Where Darkness Dwells (40 page)

"Eventually, I hope to restore the house to its original state. Period furniture, fresh paint, and the like."

He felt strangely at ease considering what they had just been through. The burning tree, the marching row of torch-bearers cutting across the open field. He felt like he should be hospitable, perhaps offer a cup of tea as he had to Jacob and Ellie. Relax a bit. Maybe continue on with the general flow of their earlier conversation.

But then Jane jerked her head aside as if a fat spider had plopped down on her shoulder. She jerked her head the other way, and Cooper could see the fear in her eyes.

He felt it too. A cold caress against his cheek. An invisible fingernail rasping through his five o'clock shadow.

Pressure, cold and bracing.

"Back to what I said earlier, I'm a guest in this house, regardless if the property title says otherwise."

With a jarring abruptness, Eunice Blankenship appeared between them. She appeared as the young, righteous and vibrant woman of her youth.

You need to hurry.

Cooper heard Eunice's voice in his head, and from her reaction, so had Jane. She was backing away from the apparition, reaching behind her for the doorknob.

NO,
the reverend said, also inside their heads, a heady timbre that was nearly a shout. He appeared behind Jane, and he placed a hand on her shoulder. She jumped away as if the spirit had inappropriately goosed her.

"Ted… what's going on?"

"As I said, a guest."

As was his penchant, the reverend's ethereal body diminished to nothing. A cold wisp of air rushed by as he whipped through the entryway. A lacy curtain pulled aside, held there by an invisible hand.

There's not much time,
the reverend said, looking out the window Cooper had just check for security.

"What do you mean?" Cooper asked the open air, then turned to Eunice. "What's happening?"

Eunice's body took on a more corporeal form, as if a dial had turned, sending additional energy surging through her body. She aged rapidly as the details of her face became more clear. Wrinkles creased her face, her skin sagged, her eyes dimmed, dirtying with cataracts. She extended her hand, touching Cooper's forearm. Her touch was as cold as the frigid reaches of Hank Calder's icehouse. Her lips moved, and a sound came from her throat, and it was a real voice.
"NOW,"
she said. Quavering, and ancient, but real nonetheless.
"Come with me!"

The lacy curtain fell and settled as Horace Blankenship abandoned his lookout position. Once again, an icy wind whipped by. Jane, while as frightened as ever, no longer seemed set on rushing out the front door and away from these unsettled spirits. The reverend threw the basement door open. Cooper assumed his spirit then went down the steps, but then a coercive hand pressed between his shoulder blades. His feet began to move, and standing next to him, so did Jane's.

"They're here," Eunice said.

A moment later something heavy slammed into the front door, while both front windows crumbled at once, leaving jagged shards clinging to weathered frames. Arms darted through the gaps, flailing, reaching, limbs slick with dark blood and something more vile. Another crash snapped Cooper's attention back to the door. The impact nearly forced it from its hinges. Time was fleeting; the door wouldn't hold much longer.

Something wriggled partway through one of the broken windows. It was a horrible sight, this creature with its pus-flesh seeping with decay, its maniacal eyes panning the entryway. Its eyes found Cooper's. It struggled through the opening, shredding its skin, losing a finger that was sheared off by a long, bladelike shard of glass. It didn't seem to notice.

The remains of the man wore overalls. His torso was tree trunk thick. A rancid odor swept over Cooper. One last push from the spirit of Reverend Blankenship ushered him down the steps. Side by side with Jane, they took the steps two at a time.

The tumult of crazed activity upstairs shook the basement's ceiling. Dust and flakes of mortar rained down from above.

"What are those things?" Jane held his hand.

Cooper had never seen such unfettered fear so close before. For some reason, he thought of Jane's husband, Dwight. The trenches changed him. He'd come home fragile, fractured inside.

Can fear stain a person's soul?

"Cooper, come on. Snap out of it."

Dazed, he heard voices, could
feel
the destruction reverberating from above, but somehow he couldn't move from the spot at the bottom of the stairs. He looked around, saw Jane's face welling with tears, overflowing, tracing jagged streaks down her cheeks. His eyes drifted past, to the mirror hanging on the wall at the bottom of the stairs. The mirror angled so you could see upstairs as well as your own reflection.

He saw the white-illumined spirits of the Blankenships, just over his shoulder. The impatience in their faces was considerable. Then Eunice stepped away from her husband's side. In the reflection, Eunice gripped his cheeks with both hands. Her icy touch quaked through his facial muscles and down the nape of his neck. The ghost's body became entirely corporeal, appearing as it had in her final state--ancient and stooped, kindness still warming her eyes. Then a rift appeared at the crest of her forehead just below her hairline. It widened, spreading as wide as an axe's blade. Thick blood flowed from the opening, down her face, and as Eunice revisited the final moments before her last breath, she gained an immortal strength that rippled through her flesh. Her grip on his face tightened. She reeled back with her left hand, then let loose with a teeth-jangling slap across his cheek.

Cooper came close to falling to the dirt floor. But he didn't. Instead, he snapped out of it. Eunice began to fade, her energies sapped, the resilience he normally saw in her face flagging along with it. She looked defeated.

"Cooper, please? What do we do?"

For some reason, he smiled. "Come with me."

He took her hand and they went down the hallway, around a corner, and into a small room.

"Now where? That window's too small for us to get through." A wedge of wane moonlight cut across the floor. Its glow found their faces, casting them in somber blue.

"Here." He left her side, went to the far wall, rapped it with his knuckles. He ran his fingers along the surface until he found the right spot, pulled out and to the side, and the secret panel opened up.

"What's that?"

"A hiding place. Created for the Underground. The real Underground."

He crawled into the opening, reaching out in the near dark, searching. Just as he had figured, the bricked up wall five feet into the opening was a hastily constructed thing. He felt around until he found a gap at the top of the wall, a small rift where the ground had shifted and the stones had sunk over the years. He jammed his fingers through the opening, then pressed as hard as he could against the wall. Stones scraped one another, and then the topmost one fell into the tunnel.

The sounds from upstairs came in ever-increasing volume and intensity. The monsters (that's what they are, right? Cooper thought, monsters?) had gathered in the entryway. Stomping feet clomped in every direction as they searched the house.

One of their pursuers had seen their escape into the basement. It didn't take them long to find the stairway and trundle down in a wild clamor.

Cooper had succeeded in prying away a number of stones, pushing some ahead, pulling some toward himself.

"Quick," he called out to Jane. "Get in here and pull that panel closed behind you."

She did as he requested, and after a moment of panic as she fought to fit the panel square in its opening, they were alone in the lightless tunnel, the sound of the approaching undead momentarily quieted.

"I can't… I can't do this. I just can't go on. I need to get out of here, I need to see my family. They need me."

The undead filing into the basement quickly deduced that their quarry would not go quietly. Growls of rage came from the small room they had just exited.

"Jane, we need to move. There's no other choice. They'll tear us apart if we don't get moving now. It won't take them long to realize we're in this tunnel. They know about this tunnel. They've been through this tunnel, and I'm pretty sure they are the ones who tried to wall it up so no one would find the entry point to their lair."

"I can't. I can't do it anymore."

He reached out in the dark, found her hand, squeezed it. Speaking with his lips an inch from her ear, "This is a tunnel that served a purpose during the Underground Railroad, but it also leads to the Underground, the corrupt Underground. Greta gave her life to send us on the this path. She sent us to my house. She was trying to help us; for whatever reason she didn't or couldn't outright tell us what to do. But, Jane, Jimmy is in the Underground. They have him, and if we take this tunnel, we'll find him. We can set him free."

His words struck to her core. He couldn't see her, but could feel a change go through her. She took a deep breath and pushed him on the shoulder. "Let's go then. Let's get my boy."

4.

Arlen Polk's gopher hole resembled more a trash heap than a furry animal's living space. Trash was strewn alongside mounds of broken rock where Arlen sorted the precious coal from the worthless slag. He'd staked a canvas tent near the gopher hole where he could rest and eat meals packed by his mom. But now, forty feet below, Arlen toiled as he always had, sweating a mindless salty lather, humming to fill the empty space.

He'd been at work all day, and close to quitting time, the vein he was chasing opened in a wide berth of rich ore that alluded to an even deeper source. Every swing he took he hoped would lead to prosperity. He kept at it, long hours after simple fatigue ceded to exhaustion. He alternated swinging his pick axe and shoveling crumbled stone into a rickety cart.

His humming died off. Spittle flew from his lips.

Greta's death hit Arlen like a physical blow, fully a quarter mile from their tree house, burrowed at the deepest point of his gopher hole.

"Mom," he called out in a whimper, as if she could soothe him. Pain seared across his forehead, making him drop his pick axe in mid-swing. He fell to his knees, grinding his palms against his temples. In the yellow kerosene light, the rough tunnel walls quaked, the floor rumbled, sending him in a rumpled heap stomach-flat against the coal dirty floor.

The hot fist of pain bloomed throughout his brain, triggering synapses that had never been alighted with intelligence. Nerve endings jangled, snapped, sparked. The pain quelled, fell apart, became bits of words. Words crystallizing into a single, distinct voice.

"We'll always be together. You will always carry me in your heart." They were his mom's oft-repeated words. Words he never truly understood until now. He'd spoken them with his own voice--his flat, masculine voice merging with her lyrical speech patterns. Hearing her through him in the enclosed air of his gopher hole scared him. Scared him nearly senseless.

The worst part was finally understanding. After all these years, understanding the depth of her unflagging love for him, feeling its warmth filling him. Knowing fully how blind he had been to the world.

He also understood the generations of children's leers and laughter, the men folk's crude humor, the women's condescending tone and dismissive behavior. He had been an unwitting outcast; his whole life he had smiled agreeably, lent a helping hand and gladly labored at tasks others would have considered a menial tedium. But now he understood. Completely.

His mother's knowledge was flooding him.
She
was flooding him. Her stories and secrets, everything, hit him boldly, his vision swimming in the torrent of information. Others' knowledge--Grandma Nina was there, too--Nina, whom he'd never met but knew through his mom's stories, she was there with her photographic memory for numbers and their patterns. Also, a man named Rubell, another named Quint, they swept in too, deposited their lifetimes' knowledge into his brain.

Rubell… he knew now. His mom's lover. The shyster of patent medicines. Arlen's father. And Quint, his great uncle, a man from whom his mom had to fight off advances, an engineer who dabbled in steam locomotion in his youth. Ranging from disturbing to ingenious, his knowledge was now Arlen's.