  It came back to me in a flash like a news reporter’s camera.

  He had been wearing a bunch of lace at his throat.

  Or something very much like it.

  The Highwayman had died for love, hadn’t he? To warn him that the inn was swarming with King George’s men, the landlord’s black-eyed daughter, Bess, had shot herself in the breast.

  They had both died.

  Would there be another victim in Bishop’s Lacey? Were Mr. Collicutt’s killers already plotting to silence someone else—someone who had loved the unfortunate organist?

  I moved slowly up the center aisle, touching the ends of every row of pews with my fingertips, absorbing the security of the ancient oak.

  There was just enough light to make my way up the chancel steps to the organ without using the torch.

  Back to business, I decided.