The Devil in Green (68 page)

'Or
it could have been a
coincidence.'

'In
your world,
Mallory.
In my world, a world ruled by
God,
there are
no coincidences. Everything that happens
is
through
His Will. He
chose
me to be
His
instrument in ridding this holy place of
Evil. And I
choose
you to help me.
I
have to choose you, because you have the
God-given
eyes
to
see
clearly too.
I
don't
profess
to know the
Lord's
mind
in
this,
and
I
cannot begin to understand what
He
sees
in
you, Mallory.
But
you fit into
His
plan somewhere,
and I have to go along with that.'

'Well,
glad
I'm
not a fifth wheel.'

'Now,
come with
me.' Hipgrave walked
a
few paces
ahead
of Mallory as
if
he were leading
him
out for some menial task.
Once
they
were
away
from the eyes of the brethren, he relaxed a little. 'I've been doing some
exploring myself. These new buildings are very strange indeed. They
change their layout, you know. Not in any obvious way - I mean, if we
want to get to the great hall we get there. It's just that sometimes the route
is different. Three long corridors one day, two corridors and a set of stairs
the next. I've been keeping detailed notes. But that's not the only thing.'

He led Mallory into a small chapel on the periphery of the new section.
There was a plain altar and cross at one end, and three rows of wooden
chairs. At the back stood a small desk covered with masses of candles;
most of them had burned right down, their wax set in a great white flood
across the desk and on to the floor, like the lava flow of a volcano.

Hipgrave headed over to the wood-panelled wall behind the altar and
began to work his way along it, tapping. When he found what he was
looking for he turned to Mallory, smiling triumphantly, and said, 'Watch
this.' He pressed the panel forcefully in the top two corners and it slid back
silently. Mallory felt a rush of cold, dank air. 'A secret passage,' Hipgrave
said redundantly.

He went to the back of the room, selected a candle with a little life and lit
it with his flint.

'Are you sure this is a good idea?' If the main corridors changed their
route continually, Mallory didn't feel comfortable going into a secret
network that might be even more unpredictable.

'No need to worry,' Hipgrave replied breezily, 'I've already investigated
it. There are plenty of exit points along the way.' He motioned for Mallory
to follow him, then stepped into the dark, shielding the candle with his
hand. Mallory considered leaving Hipgrave in there before accepting it
would get him nowhere. Reluctantly, he followed.

The tunnel was just wide enough to walk along without brushing
shoulders against the walls. After ten feet, a small flight of steps led
down, and from then on it twisted and turned so much that Mallory had
soon lost all sense of direction. It was damp with whistling, cold air
currents suggesting large spaces somewhere ahead.

They'd been following it for ten minutes when another downward flight
of stairs took them into a low-ceilinged room where expanses of
something
glowed white in the flickering candlelight. Hipgrave recoiled when he saw
what was there.

Bones were heaped on all sides. The black eyeholes of skulls glared out
from a confusion of skeletal remains so jumbled up that it was impossible
to tell where one body ended and another began, or even if the skeletons
were whole. The ghoulish display was oppressive.

'This wasn't here before,' Hipgrave said.

'An ossuary.' Mallory had been there before, briefly, on his first
exploration of the new buildings. 'They were popular in medieval times,
particularly at monasteries . .
.
somewhere to store the remains of the
people who had lived there. There's a famous one in the catacombs under
Paris.'

Hipgrave surveyed the immense size of the bone-heap stretching way
beyond where the candlelight could reach. 'There must have been a lot of
people living here.'

'Or it's been around for a very long time.'

As they moved through it, Mallory was disturbed to see at the back of
the piles some bones that didn't look human - too long, too twisted, a skull
that appeared to have horns growing out of it.
Just a trick of the shifting
shadows,
he told himself.

Hipgrave had been unnerved by the ossuary, too, for he remained silent
for the next twenty minutes until Mallory was forced to ask him exactly
where they were going.

'It's not the same route I followed before . . .'

Mallory's heart sank at the indecision in Hipgrave's voice; they were
lost. 'We should turn back—'

'No, no, we'll get there eventually.'

Mallory was about to argue when Hipgrave let out a jubilant cry. He
hurried forwards and knelt down. As Mallory came up behind him, he saw
what had caught Hipgrave's eye: a thin blue line of what looked like an
electrical discharge crackling along the floor, up the walls and across the
ceiling. It was so faint as to be indiscernible unless you were actually upon
it.

'What is that?' Mallory asked. He was surprised to feel a faint buzzing in
his sword where it hung against his leg, as if it were responding to the
energy.

'I don't know. But it's been in a few of the tunnels I've wandered down.'

Mallory cautiously reached out across the blue line. A faint tingling
buzzed in his fingers as they passed over it. The air on the other side felt
different, almost silky. Instinctively, Mallory knew. 'It's a boundary.'
Between this world and the Otherworld,
he thought. His earlier suspicions
had been true: for some reason, the cathedral compound had become a
crossing-over point, where the world and Otherworld merged, and at the
point of confluence there was chaos and unpredictability.