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"It doesn’t rimly

"We’ll have to face it, and that’s that"

"Fine," said Enoch "But Miss Wren had better be down there, too, because rat bites don’t heal quickly"

"Hollowgast bites even less so," said E her foot onto the ladder

"Be careful," I said "I’ll be right above you"

She salutedhand "Once an to climb down

Then it was rave during a bo raid," I said, "and just wish you’d stayed in bed?"

Enoch kicked rabbed the lip of the toht briefly of all the pleasant, boring things I one differently Tennis cah some Herculean effort of will, I made myself climb

The ladder descended into a tunnel The tunnel dead-ended to one side, and in the other direction disappeared into blackness The air was cold and suffused with a strange odor, like clothes left to rot in a flooded baseh stone walls beaded and dripped with in

As Emma and I waited for everyone to cliree The others felt it, too When Bronwyn reached the bottom, she opened her trunk and handed out the peculiar sheep’s wool sweaters we’d been given in the erie I slipped one overpasthalfway to my knees, but at least it arm

Bronwyn’s trunk was erine rode inside her coat, where she’d practicallythe Tales in his arht need to refer to it at any moment, he said I think it had becoht of it as a book of spells which only he kne to read

We were an odd bunch

I shuffled forward to feel for hollows in the dark This tiut, ever so faint, as if a hollow had been here and gone, and I was sensing its residue I didn’t h; there was no reason to alarm everyone unnecessarily

We walked The sound of our feet slapping the wet bricks echoed endlessly up and down the passage There’d be no sneaking up on whatever aiting for us

Every so often, froeon’s warble, and we’d pick up our pace a little I got the uneasy feeling ere being led toward some nasty surprise Embedded in the walls were stone slabs like the ones we’d seen in the crypt, but older, the writing rave-less, on the floor--then a whole stack of the boxes

"What is this place?" Hugh whispered

"Graveyard overflow," said Enoch "When they need toup the old ones and stick theine walking through here every time you needed in or out!"

"It’s not so different from our cairn tunnel," Millard said

"Unpleasant loop entrances serve a purpose--normals tend to avoid them, so we peculiars have them all to ourselves"

So rational So wise All I could think was, There are dead people everywhere and they’re all rotted and bony and dead and, oh God …

"Uh-oh," E me to run into her and everyone else to pile up behinda curved door in the wall It hung open slightly, but only darkness showed through the crack

We listened For a long moment there was no sound but our breath and the distant drip of water Then we heard a noise, but not the kind ere expecting--not a wing-flap or the scratch of a bird’s feet--but so