I doubted this. "If he's here, he's probably gone down - " I paused and looked around the courtyard. It had been almost two years since my visit here with my father - my second visit, I now knew - and I couldn't remember for a moment where the entrance to the crypt was. Suddenly I saw the doorway, as if it had opened in the nearby wall of the cloisters without my noticing. I remembered now the peculiar beasts carved in stone around it: griffins and lions, dragons and birds, strange animals I couldn't identify, hybrids of good and evil.
Barley and I both looked at the church, but the doors stayed firmly shut, and we crept across the courtyard to the crypt doorway. Standing there a moment under the gaze of those frozen beasts, I could see only the shadow into which we would have to descend, and my heart shrank inside me. Then I remembered that my father might be down there - might, in fact, be in some kind of terrible trouble. And Barley was holding my hand still, lanky and defiant next to me. I almost expected him to mutter something about the odd things my family got into, but he was taut beside me, poised as I was for anything. "We don't have a light," he whispered.
"Well, we can't go into the church for one," I pointed out unnecessarily.
"I've got my lighter." Barley took it out of his pocket. I hadn't known he smoked. He flicked it on for a second, held it above the steps, and we descended together into darkness.
At first it was dark indeed, and we were feeling our way down the steepness of the ancient steps, and then I saw a light flickering in the depths of the vault - not Barley's lighter, which he relit every few seconds - and I was terribly afraid. That shadowy light was somehow worse than darkness. Barley gripped my hand until I felt the life draining out of it. The stairwell curved at the bottom and when we came around the last turn I remembered what my father had told me, that this had been the nave of the earliest church here. There was the abbot's great stone sarcophagus. There was the shadowy cross carved in the ancient apse, the low vaulting above us, one of the earliest surviving gestures of the Romanesque in all of Europe.
I took this in peripherally, however, because just then a shadow on the other side of the sarcophagus detached itself from deeper shadows and straightened up: a man holding a lantern. It was my father. His face looked ravaged in the shifting light. He saw us in the instant we saw him, I think, and he swore - "Jesus Christ!" We stared at each other. "What are you doing here?" he demanded in a low voice, looking from me to Barley, holding up the lantern in front of our faces. His tone was ferocious - full of anger, fear, love. I dropped Barley's hand and ran to my father, around the sarcophagus, and he caught me in his arms. "Jesus," he said, stroking my hair for a second. "This is the last place you should be."
"We read the chapter in the archive at Oxford," I whispered. "I was afraid you were - " I couldn't finish. Now that we had found him, and he was alive, and looked like himself, I was shaking all over.
"Get out of here," he said, and then caught me closer. "No. It's too late - I don't want you out there alone. We have a few more minutes before the sun sets. Here" - he thrust the light at me - "hold this, and you" - to Barley - "help me with the lid." Barley stepped forward at once, although I thought I saw his knees shaking, too, and he helped my father slide the lid slowly off the big sarcophagus. I saw then that my father had propped a long stake against the wall nearby. He must have been prepared for the sight of some long-sought horror in that stone coffin, but not for what he actually saw. I lifted the lantern for him, wanting but not wanting to look, and we all gazed down into the empty space, dust. "Oh, God," he said. It was a note I had never heard in his voice before, a sound of absolute despair, and I remembered that he had looked into this emptiness