I left the Spook’s bag, with the cloaks, in the cellar and followed him, still clutching my master’s staff. When I got down, to my surprise I found myself standing on cobbles rather than the mud I’d expected. The catacombs were as well paved as the streets above. Had these been made by the people who’d lived here before the town was built; those who’d worshipped the Bane? If so, the cobbled streets of Priestown had been copied from those of the catacombs.

Andrew set off without another word and I had a feeling he wanted to get the whole thing over with. I know I did.

At first the tunnel was wide enough for two people to walk side by side but the cobbled roof was low and Andrew was forced to walk with his head bowed forward. No wonder the Spook had called them the ‘Little People’. The builders had certainly been a lot smaller than folk were now.

We’d not gone very far before the tunnel began to narrow; in places it was distorted, as if the weight of the cathedral and the buildings far above were squashing it out of shape. At times the cobbles that also lined the roof and walls had fallen away, allowing mud and slime to seep through and ooze down the walls. There was a sound of dripping water in the distance and the echo of our boots on the cobbles.

Soon the passage narrowed even further. I was forced to walk behind Andrew, and our path forked into two even smaller tunnels. After we’d taken the left-hand one, we came to a recess in the wall on our left. Andrew paused and held his candle up so that it lit part of the interior. I stared in horror at what I saw. There were rows of shelves and they were filled with bones: skulls with eyeless sockets, leg bones, arm bones, finger bones and bones I didn’t recognize, all different sizes, all mixed up. And all human!

‘The catacombs are full of crypts like this,’ Andrew said. ‘Wouldn’t do to get lost down here in the dark.’

The bones were small too, like those of children. They were the remains of the Little People all right.

We moved on and soon I could hear fast-flowing water ahead. We turned a corner and there it was, more a small river than a stream.

‘This flows under the main street in front of the cathedral,’ Andrew said, pointing towards the dark water, ‘and we cross there…’

Stepping stones, nine in all, broad, smooth and flat but each of them only just above the surface of the water.

Once again Andrew led the way, striding effortlessly from stone to stone. At the other side he paused and turned back to watch me complete my crossing.

‘It’s easy tonight,’ he said, but after heavy rain the water level can be well above the stones. Then there’s a real danger of being swept away.

We walked on and the sound of rushing -water began to recede into the distance.

Andrew halted suddenly and I could see over his shoulder that we’d come to a gate. But what a gate! I’d never seen one like it. From floor to ceiling, wall to wall, a grille of metal blocked the runnel completely, metal that gleamed in the light of Andrew’s candle. It seemed to be an alloy that contained a lot of silver and it had been fashioned by a blacksmith of great skill. Each bar was made up not of solid cylindrical metal, but of several much thinner bars, twisted around to form a spiral. The design was very complex: patterns and shapes were suggested, but the more I looked the more they seemed to change.

Andrew turned and put his hand on my shoulder. ‘This is it, the Silver Gate. So listen,’ he said, ‘this is important. Is there anything near? Anything from the dark?’

‘I don’t think so,’ I said.

‘That’s not good enough,’ Andrew snapped, his voice harsh. ‘You’ve got to be sure! If we let this creature escape it’ll terrorize the whole County, not just the priests.’

Well, I didn’t feel the cold, the usual warning that something from the dark was near. So that was one sign that everything was safe. But the Spook had always told me to trust my instincts, so to make doubly sure I took a deep breath and concentrated hard.

Nothing. I sensed nothing at all.

‘It’s all clear,’ I told Andrew.

‘You sure? You’re really sure?’

‘I’m sure.’

Andrew suddenly dropped to his knees and reached into the pocket of his breeches. There was a small curved door in the grille but its tiny lock was very close to the ground and that was why Andrew was bent so low. Very carefully he was easing the tiniest of keys into the lock. I remembered the huge key displayed on the wall of his workshop. You would have thought that the bigger the key, the more important it was, but here the opposite was true. What could be more important than the minute key that Andrew now held in his hand? One that had kept the whole County safe from the Bane.

He seemed to struggle and kept positioning and repositioning the key. At last it turned and Andrew opened the gate and stood up.

‘Still want to do this?’ he asked.

I nodded, then knelt down, pushed the staff through the open gate and followed it, crawling on all fours. Immediately Andrew locked the gate behind me and poked the key through the grille. I put it inside my left breeches pocket, pushing it down into the iron filings.

‘Good luck,’ Andrew said. ‘I’ll go back to the cellar and wait for an hour in case you come back this way for some reason. If you don’t appear, I’ll head home. Wish I could do more to help. You’re a brave lad, Tom. I truly wish I’d the courage to go with you.’

I thanked him, turned and, carrying the staff in my left hand and the candle in my right, set off into the darkness alone. Within moments the full horror of what I was undertaking descended upon me. Was I mad? I was now in the Bane’s lair and it could appear at any moment. What had I been thinking? It might already know that I was here!

But I took a deep breath and reassured myself with the thought that as it hadn’t rushed to the Silver Gate when Andrew unlocked it, it couldn’t be all-knowing. And if the catacombs were as extensive as people claimed, then at that very moment the Bane might be miles away. Anyway, what else could I do but keep walking forward? The lives of the Spook and Alice both depended on what I did.

I walked for about a minute before I came to two branching runnels. Remembering what Brother Peter had told me, I chose the left one. The air around me grew colder and I sensed that I was no longer alone. In the distance, beyond the light of the candle, there were small, faint, luminous shapes flitting like bats, in and out of crypts along the tunnel walls. As I approached them, they disappeared. They didn’t get too near but I felt certain that they were the ghosts of some of the Little People. The ghosts didn’t bother me much; it was the Bane that I couldn’t get out of my mind.

I came to the corner and, as I turned, following it to the left, I felt something underfoot and almost tripped. I’d stepped on something soft and sticky.

I moved back and lifted my candle to get a better look. What I saw started my knees shaking and the candle dancing in my trembling hand. It was a dead cat. But it wasn’t the fact that it was dead that bothered me; it was the way it had died.

No doubt it had found its way down into the catacombs in search of rats or mice but it had met with a terrible end. It was lying on its belly, its eyes bulging. The poor animal had been squashed so flat that at no point was its body any thicker than an inch. It had been smeared into the cobbles but its protruding tongue was still glistening so it couldn’t have been dead very long. I shuddered with horror, ft had been ‘pressed’ all right. If the Bane found me, that would surely be my fate too.

I moved on quickly, glad to leave that terrible sight behind, and at last I came to the foot of a flight of stone steps that led up to a wooden door. If Brother Peter was right, behind that was the wine cellar of the priests’ house.