Moving with greater purpose, he came to yet another corner. Something squeaked and scuttled away between his feet, causing him to start, his heart hammering with sudden shock.
He shivered – not entirely from cold – and carried on. As he worked his way along the wall, he came across a series of arched niches set into the wall, some two feet wide and three tall – ossuary niches for the storage of skeletons. He remembered them from that first tentative descent into the basement. These niches had first given rise to his suspicions that Blackwater House had been built on the grounds of an ancient church – perhaps one destroyed by Henry VIII during the Dissolution – that in fact the basement had been the crypt of that church. Once hallowed ground it was now the perfect setting for Sinistrari an
