Blood Codex

Chapter 22

Crowley’s feet touched the flagstone floor and he stood in a narrow pool of light from the entrance high above. The oubliette was deep, the ceiling curving away from the hole and disappearing into darkness. The walls of the prison were lost in inky shadow. Looking up at the entrance, Crowley frowned. A person would have to be a spider or a cockroach to escape, clinging to the roof upside down just to reach the hole, let alone have the skills to undo the grill from the inside if it were closed up again. He shuddered at the thought. The sooner he got back out of this place, the better.

The air was a damp chill in his lungs, dust and age penetrating his pores. He slipped a flashlight from his pocket and its beam pierced the darkness. The flagstones went flat to the walls, which curved all around to make a circular room some fifteen or so paces across. Then the stone walls rose, large blocks pressed close together. Four openings, like the cardinal points on a compass, marked the four individual cells. The room was otherwise featureless and austere. Crowley imagined multiple prisoners, colluding to escape. But even if one tall man stood on another’s shoulders, they still wouldn’t be able to reach the access hole high above. It would take three men standing atop one another to manage that, and only the best acrobats were likely to succeed. Certainly not starving, beaten, weakened prisoners.

He went to each individual cell and looked in. Four empty spaces, no taller than a man, only a few paces square. After the last one, Crowley stood back, exasperated. What now? The place was empty, as bare and cold as a desert at night. Frustrated, he went back into one of the cells and looked more closely, playing his torchlight slowly over the stone blocks of the walls. Marks and writing became clear when he took time to notice them, scratched into the rock presumably with small stones. Some were simply tally marks, maybe counting off days spent interred, though how anyone might measure the passing of days in the basement of a basement was a mystery. Perhaps they weren’t days, but something less innocent.

Other marks were words in an unpracticed hand, the language unintelligible to Crowley. All the cells had marks of some kind, some more than others. In the third cell he paused, heart rate fluttering slightly faster. Ever so faint, almost obscured by more recent carvings, was the outline of a devil. And not just any devil, but the strange, squatting creature from the Codex Gigas, crudely rendered but recognizable. Crowley pulled out his pocket folding tool and scraped at the image, and the surrounding stone. Sandy mortar rained down from a section softer than elsewhere. Frowning with concentration, Crowley carved deeper and revealed a kind of dip in the top of the brick beneath the mortar he had removed. A dip just big enough to slip in his fingertips and give some grip. Was it a handhold?

He pulled, but it was stuck fast, not budging even fractionally. Crowley brushed at the block, blew dust away, then held the flashlight in his teeth as he worked more at the surface. Either side of the devil carving were two circles, only about half an inch in diameter. They looked to be a slightly different shade to the rest of the block. He dug into them with his knife point and the same sandy mortar drifted down.

Crowley switched from the knife to a small screwdriver tool and dug into the circles, quickly revealing a deep hole in the stone. He worked his way in and the screwdriver tip slipped through and there was a sound like a popping cork. Crowley grinned and quickly cleared the second hole. He’d read about this kind of method and discussed it while teaching his ancient history classes. The Egyptians used similar techniques in the pyramids. The stone had been set in place, the holes used to suction air out of the space beyond until the block was set tight, hermetically sealed, and then the holes plugged with mortar. Now that he had broken through, the pressure equalized and the block shifted in its seat.

Crowley put his tools away, held the flashlight in one hand and used the fingertips of his other hand in the groove atop the block. He pulled and the block slid easily free. The one below it moved against the first and Crowley pulled that aside too. Each block was heavy, hard to manhandle, but he was strong enough to lift each free and put them on the floor. The opening he had made was just big enough for him to crawl through.

He shone his light inside first, but it was difficult to lean in and see. Gonna have to simply go in and see where this goes, he told himself, steeling his jittering nerves. Excitement and fear in roughly equal measure made his blood run fast. He wriggled into the opening, torch in his teeth again, until his hands found the cold hard stone of the floor on the other side. He walked his hands forwards, pulling his body through, until his legs were in and he dropped his feet to the ground. He sat back in a crouch and took his flashlight from his teeth to pan it around.

The space was much bigger than the cell he had come from, easily twenty paces or more square with a high stone ceiling. Old wooden cupboards and a rickety desk occupied one wall. On the desk was a book stand, big enough to hold a large tome, and candles had burned down to trickling, lumpy stubs. A human skull and a dusty dagger sat next to the book rest. Marks on the floor seemed to depict strange sigils, angular characters and the point of at least part of a pentacle.

Crowley slowly twisted, playing the light around the walls and gasped, his heart slamming into his ribs, when the beam of brightness revealed a hideous face, looking right back at him.