Necropolis

she breathed out, Scarlett saw white mist in front of her face. It was as if she were standing inside a fridge. She had to remind herself that this was the first week of November. It felt like the middle of winter. She rubbed her arms, fighting off the biting cold.
    There was a man sitting in a wooden chair opposite her, facing the door. She hadn't noticed him at first because he was in shadow, between two of the torches. He was dressed like a monk with a long, dirty brown habit that went all the way down to his bare feet. He was wearing sandals, and a hood over his head. He was slumped forward with his face toward the floor. Scarlett had already decided to turn round and go back the way she had come, but before she could move, he suddenly looked up. The hood fell back. She gasped.
    He was one of the ugliest men she had ever seen. He was completely bald, the skin stretched over a skull that was utterly white and dead. His head was the wrong shape — narrow, with part of it caved in on one side, like an egg that had been hit with a spoon. His eyes were black and sunken, and he had horrible teeth that revealed themselves as he smiled at her, his thin lips sliding back like a knife wound. What had he been doing, sitting there? She looked left and right, but they were on their own. The boy named Matt — if it had even been him — was gone.
    The man spoke. The words cracked in his throat, and Scarlett didn't understand any of them. He could have been speaking Russian or Polish…whatever it was, it wasn't English. She backed away toward the door.
    "I'm very sorry," she said. "I think I've come the wrong way."
    She turned round and scrambled for the handle. But she never made it. The monk had moved very quickly. She felt his hands grab hold of her shoulders and drag her backward, away from the door. He was very strong. His fingers dug into her like steel pincers.
    "Let go!" she shouted.
    His arm sneaked over her shoulder and around her throat. He was holding her with incredible force. She could feel the bone cutting into her windpipe, blocking the air supply. And he was screaming out more words that she couldn't understand, his voice high-pitched and animal. Another monk appeared at the end of the corridor. Scarlett didn't really see him. She was just aware of him rushing toward them, the long robes flapping.
    Still she fought back. She reached with both hands, clawing for the monk's eyes. She kicked back with one foot, then tried to elbow him in his stomach. But she couldn't reach him. And then the second monk threw himself onto her.
    The next thing she knew, she was on her back, her arms stretched out above her head. Her legs had been knocked out from underneath her. The two men had grabbed hold of her, and there was nothing she could do. She twisted and writhed, her hair falling over her face. The monks just laughed.
    Scarlett felt her heels bumping over the stone-cold floor as the two men dragged her away.
    THREE

    Father Gregory
    The cell was tiny — less than 33 feet square — and there was nothing in it at all, not even a chair or a bench. The walls were brick with a few traces of flaking paint, suggesting they might have been decorated at some time. The door had been fashioned out of three slabs of wood, fastened together with metal bands. There was a single window, barred and set high up so that even for someone taller than Scarlett, there wouldn't be any chance of a view. From where she was sitting, slumped miserably on the stone floor, she could just make out a narrow strip of sky. But even that was enough to send a shiver down her spine.
    It was dark. Not quite night, but very nearly. She realized that it would be pitch-black in the cell in just a couple of hours as they hadn't left her a candle or an electric light. But how was that possible? It had been around two o'clock when she had entered St. Meredith's, and the sun had been shining. Suddenly, it was early evening. So what had happened to the time in between?
    Scarlett was shivering — and not just because of the shock of what she had been through. It was freezing in the cell. There was no glass in the window and no heating. The bare brickwork only made it worse. Fortunately, she had been wearing her winter coat when she set off on the school trip. Now she drew it around her, trying to bury herself in its folds. She had never been so cold. She could actually feel the bones in her arms and legs. They were so hard and brittle that she thought they