Blood Codex

Chapter 23

Crowley sat back hard on the cold stone but took deep, steadying breaths. The face was huge, and ugly, but made of stone. Or some kind of pressed clay maybe. Moving in for a closer look, Crowley grinned at the revelation. This giant was clearly the golem of the stories they had heard. Or at the very least, a copy of it. The thing had been broken in two, the stomach section smashed open. Just the upper torso, from somewhere around the sternum up, was big enough that as it sat on the floor, it was eye-level with Crowley, and he was not a short man. The face had wide-set eyes, deep and almost thoughtful. Its nose was short and slightly flattened, above a wide, lipless mouth that seemed set in a grimace of anger or pain. Or maybe frustration.

Large chunks of the midsection lay scattered around the room, angular and irregular, the result of some cataclysmic shattering strike. The legs, still joined together by large, ragged sections of pelvis, were each at least as long as Crowley was tall. When this thing was whole it would have been terrifyingly massive. Crowley ran a hand over the smooth, brown stony shoulder, wondering if it really was the golem of the legend, hundreds of years old. Once animate, now broken and inert, could this thing really have walked with a magical shem in its mouth?

But it didn’t answer the biggest and most pressing question in his mind, which was the location of the original Devil’s Bible, or what might have happened to it. Crowley stalked around the room, looking more closely at the cupboards, all annoyingly empty. The desk was equally unforthcoming, but he pocketed the dagger for later. It had a leather-wrapped hilt, shiny and smooth with age and use, and a slightly curved blade about six inches long. The metal of the blade bore pit marks and some chinks in its sharpened edge, but was in surprisingly good condition. The hermetic sealing of the chamber had preserved it against time well.

Crowley looked at the skull for a moment, wondering who it might have been. What unfortunate soul had their head interred in this creepy occult cave, sealed in presumably forever until Crowley had arrived to disturb its rest? But he couldn’t bring himself to touch it.

He looked once more around the room, once again frustrated. To have found a secret chamber, but have it tell him nothing was perhaps more galling than having never found it in the first place.

He returned to the golem, staring at its agonized face. His brows knitted as it occurred to him that the Codex Gigas could easily have been hidden inside the monster, with ample room to spare. It was more than big enough.

He shone his light into the bottom half, kneeling to look down each leg, but saw nothing. Returning to the top half, he carefully tipped it over onto its side, grunting with the effort of managing the enormous weight. When he shone his torch inside the capacious torso, it revealed a kind of shelf set into the creature’s back. The shelf had a lip along the front and some half a meter above it, a leather strap hung limp. A node of clay in line with the strap seemed perfectly set to anchor the leather in place. It was all too convenient to ignore. The size and placement was perfect for the Devil’s Bible to sit on the shelf and be held in tight by the leather strap secured across it about halfway up.

“The golem didn't consume the bible,” Crowley said to himself in a whisper. “It housed it.”

The smile of discovery fell off his face at the sudden emergence of hushed voices, drifting to him from far away. But not that far. Had some tour guide or other employee discovered the grill he had removed, his rope hanging down into the oubliette?

The sound of feet slapping gently on the floor caused his already racing heart to double-time. Whoever it was had used his rope and descended into the lower dungeon. He quickly doused his light and peered out through the opening, into the tiny cell and the oubliette beyond.

A man stood beside Crowley’s rope, illuminated by the light falling from above. In one hand, he held a gun, light glinting off the gray metal of its barrel as he pointed it around the empty space. In the man’s other hand was a flashlight, which he lifted and flicked on. It had a red filter and light like spilled blood danced around the pale stones.

The man looked slowly about himself, pausing at each of the four cells to shine his light in. His face was shadowed, but Crowley easily saw his focus and concentration. This was not a castle employee.

There was no way Crowley could worm his way through the small opening from the secret room and into the cell to jump the armed man. He’d be trapped like a lobster in a pot. As he sat back, wondering how on earth he would avoid the man’s attention, the red light spilled into the small cell outside his hiding place. The man saw the dark square of the removed bricks and grunted in satisfaction.

“Found something,” he called up into the light, and moved forward.

Crowley stood beside the gap, mind racing with possibilities. If the man looked inside before he came through and Crowley was close enough to jump him, the man would easily shoot at point blank range. If Crowley waited across the room, the man was sure to see him and get a shot off before Crowley had a chance to cover the distance. In an enclosed space with nowhere to run, the man with the automatic pistol had all the advantages.

As the gunman hurried toward the opening, Crowley looked frantically around. His time was almost up.