The Lazarus Vault (35 page)

The file was in English, though it didn’t help much. Most of it was so impenetrably technical that even Ellie couldn’t get much sense from it. It seemed to be about a huge coal seam near Lyons which Talhouett was mining. There was only one reference to Mirabeau, near the end. Doug found it while Ellie was getting a refill of coffee.

‘Is that all?’

Doug flipped through a few more pages. ‘There’s an Environmental Impact Assessment.’

They read it together. There was nothing about Mirabeau.

‘What about that?’

Halfway down the page, under the heading ‘Sites of Historic/Cultural Interest’, Ellie read:

Submerged CHAPEL of Saint Donatian, Norman, XII-XIV(?) Century.

Map Ref: D5

Risk: Low

‘At least it’s medieval,’ she said doubtfully. Doug had a strange look on his face. ‘What?’

‘It’s three hundred miles from anywhere the Normans should have been building at the time.’

‘You trust a mining company to know the difference? And what do you suppose it means by “submerged”?’

Doug consulted the map at the front of the file. His finger came to rest on a blue patch near the middle of the page.

‘D5 is in the middle of a lake.’

They turned off the motorway and headed east, a long road winding its way through dark pine forests into the hills. Sometimes they’d come round a bend and glimpse the jagged peaks of the Alps far in the distance, before the hills closed in again. It reminded Ellie how close they were to Saint-Lazare’s castle, not far over the border in Switzerland. She twisted round in her seat and stared out the rear-view mirror. A tremor in her stomach told her Blanchard couldn’t be far away.

‘I think this must be it.’

A chain-link fence had appeared on their left, running along the side of the road, penning in the forest. Strings of razor wire spiked the top of it. At first all they could see behind it was trees, but as the road climbed higher they found themselves looking down a steep escarpment into a bowl between the hills. It must have been a natural dip, but heavy industry had gouged it out to make a black pit, vast terraces sinking into the earth. Heavy trucks ground their way up a track like a scar through the trees.

A black haze hung over the valley. There was no sign of a lake. Ellie checked the map.

‘The site entrance should be at the top of the next ridge. There’ll be a track from there leading down to the lake.’

‘Are we just going to drive in?’

‘Let’s have a look.’

The road took a hairpin bend and climbed towards the ridge. Ellie could see a guard hut, and the red-and-white stripes of a barrier post sticking up beside it.

Doug slowed. The gate was open. A black Mercedes 4x4 sat in the entrance, engine running. It must have just got there, though Ellie hadn’t seen it on the road.

‘Keep going.’

Doug glanced across. She gripped his arm. ‘
Just go
.’

If anyone was watching, it would have looked so obvious. One moment the car was slowing down; the next it was accelerating away as quickly as the small-bore engine could manage. Had they spotted Doug and Ellie? Had they noticed the car had UK plates? Ellie craned her head round and looked back: she thought she saw a man standing in the road, gesturing after them. Then the car went round a corner and she wasn’t sure if it might just have been a tree.

‘Wrong entrance?’ Doug asked.

‘Bad feeling about that car.’ She thought she’d seen a Swiss flag on its number plate.

Doug checked his mirror. ‘No one behind us yet.’

They crested the ridge and started down the opposite side. The trees grew thicker, hiding whatever might be coming after them. The chain-link fence continued unbroken.

‘Pull in there.’

On the opposite side of the road a forestry track led off into the trees. Doug braked hard and nosed the car in. They couldn’t go far – a rusted gate blocked the way – but it hid them from sight of the road.

‘Let’s get going.’ The fear that had stalked Ellie since the moment she stepped into the vault was beginning to close around her again. ‘If they saw us at the gatehouse, we don’t have much time.’

Doug took the backpack with the box. They jogged down the side of the road where the trees gave them cover, examining the fence for a way in. They hadn’t gone far when the baritone throb of an engine intruded on the silent forest.

‘Get down!’

They lay flat on the ground and waited. Half a minute later a car roared past and vanished round the bend. With her face buried in moss and pine-needles, Ellie couldn’t get a good look at it. They waited until the sound died away, then carried on, faster now.

Ellie quickly became aware that something had changed in the forest. Before, the trees had been an unbroken wall of drab green: now, most of them were brown. Dead needles clung to dead branches; dead trees pulled on their dead roots. Several had succumbed completely and torn themselves out of the ground.

‘There.’

On the far side of the fence, one of the dead trees had toppled over, making a precarious bridge across the razor wire. Doug made a stirrup with his hands and hoisted Ellie up: she hooked her arms around the trunk and hauled herself on. The stumps of broken branches scraped and scratched her. One almost clawed her eye out.

‘Will it take your weight?’ Doug asked.

She wriggled along the dead tree. She was halfway along when she heard the sound of an engine coming back up the slope. She tried to go faster. She lifted herself up and crawled forward like an ant, tensing her hands and feet in the clefts of the branches.

With a horrifying crack, the branch she was holding snapped off. She threw out a hand to balance herself and grabbed a handful of razor wire. It stopped her falling, but sliced a bloody
gash across her palm. She screamed, but if she let go she’d lose her balance and fall, probably slice her neck open.

‘
Hold on!
’

Doug pulled himself on to the tree and crawled towards her. The engine was getting louder. Gently, he reached round and cupped his arm around her waist so she could disentangle herself from the fence. Wet blood ran down her hand and dripped on to the ground. When she tried to put weight on it, she could hardly stomach the pain.

‘I’ve got you.’

With Doug supporting her, they edged forward. The engine was just round the corner now.

But they were too much for the fragile deadwood. The tree cracked: not a branch, but the whole trunk. In the split second before it broke, Doug threw his weight forward, carrying both of them beyond the fence. They fell in a tangle of limbs and branches and hit the ground with a thud.

The black Mercedes cruised past, driving more slowly this time. Ellie held her breath. The fence swayed. Could they see it? She felt sure they must hear the echo of the tree falling. All she saw was the tyres. She didn’t dare look up for fear of making eye contact. Was it slowing down?

It disappeared out of sight. They lay there until the sound had died away completely.

Ellie got up and brushed pine dust off her face. ‘How will we get out?’

‘Cross that bridge when we come to it.’ Doug pulled out a handkerchief and tied it around her hand to stop the bleeding. He picked up the backpack and slung it on his shoulder. ‘If there is a bridge.’

They left the road behind and walked into the forest, heading down the slope. The pine-needle carpet muffled their
feet like snow. The deeper they went, the browner the forest became. Whatever blighted the trees had spread to almost all of them. Ellie remembered the file.
Environmental concerns regarding the hydraulic fracturing process.
What did that mean?

Ahead, the forest darkness began to lighten to the flat grey of open sky. They hurried on. The trees thinned, then stopped abruptly in a hard line. They both stared.

‘What happened to the lake?’

They’d come out at the bottom of a long, wide valley, a hollow cupped among the hills. Once it might have been a pretty spot: now it was a wasteland. Black mudflats stretched from one hillside to the other. Dead trees ran back up the slope like debris from an explosion. In the centre of the desolation stood a sandstone church with a square tower and no roof.

‘Is this Mirabeau?’

‘This is where the map says. That must have been the submerged church.’

They slithered down a steep embankment and walked along what had once been the shore of the lake. Doug took a tentative step on to the mud. It looked firm, but as soon as he put his weight on it it oozed away, sucking him in. Ellie grabbed his arm with her good hand and pulled him back.

‘Perhaps there’s a way across further round.’

The desolation overwhelmed Ellie. The more she stared, the more she saw the detritus of the lakebed littered across the mud. Boots and buoys, blackened tree-stumps and rocks. In the middle of the lake, the rotted hull of a rowing boat had a strand of weed trailing behind it like fishing line. Most of all there were the bones: the carcasses of unnumbered fish picked clean. The birds must have gorged themselves.

A gust of wind blew through the pines. The dead-brown
forest shivered: from somewhere up the slope Ellie heard a noise like a small explosion as another tree let go its roots. The grey sky didn’t blink.

‘What’s that?’

Doug had stopped dead. Ellie, watching her footing, walked straight into him and almost knocked him over.

About ten feet into the lakebed, a flat stone lay embedded in the mud. It didn’t look like much, until you looked beyond it and saw another about three feet further, and another beyond that, a string of dull pearls leading across the mudflat to the church. Too straight and regular to be there by chance.

‘Stepping stones,’ Ellie said. ‘But how do you get to the first one?’

‘There must be a million dead branches around here.’ Doug ran up to the treeline. He came back almost at once with a quizzical look on his face, dragging a long plank behind him.

‘I found this just inside the woods. Someone left us a drawbridge.’

Ellie gazed around the wasted landscape. ‘Who?’

‘Probably not your colleagues.’ Doug threw the plank on to the lakebed. Mud spattered and slopped around it. ‘They wouldn’t want to get their feet dirty.’

They made their way out into the lake, jumping from stone to stone. As they came closer to the church, Ellie could see a brown line on the tower showing where the lake level had once been. Only the very top of the tower would have showed. She didn’t like to think that where she was walking had once been under twenty feet of water.

‘When did this happen?’ she asked aloud.

‘The Environmental Impact report was dated a year ago. It sounds as if the church was still submerged then.’

The last stone was still a little distance from the church. The
ground around it looked higher than the surrounding lakebed: they decided to risk it. Mud squelched under their feet, but not far below they felt the hard grip of rock.

‘It would have sunk if it wasn’t built on something solid,’ said Doug.

‘But who built it?’

Doug had doubted the file when it called the church ‘Norman’, but in fact it was a textbook example: the crenellated square tower; the concentric arches around the door; the shark’s-tooth pattern that made you feel as if you were being swallowed whole. The door had rotted long ago, though the rusted hinges still grasped out into space. Through the opening, Ellie saw a twin row of columns leading towards a raised stone dais. It reminded her of the Monsalvat vault.

‘It’s so well preserved,’ she marvelled. ‘It must be almost a thousand years old, drowned for God knows how long. But all it needs is a new roof and a scrub.’

‘The Normans built to last.’

They walked down the aisle towards the dais. She stared at the capitals on top of the columns. Submersion had softened the carvings to smooth ripples, like the contours of a seabed, but occasionally she could make out the shape of an eagle or a man or some fantastic beast. Were they important?

At the transept they found more carvings. Stone humps pushed out through the mud that caked the floor: at first she thought they might be fallen masonry, but they were too regular for that. When she bent closer, she could make out the vague outlines of human figures lying flat on their backs.

‘Effigies,’ said Doug. He pointed to one, better preserved than the others through some quirk of the stone or the water. ‘That looks like a shield across his chest. They were probably knights.’

‘Could there be anything inside?’

They crouched and tried to lift the stone. Water had defaced the carvings so thoroughly there was nothing to grip: try as they might, they couldn’t move it.

A noise sounded behind them: not a falling stone or a frightened bird, but the mechanical click of steel. They spun around.

Half-hidden against the mottled walls, a man in camouflage fatigues stood in the corner and pointed a rifle at them.

France, 1142

‘A lot of people have been looking for you, Peter. You’re lucky we found you first.’

I assume he’s being ironic. My hands are shackled together above my head and looped over a hook in the wall; I have to stretch my toes just to touch the floor. My legs ache, my arms burn, and half my face is covered in dried blood. It still feels as if my head’s split open.

My captor sees the disbelief on my face. ‘You don’t know what the others would have done.’

I squint through the one eye that isn’t crusted with blood. I’m in a round stone chamber. Arched windows ring it, but all I can see beyond is bright blankness. Grey light drills into my skull. It feels high up, a tower. I can’t see a door.

‘Who are you?’

My interrogator steps back. He’s an impressive man: tall, powerful and solid. He’s probably ten years older than me, but there’s a solemnity in his face that’s ageless. He reminds me of my father.