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went out the instant he and Merlinmary entered the chamber. One of the heaviest doors, locked with six padlocks, was leaking blood and groaning eerily.
    Halfway along the catacomb, the ceiling suddenly dipped lower. Grusom guessed they were directly below the cemetery because there were lotsof dead people’s legs sticking down through the ceiling. It was too dark to see much and Grusom kept being poked in the eye by toes in varying states of decay, from fresh and just a bit slimy to dried brittle bones. Merlinmary, of course, was not tall enough to touch the dead feet. This was a bit of a shame because, although most humans don’t like having dead people’s feet poked in their eyes, nothing pleased Merlinmary more than having a nice bone to chew on. Merlinmary thought of asking Grusom to break her off a few toes, but decided against it.
    â€˜These are the new catacombs,’ she explained. ‘The old ones are below us.’

    â€˜I don’t understand,’ said Grusom, going back to something that had been worrying him since he had arrived at Quicklime’s. ‘Why would a school have a graveyard at all?’
    Merlinmary explained that going to school at Quicklime’s was actually very exciting and that lots of ex-pupils chose to be buried there when they finally got very old and died or didn’t somuch die as feel like a bit of a lie-down for a century or two.
    â€˜Of course,’ Merlinmary suggested, getting back to the original subject, ‘the professor might have had nothing to do with the bus tickets. They could have been planted on him.’
    â€˜I wonder what grows when you plant a bus ticket,’ Grusom said, trying to lighten the mood with FSI joke number 127. 18
    Merlinmary laughed with a That-Was-A-Totally-Crap-Joke-But-I-Don’t-Want-To-Upset-You laugh and walked towards a beam of light that was shining down from a hole in the roof of the catacomb.
    The light was sunshine, and at the top of the hole they found Elanora Bedlam poking about in a grave.
    â€˜Hello, dear,’ she said, looking down at Merlinmary. ‘I don’t suppose you’ve seen that strange forensic man, have you? He seems to have vanished and all hell is about to break loose – his assistant’s threatening to call in proper policemen from OUTSIDE.’
    She said OUTSIDE as if it was in capital letters and a really bad thing, which of course it was. People from OUTSIDE were the last thing Quicklime College wanted in the valley and police from OUTSIDE would be double-triple-quadruple times worse with all their poking about asking questions. If that were to happen, the school would be forced to do lots and lots of heavy duty magic and build a massive new catacomb to bury all the Not-Breathing-Any-More policemen and other OUTSIDERS. This of course would mean lots more OUTSIDERS would come to find what happened to the first lot and there was no knowing where it would all end.
    â€˜He’s down here with me,’ said Merlinmary.
    â€˜Phew, what a relief,’ said Elanora Bedlam.
    â€˜Get me out of here,’ said Grusom and, turning to Merlinmary, he added, ‘We’ll talk about you kidnapping me later.’
    No we won’t, Merlinmary thought, and she did a special You-Will-Now-Totally-Forget-I-Ever-Tied-You-Up-And-If-You-So-Much-As-Try-To-Remember-It-I-Will-Turn-You-Into-Toast spell.
    Elanora Bedlam lowered a ladder down the hole and Grusom climbed out. At that same moment, his assistant walked into the cemetery. Seeing her boss appear from a grave was too much for Avid and she fainted, falling over Professor Open-Graves’s feet, which in turn made his dead body fall on top of her.
    Avid regained consciousness, saw she was lying under a dead body, and fainted again.
    Seeing all this, Grusom assumed that somehow the dead professor had come back to life and killed his beautiful assistant, and he fainted too.
    â€˜I have set up a temporary pathology lab in