Read The Dead Hamlets: Book Two of the Book of Cross for Free Online Page B

had probably been down here in centuries. I imagined no one but me even knew about this chamber anymore.
    I got up and found the next tunnel in the darkness and followed it, into the maze underneath the Tower of London. It’s not a real maze, of course. It’s more a random jumble of corridors, forgotten rooms and abandoned dungeons. All of the kings and queens of England liked to add their own touches to the Tower in their times, so they were constantly digging moats and building walls and generally trying to outdo each other. Now all those kings and queens were dead and most of them were gone, and the Tower was just another museum and tourist attraction. Hardly anyone knew about the secrets underneath it. Most of those old queens and kings probably didn’t know all the secrets hidden away beneath the Tower.
    Which made it a perfect place for me to hide.
    It was darker than night down here, so I burned a bit more grace to sharpen my vision. Maybe it was a waste of grace, but I don’t like stumbling around in the dark. You never know what you’re going to run into. I made my way to another chamber, this one lined with bricks that were older than the British Empire. It was full of forgotten artefacts—suits of armour, ancient cannons, halberds and battle axes. Much of it was half-melted or blackened from flames, so I figured they were things that had been damaged in one of the fires that happened at the Tower from time to time. I was in an old storage room. It seemed as good a place as any to rest.
    I searched through the room until I found a wool blanket in a crate in one of the corners. The blanket was wrapped around some bones that had once been a person, so I shook them free. Someone else had obviously thought this would be a good hiding place as well—a hiding place for a body. It looked like they’d been right. I wrapped myself in the blanket and lay down on another crate containing broken swords to keep myself off the cold floor. Then I closed my eyes and tried to sleep.
    It was hard, though, on account of the apparitions that kept passing through the room.
    The first was the woman in the ragged dress, carrying her head in her hands. She stumbled along, passing through the suits of armour, the pillar supporting the roof, the crate I’d taken the blanket from. Her eyes were open but didn’t seem to see anything, at least not anything I could see.
    If you didn’t have my experience and eyesight, you may not have noticed her at all. Even if you did notice her, you probably wouldn’t have recognized her. But I knew her. Anne Boleyn, a queen who had seen better days before she wound up at the Tower. I’d witnessed her doing this routine dozens of times before on previous visits.
    I rolled over on my crate to face the wall, but it was no better on that side. A Roman soldier stepped out of the brick and looked around. He wore the armour of a legionnaire, but he was weaponless. He shook his head at whatever he saw and then stepped back into the wall. I’d seen him before too, but only a few times. He was always looking for something, but I didn’t know what. He stuck to the lowest and oldest levels of the basement. The Romans had built a fort here once, and they used the blood of sacrificed soldiers in the mortar. But I’d once heard a rumour from a mummified man in a bog that the Romans had just built on even more ancient structures, all with their own violent and dark histories. It was blood and torture all the way down. The Tower was one of those places. Even I didn’t know the truth about its history.
    I sighed and rolled over again. Anne was gone but she’d been replaced by two boys chasing something I couldn’t see through the room. A cat maybe? Or a rat? They kept looking over their shoulders, like they were being chased too. The two princes who were forever lost in the Tower, courtesy of another royal intrigue. It was busy in here tonight. Must have been something in the air.
    I didn’t bother talking