‘Don’t touch them, please – the acid in your skin eats into the chalk. See, here is a shell, just like you’d find at the beach, and another one – and there is the important one.’ The wall appeared to be blank. Phryne unfocused her eyes and blinked. An armoured creature five feet long sprang into view. Dingo Harry’s finger traced plates of shoulder and belly; the heavy, ridged, savage skull and the socket where a tin-plate eye must have gleamed. No room in that cranium for brain. Just reflexes, just the mindless hunting of any protein which moved. She saw it in a flash of insight, not frozen in grey stone but alive, slate-blue and monstrous, sliding through grey water like a pike or a shark, the lower jaw loose and shining with spiked teeth, the fins stroking lazily towards . . . what? A floating baby in a leaf? Her own unprotected and terribly vulnerable limbs, unaware of the killer beneath the placid surface? A pounce, a swirl of blood which would bring all the lesser meat-eaters finning to the feast, a tearing gulp, and no more strange little heavy-headed mammal which might eventually have become a human.
Lin Chung, catching her mood, slid a warm hand into hers. Phryne called herself to order. It was unwise to indulge freely in imagination this far under the ground.
‘It’s an armoured fish – the first crocodile, you might say, though there’s a lot of argument about that. Some say that sharks are the oldest, but they have no bones, they’re cartilaginous, whereas this fellow was definitely bony, and well provided with teeth.’ Dingo Harry’s hand outlined the monstrous shape again. ‘Life began in the ocean. Some experts suggest that the reason why no one’s found the missing link is because humans went back to the sea when the earth dried up – the sea, in fact, is in our blood. The concentration of salt is exactly the same as sea water. It would also explain some of the human adaptations, the differences between us and the apes, our ancestors.’
Miss Cray did not even rise to this bait, which Phryne felt was unprecedented. Dingo Harry, who might have been expecting an interesting argument about the Creation, paused before he went on.
‘Now, if we’re all rested, we go through here on our way back.’ He snuffed the wall torches and the shadows licked hungrily forward.
‘In here,’ he announced, leading the way into another cavern, ‘is a cave known as The Crypt.’
‘It certainly is,’ agreed Phryne.
The cave was almost square, perhaps twenty feet high, and lined with blocks which strangely resembled tombs. Some past wag had inscribed names on some of them with a penknife which a vigilant mother should have confiscated before the lad became a vandal. ‘Lillie Langtry’ said one, and ‘John Thomas’ – someone had a rustic and earthy humour. Phryne walked the length of the cave with her torch, and the names sprang up in blue outlines like indelible pencil. ‘Mary Ellis’ got a mention, though if the writer had really loved her as he asserted, it seemed like a macabre joke. Limestone water dripped sadly, making strange echoes. A rising sun with the inscription, ‘1914 Steve Tom Albie’. Soldiers had come here and left this army badge in limestone, which was already blurring. ‘Ronald Black’. ‘The Boys Were Here’. ‘Daisy, Bill and Johnno 1911’. Phryne wondered if they had ever come back again.
Some of the tables had occupants. Phryne saw draped figures lying on their last resting places, muffled in falling water which turned cloth into stone. Then she blinked and they were shapeless again. The floor crunched underfoot. She was destroying tiny precious crystals with her careless feet; with her human weight and warmth and breath, which had no place in this chill mausoleum.
‘You see, this cave has all the accoutrements of a crypt,’ Dingo Harry observed in some displeasure, clearly wishing that the earthmother had had better taste. ‘Here is The Funerary Altar, and the stalagmites stand like candles upon it.’
This was true. The salmon-pink, grey and pale-yellow candles had obviously been burning for a few hours before they had frozen, flames alight, in stone. Miss Cray, who was possibly disordered in her wits, dipped into a genuflection as she passed them. Mrs Reynolds came to the old woman’s side and took her arm. Phryne saw Dot cross herself almost without conscious volition. She herself was sobered and shaken by this underground place. She touched Lin and felt what he was feeling: the great weight and ancient bulk of the earth, pressing down over this unnatural hollow, groaning to be filled, bearing down, giving birth to boulders and rivers.
‘Let’s get out of here,’ she said bracingly. ‘I’m educated enough for one day.’
‘I’m all right,’ he said evenly.
‘I know you are, but I’m not sure that I am.’
He smiled at her, the bronze face creasing into precise metallic folds in the cold light.
‘The Altar, The Crucifix, The Censer,’ continued Dingo Harry, leading the way out of the cave. The house party followed him close, eager to get back to the surface. ‘And, of course, The Urn.’
‘Oh, my God,’ said Phryne, as they passed close to a massive cup-shaped rock formation. ‘Lin, see if you can catch Tom Reynolds and bring him back without alerting the others. I know that smell of mortality.’
‘Me, too,’ muttered Dot, who had been to more funerals and lyings-in-state than was comfortable. ‘Smells like a meat-safe on a hot day. Not putrid, yet, but getting that way.’
‘That’s what they were trying to tell me,’ said Phryne slowly.
‘Who?’ asked Dot.
‘Whoever it was who has been leaving urns about with such elaborate casualness. I’m afraid, Dot, that this is where the murderer took Lina’s body. And I’m afraid . . .’
‘So am I, Miss.’
Phryne was climbing up the side of The Urn. She almost lost her balance half way up when a scream echoed and re-echoed through the cave, and something ragged and insane with fear or fury erupted out of a tunnel into The Crypt.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Plaistered and whited sepulchres were anciently
affected in cadaverous and corrupted burials.
LI PEN crouched, Phryne dangled by both hands from limestone as slippery as ice, and Tom Reynolds caught the charging figure around the shoulders and said, ‘Will Luttrell! Where have you been? We’ve been looking all over for you!’
‘Dark,’ shuddered the Major, struggling. ‘Alone in the dark. You, Tom, what’re you doing here, here of all places, why here?’
‘We’re on the way out,’ soothed Reynolds. ‘My dear fellow, you’re in a fearful state. How long have you been wandering?’
‘Don’t touch me.’ The Major threw off Tom Reynolds’ hand and swung a punch at him, which missed. Then he sighted Phryne hanging from the side of the rock formation called The Urn and screamed, ‘No! You can’t go up there!’
‘Yes, I can,’ she said equably. ‘Why, what do you think I’m going to find?’
‘No!’ He clawed at her ankles, and her fingers lost their grip. Phryne slid down the rock face swearing, as Li Pen came quietly up to the Major and applied a lock which pinned his arms to his sides. Mr Luttrell struggled, but did not seem able to move.
Dot stared at Lin Chung’s man admiringly. No noise, no challenges, no man-to-man nose-to-nose confrontation or fuss. He just walked up to the recalcitrant Major and they were denatured before they knew what had happened. Li Pen, for his part, was disappointed that so far in his sojourn in Australia, he had never met anyone who knew anything about real fighting. His master had told him that a warrior needs challenges or he grows complacent.
The rest of the party had come back into The Crypt, attracted by the noise. They crowded through the doorway and stopped as they saw Phryne ascending The Urn and Li Pen holding the fuming soldier with negligent ease.
‘What on earth . . .’ began Mrs Reynolds, and the poet swore in some obscure tongue. Li Pen brought his prisoner forward.
‘Not there!’ yelled the Major. ‘Don’t let her go up there!’
The smooth stone was very hard to climb. Phryne could get to the bulge which marked the middle of formation but no further. Her fingers slipped on the smooth sides and she could not find a foothold. She was,
