THE CRYPT [86] Three days before, Rev.Aldredson, vicar of St.Andrews church, phoned me, and I drove there at once, for I had no other work on just then. The vicar chose me because I was stronger than men and could dig down quicker and handle large girders easier if anything needed shoring up, and the men he had asked first raised difficulties about getting heavy plant into the crypt and dug-up earth out, as if picks and shovels were out of fashion. I asked what headroom and room to move there was in the crypt, and where the pillars and other obstructions were. "Ten feet headroom. Flat ceiling, not arched. The walls and pillars are in the same places as in the church above, which you can see through the windows." said the vicar. "I'll fit between the pillars in the middle, but not in the side aisles. I'll have to dig an access ramp in from outside the east end. Sorry about the grass." I said, "You better wear an overall and a safety helmet if you wanted to hang about watching." I transformed, and took a pick and shovel my size off my trailer. People came to watch. A steel diesel-powered navvy 25 feet tall is somewhat spectacular, and got through the work as quickly as an ordinary excavator. I quickly dug down beside the foundation. The neighbourhood resounded as I used a Thor-sized sledgehammer to knock in girders to support the east wall above a big enough entrance to the crypt. When I had dig the hole wide enough to crawl down it, I started to pry stones out from between the girders. Memories of suspenseful fanfares of chords making my oil run cold surfaced, from my occasional watchings of late night TV movies. As the first direct sunlight since it was built entered the crypt, a large and draculous quantity of disturbed bats chittered and flew about - and two human alarm cries and sets of running footsteps came from within. [87] I quickly ran up out of my hole and round the north side of the chancel, to a metal manhole cover against the outside of the wall. As the cover lifted I swung a big handnet. Two human forms struggled enmeshed in it as I lifted it to look at his catch. "Please, we were just dossin' in there. We weren't touchin' nothin'. We'll go away." a rough voice from in the net whined. "'ll be judge of that. I'll go down and check." said the vicar, who now wore an overall and a safety helmet. "No you needn't, it's all as it was." said the voice in the net. "Yes, I look." the vicar replied. The trapdoor was a disused coal chute. It had been locked, but the lock was broken. I said that Ratchet or Wheeljack better make and fit a new stronger trapdoor there with a stronger and pick-proof lock. "We're not sayin' nothin'" said the netful surlily. The vicar went to the coal chute. It led to a part of the east end of the crypt that (before the previous vicar changed to gas heating) had been the church boiler room, separated from the rest of the crypt by a steel door which the current vicar had never managed to open; it seemed to be rusted solid. I handed a walkietalkie to the vicar, who crawled down in. It was the first time he had been in that part of the crypt. In there he found much dirty fire and cooking rubbish and old mattresses needing removing and cleaning up after, and a quantity of valuable and other saleable stuff that he knew wasn't church property, and some substances that a police chemist would probably find interesting, and `blunt instruments', and miscellaneous stuff, and an oxyacetylene torch with smallish cylinders in an aqualung harness so a man could carry it on his back as he used it. He told me what he was finding. "This is the House of the Lord, but you two made it into a den of thieves - literally!" said the vicar angrily to the struggling netful when he came back up out, "If you guessed that the Lord's minister would not do something as lowdown and dirty as crawling down an old coal chute, you were wrong! I won't have sort of thing here, whetever you or your kind threaten!". I radioed the police to collect the two men and the evidence found with them, then went back down my access ramp and broke the rest of the wall down to make the new entrance, and shovelled out the stuff that the vicar had seen. In it he found the registration book of the red Cortina that Hoist had found a `substance' in at the pileup on the M5 [see 71,73,75]. Sidetracks. Often one job creates other unexpected jobs. The door from the old boiler room to the rest of the crypt proved to be not rusted solid but welded shut from the east side; I easily removed it and the dividing wall that it was in. Disturbed bats still flew about inside. After that interlude, I could see the whole crypt, when I switched my headlights on. I found some dry rot, and said so. In the middle of the crypt floor was a large subsidence hole. Luckily it had not undermined any of the pillars, but it soon would have. [88] I lay on the crypt floor and started to dig down into the subsidence. I wondered what was causing it, for there had been no mining under the church. I pushed the digging spoil with my feet back eastwards out into the daylight, where a man with a JCB that the vicar had called in moved it right away, wondering if I was digging a coal mine shaft judging by how much earth I was pushing out. The police came, and I handed them the two suspects and the stuff found with them, and a floppy disk with my statement on. The vicar, who was wearing thebackpack blowtorch, told them his part in the events. Seeing him in overall and helmet with the cutting torch in his hand fed from cylinders on his back, some of those present thought of intruders wearing them routinely like rucksacks climbing into premises wearing them, bringing blowtorches to places not thought that easily accessible to such tools, making short work of the thinner sorts of safes and steel chests and security chains and padlocks and suchlike as well as being a handy weapon and `interrogation aid'. The two policemen, who had had a confrontation a month before with aggressive wandering scrap metal pickers stealing what they could find, thought of what that gang could have achieved with backpack blowtorches climbing into everybody's premises, and did not like what their thoughts showed up. They loaded up the suspects and the evidence, and left. I did not know how deep a hole might be under the subsidence, even an old mineshaft, so I fastened myself by a strong chain to a strong anchorage well away. I dug down, and the JCB pulled up endless skipfuls of my digging spoil. Finally the earth slid down a few feet under me, but my chain held me safely. I got the JCB to help me to climb out of the hole, for I was unwilling to dig deeper without planking the sides of the hole that I was digging in the crypt floor. [89] By now it was late afternoon; I drove away and hired some shoring timber and returned. I planked the sides of my hole and fitted a climbing ladder in it and dug further down. The earth was sand and boulder clay that ice age glaciers had bulldozed in. I found that I had broken into a tunnel. I cleaned the rest of the subsided earth out of the tunnel, as far as I could, and went home to Wernicke's. Next morning the vicar went into the crypt and found in there two men in overalls and safety helmets and skindivers' two-cylinder aqualungs. They angrily showed him articles in that day's newspapers. On being asked what they were doing, one of them replied: "We came to slap a secrecy order on you and this tunnel business, but it's too late! Next time go to the police only, not to the press! You had no business photocopying those papers you found down there and sending copies to the papers and the telly! We came out of tunnel, which your performing lorry filled with its exhaust, which is why we need breathing apparatus.". "Lets see your credentials! I take orders from appointed officials, not from workmen!" said the vicar, "I go public about it! You tunnel under people's property without asking them: I know why, it saves time getting permission, and it saves security leaks via the people that you ask permission off. Making your REGC (Regional Emergency Government Centre) (don't tell me they don't exist! The antinuclear groups found out about them years ago) as a hidey hole for officials instead of proper shelters for the people, if we have another war (which Heaven forbid). Then your workmen get careless and a subsidence stopes itself up to the surface. A few yards along and half my church could have gone down your hole. Tell your geologist to do his homework! REGC's are the Government's business, I suppose, but subsidence holes in my property are my business! I thought it was probably an old mine working at first, so I hired plant to dig down and see what it was and shore it up before it got worse.". The other man said: "Newspapers, newspapers, nosing, sensationalizing, exaggerating, agitating, delaying and complicating things! Time was before there were `public media' when governments and important people could just go ahead and do things and never mind every Tom Dick and Harry! Look at this article!: `A Tale from the Crypt, by our correspondent. Hole in church basement starts major row between town council and Ministry of Defence about secret tunnel.'. So we didn't tell Droitwich Council! Why should we? More people told means more chance of a leak. All that Ministry of Defence planning and approvals; work well ahead, secrecy still watertight; then two of us go to find why the tunnel's suddenly full of diesel exhaust and we find this great unauthorized shaft up into someone's cellar! We can always block it off from below, but that won't get the secrecy back! Huh!". Meanwhile two local men arrived, and went down Optimus's ramp into the crypt. "So this is the Black Pit of St.Andrews! Who are the two men in overalls and aqualungs?" asked one of them. "They came from Below." said the other, "They are emissaries of He Who Dwelleth In The Pit, the commandant of the local REGC, to haunt those who break into their secret paths.". "Ha ha very funny." said one of the two men referred to. "Excuse." said a policeman who came down in after them, "While we're telling each other Tales from the Crypt, I'll tell one to the council safety officer if you don't get all that petrol and paraffin and propane out of here ! There's laws about how much inflammables can be stored in public buildings.". "As you said three weeks ago. OK. OK. I've used a lot of the petrol in my car since. A lot of the tins are empty. The paraffin's now in my garage." replied the vicar tiredly, and reflected that troubles are said to come in threes, and wondered what the third would be. "And could you possibly tell me one?" angrily asked another man who came in down the ramp, pointing at flowers covering a worktable in the north side aisle of the crypt, "I.e. what of my show dahlias and cinerarias are doing in here!? I come home and I find my dog tied short to a drainpipe and every plant cut off at ground level with a sickle like corn. I can guess. Someone wanted flowers; either I was not there to be asked, or they knew that if I asked I'd have refused, so they came in and took them. If I'm not in to be asked, then you can't take it! People who thieve for do-goodery are still thieves! Nobody can tell properly what of anybody else's stuff is wanted for. Leave things alone. Ask the , or buy your own or manage without. Unauthorized borrowing is theft. And that Mrs.Jones (White House, Chellingham) after everybody's front daffodils this spring and whatever else she could pinch and scrounge for her busybodyings. Someone saw her with your new curate recently. Someone's already seen him in someone else's garden after flowers. Sometimes people spare things, but need them for themselves. Either you let me take my flowers back , including any you've put in flower arrangements, or I call the police and see my solicitor. If rounds up your curate into her latest little group, there'll be no riddance of them conning people out of valuable stuff and collections and sets of things to sell for pence at stalls to finance daft ideas and unimportant odds and ends!". "Sorry! Sorry! So much at once. All right, my new curate gets over zealous at times. I'll speak to him." said the vicar harrassedly, "Alright! Alright! M.O.D! How was I to know it was their tunnel? Cops moaning about petrol. Then my curate again! He'll have to go. When a servant offends, his master gets blamed, like on the TV when the third subassistant cameramen lets bad language through and it's the producer that `gets a rocket'.". [90] The policeman went away, guessing that the vicar's garage would be the next place for him to keep too much petrol in. The owner of the flowers took them away, hoping that some of them would still be fit for the show bench. "Now that we've got through such totally important matters as a bit of petrol, and a few flowers, now for `any other business', such as our tunnel, and your shaft down to it, and the totally wrecked secrecy ..." asked one of the two REGC men, then broke off with a desperate "Now who!?" as four Droitwich town councillors arrived and announced themselves. " you two actually officials, or only workmen putting on airs?" one of them asked, "As far as we are concerned, (1) the M.O.D. needs planning permission from us for its tunnel; (2) this access ramp and the shaft that Optimus dug were emergency necessities, does the vicar want to apply for planning permission to keep either or both as permanent?". "These shelters should be for everybody, not only a few officials. The more access points, the better. Leave both open." the vicar replied. "No!" said one of the REGC men sharply, "It's not a mass shelter, it's an emergency communications shelter.". The arguing continued for a long while in offices and on the public media. The M.O.D. re-roofed that part of its tunnel, cutting it off from the shaft. The vicar had the shaft refilled with earth, and the crypt floor made good over the place. He kept the ramp and new crypt entrance. Wheeljack made and fitted new strong lockable doors to the new entrance and the old coal chute. James had brought his brother and nephew, and niece Sue, who saw him come in muddy, and the morning I told her all about it, and explained that the name `Starscream' really refers to the noise that jet fighter engines make. He broke off suddenly, for children started screaming outside, and he drove out to see what was wrong. Nobody was hurt. They were playing at Autobots and Decepticons; one was playing Megatron, with a cardboard tube tied to a forearm to represent his fusion cannon; another (Starscream) was running about with his arms extended sideways to represent wings. Screams and screeches and vocal imitations of motor noises and laser gunfire filled the air. I told them not to scream or screech from excitement, else it was too likely that someone who was really hurt might scream for help and the noise might be ignored by people who thought it was merely children getting excited. By now they had learned that Wernicke's real Transformers due to their size and power do not drive about among children as part of games, for real Transformers are traffic like other vehicles; and playing with Transformer toys out of doors is likely to get them lost, or parts or guns lost, or spoilt with earth getting in them. The game continued; `Rumble' made rumbling noises, then tried to transform like the character and found that his human anatomy prevented it. Another pretended to be Scavenger the Constructicon, a long reach excavator, digging a trench to take cover in. "Can we two join in?" asked Jimmy and Derek (who lived opposite Wernicke's), arriving. "You're lucky, you've got eight real live Transformers to talk to and ride in, like in the stories. We've only got the toy models of them " said `Starscream', "You two can be Skywarp and Thundercracker [the other two Decepticon F15 jet fighters]." `Megatron' muttered that in their game, as in the stories, Starscream kept trying to take over as Decepticon leader. "Time for servicing and refuelling! Teatime!" called some of them 's mother, and the game had to stop. <>