After the last kiss was bestowed, the witch trailed the disciples. Behind him, the cameraman descended the stairs, his film ink black until torchlit stalactites came into view.
The steps were chipped from a wall of a massive limestone cave burrowed in the cliff beneath Castle Crag. Shadows licked up the stairs like hellfire from a pit, half the floor of the cavern below a black lagoon, beyond which a blowhole led to lightning-lit sand. A crack of thunder drowned the dull roar of pounding waves, filling the hollow already filled with the whine of whistling winds. Down, down, down, the nude procession snaked, past stalactites and stalagmites skull-joined like Siamese twins, into the bowels of the grotto where the Whalers’ Washing House lurked.
The shrine huddled near the shore of the onyx lagoon, rotting from the damp, dripping claminess of the crypt. Twenty human-shaped idols with large cedar heads-some frowning, some laughing, some openmouthed in song-and two wooden whales formed the temple’s core. These were flanked left and right by forty human skulls, a dozen more mounted on sticks standing guard. A black trunk sat behind the mounted skulls, faced by seven mummified owls perched on the carvings. Beside the trunk was an iron-barred cage, around which, faces gnawed and bodies goosefleshed, the stoned masquers gathered in the shrine. Something dark and furtive moved within the cage.