The small body had shrunk beyond all reason, as if something had sucked it dry over a long period. Nothing was left but dry skin stretched over old bones. Thin hands like talons clutched at the throat. The head was pulled back acutely, away from the body, as if death had been an agony. From head to foot, the corpse was covered in dust-laden strands of something like rotten fabric, similar to the cobwebs they had seen earlier. The whole thing resembled a cocoon, neatly packaged and left to dehydrate here in the tunnel. It had been down here a long time. Perhaps as long as five centuries. Christopher shuddered and lifted his lamp.
“What is it, Christopher?” Chindamani whispered.
“Why have you stopped?”
“It’s nothing. Just ... an obstruction in the tunnel. Keep to the right and you’ll be able to get by.”
He walked on, hesitant now, on the alert for whatever might be waiting further along the tunnel. Sonam’s guardian was slipping out of the mists of legend and growing into a thing of substance.
Behind him, he heard the others gasp as they caught sight of the obstruction.
The next body was a few yards further along. It had died in a seated position, propped against one wall. Its arms were thrust out in front of it, as thought fending off something coming out of the darkness. Like the other corpse, it was shrivelled and shrunken.
Pieces of leathery flesh, dark brown in colour, could be glimpsed beneath layers of the dusty fabric. It seemed to Christopher as though something had trussed it up and sucked it slowly dry.
“Who are they, Christopher?” Chindamani’s voice came from close behind him. She was standing, one arm around Samdup, looking down at the little corpse. The boy seemed disturbed, but not frightened. Christopher remembered that he had been brought up in a culture that had little fear of the paraphernalia of death.
Instead of Bo Peep and Humpty Dumpty, the walls of Samdup’s nursery would have been painted with dead flesh and mouldering bones. Instead of a teddy-bear, he would have been given a statue of Yama to place by his bedside.
“I think this one was a child,” he said. But it was only a guess, based on the corpse’s apparent height.
“It seems .. . more recent than the other. Less dusty.” He paused.
“There may be more. Do you want to go on?”
“Of course. We have no choice you said so yourself.”
About five yards after that, Christopher encountered a heavy web that all but blocked the tunnel. He swept it aside only to meet another and then another. Vast, heavy strands of cobwebs filled the air. The miasmatic odour was growing in intensity. Christopher was beginning to have a good idea what had trussed up the bodies they had found. But surely no ordinary spider could have sucked them dry as well.
All at once the tunnel ended and opened out into an area of undefined proportions. The light from Christopher’s lamp shed illumination over a limited radius, but as the children and Chindamani added their lights to his, the nature of their surroundings became gradually clear.
It was a chamber thick with spiders’ webs, huge structures of ancient manufacture that looped a fantastic tracery from floor to ceiling and from wall to wall. The lamplight played complicated shadow-games among the interlacing cords and filaments. Some hung like hammocks, others billowed from the wall like grey lace curtains. No matter where they looked, the room was thick with them.
And no matter where they cast their eyes, they could make out the bundled, mummified remains of human beings. The webs were full of them; they hung like flies, light and grey and bloodless. The room was a subterranean larder of God knows what antiquity. In places, body had been piled upon body, the mouldering remains sewn together in huge packages. In one corner, what seemed to be a relatively recent addition to their meat supply was being drained of its remaining fluids by a small army of spiders that moved across their prey with quick, quivering motions. To his horror, Christopher estimated the size of the spiders: the largest had a leg-span longer than a man’s forearm, from fingertips to elbow.
Everywhere black shapes were walking in the shadows. The webs were alive with them, trembling as they crawled from thread to thread on huge, misshapen legs.
“For God’s sake, get back into the tunnel!” Christopher cried. He had seen stings on the ends of the bulbous bodies and he guessed that the spiders had not overpowered their prey by brute force.
Woodenly, they stumbled back, past the webs at the entrance to the food-chamber, as far as the first body. William was shaking with fright and loathing nothing in his worst nightmares had prepared him for such a sight. Samdup too was rigid with fear.
“The horror of it! The horror of it!” Chindamani kept repeating.
She was brushing and brushing her arms and body, desperately trying to rid herself of anything that might be clinging to her. She could feel their soft bodies and cold legs against her flesh. To be poisoned and pinned down and sucked dry by such creatures .. .
Christopher checked for spiders. None seemed to have dropped on them or followed them so far. These, then, were the guardians set over the Oracle’s treasure. A species of spider, mutated by the thin air and the darkness, discovered or placed down here to sting and kill intruders. But why had there been none in the treasure chamber And where did their victims come from?
“Chindamani, Samdup,” Christopher ordered.
“Get out any extra items of clothing you have in your bags. Wrap your hands and faces tightly. Leave no gaps, just a space for your eyes. Help each other. And hurry. We’ve disturbed them it won’t be long before they start investigating.” He bent down and quickly repeated what he had said to William. The boy had taken Samuel out of his bag and was clutching it to him nervously.
“Put Samuel away,” Christopher said softly.
“You’ll need your hands free.” William complied reluctantly.
Feverishly, Chindamani and Samdup wrapped each other up, using spare scarves and leggings they had packed. When they were ready, Chindamani helped William bind himself, then Christopher.
“We can still go back,” he said.
She shook her head.
“No,” she said.
“Zam-ya-ting is waiting for us there. It’s death whichever way we go.
But perhaps we have a chance down here.
That place is their lair. The stairs of Yama must be beyond it. If we can make it that far, we’ll be all right.”
Christopher prayed she was right.
When they were ready, he led the way down to the exit from the tunnel. He could hear the rustling of their legs in the darkness, stiff wire bristles on paper a host of spiders coming to investigate the disturbance.
If only he could make out an opening somewhere that would enable them to make a straight run for it. There was a risk that, if they became entangled in the vast network of spiders’ webs and confused by fighting off their hideous inhabitants, they would lose their lamps and be plunged into absolute darkness. And that would almost certainly be fatal.
A large spider, its legs moving jerkily, like a badly oiled machine, came scuttling towards him at shoulder height along a swathe of tattered web. He swept at it with the sword and sent it tumbling back into the shadows. Another ran at his feet with a queer sideways motion. He kicked down hard and felt it give way beneath the heel of his boot.
“Which way do we go, Christopher?” Chindamani asked, pressing against him from behind.
“I don’t know,” he said.
“If there are stairs, they could be anywhere.”
“There have to be stairs. Sonam was right about everything else.”
“Perhaps.” He paused.
“There’s one way to find out. The most likely place is right opposite. I’ll make a dash for it. Watch me closely. If I get through and there are stairs, I’ll call. Don’t waste any time come running.”