"Quick!" Shavi gasped. "The doors!" He pitched forward, spraying spittle, his eyes rolling, and grabbed the back of a pew for support.
Laura and Marshall ran together and slammed the doors shut, then helped each other to drag pews in front of them. When they had finished it would have taken a bulldozer to plough the doors open.
And then, eerily, the crescendo of awful animal noises ended suddenly, to be replaced by the dim sound of paws padding quickly away. There was a choking moan, quickly stifled, as the Bone Inspector started to feel the full pain of his wounds.
Laura whirled. Shavi still clung to the pew, pale and weak. "You did that!" she said incredulously.
He nodded, tried to force a smile. "I never realised I had it in me."
"Good Lord!" Marshall muttered. He slumped down on to a pew blankly.
Laura and Shavi hurried round and piled pews against the west and south doors too. "He's going to find a way to get in as soon as he recovers," she said.
Shavi nodded. "Then we better get moving."
Back in the sacristy, Laura felt cold, queasy, barely able to continue. Shavi, though, seemed oblivious to the growing anxiety which hung over the chapel like a suffocating fog. He swung the pick-axe at the wall with force; the reverberations exploded to the very foundations. Up in the choir Marshall still sat in a daze, staring at the floor, his arms hugged tightly round him. And at the door the Bone Inspector hammered and hollered, his voice growing increasingly fractured. It was a terrible sound, filled with a growing sense of fear. Laura covered her ears, but even that couldn't block it out.
"What's in there, Shavi?" she asked, but he didn't seem to hear. His face was fixed, almost transcendent.
And the pick-axe rose and fell, rose and fell. Shards of stone flew off like bomb fragments and clouds of dust filled the air. He coughed and choked and smeared his forehead with sweaty dirt. "Nearly there," he hacked.
Laura wanted to say Don't go any further, but with that thought there was a sudden crash and several stones collapsed into a dark void beyond. Laura jumped back in shock, not quite knowing what to expect. Shavi paused in midswing. Slowly the dust settled.
As their eyes adjusted to the gloom beyond, Laura saw Shavi had been correct in his assumptions. He had uncovered a large tomb filled with dusty stone sarcophagi; on several were carved the sign of the sword which Marshall had attributed to the Knights Templar. The atmosphere that swept out was so unpleasantly stale it forced Laura to clutch her hand to her mouth. But it was more than just the odour that choked her; there was a wave of oppression and threat which came on its heels. She couldn't bear to stay any longer. She hurried back up the steps; Shavi didn't even notice. His gaze was fixed on an intricately carved column of death's heads, Green Men and dragons which he guessed from its siting was a continuation of the Apprentice's Pillar above. Halfway up the column was an area where nothing was carved at all. Gently he touched it. It appeared to vibrate coldly beneath his fingertips.
"Here we are, then," he whispered.
Marshall still sat with his head in his hands, didn't even look up when Laura walked by. She wanted to be out in the open air, where she could breathe, but the Bone Inspector didn't show any sign of giving up. If anything, his hammering against the wooden door had grown even more frenzied, his yells hoarse and broken.
"Give it a rest," she said angrily. "This is supposed to be a place of peace and serenity. We can't hear ourselves think in here."
At her voice he subsided. It was so sudden Laura felt a brief moment of panic that he had something planned, but then he spoke in a voice that was full of such desperation she was shocked. "You musn't go through with this. You have to stop now. I'm begging you."
"If you hadn't acted so up your own arse and told us exactly what was wrong we might have listened." She chewed on her lip. "So what's the big deal?"
"Listen, then." His voice echoed tremulously through the wood. "It is not what lies here, but who: The Good Son." He laughed bitterly. "A name of respect given to placate, to keep something terrible at bay."
"He was supposed to be a good guy," Laura noted.
"You should know by now," the Bone Inspector said with thin contempt, "that when it comes to the old gods there is no good or evil. They are beyond that."
"You know what I mean," Laura replied sourly.
"If you could trust any of the Tuatha De Danann, then he was the one," he conceded. "He was loved. As I said, it would be wrong to attribute human emotions to these gods. They're alien in the true sense of the word, unknowable-"
"But you're going to," Laura noted slyly.
"The Fomorii loathed Maponus-"
"Jealous of his good looks and way with women, I'd guess," she said humourlessly.
"In their bitterness at their overwhelming defeat at the second battle of Magh Tuireadh, the Fomorii were determined to launch one last desperate strike at the Tuatha De Danann," the Bone Inspector continued. "And Maponus as the favourite son of the Tuatha De Danann was the perfect target. They attacked as he attempted to cross over from Otherworld to visit his worshippers here."
"Attacked how?"
"All that's known is that Maponus was struck down as he crossed the void between there and here-"
"If he was killed-" Laura interrupted.
"Not killed. These gods never truly die anyway. What the Fomorii planned was much worse. Whatever they did to him in the void, when he arrived here, he had been driven completely, utterly insane. That's the ultimate punishment: eternal imprisonment in a state of suffering. The world never knew what had hit it. The first sign of what had happened was a small village in the Borders. Every inhabitant was slaughtered, torn apart in so vile a manner it was impossible to identify the dead, even to estimate how many had died. In his dementia Maponus roamed the wild places and in the long nights people spoke of hearing his anguished howls echoing among the hills. Every attribute he had was inverted. He was not the giver of light and life, but the bringer of darkness and death. No love, only mad animal frenzy, no culture, only slaughter. It is impossible to guess how many died during his reign of terror. Tales passed down through the generations told how the fields ran red with blood. And the Good Son, once a name to be revered, became a source of fear."
"What happened to him?" Laura's voice sounded oddly hollow, as if the room had mysteriously developed other dimensions which allowed it to echo.
"He couldn't be allowed to continue in this way," the Bone Inspector replied darkly. "He may have been seen as saviour once, but now he was cast in the role of destroyer, and if humankind wanted to survive, it had to destroy him. Or the next best thing."
"We're a fickle bunch, aren't we?" Marshall was suddenly next to her, his voice painfully sour. "If salvation doesn't arrive just how we expect, we bite that outstretched hand."