Speaking From Among The Bones Read Online Free PDF

underfoot.”
    Well!
    Ordinarily, anyone who made such a remark to my face would go to the top of my short list for strychnine. A few grains in the victim’s lunch pail—probably mixed with the mustard in his Spam sandwich, which would neatly hide both the taste and the texture …
    But wait! Hadn’t he said “we”? Who was “we”?
    I knew, from hanging round the church, that Mr. Haskins usually worked alone. He called in a helper only when there was heavy lifting to be done, such as shifting fallen tombstones—at least the heavier ones, or burying someone who—
    “Saint Tancred!” I said, and made a dash for the door.
    “Hang on—” Mr. Haskins protested. “Don’t go down there!”
    But his voice was already fading behind me as I clattered down the winding stairs.
    Saint Tancred! They were opening Saint Tancred’s tomb in the crypt, and they didn’t want me butting in. That’s why the vicar had shunted me off so abruptly. Since he had directed me straight to Mr. Haskins in the tower, it didn’t make any sense, but then he hadn’t really had time to think.
    Floral baskets, indeed! Somewhere below, they were already breaking open the tomb of Saint Tancred!
    The vestibule, when I reached it, was empty. The vicar and the white-haired stranger had vanished.
    To my left was the entry to the crypt, a heavy, wooden door in the Gothic style, its curved frame an arched, disapproving eyebrow of stone. I pushed it open and made my way quietly down the stairs.
    At the bottom, a string of small, bare electric bulbs, which had been strung temporarily from the low roof, led off in the distance toward the front of the church, their feeble yellowish gleam only making the surrounding shadows darker.
    I had been down here just once before, upon the occasion of a winter’s evening game of hide-and-seek with the St. Tancred’s Girl Guides. That, of course, had been before my dishonorable discharge from the troop. Still, even after all this time, I couldn’t help thinking of Delorna Higginson, and how long it had taken them to make her stop screaming and foaming at the mouth.
    Ahead of me now, lurking in the darkness, crouched the hulking heap of scrap metal that was the church’s furnace.
    I edged uneasily round it, not willing to turn my back to the thing.
    Manufactured by Deacon and Bromwell in 1851 and shown at the Great Exhibition, this famously unpredictable monstrosity squatted in the bowels of St. Tancred’s like the giant squid that attacked Captain Nemo’s submarine,
Nautilus
, in
20,000 Leagues Under the Sea
, the tin tentacles of its ducts snaking off in all directions, its two round windows of isinglass in the cast-iron door glowing like a pair of savage red eyes.
    Dick Plews, the village plumber, had for years been having what the vicar called “an affair of the heart” with the brute, but even
I
knew that to be sadly optimistic. Dick was afraid of the thing, and everybody in Bishop’s Lacey knew it.
    Sometimes, during services, especially in the long silences as we settled for the sermon, a stream of four-letter words would come drifting up through the hot-air ducts—words that we all knew, but pretended not to.
    I shuddered and moved on.
    On both sides of me now were bricked-up arches. Behind them—stacked like cordwood, according to Mr. Haskins—were the crumbling coffins of those villagers who had gone before us into death, including a good many defunct de Luces.
    I must admit that there were times when I wished I could hoist those dry, papery ancestors of mine out of their niches for a good old face-to-face—not just to see how they compared with their darkened oil portraits which still hung at Buckshaw, but also to satisfy my private pleasure in confronting the occasional corpse.
    Only Dogger was aware of this unusual enthusiasm of mine, and he had assured me that it was because in tackling the dead, the pleasure of learning outweighs the pain.
    Aristotle, he assured me, had shared my keenness