and moved around until he found what he wanted: an irregularly cracked section of stone, an oval roughly five feet long and four high, piled high with a mound of fallen rubble.
“Just below where Duncan died,” Doc said, his tone low.
Joseph had to clear the rubble away before he could get at the foundation stone beneath, and this he did with terrifying ease, scooping up thigh-high piles of stones that must have weighed hundreds of pounds and hurling them off the foundation. Then he stepped aside and waited.
“How do you open it?” Doc asked.
“I do not,” Joseph said. “It’s a deviser’s laboratory.”
“Ah.” Doc closed his eyes.
Harris saw his lips move as he murmured silent words. For long moments nothing happened; then there was a faint vibration in the ground.
A square portion of the foundation stone cantilevered upward, revealing a rectangular black space below. A dry, musty smell wafted out. Doc opened his eyes and nodded in apparent satisfaction.
Alastair brought an armful of long, clumsy-looking flashlights out from the car’s trunk—boot? Harris remembered them calling it a boot, like the British—and passed them around. They all lit the ungainly devices and shined their beams down on the dull gray steps heading into the earth. Doc led the way down.
The conjuration laboratory of Duncan Blackletter turned out to be a large, simple chamber. Two facing walls were covered in bookshelves, many of them now collapsed with rot and age and the weight of the volumes they held. In one corner were a plush chair, rotting and bug-eaten, and a collapsed mass that must have once been an uncomfortable cot.
Most of the floor was decorated with what Harris now recognized as conjurer’s circles: unbroken rings of paint or carefully laid-out stones, decorated along the rims with painted