The stone door hidden below the Cathedral swung open on nearly soundless hinges.  This revealed a medium-sized room about 6m by 12m lit by a few ancient filament lights bulbs strung across the ceiling.

The room was completely empty.  There was nothing but a concrete floor stained by age and function.

He and Elim both sighed in disappointment.  Together they stepped into the room and examined the scuffed and discoloured stone walls.

“There used to be something here.”  He pointed at the marks upon the floor. Age-shadows of a large circular object and smaller square hoofprints of tables and chairs burned into the concrete where they had stood for so many years.

“Check it out, fleur-de-lys!”  A pair of the symbols were seared into the back wall at an askew angle. This entire room had a subtly oppressive character, malign and predatory.  This was a place which lurked undetected for over a thousand years.

“No dust.” said Elim quietly.

“Minimal air circulation.  Maybe nothing to draw it in?” Hsu mused aloud.

Elim was examining a large red-brown stain upon the floor directly below the flower carvings.

“Uh hey – it this blood?”

“What?”

The brown stain did seem to have pooled against the back wall.  Definitely liquid, there were even ‘holes’ where table or chair legs would have been.

“It has been scraped away here.”

“Right.  So whoever emptied out this room dragged something across the stain when it was already long dry.”

His heart was thudding heavily in his chest.  “This is a crime scene.”

“Pretty sure it is. Yeah.”  Elim backed away, seeking the angle that made the distorted fleur-de-lys marks looked correct.  “These marks look flat if I stand by the door here.”

“You think they were burned in?”

Elim shrugged.  The secret room’s mysteries were layering atop one another.

He walked the perimeter, trying to get a sense of the place.

Except for the large circular shadow it seemed the room had only housed normal furniture.  There were drips and discolourations around the circle’s perimeter – but different colours, not blood.

He took out his phone and began to snap photos.

Elim blew out a breath.  “So Bethilda got killed here.  We both think that?”

“Yup.”

“And the missing skull is probably actually her skull, turned into crystal?”

“Simplest solution.” he murmured.   “She is killed by the fleur-marks, lots of blood.  Someone then removes her body but does not clean up the blood.  Much later after the blood had dried someone comes along and clears out this room’s contents without realizing what happened here.”

“Someone from your intelligence unit?”

“We wouldn’t miss this.  But there there were a lot of sub-contractors and private firms down here too helping to catalogue everything in the basement.”

Elim had once again produced his pocketknife and was digging into the fleur-marks on the wall.  Something grey and burnt popped out into his hand. “Shit!”

“What is it?”  He strode quickly over and examined the fragment which Elim had found.  “Oh.  That’s bone.”

He produced a baggie and Elim gingerly dropped into it what was almost certainly a piece of Bethilda Anderson’s body which had been blasted into the wall.

He sighed and pocketed it.  “So now we know where the skull came from but not where it went after this or where it is now.”

The boys searched a few more minutes before agreeing that the hidden room had no more secrets.

He gently eased the hinged wall back into place until Elim grabbed his arm.

“Do you hear that?”

They boy dropped to his stomach and dug under the door until he came up with a slip of crumpled paper!  With this debris removed the door’s movement was absolutely soundless.  “It looks like a shipping label.”

Hsu plucked the label from his hand.

“One (1) frustum (rounded) to be shipped to a warehouse by A13.”

“What’s a frustum?”

“A cone with the top cut off.”

“Just call it a cone with the top cut off!”

“Don’t blame me.  In Korean we just call it a truncated cone.  English is an insane language.”

“Right.  That cone is the circular mark on the floor?”

“Must be.”  Hsu flattened out the corner of the crumpled label to reveal a logo of crossed keys.

His breath caught “Achenbrite!”

---

The warehouse by A13 was gone.  It had been burned down to its foundations six months prior.

They asked some questions of the neighbourhood residents and learned that two Achenbrite security guards had been killed during the fire.  Curiously, neither man was supposed to be on duty that night....

Elim pressed “Who are these Achenbrite goons?”

“Private contractors. Pretty shady.  And it looks like they transferred whatever alien tech they found below St. Paul’s Cathedral into their own possession rather than turning it in.  And then that bit them in the ass.”

“I figure they burned down the warehouse to cover their theft.”

“But why kill their employees?”

They made an inspection of the ruins.  Crumbling baked cinder blocks and greasy bricks sagged in a tired memory of a warehouse’s outline.  Beaten down by flames and barely cleaned up since the fire.  The floor of the warehouse held little more than a mountain of ashy dirt that was mixed with chips of cement and melted glass or steel.

Elim squatted down to examine a nodule of blackened metal which had pooled into a thick rivulet.  “This wasn’t a normal fire.  It was was too hot.”

“Maybe something exotic caught on fire... alien tech does tend to go up explosively.”

“Like your phone battery did?”

One part of the floor had been thoroughly cleared and the debris scraped away down to the original concrete.  This must be where the warehouse workers died.  The cleanup had been necessary to recover their bodies. For the rest... Achenbrite simply sifted the debris and removed any tech which survived the fire.

He wondered if there was any interesting alien artefacts hiding under this mound of ash.

(Probably not.)

“Hey Jason, check this out.”

“Jae-shin!” he corrected automatically.

This was Elim’s fun new habit.  He was now referring to Hsu Jaeshin as “Jason,” in a sort of familiar celebration of their partnership?  Elim probably believes that by blessing Hsu with a Western name he was paying him some sort of compliment.  Typical imperialist Briton.

At least he didn't tried to nickname Hsu ‘Friday.’

Elim was unphased by the correction.  “Does this look familiar?”

Burned into the concrete floor where the Achenbrite workers had died was the now familiar fleur-de-lys.  The same symbol as the place where Bethilda Anderson had been murdered.

Further search turned up three more instances of the symbol burned and blasted into nearby bricks.

“Killed by someone who shoots lasers in the shape of a pre-historic religious symbol.  Great, just what this city needs!”

He took pictures while he gathered his thoughts.  “Alright... our timeline is something like this; Alien invasion under St. Paul’s Cathedral failed in 2016.  Bethilda Anderson is one of many people called up to catalogue and clear the labyrinth.  She discovers a hidden room and is killed by... these guys.”  He flicked a finger to indicate the burn marks.

“The de’Lythals?”

“We aren’t calling them that!”

They would absolutely end up calling them de’Lythals.

He sighed. “So she is killed, and a good time afterwards the Achenbrite guys discover this same room and send its contents to this warehouse.  The bad guys track them down, kill the guards, burn down the warehouse while they retrieve their stuff.”

“Including Bethilda’s skull.”

“Yes.  Or maybe they couldn’t find the skull and that is why it got stolen two weeks ago?”

Elim pursed his lips.  “So to find the crystal skull we may need to face an alien who shoots flower-lasers which can blast holes in stone.”

Hsu hmm’d his agreement.  “The skull first appeared four months ago, so either scenario could be true.”

Standing in this burned out ruin they slowly came to a realization.  They had reached an end to their lead.  There were no next steps even if they were willing to face Bethilda’s killers.

Elim sadly kicked at the mark on the floor.  “Crap. I really wanted that €40,000.”

“Yeah, me too.”  He cast a weak grin in the other boy’s direction.

They picked their way out of the rubble before sharing a firm handshake.

“Good team up.” said Hsu.

“You too.”  Elim favoured him with a crooked grim.  “Hey, at least no one tried to bust us for vandalizing the Cathedral!”

“What?”

“Those marks.  They could have thought that we carved ‘em into the wall.  Believe me security guards are that – ”

Hsu hushed him, eyes widening and darting about as inspiration struck.  He took a breath, then two more as the idea boiling in his mind solidified.

He grinned at Elim.

“Let’s get together tomorrow! I think I have an idea!”

Special Copyrights notice:

Torchwood: Pack Animals © Peter Anghelides 2008.  Achenbrite and other elements from that story appear with the permission of the copyright holder.