The Stranger House (24 page)

As she turned away, she found herself thinking, with slightly malicious amusement, old Max isn’t going to be pleased when he hears how his Holiness has cocked things up!

She set off towards the door. Madero was now sitting at the bottom end of the table, his face still rapt. As she passed him his hand snaked out, seized her wrist and forced her hand between his legs.

“Feel this,” he said, “What do you think this is?”

She bunched her other fist preparatory to punching him in the throat, then realized he was pushing her fingers along the table’s under-edge.

About nine inches from the corner there was a groove about two inches long, ending in a deep hollow. When her no longer resisting hand was moved along, she found another one the same distance from the other corner.

“They mean something,” he said, “I feel it as strongly as I didn’t feel it at the Hall.”

“Feel what?” she demanded.

“There was this so-called priest-hole,” he said impatiently, as if expecting her to understand him without explanation, “But I got nothing there. Whereas here …”

So Max, the e-mailer, hadn’t been joking. He really was looking for priest-holes! Which, he might be surprised to discover, she knew a great deal about. Well, a little deal.

One of her teachers used to read her class books she’d
enjoyed in her own English childhood. OK, they’d been a bit old-fashioned, but Sam had loved these tales of tomboy girls in remote manor houses and boarding schools who were forever stumbling on secret passages and hidden chambers. Priest-holes were ten a penny in the UK, it seemed to the young Sam, and the land must be so honeycombed with subterranean passages that it was a wonder it didn’t just crumble underfoot.

Madero, like a good failed priest, was looking upward in search of inspiration. Sam looked up in search of clues. Right above her were the cured hams dangling from the hooks beneath the crossbeam. She recalled her reaction when she first noticed the pulley system the previous day.

She said, “What’s a ham weigh? Ten kilos? Wouldn’t have thought you needed such a high-geared ratchet for that.”

Madero’s gaze came slowly back into focus.

“Maybe they had bigger hams back then,” he said.

“Maybe.”

She went to the spindle on the left-hand wall and examined it closely. After a moment she pulled out the brake chock and began to lower the ham.

“Come on!’ she said impatiently, looking across at Madero.

He took her meaning instantly and went to the other wall. For a few moments the only sound was the clacking of the ratchets as the hams descended. Hers landed first and, as she started to unhook it, she glanced his way again but this time did not need to speak. Funny how well their thought processes seemed to slot in together when they got beyond their instinctive antagonism. Together they bent down to fit the free
hooks into the grooves and hollows beneath the table, then returned to the winding gear and in unison began to turn the handles.

Even with the gearing cogs, it took a good effort to lift the solid table, but slowly the massive legs rose. The hams began to slide down the slope and Sam paused, but Madero kept winding, so she resumed, wincing as the hams crashed to the floor.

When the table reached an angle of about forty degrees, Madero commanded, “Enough,” which was just like a guy. You have the idea, he’s not happy till he’s taken over. Now he dropped to his knees to examine the granite slabs of the floor, in particular the two which bore the circular print left by five centuries of pressure from the table legs. They were both a couple of feet square.

“There is some movement here, I think,” said Madero excitedly.

“So what?” said Sam, “Even if it does lift out, unless all your priests were my build, you’d never get one of them through a hole that size.”

“But it must signify something,” he insisted.

“Maybe. Look, if these old monks were clever enough to devise that lifting gear, they’d probably have something a bit more complicated than a simple trap.”

“Like what?”

“Well, like a counterweight system. Yeah, that could be it. How about if these two small flags are counterweights and when the table legs are resting on them the trap entrance is completely locked. Let’s see …”

She looked around, and finally her gaze came to rest on the greenish rectangular slab with the carving on it.

“This looks a possible. What the hell does this stuff say?”

“It’s from the Bible. Matthew 7:7. Curiously, I quoted part of it as we walked along the road.
Ask, and it shall be given you. Seek, and ye shall find. Knock, and it shall be opened unto you.”

“Knock, and it shall be opened,” she echoed, “OK, let’s try.”

She knelt down and gently tapped the end of the slab.

Nothing happened.

She tapped again, harder.

Still nothing.

He said with a patience worse than mockery, “I think unless there is somebody down there to answer, your knocking theory is a non-starter.”

“Don’t be a smart-ass,” she retorted, “If these guys were as bright as I think, they’d know to the last gram just how much pressure you needed to move the counterweights, and it wouldn’t be much, else what’s the point? You’d want something like this to be swift and smooth and pretty quiet. Know what I think?”

“Not yet,” he said.

“I think it’s got gunged up. Jeez, could be centuries since it’s been used.”

She stood up, reached one foot forward and drove it down on the slab.

Nothing moved.

She did it again.

“Think I felt something there,” she said.

“Sam, be careful,” said Madero.

It was the first time he’d used her given name but it didn’t feel like a step to intimacy, more like a parent admonishing a naughty child.

So her natural adult reaction was to act like one.

She fixed him with her slatey gaze and said, “Knock, knock; who’s there?”

Then, jumping as high as she could into the air, she came down with all her slight weight on the end of the slab.

It was enough. It was more than enough.

With a smooth swiftness which gave her no time at all to react, the slab pivoted away beneath her feet to reveal a black hole into which she vanished like an insect picked out of the air by the tongue of a lizard.

Sam lay on her back looking up.

It took a lot to frighten her. Snakes and spiders she could react to with clinical efficiency. Heights didn’t faze her and she had been able to swim like a fish since the age of two. But dark confined places found all of her panic buttons.

In one sense, she knew exactly why. She could recite the maths of increased blood pressure, diminution of oxygen supply, failure of motor functions and so on in great detail.

But what really pressed these buttons, she didn’t have the faintest idea.

It was a relief therefore to be able to fix her gaze on the distant square of luminosity that marked the heaven of the kitchen. The silhouette of Madero’s head which now appeared should also have been a comfort, but all she could think was that the stupid bastard was blocking the light!

“Sam!’ he called, “Are you hurt?”

She didn’t rush to judgment but put things to the test before she replied.

“Don’t think so,” she called back, “Can you get a ladder or a rope or something and get me out of here?”

“Wait,” he called, “I’m coming down.”

“Don’t be so fucking stupid!’ she began to yell. Then she realized he didn’t mean he was going to jump down into the pit alongside her, thus trapping them both. Instead he was descending a near vertical set of stairs, really no more than a series of protuberant stones in the cross wall that marked this end of the hidden chamber. If she hadn’t been too frightened to notice them, she could easily have clambered out herself.

He knelt beside her and she had to admit it was a comfort to feel his presence.

“Are you sure you haven’t broken anything?” he asked anxiously.

“Absolutely,” she snapped. In fact her body was sending signals suggesting there’d be new bruises to add to those sustained when she fell off the ladder at St Ylf’s, but she wasn’t about to invite him to run his priestly hands over her in search of fractures.

“Good,” he said.

“So now can we get out of here?”

“Of course. But don’t you want to take a look round first?”

No, she bloody didn’t, was the true absolute answer, but his arrival having raised her from the depths of utter panic, she found she did not care to let him know just how scared she’d been, so she settled for the conditional.

“Oh yes? And how are we supposed to do that when it’s pitch-black?”

This wasn’t quite true as the light from the kitchen, though not itself very strong, was already diluting what had seemed like an overflow from the Black Lagoon.

Now Madero again proved another of her pa’s maxims, never say
maybe
when you mean
no bloody way!

He reached into his pocket and produced a pencil torch.

“Lux fiat,”
he said smugly, sending the thin but strong beam probing the darkness.

She could still have exited, of course, but now that would really be drawing attention to her wimpishness.

She followed the line of light with attempted aplomb. Though little more than five feet wide, in length the chamber seemed in Sam’s prejudiced view to stretch forever.

As usual, she sought refuge in inductive logic.

“There must be cellars,” she said, “Real cellars, one at the front, one at the back, seemingly with a common wall. But in fact there are two walls with this chamber between them. But if this was built at the same time as that priory place that got knocked down, why would they need a priest-hole when you lot were ruling the roost anyway?”

Over his shoulder—the idiot was moving off towards the furthermost still dark area—Madero said, “No, it wouldn’t be built as a priest-hole. I would guess that it was constructed as a safe-house for the priory’s valuables in times of strife. But it must have seemed an ideal place to hide Father Simeon later.”

“Who?”

“Sorry, of course, you don’t know anything about him, do you? One of the Woollass family who got persecuted during the sixteenth century. The legend of the Dark Man at the Stranger House must have helped too!’

And I bet it was Alice Woollass’s idea to hide him here, he thought. What an ingenious woman, building a red herring priest-hole at the Hall, which they claimed was a secret storage place for valuables, while all the
time using a real secret storage place for valuables to hide Simeon!

“Well, that’s really fascinating,” said Sam brightly, “Look, shouldn’t we report this to someone …”

“You want to get out?” A gent wouldn’t have said it so bluntly, but she made no effort to deny it, and he went on, “OK. Just hang on a minute. Now this is amazing …”

He was just a darker shape against the darkness now. She heard him moving stuff around, what kind of stuff she couldn’t imagine and didn’t want to.

Then his voice changed and he muttered something low and fast in what sounded to her to be Latin or maybe Spanish. A prayer perhaps? That was another trouble with priests. They confused praying for things and actually doing the things they were praying for. God looked after those who looked after themselves—one of Pa’s ripostes to any attempt at religious argument. It was time to give God a hand.

“I’m out of here,” she said negligently, “I’m moving on and I need to throw my things together.”

She hadn’t meant to offer a justification which, though true, sounded pretty feeble even in her own ears.

She turned to the stone ladder. Above in the kitchen there was a noise. An indeterminate hard-to-identify kind of noise, not all that loud but to her straining ears as sinister as a leper’s bell.

Silence for a moment, then a kind of scraping, crescendoing to a great crash!

And with a suddenness like death the entrance slab flew back upwards, lay flat against the ceiling, and the light was gone.

Now Sam let out the shriek which had been spiralling around inside her head ever since her fall.

Madero was back by her side in a couple of seconds. He caught her with one arm and pulled her close, holding the torch up between them so that it lit both their faces.

“It’s OK,” he said soothingly, “Nothing to worry about. It’s OK.”

“That’s what you think, is it?” She sought solace in anger, “That’s the best that shaven skull of yours can come up with? We’re trapped down here in a dark hole, and you think that it’s OK?”

He seemed to take her question seriously and, after a moment’s thought, nodded and said, “Yes, actually, I do think it’s OK. We can work out what’s happened, which I suspect is that one of the pulleys gave way and the other couldn’t hold the table up alone. And we can work out what’s going to happen, which is that Mrs Appledore will eventually return and, finding her kitchen in a bit of a mess with knocking sounds coming from beneath the floor, she’ll get help to lift the table and pull us out. Meanwhile we have light, and the air down here is far from foetid, which suggests there is an inlet. So all we need is a little patience.”

She forced herself to track his reasoning and could find no flaw in it, and what made it particularly soothing was the absence of any reference to divine providence.

She took a deep breath and moved away from him but not too far. It seemed a good time to come clean. After that scream, what was there to hide?

She said, “Yeah. Sorry. The thing is, I’m slightly claustrophobic. No, hang about, let me qualify that. No point being coy, not in a situation like this. I’m completely fucking claustrophobic. Put me in a dark place that I can’t get out of and pretty soon I start running
around and screaming and tearing my fingernails out on the walls till eventually I hyperventilate and collapse in a foetal ball and die. This I know because I’ve been through the whole process, except the last bit obviously.”

“I’m glad to hear that,” said Madero, “Anything else I should know about you?”

“Jesus, isn’t that enough?” she said, “How long will your torch battery last? Soon as that light goes, you’d better look for cover else I’m likely to tear your eyes out.”