‘So this is your little refuge?’ Ben asked, smiling.
Roby nodded. ‘Nobody ever comes down here.’
‘I understand. Just be thankful it was me who caught you and not the Father Master of Novices. Now come on, I think you’d better get back before they miss you.’
Roby reluctantly followed him out of the narrow tunnel. At its mouth, Ben turned again to examine the cavern. ‘What is this place?’ he asked, raising the lantern.
‘Dunno. Maybe they used to keep things in it.’
Ben stepped over to the wall and ran his hand along it, wiping away dust and cobwebs. It was the same thick, craggy stone with countless pick and chisel marks made by the miners, probably monks themselves, who’d carved this space out of solid rock at a time when crusading Christian armies were fighting – and mostly losing – in the Holy Land. He followed the wall, shining the lantern to look for engraved Latin script or anything else that could explain what the place had once been.
He didn’t find any, but he did find something else. The cavern had once been bigger, until at some point, a long, long time ago, a section of it had been bricked up. How big a section was anybody’s guess.
‘I wonder why they did that?’ Ben muttered.
Roby just shrugged absently. He seemed more interested in the clandestine mobile phone he was fingering inside the pocket of his robe.
Ben ran his hand across the dusty brickwork. It looked centuries old, but the mortar had been carefully applied and was still solid. Finding a lump of rock on the ground, he used it to tap against the wall. It made a hollow sound.
‘Something’s behind here,’ he said, mostly to himself. For all he knew, it stretched out cathedral-sized behind that wall. Had part of the chamber become unstable and needed shoring up? Or perhaps the walled-up section marked the mouth of another passage leading deeper into the mountain, perhaps even all the way through to the outside, like a true escape tunnel? If that were the case, it could have been walled up to prevent anyone making their way in from the other end. But then, the monastery was hardly built like an impregnable fortress. If an invading force had wanted to take it, they wouldn’t have had too much trouble breaking down the main gates. They wouldn’t have needed to mess about with tunnels.
Just one of those mysteries of the ancient past. He wasn’t going to learn much by staring at a wall and it was time for him to go back and get on with moving the rest of the beer barrels up from the cellar. The others could be there already, waiting for him.
Ben tossed the lump of rock away. Some unconscious part of his mind expected it to hit the stone floor with an echoing thump. It didn’t. Instead, it landed with a brittle, crackling crunch that caught Ben’s ear and made him frown. Strange.
And familiar. He’d heard that sound before. It didn’t have pleasant associations.
Ben lowered the lantern and saw what the rock had landed on. He crouched down and examined it. Then picked it up and gazed at it.
It was the shattered remains of a human skull.
That evening before church, Ben sat by candlelight in Père Antoine’s cell. The chess pieces cast flickering shadows across the board as the two of them faced each other, both deeply involved. Their weekly game had become a welcome part of Ben’s routine and he’d felt himself grow closer to the prior, even if the old monk had turned out to be a fiendish player and nearly always beat him. Ben’s black army was in serious trouble again, and he was damned if he could think of a way to thwart those white bishops ganging up on his queen. He pulled her back out of immediate danger, exposing his remaining rook to enemy forces. Nothing he could do to prevent the sacrifice. War is hell.
‘Thank you again for agreeing to drive the truck tomorrow,’ Père Antoine said as he nonchalantly captured the rook and set it down among his growing collection of Ben’s lost men.
Ben shrugged, as if to say it was nothing. He contemplated his losing position for a moment or two, then said, ‘I made an interesting discovery today, Father. One of the passages down below leads into some kind of chamber, but it looks like it’s been walled up.’
The old man’s eyes flicked up from the chessboard, fixed on him for a moment and then lowered again. ‘May I ask what led you down there?’ he asked quietly. His expression was inscrutable.
‘I was just exploring,’ Ben said. He didn’t mention Roby, or the novice’s reason for hiding down there. ‘I wondered what the chamber had been used for, if anyone still knows.’
‘That place has not been used for a long time,’ Père Antoine said.
‘That’s what I thought.’ Ben backed his queen another few steps out of trouble and launched a tenuous offensive against the white king. ‘There’s a lot of dust and cobwebs down there. And other things that I’m sure wouldn’t have been left lying around if it was often visited.’
Père Antoine didn’t ask what other things. Ben wondered if that was because he already had a good idea what they might be.
‘A lot of history in this place,’ Ben said after a long beat of silence.
‘Indeed there is,’ the old man replied, gazing at the board.
‘A whole honeycomb of tunnels. Makes you wonder where they all lead. Maybe there are more chambers you don’t even know about.’
‘No. There is just one.’ Père Antoine looked uncomfortable. He shifted a knight and Ben’s offensive suddenly began to look like another retreat. ‘I would respectfully ask you not to go there again.’
‘In case it’s unsafe? Is that why it was walled up, to prevent a collapse?’
The old man pursed his lips, peering at Ben over the chess battlefield. ‘It is a place we here prefer not to speak of,’ he said, his voice barely above a whisper.
It didn’t seem appropriate to ask why. ‘I didn’t realise. I’m sorry.’
‘You were not to know, my son. Every place has its secrets from the past. Even here, some things remain that ought to be forgotten.’
‘Secrets?’
‘And ghosts. Things that should be left undisturbed.’
‘I don’t believe in ghosts.’
‘Yet they haunt you still,’ the old man said with a faint smile. ‘The ghosts of your past actions.’
‘But God forgives. That’s what you told me.’
‘Yes, He forgives. Even the worst and most shameful acts of man, if we repent fully enough and ask for His mercy.’
It seemed as if the prior was alluding to more than just Ben’s own sordid history. He felt that in bringing up the subject, he’d unearthed something greater, something darker, than a forgotten skull from centuries ago. But it was obvious that the old man had no desire to dwell on the matter any longer. There was a firmness in the monk’s eyes, the closest thing Ben had seen in him to a look of authority. In the gentlest way, it meant ‘this subject is closed’.
‘Check,’ Père Antoine said.
The rain started some time before dawn the next day. Ben watched the spring downpour from the window of his cell as he got ready that morning. Big splashy raindrops burst on the flagstones below and trembled on the leaves of the trees that stood in the courtyard. It felt strange to be putting on his black jeans and denim shirt instead of the robe he’d become accustomed to. The prospect of leaving the monastery and venturing down to civilisation for the first time in six months felt strange, too. Maybe the world down there would be completely different from before.