I had remained silent for a very long time because I didn’t trust myself to speak. If I opened my mouth, I was very much afraid I might start screaming.
Devlin ran the flashlight back and forth across the chamber. “What I want to know is where all those flies went.”
I hadn’t even thought about that. Now I looked at him aghast. “You don’t think there’s another body down here somewhere, do you? Or someone still alive? Someone…”
Someone who is taking a long time to die.
A week ago, I would not have been able to imagine such an atrocity. Now I felt a creeping certainty as I stared at that hole in the brick wall, that dark, menacing gateway.
“I’ll have to go in there and find out,” Devlin said, and I thought I detected a note of dread in his voice.
“Right now?” I didn’t even want to contemplate what lay beyond that gaping rift.
“If there’s even a remote chance someone else is down here, yeah. Right now.”
“But…shouldn’t we at least wait for backup? You said help would be here soon.”
“It may not be soon enough. Sometimes even a minute makes all the difference.” The quiet way he spoke made me think of his wife and daughter trapped in that sinking car. “I’ve got to find out what’s in there.” His voice was hard, resolved. No talking him out of it.
“Then I’m going, too,” I said, though in truth, I was operating more out of fear than altruism. I didn’t want to stay behind in that chamber of horrors. I’d take my chances with whatever lay beyond that wall. With Devlin.
I thought he might argue and I was fully prepared to stand my ground, but then his gaze lifted to those chains and he nodded. “I think that might be for the best.”
Shining the light into the aperture, he crawled through and I went in after him.
On the other side, the space opened up enough to stand upright. The walls here were also brick and slick with slime. When Devlin aimed the flashlight straight ahead, I could see nothing but endless tunnel.
The space was so narrow we had to move forward in a single file. When I glanced over my shoulder, the darkness behind me was complete.
“I’ve been thinking about the timing of all this,” I said softly, as I moved along the passageway behind him. “Hannah’s mother said the last time she saw her alive was last Thursday. If her body was buried sometime after I left the cemetery at four on Friday and when the storm hit at midnight, then she could have been down here while I was up there photographing headstones. I could have walked right over where he had her hanging. If only I’d heard something…seen something, I could have called the police—”
Devlin glanced over his shoulder, his face grim and shadowed. “Don’t do that. There was nothing you could have done.”
“I know, but it’s a hard thing to think about.”
“There are a lot of hard things in this world,” he said. “You don’t need to beat yourself up over something that’s out of your control.”
I wondered if he’d managed to take his own advice, or if he still played those terrible what-if games in the middle of the night, when sleep would not come and his ghosts would not leave.
We fell silent as we trudged along the tunnel. It seemed to me that we were descending, but I couldn’t be certain. The claustrophobic confinement and the utter darkness behind us were a bit disorienting.
And everywhere, more cobwebs. I couldn’t imagine how many spiders it had taken to spin them over the years.
“I can feel them in my hair,” I said with a shudder.
“What?”
“Spiders. They’re everywhere. Must be thousands. Millions…”
“Don’t think about it.”
“I can’t help it. You know why I’m arachnophobic? I was bitten by a black widow when I was ten.”
“I was bitten by a copperhead when I was twelve.”
“Okay, you win.” I ran fingers through my hair, trying to shake loose the unwelcome visitors.
“I didn’t realize it was a competition,” Devlin said. “Should we compare scars?”
I appreciated his attempt—feeble though it was—to lighten the mood. “Where were you when you were bitten?”
“My grandfather has a cabin in the mountains. We used to go up there for a week every summer when I was a kid. I had an old bike I kept around to take out on the trails. The snake was lying across the path late one afternoon. I didn’t see it in time and ran over it. The body coiled in the spokes and when I tried to nudge it loose with my toe, the thing struck. Nailed me on the shin right through my jeans.”
“Was it bad?”
“Not as bad as you might think. My grandfather kept antivenin in the cabin. He gave me an injection and some antibiotics for the infection.”
I started to ask if his grandfather was a doctor, but then I remembered Ethan had said that Devlin came from a long line of lawyers. He was, in fact, the black sheep of the family, because he hadn’t followed the traditional path.
“You didn’t have to go to the hospital?”
“No. A little suffering builds character, according to my grandfather. I was pretty sick for a couple of days, but that was about it. Your black widow was probably a lot worse.”
“Not that it’s a competition.”
“Right. Where did it get you?”
“My hand. I moved an old headstone and disturbed her home and her babies. My fault entirely.”
“You’ve spent a lot of time in graveyards, haven’t you?”
“It’s my job.”
“Even when you were a kid?”
“More or less. My father was a cemetery caretaker. He had several that he looked after, but my favorite was the one by our house. Rosehill. Have you ever heard of it? It’s surrounded by dozens and dozens of rosebushes. Some of them are over a hundred years old. They climb up in the trees and hang down from the limbs. In the summer, the scent is like heaven. I loved playing there when I was a little girl.”
“You played in a graveyard?”
“Why not? It was quiet and beautiful. A perfect little kingdom.”
“You are a very strange woman.”
“I thought I was practical.”
“Strange, stunning and practical.”
My heart quickened. I loved his description even though it seemed so out of character for him. It made me think of Rhapsody for some reason. Strange, stunning and practical. A girl who could play kick ball and cast spells.
The steady beam of the flashlight revealed nothing ahead but more brick walls and more darkness.
We’d only been walking for a few minutes, but already we seemed a long way from the opening through which we’d crawled. I wondered if help had arrived yet. Devlin must have told them I was trapped in the chamber, but how would they know to look for us in here? We were far enough away by now that I doubted they would even hear us if we called out.
Devlin stopped so abruptly I almost plowed into his back.
“What is it?”
“Another opening.” He slanted the beam toward the bottom of the wall to our right. Some of the bricks had been removed to make a hole large enough to crawl through.
He knelt in front of it and shined the light through.
“Is it another tunnel?” My query bounced off the walls and came back to me.
“Looks like it.” He paused, still probing the darkness. “I smell mildew and rot. This place is old.”
“What do you suppose it was originally used for?” I stood in the dark, hugging my arms around my middle. The air was damp and dank. Like the touch of a ghost. “These tunnels must have taken years to dig.”
“Maybe there was an old plantation house here before the cemetery was built. This could be part of a cellar system. They sometimes put the slave quarters underground.”
Slave quarters. Perhaps that explained the pall that lay over Oak Grove.
My gaze lifted. It must be twilight up there now.
“Wouldn’t this place flood when the water’s up?” I asked.
“Probably why there’s mildew and slime all over the place.”
I glanced around nervously. “How do you suppose he found it?”
“Old records, deeds. Or maybe he stumbled upon it by accident like we did.”
“We keep saying
he.”
“Most predatory killers are male.” Devlin straightened.
I nodded toward the opening. “Are we going in there?”
“No. I think we should stay in the original tunnel. We can always double back. Let’s just keep going.”
We started walking again.
“This place reminds me of a recurring dream I had as a child,” I said, falling into step behind him. I tried not to project beyond the strength of the flashlight beam. “It was terrifying. So traumatic you would think I’d been lost in a tunnel or a cave in real life, but there was nothing like that where I grew up.”
“Maybe the tunnel represented a different kind of trauma.”
“Maybe. At one end, I could see a faint glimmer of light and on the other end, nothing but darkness. I would always start out walking toward the light, but then something would compel me to turn and I would go toward the darkness, only to be tugged back around to the light. This would happen over and over again. A few steps in one direction, turn, a few steps in the other direction. It was the most awful tug-of-war you can imagine.”
“Were you alone?”
“Yes. Except…once in a while I could hear a woman’s voice. She spoke in whispers. I could never quite make out what she said, but I always listened and listened, hoping that she would tell me where I was supposed to go, but she never did. And if I stopped for too long, the hands would come out of the walls.”
“Hands?”
I shuddered. “Dozens of them. Pale and grasping. I knew that if they managed to grab me, they would pull me down into some dark place far more terrifying than what awaited me at either end of the tunnel. So I would start walking again. A few steps toward the light. Turn. A few steps toward the darkness.”
“You never made it to the end?”
“Never. I’d wake up with the most dreadful feeling of being lost and not having a clue where I was or where I was meant to be.”
“Sounds like a near-death experience,” Devlin said. “Not that I believe in any of that stuff, but the way you described your dream is a lot like the way I’ve heard people talk about an NDE. Except for the hands,” he added. “That’s new.”
“The hands were the scariest part.”
He waved the flashlight over the walls. “See? No hands.”
“Thanks.” I tripped over the corner of a loose brick and righted myself with a palm to his back. Quickly, I pulled away. “Have you ever had a recurring nightmare?”
“Yes.” He paused. “And then I wake up and remember that it’s real.”
The silence stretched on and on.
TWENTY-EIGHT
W
e were well into the tunnel by this time. Too late to turn back. I could feel a chill at my back and imagined a ghost behind me, creeping through the shadows, coveting my energy, leeching my warmth.
I whirled, my heart in my throat. “Did you hear something?”
“No.” Devlin turned and swung the light down the tunnel.
I caught the gleam of beady eyes and then the scurry of tiny feet. Just a rat.
We pressed forward. I was breathing a little easier now, knowing the sounds I’d heard from behind me were nothing more than the scratch of rodent claws on brick. And oddly, telling Devlin about my dream had lightened my mood, unchained me from a childhood terror that had dogged me for years. It had also made him my confidant. I’d never told anyone about that nightmare. What this said about my feelings for him, I was a little too scared to consider.
We had been keeping a steady pace, but now I slowed, my head turning to the side as a new sound invaded the silence. I paused, took a step forward, then glanced over my shoulder.
“Something’s back there.”
Devlin barely broke stride. “Another rat.”
“No, not a rat. Listen.”
Nothing but silence.
Then it came again, a sort of furtive shuffle. The hair sprang up at my nape.
“There! Did you hear it?”
Devlin whirled, the light beam piercing the darkness. “Stay calm.”
“I am calm,” I said over the thunder of my heartbeat. “What do you think it is?”
“I can’t tell.”
It wasn’t a ghost. This was something very real, something solid and alive.
Devlin transferred the flashlight to his left hand, and with his right, drew his gun from the holster. Again and again, he swept the beam across the darkness.
“Get in front of me,” he said and handed me the flashlight.
“He’s back there, isn’t he?” I whispered.
“Just keep moving.”
We walked in complete silence now. Once the sound faded, my nerves settled and I noticed we were ascending. And just when I hoped that meant the end would soon be in sight, we came to a dead end.
There was nothing in front of us but a solid brick wall.
The thought of turning around and going back toward that sound, back to that chamber of horrors was too much. I was emotionally drained. Spent. I felt like dropping to the floor and bursting into tears.
“Over there,” Devlin said, and pressed my hand holding the flashlight down and to the left.
Another opening. Another way out.
He took the flashlight and shined it into the hole.
“Is it a way out?” I asked nervously.
“I think so. Come on.” He went first and waited for me on the other side.
We were in some sort of circular chamber maybe five feet wide in diameter. Metal steps had been bolted into the wall and I felt a surge of elation until I realized those stairs led up to nothing. There was no opening at the top. Just total darkness.
“I think we’re in an old well or cistern,” Devlin said. His voice had a metallic sound as it ricocheted off the round walls.
“How do we get out?”
“There must be a lid or something over the top.” He slanted the beam upward for a moment, then handed me the flashlight and his gun.
“Do you know how to use a weapon?”
“No, not really.”
“The safety’s off. If anything comes through that hole, point at it and squeeze the trigger. Don’t think, just do it.” I nodded.
“Keep the light,” he said. “Don’t watch me, watch that hole.”
“Okay.”
He tested his weight on the ladder, his footsteps clanging as he went up. Within seconds, he was twenty feet above me. I heard the click of the lighter and a grunt or two from Devlin as he tried to dislodge the cover, but I resisted the temptation to glance up.