The Beast of Seabourne by Rhys A. Jones Page B

mostly obscured by cobwebs. Oz brushed them away to reveal a wooden hatch. He knelt to inspect it and saw that a simple rotating latch secured it.
    Outside, the wind moaned around the rafters. For a moment, Oz had the strangest feeling of displacement. On that dark platform, it was impossible to tell whether it was day or night, summer or winter, this century or last. It felt somehow separate from the world as he knew it. Judging by their silence, Oz guessed the others were feeling it, too. Ellie was the one who finally said, “Maybe there’s another passage through there, or another room?”
    â€œReally? Who cares? Let’s go back,” Ruff said in a deadpan voice.
    Ellie stared at him. “You want to go back?” There was a hanging silence before Ruff said through gritted teeth, “’Course I don’t want to go back. Open the buzzard hatch. I didn’t come all this way on an empty stomach just to talk about it.”
    Grinning, Oz rotated the latch and pulled. The door creaked outwards to reveal a tiny space lit only by watery greenish light.
    â€œWell?” Ruff snapped, jostling Ellie for a glimpse under Oz’s elbow.
    â€œLooks like a cubbyhole,” Oz said. He got to his hands and knees and lowered himself backwards into a small, tight room, no larger than a walk-in cupboard. What little light there was dribbled in through a narrow slit-like window, coated with mossy grime, high in one corner. Ellie and Ruff followed him in. All three of them had to stoop to avoid banging their heads.
    â€œBlimey, was everyone severely vertically challenged in the seventeenth century?” Ruff asked.
    â€œI don’t think you were meant to walk about in here,” Oz said, shining his torch around. The walls were panelled, but not with the dark oak of the library. Like the ceiling in the orphanage dorm, these panels were wooden but elaborately decorated, separated by oak beams such that each was a framed canvas. Oz peered in wonder at the depictions of strange birds and plants and weird designs.
    â€œWhat do you think this was?” Ellie asked in an awed whisper.
    â€œPriest’s hole,” Ruff said. “A place for the persecuted to hide. In Witchfinder Inquisitor 3 , there’s this old house and…”
    Ellie shut him up with a piercing glance.
    â€œI’m only saying,” Ruff mumbled.
    â€œYou’re probably right,” Oz said. “But I also think it was a bit more than that. Somewhere people came to think, perhaps.”
    â€œWhy do you say that?” Ruff asked.
    â€œBecause it says so there.” Oz pointed to a panel next to the window. On it was an inscription burned into the wood. Ruff peered at it.
    â€œâ€˜The room of reflection,’” he read. “Buzzardo-weird.”
    Oz was only half-listening. One panel had drawn his attention in particular. He stooped to stare at it in the stark light of his torch. In amongst the birds and the crescent moons and faces with elaborate headdresses were other shapes. He recognised a few as alchemical symbols, which he remembered from the library panels. How could he possibly forget the three-pronged fork shape for cinder and the crossed Z of tin, symbols that had helped them solve the cipher that led to opening the passage door? But some of the others were new to him. There was a bird with a long, upright tail, a wheeled cart belching smoke from a stack, and what looked like a hot-air balloon. They were incongruous and yet of the same style and colour as all the other designs.
    â€œMust have been a great place to hide,” Ellie said as she used her sleeve to rub years of dirt off the window. “Ooh, you can see the whole street from here. Actually see who was coming. Bit like a spyhole.”
    â€œBut I’ve never seen this window from outside. It must be hidden,” Oz said, joining her. “I wonder if this was what Lucy Bishop was looking for,” he