“It’s a hole,” said Bod. “Or a door. Behind one of the coffins.”
They found it behind a coffin on the bottom shelf—a simple crawl space. “Down there,” said Bod. “We go down there.”
Scarlett found herself suddenly enjoying the adventure rather less. She said, “We can’t see down there. It’s dark.”
“I don’t need light,” said Bod. “Not while I’m in the graveyard.”
“I do,” said Scarlett. “It’s dark.”
Bod thought about the reassuring things that he could say, like “there’s nothing bad down there,” but the tales of hair turning white and people never returning meant that he could not have said them with a clear conscience, so he said, “I’ll go down. You wait for me up here.”
Scarlett frowned. “You shouldn’t leave me,” she said.
“I’ll go down,” said Bod, “and I’ll see who’s there, and I’ll come back and tell you all about it.”
He turned to the opening, bent down, and clambered through on his hands and knees. He was in a space big enough to stand up in, and he could see steps cut into the stone. “I’m going down the steps now,” he said.
“Do they go down a long way?”
“I think so.”
“If you held my hand and told me where I was walking,” she said, “then I could come with you. If you make sure I’m okay.”
“Of course,” said Bod, and before he had finished speaking the girl was coming through the hole on her hands and her knees.
“You can stand up,” Bod told her. He took her hand. “The steps are just here. If you put a foot forward you can find it. There. Now I’ll go first.”
“Can you really see?” she asked.
“It’s dark,” said Bod. “But I can see.”
He began to lead Scarlett down the steps, deep into the hill, and to describe what he saw to her as they went. “It’s steps down,” he said. “Made of stone. And there’s stone all above us. Someone’s made a painting on the wall.”
“What kind of painting?”
“A big hairy C is for Cow, I think. With horns. Then something that’s more like a pattern, like a big knot. It’s sort of carved in the stone too, not just painted, see?” and he took her fingers and placed them onto the carved knot-work.
“I can feel it!” she said.
“Now the steps are getting bigger. We are coming out into some kind of big room, now, but the steps are still going. Don’t move. Okay, now I am between you and the room. Keep your left hand on the wall.”
They kept going down. “One more step and we are on the rock floor,” said Bod. “It’s a bit uneven.”
The room was small. There was a slab of stone on the ground, and a low ledge in one corner, with some small objects on it. There were bones on the ground, very old bones indeed, although below where the steps entered the room Bod could see a crumpled corpse, dressed in the remains of a long brown coat—the young man who had dreamed of riches, Bod decided. He must have slipped and fallen in the dark.
The noise began all about them, a rustling slither, like a snake twining through dry leaves. Scarlett’s grip on Bod’s hand was harder.
“What’s that? Do you see anything?”
“No.”
Scarlett made a noise that was half gasp and half wail, and Bod saw something, and he knew without asking that she could see it too.
There was a light at the end of the room, and in the light a man came walking, walking through the rock, and Bod heard Scarlett choking back a scream.
The man looked well-preserved, but still like something that had been dead for a long while. His skin was painted (Bod thought) or tattooed (Scarlett thought) with purple designs and patterns. Around his neck hung a necklace of sharp, long teeth.
“I am the master of this place!” said the figure, in words so ancient and gutteral that they were scarcely words at all. “I guard this place from all who would harm it!”