“Come on, the guards will be here any second,” Newbury called to her, reaching for her hand and dragging her towards the door. The lock was a mangled mess. She wouldn’t be needing the other lock pick.
Newbury tugged at the door and it opened easily, then they were out in the corridor.
Veronica couldn’t believe their luck. There were no guards. The fools must have thought after six or seven hours that the spider was enough of a deterrent to prevent them from making any attempt to escape. Instead, their inattentiveness had given Newbury and Veronica the chance they needed to get away.
“This way,” Newbury said, and they set off at a run, following the incline that would take them back to the surface and Packworth House. They rounded the kink in the passage a few moments later, and Newbury ground immediately to a halt. He held his finger to his lips.
Veronica listened. There were voices up ahead. Three-no-four of them. She looked at Newbury and held up four fingers. He nodded. Releasing her other hand, he flexed his shoulder muscles and began slowly creeping towards the sound of the voices.
Veronica grabbed his arm. She shook her head, mouthing, No! She knew they would be armed with pistols and swords. As he was, Newbury was no match for them, even with her help. His mastery over the spider had been impressive, but this would be suicide.
Reluctantly, she pointed back the way they had come. They would have to find another way around. Newbury nodded, silently accepting the inevitable.
They turned and ran on.
CHAPTER
22
Veronica realized how big the warren beneath Packworth House really was as they walked down the seemingly endless passageway. It delved down farther and farther into the bedrock, branching off in myriad directions to form a chaotic web of tunnels and rooms. She and Newbury walked along the roughly hewn corridors, pausing every time they heard evidence of other people, sometimes doubling back to find a different way around or changing tack when they happened upon a dead end.
Veronica hoped there was another way out of the catacombs. There had to be. To come this far only to end up trapped down there and recaptured… She wouldn’t even entertain the thought.
She was tired now, near exhaustion, and the emotional impact of their time in the cell was beginning to take its toll. She was operating purely on adrenaline and the need to escape, to get them both to safety. For the moment she pushed all thoughts of Charles and Amelia out of her mind-they could worry about them once they were out. She had to focus on staying alive.
Up ahead the passageway branched off into three different directions. Here, Veronica noticed that the tunnels were more ordered and uniform, finished with neat brickwork and vaulted ceilings. She guessed they were part of an older structure, long buried beneath the soil, and that the Bastion Society had somehow found a way to marry their own, newer tunnels to the existing infrastructure. She suspected they were no longer under Packworth House, but instead far beneath one of the neighbouring properties.
There were clear signs of habitation here, too. Voices chattered in the distance, and the sound of industry echoed off the barren walls: the hammering of metal panels, the grinding of gears, the splutter of steam-fired engines.
Veronica tugged on Newbury’s sleeve, and he hesitated, looking back at her inquiringly. “I’ll try to find a way around,” he whispered.
Veronica shook her head. “No. We’ll only end up running round in circles down here, heading deeper and deeper underground, further away from any chance of escape. Let’s see what they’re up to. If there are people here, there must be another way out.”
Newbury nodded and returned to surreptitiously edging along the passageway, his back against the wall. Veronica followed him, keeping pace. When they came to the junction, they continued down the central tunnel, wary at all times of discovery.
The tunnel finally terminated in a vast chamber, a huge natural cavern, the ceiling of which was covered in a forest of dripping stalactites. The cave had been adapted to house a massive brass sphere, at least thirty feet in diameter. Its outer shell was battered and tarnished, and it sat upon a supporting pedestal surrounded by all manner of strange, bulky equipment. Funnels and tubing protruded from it like the spines of a sea urchin, and a large iron cylinder, like a chimney spout, rose from its top and disappeared into the ceiling above. It thrummed gently, vibrating through the cavern floor.
Veronica, lurking in the shadows at the cave mouth, glanced at Newbury quizzically. “What is it?” she whispered.
“I have no idea,” he replied.
Cautiously, Veronica broke cover and crept into the cavernous chamber. There were no signs of life inside. Whatever the machine’s purpose, it didn’t currently appear to be operational.
She heard Newbury’s footsteps behind her. “There’s a door here,” he said, approaching the vast, gleaming belly of the sphere. He pulled it open and bent low, ducking inside.
A few moments later his head reemerged from the doorway. “It looks like some sort of medical chamber. There’s a chair inside, and a device hanging from the ceiling covered in banks of needles.” His head disappeared inside again.
Veronica walked around the strange machine. There was a workstation wired into the sphere and covered in a plethora of buttons and levers that she assumed must affect whatever went on inside the device. Farther around the sphere she was confronted with the evidence she’d been looking for, and the nature of the device became suddenly clear.
It was the duplicating machine.
Two large glass tanks sat side by side on a raised dais, connected to the brass sphere by thick, snaking pipes. The glass panels were encased in mahogany frames, each displaying elaborate engravings and fretwork. The symbols and carved figures that intertwined in the woodwork were strange and unfamiliar, yet reminiscent of the type of ancient pagan iconography she’d encountered regularly at the museum. Both tanks were filled with a thick, viscous fluid that seemed to glow pink with its own ethereal light. One of the tanks was empty, but the other held the partially formed body of a human male. It was utterly disgusting, and Veronica blanched at the very sight of it.
The lower half of the cadaver could have belonged to any man in his mid-forties, save, perhaps, for the pinkness of the flesh and the lack of natural wear and tear. But the upper half of the torso remained horribly incomplete. The rib cage and belly were almost entirely exposed, revealing the swimming, un-living organs beneath. The right arm was still skeletal, with only the first tentative signs of muscles and flesh beginning to form around the hand and wrist.
The head, however, was perhaps the most disturbing sight of all. The left half of the face was pink and human, the eyeball staring unseeing from the socket. But the right half was a horrendous vision of exposed muscle and bone. The eye socket was an empty void, the cheekbone clearly visible below. There was no ear, and farther down she could discern part of the throat and the trailing muscle of the tongue, lolling about in the suspension fluid. Pinkish muscles were beginning to build up around the jawbone, but the back teeth were still visible beneath.
It was a vision that she knew would stay with her forever. She knew this man had never been alive, but somehow that made the whole thing worse. She shuddered to think that the body she was staring at was an incomplete copy of a man who was probably carousing in the great hall somewhere far above her. Worse was considering what he might do to it once it had been completed and transported to the hanging room.
Veronica stepped back from the tank, unable to look upon the duplicate any longer. She had no idea how the machine worked, and no desire to learn, either. It was an abomination, a travesty against nature. She found it ironic that the members of the Bastion Society could be so aggrieved by the Queen’s desire to continue living, but not see the horror of their own creations.