“Neville. For the love of God!” Quentin cried. “There were weeks before she died. Weeks when she left her hiding hole, when she wandered the abbey grounds by night. Nights when she used a spade, don’t you see! In her distraction, a garden spade, trying to dig through the stone! She was searching …”

The door opened heavily, grinding against the floor.

Tick-tick. Tick-tick. Tick …

And there was silence. The tapping stopped short. The candlelight faltered, recovered, bathed the priest’s hole in its bleak, liquid candescence.

But the place was empty.

Together on the threshold, Quentin and I found ourselves peering into a cramped dungeon with low beams above walls of uneven stone blocks. Nothing moved within and the quiet was so complete it seemed almost unnatural. Not even a rat scrabbled for cover as we two stood baffled, gawking.

Then Quentin blurted, “There! Look!”

I lifted the taper. The light spread over the entire chamber. My gaze, following Quentin’s gesture, fell on a small white mound of flakes and powder that had collected on the floor at the base of the wall. It was immediately apparent that the debris had fallen from one of the stones above. I could see where the stone had been chiseled, its edges frayed and chalky as if—just as if someone had been digging at it with the point of a spade.

Before I had time to think, I was moving forward, one hand holding the candle high, the other stretching towards the stone. Quentin shouted my name again, but my fingers were already digging at the jagged edge where the blade had bit into the rock. I gripped it, pulled. The stone shifted easily, wobbled, rolled from its position. It slipped from my grasp and there was a loud crash as it dropped to the floor at my feet. In the same instant, the air seemed to shake. Quentin shouted wildly. I gasped. But these noises were washed away by an indescribably hideous shriek. It flew up around us from everywhere and nowhere at once: a ragged howl full of hellish rage and a grief beyond the soothings of eternity. The entire house seemed to quake and shiver to its foundations as the anguished wail went on and on and on.

For there, in the niche revealed by the displacement of the stone, preserved in that airless cell so that its skin had grown leathery and tight, had yanked its mouth wide and given its eyeless sockets a stare of endless agony—there, its neck slashed open, lay the body of an infant, which decayed and crumbled to dust even as we gazed upon it.

II

STORM,
LIFTING
HIS
TRAGICAL
EYES

1

A glass shattered across the room and Storm, lifting his tragical eyes, saw, though too late, a woman worth dying for.