Read Mammoth Book of Best New Horror for Free Online Page A

and performing ceremonies, the reason for whose existence most have forgotten. To these walls, men and women are called equally to play their role as God intended." He glared fiercely at Charlotte and then whirled about, his belt ends and the hem of his robe flailing around him. Charlotte, against her better, more rational, judgment, followed.

        The passage opened out into a cave that took Charlotte's breath away. It looked as if the whole of the huge outcrop of rock in the island's centre had been hollowed out. Looking up, she saw a roof far above her that was ragged with gullies and peaks, like a sonar map of deep ocean floors. Here and there, chisel marks were visible and she realized that this must have been a natural opening in the rock, and that man had expanded what nature (God? She wondered fleetingly) had begun. The floor was inlaid with white marble and the walls painted the same yellow and orange as in the church, although there was no black stripe around the base of the walls. At either side of her, doorways were set into the wall, carved rectangles of darker air. The nearest one, she saw, opened into a small carved room that appeared to contain nothing but a bed. He lives here as well! she thought in surprise, and then her eyes were drawn to what lay in the centre of the cavern.

        There was a large opening in the floor.

        Charlotte walked to the opening, beckoned on by Babbas who had gone to stand at its edge. It was roughly square and at each corner was a burning torch set on top of a metal stand. Lamps burned around the walls, she noticed, and then she was looking into the hole.

     
        It was pitch black. Charlotte stared down and immediately felt dizzy, as though she were having an attack of vertigo and, in truth, it was like looking down from a great height. The darkness in the hole seemed to start just feet below its rim, as if it was filled with inky water. Why doesn't the light go into it? she had time to think and then Babbas' hand was on her shoulder and he drew her gently away. He guided her back to where she had been standing, to where the floor was all around her, gleaming and white.

        "There is the function of the Order of St John of Patmos," he said in a soft voice. "We keep the light burning that holds the darkness at bay, and it is what you have come here to do."

        Charlotte stood, breathing deeply to overcome her dizziness. The old man stood looking at her kindly. His eyes glimmered with… what? Expectation? Hope? She could not tell and then the thing that he had said last of all lurched in her memory and the individual words connected, made a sentence, gained meaning.

        "I'm not here to do anything!" she said loudly. "I just wanted to look around!"

        "Of course you did not," said Babbas, and the sadness was there again in his voice, the sound of a teacher coaxing a particularly slow child. "You were called here, as I was before you and the others were before me. No one comes here to look; we come because God needs us."

        "No," Charlotte said as emphatically as she could, "I wanted to see the church. Now I've seen it, I'll go. Thank you for showing it to me." She took a step back, moving towards the passageway. Babbas did not move, but simply said, "You may leave, if you wish, of course. I shall not stop you, but you will find that the world has already forgotten you."

        Charlotte opened her mouth to say something, to say anything to counter the oddly threatening madness that was coming from the old man's mouth, but nothing came. She wanted to tell him that he was insane, that the place she had made for herself in the world was as secure as it had ever been, but instead, the thought of Roger popped unbidden into her mind. Or rather, the memory that Roger had been gone when she looked for him a second time. Could he have forgotten her? Gone back to their hotel room because she no longer existed for him? No, it was