“I have a feeling I’m never going to want a garden.”

I didn’t answer. My eyes were glued on that gap on the wall, which I was illuminating by means of another homemade torch. By this time we could see the end of the floor slab, and there was a considerable pile of dirt on the stairs.

In less than an hour Tony had cleared the lower surface of the stone. He began to chip out the mortar. This was the trickiest part of the job; we ended up replacing some of the dirt Tony had laboriously removed, in order to support one end of the slab so it wouldn’t give way all at once and mash Tony. After a couple of heart-stopping scrapes, he finally managed to do what he had set out to do. There was an opening a couple of feet square in the wall of the shaft.

Tony turned.

“I think we can make it now.”

But for several seconds none of us moved. We stared at one another with the white-faced incredulity of shipwrecked sailors who finally see a sail on the horizon.

“Better let me go first,” I said. “I’m the thinnest.”

At the expense of a few square inches of skin, I got through. A push from Tony and I was out, gooseflesh popping out on my bare arms as the heavenly coolness of the night air hit them. My coat was still down below, and so far as I was concerned, it could stay there. Nothing, not even the shrine, could have gotten me back into that hole.

At first I just lay there on the floor and admired the view through the open door. As Tony had predicted, I was on the ground floor of the keep, and the moonlight scene without was exquisite. A desert would have looked good to me just then if it had a sky over it.

The sight of the silvery moonlight reminded me of a minor discomfort that had been overridden by more pressing worries. Suddenly I was dying of thirst. Leaning over the hole I croaked out, “Put out the torch and come on.”

Getting Blankenhagen out wasn’t easy. Only fortitude and hope had kept him conscious; he was a dead weight, and even with Tony pushing from below and me pulling from above we had a hard time. When we finally extracted him, he collapsed at full length on the floor and lay there without moving.

Tony followed, breathing hard and looking as if he were going to be sick. We were both flat on the floor, just breathing, when the beautiful silver moonlight was blotted out by a shape in the doorway.

The figure crossed the room without a glance at the shadows where we were sprawled, and disappeared.

I applied grubby knuckles to my eyes. I knew the stairs leading up to the next floor had provided the means of exit for that incredible apparition, but I couldn’t believe I had really seen it—a tall figure, cloaked and hooded, wearing boots that rang metallically on the stone floor—and carrying in its arms the white-robed figure of a woman.