The Skull by Christian Darkin Read Free Book Online Page B

William loosened the stone at the top of the door and edged it out just enough to free the top three stones. He had done it so often he could open the tomb in the pitch dark and seal it again invisibly, but all the same he lit two lamps and gave one to his guest, gestured at her to descend and then followed her into the tomb.
    When he reached the bottom of the steps, she was simply standing, staring. William deliberately never mentioned the tomb’s occupant to his foreign guests as they passed through. He preferred to wait until they discovered the creature for themselves, and watch their eyes. Hers were bright. Searching. They seemed to pick over the skull, making a journey around the huge eye, and up along the jaw, flicking up to the point of each curved tooth in turn.
    â€˜What is it?’ she whispered eventually.
    â€˜Don’t you have dragons in France?’ he said with a dismissive shrug. Then he added ‘Oh, don’t worry. There aren’t many left now. Most of them have been argued to death by Mr Isaac Newton.’
    She laughed.
    William smiled back. Then he looked at the skull himself. She – ever since his father had first brought him here as a child, he had thought of the creature as ‘She’ – looked different today. William had always fancied that She had moods. That She watched what went on in her tomb and reacted to its visitors, to their stories and their plans.
    When the young rebel with his demands for revolution had passed through, She had seemed to look right through him as though he was not even there. When the frantic preacher-philosopher had arrived, scribbling his notes as he tried to force his God into a set of rational rules, She had seemed almost amused by him. And on the night he learned that his father had been lost at sea, when the whole village bustled through the house, swamping him and his mother with sympathy, he had crept up to the tomb to be alone and found She had changed again. Suddenly closer to him. Part of his father, but somehow now part of him as well.
    Today She was brooding as if with a dark thunder. Looking into her eye, William felt he was lost, pitching in a stormy sea.
    He blinked and forced his eye back to his guest.
    â€˜But you’re not here for that,’ he said. ‘This is what you want.’ He took the lamp and led her over to the other side of the tomb.
    Further back in the room stood shelves containing the books of the secret library. The ancient ones were beautiful, but were seldom read. It was the modern printed volumes, and more especially the thin, paper-bound pamphlets piled on the floor, that made it necessary for the library to stay secret. They were filled with dangerous ideas: treachery, heresy, philosophy, science. Behind the books was the most secret thing of all.
    It was a large workbench with a tall, solid wooden frame halfway across it. Embedded within the frame was a heavy rectangular plate which could be lowered by pulling on a metal handle until it pressed hard into the surface of the bench. The entire structure was stained with printer’s ink and beside it piles of fresh, unprinted paper lay waiting.
    â€˜Do you know how to use it?’ William asked.
    â€˜Oh, yes,’ said the woman quietly, running a hand down the side of the printing press as though she was steadying a horse. ‘I know.’
    William paused. ‘I can stay and help for a while,’ he said. ‘If you like?’
    The process was slow. William sat with the box of letters, each one embossed in reverse on its own metal peg, while the woman, Marie, held the block that would house them. As she called for letters one at a time, he found them in the box and handed them to her so that she could arrange them in neat rows. He knew it could be weeks before the block was ready to print the first copy of her pamphlet, but once it was made she would be able to run off hundreds, even thousands of copies in a day, ready to take