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-'
'I know,' said Victor, grimly.
'-the seats, they're still-'
'I know.'
'-occupied.'
'I know.'
All these people - these things who had been people - sitting in rows. It's as though they were watching a click.
He'd almost reached it now. It shimmied above him, a rectangle with length and height but no thickness.
Just in front of it, almost underneath the silver screen, a smaller flight of steps led him down into a circular pit half filled with debris. By climbing on to it he could see behind the screen, to where the light was.
It was Ginger. She was standing with one hand held above her head. The torch in it burned like phosphorus.
She was staring up at a body on a slab. It was a giant. Or, at least, something like a giant. It might just have been a suit of armour with a sword laid on top of it, half buried in dust and sand.
'It's the thing from the book!' he hissed. 'Ye gods, what does she think she's doing?'
'I don't think she's thinkin' anythin',' said Gaspode.