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high in the vaulted ceiling.
    Something moved.
    Or had it?
    He couldn’t see a damn thing. Just my imagination, he thought. The only thing moving in this place are the creatures instilled in my head when I was a kid and learned about the bogeyman. That was his damn problem, too much imagination. He should have been writing fiction instead of news stories. Maybe that’s what made him a good tabloid reporter—most of what he wrote was fiction, junk fiction at that. And, as he boasted over a pint or two—or three or four or more—it took a truly junk mind to write stories that were so outrageous, they had to be true. But tabloid reporting wasn’t just all about farm girls giving birth to two-headed lambs after being raped by aliens. Sometimes there was real news to be reported.
    He hadn’t always been a tabloid reporter, using his imagination to give stories a slant that appealed to the reading public’s lust for serial killers and the sex lives of the rich and famous. There was a time when he had been a respected journalist, a prizewinning investigative reporter who had his own byline and dug deep into the ills and sins of society. Those days were years past, that life was trashed because he had made a mistake that cost the life of someone he loved. Now, like the never-ending revenge Zeus took on Prometheus, chaining him to a mountain and sending an eagle to eat his immortal liver, Dutton was doomed to assault his liver with booze while he cranked out imaginative tabloid trash.
    It was his damn imagination that got him into invading the Abbey in the first place. He tended to believe his source, Howler, a onetime famous plastic surgeon, long prohibited from practicing after he gave one poor bastard a Boris Karloff face. The fact that he had been under the influence of a controlled substance at the time was a given. Howler now supported his drug habit doing part-time work for the coroner’s office, reconstructing stiffs who were no longer recognizable so they could be identified.
    Howler was a crazy, but he had that sly perception of some addicts that seems to remain behind after the druggies have burned out trillions of brain cells and begin to look like cast members of Night of the Living Dead.
    His heart stopped again—something in the place—or in his imagination—moved in the darkness.
    Somebody there? he almost croaked, but choked back the question.
    He was between the proverbial rock and hard place. There weren’t any guards inside the Abbey, though he assumed they had to be somewhere nearby. If he stood up and started screaming, maybe they’d come running—and maybe, when they found him, he’d get five-to-ten at Dartmoor Prison for invading a national treasure. He had already done a few months in jail, back in those heady days before he fell from grace as a reporter for a prestigious newspaper and turned to shoveling muck for the muckiest tabloid in the country. And he wasn’t anxious to return. There were people in jail a lot crazier and meaner than even the ones he dealt with for the tabloid.
    He also wasn’t anxious to make news in a more gruesome way. He was beginning to wonder if he would end up as the lead story in his own paper— Crazed Killer Skins Reporter Alive as Elvis Watches was how a good tabloid headline editor would run the story on the front page.
    Before he risked prison or tabloid immortality, he had to find out what— who —was in the shadows. And hope it wasn’t an ax murderer.
    Com’on, moon. The place was creepy enough without shadows that moved. It was supposed to be a church, but somewhere along the line they started planting people inside like the pharaohs of old Egypt. Most of the bodies were in granite-looking tombs standing four or five feet high with the form of a body lying on top. As in the case of Henry III, Dutton didn’t know if the bodies decked out on top of the tombs were bronze statues of the dead person or were actual bodies bronzed. Whatever they were, all