Delon walks on and the rest of us follow. Candy keeps looking at me like I might keel over at any second. After my soirée with the dead, I must look pretty bad.
“Where were you? We’ve been looking for you for over an hour.”
“And dodging the other group,” says Vidocq.
“You saw them?” I say.
“Their lights,” says Candy.
“Sorry to slow you. I’ll tell you what happened when we’re out of here.”
Delon is putting his shoulder to the door when we get there. Traven helps him. They both pound on it, but the door won’t budge.
“Let me try,” says Vidocq. He gets to work with his lock-picking tools but stops after a few seconds.
“The door is already unlocked. Perhaps there’s debris on the other side.”
“Let me try,” I say.
The others get behind me. I bark some Hellion and concentrate on blowing the door off its hinges. A few sparks dance around the doorframe like a bunch of drunk Tinker Bells giving me the finger. My head goes funny. I fall back against the wall. Traven and Candy grab me.
“Sorry. I think I missed.”
Candy runs a hand through my hair.
“Don’t feel bad. All guys have performance issues now and then.”
“Unless you have some Viagra for magic in your pocket, I think I’m done for tonight.”
Delon probes the door’s hinges with a knife.
“At least you cleared off some of the dust. I think we might be able to pop these.”
“You do that. I’m going to sit here and be useless for a while.”
“Of course,” says Delon. He’s trying to sound neutral, but I can hear the microtremors in his voice. He’s as giddy as a little French girl to see me bloody and weak.
Brigitte and Delon use their knives to pry up the hinge pins. Brigitte knocks hers out first and it clinks to the floor. A minute later Delon’s pin pops out. With Vidocq and Traven’s help, they lift the door out of the frame. Delon shines his light into the darkness. There’s no floor. Nothing in there but a spiral stone staircase. It doesn’t even look like it was built but was carved like a gargoyle from a solid piece of stone. The steps are slick with dripping water. Strands of some kind of spongy green growth hang from the sides. Underneath the dirty water and lichen are images of dragons and sea monsters surrounded by strange writing.
“Can you read any of that, Father?”
Traven comes to the front and shines his flashlight over the stairs.
“No. But the symbol pattern looks like some kind of ritual magic. An incantation. Perhaps an invocation.”
“Of what?”
He shakes his head, still moving his light over the symbols.
“I’m sorry. I don’t know. But it’s possible that the stairs function in a similar way to a prayer wheel. Each turn along the path proclaims the prayer or offering.”
“You mean, by walking down these stairs, we might be calling up something and we don’t know what.”
“I’m afraid so.”
“We don’t seem to have much choice,” says Vidocq. “We can’t find our way back the way we came.”
“I saw something like this back home, in a cemetery outside of Ostrava,” says Brigitte. “I was helping friends kill a den of vampires that had been plaguing the city. There was only one way into their tomb, but everyone who tried to enter was attacked, as if the vampires knew they were coming.”