The Golem's Eye

Nicholas—hold your lanterns up and over. I'd like to see exactly what I'm touching." Stanley giggled nervously.
    Kitty glanced back up the chamber. Through the dark, she could just glimpse the impassive outline of the fake wall, its dreadful secret hidden behind. She took a deep breath. Why? It made no sense...
    She turned back to the sarcophagus. Mr. Pennyfeather leaned in, took tentative hold of something, and pulled.

31
     
    Kitty
     
    The silken sheet rose from the sarcophagus almost soundlessly, with the faintest of dry whispers and a delicate cloud of brown dust that erupted up like spores from a bursting puffball. The dust wheeled in the crowding lantern light, then sank slowly. Mr. Pennyfeather gathered up the sheet and rested it carefully on the marble rim; then, and only then, did he lean forward and look inside.
    "Lower the light," he whispered.
    Nick did so; everyone craned their heads over and looked.
    "Ahh..." Mr. Pennyfeather's sigh was that of a gourmet at his table, whose meal sits before him and who knows that gratification is near. A chorus of gasps and gentle cries echoed him. Even Kitty's misgivings were momentarily forgotten.
    Each one of them knew the face as if it were his or her own. It was a centerpiece of life in London, an unavoidable presence in every public place. They had seen its image a thousand times, on statues, memorials, on roadside murals. It was inscribed in profile on school textbooks, on government forms, on posters and placards erected on high billboards in every market. It looked down with austere command from plinths in half the leafy squares; it gazed up at them from the pound notes drawn crumpled from their pockets. Through all their hurrying and scurrying, through all their daily hopes and anxieties, the face of Gladstone was a constant companion, watching over their little lives.
    Here, in the tomb, they looked upon the face with a thrill of recognition.
    It was fashioned, perhaps, from gold, thinly beaten and finely shaped; a death mask fit for the founder of an empire. While the body still lay cooling, skilled craftsmen had taken the likeness, made the cast, poured in the liquid metal. Upon burial, the mask had been set back on the face, an incorruptible image to gaze forever into the darkness, while the flesh beneath it fell away. It was an old man's face: hook-nosed, thin-lipped, gaunt about the cheeks—where suggestions of the sideburns lingered in the gold—and incised by a thousand wrinkles. The eyes, sunk back deep within the sockets, had been left blank, the gold cut through. Two gaping holes stared blackly at eternity. To the company, gazing open-mouthed, it seemed that they looked upon the face of an emperor from ancient times, wreathed in his awful power.
    All about the mask was a pillow of white hair.
    He lay neatly, in a pose not dissimilar to the bodies in the secret annex, hands clasped upon his stomach. The fingers were entirely bone. He wore a black suit, still buttoned, taut enough above the ribs, but sagging nastily elsewhere. Here and there, industrious worms or mites in the material had started the process of decay, and small patches of white shone through. The shoes were small, black, and narrow, wearing an additional patina of dust over the dull leather.
    The body rested on red satin pillows, on a high shelf that took up half the width of the sarcophagus interior. While Kitty's eyes had lingered on the golden mask, the others' had been drawn to the rather lower shelf alongside.
    "Look at the glow..." Anne breathed. "It's incredible!"
    "It's all worth taking," Stanley said, grinning stupidly. "I've never seen an aura like it. Something here must be really strong, but it's all got power—even the cloak."
    Across the knees, and neatly folded, was a garment of black and purple, topped by a small gold brooch. "The Cloak of State," Mr. Pennyfeather whispered. "Our friend and benefactor wants that. He's welcome to it. Look at the rest...."
    And there they were, piled high upon the lower shelf: the marvelous grave goods they had come to find. There was a clustering of golden objects—small statuettes fashioned in the shape of animals, ornate boxes, jeweled swords and daggers, a fringe of black onyx globes, a small triangular skull of some unknown creature, a couple of sealed scrolls. Up by the head sat something small and domed, covered in a black cloth now gray with dust—presumably the prophetic crystal ball. Near the feet, between a flask with