Urn Burial (21 page)

It stretched, five feet wide and perhaps thirty feet long, over a chasm. ‘Differential solution,’ commented Dingo Harry. Someone, mindful of the nervous, had made a waist-high handrail out of hemp rope and pitons for the panicky to hang on to.

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Phryne was not afraid of heights, and hung over the rope, listening to the millwheel churning of water in the depths below, and admiring the way that pink colouration gave way to bands of black and grey as the light receded down the walls of the cliff.

‘Miss, Miss, be careful,’ wailed Dot, who had shuffled across, holding on to the rope with both hands and resisting an unworthy urge to crawl.

The house party’s variation in courage was interesting. Phryne noticed that Miss Mead and Miss Cray walked across without trouble, as did Mrs Reynolds and her husband and Li Pen, Miss Medenham and Mrs Luttrell. Mrs Fletcher baulked, caught her daughter’s stern eyes, and managed the walk with only a subdued whimper.

Dot didn’t like it at all, whereas Lin Chung was utterly unafraid of heights, though he was not keen on depths. The poet had to be coaxed and the Doctor almost dragged. He was really afraid.

Phryne saw a sheen of sweat on his bony face and his wide eyes caught the torchlight. Miss Fletcher almost led him over by the hand, talking to him gently as one would to a nervous horse. She seemed much more relaxed now that she did not have to strain at being a good girl. Phryne almost warmed to her as she and the Doctor went by.

As they passed through another junction, Phryne began to hear footsteps. They never coincided exactly with the noise the house party was making.

Every time they all paused to survey some new marvel, the following feet tapped on a little longer than an echo would, then stopped.

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She began to feel eyes on the back of her neck, and rubbed a palm over the prickling hair. Li Pen dropped unobtrusively back through the crowd until he stood beside Lin Chung. The slim valet said something to his master in Chinese and Lin replied quickly.

‘Yes, I can feel it, too,’ said Phryne, grasping at the meaning of the high, slurred dialect. She would never really get the hang of a toned language but she was beginning to pick up the sense of the speech.

Lin, surprised, said, ‘You understood what he said?’

‘Not really, but there’s someone behind us. I can sense them.’

‘You were certainly a warrior in a previous life,’

said Lin. ‘He says there is a wild animal in the cave. As this is Australia and I have assured him that there are no large predators here, he has decided that a human with the heart of a beast must be stalking us.’

‘I almost wish you hadn’t translated that. Li Pen, you remember the night we came here – is it the same hunter?’

Li Pen nodded. Phryne shook herself.

‘We say nothing to the others,’ she decided.

‘But I go last,’ insisted Li Pen. He fell in behind and followed as they walked into the new cave.

The sound of his cat footsteps behind her made Phryne feel much safer.

The new cave had teeth.

Instead of the massive, melted-looking columns 211

of the cathedral, this one was newer and the stalactites and stalagmites were almost sharp. They dipped over Phryne’s head like icicles, thin as blades, striking up through the soft floor and down from the roof like incisors, white as bleached bone. It was a little unnerving and Phryne felt Dot draw closer.

‘In the mouth of the beast,’ said Lin, and Phryne snapped, ‘Less mysticism and more light. If this place was strung with electric lights it wouldn’t be so alarming. It’s the contrast. White teeth and black shadows.’

‘You can’t abolish all mystery with your modern machines, Silver Lady. Some very old part remains; some primitive Lin Chung who hid here when the ice sheet moved down, and feared ghosts and bears and shadows with fangs. He tried to fight his terror with fire, also, and it did not entirely work.

If your electricity failed, the dark would return, as it has been since the beginning of the world.’

‘To banish fear with light has always been the aim of humans,’ agreed Tadeusz, breathing fast.

‘Yet we cannot exile the shadows, for they lurk in our own heart, our own mind.’

Phryne lifted her torch high, and the white teeth gleamed with the dust of diamond. The stone on her ring caught the light and blazed.

‘Miss Fisher . . .’ said Tadeusz, abandoning phil-osophical speculation with a jolt. ‘Wherever did you get that ring?’

‘I found it. Pretty, isn’t it? Do you know it?’

‘I do indeed. Though I haven’t seen it for years –

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diamonds are so seldom set in silver.’

‘I think it might be Indian. What do you think?’

‘No, it’s South African. Miss Fisher, I don’t think you should be wearing it, not in this gathering, it can only . . .’

Dingo Harry called them through into another cave. The poet lost his thread and said no more about the ring, although Phryne caught him glancing at it. She bit her lip in frustration.

The next cave was spacious and not too high, and the party sat down on convenient but damp stumps of stalagmites to drink tea and discuss what they had seen. Torches had been set in iron rings around the walls, and Phryne noticed that the smoke was blackening the pristine ceiling.

Humans and caves did not go together. A few more years of human smirching and they would be sooty, smelly, grey and uninteresting. After which, presumably, humans would leave them alone, and the caves would repair themselves over a hundred years, patiently constructing more delicate alchemical marvels, to be ruined again by the next human who fell through the roof. Phryne was feeling most displeased with a species to which, she reminded herself, she belonged. She took an egg sandwich and a gulp of tea and strove to adjust her philosophy.

‘What a remarkable place,’ observed Miss Mead. ‘A demonstration of the multifold gifts of the Almighty.’ She trailed this unexceptionable tag at Miss Cray, who did not take her cue to launch into her usual speech on the Magnificence of God 213

and the Necessity of Supporting His Work Amongst the Heathen with Immediate Generous Donations. Indeed she seemed altogether subdued, which would have been more interesting if Phryne had not felt as though something with talons was about to spring from the darkness onto her back.

‘Yes, there are names for most of the formations,’ Dingo Harry was saying in reply to a polite question from Miss Mead. ‘This is called Picnic Cave, for obvious reasons. The first cave is called The Cathedral, and the formations are like the trappings of organised religion; The Pulpit, The Nave, The Font. Then there is London Bridge, Gem Cave, and Undersea Cave where the limestone is twisted into forms like fish and coral and weed. Surprisingly, the shapes are like those which would have been here when this was the bottom of the sea. See, here is a fossil, and another. Have a look at this wall.’

Phryne finished her sandwich and joined Tom Reynolds and the Doctor. The torchlight showed regular furrows, dips and indentations like shells and strange bubbles. She saw wavering shapes like weed and a fronded, primitive strand of kelp.

‘Erinoids,’ explained Dingo Harry, his scarred forefinger caressing the surface without actually touching. ‘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 un-focused her eyes and blinked. An armoured 214

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 215

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.

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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.’

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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.

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CHAPTER THIRTEEN

Plaistered and whited sepulchres were anciently affected in cadaverous and corrupted burials.

Urn Burial, Sir Thomas Browne, Chapter III.

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!’

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‘Yes, I can,’ she said equably. ‘Why, what do you think I’m going to find?’