“What door?”
Marek darted left, along a cloistered corridor, and then left again, through a very narrow opening that brought them into a tight space, a kind of storeroom area. It was lit by a torch. There was a wooden trapdoor in the floor; he flung it open, and they saw steps going down into darkness. He grabbed a torch, and they all went down the steps. Chris was last, closing the trapdoor behind him. He descended the stairs into a dank, dark chamber.
:
The torch sputtered in the cool air. By its flickering light, they saw huge casks, six feet in diameter, running along the wall. They were in a wine cellar.
“You know the soldiers will find this place soon enough,” Marek said. He led them through several rooms of casks, moving without hesitation.
Following him, Kate said, “Do you know where you’re going?”
“Don’t you?” he said.
But she didn’t; she and Chris stayed close behind Marek, wanting to be in the comforting circle of light from the torch. Now they were passing tombs, small indentations in the wall where bodies rested, their shrouds rotting away. Sometimes they saw the tops of skulls, with bits of hair still clinging; sometimes they saw feet, the bones partially exposed. They heard the faint squeak of rats in the darkness.
Kate shivered.
Marek continued on, until at last he stopped abruptly in a chamber that was nearly empty.
“Why are we stopping?” she said.
“Don’t you know?” Marek said.
She looked around, then realized that she was in the same underground chamber she had crawled into several days before. There was the same sarcophagus of a knight, now with the lid on the coffin. Along another wall was a crude wooden table, where sheets of oilskin were stacked and manuscript bundles were tied with hemp. To one side was a low stone wall, on which stood a single manuscript bundle — and the glint of the lens from the Professor’s eyeglasses.
“He must have lost it yesterday,” Kate said. “The soldiers must have captured him down here.”
“Probably.” She watched as Marek started going through the bundled sheets, one after another. He quickly found the Professor’s message, then turned back to the preceding sheet. He frowned, peering at it in the torchlight.
“What is it?” she said.
“It’s a description,” he said. “Of an underground river, and . . . here it is.” He pointed to the side of the manuscript, where a notation in Latin had been scrawled.
“It says, ‘Marcellus has the key.’ “ He pointed with his finger. “And then it says something about, uh, a door or opening, and large feet.”
“Large feet?”
“Wait a minute,” he said. “No, that’s not it.” What Elsie had said was coming back to him now. “It says, ‘Feet of a giant.’ A giant’s feet.”
“A giant’s feet,” she said, looking doubtfully at him. “Are you sure you have that right?”
“That’s what it says.”
“And what’s this?” she said. Beneath his finger there were two words, one arranged above the other:
DESIDE
VIVIX
“I remember,” Marek said. “Elsie said this was a new word for her, vivix. But she didn’t say anything about deside. And that doesn’t even look like Latin to me. And it’s not Occitan, or old French.”
With his dagger, he cut a corner from the parchment, then scratched the two words into the material, folded it, and slipped it into his pocket.
“But what does it mean?” Kate said.
Marek shook his head. “No idea at all.”
“It was added in the margin,” she said. “Maybe it doesn’t mean anything. Maybe it’s a doodle, or an accounting, or something like that.”
“I doubt it.”
“They must have doodled back then.”
“I know, but this doesn’t look like a doodle, Kate. This is a serious notation.” He turned back to the manuscript, running his finger along the text. “Okay. Okay . . . It says here that Transitus occultus incipit . . . the passage starts . . . propre ad capellam viridem, sive capellam mortis — at the green chapel, also known as the chapel of death — and—”
“The green chapel?” she said in an odd voice.
Marek nodded. “That’s right. But it doesn’t say where the chapel is.” He sighed. “If the passage really connects to the limestone caves, it could be anywhere.”
“No, André,” she said. “It’s not.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean,” she said, “that I know where the green chapel is.”
:
Kate said, “It was marked on the survey charts for the Dordogne project — it’s a ruin, just outside the project area. I remember wondering why it hadn’t been included in the project, because it was so close. On the chart, it was marked ‘chapelle verte morte,’ and I thought it meant the ‘chapel of green death.’ I remember, because it sounded like something out of Edgar Allan Poe.”
“Do you remember where it is, exactly?”
“Not exactly, except that it’s in the forest about a kilometer north of Bezenac.”
“Then it’s possible,” Marek said. “A kilometer-long tunnel is possible.”
From behind them, they heard the sound of soldiers coming down into the cellar.
“Time to go.”
He led them to the left, into a corridor, where the staircase was located. When Kate had seen it before, it disappeared into a mound of earth. Now it ran straight up to a wooden trapdoor.
Marek climbed the stairs, put his shoulder to the door. It opened easily. They saw gray sky, and smoke.
Marek went through, and they followed after him.
:
They emerged in an orchard, the fruit trees in neat rows, the spring leaves a bright green. They ran ahead through the trees, eventually arriving at the monastery wall. It was twelve feet tall, too high to climb. But they climbed the trees, then dropped over the wall, landing outside. Directly ahead they saw a section of dense, uncleared forest. They ran toward it, once again entering the dark canopy of the trees.
* * *
09:57:02
In the ITC laboratory, David Stern stepped away from the prototype machine. He looked at the small taped-together electronic bundle that he had been assembling and testing for the last five hours.
“That’s it,” he said. “That’ll send them a message.”
It was now night in the lab; the glass windows were dark. He said, “What time is it, back there?”
Gordon counted on his fingers. “They arrived about eight in the morning. It’s been twenty-seven hours elapsed time. So it’s now eleven in the morning, the following day.”
“Okay. That should be okay.”
Stern had managed to build this electronic communications device, despite Gordon’s two strong arguments that such a thing could not be done. Gordon said that you couldn’t send a message back there because you didn’t know where the machine would land. Statistically, the chances were overwhelming that the machine would land where the team wasn’t. So they would never see a message. The second problem was that you had no way of knowing whether they had received the message or not.
But Stern had solved both those objections in an extremely simple way. His bundle contained an earpiece transmitter/receiver, identical to the ones the team was already wearing, and two small tape recorders. The first tape recorder transmitted a message. The second recorded any incoming message to the earpiece transmitter. The whole contraption was, as Gordon admiringly termed it, a multiverse answering machine.
Stern recorded a message that said, “This is David. You have now been out for twenty-seven hours. Don’t try to come back until thirty-two hours. Then we’ll be ready for you at this end. Meanwhile, tell us if you’re all right. Just speak and it’ll be recorded. Good-bye for now. See you soon.”
Stern listened to the message one final time, then said, “Okay, let’s send it back.”
Gordon pushed buttons on the control panel. The machine began to hum and was bathed in blue light.
:
Hours earlier, when he had begun working on this message machine, Stern’s only concern was that his friends back there might not know they couldn’t return. As a result, he could imagine them getting into a jam, perhaps being attacked from all sides, and calling for the machine at the last instant, assuming they could come home at once. So Stern thought they should be told that, for the moment, they couldn’t come back.
That had been his original concern. But now there was a second, even greater concern. The air in the cave had been cleared for about sixteen hours now. Teams of workers were back inside, rebuilding the transit pad. The control booth had been continuously monitored for many hours.
And there had been no field bucks.
Which meant there had been no attempt to come back. And Stern had the feeling — of course, nobody would say anything outright, least of all Gordon — but he had the feeling that people in ITC thought that to go more than twenty hours without a field buck was a bad sign. He sensed that a large faction inside ITC believed the team was already dead.