Chapter 10
Colin lifted his backpack, pulled the flashlight out, and waited for Finger to shuffle past him before he drew the straps
over his shoulders. Finger had the shillelagh in one hand, but Arthur twitched his flashlight toward the wall.
“Leave that here.”
“As you like, as you like,” Finger said, in a joyously groveling tone. “Finger shall leave one club but bring the larger for
our general security.” And he squeezed his crotch and leered. He let the shillelagh thump the wall and slunk past Arthur,
and only then did Arthur dim his light to an ordinary yellow glow.
Colin threw his own flashlight on—the regular setting, not full spectrum—and cast it at the shillelagh to see what had almost
been buried in his head. Behind it was a faded fresco of the Virgin Mother in her blue and white gown, raising her hand in
a blessing over a pile of shrouds.
“The Black Death,” Arthur told him. “This was a plague cave.”
“How it stank,” Finger said with a certain satisfaction. “The full-grown died quietly. But not the babies. The babies sounded
like little bleating goats. There were a thousand men, women, babies died down here the first time the plague touched these
shores. They brought them in, then rolled the boulder over the entrance because the flies came in the millions. Many were
still alive when they did it, but only the children screamed. The adults were grateful for the dark, so they wouldn’t have
to see the blackness consuming them. Blacker even’n you, young gennleman, heh heh!”
It was not, at first, the sort of cave Colin expected, neither a nasty, dirty, wet hole nor a dry, bare, sandy hole, but a series of carefully hollowed-out rooms connected by a series of low, vaulted doorways.
There were carvings above these openings: fourteenth-century Gothic skulls framed by wings, Celtic crosses, and runic symbols.
Places to sit—like long pews of stone—had been carved into the walls.
“It would’ve been a religious retreat, before it was a mass grave,” Arthur told him. “Cells for monks to fast and listen for
God.”
“A place for them to bugger one another in privacy,” Finger said. “If any called for God in them days, it was only when he
made a hot little squirt up a fundament. There are no atheists in foxholes or buried balls deep neither. And no God in holes
like this.”
“Light can find its way into the darkest of places, Svangur,” Arthur told him. “As you’ve learned to your dismay. Carry on.”
The troll’s shadow led them from one vault to the next.
“God,” Colin grunted. He was feeling the knee with every step. “I’ve thought a lot about God over the years, Arthur. I had
an idea about him.”
“I didn’t know you were a believer. What’s your idea?”
“He’s an egregore. A Philip. The greatest Philip of all, perhaps. It would explain so much. Did you know people have better
health outcomes when they pray?”
“Yes.”
“And they have better health outcomes when someone prays for them . . . even if they don’t know someone is praying for them? Which somewhat undermines any argument based on the placebo effect. Mass Christian belief could
be powerful enough to throw the occasional shimmy in reality. What do you think?”
“I think you’re halfway there, Colin. God isn’t our egregore. We’re His. He doesn’t exist because we believe in Him. We exist
because He believes in us.”
Colin smiled. “You should’ve followed your mother into her line of work. You have a knack for that—giving a phrase an inspirational
twist. Do you really think a loving and independent God would’ve let Black Cricket penitentiary collapse on four hundred women?”
“Did God let that happen? Or did we? I think if you refer to the record, Colin, you’ll find it was us.”
Finger ducked into a round tunnel at the far side of the latest crypt.
The big man almost filled it . . . if he was still a man at all.
It seemed to Colin that Finger’s right shoulder was hiked up, and that he was broader through the chest than he had been when he first squirmed under the boulder to enter the caves.
As Colin climbed into the narrow passageway, he saw that the walls were heavily frescoed here. Some artist of the twelfth
or thirteenth century had painted black spiders on it, sitting in nests of artful, geometric spiderwebs. Life-size pale candles
had been painted between the spiderwebs, golden rings of light spreading out between them in broad, even discs of brightness.
It was all so faded, they were less paintings than the memory of paintings. Finger was ten feet ahead, and as he walked, the
big troll ran his fingertips across the walls, arms stretched out to either side.
“Be honest, Arthur. Doesn’t the problem of pain shake your faith?” Pain was very much on Colin’s mind and his breath came
in short spurts. His kidneys felt sick. “Think about the children who died down here. The people who watched the stone roll
over the entrance, leaving them to their fevers and the darkness. Why forgive God for that suffering? You wouldn’t forgive
yourself, if you caused it.”
“You take the same view of sorrow as our pet iguana. I don’t. Sorrow and love are a single coin—the one we pay as the price
of our humanity. Take it away and we’d be the worst kind of poor. And it’s a mistake to believe the value of a life is erased
by anguish at the end. If there’s one thing atheists and the devout can agree on, Colin, death is where you leave your suffering
behind.”
Colin felt ill from the throbbing in his back and knee . . . ill and woozy. His ears were not exactly ringing, but there was
a kind of susurration in them, as if he was listening to a seashell—an Aztec conch perhaps. The tunnel seemed to be whispering
around him, a disturbing notion.
“I’m telling you,” Colin went on, irritated now—that hushed, felty fluttering in his ears was grating on his nerves—“you could’ve made a lot more money preaching on the internet.
I could’ve custom-designed a website for you to stream your ministry.
You could’ve been the first big televangelist of the new—eesh!
” Something brushed his hand and he shook it in reflex.
A spider dropped to the floor. A fat one: black and fulsome.
Only when it hit the floor, it fell amid other spiders. Colin half turned, glancing around him, and a rush of cold blood surged
toward his heart. Colin had not known, until that moment, that he had a phobia of spiders. Not until he saw that the paintings
of them were peeling themselves off the walls and scuttling toward them. There were so many he could hear them . . . that was the faint, whispery, scrabbling sound his ears had been detecting for the last few moments. One dropped
from a transparent line onto his head. When he opened his mouth to scream, another climbed into his mouth.
He tried to run and went down on one knee. There was webbing spun around his shins. It was only a few threads, but it wouldn’t
break, tight and tough as nylon. He tried to yank it free and his hand stuck to it. Stu Finger was already at the end of the
tunnel, looking back at them and huffing with laughter.
“You never know what pests will come crawling into these holes,” Finger said, “but fortunately they keep the spiders fed.”
Colin struggled to loosen his right hand from the tacky webs around his shins, and as he fought to free himself a spider crawled
up the back of his hand and around his wrist, paused, and then sank its fangs into his flesh. Another was biting his ear—it
felt like being burned with a cigarette. He could feel spiders crawling under his shirt, a sensation so awful, it brought
him to the edge of panic, a thing he could not ever remember experiencing before. It was a fear so sharp it made thought impossible.
Arthur was down too, sitting on the floor, a gray and sticky binding of webs around his shins and upper thighs. There were
spiders rooting in his beard, spiders on his cheeks. Arthur’s right arm was already bound to his chest by more webbing—several
spiders worked in a determined fashion, scrambling in circuits around his torso. Soon enough they would both be cocooned.
But Arthur’s left arm was free, and he lifted the Surrealist’s Glass to one eye, searching the walls for something. Colin saw a fat, fuzzy spider burrowing into the side of Arthur’s neck like it was hoping to wiggle all the way in.
“The candles,” Arthur gasped.
Arthur lunged and fell on his side, across the curving, narrow floor of the passage, shaking a few spiders off. Arthur clawed
at the wall with his free hand and his fingers found one of the painted candles—so faded it was almost colorless. Arthur shut
his eyes. His lips, Colin thought, were moving in prayer.
“What are you doing?” Colin cried, although his mouth was full, and his words came out in a choked muffle. He spat out a wet,
bitter wad of spider.
“Trying to believe in candles,” Arthur said, with his eyes shut, as he peeled the candle right off the wall. Only as he pulled
it free it was somehow a real candle, a four-inch taper of smooth ivory wax in a little gold dish, the flame dancing and wavering.
Arthur brushed the candle at his own neck and the spider that had been trying to burrow in emitted a tiny shriek. It was a
whistle of pain, almost too high-pitched to hear, but an instant later the spider fell away. Arthur tried to lower the candle
to the webbing that pinned his right arm to his chest, only a spider bit the back of his hand. He cried out, dropped the taper,
and it rolled away from him. When Arthur reached for it a trio of spiders crisscrossed his forearm and briskly, efficiently
pinned it to the stone with cobwebs. The candle was a few agonizing inches away from his outstretched fingertips.
Colin had a folding carbon steel knife with a Teflon grip in his backpack, but he would choke to death on a throat full of
spiders before he ever got to it. They were all over him, on his face, on his chest. He slapped the wall above him, put his
hand on one of those painted candles. There’s nothing there, he thought, but paint and stone, nothing, nothing—the panic fizzing up on him. Holding that panic back was like trying to hold a door closed with someone bigger than him pushing
against the other side.
Only an idea wasn’t nothing. King Sorrow had only been an idea once and had still uncoiled himself from the Long Dark of the unconscious mind to come through into their world, to burn and bite.
The idea of a candle was real enough, in the mind.
And his desperation was real. His need for a candle made a few neurons fire, and a candle lit itself in his imagination.
Thought had a physical reality—neuroscience insisted on it—so he reached for the candle in his imagination and when he opened his eyes it was in
his hand, throwing a clear, bold, golden light.
He burned the spider sinking its mandibles into his wrist and was rewarded with another of those pathetic shrieks and the
stink of burning hair. It fell free. He touched the thickening straps of spiderweb around his shins and ankles and the webs
ignited like straw, turning to hot copper, wilting and shriveling and falling away. Colin lashed out with one foot and kicked
the candle Arthur had dropped back to his friend’s fingertips. Arthur spun it, so the flame licked at the webs across his
forearms, and in another instant he was free. They both were.
They clasped hands and heaved each other up, and then stood back-to-back, stabbing this way and that with their candle flames.
Spiders squealed and smoked and fell, curling up on themselves. Arthur and Colin turned in a slow ambit, forcing the spiders
away from them. The spiders retreated up the walls . . . and settled back onto them, flattening, joining the stone again to
escape the flames. Colin never quite saw it happen, but one moment there would be a black, fleshy spider on a wall and the
candlelight would flicker and then, when the light wavered back, what had been alive a moment before was only a painting.
The two men continued to rotate in a circle, shoulders pressed to shoulders, until Colin realized the corridor was empty and
they were no longer holding candles anymore but clutching their flashlights instead. He was never clear when the candles had
rejoined the wall.
The excitement had seeped out of Stuart Finger.
In the gloom, he was more the troll than ever as he stood at the end of the tunnel, his long apelike arms dangling at his sides.
Most of his wispy yellow hair was gone, and Colin didn’t like the look of his mouth.
His lips had a rubbery quality, and the mouth seemed more and more like the gaping mouth of some cold-blooded fish, a pike maybe.
His glee had vanished and his eyelids sagged with disappointment.
Colin’s skin was still crawling and he couldn’t stop checking himself over, looking to see if he had any spiders left on him.
He hated the hairy feel of them. He had never liked hair. He wanted the whole world to be like his phone or his computer:
smooth and glassy and perfect. At the same time, he was breathless with an excitement that was very close to exaltation. It
had always delighted him to be in the presence of the impossible, to see reality dribble and run like candle wax. Even when
it bit him.
“We should turn him into a rock,” Colin said. He hardly recognized his own voice. His breath came fast and harsh. “How badly
do we really need him, Arthur?”
Arthur put a cautioning hand on Colin’s bicep. “He had to try. I was expecting something like—well, not that. But something
more than his club.”
“Of course they need us,” Finger said to himself. “Maybe not to find the hoard, but to find the way out for sure. No good
leaving a trail of breadcrumbs. It’s too late now and the rats would eat ’em anyway. They come out with us or they don’t come
out at all.”
It crossed Colin’s mind that he really didn’t know the way back . . . and that every room they had passed through no doubt had multiple exits that he had failed to observe
in the dark. And any one of them could contain more spiders . . . or worse.
“Shit,” Colin said. “How come we didn’t think of that?”
Arthur lifted one eyebrow. “You mean you didn’t? We turn him to a rock now, Colin, he won’t just be his own headstone. He’ll
be ours too.”