When I neared the door to the back of the church, I peeked through the window and sure enough I could see the phantom pacing and growling just a short distance away. “You son of a bitch!” I yelled at it.
“Hissssssssssssssss!”
it replied.
I turned back and looked at Heath. There was no way I could get him through the castle and back down the stairs. It would take us much longer, and I had little doubt the phantom would eventually find us one way or another.
I swept the beam of my flashlight around the whole church, methodically looking for anything I could carry that would give us a little more breathing room. To my immense relief I finally spotted a crucifix hanging on the wall. I moved quickly toward the crucifix and tripped as I went, stumbling right onto a large marble slab. “Son of a—” I muttered.
“M. J.?” Heath called weakly.
I got up and dusted myself off. “I’m okay,” I said, looking down. I realized that I’d stumbled onto a crypt, and the writing indicated that buried there was one Malachi Dunnyvale, beloved son of Ranald and Meara, born 1572, died 1584. I realized that Malachi had died the same year the castle was completed, and wondered if Ranald had added the family crypts later, which would explain why Malachi was buried here instead of with the rest of his family.
Still, there wasn’t much time to ponder things and I moved to see if I could retrieve the crucifix.
I had to climb up on the old stone altar to get to it, but my hands finally curled around it and I felt it give way. As I pulled on it, however, it acted like a lever, and the altar I was kneeling on swiveled inward to reveal a stone staircase. “Whoa!” I gasped.
“M. J.!”
Heath shouted in alarm.
I realized I’d swung completely out of his view. “I’m here!” I called, hopping down and coming out into the chapel again. “And I believe I just found our way past the phantom!”
Heath and I moved slowly and carefully down the spiral staircase. I had to support a lot of his weight, and the stairwell was narrow, which didn’t make it an easy journey, but it was definitely preferable to facing the phantom.
As we descended, I could smell the brine of the ocean and hear the crash of waves echoing up through the stairwell. The air became noticeably chillier and damp.
I knew we would eventually come out somewhere near the shore, but I wasn’t sure where.
I was wrong. The staircase ended and Heath and I found ourselves in a very narrow tunnel, and for someone like me, who suffers from bouts of claustrophobia, it was a worst-case scenario. “Aw, crap,” I whispered when I realized the tunnel went on for quite a way. “I don’t think I can do that.”
My breathing was coming in short little gasps and I knew I was close to hyperventilating.
Ever since I’d been trapped in a narrow underground tunnel with my ex-boyfriend Steven two years before, I found that tight cramped spaces caused me to have panic attacks. The stairwell was bad enough, but this ... well, this threatened to push me over the edge.
“Breathe slowly, M. J.,” Heath said, hugging me slightly around the shoulders.
I closed my eyes and tried to take slower inhalations, but it wasn’t working, and very quickly, I became dizzy.
“M. J.!” Heath commanded, squeezing me again. “You have got to calm down, babe.”
I nodded, but my breathing and heart rate both increased. I could feel the world spinning and I started to sink. “Can’t ... breathe!” I gasped, feeling my grip on Heath loosen. My knees hit the floor and then I was on all fours, still squeezing my eyes shut and fighting with everything I had to stay conscious.
A moment later, I lost the battle and slipped into the darkness.
The next thing I realized was that someone’s hand was warming my forehead. “M. J.?” I heard Heath ask.
My eyelids fluttered.
“Hey, honey,” he whispered. “Come on, now. Wake up for me.”
I opened my eyes and sat up, blinking at him in a state of disorientation. “What happened?”
“You had a panic attack, and you fainted.”
I swallowed hard and my stomach felt queasy. Plus I was really embarrassed. “Sorry.”
Heath smiled and squeezed my hand. “What are you sorry for? Being human?”
I shrugged. “The last underground tunnel I was in that was built like this one collapsed and nearly killed me.”
Heath’s eyebrows shot up. “There’s a story I want to hear.”
I looked at him in the dim light and took in his hunched-over posture and the pain in his eyes, and realized that I had no choice but to suck it up and get him out of there. “I’ll tell you,” I said. “But after we get you to a doctor.”
Heath smiled again. “Deal.”
I got up and focused on the ground in front of me. If I looked up and took in the narrowness of my surroundings, I knew I’d start to panic again. “We’re not going to be able to make it through here side by side,” I told him. “So you lean on me piggyback-style, okay?”
He agreed and I helped him to his feet; then, when I felt his hands grip my shoulders, I began to move us forward. We could still hear the crash of waves and smell the salty air, but no hint of open sky revealed itself as we moved along, although it was still damp and every once in a while I saw a puddle or two.
We went on like that for quite a while, the tunnel bending always to the left; then it curved sharply and we came to a slope, traveling upward until finally we were met with an L-shaped corner. Here the tunnel ended in front of us, and we had to make a tight right turn.
When we came around the corner, I was amazed by what I saw.
“Whoa,” I said, pointing my light ahead of us to a much wider tunnel that ran straight and true, dripping with moisture.
“Where are we?” Heath asked.
Above us we both heard the crash of a wave, and I realized what I was looking at. “Heath,” I said excitedly. “I think we’re
under
the causeway!”
I felt his body weight ease forward onto my shoulders as he too peered down the stretch of tunnel in front of us. “No way!”
Another crash of waves echoed right over our heads. “It has to be!” I said. “I mean, think about it. The spiral staircase at the church was at the back of the castle, so we would have come out on the far side of the rock. The narrow tunnel we were just in curved to the left, which means it eventually would have put us on the Irish-coastline side, and this is about the right place for the causeway to be.”
“Genius,” Heath said admiringly.
“Come on,” I told him. “We’re almost home.”
The tunnel under the causeway was wide enough for Heath and me to walk side by side, which made it easier on Heath as I was able to support his weight. Eventually we reached the end and walked up a flight of stairs to another corridor that bent to the left. We followed that as it sloped upward and eventually ended at a small cramped space with a heavy iron manhole above our heads. I felt my stomach muscles clench when I realized the manhole might be too heavy for me to push aside, but when I pushed up on it, it eased up and over with only a reasonable amount of effort from me. “Thank you, God,” I whispered, shoving it the rest of the way, then shimmying out of the hole before helping Heath.
We came out onto a bluff with a small cobblestoned platform surrounded by tall hedges, and I sucked in huge gulps of fresh air and relished the feeling of being in a wide-open space again. “Man! Am I glad to be out of there!”
“Where are we?” Heath wondered as he stood hunched and hurting next to me.
I stepped out from behind the hedges to get a better look at our location and spotted our two vans sitting side by side about fifty yards away. I pointed them out to him, and we could both see that in between the vans and our location was the causeway, confirming that we had indeed traveled under it.
“So, Dunnyvale built an escape route,” he said, looking from the causeway to the manhole behind us.
“It makes sense, when you think about it,” I told him. “If the castle was ever laid siege to, he could have gotten himself and his family out without the enemy ever being the wiser.”
“And now we have a safe and phantom-free route to the castle,” Heath said.
I turned to look at him sharply. “Why would we
ever
want to go back there?”
He in turn appeared confused. “To find Gopher.”
I shook my head. “Gopher’s not there, Heath. We searched the entire top two stories tonight and much of the lower one on our first trip. There’s no way he’s still in that god-awful place.”
“So where is he?” Heath pressed.
I turned to look behind us. “My theory is that he might have followed the same route we did. Or he got clear of the castle and made it to the causeway.”
Heath sighed heavily. “Or he’s dead and no one’s found his body, and you and I are both unable to reach him intuitively.”
I frowned. That was a possibility. “Or that,” I conceded.
“That theory makes the most sense, really,” he told me. “Otherwise, if Gopher had made it out, he would have made contact with us.”
I looked back again to the causeway, and tried to reconcile my own gut feelings with the theory that Gopher had been killed. What I realized was that in my heart I didn’t feel that was the case. I just knew he was alive. But where was he, and why hadn’t he at least called one of us?
I was about to tell Heath what my intuition was saying when I realized that he was clutching his knees with his hands and gritting his teeth. I felt terrible all over again. Here I was trying to figure out our mystery and poor Heath was in a great deal of pain and needed to get to a doctor—pronto.
“Come on,” I told him. “Let’s see if we can’t get you some medical attention.”
I called Gilley from the hospital. He reacted to the news that Heath was hurt and in the ER the way I expected him to—by completely freaking out.
It took me about half an hour to calm him down, which was exactly how long it took for Heath to get stitched up. “Lucky us that it was a slow night in the ER,” I said as I helped to ease him into the van.
Heath winced when he sat down, but only for a moment. His wounds were mostly superficial, as the spike had poked into the more solid part of one of his vertebrae, so his wound was painful but not serious, and would require little follow-up care.
“Are the pain pills kicking in?” I asked, buckling myself into the driver’s side.
He nodded dully. “Oh, yeah.”
I drove us back to Anya’s and by that time Heath was fast asleep. I had to wake Gilley up to help me get Heath into the house. He was really out of it and barely conscious, so it took us a good ten minutes just to move him from the van to the cushy couch in the living room.
“Should we try and get him upstairs?” Gilley asked.
I shook my head. “I’ve been pushing him beyond his limits all night. Let’s just cover him with a blanket so he can sleep.”
After Heath was tucked in, I followed Gil upstairs. “I have news!” he whispered excitedly.
I sighed. I was sick of news. I was sick of this bust. And I was sick and tired of being sick and tired. “Can it wait until morning?” I pleaded.
Gilley’s hopeful expression sagged, but then he laid a hand on my arm and said, “Sure, M. J. Get to bed and I’ll fill you in tomorrow.”
That night I slept like the dead right up until I dreamed about them. “Hello, lovely lass,” said a familiar voice.
“Lord Dunnyvale,” I replied mildly, leaning back against the tree and taking a huge whiff of the flower-scented air.
“I see you’ve finally discovered the key to your success,” he told me, stepping out from behind the tree to take a seat next to me.
“You mean the underground tunnel you built as an escape route?”
Ranald smiled winningly at me. “Bit of an engineering marvel that was,” he said proudly. “And it’s withstood those crashing waves all this time so beautifully. Barely a leak in it.”
I had to give him credit on that one. “Yes, it is a marvel, my lord.”
Dunnyvale pulled at his goatee. “Aye,” he agreed. “But that’s not what I was referring to, miss, although you did come across a very large clue last night. You’re so close to putting your puzzle pieces together, but you still need Alex. She’s the one to put it all in place for you.”
I leaned my head back against the tree, trying to rein in my impatience. This man talked in circles and he wasn’t helping me nearly as much as he liked to think he was. “Who we need is Gopher,” I snapped. So much for reining in that impatience. “And at this point we don’t even know if he’s dead or alive.”
“Oh, he’s alive all right, and he’s been taken somewhere safe for the time being,” Dunnyvale assured me. “Still,” he added, “I’m not sure he’ll be alive for long without Alex.”
I eyed Dunnyvale suspiciously. “You’re
sure
he’s alive?”