Crowley looked at the skull for a moment, wondering who it might have been. What unfortunate soul had their head interred in this creepy occult cave, sealed in presumably forever until Crowley had arrived to disturb its rest? But he couldn’t bring himself to touch it.
He looked once more around the room, once again frustrated. To have found a secret chamber, but have it tell him nothing was perhaps more galling than having never found it in the first place.
He returned to the golem, staring at its agonized face. His brows knitted as it occurred to him that the Codex Gigas could easily have been hidden inside the monster, with ample room to spare. It was more than big enough.
He shone his light into the bottom half, kneeling to look down each leg, but saw nothing. Returning to the top half, he carefully tipped it over onto its side, grunting with the effort of managing the enormous weight. When he shone his torch inside the capacious torso, it revealed a kind of shelf set into the creature’s back. The shelf had a lip along the front and some half a meter above it, a leather strap hung limp. A node of clay in line with the strap seemed perfectly set to anchor the leather in place. It was all too convenient to ignore. The size and placement was perfect for the Devil’s Bible to sit on the shelf and be held in tight by the leather strap secured across it about halfway up.
“The golem didn't consume the bible,” Crowley said to himself in a whisper. “It housed it.”
The smile of discovery fell off his face at the sudden emergence of hushed voices, drifting to him from far away. But not that far. Had some tour guide or other employee discovered the grill he had removed, his rope hanging down into the oubliette?
The sound of feet slapping gently on the floor caused his already racing heart to double-time. Whoever it was had used his rope and descended into the lower dungeon. He quickly doused his light and peered out through the opening, into the tiny cell and the oubliette beyond.
A man stood beside Crowley’s rope, illuminated by the light falling from above. In one hand, he held a gun, light glinting off the gray metal of its barrel as he pointed it around the empty space. In the man’s other hand was a flashlight, which he lifted and flicked on. It had a red filter and light like spilled blood danced around the pale stones.
The man looked slowly about himself, pausing at each of the four cells to shine his light in. His face was shadowed, but Crowley easily saw his focus and concentration. This was not a castle employee.
There was no way Crowley could worm his way through the small opening from the secret room and into the cell to jump the armed man. He’d be trapped like a lobster in a pot. As he sat back, wondering how on earth he would avoid the man’s attention, the red light spilled into the small cell outside his hiding place. The man saw the dark square of the removed bricks and grunted in satisfaction.
“Found something,” he called up into the light, and moved forward.
Crowley stood beside the gap, mind racing with possibilities. If the man looked inside before he came through and Crowley was close enough to jump him, the man would easily shoot at point blank range. If Crowley waited across the room, the man was sure to see him and get a shot off before Crowley had a chance to cover the distance. In an enclosed space with nowhere to run, the man with the automatic pistol had all the advantages.
As the gunman hurried toward the opening, Crowley looked frantically around. His time was almost up.
Chapter 24
Rob Jeffries crouched outside the small cell and shone his red light on the two large stones, sat beside the hole they had been removed from. He frowned. Landvik sure had him do some unsavory things, and crawling around creepy dungeons was definitely high on that list. He should have sent Dean Patterson down after all, but the guy was constantly complaining about his injured knee. Jeffries wondered again if the loser was overplaying the hurt to get out of the tough jobs. Surely that Rose Black woman hadn’t kicked him hard enough to do the kind of damage Patterson complained about. Then again, Jeffries had to respect her skill if she had. Tough woman.
He moved into the small cell and shined his flashlight into the space beyond the removed blocks. The room was large, but seemed empty. He considered firing a round or two into the room ahead of himself, but thought better of it when he considered the noise and the potential ricochets.
Instead, he put his arm with the light through the hole, then the other hand with the gun, and played both around inside, looking over the top as best he could. Nothing. And no one made a grab for him. He leaned his head in, groaning with the tightness of the fit, and checked again. Nothing. A desk, a cupboard. He looked to his left and saw a massive statue, broken and lying around all over one side of the room.
With a grunt of effort he wriggled and pushed his way through, fell unceremoniously onto the cold flagstones, and quickly gained his feet. He turned in a full circle, light and gun aligned as he tracked every inch of the room. No one. He looked closely at the floor looking for trapdoors, scanned the ceiling for other openings, the wall for ladders. Nothing. He kicked at the large statue and a couple of pieces lying around. “Ugly damn thing,” he muttered.
It looked as though someone had been here before them, no doubt Rose Black and the man she had dragged along with her, but they appeared to have missed them. So close, it was infuriating.
He crawled back out through the tight access gap and went back into the pool of light and the rope. “There's no one down here,” he called up to Patterson.
“The girl's not there?”
Jeffries rolled his eyes, ground his teeth. “What do you think ‘no one’ means?”
“You checked thoroughly.”
“Yes, I did! If the girl and her friend were here, they’ve gone now.”
“Why did they leave the rope? Leave evidence they were here?”
Jeffries shook his head, bit down on an abusive response and said instead, “I guess they were in a hurry. Or maybe they just didn’t care.”
“What are we gonna tell Landvik?” Patterson called down.
Jeffries barked a derisive laugh. “Landvik? Nothing right now. We’ll have to decide what’s next before we tell him anything. Now, either come down here and check for yourself or pull me up. It’s creepy as hell in this hole.”
“All right, all right, keep your hair on.”
Jeffries pocketed the gun and flashlight, wrapped the end of the rope around one ankle, and gripped on. “Pull!” he called as he began to climb and he heard Patterson’s grunts of effort as the man finally started doing something useful.
Crowley kicked away a large slab of clay and scooted out of the golem’s large torso. The hiding place he had crawled into was cramped and uncomfortable, and the two chunks of broken golem pelvis he’d used to conceal himself had been a sloppy effort, but the man with the gun hadn’t looked very hard, despite what Crowley had heard him calling up to his friend.
Crowley stood and dusted himself off, taking deep breaths to settle his racing nerves. That had been way too close for comfort and only the fact that the gunman hadn’t realized the golem was hollow had saved him from a dangerous, almost certainly deadly confrontation.
Urgency pressed at Crowley’s heart and mind as he mentally kicked himself for leaving Rose alone. He’d gotten so caught up in the search for the bible that he hadn’t considered the people who were after Rose might have caught up with them already. Or at all, for that matter.