by Bryan, JL
It was Heinrich “Hank” Grolman, I was pretty sure, original builder and owner of the house. He was watching us, perhaps curious for now, but I had no doubt he was dangerous. It was possible he could summon all the ghostly lodge members, bring the hunting party up to capture us here in the house, perhaps with a blast on an ivory hunting horn.
He didn’t make any moves right away, though, just watched us pass, his eyes burning darkly in their sockets.
Marzena continued walking, illuminating our way with her feeble light, so Stacey and I kept following, though we took turns keeping an eye on the master bedroom door for Grolman’s possible coming attack.
Our spirit guide finally stopped outside a guest room door. As we caught up to her, she vanished.
Stacey mouthed something to me. Adrienne. This was the room where she was sleeping.
I shrugged, then motioned for Stacey to stay put.
Carefully, gently, I placed my fingers on the doorknob and turned it. Every noise sounded unnaturally amplified, the metallic rasp of the latch bolt across the strike plate, the tiny squeak of the spring inside the knob.
Finally, I nudged open the door. At least I hadn’t needed to pick the lock.
Adrienne’s many pieces of black leather luggage made it perfectly clear that this was indeed her room.
I looked first to the bed, to see whether Adrienne was awake and preparing to yell at me for this deep intrusion into her personal space late at night. There was no response. She’d closed the bedcurtains, though, so I had no idea whether Adrienne was awake or asleep in there, or whether Wyatt was with her.
Marzena’s flickering spot of candlelight floated above a particular suitcase, which was closed tight, so I’d have to open it without drawing attention. Great. Sneaking into Adrienne’s room while she slept and then rummaging through her luggage could only end well.
I knelt in front of the chosen suitcase. Adrienne had already inserted the brass key into the lock, fortunately, in between the engraved words Louis Vuitton and Made in France. It had to be fairly vintage, too, since it lacked the built-in wheels of modern luggage. This was luggage designed to be carried by servants and staff, a perfect match for the Grolman estate.
Slowly, I turned the suitcase key, wincing at the slight scraping sound.
I hesitated and held my breath, watching the bedcurtains for any hint of a response from Adrienne to my late-night burglary. Nothing so far.
Next came the suitcase’s two heavy brass latches, one on either side. I carefully pulled them open, doing my best to soften the movements, but their metallic rasps boomed in my ears.
I went still and silent, holding my breath again, eyes on the bedcurtain.
Maybe they moved, or maybe it was my imagination playing tricks as I stared obsessively at the thick, shadowy folds of cloth.
Finally, I searched Adrienne's suitcase, pawing through silk and cashmere, and some really incredibly nice-feeling cotton socks that must have had a thread count of about a million, but found nothing that seemed worth all this trouble.
A rasp of cloth sounded from the bed.
I looked over, my heart on the verge of exploding, and held my breath again.
One of the bedcurtains shifted, like it had moved and was falling back into place.
I froze, wondering whether I had any chance of staying hidden by the darkness of the room. Had Adrienne looked out and seen me? Or had she just brushed against the curtain from the inside? The movement was so slight, I told myself, it could even have been the air vent in the room giving the curtain a little push. I didn’t really believe that, but I wanted to believe it.
Nobody came charging out of the bed screaming at me, so I continued my fruitless search. It was difficult to hurry and stay quiet at the same time. I dug deeper, looking for inner zippers and hidden pockets.
Marzena’s features grew clearer in her candlelight. She leaned closer to me and began decaying before my eyes. This seemed like an overly dramatic way of telling me I was making her wait too long, literally withering away in front of me like that. Okay, Marzena, I get it, I mouthed.
My prying fingers found their way under the corner of the suitcase’s interior. I pried up a hard flap at the bottom—unfolding many of Adrienne's clothes in the process—and revealed a shallow compartment below.
My breath caught as I saw it. It was steel, the ring so big I could have gripped it in both hands with room to spare, the teeth long, oddly shaped and jutting out in every direction like a medieval spiked weapon.
I knew what it had to be.
Adrienne had brought the vault key with her.
I rubbed my chin like Indiana Jones weighing the size of the little statue in at the beginning of Raiders of the Lost Ark. Cold sweat erupted all over me. This was it, the lodge’s greatest mystery, and I was about to open it. I was thrilled and terrified all at once.
My hands shook as I took the key. Little cloth hooks held it in place in the suitcase, which slowed me down and aggravated me greatly until I figured out how to unfasten them. Marzena was probably making her face rot to dust in fast-forward to complain about the time again, but I didn’t give her the satisfaction of looking up to see it.
At last, I stood, gripping the key in my hands. It was about as heavy as a crowbar, though much thinner and longer.
Hardly daring to breathe, I eased over to the door.
Stacey, just outside in the hallway, gaped at the key when I emerged, her eyes nearly popping from her head. I handed it to her and made sure her grip was solid before I let go. Dropping it on the floor would no doubt wake everyone.
With sweat-drenched palms, I slowly pulled the door shut in order to leave it exactly the way we’d found it, like Smokey Bear says to do in the woods. I winced as the latch bolt clacked into place. Then the door was solidly closed.
Stacey pointed at the giant key repeatedly, and pretty much unnecessarily, her jaw wide open. I could tell she wanted to yell in excitement and was just barely holding it in.
I took the key back from her, hoping that would calm her a little. She was bobbing on her toes, resisting the urge to actually jump up and down.
Now that we had the key, we didn’t exactly need a spirit guide to tell us where to go next.
We headed back to the stairs, the host of dead girls lighting our way with flickering ethereal candlelight.
Chapter Thirty
We traversed the basement and reluctantly crossed through the broken hole in the basement wall, back to the area where we’d been assaulted. I was still in great pain from my last visit to the underworld of the house, and despite my desire to open the vault at last, I was not eager to return to the scene of the attack.
In the maids’ thin candlelight, I worked the vault key into the hole on the huge black door. I had to turn it this way and that; just trying to use the key was a bit like picking a lock. This lock and key had indeed been a special custom job.
The dead maids gathered close, their faces pale.
I recognized one of them from the 1890s-era photographs I’d seen. There had been many of her, thanks to her famous and politically involved father. Not like her more reclusive fiancé, Heinrich “Hank” Grolman, of whom pictures had been rare.
“Evangeline?” I whispered, then made myself speak up. “Evangeline Ryland? Why are you here? Are you lost from the shipwreck?” She was dressed as a maid, so that didn’t really add up.
The ghost who looked like Evangeline gaped at me. A moment later, a fox mask covered her face. Then she vanished, leaving only the orb of her candle to aid my vault-opening efforts.
I focused on my work, taking furtive glances up the hall, watching for the return of the supernatural hunting party, or at least for Heinrich Grolman to follow us down from his room.
I was sort of hoping for that, really, because if Grolman’s ghost made no move to stop us, it would imply that perhaps he actually wanted the vault open, in which case we were playing right into his hands. Even down here in the basement, there we
re no snarls or menacing voices this time, now that we had the key. And that troubled me.
At long last, a metallic thunk thundered from the depths of the door as the bolt slid aside.
At that moment, all the girls’ candle lights vanished like a birthday cake had been blown out, leaving Stacey and me in absolute darkness.
“Hey, Ellie?” Stacey whispered.
“Yeah?”
“Did the maid brigade just ditch us?”
“I think so.” I clicked on my belt light, and Stacey did the same.
Together, we hauled open the steel vault door.
Beyond, lined with more unlit horned-skull sconces, lay wide, shallow stairs carved from rock, twisting slowly down and out of sight.
The sour air rising from below threatened frostbite. It made me think of Dante’s Inferno. Not the fiery upper levels, but the very bottom circle, the lowest pit, where Satan lives and all is frozen.
“Okay,” I whispered. “Let’s go.”
We descended the stairs.
They brought us to a sizable room hacked out of the hard rock of the island bluff. Maybe it had begun as a natural cavern, but the chisel marks on the wall indicated it had been widened.
In some ways, it was a larger version of the chapel-sized temple of the goddess Fortuna and infant god Plutus up in the cemetery. It had rows of padded planks for kneeling, the padding consumed by mold and water damage. Nobody had tended this temple in many years.
Dampness trickled in from the walls, too. The floor was sloped, sending the moisture creeping down the sunken aisle between the rows of kneeling benches. The aisle served as a handy drainage gutter for all the dampness creeping in.
The sunken gutter-aisle ended at the floor’s low point near the far end of the room, where a circle of rotten wood about the size of a tractor tire was set into the sunken floor. Nearby, a long lever was built into the wall.
On a pedestal overlooking the rotten wood circle stood a statue of a winged man, handsome as an angel and larger than life. He smiled and pointed out at the audience like a late-night infomercial host who wanted to emphasize how much everybody could benefit from his amazing product, but only if you act now, because supplies won’t last at these prices. He was the focal point for all the benches in the room.
“That’s Plutus,” I whispered to Stacey. “See how his eyes are blank? That’s because he’s blind. He can’t see who deserves wealth and who doesn’t. See how his foot is curved and sideways? He walks with a limp, because wealth comes slowly.”
“And what’s with the wings?”
“Wealth is also quick to flee.”
“So why doesn’t he arrive quickly on wings, and leave slowly on foot?” Stacey asked.
“Maybe he does, sometimes.” I eased closer, wary of the big rotten circle on the floor in front of the idol. The wealth god held a heaping bag of coins, and more bags and chests were piled around his feet, all part of the statue. Plutus carried as much luggage as Adrienne, it seemed. “I read that he’s tied closely to death by way of inheritance. Which is certainly one way to confer wealth without regard to who deserves it.”
“These walls are creeping me out.” Stacey’s flashlight passed over one deeply set alcove after another, which I might have taken as storage nooks for specialty items, if this were actually a bank vault. She moved closer to one alcove, studying it. In a low, almost strangled voice, she said, “Uh, Ellie? You should probably…yeah.”
I stepped over to join her, looking along the beam of her flashlight, and drew a sharp breath when I saw what she meant.
The alcove was roughly the size of a coffin or sarcophagus, but vertical. It was mostly empty, but there was a small rock shelf near the top, high and out of sight, above the level of the alcove’s front opening.
On that shelf rested a human skull, its dark eye holes staring back at me indifferently.
I snapped a picture with my phone before stepping back.
“Do you think they’re all like that?” Stacey asked.
“There’s only one way to find out. You check the alcoves down that way, and I’ll go this way.”
Stacey blanched, but she nodded and got to work. Slowly.
I was sympathetic. Bracing myself, I looked into the next alcove. Another skull awaited me there, again tucked high and out of sight.
In all, we found that seventeen of the nineteen alcoves contained skulls. Two had empty shelves.
“I know I’m not the more experienced investigator here,” Stacey said, “but I’m going to go way out on a limb and say the haunting of this estate could be related to this underground death-god temple full of human skulls.”
“Sometimes you have to go way out on a limb. Marzena showed me some of her memories. They would drug their victims. One lodge member would hide the victim deep in the woods for the rest of the hunting party to find.”
“This is the place, huh? I almost can’t believe it’s real,” a woman’s voice said, startling us both.
Adrienne emerged from the stairwell, wearing a long, casual shirt dress over worn-down jeans and caramel leather Gucci riding boots that had probably softened her footsteps. She’d removed her funereal marble makeup, revealing a softer, pinker, more vulnerable face beneath.
“Oh, uh, hi,” Stacey said, giving it her best nervous smile.
“You know, it is true what I always say to Wyatt,” Adrienne said. “I do hate my family. It’s one of the top things he and I have in common, hating our families. I hate being expected to carry it and protect it, as though anybody in the twenty-first century cares about our reputation. We sell lard. I’m the lard princess. That’s what they called me at boarding school, did you know that? Plus, I was overweight. Are you there, anorexia? It’s me, Adrienne. Now cut to a montage of me growing up into a freaky, rebellious art student with minor substance abuse issues. But only able to live that lifestyle, doing molly at runway shows in London, because of the very privilege that I resent. I’m a whole clutch of clichés, in short.”
“What would you need to protect your family from?” I asked.
Adrienne gave a horse-like derisive snort. “Look at this place. Dead people from long ago are so weird.”
“Do you know what went on down here?”
“Nothing good, as you can see. How could it be anything good? It’s nothing we’d ever want to be associated with. It’s a stain on all of us in my family, a burden, a curse, choose your nomenclature.”
“Whose skulls are these?” I asked.
“Skulls?” Adrienne looked around. Her gaze lingered on the tall, winged god. “What skulls?”
We showed her one, and she recoiled just as we had.
“Oh, no,” she whispered. “That’s awful.”
“I believe we have a real opportunity to remove the entities from this island,” I said. “If we can give these remains a proper burial—”
“But what happens if word leaks out about all this?” Adrienne asked. “My family will kill me. And stick my skull down here in this basement, apparently. This has to remain secret.”
“Sometimes truth and sunlight are the only cure.”
Adrienne shook her head. “They should have filled this place with dirt instead of just sealing it off.”
I nodded. “That would have made it more grave-like. Sometimes the dead are restless if their bodies haven’t been properly honored. For example, considering this place is dedicated to a Greek underworld god, members of the cult might have wanted coins placed under their tongues. That would pay the ferryman so you could cross the River Styx to the underworld. We could check these skulls for coins. Maybe try adding some if there aren’t any. That will send them on their merry way to the other side.”
“I think I have some change.” Stacey reached into her pocket.
Adrienne was aghast. “That’s gruesome.”
“Yeah, but that’s the job.” I drew out the pen that I had for my notepad and approached the skull in what seemed like the most prominent alcove, closest to the
god Plutus. “I’ll just peek in here, see if there’s a coin.”
“Don’t,” Adrienne said.
“There’s no telling whether adding coins would really help, anyway, partly because we don’t know whether these are the skulls of cult believers or their victims. But the coins would be easy to try as a first measure,” I explained.
“I’ve got a quarter, couple nickels, about six pennies.” Stacey jingled the coins in her palm. “I hope the ferry to the underworld’s cheap.”
“I’ll just pry this guy’s jaw open and have a peek…” I reached my pen toward the skull’s nose hole.
“Stop!” Adrienne screamed. “Get away! Don’t you have any respect?”
“Sorry.” I backed away from the skull and the alcove. “I know our humor can get a little dark sometimes, but that’s just our way of coping with the things we see. We’ll rein it in.”
“That,” Adrienne hissed, “is my great, great, great-grandfather. We will not disturb his remains or anyone’s. That is the first rule.”
“What’s the second rule?” I asked, automatically. I definitely wanted to know what more she had to say. She was changing her tune fast, suddenly revealing more knowledge.
“Shut up! We do not desecrate the dead. You have to leave. We should all leave, right now.”
“Why?” I asked. “Is this a family crypt? Is that what you’re here to protect?”
“Go! It’s not safe for us here. Not even me.” She pointed to the stairs. “We have to seal this vault. I’ll tell Wyatt to fill it with rubble and dirt, make it part of the earth. I promise. But we have to go.”
“What are you afraid of?” I tried to act calm and detached, but I was getting worn down by the burning cold of the room, my energy sapping quickly.
Adrienne glanced at the alcove where her ancestor’s skull sat. “It’s not just Garit here. It’s also Garit’s son William, another direct ancestor of mine. And Garit’s brother Otto, and other members of the lodge.”
“So, it’s a crypt for the lodge members?” I asked.
“Yes, but only the highest-level members. Through a bargain with the gods below, their souls are preserved here on the island, kept safe from the ravages of the underworld, from all the penalties for their sins that await them. So long as this temple remains undisturbed, they will spend eternity at leisure on this island, reliving their fondest memories of singing and drinking and hunting, chasing the animals.”
