Moving pictures

He eased himself sideways until he reached the wall.

'We'd better go back,' he said, in what he hoped was a matter-of­fact voice. 'There could be anything ahead of us. Ravines or anything. We could get more torches and more people and come back.'

There was a flat sound from far down the passage.

Whoomph.

It was followed by a light so harsh that it projected the image of Victor's eyeballs on the back of his skull. It faded after a few seconds, but was still almost painfully bright. Laddie whimpered.

'There you are,' said Gaspode hoarsely. 'You've got some light now, so everything's all right.'

'Yes, but what's making it?'

'I'm supposed to know, am I?'

Victor inched forward, his shadow dancing behind him.

After a hundred yards or so the passageway opened out in what had perhaps once been a natural cave. The light was coming from an arch high up at one end, but it was bright enough to reveal every detail.

It was bigger even than the Great Hall at the University, and must once have been even more impressive. The light gleamed off baroque gold ornamentation, and on the stalactites that ribbed the roof. Stairs wide enough for a regiment rose from a wide shadowy hole in the floor; a regular thud and boom and a smell of salt said that the sea had found an entrance somewhere below. The air was clammy.

'Some kind of a temple?' muttered Victor.

Gaspode sniffed at a dark red drapery hung on one side of the entrance. At his touch it collapsed into a mess of slime.

'Yuk,' he said. 'The whole place is mouldy!' Something many­-legged scuttled hastily across the floor and dropped into the stairwell.

Victor reached out gingerly and prodded a thick red rope, slung between gold-encrusted posts. It disintegrated.

The cracked stairway carried on up to the distant lighted arch. They climbed it, scrambling over heaps of crumbling seaweed and driftwood flung up by some past high tide.

The arch opened out into another vast cavern, like an amphitheatre. Rows of seats stretched down towards a - a wall?

It shimmered like mercury. If you could fill an oblong pool of mercury the size of a house, and then tip it on its side without any of it spilling, then it would look something like this.

Only not so malevolent.

It was flat and blank but Victor suddenly felt he was being stared at, like something under a lens.

Laddie whined.

Then Victor realized what it was that was making him uneasy.

It wasn't a wall. A wall was attached to something. That thing was attached to nothing. It just hung in the air, billowing and rippling like an image in a mirror, but without the mirror.

The light was coming from somewhere on the other side of it. Victor could see it now, a bright pinpoint moving around in the shadow at the far end of the chamber.

He set off down the sloping aisle between the rows of stone seats, the dogs plodding along beside him with their ears flat and their tails between their legs. They waded through something that might once have been carpet; it tore wetly and disintegrated under their feet.

After they'd gone a few yards Gaspode said, 'I don't know if you've noticed, but some of?'