They walked on for five minutes, ten. Soon Charlie noticed the passage had narrowed, the ceiling lowering so that he had to dip his head as he went. But the bones of the dead were no longer; there was only the long darkness of the tunnel. A thick tree root emerged out of one wall, near his elbow, snaking alongside them like a kind of marker, guiding the way. It was joined by a second, and then underfoot a third, until soon the floor and walls of the tunnel were strewn with roots, roots breaking through the stones and mortar and the soft collapsed coffins of the ancient monks. The deeper they went the more roots they had to clamber over, and dip their heads to avoid, until it seemed a tunnel of root and not stone at all, as if they were descending into the heart of a monstrous tree. Charlie felt Marlowe fumble for him, grip his hand hard.
“It’s okay,” he muttered.
But whether he spoke to the boy or to himself did not matter; it convinced neither.
A few feet ahead, Komako stopped short. Charlie could see stones and rocks and a great tangle of tree roots blocking the way. There’d been a cave-in.
Komako just stood with the lantern lifted high, as if perplexed. Charlie didn’t understand her hesitation; it wasn’t such a big job as that; he’d worked at harder hauling when he was half as big, back in Mississippi.
He strode past, reached for the biggest root blocking the way. It felt soft, almost furred, in his fingers. He yanked hard at it.
“Charlie, don’t!” Ribs cried out.
But he nearly had it free. He leaned into it and pulled. Suddenly the walls and ceiling trembled. Dust sifted down around his face, got into the neck of his robe. A deep inhuman groan rippled through the tunnel, as if the blackness was a living thing.
Charlie stumbled back.
Komako grabbed him by the shoulders, spun him around. “Don’t hurt the roots!” Her braid whipped angrily from side to side. “What’s the matter with you? You’ll bring the whole tunnel down on us. Just stand over there. No, there. Touch nothing.” She said something then to herself, in a sharp angry Japanese; it sounded less than polite.
Charlie, staggering back to the others, could guess its meaning. He rubbed at his shoulder. “She doesn’t like me much, does she?”
Ribs, her robe floating beside him, paused. “I like you,” she said.
But he was only half listening, instead watching Komako hook the lantern on a tendril for light, and in her pale nightgown work to clear the rocks without hurting the tree; and he didn’t take his eyes off her until the way was clear, and they could squeeze through, and go on.
At last they came to a chamber. It was very dark. When Komako lifted the lantern Charlie saw the floor and walls and low ceiling were completely covered in the rootlike tentacles of the wych elm, so that it felt like they had come to the hollow core of the tree itself. A musky scent of earth and wood filled his nostrils.
He stopped with the others just inside. Marlowe picked his careful way forward, at the edge of the pool of light, clambering over the lumpen roots. In the half-light of Komako’s lantern, Charlie could just make out, suspended from the low ceiling, in a vast tangled knot of tree roots and clumps of dirt and dangling moss, a kind of thing—a figure—so ancient, it seemed to have grown into the very roots of the tree.
Komako lifted the lantern higher. Hanging in the center of that tangled gnarl was a face, a face that could have been carved from wood, elongated and strange and with a strange gaping mouth, except that its yellow eyes were open, and glittering, and intelligent.
Charlie caught his breath. Marlowe was standing directly under it, small enough that he could look up into its eyes without crouching.
It was the glyphic, of course. The Spider.
“You … should not … be here,” it said, in a voice like a slow rumble, a voice as cold as the dark places of the earth.
Oskar let out a whimper; a moment later Charlie felt something too, a tightening at his ankle. One of the roots had snaked around his shoe and pinned him into place. The others too were ensnarled, all except Marlowe. A second, a third root wrapped up around Charlie’s legs, over his waist, his chest, holding him fast. The more he struggled, the more the roots squeezed, impossibly powerful. They were coming out of the walls, out of the ceiling.
“Uh, Ribs?” called Komako, nervous.
But it was little Marlowe, standing directly in front of the glyphic, who spoke to the creature.
“We didn’t want to come here uninvited,” he said. “But we need your help, please. We have questions.”
“They … want to know … about the missing…”