‘I won’t allow it,’ he said, but it sounded feeble. ‘It’s far too dangerous.’
She met his look with an unruffled mien. ‘I’m coming!’
‘This shaft is likely to lead to another crypt as singularly unfruitful as this one and it’s important that I have someone who can call for help should I run into trouble,’ he said, but something told him that logic would get him nowhere at all.
‘I have a hunch you’ll need me.’
‘You and your hunches!’
He wasn’t used to women, let alone potholing with women, and he doubted that their sex was capable of it, considering most of them lacked any sense of direction and had an abhorrence of things that liked to have their abodes in holes. But he sensed she was going to hold her ground and he didn’t have time to argue with her, so he entered the tunnel with her following close behind and hoped for the best.
‘Why are the two crypts so far apart? It doesn’t make sense,’ she said, behind him.
‘Noble women were never buried with their men, for obvious reasons.’
‘I can well imagine that being holed up for eternity with controlling, egotistic, ignorant men would have sounded as unappealing to the dames of yesteryear as it does to the women of today.’
He paused in his tracks. ‘Are you certain you wouldn’t like to go back and stand guard?’
‘Absolutely not! I’m enjoying being your partner in crime.’
He grunted.
The ground was drier here and seemed to rise a little. Eva stumbled on something and gasped. It was a skull. Rahn picked it up. It had a gash on the temple. ‘An ossarium!’ he said with glee, showing her.
It seemed to fascinate her and she took it from his hand for closer inspection. ‘Alas, poor Yorick,’ she said. ‘It looks old.’
‘Yes, I think this place is ancient. The Visigoths liked to bury their dead in underground places. Look!’ The flickering candlelight illuminated more skulls and bones, heaped one over the other, lining the walls of the tunnel. ‘Just like the catacombs of Paris! A lot of people died here during the war with the Franks, not to mention the Cathar wars and the Great War. They had to store the bones somewhere.’
At this point the shaft narrowed abruptly and they had to walk in single file, sometimes having to squeeze through a tight opening. He predicted that they would soon come to a dead end and have to track back since the air was stagnant and oppressively humid. He took off his jacket and carried it in his hands, moving ahead with caution. Above them, the roots of trees and other vegetation poked through the dirt, catching in their hair and clothes. Below, the rocks and debris made their progress slow and tedious.
Rahn came to an abrupt stop.
‘What is it?’ Eva said.
‘Look for yourself!’ he said happily, shining the light of his candle on the matter at hand. The girl did not gasp as he had expected and this disconcerted him. The low ceiling and the sides of the shaft were completely covered in a black mass that consisted of a tangle of legs and hairy bodies. Some of the creatures dangled and dropped at their feet, while above whole clusters sat on lacy webs.
‘It’s a large nest of spiders, see the egg sacks?’ Rahn said.
‘What are you going to do?’ He thought he could hear a smile in her voice and it irritated him.
‘Here,’ he said, ‘back up, and give me your candle.’
‘Why?’
‘Mademoiselle, you can turn around and go back if you like but I intend to go on and I need your candle for just one moment. If you please.’
‘As you wish,’ she said. ‘But you haven’t told me what you’re going to do.’
‘I’m going to burn them.’
‘You’re going to cremate them?’
‘Would you rather walk through them and have them crawling all over you? I assure you that their bite is quite painful.’
She gave him the candle and he placed a candle to each wall simultaneously. It was not a pleasant scene. The mass of bodies caught alight creating an arch of fire. Rahn braced himself for the sound.
‘Do they always squeal like that?’ she said, unperturbed.
‘Yes.’
There was a frenzy and those spiders that had not been consumed by the conflagration moved off almost magically, leaving only an acrid smell.
He gave Eva her candle. ‘That was easy,’ he said merrily. ‘Far easier than a nest of snakes, or rats. Why, I remember there was a cave at Ornolac that—’
She was looking at him with a singular expression.
‘What?’
‘You have one on your head,’ she said.
He scrambled to get it off and stomped on it until it was nothing more than a brown stain.